Specimens

There are rooms we don’t realize we’ve survived until we try to describe them.

This entry sits between memory and mythology, between what happened and what had to be invented in order to carry it. Specimens is part of an ongoing narrative about Alice—a girl returned from the forest changed, not visibly harmed, and therefore never fully believed. What follows is not a story about abduction in the way we’re trained to expect one. There are no alarms. No struggle that reads cleanly. No villain who explains themselves.

Instead, there is a room.

A seamless space filled with humans reduced to presence alone. Observed. Categorized. Kept. A zoo not built for cruelty, but for collection. The Greys who oversee it do not act out of malice; they act out of interest. This distinction matters, because it mirrors something painfully familiar: the way harm can occur without overt violence when beings are stripped of agency and turned into objects of study.

After Alice is returned—placed impossibly on a mountain without her boots, her feet clean—she begins collecting butterfly wings. Not as decoration. Not as obsession. As translation.

Butterflies become a language she already understands. Fragile things valued only once they stop moving. Beauty flattened into symmetry. Life reduced to what can be safely displayed behind glass. Her bottles and shadow boxes echo the Room, but alter its rules: nothing living is trapped, nothing is taken before it’s ready to fall.

Specimens explores what it means to survive being observed, and how children—especially quiet, adaptable ones—learn to reinterpret captivity as order, endurance as virtue, and survival as consent. It is about collectors and the collected. About who gets to look, and who is expected to stay still.

This is not a story about aliens.

It is a story about systems that watch without caring, about how easily beings become exhibits, and about the long work of reclaiming the right to move again.

---

Alice did not begin collecting butterflies because she liked them.

She began because she recognized them.

In the Room, everything was seamless. No corners. No seams to worry at with your fingers. The walls reflected light but did not emit it, a brightness without warmth, like being illuminated rather than seen. Small glass cubes cut into the ceiling allowed daylight to fall in sterile squares. No air moved through them. Nothing entered. Nothing left.

---

The humans filled the space the way insects fill a case—grouped without logic, arranged without care. Bodies in various stages of depletion. Some afraid. Some emptied of reaction. A man dressed like a king sat apart, his costume intact, his authority meaningless. Children clung to a woman because clinging was still allowed.

They were not fed. They were not harmed.

They were kept.

When the narrow wall lifted, more glass appeared, and behind it stood the Greys. Watching. Not studying behavior, not communicating—simply observing presence. Alice understood immediately: this was not punishment. This was not processing.

This was a collection.

The Greys’ eyes moved the way collectors’ eyes move—separating color from symmetry, vitality from rarity. When the smallest Grey pointed at the woman and children, Alice felt something tighten in her chest, the way wings tighten before tearing. The taller Grey corrected the gesture, lowered the finger, not because it was wrong, but because it was premature.

Decisions required consensus.

When they returned with the tallest Grey, the pointing resumed. This time it held. The woman and children were removed carefully, efficiently, as if plucked. The rest of the Room absorbed the loss without sound. Empty space rearranged itself. No one asked where they went.

After visiting hours—after the glass sealed—the humans changed. Fear loosened its grip slightly. Breath returned. The paralysis imposed by being watched receded just enough to feel pain again. Alice learned then that observation itself was a force. Being seen without being engaged stripped something essential away.

The Greys were collectors.

They did not need reasons. They needed specimens.

After she was returned—placed back on the mountain without boots, her feet clean as glass—Alice understood why butterflies felt familiar. They, too, were watched more than touched. Desired for their fragility. Reduced to pattern and pigment once motion ceased.

She did not chase them.

She waited for what the forest released on its own.

Wings fell where bodies had been taken. Powder clung to leaves like residue from another world. Alice gathered fragments the way the Greys gathered people—not violently, but decisively. She learned how to clean them without damaging the veins. How to arrange them so symmetry could exist without flight.

---

Her bottles became Rooms.

Glass walls.

Perfect stillness.

Specimens preserved at the moment just after struggle.

She never kept the bodies.

That mattered.

The Guardian watched her from the trees and understood the difference. The sasquatch knew that this was not cruelty but transcription. Alice was recreating a system she had survived, but changing one crucial rule: nothing alive would be trapped inside.

The Greys collected to possess.

Alice collected to remember.

In her rooms, the butterflies were no longer observed by something greater. They were not ranked, not pointed at, not selected for removal. They were held in a way that acknowledged what had already been lost.

This was how Alice learned to look back.

Not to forgive.

Not to forget.

But to name the Room for what it was.

A zoo.

A display.

A place where survival depended on being interesting enough to keep—and quiet enough to endure.

And a lesson she would never again mistake for beauty