"W-why me?" The words come through slack, nerveless lips; Sarah can barely even understand her own badly slurred words. The drug is still coursing through her bloodstream, still making her head droop forward periodically in a semi-conscious fugue state, and she's not really sure at first whether the woman in the charcoal gray suit responds to her or not. Consciousness is a series of interludes now, punctuated by moments of drifting oblivion that she doesn't even notice herself falling into. The Japanese woman with the close-cropped black hair and the impeccably tailored suit simply appears to move without motion and it's only slowly that Sarah realizes it's because she's been passing out again.
She tries again. "Why me?" Sarah asks, lifting her head up and unconsciously moving to wipe the drool away from her lips. Her hand moves maybe a fraction of an inch before pulling against a heavy leather cuff around her wrist that secures her arms to the armrests of the chair. She remembers testing them when she first woke up, tugging against them with muscles that felt pitifully weak and finding that she couldn't so much as budge. Even rocking from side to side did nothing, she recalls. The chair is bolted to the concrete floor, and the restraints are bolted to the chair. Sarah isn't going anywhere.
The woman turns, revealing a navy blue dress shirt beneath her unbuttoned jacket and a skinny tie that's a vivid slash of red against the cooler colors. She looks like she's auditioning for a New Wave band from the 80s, or cosplaying as some teleporter-accident version of the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors. "Ah," she says, in a thick accent that suggests a native Japanese speaker. "Back with us again, I see. For good this time, I hope? I do apologize if I misjudged your tolerance. It's always so difficult to mix the drug properly with alcohol."
The words stir a memory in Sarah's still-muzzy brain. She was at a club, not one of her usual haunts but a new place that opened a few weeks back near her apartment. The drinks were cheap, the guys were cute, the music was practically her personal playlist, but she couldn't shake the feeling that something was... off. Odd. Strangers seemed bizarrely attentive--never overtly, never staring at her or following her or anything, but giving off subtle signals with their body language that triggered some subliminal perception that she was the focus of the room. Sometimes when she turned a little too quickly she would catch people behaving perfectly naturally, the kind of natural behavior that could only be rehearsed. Even in the middle of a crowd of people, she didn't feel safe.
Sarah ignored her instincts, though. It seemed impossible that she could be in danger in the middle of a whole room full of strangers. Clubs had their sketchy guys, yes, but the odds of thirty or forty sketchy people of all different genders showing up on the same night with just one normal woman to skeeve on? Had to be her imagination. Absolutely had to be. Sarah told herself she was just being paranoid right up until she finished her third drink and the darkness behind her eyes swallowed her up so quickly that she didn't even have time to register that she was falling over.
And now here. "Who are you?" Sarah shouts, the panic in her voice rising as she yanks as hard as she can at the restraints and finds that her helplessness had nothing to do with the drugged lethargy in her limbs earlier. "What is this, where am I, what's going on, how--how did you--?" The questions multiply faster than she can get them past her lips, encompassing everything from the coincidence behind a new club opening up so close to her place to the identity of the stranger in the tailored suit to the drugs they must have used to knock her out so swiftly and completely. "Let me the fuck out of here!" Sarah screams, her panicking hindbrain cutting directly to the chase.
The woman walks up to Sarah's chair, towering over her for a long moment--it's not just that Sarah's sitting down, the woman is a statuesque six feet tall and would easily stand a head taller than the helpless blonde even if they were both upright and barefooted--before squatting down and gazing up at Sarah with a soothing smile on her face. "You are Sarah Guest, correct?" she asks, sounding polite, prompt and officious all at once. Like she's the world's most unorthodox process server, getting ready to hand Sarah a writ for her unpaid parking tickets or something. "Originally from Hastings, Nebraska? Daughter of Michael and Susan Guest?"
Sarah shakes her head. "N-no," she says, all too conscious of the desperate haste in her voice that makes the lie blatant and obvious. She catches sight of the counter on the far wall, of her purse lying open on its side with its contents scattered across the industrial green Formica surface. Her driver's license must be there, she realizes, and even if it isn't she showed it back at the bar to get her drinks. They know who she is. There's no getting out of this. But her mouth is moving faster than her sluggish, terrified brain. "My name's, um, S-Sammi, Sammi, um... uhhh...."
