Work Text:
Today is a lovely day in the missile bay, and you are a horrible rat.
Even better, you are not the only horrible rat around! You have an entire mischief of rats around you! There are so many rat friends and family who dart through closing doors and crevices in the cave system that the Others in this underground base call home. The Others are much larger and occasionally scream at you and your friends, but that has been happening less ever since the tall one with springy yellow hair got in a fight with the small one with all the shiny tags that always sits in the large chair. You weren't there at the time—you were but a little pup just beginning to learn the ways of Mischief from your uncle—but your uncle's mother's fifth cousin twice-removed got to witness the entire showdown. The tall one talked about "good auras" while the small one said something about "pest control." Luckily for the rats, the tall one won the fight solely because of the intervention of your cousin.
Anyway, ever since that fight between those two Important Others, three things have changed:
- The Others shout at you less, especially when the tall one with springy hair is nearby.
- The tall one with springy hair is willing to offer nice-smelling cheese in exchange for discarded paper.
- There are now a handful of hard rats with absolutely no social skills whatsoever running between the cave crevices.
The last one sounds worse than it is. The hard rats are confusing, but they never actually hassle you or any of the other rats. It's a bit creepy when they sit there and stare and you, but that's all they do. Your brother-in-law's fifteenth-youngest aunt still lives on the celebratory cheese she gets whenever she tells the story of running up and tapping the nose of one of those things, and how it just stood there and did nothing!
You admit that your sixty-eighth niece from your great-grandfather's side has a different story. She says that she saw one of those rats snap up a cockroach, and how did it move that fast, and where was it hiding all of those teeth… But that's just a story. Your brother-in-law's aunt is fine, (great, even) while your niece refuses to leave her nest. Which just goes to show that doing is always a better idea than watching.
Speaking of doing, you've been trying to figure out the best way to make a mark in your family. Something that will make you as celebrated as your aunt and cousin It's hard—you can't think of anything as cool as your cousin's racket trading cheese for paper with the Tall One, and you can't think of anything as brave as your aunt's taunting of the weird rats.
(And, maybe, you haven't even been brave enough to match what your aunt did. Your niece's descrpition of the hard rat's teeth have to be exaggerated, and yet…)
So—no messing with the Others, and no messing with the hard rats. Luckily for you, there's a third route to fame—exploration. Your cousin wouldn't even have been able to tip over the small one's chair if it weren't for the efforts of your many-times-great-grandparent who found the route into that room in the first place.
You're proud of your great-grandrat, but really, it doesn't even matter how many great great-and-so-on grandrats have scurried through the halls of this labyrinth! Because the second-best trait of these Others (the first being their weird yet exploitable obsession with paper) is that they are always building new things. And not just small things like the hard rats, but big things.
Their latest project seems to be a floating home. It's smaller than a lot of the floating homes that you've seen them build on the water. This one has a weirdly round metal surface where the Others would normally walk—they seem to be using rat holes to get in and out of this place instead.
It's a new type of thing! Think of how celebrated you'll be once you can talk about what the Others are doing inside their floating nest (as opposed to their weird and flat sleeping spaces in the main area.) Exploring counts as doing, and you won't even have to confront your slowly-developing phobia of the hard rats to do this!
You spend the night bragging to your friends and family about your plan. You don't know how long this exploration is going to take, after all, and you don't want your family writing you off as dead just because you're somewhere else. The mood when your six-times-removed-sideways second uncle came back from his unannounced exploration of the Inside Water Park was a lot less excited than what you want to happen when you return in triumph.
Mostly, everyone is dismissive. You've been on their side of the conversation: oh, look, someone just out of puphood trying to do the Next Cool Thing. And, yes, most of those rats come back with pretty obvious lies about the things that they totally, definitely saw and mysteeeeeriously can't find again. Your eighty-third elder sibling's sister-in-law's twenty-third cousin never recovered from the humiliation (and it was deserved—bowls of grapes don't just hide themselves in the walls!
But that's different. Your eighty-third elder sibling's sister-in-law's twenty-third cousin and your sixty-eighth niece from your great-grandfather's side aren't you. You'll show them—you'll show them all!
The first step is to get inside the floating nest. The holes that the Others climb in and out of look tempting, but are probably too risky for you to use. The holes are so narrow that they only way through them would be to ride directly on one of the Others. The tall one would probably allow it if you brought a lot of paper, but you haven't seen that one anywhere near the floating nest.
Backup plan: use one of the boxes that are being loaded onto the floating nest. Let the Others carry you in, and you'll be set!
You have a few choices for boxes. There's a bag with foodstuffs that the Others eat that you could probably chew through, but you've seen the Others check those pretty thoroughly. You dont want your mission to end before you can even start it.
You see a second set of boxes that look promising, though. And these are a set—a box inside of a box. Which make this twice as good of a place to hide!
The inside box looks like a smaller version of the floating nest. It's got a rounded metal surface that's just like it. Instead of a small hole, it looks like the entire roof opens up. And this one is sized for you! It's maybe a little smaller—there's only enough room for one rat—but that's fine. If your friends and family can't bring themselves to explore this with you, then that's their loss.
Really, with a rat-sized nest like this, it's like the Others are begging you to join them. And maybe they are! Surely the Tall One can't be the only Other who's obsessed with paper and has an enticingly large pile of cheese?
That decides it. Fate has lined up for this moment. You're taking that shiny nest before another rat shows up and gets in first.
You wait until the Other inspecting the nest turns its back, then you scurry across as fast as you can. One leap into the box, and then a second, smaller leap into the metal nest.
You're in! The nest is a little uncomforable, and the material reminds you of those weird hard rats, but surely they put somewhere soft for you to—
The Other turns back around and closes the roof of your nest. Suddenly, everything is dark. And not like dark it gets in the base at night. This is actual darkness, with not even the slightest trace of light for your eyes to find.
You console yourself that your plan is going flawlessly. You can feel your nest being jostled and then rocked back and forth. You must be getting moved to the big floating nest. You do your best to get comfortable in your nest, but the movement keeps throwing you into the hard walls and floor of this terribly-built nest.
Eventually, your nest stops moving. You wait a while longer and feel around for a soft spot to rest, but you can't find one anywhere.
That's it. It's time to get out and find a better place to stay. Even if the humans have built themselves just as bad of a nest for themselves, you can find something soft to use for your own nest. Some discarded cloth would be great, but you'd happily take paper at this point.
This brings you to your second mistake: you can't find a way out of this nest. The nest is tiny! The exit shouldn't be this hard to find! But, no matter how frantically you search, you can't find one.
You're beginning to worry that this nest was actually an elaborate trap.
Well, there's nothing you can do from here. You quiet your fears as best you can and decide to sleep. Maybe, when you wake up, things will have changed.
Things do change, and they don't take very long to do it.
Before you can get too hungry or thirsty, you wake up to your nest? trap? being moved again. This time, the movement is more forceful. Fortunately, you've now spent enough time in the nest to find a good place to brace yourself.
You feel the movement stop, but your prison does not open. After a short time, you feel yourself pushed hard against the back of whatever-this-is. You'd say that the force is from this thing moving,, because you can't feel anything inside here that's pressing you, but you've never felt anything move even half this fast.
Eventually, the feeling stops and you shake it off.
And then a light turns on in your nest.
This was all a Trap. The Others must have known that you would try to get on their nest, and this must be their plan. You flinch against the brightness—so bright, after your hours of complete darkness—and then you see It.
A button.
It glows the same way your niece said the hard rat's eyes glowed before it opened its mouth.
Nope, nope, you are not pressing that thing. In fact, you are going to do everything you can to avoid that button.
You sit still, or you try to. But your false nest has turned against you. Something from above presses on you and releases, and then does it again. You can hear strange thuds and clunks from behind your nest chamber. And, while the movement outside isn't nearly as strong as before, you can still feel this place rock back and forth slightly.
Soon after your perch turns you upside-down and you tumble onto the surface beneath. The light dims—the thing you were sitting on before has moved to cover most of the button.
It's every rat for themselves. Whatever this thing is, it can press its own button if it wants. Let it doom itself.
Abruptly, you're thrown into the back of this false nest again. This force is even more powerful and comes with a horribly loud SCREECH and CRASH that hurts your ears. The top part of this trap crumples. You squeeze yourself as small as you can.
When it's all over, you see a patch of actual light coming from the top of this trap. Freedom! You scurry out as fast as you can.
Time to explore the rest of this big nest. You're sure you'll find something to impress your family here. Especially now that you know how to avoid small nest-like traps.