Moea felt the cold floor underneath her legs as her shoulders were shaken by a blurry figure. The figure had bright pink hair with a crimson halo shape around the top of her hair. Her eyes were glowing yellow through the dark cool grey of the underground. As her vision cleared up,

Moea groaned, sitting up properly as multiple figures revealed themselves in the dark. They looked like adults, but...younger, and with very strange faces. Their eyes and eye colors were very different, and she could see their eyebrows. They weren't wearing masks, something Moea had never seen before. She squinted, suddenly feeling all these towering figures surrounding her, and her lack of a cloak, which she found in the hands of the girl in front of her. Various other people stared at her with wide eyes. She could hear a few of them whisper, asking themselves how she got here.

Moea could only stare back, speechlessly, as the pink haired girl spoke up, in a soft, soothing voice that almost put the already dazed girl back to sleep. She apologised for putting Moea to sleep earlier and explained that they weren't going to hurt her.

Moea looked at the girl in confusion, completely transfixed, and holding back the urge to play with the girl's almost luminous hair. The girl giggled and held out her hair. She said that her child also liked playing with her hair. Yet again, Moea only stared back. In response to Moea's puzzled expression, the girl handed her her cloak back and revealed a child. A small, wide-eyed child with innocent yellow eyes and bright rose hair. The child tugged at the pink haired girl's cloak, hiding from the strange face that was Moea- or more specifically, hiding from the mask on Moea's face.

The girl introduced herself as Somnia and tugged at one of the other people behind her. A male with a yellow flower in his cheek. Somnia introduced the male as Helian, and explained that they, and the other taller people were not adults. They used to be children, just like Moea, but were taken to the underground after their 13th birthday.

Moea felt her vision blur together again as she tried to process the information hitting her head as Somnia started rambling on about the horrible things the adults had done to them, how they had to run away to try and make it to the surface to raise the next generation right, and-

Helian interrupted her, gesturing to the now even more confused Moea as Somnia sighed, explaining that they had no way to get out as, since the only way out was through the vents, and they were tagged with locator chips. Moea looked into the eyes of the teenagers around her, and saw only despair and hopelessness. Some had fear in their eyes, and some had even accepted their terrible fate.

Moea still couldn't wrap her head around what was going on. Somnia took her hand in hers and looked into Moea's eyes with her deep, hypnotising yellow eyes. She begged for Moea to take her child, bring her to the surface, and raise her to be free of the evil of the underground. She praised the fate that brought her child a way out of the underground, and with the help of Helian, managed to pull Moea's mask off.

The new air outside of the mask's cover stung like hell on her face, like 50 needles on her foreface. As Moea opened her eyes for the first time, her chestnut brown hair rapidly changed into a deep purple as she looked at it in awe. The rose haired girl, who Somnia introduced simply as Rosa, was now trustful of Moea and willing to take her hand. Somnia explained that Rosa accociated the masks with adults and therefore was terrified of them. She was about to say something else, but the sudden urgent tapping of footsteps startled the whole group as some of them panicked. A thick and heavy aura of despair settling inside the dark room.

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Somnia hurriedly pressed several sheets of paper into Moea's hand and said to look for a man named Erio. She leaned in to press her lips against Rosa's forehead as she and Helian said goodbye to her. The rest of the teenagers said their farewells as well, as they left the room.

All Moea could hear before she looked away in horror was gunshots, and the last thing she saw of Somnia, was crimson blood shooting out of her crimson halo.

She gagged and dragged Rosa away. She found a ventilation shaft against the wall and pushed Rosa in, who was on the presipice of bursting into tears without even knowing what was going on. Moea crawled in after her in a panic as the two made their way up the narrow and cold metal space, hiding behind a corner as Moea pressed her hand against Rosa's mouth, who was now bawling out, calling her mother's name. She took a look at the papers she was given, and found a map of the ventilation shafts among them, leading to one of the exits.

She leaned her head back against the metal wall, panting.

They needed to *leave* this place.

It took a while for the gunshots to settle down. In the meantime, despite the struggling and crying Rosa in her arms, Moea managed to cover some ground. She could still hear the bullets being fired from that room.

Now that it was over, they both had to be very quiet. Rosa however, was anything but quiet, she whimpered and whined, and pulled away each time Moea put her hand over her mouth to silence her.

Moea let out a frustrated groan. She couldn't imagine having been this restless as a younger child. She remembered her toys from the past and reached up to grab her flower from her now purple hair, when her wrist began to throb painfully. She winced and pulled her hand away, trying to find where the pain came from.

To her horror, she found her wrist to be bent unnaturally. She took quick, sharp gasps, before whimpering in pain alongside Rosa. The pain topped everything she'd witnessed since she went inside that damned elevator. The shock of this new environment wasn't there any longer to distract her from the results of her fall earlier. Her wrist was dislocated, and it hurt. It hurt a lot.

She couldn't budge, the pain stung and did so all the way up her arm. It left her incapacitated as she rocked back and forth, trying to soothe herself. Rosa looked at the girl and held onto her. They cried together for a while until Moea felt the pain subside substantially. She looked up from her arm to see her wrist no longer deformed, and Rosa's one eye growing a flower out of it. The color matched her hair perfectly, and the flower glowed, brightly. Rosa hadn't ceased her crying but was much more calm now than a few minutes ago.

Moea decided to question what had just happened- along with the plentiful other events that had transpired in the past few minutes later, and decided to move on.

She had a mission, which was to bring Rosa to Erio. Why was she doing this? She didn't know Somnia for any more than 6 minutes or so, yet she knew that her death would be in vain if she didn't follow through. Besides, what other choice did she have? Return to a life where she'd never look at adults the same? With a strange child from the underground no less?

That just wasn't happening. She was going to stop Rosa, as well as all the other children back home from suffering the same fate as Somnia and the others. The only way out was forward, to this Erio fellow. Moea pulled her flower out of her hair and gave it to Rosa to hold, who- upon grabbing the flower- almost immediately calmed down. It glowed just like her mother's hair. Albeit, a different color, but she still held it close, finally agreeing to move on.

The space felt increasingly narrow, and it started to do a number on the pair's knees as they crawled their way relatively problem-free to the part of the map Moea feared the most. They'd have to exit the narrow, yet safe vents, into a room of sorts, to enter another ventilation shaft on the other side.

Easier said than done. Moea didn't even have to look outside the gridded vent exit to hear the footsteps of dark, leather shoes on the pearly white, laboratory floor. Moea could notice various tubes inside the room. She only caught a glimpse of the tubes before she had to duck at the sight of an unsuspecting adult passing by, holding a clipboard.

She prayed that what she saw weren't bodies swimming inside the tubes.

She shuddered, a chill running down her spine as she crawled towards the entrance, pressing her hand against the grid.

Before she even tried to push it open, the grid fell out, and crashed against the hard floor in a deafeningly loud sound.