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Your stomach growls. There’s no more food in your supply. What was once a large, soft ball of succulent nutrition is now nothing. Absent. Your rational mind does not know what to do.
Instinct, however, directs you, and gives you one simple instruction. Leave. You feel it in your soul. It hadn’t occurred to you that there might be more things outside this little ball you’d been in as long as you could remember, but now that you thought about it, maybe it made sense. If there was no more food in here, maybe there was food out there.
Extending your fore claw, you can feel the edge of this little sack. You know you have to break free.
Motivated, spurred, emboldened by hunger, I struggled against my confines, instinct overpowering doubt and confusion at my recent revelations of life outside the bubble.
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Shhhhhhripppp, the leathery case around you rips away.
Your head poking out of the casing, you look around, your lungs filling with the outside. Above and below you are big, grey plates, and around you are long, grey and brown bars, standing up in the space between the two plates.
Outside the bars, though, you see more outside. The space you’re in is about ten times as long as you, and eight times as wide. In front of you, there are some fluffy things. They’re weird. Two of them are about twice as big as you, and one of them is even bigger than that. They’re circling around you and making a low, grovelly noise. They don’t look very nice to you.
With little time for the proper awe at the new sights that surround me, I became immediately alert. I knew danger for the first time, and it seemed my fears of leaving the bubble may have been justified. Yet even scared, I felt the pangs of hunger in my belly, and instinct drove me onward in search of food.
I snarled back at the beasts. I could not run. My bubble had burst, for better or worse, and the creatures forced me to decide my fate.
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One of the smaller creatures let's out a loud bark and leaps up at your cage, impotently biting at one of its bars. As it snarls and chews, its larger cousin jumps up and slams itself against your cage, knocking you and it off of the table you had been sitting on.
However, the cage withstands their assault.
Drawing upon hereditary knowledge, Dalyassa identifies the creatures attacking her cage. Instinct tells her that the best approach is to mimic the animal, and her drive to survive kicks in automatically. Scales shift to fur, her snout lengthens into a muzzle, and her tail becomes billowy and fuzzy.
Transformation complete, she barks once, in a way that hopefully suggests friendship.