The Exit 8, furry sex version

Taking the metro in the morning is as much of a walk of shame as always.

Being a short kobold, it’s bad enough I have to wake up extra early to avoid rush hour (unless I felt like getting trampled that is), but my height, plus being one of the few reptiles in a mammal city, plus the bright red color of my scales, and almost every time I catch the attention of someone in the worst way.

Today, it was older highschoolers pointing and snickering (they look old enough to be applying for college, shouldn’t they be acting a little more mature?), a hyena punk with an oddly-shaped guitar case trying to provoke me for no apparent reason, and a tall woman wearing a suit looking down on me for no reason. The last one doesn’t sound as bad, but for some reason it really got to me. It was like she was looking at a piece of shit stuck to her shoe.

Trying to push these unpleasant feelings out of my head, I turn around a corner.

And am faced with the same corridor that I just walked past, with the same woman coming in from the opposite direction. The only detail that slightly counters the overwhelming sense of deja vu is that she doesn’t look at me, rather staring off into where the horizon would be, should we not be underground.

I make my way through the corridor and turn the corner, only to once again be faced with the same place I just left. Looking back, the same exact structure repeats impossibly, the same woman occupying two positions simultaneously.

Alarmed, I hold back the impulse to run, and notice something off. This is the 8th metro station, the yellow line. But the engraving on the wall calls it station 0.

There is no station 0.

After making sure my phone has no signal, over the course of about an hour, I experiment by going back and forth across the same short corridor, and am able to identify a few rules.

First is that the corridor repeats, but is not always identical. Sometimes the posters might change, some of the garbage in or around garbage cans, and the people in the hallway (though they are always staring off into the abyss and unresponsive).

Second is that I need to identify ‘anomalies’, at least if we are to assume I should make the station number go up.

Every time I walk across the corridor, if everything in it was normal, the number increases. If I go backwards through a corridor, it resets to zero. But if I go forward and fail to identify an anomaly, it also resets.

An anomaly is basically something completely out of the ordinary. Like I said before, small, ‘normal’ changes are fine. A soda poster changes into an anti-noise ad? That's normal. One of the posters is now doxing me? That's an anomaly.

Visually noticing an anomaly is not enough though, I need to physically touch it. On the other hand, if I touch something other than an anomaly (other than the floor),another reset.

Was quite a bit of work, but being methodic really paid off. Only an hour in and I seem to have all the rules of the game, and am confident I should be able to safely exit in no time.

Less than ten minutes later, I have flawlessly increased the number to 5, when I turn around the corner, and see the woman usually there, except she’s covered in post-it’s that say “**** me”, “breed me”, “sensitive here” and the like.