It was a bright summer afternoon. Talyn, on break from school, laid on her bed and fanned herself with a thin
sheet of paper. Beads of sweat fell off her face occasionally. She felt the summer heat radiating in her room,
and she didn't like it.
"Ugh... It's too hot today!" She rolled over, and tossed the paper sheet into a nearby trashcan. "Maybe I'll
go
hang by the city lake and nap. It's too hot here to nap, anyways", she mused to herself. She got up and
slogged
downstairs.
Her parents were at work, so she left a sticky note to them saying she'd be by the lake until the heat cooled
down. She grabbed her burlap backpack, containing random objects like apples and a pad of paper and pen, and
left
her house.
The lake wasn't too far off from the young girl's house, so she didn't need to exert herself too much in the
heat. As she walked down the baking sidewalk, she tried her best to keep to the shade and darted to each
shaded
part of the street swiftly.
As Talyn stood at a crosswalk, she inhaled the city air. She noticed it seemed somewhat different than usual.
"Hmm... Is it me, or is it more humid than usual today...?" She looked around. Other people at the crosswalk
didn't seem bothered by it (or they were ignoring it?), so Talyn figured it's probably nothing. She shook her
head slightly, her dark brown hair shifting as she did. The signal on the crosswalk turned green, so she
continued her journey to the lake.
Talyn noticed the amount of people on the streets thinned as she neared the lake, while the strange, humid air
only thickened. Talyn tried covering her mouth and nose with her shirt, in an effort to filter out the thick
smog. She usually had high tolerance to olfactory senses like cigarette smoke and normal city smog, though
this
seemed to be on another level entirely. Talyn stopped walking, and saw that other people began reacting to it
too. A businessman on the opposite side of the street came out of an office building, and suddenly broke into
a
series of coughing fits as soon as he contacted with this strange, thick air. He dropped everything he was
holding--his cellphone, and a folder of papers that scattered all over the floor like spilled milk.
"Aaagh! *cough* D-dammit! Didn't know *cough* this stuff would act so quickly...!" the businessman swore to
himself. "N-need to *cough* gather these documents *cough* before-- Hhrgak!"
She saw the man's body wracked with violent shakes as he collapsed to the slate gray sidewalk. She saw thick,
green spikes tear through the back of the businessman's expensive suit. She saw the man's pained, gnarled
hands
twist into sharp, scaly claws. She saw his face contort into a grizzled snout, and his vibrant green eyes
target
her as humanity seemed to ebb from his eyes. His maw was now a toothy void of hunger and slobber. Now that his
violent shaking had stopped, the man-creature seemed to be in full control of itself, and it leapt toward
Talyn.
The terrified young girl screamed, and...