The Zoo

The Zoo: The zoo is just slightly further East of the police station. It’s overgrown with dead vegetation, thorny and dried up. The entrance, a crumbling stone frame with wrought-iron gates long since rusted over, is topped by a stone sculpture of a unicorn, its body cracked at the midsection. The tall black brick walls surrounding the zoo are broken in places, often with a dried and rotten log lying atop it. The ticket counter at the entrance still works perfectly, with an automated message repeating “Enjoy the show!” for every person entering through the turnstiles.
Once inside, there is a large hut entitled “Reptile House” while the rest of the zoo is little more than a series of iron barred cages littering paths that rise and fall with the terrain. Inside every iron barred cage is a Captive and a wooden bucket.
Captives are human, but malnourished and naked. Male Captives are all eunuchs and the female Captives are bald and have scars where their breasts should be. They shiver at all times, huddled in the center of their cages. If they see you, they will immediately start screaming and begging for food, hoarse voices straining, stretching out their hands through the metal bars to try to grab you. They press their bodies against the cages hard enough to leave cuts from the rusty metal, but no blood comes out, just an amber sap. If they should get hold of you, they will not let go and will pull whatever they can of you towards their mouth and begin to eat. You can break free, their limbs often being pulled off with you. It will hardly phase them though as they continue to scream for food and rub themselves against the cage with whatever limbs they have left.
You can offer to let a Captive out and if they hear what you’re saying, they will immediately scream at you not to open the cages, not to let them in. They’ll pull themselves from the bars and retreat to the door, which they will use all their strength to keep shut.
If instead, you enter the reptile house, you’ll find it dark. Inside the reptile house, there’s an old wooden odor, like a cellar that hasn’t been opened in years. The floor is smooth concrete, the lights don’t work and there’s a constant hum and occasional faint mechanical hissing of a mist generator. The wooden walls look like crude attempts to replicate real wooden huts, with very small windows near the ceiling in some early rooms. There are exhibits in every room, a glass terrarium next to an inscription in some foreign language. Each terrarium seems empty, save sometimes for the skeleton of something unidentifiable but well-maintained. The deeper you go, the more slanted inward the walls become and the smaller the windows become. The humming grows louder, and the mechanical hisses grow in number, like steam escaping valves. The musty scent becomes heavier and heavier. The terrariums get larger, as do the skeletons. Suddenly the walls look real suddenly with no windows and bent at almost 30 degrees inward. Its humid and wet, droplets falling from the ceiling and puddles forming in the now uneven dirt below your feet. Things touch you in the darkness, seeming to pass through your clothes, slender and warm fingers on your shoulders and scaly skin brushing past your legs. Going deeper still, the fingers get warmer and crawl down your back or firmly around your neck, the scaly skin begins to constrict around your individual legs and all the while it gets more and more humid until breathing is nearly impossible. The sound of machinery is inescapable, with a pulsing sound. A faint distant light appears, which draws you towards it. It’s an LED for an emergency power switch, the fingers tightening their grip and your legs now immobile.
Flicking the switch will turn off the power for a moment. The fingers and scales will disappear, the humidity will start to dry up. Then a steam whistle will screech in your ear, there will be the sound of running water. The lights will flick on for a moment, showing a huge boiler, rumbling and rocking to and fro, as if ready to burst. You can look around for the source of fingers and scales, but there will be nothing. The lights will switch back off and lukewarm water will begin to pour into the room. The whistle won’t stop screaming and klaxons will start going off, a faint red emergency light springing to life above you, with the water level rising slowly. Something will brush past you in the water, something scaly and covered in mucus. Behind you, the way you came, are a set of stairs, slippery and wet with something oily and slick, making climbing them difficult. As you go higher and higher, the stairs get steeper and the steps become narrower. If you manage not to fall, the stairs will finally end and you will be back outside the reptile house. Turning around, you would see the entrance again.
Denizens and Lopers are common in the zoo. Denizens can often be found burbling laughter at the Captives and sometimes trying to reach through the narrow gaps to reach them. Lopers sometimes run in packs of up to twenty in the zoo, racing past cages but avoiding the reptile house. At night, the lights come on in each of the Captive’s cages, white harsh light spilling down onto them.