The drive to the new facility took less than a day and when Michael was finally allowed to step out from the truck and stretch his tried body, he found he could see nothing but desert for miles around. The view though was cut short as guards quickly ushered him through the well-guarded entrance of the facility.
As he was brought deeper into the complex, Michael noted that the design wasn’t much different than the one he was used to. It had the same long white corridors and large steel containment chambers and besides a slightly different layout, the whole place was pretty much the same.
After some time spent walking through the depths of the facility, he eventually made it to his temporary containment cell.
It was nothing grand, being very similar to his room back in the other facility, though this one was missing his exercise equipment and his nice bed.
He’d need to request to use the guard's workout room while at the facility, as well as for them to get him a new bed.
He refused to go back to the cot.
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Just like that the rest of the week passed by uneventfully. Everyone at the facility he ran into seemed hesitant to talk to him, likely wary of him losing his nerve bout canceling the Sky Guy job. From what he’d read, ‘The Shy Guy’ is something they’ve been trying to kill for decades. Michael was probably their best bet at getting rid of him.
Throughout the week Michael made use of the facility gym, while also studying the various SCP’s on his laptop. However, it didn’t have any access to the internet, it had been specifically modified to just hold the SCP information and Hearthgrieve had heavily implied that they had kill switches built into the device if he tried to spread the information inside.
So his dream of using it to play video games was crushed pretty early on.
He did however search himself up on the laptop. Although there wasn't really anything on there that he didn’t already know. Except for when he looked under what to do in case he purposefully breached containment.
It said to beat him with a foam bat until he behaved.
…
'This has to be Hearthgrieve fucking with me, right?' Michael questioned.
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Once the two weeks safe period had passed, a long bit of rope was stretched into Michael’s cell, alongside an easily removable belt attached to the end.
Michael put it on, mostly happy with the deal he’d made. Mostly.
They needed his cooperation in this, that’s why they'd so readily agreed to their terms. They couldn’t force Michael to take SCPs with him to another dimension if he didn’t want to.
Well, they could, but he could just bring them back, and outside of their containment chambers at that. That would just be a disaster waiting to happen.
Michael pondered his situation.
He needed to start taking anything of value in the other dimensions. Now that they agreed to let him keep what he found, it was the best way to increase his survivability. Even with their unspoken caveats in that deal.
So if he found any magic shit, he was going to snatch it without a second thought.
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Bathing became a problem when you could go through a dimensional shift at any moment. He couldn’t take off any of his equipment, so sponge baths were the only way to go.
He’d read in his own document that one time Tommy had decided to take a bath when he could get shifted at any moment, and had promptly gotten transported halfway through. No equipment and no clothes.
'I swear that guy should have died sooner. There has to be something he did that I’m not seeing,' Michael thought before just shrugging. 'Well, I'm sure I'll find out eventually.'
Michael began washing his face when he began to get a feeling of weightlessness that permeated his whole body.
“Here we go again,” Michael said, despite it all a smile on his face. This was what he lived for. He could put up with imprisonment, he could put up with shitty deals. So long as this was the outcome.
So with that, space once again consumed Michael, as well as the monster tied to the end of his rope.
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Once the shift had ended, Michael could hear the ‘Shy Guy’ behind him as it let out an ear piercing scream, back arched towards the ceiling before abruptly curling up on the floor. Once it lay there it began to frantically rip and tear away at the flesh of its face. Spreading blood and chunks of flesh across the floor. It was trying desperately to hide it from something it clearly couldn’t get to.
Michael couldn’t turn around to see what it was doing, but he could hear it. It wasn’t a pleasant sound to listen to. So Michael focused on surveying what was in front of him.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Aisles upon aisles filled with furniture and shelving surrounded him. The shelves stretched high, much higher than would be expected in a store like this, but fell far short of the ceiling which felt like it easily could've been a thousand feet in the air.
Standing up, Michael immediately detached the rope tethering him to ‘The Shy Guy’ and began to walk away. And only once he'd determined he was far enough did he break into a jog. He’d decided to move as far away from the monster as humanly possible.
There was no real reason to stay close to the thing as it tore away at its face. Not if he wanted to live anyways.
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Walking along, Michael was feeling pretty good. He’d quickly identified his location as an IKEA, although substantially bigger than he would've thought. He’d found no walls so far, despite jogging for quite some time now. Even still, Michael was in a pretty good mood.
He’d gotten rid of a monster and got to steal from an IKEA. Honestly a pretty good day all things considered.
Despite this, Michael stayed alert, not wanting to get complacent in an unknown environment. This caution paid off fairly soon, because after roughly forty minutes of walking he came across another monster.
An abnormally tall humanoid moved slowly along down the aisle, wearing the signature yellow shirt and blue pants of an IKEA employee. Its face had no features and looked as if someone had poorly molded its body out of clay.
Michael approached carefully, only calling out to it once he was in an advantageous position. Standing halfway behind a nearby shelf, stacked high with boxed containing bedframes.
“Hey um, you're not gonna try to kill me, are you? If so, I’d appreciate you telling me now,” Michael yelled from behind the shelf.
The creature didn’t respond, it simply continued to saunter away. Moving down the aisle without a care.
'Well, that’s a relief I guess,' Michael thought with a shrug, walking back down the aisle.
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Michael continued walking away from where he'd left ‘The Shy Guy’.
He’d come across a good few more of the IKEA creatures, which he’d started to refer to as ‘Workers’. All of them had been as docile as the first, but even still Michael didn’t lower his guard around them. Some of them had larger unproportional bodies, with arms the size of tree trunks, something he’d very much like to not get hit by.
That was the thought fluttering through Michael's head when all of the overhead lights went out with a buzz.
“Well, that can’t be good,” Michael said to nobody in particular.
Michael then turned on his flashlight and continued moving, taking corners cautiously and being nervous of what this change could entailed. It felt like he was in a horror movie, and a low budget one at that.
As he walked it didn’t take long for him to come across another one of the workers. However, this one behaved differently than all the others he’d seen. It ran instead of slowly shambling and was constantly repeating the phrase, “The store is now closed. Please exit the building.”
Its head turned then snapped towards Michael, twisting unnaturally before it sprinted towards him at full speed.
“The store is now clo-”
Never let your enemy finish talking, that was a rule Michael intended to follow.
It didn’t get past that word before Michael fired his shotgun. Bursting the creature's head like it'd been filled with white confetti, and causing it to violently crash down into the floor, breaking through a nearby coffee table in the process.
It laid there ragdolled on the floor, clearly dead.
'And here I thought I finally got a safe dimension,' Michael thought, picking up the leg of the broken coffee table.
Cautiously he moved towards the corpse, and with a few firm pokes found that it didn’t have any blood or bones, it was just completely filled with the same pale skin that it had on the outside.
Getting back up Michael began to move, not wanting to see if more of these things were going to be attracted by the noise. Despite his gun being suppressed, the sound still echoed a lot more than he was comfortable with.
As Michael jogged, things began to escalate. He was starting to see small groups of the workers, which he'd easily managed to kill with some well placed shots.
The problems came when the packs of these things began to number in the dozens. And it felt like every monster killed was being replaced by two more.
Michael ran through the aisles of furniture, trying to break eyesight with the workers following him as often as possible, but despite his flashlight cutting through the dark, it was still quite difficult to see.
He could hear the heavy footsteps of the workers behind him as they continued to drone on in a chipper tone saying, “The store is now closed. Please exit the building”.
Reaching down to his side, Michael grabbed hold of a grenade, pulling the pin. Then right before he rounded a corner, Michael whipped the grenade behind him as he ran.
The resounding explosion was deafening, causing Michaels ears to ring as he moved in between shelves. Moments later, still running Michael saw it. A large wall made out of bits and pieces of metal, wood and furniture. Small holes littered the walls, but they looked deliberate. Likely being something to shoot or stab through.
Several humans stood atop the wall, holding what looked to be makeshift crossbows.
Michael quicky ducked behind a shelf. He wasn't sure they'd seen him just yet and debated ignoring them and continuing on. Who was to say they weren't also enemies after all, but the consistent noise of workers moving about was a strong incentive to be a little trusting.
His body still wasn’t ready for this amount of abuse, and he was already starting to feel exhausted from the little running he’d had to do. Risks would need to be taken.
'Well, time to test my luck,' Michael thought, watching the men atop the fortification with an inquisitive eye.
With a sigh, Michael poked his head out from behind his cover, and yelled a greeting to the two guards.
“Hey ugh, can I come in?” Michael asked.
They both looked towards him with surprise, hesitation marring their expressions before moments later moving to open the main door for him.
“Get inside quickly, we won’t keep that door open for long,” a guard yelled down to Michael.
He didn't need to be told twice. Rushing inside, the doors quickly shut behind him and Michael bent over gasping for breath. He’d done way too much running today, and not enough back at base. He'd need to work on that.
One of the guards walked up, holding his crossbow. He had short black hair and scars covering much of his exposed skin.
“If you were out after dark, I’m guessing you're new here. Even if you're armed to the teeth like that,” the guard said, eyeing Michael's gear.
“Yeah, I guess you could say I’m new here,” Michael replied with a grin between gasping breaths.
The man smiled in return, “Well I’ll be the first one to welcome you to our little settlement, the village of the Low Hanging Bathroom Light.”