The sound of footsteps scurrying across glossy flooring awoke Veritas from slumber, even with Veritas being physically and mentally exhausted, he clung to consciousness vehemently, then a flood of memories flooded his mind of his previous experience.
“Well. Fuck.” Beautifully summarising his experience and moving on with his life he got out of a soft bed and followed the footsteps, walking extra loud as he got closer to a doctor to alert him.
“Ah hello, what brings you here… Oh! Good morning Mr Flecture, Mr Yehoshua informed us of your identity.” The man greeted and explained seeing his confusion at the man knowing his name.
“I see… Where is Josh then?”
“Right! I forgot, you need to go join the other Otherworlders at ACCb2. Follow me please, I’ll lead you there.”
Led down multiple corridors and hallways, Veritas bids goodbye to the unnamed doctor and enters the room.
Creeeek
The sound of the old metal door squeaking drawing the attention of the room, Veritas however doesn’t notice as his attention is on the metal door.
‘Why have such a thick metal door with a lock on the outside. Now that I think about it, the doctor didn’t mention what the purpose of this place…’
Turning his attention back towards the rest of the room, noticing tens of people surrounding a big unique looking glass cylinder with a black screen, very similar to a computer but without the keyboard.
The other notable part of this machine was that it was seemingly possible to enter as a large chunk of the glass opened up.
“Ver! Over her—!” “Mr Yehoshua, please be quiet.”
A person next to the machine said with an expressionless face, as if the world could end and he wouldn’t be fazed, cut off Josh.
”Mr Flecture was it? Come in, your friend there can fill you in on what you missed.” He said looking through stack of papers to confirm Veritas’s name,
Making a gesture, a quiet click was heard behind Veritas.
‘Huh weird…’ Veritas thought as he came to the conclusion he was the only one to have heard it, looking at the stagnant faces of the crowd he was approaching.
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“Yo Ver, you doing alright man, you were unconscious when all of us ended up here?”
Josh asks worried.
“Yeah I’m doing fine, just, had an ‘unpleasant experience’.” He says with air quotes and a shiver.
“Anyway care to fill me in?” Gesturing the crowd and the now talking person next to the machine.
“Okay… where to start? Well that guy just introduced himself as Mr A but I’m pretty sure everyone has guessed that’s a alias, he’s always wearing that blank face and we are doing something called an ‘Affinity Check’. That’s about it so far, he’s still explaining.” Josh says pointing at ‘Mr A’.
‘Affinity check? Thinking back the doctor did call this place ACCb2, So the first two would be Affinity Check, what does the second C mean? b2 is probably just Block 2.’
Turning to face Mr A, Veritas starts listening to what the man is saying.
“We will be checking everyone’s affinity, affinity is what we use to bring elements into the world, if you have a fire affinity, if you use the natural energy generated by the world, which we call mana, you can turn the mana into fire using your affinity!”
He explains, ‘So mana is energy and your affinity is a converter.’ Veritas summarised. ‘Weird how similar this is to fantasy novels, what’s next gods?’
Mr A continued, “so we will be checking your affinity, which is what this machine is used for.” He says lightly knocking the glass with his knuckles, “We will check you all in alphabetical order.”
‘So I’m probably lasted or second last.’
“Alex Smith? Please step forward.” A man walked forward.
“Okay walk into the machine.” Mr A nonchalantly said and started tapping on the air seemingly looking at the black screen that was now lit up.
Alex stepped into the machine, immediately the glass shut tight behind him and the cylinder filled up with a colourless gas, think yet see through. Everyone was aware it was there, just they couldn’t understand how they knew.
The gas slowly started to gain colour, specifically, a fiery red that seemingly started burning the air, before stopping suddenly with no more gas.
“Fire affinity, good but common, next…”
More people were called up until it was Josh’s turn. He walked in and two colours appeared, this was surprising but not entirely as others had multiple colours, and was soon confirmed to be people with multiple affinities.
The air inside the cylinder started to buzz and spark, whilst a different part of the cylinder was glowing and had a calm feeling that spread to whoever witnessed it.
Mr A whistles before saying, “Lightning and Holy, truely incredible, I see now why…” he mumbles to quiet for anyone to hear.
Josh comes out and the affinity check continues, with a few surprising affinities appearing.
Eventually everyone but the last person had their affinity checked. Then the last person went on stage, they walked into the cylinder, and then, nothing, nothing happened, the gas seemingly disappeared, then something indescribable appeared in the cylinder, people watching collapsed left and right, some bleeding from their eyes and others eyes glazing over.
Then, it simply disappeared, while everyone had passed out or was too exhausted to care about anything, 2 people were exceptions to this, Veritas, and Mr A.
More Terrifying than anything else that Veritas had seen other than his previous experience in the void, was seeing Mr A, a expressionless man, suddenly have a grin that covered his face, a mad look in his eyes as he licks his lips and gazes at Veritas with obsession and madness.