Viktor felt himself lying on a bed, a stale, hard thing with foam indistinguishable from wood. He forced his eyes open, only to shut them again as harsh lighting assaulted him. The man winced before opening his eyes much more slowly this time. A white, rough ceiling met his view.

He grunted, pushing himself off the hard bed to get a proper grip on his surroundings. He was in a rather large, windowless room that was completely white. The only other colors came from the grey metal frames of seven other beds and the participants they carried. Though, they were all asleep.

He turned his attention back to his situation, trying to recall how he ended up here.

‘I was in my car, there was a storm… the smoke… the letter!’ Last he remembered he’d been freezing to death when the invite arrived. He recalled signing it, then he was here.

‘So… is this the venue? Sure doesn’t look like one.’

Viktor’s mind was a mess; he couldn’t wrap his head around how he came here.

‘Kidnapping… that’s possible, they did say they would move me immediately if I signed the invite. Would it still count as kidnapping then?’ The man brushed off the question.

‘Focus.’

Even his clothes had been changed, making it more likely that he had been kidnapped.

‘Heh, kidnapping it is then… fucking invite!'

He felt wary of the invite. Any organization willing to wait for a man to reach such lows before handing out a shady invite was already suspicious enough, not to mention the way it reached him. Now that he could think clearly...

‘Wait! My hangover is gone?.. yeah, I was kidnapped.’

It would have taken days to recover from that mess.

‘At least one good thing came from this.’

Not that it’d mean much; he’d be drinking himself to death again at the nearest bar. Assuming he could find one. He shook his head before getting back to the matter at hand.

‘Still, it was WCO that sent it… THE WCO!!'

Viktor felt almost giddy at the thought of joining again, of becoming champion again. Even he couldn’t help but hope.

Suddenly he stopped, immediately patting down the black jumpsuit they’d suited him in with frenzied panic. He finally let out a sigh of relief when he brought something out of his pocket. It was the brown paper, luckily they'd left him with it. The same couldn’t be said about his pack of cigarettes and lighter.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

‘Hah, that’s gonna be a problem soon enou…’

But he couldn’t finish the thought, the others had started waking up. The first among them a haggard-looking man in his 40s and the last being a girl who looked no older than twelve.

Throughout the whole process, Viktor kept silent.

The eight people just stared at each other in awkward silence, before it was broken by one of the men.

He wore grimy pairs of glasses, matched by his scattered hair and a face covered in dirt. The man reeked of homelessness, literally and figuratively. Still, he managed to give a rather amicable smile, one of a businessman, one that had lost his edges.

“Well, I don’t suppose you fellows are looking to clear any economic criminal records,” his voice was hoarse and croaky.

A woman answered him, “Does she look like she even knows the fucking word?” pointing at the twelve-year-old girl.

Her voice was rough around the edges with a distinct southern tang, her hair was messy clinging in odd and misshapen lumps to her dirty tan skin. Her eyes were nearly bubbling as if struggling to stop the venom beneath from spilling.

“No, I don’t, and this isn’t an economic cri… whatever. It’s Benny’s world and I... am here on an adventure. Are you guys the other heroes?” the twelve-year-old girl said with surprising confidence while tightening her grip on a long-eared plush bunny in her hands.

“Next you’ll tell me the government is giving free houses,” the woman started laughing.

“That was on my invite,” another woman suddenly said. The tanned-skinned woman was about to retort again when she got cut off by the voice of an older man.

“Alright, that’s enough. Who else got told something different?” His voice was calm and composed, his dark and greying hair shaggy but not in disrepair against his dark skin.

Almost everyone raised their hands.

“Haa… it appears we’ve been scammed,” the man said with resignation. The people had already been tensed but that conclusion was about to push them over the edge. Viktor was prepared for it but it still hit him like a bladed gut punch.

It

Luckily, the man with glasses intervened.

“That’s not necessarily true. All the promises they made don’t have to be mutually exclusive,”

the man with glasses said, almost everyone turned their hopes to him. Almost. The dark-skinned man seemed little affected by the conclusion he made, as did the little girl. He looked at the man with glasses.

“What are you saying?” he inquired.

The man with glasses smiled amicably before continuing,

“Well, sir, we were all promised different possible rewards and competition, but this doesn’t mean they are mutually exclusive. It's possible that the reward for the competition is so big that it can fulfill all our wishes. I was a businessman before this, and I have seen my fair share of contracts. It is highly likely that the invite was just tailored to interest those it was being offered to.”

The explanation seemed to calm the people down, not Viktor though. The whole argument had been invalidated by the fact that they made a literal child sign the invite, that had to be illegal. The man with glasses continued nonetheless.

“Don’t worr…”

He was abruptly cut off by the sound of stone breaking. Seven long, red, and lanky hands broke through the wall directly opposite to the location of the beds. The arms looked to be made of nothing but blood and muscled flesh. They twisted and turned, grabbing onto each other until they formed a roughly rectangular fleshy structure.

And then in the middle of the rectangle, a red light slowly appeared and engulfed the structure. “It” turned on, like a macabre mockery of every television ever made. A deep, distorted, and heavily warped voice of what had to be a thousand people speaking at once came through.

[PARTICIPANTS 0670, 0671, 0672, 0673, 0675, 0676, 067… WELCOME TO THE FACILITY.]