The Great Wild Wonder

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through her window. The minuscule crack in the barricades before her shared an amazing story of color and vibrant life, a whole universe that defied the sterility of her home in its primal beauty. She saw the greens of jungles, the flittering, colorful wings of fauna in flight, and the shuffling of underbrush as hidden creatures held secret meetings. There was so much out there that refused control or containment that fascinated and amazed her in its freedom. Whenever she was given time alone she would find herself peering through this heaven-sent flaw in the fortified surroundings meant to keep her safe within these walls. Well, she was told this bunker was meant to protect her at least.

Most of her existence up until this point was spent hidden away in this mechanical home, saturated by fluorescent lights and filled with the sounds of whirring machinery. She was never told what these contraptions were accomplishing or how they went about their work, only that their functionality was necessary. Her guardians tended to impart just enough knowledge to keep her within these walls. "The world outside is dangerous," they'd say, "you're far too important to risk exposure to the conditions out there." When she was younger, she had trusted their judgment implicitly. As the years passed, however, her observations of her limited worldview gave her cause for doubt.

There was little joy to be found in her daily routines. She would be awoken by her chaperones, tall figures clad in white labcoats accompanied by metal facsimiles of themselves, and run through a series of tests. The assessments would be new and different each day but she would never know the results or the cause of these visits. Sometimes they would inject her with things only to take blood out of her an hour after, sometimes they'd move her to another room to go through some variety of mazes, and sometimes they'd ask her to attack their chrome companions. She rarely got to converse with them while these tests were taking place and generally couldn't get a read on how they felt about her successes or failures. Their expressions were consistently hidden behind thick, black goggles and bulky leather masks. The metallic friends did not give much indication of personality either, as they only made the same whirring sounds as the walls around her whenever she would ask them questions.

For protectors, she did not understand the extent to which they would emotionally distance themselves from her. They had not even given her a proper name, as far as she could tell. The chaperones in labcoats just called her things like "subject" or "miss", nothing with any derivation of care or meaning. Everything they had done, they had claimed it was for her safety, but they never clarified why they cared so much that she remain safe and secured in the first place. She wondered if it was because she looked so different from them, with claws where they had fingers, scales where they had skin, and fangs where they had flat teeth. While their coats flowed behind them, all that was at her back were jagged spines and a thick tail. She still had hair as they did, she had seen the red locks brush past her vision. She stood upright and wore clothing just like them, even if hers was a plain, fitted body suit as opposed to their professional, scientific attire. There was much she didn't understand about her situation, even after years of experimentation and containment.

The outside world, however, provided something wholly different and fascinating to her. When she first discovered that hole in the window, she kept it a secret from her guardians, a special view all her own to give her joy and foster her imagination. Outside of this bunker, the world changed and shifted on a whim. She would observe storms that shook even the largest trees down to their roots, fierce combat between all kinds of beasts in pursuit of dominance or survival, and generations of creatures raising their young in expansive families and feasting off the fruit of the land. There were many species out there that even reminded her of herself in appearance, save for her more humanoid features. She wondered what might have been beyond her glimpse of the world, as small as it was, and what other mysteries lay just outside of her reach. For that matter, she questioned why this was denied to her for her whole life. Was it truly for her safety, or did their interests go against her own?

When she came to this line of questioning, she set about plans to escape and see these lands she had been kept from. She didn't even initially plan to leave permanently at the time, perhaps out of some odd attachment she still felt for what had been her home for so long. She knew not what would truly await her, but she had to know the truth of this life she had led up until this point. Little did her guardians know, their cold indifference and their scientific regimen had set in motion this series of events, one that would doom humanity in the end. Their experiments on the stolen child of beasts had borne fruit that would lead to the destruction of the Eden they had developed in this savage land. Soon enough, this path would lead to the birth of no mere "subject", but to a sovereign of a world made hostile by man's hubris. Soon, this princess trapped for so long would grow into a true Queen of Monsters.