Originally written by Cephei97.
Most people have heard stories of cave explorers getting lost. Some get rescued, while others unfortunately don't live long enough to be recovered alive. Elmina was one of the unlucky ones. Elmina Teufel was a self-taught caver who thought she could explore a cave all by herself. Even though she was warned of the risks of solo caving, she tried it anyway.
She was a 26 year-old woman with a height of 5'8" and the average weight of 130 lbs. Her blue eyes weren't very vivid, but they did have a curious case of brown central heterochromia. Since she loved the outdoors, her light skin had a moderate tan. She hated holding her hair up in any way, so she always kept it down. As a result of that, she always had to brush it after waking up in the morning; the wavy dark brown hair would frequently get tangled, making her look like some sort of poodle.
Elmina was the kind of person who preferred to read about things online rather than going to the local library to do research. She took up welding as a hobby after her father taught her to perform shielded metal arc welding in his garage when she was 16. While she seemed like a tough, hard-skinned person on the outside, there was still a soft spot within; she saved that spot for her closest friends. She also loved cats, and always wanted to have a pet cat, but didn't have the proper budget for food, litter, the vet bill, etc. She made up for this by making up 6 pet cats and dreaming about them. In a majority of those dreams, she was a cat herself. Elmina was quite spiritual, and had frequent lucid dreams since she was a child. She used this method to visit her cats in the dream world. Random strangers she occasionally saw would give her odd looks, as she would sometimes accidentally encounter them in her dreams; those encounters weren't 1-sided visits, apparently.
When Elmina reached middle school, she didn't fit in too well, and kids would always gossip about her behind her back. She would always make herself feel better by imagining them getting beat up. Sometimes she would dream about punching them in the nose. The next day, she was always puzzled over how the kids would complain of broken noses even though the teachers and nurses saw nothing physically wrong with them. When she found out what was happening, she purposefully visited the dreams of her friends and held conversations with them. No amount of conversations would convince her friends to join her on her first cave expedition. Her friends didn't share her love for caving, so they didn't accompany her on her first trip alone. The best they could do was wish her luck. Elmina didn't like the idea of being alone with a stranger, which was also why she went completely by herself.
The expedition took place around February 28, 1988. The first time she explored a cave by herself was also her first time exploring a cave. All the documents she read on the internet would not be able to match up with experiencing the real deal. Her first cave journey was Lovelock Cave in Lovelock, Nevada. The archaeological history behind the cave piqued her interest, and she wanted to see it in person. When she was 20 ft down into the cave, she saw a glimmer of light in her peripheral vision. She dismissed it as her flashlight's light bouncing off of something, but thought twice and decided to investigate. An oddly reflective pebble sat in front of an entrance to an unknown passageway that was not part of the normal route. The entrance to the path was only 4 feet tall and 5.5 feet wide, so she had to bend down a bit to creep through. Her love for the unknown made this opportunity too difficult to turn down.
When she was only a few feet in, her compass began to act erratic. The needle wouldn't stop spinning, and tapping the compass didn't help. This new pathway was rocky, but unnaturally straight like some sort of hallway. An hour passed since her journey into the tunnel, and she couldn't tell the difference between which way she came in and which way would continue deeper. She began to feel extremely fatigued, even though she had a good night's sleep the night before her expedition. Elmina pulled out her phone to check the time, since her analog watch had a bad habit of randomly stopping. The phone's screen flickered rapidly before shutting off completely and refusing to turn on afterwards. Any further attempts to use the phone were futile. Anxiety was eating away at Elmina from the inside, and the fact that she began to have a bitter metallic taste in her mouth a few minutes later did not help at all. She began to feel extremely nauseated, so she decided to take a break and sit down. That's when the itch began.
Her face itched, her arms itched, her eyes itched, her scalp itched; everything was horrendously itchy. Whenever she scratched, her skin would slough off little by little, leaving behind pale purple patches. The unbearable urge to scratch the itches was irresistible to her. She scratched and scratched until she found that she didn't even have the strength to move her arms to scratch anymore. She flopped over onto her side, exhausted. She was tired and frightened out of her mind. All she wanted was to be in the comforting presence of her friends. She silently wished that she was a cat so she could simply see which way was the right way out in the darkness she was surrounded with. Her eyelids felt heavier with each second and slowly closed, letting her drift off to sleep.
The sound of loud humming jolted her awake. The noise itself was deep, and she felt as if the source of the sound was from within the very depths of her brain. She looked around and saw a blinding light pointed directly at her face. She felt around on the ground and flipped a switch; that shut off her flashlight, which was apparently the source of the harsh light. When her eyes readjusted, she could see everything. Her dreams were coming true. However, something was off in this dream.
When she looked down, her skin was completely pale and purple in color. The itch was gone, and so was the fatigue and disgusting taste in her mouth. She could barely feel her hands, as if they partially lost blood circulation. She examined her hands and found that sharp, claw-like pieces of metal were attached to her fingertips like the claws of a cat. It seemed that her feline wishes were granted in a twisted, genie-like fashion. This took her off-guard, but she quickly got used to it. The orange long-sleeved shirt she wore bothered her greatly, so she took it off and left her striped tank top on. She pulled out her phone to look at her reflection on the screen. Her lips were nearly pale white, her eyes looked jaundiced, and her irises were surrounded by red markings that looked like she had popped a few blood vessels in her eyes. Her hair had grayed as if she aged by several decades, and her teeth were black and like onyx gems. She thought her hair looked like a mess, so she used 2 black bracelets that were on her wrists to tie her hair into 2 ponytails. Elmina felt like a different person altogether, but she felt great.
Elmina promptly tested out her new "claws" on the rock wall. The metal of the claws was unnaturally strong, making the wall feel like it was made out of loose gravel. She decided to take a shortcut and dig her way out. When she reached the surface, it was in the dead of night. The compass was still acting strangely, so she couldn't find her way home unless she asked for directions. Two figures dressed in black suits were quickly approaching from several feet away. They did not look like friendly tourists. Elmina closed her eyes and willed herself back to her house and vanished before their eyes. The people in suits held a wrist up to their mouths and spoke into their sleeve before splitting up to search for Elmina.
No matter how hard she tried, she simply couldn't fly; Elmina simply stuck to sprinting and visualizing places she wanted to go to in her mind's eye. The lights of her house were overwhelming, so she ran to the garage and grabbed her welding helmet. After putting it on, it functioned like makeshift sunglasses. She used a strap from an old backpack she had and attached it to the helmet so she could carry it on her back whenever it was dark enough outside for her to take it off. She also messed around with a purple paint can she found and used a long paint brush to paint her face for fun (because trying to do it with normal makeup would probably lead her to accidentally poking an eye out with those claws).
The tingling sensation in her hands intensified as time went on, so she looked back at them to see what was happening. Her hands were completely degloved; all layers of skin fell off along with any fingernails, revealing flesh and tendons. As much as she tried to will the wounds away, they just wouldn't heal. She discovered that the claws themselves were directly connected to the finger bones, which was why they didn't come off when most of the flesh at the fingertips was lost. She quickly wrapped her hands in bandages, which helped with most of the bleeding. The metal wasn't made from an element that was known on the periodic table, and its adverse effects caused the degloving in her hands. Luckily, the effects were only powerful enough to spread up to 1/8th of the wrist and not the rest of her body.
She ran up to her room and saw 6 phantom-like figures sitting in the center of her room. They had no shape and were monochrome in color. They whispered in an unknown tongue before shapeshifting into feline-like forms that stood much taller than the average house cat. The heights ranged from 2.5-4 ft. Each figure mimicked the appearance and personality of each pet cat from Elmina's dreams.
"Bienvenido, Elm." the phantoms said in unison. Each voice sounded adolescent and was a somewhat different pitch than the other. "Here for help. Das ist acceptance? Oui? Nyet?" They spoke in a mixture of multiple languages, using simple words that Elmina had already learned. She slowly nodded her head and replied.
"Yes."
She hadn't heard her own voice since the cave incident, and it sounded like she was speaking in 2 slightly different tones at once; this was another thing that she had to get used to.
"'Elm' is fine, but please—use 'Gracie' as my nickname now."
Elmina called the little group her "Cat Children". She divided the group into sub-groups of 2: The Messengers and The Defenders. If she wanted to warn others of her arrival in an area, one of the 3 Messengers would visit the nearest slumbering person in a lucid dream to warn them. The Defenders' name is self-explanatory: they assist Elmina during her times of need. The Cat Children cannot be killed by normal means such as starvation or suffocation, but they are rather frightened of fire. They also share Elmina's peculiar sensitivity to lights that seem average to the human eye. Like a childhood boogeyman, those creatures can be shooed away with the right amount of photons. If they are somehow killed, they reappear near Elmina in 1 day and 3 hours. If Elmina is killed, she will come back one way or another in 1 day and 3 hours. If she is killed in the same exact way at the same exact location as her previous death, the time it takes for her to return will double. Any break in the death chain will reset it to 1 d 3 hrs. Oddly enough, flesh wounds or blood loss aren't a problem; she only dies if either her brain or her heart are severely damaged. If any of the Cat Children die while Elmina is dead, they will remain dead until Elmina comes back, which is when the time it takes for them to return truly begins. The death chain effect applies to the Cat Children as well.
She thought about how unusual her lucid dream world had been acting lately, and wanted to blow off some steam like in some of the video games she's played. She walked downstairs to her garage and found a shiny metal bar, placing it on the metal table next to her welding machine. She then went to her kitchen and began pulling various things out of the drawers (knives, forks, etc.) and came back to the garage. She fired up her machine, set up everything like always, put on her mask, and went to work. She crafted an absurd weapon by welding the detached blades of knives on one side, and welding the cut off top portions of a fork and spoon onto the topmost knife. She then added the top of another severed fork to the opposite side of the bar with the pair of scissors next to it. She opened her garage door with the remote control button and walked outside, letting the nighttime breeze refresh her face. She ran off to a nearby restaurant that had outdoor tables to test out her new weapon. After the police showed up after the first 3 casualties, she had already willed herself back home and was sleeping in her bed. She really wanted to do more "testing" before the cops intervened, but did not want to risk getting shot. Whenever she sleeps in a lucid dream, she usually wakes back up into reality.
The next morning, the local news station on her radio alarm clock woke her up. The station reported 6 people pronounced dead at the restaurant near Elmina's house. 3 people died from deep lacerations and blunt force trauma all over their bodies, while 3 others complained of intense idiopathic pains before mysteriously perishing where they sat. Elmina woke up and stretched. When she reached out to pull the covers off of herself, she noticed that her skin was not a soft tan color: it was a lifeless, pale purple.