It felt like sinking into the floor only worse. The world began to spin around Amelia as if she were drunk. She felt confusion. Terror. She began to forget. Her entire mind was in disarray.
Totally disorientated, she found herself unable to think. The image of her loving mother cradling her with a scraped knee flashed by and she let out bubbles of anguish as it faded. No! She had really liked that memory! In a moment, she forgot it had ever existed.
Her intelligence began to fade. Numbers. Words. Language. She lost it all in seconds as her neurons simplified in her shrunken fish brain and shed useless data. She felt herself dumbing down, but she was too far gone to even realize what it meant.
She grew cold. She grew still. Instinct began to flood in. Eat. Sleep. Reproduce. Survive. Eat. Sleep. Reproduce. Survive.
Suddenly, she kicked back in full. For a fleeting moment her mind fired back up like a fire work, not totally lost, and she let out a horrified bubbly scream, flailing in her plastic prison and splashing water over the sides. She slammed into the wall and threw herself upward, jolting from the top of the container and swimming frantically in the air.
NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!
She hit the floor with a sickening thud. It hurt like hell and knocked whatever air was inside of her out. She felt the burn of her gills drying out again. She curled in agony.
Her mind began to fade again. She fought with every anguished moment to hold onto it. She didn't want to be an animal. She was a women! She was a happy friendly laughing singing dork. She was intelligent! Intelligent! She had to stay intelligent!
It faded out again, like a wash of ice cold slapping across her senses.
She grabbed the wisps of her collapsing neurons and held onto them as hard as she could. Every time the splinters of her mind fractured she frantically tried to pull them back into place.
All the while, Tom watched at his feet as the struggling trout gasped and flopped and curled in absolute anguish. This had never happened before. By now, they were always gone.
Amelia was fighting for everything she was. Even dying in the unbreathable air she refused to let go of her self.
Tom stared in wide eyed shock and carefully bent down. The fish was gasping and moaning inhumanly. He reached for a nearby bottle with trembling hands and uncapped it.
The trout let out a horrific gurgle and tensed so hard it looked like she might snap her spine. She had bit her own lip, blood was pouring from her mouth like she had been hooked. She began to convulse.
Tom poured the container he had opened over her and stepped back in horror.