Familiar Faces, Unfamiliar Spaces

The feeling of floating in nothing is a feeling not unfamiliar to Oz, considering he spent the first hundred years of his life floating in an empty void before time came into existence. But what is unfamiliar to Oz is the feeling of static, like all the non-existent nerves in his body have started to light up, a blood flow that had stopped long ago suddenly starting again.
The feeling of the outside world comes back to Oz in waves. The pain starts gradually with what feels like a small pinch of his limbs and soon turns into feeling like each atom that he’s made up of is being violently wrenched apart.

His head is pounding, like he’s banging it against a wall with all his might. The feeling of nausea is so intense it makes him want to de-solidify back into the goo he was before he discovered other species and took on their solid form.
He tries to open his eyes, but once he does they start to burn, like someone just threw acid into his face. The only thing he registers in the world around him is lime green, and darker green shapes running around outside of the green.

A final pound of his headache thrusts him back into unconsciousness.

The feeling of floating in nothing comes like a sweet relief to Oz. He can’t tell how long he stays there in the nothing, only that the cycle repeats where he’ll wake up, melt in pain, then be back in the nothing again.

After the sixth time, something new happens.
He opens his eyes again, his body lighting up in agony, only to see lime green.

Green floods his vision, but he can make out a vaguely human shape right there in front of him, if only because it's a darker green than the lime green that covers his vision. He hears the sound of glass cracking, before falling back into the void of nothingness.

Oz has no idea how long he spends in the nothing before he’s being shoved back into awareness.

He hears the sound of glass breaking and someone shouting as he’s being swept up by the green, toppling to the ground, cutting his arm along a sharp piece of glass.
The only thing he can see is red. He feels someone’s arms picking him up and putting him against their chest, their skin hot against the coolness of the air around them.

Alarms are blaring, covering the sounds of muffled curses and shouting.

Oz’s limbs feel heavy and sluggish. He then feels like he’s moving, being carried in someone’s arms. Most likely held against their chest by the faint heartbeat that he can hear next to his head.

The blaring of alarms fades into the distance when he feels the person carrying him start to slow down.
It takes him a minute to realize that someone is speaking to him, his mind moving sluggishly to make anything out.
“You’re ok, Ozzie, I got you. Let’s just get out of here, yeah?”

“Dames?” Oz slowly raises his head, his vision blurring and focusing in with each throb of his headache. He registers Damien’s bare chest first, red and unscarred, surprising since he’s been in so many fights. He then looks up, to see Damien looking down at him, worry clear on his face. His eyes are an electric green, which is very different than the gold they normally are. His hair has a white streak in it, and the horn that he had broken off has grown back, leaving him with two horns again. His lips were pulled into a small frown as he looked Oz over for any bad injuries.

“Ozzie! Thank God you’re okay. You are okay, right? No pain or anything? I mean, of course there's pain, you have a gash on your arm and it’s bleeding. Is that blood or is that you, because I know you’re an eldritch being and all but I thought your blood would be gold like a Greek God or something.” Damien slowed to a stop and looked down at Oz.

“Can you hear me right now Ozzie? Cause if so, you don’t need to worry. I’m here and I won’t let anything else happen to you.” Oz could feel the heat rising to his cheeks from that statement, as his phobias pop out of his shoulder cheering Damien on.

Oz looked around himself, taking in the blank light grey hallways and the low buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead. There were no decorations to give them any indication of a way out.
“Dames, where are we?” Oz turned his head sluggishly back to look up at Damien.

“No clue Ozzie, but we’re going to figure it out.” Damien grew a confident smirk. “Between your brains and my arson, nothing will be able to beat us.”

Damien carefully set down Oz and rose back to his feet. “What I do know is that we seem to be in some sort of laboratory, and the scientists placed you in some sort of vat of acid. I was placed in a vat of magma, so I was fine. But Ozzie, you were melting and then reforming continuously. I… I don’t know what I would have done if that glass didn’t break.”

Oz stumbled to his feet and hugged Damien. “You would have figured something out Dames, even if it was a simple burning down of this lab.”

Damien wrapped his arms around Oz. “We should probably get going, maybe there’s a map in one of these lab rooms?” Damien swiveled his head, looking for a door, letting go of the hug he and Oz were in.

“There’s a door right there. Let’s go, Ozzie.” Damien walked over to the left, where a grey door had blended into the walls around it. Oz followed him inside, where they were greeted with a room filled with a bunch of glass tubes, and different colored liquids inside of each tube. Oz could see figures in the liquids, distantly realizing that these were bodies of humans, and based on the decay, they weren’t alive.

They walked down the rows of tubes, seeing dozens upon dozens of dead bodies. In one tube, there looked like a giant tortoise. The tortoise opened its eyes and then smiled.
“Hey, Dames?” Damien looked over from where he’d been looking at a human-sized red-eared slider directly across from the tube Oz was looking in. “Should we free him?” He came over and stood next to Oz. “Maybe?”

Inside the tube, pink cherry blossom petals started to appear and swirl around the tortoise. “Or I guess he’ll free himself.” Damien gently grabbed Oz by the shoulders and started moving him backward from the tube.

The petals swirled around the tortoise faster and faster, making the tortoise hidden from view. The glass shattered as the petals swirled around the room, cutting into other tubes and shattering those as well.

Damien covered Oz with his body as petals, glass, and a slimy blue substance swirled around the room, the lights turning red as alarms blared.

The tube behind them shattered, the red-eared slider falling out and onto the floor. With a last twirl, the petals all fall to the floor, the giant tortoise nowhere to be seen.

The pair slowly stand up, looking around at the carnage around them. The tubes are all destroyed, the corpses strewn about randomly near the tubes they were in. The slimy substance is moving out of the tubes slowly, like slime.
A groan comes from behind the pair as the red-eared slider sits up.