**Note from the author:
This is a side story set in the Earth: Tentacle Breeding Ground universe, and I recommend reading it as supplementary to the main narrative.
As of 2/24/23, I have also made some adjustments to character names:
Jean > Vincent
Annette > Marie
Genevieve > Pauline
Chanel > Celestine
Marc > Anthony
As always, thanks for reading and feedback :)
***
Vincent slowly cracked his eyes open for the first time in months, though to him it merely felt like a pleasant nap. The first thing he noticed was an unfamiliar, cloying taste in his mouth, and that his heart rate was oddly elevated despite his body being at rest. Disoriented, he shifted his eyes around the dark chamber he found himself in, his stiff body unable to move from his strangely moist but comfortable bed. His scattered thoughts slowly knitted themselves together as he began to make out the shapes around the room. It was all coming back to him now.
He was in the coma ward of one of Paris's oldest and finest hospitals. The rare neurological disease that had plagued him for all forty-three years of his life had finally progressed enough to force him to enter a medically induced coma in order to prevent more permanent damage to his body. He wasn't sure how long he had been out, but surely this was a sign that his research assistants had finally proven themselves competent and successfully completed the cure he had devoted his life to developing.
This flash of hope only lasted for a moment. Something was clearly wrong. The room was unusually dark. Either it was nighttime or something thick was covering the windows, but regardless, no lights were on, and missing were the expected sounds of beeping equipment and bustling hospital staff. What he heard instead was a strange combination of grotesque, wet squelching sounds, erotic moaning, and... a woman's giggling? Surely some whore nurse hadn't turned off the lights to have her way with one of the other comatose patients?
Feeling some strength finally returning to his muscles, Vincent weakly turned his head to get a better view of his surroundings. A slowly blinking red light on the wall, assumedly some sort of emergency power system, periodically illuminated the room... no, the hellscape. Each flash painted the interior a bloody crimson and cast long, black shadows that wiggled and danced as if alive. Vincent's eyes widened and he attempted to gasp, but he suddenly noticed that his mouth was covered in some sort of organic oxygen mask that was hanging from the writhing ceiling.
A man of a lesser mind might have immediately panicked, but Vincent remained motionless, analyzing the situation and attempting to draw clues from the nightmarish environment. Clearly, some sort of biological warfare had occurred since he had fallen unconscious, or possibly a new, invasive species had been discovered. A virus, perhaps? The unearthly sight of squirming tentacles weaving along the slime-covered tumorous growths emerging from the walls pointed towards an extraterrestrial origin. Not something too hard to believe possible. The fact that he could still breath unhindered through the obstruction in his esophagus certainly indicated something beyond human understanding.
Streams of mucus-like fluid oozed and dripped from every fleshy surface, with slimy strands webbing around each piece of furniture as if spun by a drunken spider. All around the room, several occupied beds divided by curtains could be seen barely peeking out from the pulsating organic masses around them.
All of the other people in the ward appeared to be sleeping - or more likely, in comas - and they all had the same tentacle covering their mouths as Vincent. For the first time, he realized that everyone was nude, including himself. He could see a few pairs of naked breasts gently rising and falling with steady, sleeping breaths, and semi-erect penises whose shadows mingled with those of the swaying tentacles. It was an oddly hypnotic sight, and not one that Vincent necessarily found unpleasant.