Keith was rich, but wasn’t as rich as Charlie. He lived alone, in a rented apartment. Once he got home, he was more exhausted than angry. Heather had really hurt him this time. He knew what he was getting into when he first started dating her. 

They met at one of Heather’s endless processions of parties; grand spectacles of hedonism and sin - well as much sin that college students studying at one of the top universities in the world could get into. They were just students after all. 

When he first saw her, he was immediately struck by her beauty. There was something about her, the way she attracted all attention in the room to her. She was an angel. However, that perception change quickly as he dated her. 

Heather was evil. 

She enjoyed controlling people, playing them like puppets on strings. He hated that side to her - but her beauty was so attractive to him that he kept justifying and playing down her behaviour. 

Keith collapsed onto his sofa and put his feet up. He sighed. They had probably broken up. Heather wasn’t one to be chained to one person anyway. 

‘It was dumb of me to think she actually loved me, fuck it though, there’s nothing much else I can do. Becky did say she was gonna give me head though, so I have that to look forward to.’

Keith stopped thinking about the situation. Although he was passionate about relationships, and his anger was very real, Keith wasn’t one to dwell on things if they were unavailable to him. He clicked on Spotify, and started to listen to Drake.

‘Perfect breakup music.’  

Keith cocked his head back and closed his eyes; thinking of the tremendous, bed-breaking sex he had with Heather. 

* * *

Charlie woke up, his head splitting. 

‘Wh..what?’ 

He opened his eyes. And then he tried to open them again. There was no difference. 

‘I’m blind! Oh… no wait, it’s just that it’s so dark in here I can’t see anything. Where the hell am I? Don’t tell me I’ve been kidnapped?’ Charlie freaked out at the thought. He shouted out, trembles in his voice betraying his fear,

“If you bastards so much as look at me different, my parents will have your fucking necks you hear me? You hear me you sons of bitches? I swear to God… I swear to God you’ll be dead quicker than you can say your own God damn name. I got cousins in the mob, in the mob! You ever seen the Godfather?” he screamed expletives and threats until his vision abruptly returned. Light flooded his eyes,

“Why is it so bright in here?” He rubbed his eyes. 

The room was all-white, and was a pretty large room. The overwhelming whiteness of the place made it hard to judge the size by eye, but it had to be massive because of one reason. The bodies. People lay, sleeping. There must have been a hundred of them. One was awake. They were looking at him weirdly. Charlie ignored the look and went through his pockets. No cellphone. He asked,

“Where are we?”

An Asian kid of about 15 years old looked shocked. 

“You, are you speaking in English?

“What sort of question is that?” 

“I’m speaking in Mandarin…”

Charlie looked at the kid and frowned, and then realised how strange he looked. 

He was wearing orange robes, and had hair shaved to the scalp. He must have been one of those Buddhist monks in Tibet. But the next question was now even more important. If he really was speaking in Mandarin, then the entire situation was probably unimaginable. Someone who could create a universal translator had brought them to the room. And it was for a reason. 

“Where are we?” Charlie asked the kid again.

The kid sighed, 

“I wish I knew. I was just walking through the mountains, to start my morning lessons when, out of nowhere, I saw a butterfly. It had a purple body and patterns that looked like green eyes, it was so magnificent! I chased after it…” The kid babbled on about a variety of different, inane things until Charlie couldn’t take it anymore. 

“Stop! Just tell me three things: Your name, the last thing you remember before you woke up, and how long you’ve been awake.” 

“Li Tao, going to bed, and about twenty minutes before you woke up. I regularly meditate, and that’s probably why I woke up first. What’s your name?” Li Tao asked.

“Charlie.”

‘If what monk boy says is true, then the rest of them should start waking up soon.’

After five minutes, one-by-one, almost a hundred people woke up. There was chaos everywhere, people were screaming and fumbling around at first, wondering why their vision was gone. After a while, people were even more confused. One guy even pelted full speed from one side of the room to the other, intending to crash. What happened was even weirder. The wall swallowed him up, and for a few minutes there was pandemonium. But then, the wall spat him back out. 

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“That was awesome! It felt like being in a huge puffy cloud,” he said before running back in. 

People began imitating his behaviour. It was a funny sight seeing all those people running in the wall and being spat back out. That was, until it stopped. The wall still spat people out, but… they weren’t whole any more… they had been sliced into countless pieces of meat, and spat out alongside a mist of blood. 

At least twenty people died this way.

There was an uproar, everyone quickly backed away from the walls towards the centre of the room. Before the wall spat out such gore, there had been a somewhat lighthearted tone, but now, it had completely turned. Fear filled everyone’s hearts. Now, things had become real. Whoever had taken them captive had no regard for their lives and that truly scared them. 

A pale, shivering teenager started it all off. He shouted, 

“Who are you? Why have you taken us? What the hell do you want with us? God damn it, you killed all those… those people… ugh.” 

He cursed, and clutched his belly, and vomited. Surprisingly, the ground sucked it up, returning to its previous white, as if it had never been soiled. 

Others started screaming, shouting, crying, puking. There were only a few people still calm apart from Charlie. One was Li Tao, who was currently on the ground meditating. The other four were; a tall Japanese looking teenager with glasses who was still wearing his school uniform, a black kid who had pristine Jordans on, an Arab looking twenty year old, and a girl who weirdly had a sword. 

The kid with the clean white sneakers grimaced, and seemed annoyed with the scene. He reached around his back and thrust his hand into the waistband of his jeans. 

He pulled out a gun, and shot three times. 

Silence. 

Everyone in the room looked at him. 

“Man, do y’all really have no shame? Look at you, running around like a bunch of headless chickens. What you thought was gonna happen? Someone takes you from your momma’s house and sticks you in this forensic ass room, and you think this shit is a jungle gym? In Chicago, niggas die every day. They’re taking lives like they’re cutting weeds. The sooner y’all realise that lives ain’t worth shit, and nobody will care when you die, the sooner you can adapt to anything you’re hit with.” 

He put his gun away, walked over to the wall, leaned against it, sat down, and closed his eyes.

Everyone started to calm down from their panic, but it gave way to anger. 

“Does anyone know what’s going on?” A girl with a braid running down her back addressed the crowd. 

“Well… we’ve been kidnapped, and to what end, I don’t know.” The girl with the sword muttered.

Li Tao spoke up, “If it helps, we can all introduce ourselves and where we come from? It’d help if we at least knew something about each other,”

 “I’m Wang Bailong, from Beijing,”

“I’m Sasha Raskolnikov, from St Petersburg,”

“I’m Bianca…”

After everyone introduced themselves, it became apparent that they were each from different places in the world. It was obvious that they weren’t all speaking the same language. This shocked Charlie, because this confirmed one thing. This wasn’t a simple kidnapping. Either this was a high-level power in the world that had taken them, or it was something… more fantastical. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.  

“So… we gonna talk about the fluffy walls of death?” A brawny Icelandic man named Olaf with a shaved head asked.

When reminded of the dead bodies, some people turned pale. 

“If you think about the time it took for the walls to start dismembering people, it suggests one thing,” The Japanese student said. He had introduced himself as Jun.

“What?” the strongman replied.

“That someone or something has control of this space. It should be as easy as turning their hand over to kill us. But we’re still alive. That means they need us for something.” Jun adjusted his glasses and frowned.

“But on the other hand, they killed twenty people for the smallest reason, so they don’t care whether we live or die. Analysing the information at hand, plus the fact that the unknown entity has possession of a universal translator and this strange room, I have only one conclusion. That whatever the circumstances, we are powerless to decide our own fates.” With that, he sat down. 

Nobody spoke after that.