Her own heartbeat thuds in her ears, slow and laboured, each beat punctuating hazy flashes of consciousness. She sees lights, like white and blue stars blurred amidst a dark room. A long blink, then hazy figures stand in the room, their outlines burly, coloured white, heads round as if bald, bodies clothed in sharp green shapes. Another long blink, and one stands right before the rest, the lithe silhouette and generous curves of a feminine figure, bending to examine her. Green lips smile: "Perr'ct. Tre ull - Tesh." Two white claws are held before her face, lowering slightly as if miming closing her eyes, green lights twinkling on the backs of the fingers. The next blink seems far heavier, lasting a much longer time.
Before the darkness clears, sound emerges, distant and rumbling, coming from above, the rhythmic waves of many voices chanting two, steady syllables, over and over. She can't make them out, the voices muffled by distance and a wall between the sound and her - a white wall curving into the ceiling and the floor that she lays on. The floor feels warm, firm yet still somehow soft against her bare skin. She's completely naked, her clothes nowhere to be seen save only for her glasses.
The small room is well lit and warm, the glass wall on her right making the space seem wider. Something moves behind the glass. As Tess' vision starts to clear, a figure is revealed, tall, feminine, the tawny skin of her delicate arms and back glistening as if wet, the white skin of her front shining smooth in the light. As Tess' vision continues to clear more details of the figure are revealed - a face that looks nearly human but with pearly white skin, shaped like a young girl's face with round, perky cheeks, freckled with... whiskers? The white lips are very generous, pouting in concentration, or maybe in frustration, the hairless brow furrowed over the large, solid grey-blue eyes. The lips blow a few tawny tentacles of 'hair' out of her face, as her long neck cranes a little lower, smooth tawny arms and white hands fiddling with something on the wall. Her legs are the source of the movement Tess saw before, their shape very long and shapely, as thick and long as the tail - a closer inspection revealing the legs and tail to actually be three thick tentacles curling onto the floor, lowering and rising the upper body with a nearly hypnotic rhythm, as the... girl continues to intently tinker with the wall.
On the far side of the tall girl, there's another glass wall, behind which a far stiller figure sits – or rather kneels, hands resting on thighs, back straight. The figure looks more masculine, limbs, back and chest heavily set, coloured halfway between a light green and brown, darkening in spots to nearly black on the outside of the limbs and the back. The back is split by a dark ridge of black bony spikes extending from the spine, continuing up the broad neck to just before the back of the head. A head without hair, features or eyes, just four fangs, forming a noble T like the slit of a knight's helm, skin taught between them and the jaw thick with muscle, moving slight with each slow, measured breath.
Behind the... man, another glass wall separates him from another figure, more indistinct through the many panes but distinctly purple and feminine, the one afterwards a flowing blue shape, then a squat red, a broad black, and so on. Ten completely alien figures wait behind the green-brown man and the tawny-white girl, all the twelve of the aliens trapped in their own glass walled rooms, like Tess, all thirteen rooms secured within the white ceiling, floor, and the forward wall, obscuring their sight of what's ahead, not letting them see the source of the distant rhythmic chanting above, just letting them listen to the sound growing steadily closer and steadily louder.
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