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"Sir? We're ready for you."

I jerked from my stupor, blinking away the glaze of hours I'd spent in the puny waiting room, "Huh? Oh, uh, right..." Getting to my feet, I gave the auburn labcoated vixen a nod and the most pleasant smile I could muster, all the while swallowing down the nerves I'd ignored up until then.

"Follow me, please." Was her reply, her clawed toes clicking lightly upon the tile floors as she led me forth, her expression as sterile as the hallway itself as she clasped a clipboard to her chest. I followed in her wake, the silence clenching around my chest until I was forced to speak again.

"So, uh, about this tranquilizer..."

"Neutralizer. It's designed to be a non-lethal compound that both preserves the subject's consciousness and renders them totally harmless. And before you even ask, no, there have been no harmful side effects in any subjects thus far." She snorted softly, almost under her breath, "And I will remind you, you did submit to this testing beforehand."

My jaw snapped back shut, the auburn fur's abrupt response sending me back into silence as she led me right and left and right again, winding her way down hallway after hallway. It was hardly an aggressive answer, but the dismissiveness in her tone was hardly comforting. It certainly made me rethink whether the week-long ordeal ahead of me was worth another few months' rent.

I only had a few seconds to ponder the meaning of her curt explanation. All at once she turned on a paw, nearly sending me into her while she flicked a keycard into an electronic lock. Hauling the door open, her slender form propped it open for me, and with another quick nod I slipped inside.

The room itself was a spotless white, unoccupied save for a single, opaque-windowed booth in the far wall, a single, formidable metal bulkhead set between myself and the spartan, tile-floored accommodations. The ceiling remained equally bare, with only a quartet of large vents and a single fluorescent lamp looking down from above. I balked almost as soon as I'd entered, a small shiver seizing my spine. _This_was the "safe, controlled" environment the bright, cheery ad in the paper had promised?

"Uh, ma'am? Th-this is it?" I glanced down at the unforgiving tile floor, spotting them same number of large vents below. "I know it's supposed to be a gas, b-but I'd still prefer somewhere safer-"

"Stand in the middle of the floor." The fox's sharp interjection coincided with the creak and heavy thump of the door behind me, the sudden noise provoking a startled flinch that jolted my whole body. The slender-bodied vulpine's gaze was unbroken as she passed in front of me, the soft click of a lock accompanying a single twitch of an angular ear. Her expression, however, had changed, the stony edifice cracking with a smirk that was either amused or condescending. Perhaps it was both.

"Breathe deep and slowly, no matter what. We will monitor you from the booth." A simple flick of her hand towards the blackened window sent the bulkhead leading inside sliding open with a whining creak and a puff of pressurized air. Her ear flicked once as she turned round once more, her faint smirk widening with a tug of her lips, "Just enjoy the ride." With a single graceful step and a flick of her bushy tail, the vixen slipped inside the sealed booth, the doorway sealing behind her with a dense thump.

I stood frozen in the resounding echo, without escape, and without a clue of what I'd stumbled into. The benign, bold-lettered ad was vanishing fast from my memory, its promise of "easy, simple procedures" seeming emptier by the second. I'd expected a week of mild, uneventful drug testing, and instead I'd been met with a level of secrecy and opaqueness that sent shivers down my spine, and that wasn't even counting the vixen's unnerving smirk.

I swallowed, trying my best to ignore the bead of sweat forming on the back of my neck, and the trembling seizing my limbs. "Hey! Look, I-I want more information about whatever the hell you -"

A deafening hiss drowned me out from above, yanking a sudden, cracking shriek from my throat. I backpedaled instinctively, stumbling back into the thick, sealed doorway behind me. My sight jerked down to the floor, to the vents that rushed and breathed forth a billowing cloud of white, smoky gas. The trembling in my legs instantly turned to bone-rattling quakes. Screw the ad, screw the fox, there was no way in _hell_anything administered through a vent in a sealed room was harmless. And if I didn't want it in me, I had to burst out of that horrible room that very instant.

I managed to tear my eyes from the massing cloud after another second or two, icy fear shattering in favor of the rush of unbridled panic. I threw myself up against the massive, airtight doorway, white-knuckled fingers throttling and yanking the doorknob back and forth as hard as they could. What musculature my skinny form had flexed and trembled as I slammed myself up against the heavy, unbreakable door, throwing all of my weight into each tug and ram of my shoulder.

The towering slab of metal didn't even budge, shrugging off my struggling without so much as a chip of paint lost. My lungs began to burn after a few more seconds of thrashing, flexing and twitching and begging to inhale until a wordless, gasping cry burst from my lips. The rising tendrils of the odorless gas dove towards the opening, and suddenly I'd gotten a massive lungful of the stuff. I coughed and sputtered, wheezing as I realized too late what I'd done. My attempts to force an exit were reduced to frantically jiggling the doorknob, each cough bringing in another sharp, rapid inhale of the rising cloud that had nearly filled the room. And then the stuff actually started working.

It rose over the heaving throes of panic and the spasms of my limbs, a faint whisper of a tingling sensation. The silent hum nearly sent me straight to the ground as it reverberated out from my very core. My bones quivered like the pipes of an organ as I slumped up against the doorway, my legs dropping away from me as my knees, and then my side met the cool, hard tile. Muscle slackened and turned to quivering gelatin, and the thrum crawled back up my body, from breathless lungs, straight past the gasping whimpers caught in my throat, all the way into my skull. It washed over my brain like a tidal wave, and suddenly all the terror and panic had been slathered into bleary gauze, pooling and congealing into an immobile mass. The looming, smothering cloud of smoky white blurred in my vision, swallowing me whole as it yanked my eyelids shut, sending me trembling into the void.

The cold was what pulled me back out. Its solid, unyielding surface ground up against my face, mashing against the weight of my immobile form. The flicker of sensation was enough to restart my mind, and all at once I was shot up out of the darkened abyss, the flow of my senses bursting forth from the dam of dreamless sleep. The strong pull of gravity revealed itself, resisting my body with every ounce of its strength as I attempted a futile flopping of my heavy, unresponsive limbs. A hacking wheeze accompanied an inhale of air, and suddenly I was up, lurching into a seated position as my chest heaved. Vision flooded back in blurred, brightly-lit smatterings, a furious blink seizing my gaze as I tried to stave off the dry, and I fumbled to brace my upright form on the tile floor beneath.

Except, of course, for the fact that the tile floor had vanished entirely.

It took me a moment to process it; the smooth texture of plastic, the faintest hint of pliability beneath my palms. My watery eyes slowed their blinking, focusing in the wake of the blur that had filled them, staring down beneath me. Translucent, seamless white stretched out in all directions, slowly, steadily yanking my gaze upwards. The surface itself stretched for yards and yards, its area nearly that of a good-sized yard. At its edge before me and to either side, the plastic abruptly curved, warping upwards into a looming, towering wall, nearly as tall as it was long, its ceiling far, far above my head.

I don't know exactly how long I stared, just gaping at the sheer enormity of the space itself. The alien room held nothing else but me. No others, no beds or equipment, or even a door within the far wall. Just towering, vast stretches of plastic, its surface thick against my feet as I forced myself unsteadily onto them. I let my gaze continue to wander across the barren surfaces, turning slowly about, from the far wall before me, to the one to my right, straight behind me to the immense, transparent pane.

My bulging stare suddenly froze, a whimper forcing its way out of my lungs in the gasp that followed. The pane, perhaps thirty feet high, was filled with a huge, monstrous snout, its dark, round nose nearly pressed up against the porous surface. Beneath the flaring nostrils and the muzzle of auburn and white, a pair of vast, thick lips curled back into a smirk that lay somewhere between amused and condescending. And beyond them, a pair of monstrous green eyes sparkled and gleamed, their vast pupils looming above, ready to swallow me whole.

"I was wondering when you'd wake up."

I wasn't at all prepared for the deep, thunderous tone that erupted from the labcoated vixen's jaws, and I could only cry out and slap my hands over my throbbing ears as she spoke again, "We've never had someone stay under as long as you...or reduce to such a degree..." Her giggle shook the plastic beneath my feet, the booming noise only faintly resembling the pleasant sound it must have been to her. "Oh, you're going to be a _wonderful_subject..."

I could barely think above the sound of her voice, never mind the thought of what the towering nightmare of a woman might have done to me. The moment the ear-shattering words faded away, I did the only thing I could possibly imagine doing.

"Wh-what the fuck_did you do to me?!?" I screamed at the very top of my lungs, each word raspy and dry as I stumbled back from the looming specter of the vixen, "Turn me _back!"

At first, I wasn't even sure the monstrous fox could even hear my cries. Then, with a small flick of her ear, her smirk burst into a full-on grin, revealing a full row of fangs, each one perhaps half my size, gleaming and sharp as any knife I'd ever seen.

"Oh_please_, don't tell me you think we'd have an antidote on the spot...the whole point of our contract is to neutralize each subject permanently!" Her laughter thundered forth again, though at least this time my hands were already in place to block out the unstoppable noise. Hot breath accompanied her words now, the humid air a firm, heavy breeze that threatened to throw me right back into a hacking cough.

"As for what's happened to you..." Her deepened tone shifted higher, the glint in those vast eyes turning into a full-on prideful shine, "You've experienced the next generation of nonlethal neutralizer. Rather than merely irritating the subject, our compound exerts a rather unique biochemical and subatomic effect, causing the subject to merely dwindle to a more manageable physical stature." Her ears rose straight up, as did her posture, her towering form casting me in a massive shadow as she blocked out the light from outside. "And you're our most effective trial yet! Mere inches in height, and totally incapacitated for nearly two days!"

Each cheery, booming word nearly sent me retching, my stomach warping within a black singularity as the monstrous vixen's gargantuan face delivered the news with that vast, sickening grin. My legs met the plastic floor, and all at once I'd crumpled into a kneel, shutting my eyes as I braced myself against the cold, unyielding surface. Her answer rang inside my skull, taunting and cackling and threatening me with the unthinkable. She'd taken me without so much as a struggle, and her toothy smile was all it took to convey her predatory pride. I was beyond powerless, a mere speck she'd lead blindly forth, with only the mere promise of a check and a cheap newspaper ad. And now I was hers, to do with as she pleased, to be trapped or toyed with or merely wiped from existence.

Amid convulsing innards and a shudder that threatened to tear flesh from bone, her deep, thunderous voice shook the cage once more, "No more questions? That's all right. We'll have plenty of chances to talk again..." The booming tones formed a melodious, rhythmic giggle, and by the time I'd swallowed down the lump in my throat and dared to gaze back towards the cage door, the monstrous snout had already begun to recede from the massive, transparent pane, her warm breath ceasing its flow through the air pores as she pulled back, her massive, toothy grin still managing to fill my vision.

"I'll be back later for you...my little subject..." The entire cage quaked with her footfalls as she teasingly crooned, turning about towards an unseen exit, her vast, labcoated form sauntering out of vision. The lights went out, and in the distant the thunderous clank and slam of a door sealed the tiled, sterile room. In the silence and the darkness, I could only wait, counting the uncountable moments, submitting to the vast, cold space I'd been left in, and praying my captor might return for her subject.