Butterflies swirled around a lone fur in the middle of a massive field, batting him with their wings and completely blocking his field of vision. The fur however, remained calm in the thick fog of bugs; despite the fact that the butterflies were attacking him from all directions and with as much force as possible for such a gentle creature. The sheer amount of winged beauties did not permit one to see their victim, but from the lack of movement within the cloud and the signs that the ‘mob’ of sorts was dispersing, it was easy to assume the inevitable. The fact that more and more began to leave and a slumped, bloodied figure began to emerge beneath the cloud of colorful wings.
As the last of the bugs fluttered away into the air, they began to flicker ever so slightly. The whole world began to flicker and lose phase around the slumped fur, who appeared to be a wolf now that the butterflies had vanished from around him. All of reality had begun to flicker at this point, the sky darkening and getting an almost triangular pattern about it. The trees and grass had vanished by this time, along with every colorful bug in the sky which had attacked the fallen animal. A few more flickers, and what had been an entire, serene meadow which went on for miles and miles became a 20′ square, pyramid-like room. The wolf’s head turned towards the sky as even the blood on his body began to flash and go out of sync. Hardly a second later, the wolf was blood-free and in a white trench-coat, having previously been naked and relatively covered in blood.
As he slowly clamored to his feet, a faint hum came from the left side of the room as the wall itself seemed to sink into itself. It folded open soon after, exposing a long hallway that the wolf began to stride towards in long, graceful steps. He brushed off his right shoulder as he walked, appearing to brush off some blood from his shoulders that was no longer there.
“You know it’s not there Rage, calm down and return to reality,” A voice from nowhere echoed throughout the hallway. This startled the slightly-spacing wolf slightly as he heard it. His head turned down in embarrassment as his brain comprehended the statement, trying to pull himself back from being somewhere which did not exist anywhere in this reality. He continued to walk though, his destination coming into view as another, more simplistic door at the end of the corridor. Step after step, footfall after footfall, he got closer to the door that was his final destination along the hallway.
A slight ‘whoosh’ and a click signaled the door opening, snapping the wolf back into reality yet again. He, as well as every other fur who had ever gone into the holo-chamber for his type of ‘treatment’, always had trouble coming back to what one considered ‘real’. He had been spacing out to the point of it being inconvenient lately though; he would need to talk to the Doc about stepping down the treatment to a less regular dosage. Hardly a point he would bring up at the moment however, this fact further stressed by the fact that he had been failing a few treatments this week.
“Well Rage, this treatment failed as well. You know as well as I do that you must control all the targets using just a portion of your mental capacity. You are trying with your whole brain, and thusly losing focus on the primary objective. You know you must try harder to complete this; and keep in mind the amount of money you are worth to The Body.”
“I know Doc, I know.” Rage sighed and looked around the lab quickly, eyeing all of the equipment which generated that fake reality and monitored his status in it. His eyes settled on the Doc, a middle-aged dragon who had eaten far too many snacks in his day and had the gut to prove it.
“You know I don’t like it when you call me Doc, Rage. Please use my name, as I believe I have at least earned that right.”
“Fine, Dr. Matis.