"Fuck you! Let me go!" Arkadia howled, trying to wrench her forelegs free from the lionesses frog-marching her down the hallway. The short, svelte hyena thought this was going to be a simple night out, just an evening on her own at the club. She was not expecting two hulking, powerful lionesses to grab her the second she walked through the door and drag her through a side door and down to some weird basement.
Neither of them would say a word to the hyena, and they were both far stronger than her. She stood no chance of overpowering them, but she couldn't just give in! She cursed, spat, and bared her claws, but pinned as she was she couldn't even scratch her assailants. When she went limp and tried to be nothing but a dead weight, they still kept taking her deeper into the bowels of the building.
The trio finally reached a red steel door at the end of the hallway with "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY" stamped on it. One of the lionesses reached up and gave it a firm knock. Arkadia looked up at her with a scowl.
"Where the hell are you taking me?" She asked, growling.
"Where dirty dogs belong," the lioness to her left replied tersely.
"What are you talking about?!" Arkadia exclaimed, kicking the lioness as hard as she could. "You have no right to do this, let me go!"
"No," the lioness on the right said. "Stop arguing. This will be easier for you if you accept that we have every right to do whatever we please."
"I'll have your jobs!" Arkadia protested. "I'll have you thrown in jail! I'm an important fucking figure, I've played this club ten times!"
The lioness on her left chuckled darkly. "As if that will save you," she said. "Your absence will not be noticed. Now shut up."
That response gave Arkadia pause. What the hell did she mean by that? She wasn't an interplanetary celebrity or anything, but people knew who she was! Her following wasn't massive, but it was devoted. They would definitely notice if these damn lionesses decided to disappear her or send her off to one of the labor colonies in a different system. She would just have to bide her time and wait for rescue.
The red steel door swung open with a loud buzzing sound, and the lionesses shoved Arkadia through without another word. Instead of another hallway, the blue-haired hyena fell down a pit into pure, inky blackness. She screamed, looking for anything to stop or slow her descent, but the walls were too far away. All Arkadia could do was fall further, her screams swallowed by the void.
"Oh goody, it's you!" An excited female voice called from the shadows. "I've been asking them to bring you to me for months and months! Ever since the first night I saw you on stage, I knew you just had to join my collection!"
That only raised further questions, but Arkadia was far more worried about her imminent acquaintance with the floor of this pit, wherever it was. Luckily, she landed on a massive latex bag full of air, sinking about ten feet into it before bouncing back upward. She bounced on the bag three more times before finally coming to a stop. Pink lights switched on once she settled in, built into sconces on three of the walls.
The fourth wall was one giant screen, now lit up with... was that a puppy? She looked like a robot, with ball joints and a display screen instead of a face. Her whole body was covered in bright pink fur, with sparkling gold claws at the ends of each of her paws. Arkadia didn't have the faintest idea who this dog was, nor could she see any plausible pathway to getting away from her.
"Hehe, hi!" The puppy chirped, her fluffy tail wagging behind her. "My name's Dot. Welcome to my craft room!"
"Are you the uh, the owner or something?" Arkadia asked uneasily. She looked all around her new prison, but she didn't see any way out. No doors, no windows, not even an air vent. She was stuck here with this digital puppy, and judging by the unhinged tinge to her giggles, that was not ideal.
"Owner? Oh, you're so funny!" Dot giggled. "Stars no. I'm just stuck here! Some big cat ladies tricked me and programmed me into the club's servers, and they said they aren't gonna let me go until I make sure the whole place is all decorated exactly how they want it. So I'm gonna make you into some super-pretty art for the dance floor!"
The notion of being "art" for a place like Staccato was disconcerting, to say the least. The walls were lined with latex and dotted with statues that, in the word of their public relations team, "celebrated the canine form in all its glory!" Arkadia always assumed that the statues were made from scratch, and she never complained about having something to look at while she was performing on stage. Come to thing of it, there did seem to be more of them every time she performed.
The prospect of BEING one of those statues was a great deal more worthy of complaint!
"H-hey, hold on a second here Dot," Arkadia said, backing away from the screen. "Can we uh, can we talk about this? I didn't ask for this, I don't really want to be art. I'm supposed to be playing this club again in like a week!"
"Oh, that won't be a problem!" Dot said with an eager giggle. "I've been building a scan of you during all of your performances since my Mistresses put me in here. Plus all the times you come here in the audience! That's a big part of why I was soooooo excited to have you. You really love this place! So I'm gonna make sure you never, ever, ever have to leave!"
"Wait, wait, wait!" Arkadia said, panicking. "There's, there's um, there's other clubs I love too! If you turn me into a s-statue, I'll never be able to see them again!"
