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Writing Prompts: The Threequel
7 years ago
Seto, oh no, I'm afraid ignoring the other thread will not be that simple.
The puppy stared at Seto. Its eyes were glassy and dull its tail moved with a heavy, slow thud, but a puppy was a puppy, right? He opened the cage and gave it a few friendly pats on the head.
A throat cleared behind him. "Please stop petting the test subjects." The man in the lab coat's voice was faintly strained and worried.
"Oh, sorry. Just, I felt a little sorry for it?" Seto gave a sheepish shrug and re-fastened the door of the cage.
"Understandable, have a good day." The man rapidly ushered him out the door and closed and locked it behind him. Seto stood there blinking a moment, then shrugged and started walking to his stop. He had to get to his creative writing class.
A short while later, he exited the bus, to find the puppy hunched by the bench, waiting for him. "What the--how did you--" The puppy stared at him uncomprehendingly and moved its tail. "Uhh...okay then..." He took a glance at the name on its collar. "...Gem. I guess I'll take you with me and return you to where you belong tomorrow."
The puppy turned out to be oddly heavy when he lifted it, and the fur was greasy and unkempt. Weird. It must have gotten into something on the way to the bus stop, because it hadn't been like this before. He set it down next to his desk when he reached the classroom, wiping his hands clean with a wrinkled nose and gave the class he'd be instructing an apologetic look. "It...uh, followed me to school today?"
The dog got a lot of strange looks from his students. Not just because it was a dog in a classroom, but there was just something...off about it that Seto himself wasn't able to deny, no matter how friendly he tried to be to the pup. It got him to wondering if even dogs could suffer from mental retardation. It would make sense, he supposed.
Trying to clear those thoughts from his mind, he set about writing the daily prompts on the board, when suddenly he heard startled laughs from the students, and turned to see Gem crouching in a puddle of urine. Stifling a sigh, he gathered up some papertowels and tried to clean up the mess, soon wondering somewhat worriedly about what sort of chemicals she had been injected with at the lab. The yellow puddle gave off a chemical stench and even marred the wax on the floor. Alarmed, he dismissed the class and went to search out the custodial staff to borrow a mop and a heavy duty pair of gloves. Throughout it all, the dog just sat there like a shaggy, greasy lump. And stared.
The next day he was unable to get ahold of anyone at the test facility, and attempts to deliver the puppy back to them by hand met with a locked door and a darkened building. With no time to make any other arrangements he again took the puppy to his writing class. Gem, once again, seemed to take a peculiar delight in disrupting the class just as the writing prompts were being handed out. This time she crawled onto his briefcase, then when he struggled to remove her (had she grown heavier?) she voided her bowels right as he picked her up. The greenish diarrhea was the consistency of watery oatmeal and ran down in rivulets over his legs and feet, and it wasn't required to dismiss the class this time as the whole assembly fled in horror at the stench.
Seto staggered from the classroom, stripping off the vile, soiled clothes as he went, gagging and vomiting.
After finding a change of clothes, it was with complete and utter revulsion that he approached the puppy again to carry it home. It was almost a relief in the morning when he found its glassy, barely blinking eyes less responsive than ever, while clumps of fur had started falling out, leaving bare patches all over its body. Obviously there was something terribly, terribly wrong with this puppy. He couldn't take it to class like this, and he definitely wouldn't leave it to foul his apartment.
With a clear conscience he carried it to his vetinarian to have the poor, stupid, diseased, disgusting creature euthanized.
He arrived at class late, but with such a wondrous sense of relief that that business was all over. Cheerfully, he chatted with the students and then began writing the day's assignment on the board. Life could now return to normal.
The laughter and friendly conversation in the room suddenly fell silent. Every gaze was on the door, most of them vaguely horrified.
Seto heard a heavy rasping pant and the sound of a tail slowly thumping the floor, and felt his skin crawl.
Turning slowly, reluctantly, he saw Gem in the open doorway. Her solid black eyes betrayed no comprehension, and the bare patches of skin had split into open sores, leaking pus. Her movements were stiff and unnatural as she approached him, one staggering step at a time. Seto sat frozen in his seat, watching the puppy approach with the kind of mounting, helpless dread usually only be brought on by a nightmare one couldn't escape.
It stopped just before his feet. There was a rattling noise in its chest, and perhaps it tried to bark; but when it opened its slime-filled mouth the rotting muscle of its tongue simply slithered right out and plopped onto his shoe.
The puppy settled back on its haunches with a thud that placed a dent on the floor. Man's best friend, and the one that would never leave him, it looked mutely up at him. And stared.
