She had never left it before.

  Even when curious hands lifted her from the velvet lining, she always returned. The glass door would close, and the world outside would shrink to a distorted blur. Safe. Familiar.

  But the case was open now. Worse—broken. The sharp scent of dust filled the air, clinging to the splintered wood where the hinge had snapped. Shards of glass lay scattered like fallen stars, catching the dim, sickly light from outside.

  She climbed shakily to her feet and stepped forward, the motion unnatural, legs stiff with disuse. The wood beneath her was cold and uneven, old and very clearly disused. The world beyond her display case stretched out, too wide, too empty.

  The hall was completely silent.

  She hesitated at the edge of the display, waiting for a voice to scold her just like little Beatrice, for careful hands to tuck her back where she belonged. No one came.

  A gust of wind rattled the loose frames of shattered windows. Something small - a spool of thread - rolled across the floor, slow and aimless.

  She swallowed, though she had no throat.

  Where is everyone?

  It was too dusty and dark for anyone to have been there recently, which was odd in and of itself - her family were as close to nobility as you got; they would never have allowed their home to fall into disrepair and had always loved to show off their wealth to, well, everyone. Walking down the hall, she still found nobody. No people walked these halls, nor danced in the ballroom, nor spoke, nor sang, nor.. anything, really.

  Why didn’t I get up sooner? Why didn’t anybody else get me out of my case? Why can I move now? Questions floated through her head, unanswered and (likely) unanswerable.

  She continued out of the hall, unsure of what to do now. She couldn’t help but marvel at absolutely everything around her. Collapsed walls showed the sun, which seemed to.. shine differently, somehow; it was far more yellow than it should have been and shined far too brightly.

  The little doll walked slowly through the ruined mansion, unsure what to do but wanting out. It was oddly quiet, no matter where she went or how hard she looked. Nothing moved. No birds sang. There were droves of dead.. bugs, laying on the ground all over the place - enough that she eventually stooped to examine one. It - and the rest of the gross little insects - had a flattened, oval-shaped body, long antennae, six legs and was a dark reddish-brown color, not unlike the walnut wood of the velvet lined box her family had occasionally used to transport her in.

  She looked behind herself and was startled to see a small path of damaged bug carcasses behind her. Checking her shoes, it was obvious that she had stepped on some of them. Their legs were too flat to the ground, their wings were a little more splayed (it was then that she realized they even had wings), and - even beyond the ones that she had stepped on - plenty of them were in different stages of decomposition. Would they wake up like she had? Maybe their bodies were too far gone for that.

  She heard a weird clicking, clanking, screeching clatter behind herself. It sounded like a thousand joints being popped at once, but some of them were made of metal. Turning around, she saw a weird.. creature, about half her size. It looked almost like a rat, but.. parts of it were rotted away. Where did the metal sounds come from? It was as if an engine was stalling or just refusing to be turned on because of a lack of batteries. Maybe parts of the rat were manufactured? But how did those parts get added into the rat? How did they work - is it just an augmentation? Is there more to it than that? It almost made her want to dissect the rat so she could see how it worked - see every little piece of it - and potentially make it better, but she had no idea how she would do that, had nothing to dissect it with, and would rather not kill anything if she could avoid it.

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  The rat-thing had stopped moving when she looked at it, but began moving again when she looked away from it - she caught its movement out of the corner of her eye and looked back at it before it got too close. Odd. Why wouldn’t it move when she looked at it? The pale porcelain doll was confused, but didn’t know what to do about it. Was there a way to make the thing want to move when she was looking at it? Perhaps it was programmed to avoid movement when under observation? Whatever the case, she couldn’t spend forever looking at it. Just as she was about to turn, she heard the same sound from behind herself - from the direction she had been walking towards. Looking back, she realized two things very quickly: (1) There was more than one rat-thing wandering around the building, and (2) there were enough of them that she suddenly felt very overwhelmed and unsafe.

  The rat-things would slowly advance as she looked at their brethren. They kept getting closer and closer, slowly advancing towards her, backing her into a corner. She had nothing to defend herself with. Hastily devising a strategy, she stared hard at the ones closest to her and sprinted past them, turning around after a few moments to look at them all again. The things were almost immediately behind her. She backed away slowly and steadily, keeping the things in her field of vision for as long as she possibly could, until she finally felt utter emptiness behind her foot.

  Barely catching herself from falling, she automatically looked back and was startled to see a massive hole in the floor behind her. She supposed it made sense, since the house was falling apart, but she had not expected the inside of the house to collapse like this. Realizing that she was still in imminent danger, she looked back up to the rat-things (she could figure out a better name for them later) and was startled to see how much distance they had crossed in the few moments while she looked away. They were fast, if nothing else - fast and in large numbers. She crouched down low to the ground, feeling around for something - anything! - she could use as a weapon. She felt a rock in her hand (not much more than a pebble, really, but she was small enough that it was about the size of her fist) and picked it up, chucking it with all her might at the closest rat-thing to herself.

  When the pebble hit, she saw a red “-1” float off the top of it. She had to do a double take. Looking at herself and the entire situation she was in.. made her head spin. She was trapped on the edge of a very non-survivable fall, with a pile of hostile, undead(?), augmented(?) rat monsters which, if hit with a pebble, would have bright red negative numbers float off of them. There weren’t enough pebbles to throw at them all. Killing them wasn’t an option, running wasn’t an option, waiting them out would have her staring at them forever, there was nowhere to hide (as far as she could tell), so.. what could she do?

  Glancing back again, she saw the massive chasm behind herself. Falling into it would probably kill her, but if she could jump across, she may be able to get away from the rats. It would be hard, but she might just be able to make it if she jumped across. Looking back at the rats one last time, she angled herself so that her body was half turned in the direction of the gap, while her face was pointed at the rat-things. She could instinctively tell that she would never make it if she didn’t have a running start, so - against her better judgement - she took a few steps closer to the rat-monsters before breaking into a sprint, launching herself at the other side of the ravine as best she could with her stiff porcelain legs.

  For a moment, she was weightless. It felt almost like she was flying. But then the far side of the gap came and nearly passed her. She was able to grab hold of the very edge of the gap at the last moment, the impact causing cracks to form along both her arms and run up her shoulders. She pulled herself up, slowly, painfully, before her arms began giving out with shuddering, painful spasms. She fell back, hands still holding the edge, unable to think clearly with the white-hot pain clogging her senses. She heard the sound of footsteps approaching her. They weren’t the clanking, popping, cracking noise she was used to with the rats.

  Don’t tell me there are more rats. Please, I am so tired of those. It would be a stupid way to die, barely getting away from something just to get eaten by it when you think you’re safe. She couldn’t think clearly. She just had to keep holding on. The pain and lack of structural integrity in her porcelain body made it hard for her to focus, think, even holding on was hard. She could feel her hands slowly slipping, her grip loosening, even though she was trying to keep holding on.

  Just as her fingers slipped and she began to fall, she felt something wrap around her hands. It wasn’t porcelain, nor was it an animal claw, nor anything else familiar. She could tell that it was some kind of cloth, but beyond that, she couldn’t tell what it was. Her vision was hazy. She could barely think as she was pulled up out of the massive ravine. Dimly, as her line of sight tunneled to black, she hoped that whatever it was that saved her wasn’t going to eat her or.. worse. Then, her world faded to black.