Haha! You thought it was dead! They called me mad! Mad!
Emergence
There is a special place in Hell for people like Ravana. That is not a lie, it is literally true; currently your head.
It is with sluggish speed that you begin moving within the chrysalis that has surrounded you. It feels like your body has taken a hundred punches and kicks, like it has been whipped blue and yellow all over, yet you know that your skin is purer than it ever was before. Your teeth grind against each other in frustration and exertion as frozen fingers force their way through a carapace of volcanic basalt around you. There, a speck of light reaches your eyes, blinding you for a moment until you get used to the still-dying half-light of the nightly street lamps, flickering and fluttering like the moths that surround their radiant luminosity in wing-flapping throngs.
Wait, no that's not entirely what you're seeing. Those aren't moths but confused specks of light playing on your eyes, and all the light is green and poisonous, like floating in an ocean of verdigris. This place of yours is cold and sterile, like a great freezer where meat past its expiration date is placed to be forgotten. A smell that you cannot quite place, fills the air, like old meat mixed with some sterile stench. Dragging yourself out of basalt-like confine, your palms scrape against the stony surface, which slowly breaks beneath them, pumice-holes collapsing internally at the pressure. A nail on your left hand lazily scrapes against the rock, uneven earth filing away and leaving it just as uneven itself. You grind your teeth. Annoying.
The verdigrised light of your soul bathes it in a splendorous green, in which hundreds of drawers in the walls, identical and given small numbers and labels in metallic letters, reveal themselves to you. You are not entirely sure what is within them, and you are not entirely sure you want to know either at this point. As you finish pulling yourself out, your bare feet land on cold, laminate floor, icy as the ocean in winter to your feet. A chill goes through your body, and the fact of your nakedness leaps to your attention as you realize that you are wearing none of your clothes. Cold panic floods through your mind as you frantically look around the room, the same featureless drawers looming above you in every direction, but the distant door.
For a moment, rest falls over you as you you realize they must simply be in the enclosure which you just stepped out of, left and discarded like that. With your newfound calm, you simply turn around to explore it.
It resembles a coffin to you, or perhaps an angel of grief, resting in a graveyard. A feminine figure of volcanic rock and basalt, from which you emerged in your rebirthing. You cannot see its face anymore, but in your inner eye you see it; a faceless visage marked only by a solar glyph. Many-coloured in greys and yellows, blacks and reds, its surface is chimeric, seamlessly blending into each other like so many patches, like a hundred faulty reparations on a jacket. Unfortunately, it also seems to be completely empty, containing nothing but residual dust that must have broken off when you left it. There is nothing within it but the dust.
You stare.
Panic rising again, you bend over to explore it from the inside with your head, green light colouring it with the clarity of some fucked-up day. Empty. The dust tickles your nose, making you want to sneeze, even as you near-effortlessly dig your fingers into the surprisingly fragile and brittle rock in desperate attempts to find something, anything, to cover yourself with. Unfortunately, your search does not turn out particularly fruitful. At the end, you may have found something to cover yourself with, but that is mostly useless dust in a particularly frustrating combination with the shame that fills you. Thank God that no one can see you right now.
After that complete failure, a new idea fills your mind; maybe the drawers might contain something? You run to the nearest drawer on your right, the implacable smell getting stronger as you approach, stronger along with an equally implacable feeling of worry in your stomach. You place your hand on the metallic handle of the semi-transparent plastic drawer, some dark shape within evident through the material as you pull.
You pull and reveal its contents, expecting, or perhaps
hoping, more or less to find anything but that which you find within; meat.
Terrifyingly fresh and obviously frozen, perhaps treated with some form of chemicals or preservatives, the meat lies red and raw within the drawer. It looks like it has been there for weeks or longer. The obvious cold doesn't seem to bother you that much be because you're somewhat focused on something else. Namely the fact that you seem to currently be locked inside some fucked-up serial-killer lair straight out of a budget Netflix TV-show. With frenetic energy, you open another drawer; meat. Distraught, you hastily open as many drawers as you can, pulling again and again, only to reveal more meat. All of them, filled with nothing but different kinds of meat: Hearts, livers, lungs, flanks, briskets, ribs, loins, sirloins and chucks. Red and frozen animal meat of a hundred kinds, the stench, now
very familiar, striking you in the face like a hundred fists. You turn up your nose at the smell, wanting to vomit.
Horrified and defeated for now, you sit down to think. You want to close the drawers again, but you can't muster the energy for it. And slowly, insidiously, with all the grace of a silent serpent within shades, a series of far more pressing questions steadily raise themselves within your unsuspecting mind. Where
are you? Who took you here? For what purpose? Can anyone see you?
You look around the room again, this time far more attentive towards the upper corners and the doorframe far ahead in the other direction of the room, at the end of both the rows upon rows of drawers. Signs of where you are, signs of identification, signs of anything, perhaps worst of all, signs of surveillance. You find the last one, the red and evil glare of a CCTV camera gazing down upon you from the upper right corner, the baleful light indicating its watchful eye far, like the blazing gaze of some fantastic demon out of myth. Rather much more like one of your old man's stories of
daeva, than the harmless man-made electronic which it is.
"Fuck. Fuck, fuck,
fuck."
The realization strikes you like a punch: Someone could be watching you right now.
Someone likely
is watching you right now.
You desperately try to cover your exposed body with your hands, even as the realization dawns upon you, looming above you like a dark cloud, that someone could be seeing you naked right now. Anyone could be seeing you panicking, desperately looking through drawers and frantically forcing them up, even as the stench makes you want to vomit, filling the air and your nostrils like mustard gas. You want to creep back in the rocky structure you left and hide out of shame and embarrassment, you want to slither down and pretend the world cannot see you. It makes you feel embarrassed, it makes you feel powerless, it makes you feel vulnerable.
It makes you feel
angry.
What
right do they have to move you around, to observe you with cameras, to force you to feel shameful and powerless? You were promised that you would never feel like this again, that you would never need to cower again. You have been victimized, forced into a situation you do not want to be. You don't like that. You don't like that at all. You're going to make them regret doing that. You're going to make them all regret that. Make them pay. And for a scant few moments, the world-shaking terror and vulnerability is replaced with righteous rage and indignant irritation at the world. This will not stand. You were promised better.
You angrily rise from your seated position, a slight stamp in the earth with your right foot as you do so. You stare at the camera, baleful intent in your eyes, wishing you could tear it down, wishing you could pull it to your hand and crush it. The violent will in your mind is the same as the one by which you have punched many would-be pretenders to your throne of sycophants, the same will by which you climbed to the top and forced everyone to recognize that it belonged to you. Murder on your mind, you all but command the camera to cease its staring. You have had enough. Staring daggers in its direction, your will is clear, it will cease or it will break.
A camera is a dumb machine. It could only choose to break.
A grinding force, an invisible power, pulling and pushing; electronic wires tearing and plastic breaking. The camera is, as if held by some invisible hand, pulled from its socket in the corner, smashed into the earth as if thrown, crushed on the ground as if stepped on by a giant. The violent force smashes your reverie as surely as it did the camera, as you are for a moment taken aback by the force of your intent. Staring at the camera, you look at the wreckage there, digesting slowly that you did that, the slightly smoking and sparking wreck your creation as surely as the camera itself had been someone's creation.
You smile. You don't mind that. You don't mind that at all. A few moments of happiness which you indulgently enjoy until you remember your current situation and look around the room one last time, perhaps hoping you missed something the last time. A pointless search, as fruitless as it lacks goals.
You begin walking forward, the door flinging open as you near it, even as you don't move a muscle. As you move past it, you can clearly see it hanging loosely on the hinges, torn partially free from the force you applied to it. Stepping outside the room, you are left in a corridor with no end in sight either left and right; only turns in different directions. It's hard for you not to feel a strange feeling of remembrance or reminiscence, that tinglingly delightful
deja vu. Unfortunately, that feeling of reminiscence is not currently particularly that useful; no escape routes and far worse, no clothes.
These corridors are not foreign to you, it feels like you have been here before, or walked somewhere similar. They are utilitarian and simple, reminiscent of an institution of learning; a laboratory, school or university. Slinking down the corridor, you keep a watchful eye about you, fearful of interruption by whatever brought you here, and to what intentions. Urgh! There is a disgraceful lack of clothing lying around here. Or things that could be used as clothing. You'd settle for just a discarded hoodie or a forgotten waterproof at this point.
With nervous and measured steps, carefully ensuring that not a sound emerges from your tenuous tread, you walk down the right path. Your attention is firmly planted on the corridor around you. There, you see a camera in the upper corner as you turn, one which your will finally dislodges from its socket in the instant you turn your back to it; the glassy plastic dome of the camera breaking as you smash it into the ground. Then, turning the corner, Ravana appears from seemingly nowhere, and your focus quickly turns into simultaneously trying to appear in control and covering yourself up to preserve some modicum of decency.
A strangely well-groomed pompadour on his head, he looks far more presentable than he did when he gave you his offer. Leaning against a wall with a smug grin on his dark-skinned face; Ravana resplendent. Where the burning green sun used to shine on his forehead, a wound instead adorns it, red in gory glory. Over his eyes, a pair of sunglasses rest, you don't know where he got them from, but you have to admit that they look cool. A traditional Indian
shalwar kameez adorns him in whites and gold, combined with a sash in ruby red.
He laughs, you're unsure if it's mocking your predicament or apologetic, you choose to believe it is the former, "Relax, I'm not going to look, women all over the world tell me that I'm a
gentleman of highest caliber."
You somehow doubt the veracity of that claim, but choose to keep silent for now.
"Okay, that is up to the question, I know, but on the subject of questions, how do you feel we go make the people who put us here regret their life decisions and kick some ass?"
Mentally, you add "And get some clothing", but otherwise, this is the first time Ravana has said something you agree with, and you suspect neither of you are going to miss an opportunity to fuck some kidnapping shitheads up. Well, fuck some kidnapping shitheads up and find out what even happened here, who kidnapped you and why they put you in a room full of meat. Besides, with the sudden dopamine rush of the fact that you can
crush cameras by thinking at them hard, it's not hard to feel a tiny rush of confidence and powerful, despite the compromising situation.
The corridor in front of you turns into a juncture, continuing forward and splitting to a parallel passage that opens up left and right, giving you a total of three possible paths from here. A helpful plaque in sterile steel or some other material, helpfully points out where each of the passages are supposed to lead. At the top right of the plaque, a familiar sign waits for your eyes to see; a seraphic figure upon a shield. Beneath it, big capital letters with artful serifs clearly spell out "STVDIVM VRBIS", an eerily familiar phrase to you.
A swift shiver passes through you for a moment, before being replaced with a moment of fiery anger. You know this place. This is the
Sapienza university of Rome. You studied here and now they have taken you to it. The sign spells out various places, "haematology lab", "meat freezing room" and "medicine". All different rooms, connected to this part of the university. You may never have been much familiar with the natural sciences, but your feeling of
deja vu is suddenly justified.
"Hell yeah." You tell Ravana. You wouldn't mind punching some idiots in the face. Not at all.
Where do you investigate?
[ ] The Office (1x): A few turns left and right from here, this place is likely to be without significant danger, but by the same note also not very likely to contain anything or anyone you can work out your anger on by beating them up. Not very likely to contain clothes either. On the other hand, there might be someone you could talk to.
[ ] The Laboratory (1x): Just down the corridor, you're not entirely sure what this place would contain. Most laboratories are likely to contain some form of clothes, so that's likely to be assured. But with most likelihood, whoever are inside it will not be capable of telling you a lot about why you're here in anything but scientific terms, useless to you.
[ ] The Security Department (1x): A bunch of corridors from here, this place would most definitely contain someone to beat up, but is not very likely to contain anyone who can tell you anything important. It might contain clothes though, and likely also a good idea of where an exit could be found. This is the most dangerous of your options.
Current goals:
- Acquire clothes: Unfulfilled
- Discover why you're here: Unfulfilled
- Make someone fucking answer to this: Unfulfilled
- Learn what you can do: Unfulfilled
- Find some exit: Unfulfilled
