Chapter Text
You think it’s been about two weeks since you entered hell. It was just you and your coworker, Marvin, but now, even he’s gone. Your chances of surviving together were slim, but you knew you had to go down into Hell. Two is a party, but having a crowd of three or more would have made your odds much better. With him gone, you know your fate is grim.
It was one of those malicious faces that killed him. It killed him before you both could kill it. God, you feel so guilty for leaving him behind. Logically, you know that trying to get him out of the battlefield so you can provide care would have meant your demise, too. Even then, you’re human and not a terrible one at that, and so you feel the guilt for not performing a miraculous save regardless. You remember his cries for help getting quieter as you ran away, and a feeling of disgust washes over you.
The disgust mixes with anxiety. You wonder why it was you that survived. Of all your coworkers on the surface when Hell started to invade your lab, and now of you and Marvin, why is it you that lived and not them? While you think some of them were equally or more worthy of survival, in terms of morals and contributions to the world, your current thought process is more focused on logistics. “I was luckier than them”, you thought to yourself. “I dodged at just the right time. I hit my mark at the last possible second. I made it to safety just in time,”. With feeling that your victories are due to luck, you’re terrified you can only roll winning dice so many times in a row.
Since then, you’ve found yourself hunkering down in a room in Limbo. It’s a small bedroom, and one wall is mostly taken up by a stone door, The opposite wall has a small window to see into the factitious landscape, and thankfully, it has bars and is too small for anything to come in through it. On the West side of the room is a twin-sized bed with red sheets and a pragmatic head and footboard. Unsurprisingly, in the two days you’ve been stuck in this room, it has proven to be just ever-so-slightly uncomfortable. Roughly three feet away from the bed and against the East wall is a desk and chair that shares the traditional style of the bed, and all of it is made of manufactured wood.
Before you lost Marvin, your goal was to look for survivors in Hell. Since everybody on the surface is now dead, in Hell lays your last shred of hope. It’s ironic; the way you both had gone into Hell when Hell was the very thing that killed everybody on the surface. You’re now in its home playing field. Whenever you decide to leave this room, you'll be at the mercy of the husks, and the machines that were sent ahead of you. You’ve been fortunate to avoid any face-to-face confrontations with one so far. Just another example of your ever-fleeting luck. The anxious feeling you have worms its way a little deeper in your stomach.
While these feelings have kept you from being hungry, you do feel thirsty and so you slide your PPAS (portable provision acquisition system) to yourself across the table. Trying to keep yourself from going insane, you examine it again for the millionth time. It’s a small gray disk that always reminded you of a mug warmer. There’s a switch on the bottom to turn the power on or off, and on the back of the disk is a small black oval that reminds you of an infrared reader. Instead of infrared, however, it collects energy wirelessly from Hell. The whole reason for going to Hell was to find a new source of power after The New Peace, after all. This was one of the many small inventions completed before most of the rest of your race was wiped out. In addition to the switch and energy-absorption plate were two buttons on the front side of the disk. One looks like a chicken leg with a bite taken out of it, and if you were to press it, one of five barely cromulent flavors of nutrition bar would be materialized. You were told these provisions are teleported from a giant warehouse, but you had never seen it yourself. You hope that’s the case, and that there's enough stock to last you indefinitely with nobody there to replenish it anymore. The other button looks like a bottle of water, and right after you pressed it just now, a clear-plastic bottle of water appeared atop the small platform. You unscrew the cap, take a few sips, and stare out the window.
“After all that, am I just going to die anyway?”, you say aloud to yourself. “If I go out, I’ll get killed. And if I stay in, I’m just in some--”
Limbo, you were about to say, but you can’t stand the irony of literally being in Limbo, and you stop yourself. Instead, you laugh sadly after a brief moment, because if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. Even though you’re trying not to, you feel a few tears form in your eyes anyway. You focus on the fake tree outside the window so the tears don’t spill down your face. “It’s going to be okay,” you say softly to yourself. And then you say it again. And then you say it one more time. While giving yourself affirmations and looking out the window, your heart sinks and skips a beat as you see a blur of red and yellow go by, accompanied by the faint noise of hydraulics. You freeze and hope whatever it was didn’t see you.