Chapter 457

The stage lights cast a sickly yellow glow, doing little to illuminate the corners of the studio. Leo adjusted his tie, a practiced, almost weary gesture. He could feel the fabricated smile tighten on his face.

It was showtime again. He introduced his nightly program, "Cozy Corner," a saccharine concoction of home tips and feel-good interviews. He hated every manufactured moment.

He brought on his guest, a local baker with bright, unnervingly cheery eyes. Her hands were dusted with flour and she smiled in that irritating, overly enthusiastic way.

The audience, a sea of placid faces, seemed to absorb her vapid pronouncements. Leo made empty gestures towards a cake, a monstrosity of frosting and artificial colors.

He forced himself to speak with his fake warmth, "That looks delicious, truly delicious. Did you find it to be challenging, creating such art?" He knew she would say that everything she does has never been challenging. He waited for the expected response.

"Oh not at all, everything is quite easy for me," the woman said.

"Amazing. So effortlessly done," he continued, with a touch of nausea growing at the back of his throat. He had to continue this. It was the only thing he could do, his programming forcing the action forward. The studio, he realized, felt like a gilded cage.

After what seemed like an eternity of vapid pleasantries, he moved on to the next segment. He forced the audience's laughter to explode on the proper cue cards, like an elaborate ritual of false merriment.

His hand clenched behind the fake wooden kitchen counter that was on set for the entirety of this horror show, a show that had been happening for as long as he could recall. This never ends.

The camera pulled back from the close-up of the cake. He could see his face on the monitors, an unfeeling mask of affability. He saw the man he used to be in his reflection.

He felt the old self, almost dead and decayed, claw at his flesh to find his way back. This is so incredibly boring, it pains me to continue doing it.

The lights grew intense again for a commercial break, giving the small break that he was desperate for. The set became almost still with the quiet sounds of people setting up the next segment of the night. The artificial energy dropped instantly. The baker looked confused. Her perfect persona cracked just slightly.

He sat down, feeling exhaustion leech through him like some insidious poison. His eyes closed for the briefest second, seeing only a distorted tunnel, before another producer was talking to him about being "energetic".

There was something there, he could feel it; something beyond. But no, that was impossible, surely he must just be dreaming things that aren't real.

"Okay, five, four, three." They were in the home stretch. Back on he goes. Leo plastered his face into a wide smile as they were back to recording the segment with the baked item in the frame. He spoke, using a sickening amount of positivity that sounded quite revolting in the context of what he had just felt. "And welcome back!"

"Well now folks, isn't that beautiful," He said as he was forced to pretend to like some object. He reached for a poorly glazed decorative plate and was made to speak more on the "splendid artistry" of such a horrible-looking object. "Our baker is quite the marvel." It made him ill to speak in such tones and fake excitement.

He heard the same sounds echoing inside the confines of the studio, almost distant and unnoticeable at first. This is all planned and pre-set, almost too perfectly put in place for just anyone. Leo hated this place, its endless loops, its bland monotony. All for what? Who made this happen?

His head throbbed with growing pressure and an unnatural awareness he couldn't name. The edges of the set, previously familiar, now appeared warped, shifting. Was he going mad, he thought. No, there was no way he was mad.

There must be another explanation that would make sense, eventually he will make that discovery. He needed it soon, however, to feel like this was something he wasn't alone in.

He knew the crew, at some point, had to see these changes in the environment, no matter how small they might be.

His body felt strange. Something felt alien and foreign. A tightening in his skin felt like an additional layer to him. His fingertips felt longer, oddly angled and brittle, with a sharpness growing like the tip of a needle.

He tucked his hands tightly beneath his forearms, as if in some self-made straitjacket, and attempted to mask his fear. It grew.

He turned back towards the camera as if it would give him answers. Instead, all that came from it were these feelings that told him something is truly off about this situation, the cameras are not his friends. "So," he began, feeling something new crawl up his throat.

He faked a cough, "So let's move on to…", the words escaped his throat like broken glass and the edges of the letters he formed morphed into a language unknown, one that had an acidic sharpness as he formed them into audible noises that would mean absolutely nothing to the baker in front of him or his "audience" behind the cameras.

His throat felt sore and he knew if he was looking into the mirror he would see his own face, morphed and changed. Leo could taste bile forming in the back of his mouth.

It was dark, and viscous, unlike anything that could have come from him, yet at the same time, it was. "The next..Segment..", he wheezed again. His smile felt tight and cracked.

He looked over at the producer, waiting for direction. Yet instead, all that they had for him was a frozen smile and unseeing, blank eyes that stared off in the same direction.

Everyone around him, as well, was doing the same thing, except they had expressions locked into whatever emotion they were having the very second it happened, like statues waiting for the artist to bring them to life again. But no artist could exist, as Leo knew, it was just a waiting game. Waiting to become an "other".

His skin prickled, his heartbeat loud and distorted in his ears. He felt a coldness spread outward from deep within him, chilling his insides.

He brought his arms in to create warmth as the pressure became nearly impossible to ignore and the transformation progressed quickly as all of his nerves were beginning to feel very raw and his vision grew more and more blurry. "I.. Uh…," he groaned as the change got far more drastic. His form twisted again, the suit becoming ill-fitted.

His fingernails felt as though they would puncture the flesh if he even thought of flexing them, a razor's edge at each finger. His mouth fell to an unnatural length with each strained breath.

The set before him now morphed in his vision, no longer was it a quaint cooking studio, it now felt far more ominous. It resembled more of a temple. A bloody, cruel, bone white and crimson temple.

The cheerful baker stared blankly, and didn't speak, oblivious. Or rather, she didn't see any changes, only him doing an impromptu monologue as she stood as still as stone. Her wide grin looked maniacal with this setting.

How was it possible that everyone else was in such a trance while he, a vessel, went through his change as though the world simply wanted him to adapt to something horrible? Why only him, why?

He tried to form words, but they came out in a series of raspy clicks, sharp, insectile noises that caused a throbbing sensation inside his skull that was beginning to crack at its seams. He caught a reflection in a shiny, decorative knife.

His face was not his own; instead, he saw a distorted face with dark pits where his eyes used to be. They stared out as black holes looking out to the stars, but all he saw was pain and an everlasting, growing, loneliness that could never end.

A chitinous plating grew beneath the flesh of his face, creating edges and sharpness where soft flesh should have existed.

He gagged. His stomach churned, turning to a sludge and bile of an unidentifiable liquid that formed with growing heat. Leo lurched backward, hitting the fake wood with a heavy thump that did nothing more than push it along the counter, as though it was waiting to be destroyed and finally break free of its own fake shell, similar to his.

The transformation pushed, it grew within. Spiked limbs punched through his coat and his shoes became grotesque appendages with elongated toenails that pushed and grated through his skin as his legs grew longer and bent.

He thrashed, pulling the counters and plates asunder, sending them crashing to the set's hard, tiled floor. Still no one reacts. Still they remain frozen, smiling, staring with vacant eyes, not understanding the horror they were witnessing as the lights all turned to crimson in the final moments of his form transforming completely. The studio, a strange construct that it is, absorbed these shifts in mood as it only waited. This cruel theatre of false life.

The baker's fake smile twitched, the slightest of expressions, before becoming inert once more. It didn't understand. This studio, none of them, none of it would understand. The silence screamed within the artificial void of the soundstage.

All of those "people" had been staring straight ahead this entire time, simply just frozen to fulfill a single moment of pre-written history that now only existed as part of its past, yet there was a loop here that couldn't simply be understood as simply linear time, not in this twisted play.

He collapsed, the transformed husk of Leo. He let out a howl. An otherworldly call of anguish as a dozen limbs and sharp appendages formed as the only body it had known warped away.

A creature stood where Leo once did, no longer bound by the shackles of his humanity or this world that had decided it was not going to have him, any longer.

The crimson light bled, giving the transformed beast a terrifying silhouette on a very small space in this ever expanding void that became of his reality as well.

His former hands were claws, tipped with black, shiny points. They dug into the floor with unbridled hatred, the surface denting with their power. It let out another piercing scream. One that spoke of torment and a knowledge that it will forever live on inside a stage of pure sadness, pain, and loss of self.

He now walked the studio's set. A predator to a cast and crew of emotionless puppets who were there to only continue their act, eternally. They would never react to the beast who had just been one of their own, just another facet to this sad existence they all inhabited as they were waiting.

His consciousness screamed. Leo begged for his old form, begging and pleaded in silence for a release of this torment, that had yet to find one that gave way, so it can now just give in.

He then took one, measured step closer to the camera. Then two, his claws clicking. A single point that moved faster each step to the glass lenses of each screen. Then, after one last breath, he then lunged forward into the lens of the camera.

A singular image that then repeated on every screen as he passed into the only world where he could still somewhat retain an iota of who he was. The screen crackled as he jumped through into the digital and then to beyond as a formless thing to forever see himself, on repeat, in this horrific display.