For as long as I've known, I've been stuck in a lab, restrained to the wall and unable to move freely. The lab is full of freaks like me: abnormals. We are humans that possessed strange abilities like future seeing or mind controlling. But my ability isn't as powerful as that. All I can do is transform into a snake on will, but I have to harm myself in order to transform. Since I'm restrained, I haven't been able to transform into a snake. Of course, if I was able to, I would. Anything to escape this awful lab where white-clothed people come and inspect me every day then spoon-feed me a disgusting mixture. Every abnormal has some sort of weakness, even the more powerful ones kept deep underground. As long as the lab people can find it, they aren't a threat. And I'm probably one of the weakest in the whole facility. It wasn't like I was ever going to be free.

That is, until, I was sold to a wealthy man who came in one day.

It seemed like an average day, restrained in my cell following the daily routine of eating and being inspected. A lab person was talking to a strange man who wasn't wearing the white clothes like everyone else. He pointed at me, and I was confused. Why on Earth is this man interested in me? The lab person was talking to the man but I couldn't hear anything because of the sound proof walls that surrounded my cell. The only way the lab people could communicate with me was by speaker or by entering my cell. I was classified as a yellow threat, meaning I'm usually safe to be near people. Red threats are more powerful abnormals that can't be interacted with at all. I suppose that means green threats exist but there wasn't any way for me to find out. I knew red threats existed because the lab people once questioned if I should be moved there. I suppose I'm not as weak as I think, but a snake isn't any match for a future seer, the most feared abnormal.

Soon after I first saw the man outside my cell, some lab people came in and injected something into my neck that made me doze off, likely so I wouldn't attempt anything dangerous. What I saw once I woke up was darkness. It seemed I was stuck in a tight space, but moving at the same time. I heard sounds of things whooshing past me, but I couldn't identify what it could be. One thing I figured, I probably wasn't in the lab anymore.

I was only in the dark for a few minutes before a wall of blinding light appeared before me. Seemingly, I was in a box made of glass and my arms and legs were tied closely to my body. This was familiar because I had spent my whole life like that. The only difference was that the box was smaller--just barely large enough to hold my body. Did the man who owned me want to keep me in this box forever to look at? I doubted I would survive long if that was true. There seemed to be no holes in the glass large enough for a snake to slip through, which also meant there were no holes for air.

Two large humans picked up the box. Instead of white clothes, they wore black. So perhaps there were two kinds of humans in the world: white-clothes and black-clothes? Plus, of course, abnormals. They took me into the wall of light, which hurt my eyes. When my vision adjusted, I saw more strange sights than I had ever seen in my whole life.

So many colors! The floor was green, and the ceiling was blue--or was there a ceiling at all? It was almost as if the ceiling was an infinite distance away. Brightly colored objects in all different colors lay across the floor.

The black-clothes set the box holding me on the floor, leaving me suspended sideways in rope. One of them said something to the other, and then they both walked away. Then they vanished, out of my sight.

I sat like that for a few minutes, eyes still hurting from the light. Then, suddenly, the glass around me fell away and I had my first real taste of this strange place that wasn't the lab. The green floor felt surprisingly soft, not at all like the floor of the lab. In fact, it itched a bit. And everything smelled strange, like light and water. I twisted my head to smell one of the colored objects. It was the sweetest, most beautiful smell I had ever smelled.

I still had ropes binding me, however, so I couldn't properly do anything about this. But the man who owned me was not a white-coat. These were not the restraints of the lab, where every contingency was planned for. Namely, my mouth had no mouthguard in it.

I bit down on my tongue, feeling the blissful release of pain. It was only a little bit of harm, for only a small transformation, but it was enough. I felt the wonderful, familiar feeling of my body shrinking, arms and legs gluing to my side and turning into scales and pure muscle. My snake spine cracked from years of inactivity, but I knew instinctively what to do. My tongue (healed from the bite I had inflicted on myself) flicked in and out, sensing the air. Finally, I was free from restraints. But what was this place?

I shifted back into a human and looked at my surroundings. This place was much larger than the lab, with tall green and brown objects surrounded by smaller colorful objects standing in the spaces between well-marked paths. Some of the paths were rough and gray, others smooth and reddish. I heard water in the distance, which excited me. The water at the lab was mostly mixed with chemicals and other substances they wanted to test my abnormal body's reaction to. My legs felt sore from years of disuse, but I began walking down a reddish path towards the noise.

Finally I saw another human--a girl with long hair, standing completely still in the center of a round red path. As I approached, I saw she must have been abnormal, because her skin, hair, and clothes were all the same shade of light gray. What was her threat level? Did I need to run if she noticed me? I approached her slowly and carefully.

She gave no response, so eventually I spoke up. My throat creaked as I tried to form the words I had seen the white-coats use. "Hell....lo."

The strange abnormal refused to even look at me, so I walked around to look her in the face. She had round eyes and a small, serene smile--not an expression I was used to seeing. I tried again. "I am... a snake-shifter... yellow threat. What is your... category?" This was likely my first time ever willingly talking to someone. Even in the lab, my mouthguard had made it difficult to speak to my captors.

She did not acknowledge my attempts to communicate. I tried one last time: "What is your category?"

From behind me came a strange noise, like wailing but positive. I seemed to remember it was called laughing. Nobody had laughed in the lab except for the white-coats, and their laughter wasn't a happy thing for us. I whirled around to see another girl watching us from the path, with bright yellow hair and green eyes. Every few seconds, she took a few steps, as if it was physically impossible for her to stand still. She laughed at me again, exposing crooked, gap-ridden teeth.

"That's a statue," she said, between fits of wheezing. Her voice was louder than any other human I'd ever heard before. "It can't talk back to you."

"A statue," I repeated. We had no statues at the lab. "What is your category?"

"Wow, you really are new here." She calmed down a little bit but still kept twitching. "I'm Lux. This is Tamnica Gardens, and I'm assuming if you're here then that means Mr. Godfrey owns you too. You'll like it here. We have food, water, shelter. Just don't go past the blue hedge row or the monsters will get you!"

I wasn't familiar with the word monster, except that the white-coats had on occasion referred to red threats by that name. As a snake-shifter, I knew I was not prepared to take on a red threat.

Lux started pacing in circles around the statue, still talking loud and fast. "There's five of us here, plus you now. There's me, obviously, my power is creating light and heat and my weakness is that I'm too amazing for this world. There's the twins, Ama and Jade, who can read minds and maybe also control them. Their weakness is they can't be too far away from each other. Rafi's a vulture-shifter, but he wears gold weights on his ankles so he can't fly away--not that he would want to, because we have everything we need here. And Tala's been here the longest of any of us. Her power is controlling plants. We all live in the Greenhouse. Come on, I'll take you there!"

So my strange new home had other residents--and they were all abnormals. What were their threat levels? Did they pose any threat to me? Before I had any choice in the matter, she grabbed my arm and started dragging me down the path.