The air smelled funny. (Name of lead teen) notice the stale and stuffy air before she noticed anything else because that wasn’t how her room normally smelled. (Don’t know if the kids should completely remember their lives or just have vague impressions) Usually, she could smell the fresh breeze of her family’s farm through her bedroom window (this could be changed to metallic tang of an overly industrial world). The earthy smell of freshly tilled soil mix with Mom’s cooking was what normally brought her to conciseness every morning.
But not this morning. (name) tried to understand what was different. It came to her that she was not in her bed! The feel was wrong, no sagging soft mattress that force her into a protective ball in the middle of her bed. No, this bed felt hard and cold. She was lying on her back, a position that she hated to sleep in.
“Alright (name), it’s time to wake from this dream” she told her self.
She had always been able to pull herself out of bad dreams this way and she was sure that she would open her eyes to the familiar surroundings of her tiny bedroom in her parents’ house on the farming world of (name for plant dedicated to farming).
(Name) did manage to accomplish getting her eyes open but the rest was lost in the dim glow of the small chamber that encircled her. Quickly, she swiveled her head around the plain, smooth walls of some kind of container. She wasn’t normally claustrophobic, having seven older brothers that thought it was funny to lock you in any small place, tended to cure you of that kind of fear. But, (name) did not recognize anything she was seeing. This was not a closet in her house or the shed were her family kept tools, this nothing she had ever seen before.
Her heart started to pump faster as adrenalin flooded her system. She flopped over and caught the sight of a small window at the end of the tube behind her head. She crawled to the window and stuck her nose to the glass, nothing. She couldn’t make anything out, just vague shapes and lights. Panic threatened to overwhelm her and she began to bang on the window. Just as she gathered her breath for a big terrifying scream, the front of the pod popped outward. The suddenness of the opening made her swallow her panicked cry.
Just a second ago (name) would have thought all she wanted was out of this tube, but now being face with the unknown of outside she didn’t know whether to stay or go. She liked to think of herself as brave. She knew never to show fear around her brothers because they would exploit it for every good laugh they could. But this was different, she didn’t know what she would find outside and she was afraid that she wouldn’t be able hide that fear if her brothers were out there waiting to make fun.
Well. (name) decided she couldn’t sit in this tube forever, someone might close her back into it. She scrambled her way to the edged and leaned slightly out, ready to jump back incase of… she didn’t know what, but it never hurt to be cautious. Her first glimpse down only revealed a floor, gray and institutional, so she risked a peek up and was struck by something falling. She braced as best she could for pain from what ever was going to hit her square in the nose, but that pain never materialized. Instead, a soft fluffy brown thing stayed draped across her face. She pulled it off only to be shocked the staring face of a teddy bear.
(Name) quickly returned her gaze up to see thousand upon thousand of tubes above her and some that were open like hers. People seem to be emerging from them as she was. No, she corrected herself, those weren’t people they were kids. Small kids, some big kids too, were out of their tubes and trying to climb the small rung ladders that ran to the sides of the tubes.
The owner of the teddy bear paused before making the leap to the floor to retrieve his toy from (name).
Big brown eyes and mass of untidy brown hair lightly landed on the floor in front of her. He said.
“I need a potty and I’m hungry.”