Chapter the Sixth: In which a pet is acquired.

Gepard cautiously approached the edge of the hole in order to peer down, and the floor gave way beneath him. He fell a little bit, and I heard a thud when he landed. "I'm okay, too," came his voice, and I heard Kallista giggle a little bit. "You guys should come see this," he added. "It's really weird. Like, almost as weird as Niall."
"Shut up."
Venice shrugged and hopped into the hole. I removed some rope from my satchel and lowered myself down slowly.
I had to agree with Gepard. What was down the hole was, indeed, really weird.
The short drop ended in another hallway, perhaps even bigger than the one at ground level. It was certainly much cleaner. it smelled vaguely of chemicals, but not in the same way a hospital smells of chemicals. It was an altogether more unpleasant smell.
In front of us, the hallway ended in what I presume used to be a door, but behind us, it was too dark to see the end of the hall. Even as I lowered myself down the rope, Gepard was stepping through the doorway. If the hallway underneath a hallway was odd, what lay behind the door was even more so. On an oddness scale of one to Optimus Prime, this was pretty damn high.
The hallway led to a laboratory. It was by no means an abandoned laboratory, either, although the place had been completely wrecked.
It looked as I imagine a Victorian meth lab would have looked. Out-of-date laboratory equipment was strewn around the room, test tubes had been overturned, and there were several cages with animals in them. Some of the animals were even still alive, but most had either just died or had been ripped apart with terrifying brutality. Several of the animals that were still living looked mutated, like something out of a mad scientist's laboratory. I supposed that probably wasn't all that far from the truth.
There was one rat in particular that had impossibly broad shoulders and a face that was too small for its body. I tried hard not to retch, and began looking around the other cages. In one of the smallest, there was an entirely-normal-looking-if-a-little-undersized mouse hiding in the corner. I felt sorry for it, so I picked up the cage, intending to take it home with me. (Niall Montblanc, your friendly neighbourhood marshmallow.)

"Niall? You might want to take a look at this..." said Gepard. He didn't make a friendly jibe at me, and he wasn't hitting on either of the girls, so I knew it was serious. I walked over to where the others were standing, still carrying the cage: They were all staring at the a cage that was significantly larger than the one in my hand. It was perhaps 15x15x15 feet, and the door had been torn from the hinges as if they were paper.
"What are we dealing with here?" said Kal, no longer her usual bouncy self. She sounded scared, and, though I would never admit it, I was scared too.
"Let's not stay to find out," I said, before leaving the room and climbing back up the rope. (Better a live coward than a dead hero and all that.) I quickly found that climbing whilst holding a cage is fairly difficult, but I managed. The others followed soon after, and we were all eager to return to the car. It took a while before anyone noticed the cage I had acquired.
"What the frak is that?" asked Venice, turning around in the driver's seat.
"This is Horatio. He's a mouse."