Lately life had been flying by without giving her much of a break. She had a side job, which had been sucking away quite a bit of her free time. Saph had been gone a lot more too... she assumed probably taking extra jobs here or there related to the latest Roach incident.

Considering how busy the both of them were these days, logically they saw each other less. Most of the time when she got home Saph was gone, or on his way out. The same could be said for her. Thus, Shelby was lonely. Even surrounded by a plethora of kids and adults she struggled to drag herself out of her shared room and actually interact with people.

She had taken more to boxing herself up in her room, turning her headphones all the way up, and losing herself in various art projects. Her most recent project was personal, rather than being a commission. The idea behind it had been to work on how accurately she could portray another artists style, while also keeping her own creative flare in mind. The theme had been based on one of her favorite movies... which involved mazes, goblins, magic, and a princess on a mission.

She more or less liked it because of the art, and the fact the female lead chose her own mission over romance... which had been rare for movies when she was younger.

Currently, Shelby had been at the easel for a few hours already, and this was her second go at the piece. She had the maze nearly done, as well as a goo portion of goblin denizens, and various other things she could dredge up from memory. A few elements had been combined as well, such as pathways full of sentient, talking hands... and numerous areas where bog like formations popped up to fill in space.

She was struggling with how exactly to draw the princess... considering she couldn't quite remember what the actress had looked like.

Her indecision was strong, and because of it she ended up with quite a few sketches that didn't exactly match with the image in her head. She covered a few up with patches of white paint, but halfway through ended up smearing a bit too much color in the wrong place. A bit of white was not going to cover up that mistake.

"...Crap." Frowning, she gripped her current brush between her teeth and reached out to try and pick up some of the extra paint with her fingers...

She blinked, and staggered forward a bit as her chair vanished under her. It took a moment for her brain to process the fact that she suddenly wasn't where she had been a moment before. The paintbrush fell from her mouth as her jaw dropped and she turned in a full circle.

"...Wh...what?" Behind her was an expanse of black, with a single painted canvas floating in the middle of it. Dumbfounded she turned around again. In front of her were a set of walls. They seemed to stretch out for quite a distance, before curving off into the distance. The artist reached up with shaking hands to remove her earbuds from her ears, and let out a few choice words that summed up her current thoughts.

Where the hell was she?

Around that time all of the gears in her head started to creak back into motion, and she noticed something odd. Or, well, more odd than her suddenly being ripped from her bedroom without warning.

The wall before her looked like a large, painted version of the picture she had just been working on. She could see the detail she had spent so long painstakingly working into the paint. Everything from the moss, to the layout of the bricks, to the hint of clouds in the sky. She'd created it all.

Blinking, she stood there dumbstruck for a moment before she started to laugh. "Ha ha! Okay... I get it. Scare the human. Well, congrats whoever you are! You win! You scared the piss outta me!" Shelby glanced around, straining her ears for any hint of childish giggling.

"... This is a pretty elaborate trick, you know. Props to you. Now... um... can we make everything go back to normal? I kinda wanna finish my painting."

... Silence.

"...Hello?"

No one had answered her, and she had been wandering around presumably for an hour now. She'd gone from flustered to confused, back to flustered again, and then headlong into pissed. Most of her was still sure that this was a prank of some sort by some student that had chosen to single out the least likely person in the whole school to retaliate.

They were wrong, whoever they were. When she found them... or got out of here, whichever came first really, she would show them the error of their ways.

... Somehow.

But first, she needed to find a way out.

She'd headed into the maze at first to try and see if anyone was hiding within it. Maybe it was some kinda game? Some kid had seen her painting and thought it would be fun to go explore it or something. Shelby had forgotten one terribly fact, though, before she'd gone in. In the movie walls had a way of moving themselves, and paths tended to appear and vanish on a whim.

She had turned around at some point to leave, and yet she was 80% sure that she was now deeper into the maze than before. In fact, she even stumbled into an unfinished corner. At a certain point the paint-pathway and paint-walls tapered off into blank white. She hovered on the edge, uncertain if she would fall into that empty space, or if it was solid ground.

At another point, at what felt like the complete opposite side of the maze she ran into one of the many bogs she'd added in. Really, they had been a lazy approach to cover more space with less detail, and nothing more.

She was regretting that now.

In the movie the bogs had always been described as overbearingly foul in smell. Something of a mix between old crusty socks and spoiled eggs.

In reality the brown, bubbling mixture with a questionable sound smelled much worse. Shelby hightailed it out of the area as fast as possible, but the smell clung to her like a bad perfume.

Around the time she hit the area where the hand monsters were, she wasn't even mildly entertained anymore. She was tired, thirsty, and a headache was building up behind her eyes. The silver lining there was that the hand creatures could at least talk, even if they were pretty snide about it.

As she stepped close to them they formed into various faces, many of which swiveled in her direction. It was more cringe worthy facing it herself than it had appeared in the movie.

Who might you be? Questioned one of the hand-formed faces. Another let out a bark of laughter, and yet another chimed in with something she was sure was an insult.

"Shelby." She answered plainly, while trying to run though various lines of the movie in her head. What had the main character said to get them to interact with her? Oh! Yes, duh. "I, uh... need help."

"Help?" Chimed one, "Help! She needs help!" cackled another. The faces shifted, and it was honestly dizzying... before they reformed in different places.
"Do you need help out, or in?" One finally asked.

Shelby squinted, and again tried to refer back to a movie she hadn't watched in a handful of years or more. This is what she figured talking to a Sphinx must have been like. Everything was riddles and you had to chose your words very carefully.

She was at least fifty percent sure that the girl had requested to go down. She was also sure that the maze itself was probably geared to steer those who entered it toward the center. She wanted out, preferably asap.

"I would like to go out."

"OUT! She said OUT!" The lot of them burst into loud, rancorous cackling. She didn't even have the time to worry about the ramifications of her choice before the wall before her suddenly flipped without warning. The snarky hands were gone.

"HEY!" A groaning, grinding sound cut her off, and the ground started to rumble slightly. Shelby realized too late that all of the walls surrounding her were now steadily moving toward her. She was effectively being pushed back toward the wall behind her.

"NOT FUNNY! KNOCK IT OFF!" Kicking didn't seem to help. Was she about be be crushed to death by colorful, paint splattered walls?

Her back hit the wall behind her as she was boxed in, and then suddenly... it just wasn't there anymore.

With a wild flail of her arms she pitched backwards. The open air lasted for half a second, before she splashed backwards straight into a bog.... that happened to be within eyesight of the strange pitch black wall and the mysterious painting.

Screaming wasn't an option because the smell hit her mid air. She flailed briefly within the muck before finding her footing and pushing herself up. Turns out it wasn't terribly deep!

It also turned out that it smelled much, much worse when you were covered in it, versus just being near it.

Taking in a gasp of air was reflex, but also a terrible idea. Now the stink was in her lungs, as well as on her skin. She could hear that little goblin man, whatever his name had been in the movie, moaning about how if you ever got any of the bog of eternal stench on you, you'd never get it off again.

"@#$%^!" The word echoed into the distance, bouncing off of the wall to her right. She could swear she heard distant laughing somewhere off in the maze.

Dragging herself from the muck was a task, also. It wasn't deep but it was thick like cake batter. Attempting to scrape some of it off of herself wasn't helping either. It just seemed to stick to her stubbornly.

"Stupid @#$%ing hands! Stupid Henson!" She had half a mind to match back in there and give them what for.

She headed toward the opening of the maze again, but stopped before fully entering. Her attention had been captured by that floating painting again.

Curiosity won over her anger momentarily, and she squelched her way on over to her.

Interestingly enough, the painting looked like her room. It was captured from an angle that one might have seen if they were standing behind her easel and looking at the door.

Cautiously, she reached up to poke at it..

--

A flat second later she stumbled again, tripped over her painting stool and landed in a heap on her floor. "%@#$!"

The first thing she noticed was that she was back in her own room... somehow. The second thing she noticed was that she was still covered in bog muck.

...wait, scratch that. Upon examining herself she found that it wasn't eternal stench. It was... paint. She was covered from head to toe in various shades of paint. The canvas she had stretched across the floor was also covered in paint.

Her confusion sprinted back with reinforcements, as she picked herself up off the floor.

She spent the next few days simultaneously attempting to track down a possible mystery mutant, and reevaluating her own life. When it became apparent that no one had been involved in the strangeness of visiting painting world, Shelby had to try and rationally solve the mystery on her own.

This was a lengthy process that involved her locking herself in her room and basically attempting to interrogate all of the paintings in her room one by one. She didn't manage to get any answers out of the first painting... but did discover something interesting (and terrifying) when she went to drag the second painting out.

Quite suddenly, she found herself within that paining as well. A moment later she was back out, scrambling across the floor on all fours and panting heavily. There were large gashes in the fabric of her shirt, and she had more than a few scratches visible on her arms and legs. With wide eyes she stared down the painted form of a skeletal tiger, stalking motionlessly though dark water filled with lily pads.

That one had tried to eat her.

She quickly shoved it into the back of her closet, careful to only touch it with a yard stick.

The next painting she 'visited' unwillingly happened when she was trying to shove all of her artwork into that same closet from before. She had basically decided that she didn't want to deal with... whatever this was, and that for the time being she was just going to put her paint brushes down for a while.

Unfortunately, she didn't understand that there was some kid of connection between her physically touching a painting and being sucked into it, for lack of a better term.

This particular painting happened to be abstract, and while it was pretty from the outside, once you stepped inside it was chaos. She popped into existence within the painting, landed on nothing, and then immediately shot up toward the ceiling.

How did she know there was a ceiling? She hit it.

And before she could get her bearings she was rocketed off toward the other side of the painting, and encountered a wall. A very hard wall. As it were, it seemed that while from the outside the picture would appear to be never ending, it was in fact not. Around the space where the canvas would have ended was a dark block of nope, that seemed to stretch around the small world and encapsulate it like a box of sorts.

She was trapped in a box that was full of large, multicolored acrylic worlds and swirling belts of stars and color.

Gravity seemed to rotate around the worlds, which now that she thought back on it, was kinda what she had envisioned as she had been painting it. The 'planets' constantly shifted around within their box, drifting past each other lazily. Unfortunately with every rotation one of their passing gravity feilds would snag her and fling her off in a different direction.

It took way too long in her opinion for her to try and forcefully fling herself back toward the black wall that housed the apparent 'exit'.

--

When she was safely back in her room she carefully shoved the rest of the art somewhere safe and flopped onto her bed. After her day of unintended adventures she still had a hefty dose of confusion to deal with, quite a few new bruises, and many... many more questions that needed answering.

But, at least one thing was beginning to become clear to her.

... Maybe she wasn't nearly as human as she had thought she was.

{ENd}