An alternate beginning, at an unknown lab...

The throbbing headache as you awoke was the first of many red flags. A brightness hit your eyelids, compelling you to raise your hands up to shield yourself. Squinting, you turned to your side, ignoring the pins and needles of a body-wide numbness subsiding in order to focus on your surroundings.

The wall of glass next to you sure didn't look like the window in your bedroom. And the cold metal floor, laced with softly glowing lines, clearly didn't provide the comforts of the bed you were certain you'd fell asleep in prior to wherever you'd ended up. Panic quickly filled your mind as your hand shot out toward the glass, intending to just touch it to feel if it was even real. With the numbness still partially present, you didn't seem to have solid control over your movements and your hand slammed into the glass with a loud thud. Ow.

You shook your head to try to clear your thoughts, as adrenaline rushed through you to bring you to your knees, urging you to act on instinct instead. You took a deep breath, and placed your hand on the glass, this time looking beyond your own confines to try to understand where you'd ended up, racking your mind for your best guesses. Some sort of hospital quarantine, maybe? Or worse, were you by aliens and put into an interstellar zoo? Perhaps you were in some sort of bizarre experiment?

The view out of your glass chamber didn't help much. Other similarly lit chambers stretched as far as you could see, with no sign of walls beyond the darkness in the distance. For all you knew, this facility or whatever it was could extend for miles! Each chamber you focused on as your eyes darted back and forth showed two beings in each, most still asleep although some people seemed just as confused and frightened as you, pounding on the glass or appearing to yell out. You couldn't hear any of them. Each chamber seemed to have at least one human, but as for the second entity... you struggled to know what to even make of some. Some looked like a second human, partially or completely, others looked partly like insects or animals, perhaps a squid or two? And then you could only suppose that the gelatinous shapes in other chambers were alive as they jiggled or flexed independently.

Two in each chamber... you realized you'd been so transfixed on your surroundings while searching for an answer to your predicament that you hadn't even looked behind you at the other side of the chamber. You spun quickly, staring at the partner sharing your space.

"I was wondering when you were going to wake," they said softly to you.