Chapter 1

There is screaming. It’s hard to tell if it’s out of pure horror or out of delight. It always sounds the same, though some screaming sounds miles away. Just exactly how big is this place? Twenty year old Toni looks up, seeing a sign on a chain link fence that says, in old, rotted out wooden letters, “PLAYPEN.” It’s an odd place to be and she doesn’t even know how she had ended up in front of this...place. The entrance reminded her of one of those McDonalds playplaces, only much larger. Obviously meant for adults. It’s high up, too, with no way out. The only way in is inside the big, run down building it’s connected to. She can’t tell if she is outside or inside the actual building. Inside a building containing another building? Maybe. 

“Is this place even safe to enter?” Toni thinks to herself. “It looks like the ceiling could fall at any moment in time…”

Toni looks around at the people around her, blurry faces is all she can see and, habitually, she pulls her long, wavy brown hair up into a loose bun from nerves eating away at her. Toni folds her arms against her chest, taking a deep breath in and forcing it out. Why is she impatient? What the hell is going on? 

A speaker squeals as a man covered in a huge fur coat taps the speaker and clears his throat to capture everyone’s attention. The murmuring that she hadn’t realized was happening suddenly stopped with a whisper here and there. The man looked to be in his thirties with slicked back hair and bright green eyeshadow and orange lips. There were sequins above his left eyebrow. 

“How...flamboyant,” she thinks to herself. 

The man opens his mouth to speak and then everything vanishes with a light and the droning sound of an alarm clock. 7:15 AM it reads. Groaning, Toni gets up and runs her fingers through her hair where they get caught. 

“What an interesting dream…” she thinks.