Hannah awoke with tears in her eyes, a sad feeling weighing down her heart as the remnants of the dream began to fade. What had she dreamt about? It was quickly leaving her. Did it have something to do with food?
Ah, yes, food! Remembering the existence of food awoke the need for it deep in her gut. But how was she this hungry again? She had stuffed herself more than ever before, then fallen into her food coma. Yet she was just as hungry as yesterday? This hunger was too deep, too overpowering, too raw to be considered normal. Whatever, she thought to herself, I'll figure that out later. She had more urgent things to take care of. So she gorged herself on the delectable room, taking bites straight out of the walls instead of attempting to use her weak fingers to rip chunks out first. Her teeth sank into the soft walls too easily to resort to an inferior method. While perhaps she should have given this more thought, she was too completely engrossed in the experience to pay it any mind. After all, who could think straight when faced with such an intoxicating feast?
This pattern of eating until she fell into a deep sleep, in which she dreamed of long-gone dishes before forgetting the dream upon waking, repeated a few more times. In these dreams, she discovered that it had been so long since she'd eaten "normal" foods that she couldn't remember what many of them tasted like. Not even in a dream. Instead, the forgotten flavors were replaced with the divine taste of her mysterious edible room.
Something unusual came to Hannah's attention after a few times. No matter how much of the room she ate while awake, it didn't shrink as quickly as she would have expected. Or, rather, when she woke up, she would find that it was about as big to her as it had been the previous time she awoke. As she mused on this, moving to tear a chunk of the room from the ceiling, her nose bumped into something hard. It was still far too dark to see. So, curious (and at this point sated enough to think straight but not so much as to pass out), she climbed up onto the ceiling to get a better feel of it. She rubbed the material, finding it hard and somewhat porous. It proved to be too hard to eat when she gnawed at it. Despite its hardness, it smelled like it had something good hidden inside, a new flavor she hadn't yet experienced. It made her mouth water. After eating around the ceiling's strangely round beam, having uncovered a good portion of it, she fell unconscious once more.
The next "day," Hannah ate all around that ceiling beam, discovering two more just like it, each fairly close to it on either side. The space between them definitely looked big enough for her to fit through. She only ate laterally rather than upwards for now, finding that enough time had passed that her ravenous hunger had decreased somewhat. This freed her attention from being wholly occupied with the delicious room and allowed her to begin to think about her situation. What exactly had happened with Dokjin? Why did he suddenly turn on her, and where the heck was she? In all her days, she had never imagined what it would be like to be confined in such a place.
If she had been abducted by aliens, as seemed the most plausible course of events, she would have expected to be kept in a jail cell similar to those humans used. Made of straight metal bars, cubic in shape or even cylindrical, and absolutely inedible. She would have expected to be chained to a wall, starved and tortured, or even forcefully used as a mother for alien young. That happened in those old movies, right?
Oh goodness, Hannah thought to herself. Was she daft? Never once in the nearly half-a-century long war had aliens ever used humans in such a way. Did they worm their way into the brain to take over individuals in order to infiltrate human camps? Sure. Replace the eyes of a human with their own in another form of espionage? Yep, that had happened too. Hypnotizing humans into becoming slaves, eating captives alive, growing alien molds on their corpses to use as air freshener… the aliens did all kinds of weird things involving the humans they warred with. In an extermination mission several years ago, Hannah had even found among an aliens' belongings a human corpse, completely dehydrated, joints equipped with screws and skin preserved (still on the bones) in some sort of hard yet flexible clear substance. A human corpse marionette, dressed in alien garb as if it were some sort of macabre child's toy. This was just one of many equally strange (and disturbing) things she had discovered the aliens did with human corpses. It was enough to convince her that the aliens were all psychos obsessed with humans and their corpses. Yet, even among the strange habits of hundreds of different alien species, never once had aliens used humans to reproduce. The reason was obvious. Humans and aliens were different species, with incompatible DNA. Heck, many of the aliens' physiologies were in phyla, kingdoms and domains that didn't even exist on Earth.
The memories of all the strange things aliens had done to humans caused Hannah's anger to boil, even as she exposed more of the ceiling beams in what continued to be total darkness. Not even the delectable sensations dancing across her tongue could distract her from this fury. Not only had the alien races decided to invade Earth for who-knows-why, but they just had to be so utterly disrespectful of the human race. Decades of battle had made it perfectly clear to her how disdainful they were of human life. They took no prisoners unless it was for their unspeakable purposes, used cruel and brutal methods without restraint, spared no child and catered to no pleas of mercy. It was submit or die. Or rather, die cleanly or die painfully. Further, every single intelligent alien race had refused to use the human language to communicate, instead using what they called Galactic Speak. They were so adamant in this that eventually humans gave up on their mother tongues entirely. Since there was no spare time to teach the rising generation multiple languages, and every human had to learn Galactic Speak anyways, humans chose to sacrifice their very heritage in order to give their species a chance to survive.
Such arrogant creatures the aliens had been. Sure they were powerful, but if they had been the least bit respectful of humanity, Hannah wouldn't be so angry now. Perhaps the war (or, more accurately, series of consecutive, overlapping wars) could have ended decades ago. Her anger mixed with hopeless longing as she thought of all the dear friends she had lost. Would Raphael still be alive if even one of the alien races had chosen peace? Olivia, Ham, Destiny, Zander, Chansin, Fina, Chortle… the list of deceased friends went on. So many had died. Too many. Were her remaining companions still alive? The dozen besides Dokjin and herself that had survived the week after the Final Battle? She hoped they were. She hoped they had subdued the somehow-traitor Dokjin and escaped, found some haven with everything they needed, and finally got to rest. A deep sorrow bloomed in her chest with this wishful thinking. If she was here, wherever this was, it meant that Dokjin had won and her friends were, at best, in similar enclosures, and at worst, dead. Or maybe she had the best and worst outcomes switched… she was sure she hadn't discovered enough yet to decide. There was surely something more to whatever had happened to her. She was missing crucial information and she knew it.
Eyes growing heavy from mental exertion and a nearly bursting stomach, Hannah curled up in a corner and drifted into a dreamless sleep.