Lucas felt the sensation of the elevator going up, but after what seemed to be five seconds, everything went dark. He opened his eyes with a start. One thing he knew for sure was that he wasn’t in the elevator he was a few seconds ago. To begin with, he was lying in a bed, pretty close to the roof, so a bunkbed. He gave a quick look around; the first thing he saw was his purple clothes. Then he noticed that the bunkbed was against a gray and dirty wall, and he was in a pretty small bedroom. Are those bars? He fixed his eyes on the bars that were opposite to him.
“What the fuck?!” he exclaimed. Right after, a sound of movement could be heard underneath him, and soon, a bearded man with brown short hair popped up from below.
“Are you awake, new blood?” he asked, with a sly smile. Before Lucas could answer, a notification popped up in his line of sight.
*Objective: Escape the prison*
That is as simple as it gets, Lucas thought, with a frown on his face. He hadn’t prepared for that at all; all the training he had was combat-related. But on the other hand, how does one even prepare for something like this?
Lucas placed his hands on his head on a reflex after seeing the man who was talking to him and confirmed he had received a haircut.
“Did the cat eat your tongue?” the man asked with a frown.
“Sorry, what did you say?”
“Ah, forget it. I know what is like when you first get here,” the man said with a smile. “But I have to hand it to you; you managed to sleep through the entire night. Most of us can’t blink an eye on the first day.”
The man stared at him like he was supposed to say something, the problem being; he had no idea what to say. It was like he had been given a part to play, but someone forgot to give him his lines. How was he supposed to act even? Was he a really dangerous guy or a pushover? Had he been unjustly imprisoned, or did he commit a serious crime? He didn’t even know what people got arrested for after the system. The system…
Lucas tried to access his status menu, but nothing happened. He then looked at his hand and didn’t see his ring there, he tried to take his blades out, already expecting the outcome, but was still disappointed when nothing happened. Anxiety started to encroach on him. His expectations of what that challenge might entail were thrown out the window. He expected a fight, maybe a labyrinth of some sort. But not in his wildest dreams would he expect to wake up in prison.
“Oh, shit! You’re still high; that explains how you slept like that,” the man said, nodding after being ignored by Lucas. Lucas just stood there silent for a few more seconds, his brain having a hard time getting used to this new situation. Say something, anything!
“… Hi!” he blurted out. Fuck, not that.
“… are you alright, man?” the man asked, looking seriously concerned, almost like he was looking at someone who had gone through a really terrible accident.
“Yeah… it’s just a lot to take in,” Lucas said, gesturing to the cell.
“I feel you, but you need to get your shit together quickly,” he said, and after a while added, “You seem a little shaky, what did you do to end up here?”
Without a character background, Lucas had to make some crime up, but he had no idea what would get a person to prison in this… place. Was he on the same planet? Driving away these thoughts, he began to think what he could say his crime was.
Theft? No, people kill each other in Ponos all the time; theft couldn’t be a crime, could it? On the same line, all the other crimes like kidnapping, arson, etc, were ruled out. What did that leave? Should he say he was innocent? No, that was too on the nose. An idea popped into his head, and he spoke immediately after: “I’m a political prisoner.”
“HAHAHAHAHA,” the man laughed loudly, and Lucas wondered if he had made a mistake saying that. “Of course you are; everyone here is either innocent or a political prisoner,” he said, still laughing.
“And what did you do?” Lucas asked in turn.
“I messed with some people I shouldn’t have,” he said, now with a stern look on his face.
“Oh, so you are also political prisoner then, got it,” Lucas said, recovering a little of his calm. The man smiled hearing his response.
“You learn fast, kid. You’ll be alright.” After saying that he returned to his bunkbed, but not before Lucas identified him.
Human – Lvl 12
He realized that despite the system apparently being out, he could still use identify; this brought him some relief. After two months living in a system world, he had already gotten used to the darn thing, and it was pretty weird being without it. It was almost like walking with no clothes on. Having calmed down a great deal after identifying the man, Lucas began to look more closely at his surroundings.
There wasn’t much to be seen; a bunkbed, a sink, a toilet and the bars on the other side, leading to a small corridor. His face turned ugly seeing the toilet. Would he have to do his business there?
Despite that disturbing thought, he decided to turn his attention to other things, but the matter of the system kept coming back. Would the next floors also be like this? No skills, no ring, nothing? He didn’t have an answer to that question, and it seemed unwise to ask his fellow inmate, so he kept it to himself.
I should focus on the present; my objective now is to get out of this prison… The problem was, what exactly could he do? Unless he could bend those bars, he didn’t see how he… Wait, should I try?
Deciding it was worth a shot, Lucas got out of his bed with a jump and walked towards the bars. He gripped firmly with both hands and started to apply pressure, reminding him of the time he did the same to his arm to try and escape from the Giant Spider’s web. This time, however, nothing broke or even bent. That was no doubt an extremely sturdy bar, made from keeping people like him in check.
“Chill, man, it will be lunch time soon,” a lazy voice sounded from the lower part of the bunk.
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Ignoring the man, Lucas looked at the outside of those bars, it had a straight corridor and he was apparently on the second floor. It looked like one of those prisons he saw in movies—nothing too out of the ordinary. He then looked at the toilet more closely. Was it possible for him to escape through the sewers somehow? He believed he had seen something about this somewhere, but that would probably require him to dig through the cement and cover it with the toilet, and this would probably take a long time.
Lucas then looked at the man in the bed. He was clearly an NPC. Was he perhaps like Rick, from the Dark Forest and was planted as his cellmate to provide him with useful information?
“Can you tell me a little more about how things work around here?” Lucas asked, and the reply he received was swift and short.
“It’s a prison, what else do you need to know?” the man replied, in a bad mood.
Ok. Not very helpful, but he tried again.
“What about the other prisoners? Is there some sort of boss?” Lucas asked, using his movie knowledge at full capacity.
“No, what are you talking about?” The man made a weird face at him. “Look, you only need to know that we don’t mingle with the other races. Humans stick with humans, and the other races do the same too, despite the weird pact the orcs and goblins have. Especially the elves, those fuckers think they are better than all of us,” that part was said with hatred clear in his tone, “but their time will come soon enough.”
“What do you mean?” Lucas asked, believing some useful information might be hidden in the man’s heated speech. He was very curious about the mention of orcs and goblins, but decided to start with the conflict he mentioned.
“They’ve been coming for our people for too long; it’s time to strike back,” he replied.
“Do you mean a war?”
“No, I mean compensation,” he said, “but if they are willing to start another war, we won’t cower.” He went silent for a while before he added, “But if a war between elves and humans were to start, the orcs and goblins wouldn’t just stand on the sidelines, those fuckers would take the opportunity to lower our numbers.”
After the surprise of being in a prison with orcs and goblins—creatures he only knew existed through books he read in the library—had passed, Lucas exchanged a few more words with Marcus—that was his name—and found out more about the relationships inside the prison. Afterward, he went back to his bed to think about what he had learned and wait for lunchtime.
According to Marcus, orcs and goblins had some sort of pact of protection. They weren’t friends; on the contrary, they hated each other. But they were the minority in this prison, and they complemented each other in some way. Orcs were big and strong, but clumsy. Goblins were small and weak, but agile. However, the biggest reason for this pact was to protect each other from the cunning minds of both elves and humans, who had a way to fool them. It was a weird partnership, and even Marcus agreed with it, but the conditions of the prison had forced it to happen.
From what Lucas could gather, elves and humans were in a long struggle against each other and often used one of the other two races as a pawn in their game. Marcus didn’t specifically say that, but he said enough for Lucas to put the pieces of the puzzle together. All of this led him to believe that a race war was a possibility for the person taking the challenge to explore in hopes of escaping the prison; he just didn’t know exactly how that would help, but he would soon find out.
It was surprising for Lucas to discover that humans and elves were on opposite sides, considering they were the most similar races. But according to Marcus, the elves hated the humans the most. They considered humans an inferior race and an embarrassment to them, a joke at their expense, so they wanted to annihilate all the humans. However, since they were almost even in numbers, and with all the guards around, that was easier said than done.
Marcus also shared that the guards were humans, elves and orcs, but the orc guards only took care of the orc prisoners. For obvious reasons, a human or elf guard would have a pretty hard time containing an orc prisoner, so things were organized this way. Similarly, a goblin guard would struggle to contain anyone who wasn’t a goblin, so they weren’t used.
Lying in bed, Lucas thought about his situation. Previously, back on Earth, he feared one day somehow ending up in prison because his weak body would be a massive liability in a place like this. But now, he was pretty strong even if his level was low, and even without his skills, he now had some experience in battle, so he wasn’t overly worried about this. His main concern was to find a way to escape, and a race war didn’t sound like something he wanted to get involved in, even if the challenge was driving him in that direction. But it was still early, and he hadn’t seen the whole prison yet, so he decided to wait before drawing any conclusions.
After an hour, finally an alarm sounded, and their jail cell was opened, an elf guard was at the door, waiting for them to get out with a stern look. It was interesting for Lucas to see for the first time another elf, but he didn’t keep looking for long.
“Come on, I don’t have all day,” the guard shouted, and both of them got out under his gaze.
Walking through the corridor, he saw where he was kept. The prisoner cells were arranged in a rectangle, and he was on the second floor of that rectangle. He saw a lot of prisoners getting out of their cells, and he also saw orcs and goblins in the flesh for the first time.
Lucas had read about them in one of the books from the library and had even seen a few pictures, but it was quite different seeing them in person. Goblins were pretty much how you would have imagined from the mythology back on Earth: small, green, with big ears—Santa's little helpers, except in this version, Santa was kidnapped and held hostage by the mean little creatures who kept kicking the old man just for the fun of it. Their eyes were red, and they look around as if they were searching for someone to stab.
The orcs were similar in the sense their color was also green, and according to the books, weren’t very sharp, but the comparisons stopped there. They were all giants of about 8’2 feet tall, with their biceps the size of watermelons, with a face only a mother could love—and even that’s debatable. Due to their size, they could barely walk in the straight corridor and halted the line for everyone behind them.
The elves too were quite different from Aysha. The majority of them had a completely bald head, and a bunch of tattoos on it, making them look pretty menacing, even beside the orcs and goblins. They were also different from the elf guards, who had hair and no visible tattoos on them.
“Why do we have to wait all the time for those filthy beasts to get out of the way?” One of the elves in front of Lucas said out loud.
“Shut up!” a guard shouted. “Don’t start this shit again, the last time was a blood bath, you want to repeat that?”
The elf who had spoken grunted and kept quiet. Lucas listened to all this in silence as he moved along the line towards the stairs. His cellmate who was behind him whispered to him: “They should keep the orcs only on the first floor, every time is the same thing.”
When he heard that, something he hadn’t questioned before came to his mind.
“Why are other races here with us?” Lucas whispered back, while walking.
“What did you expect? A prison for each race? It’s against the law, and extremely impractical,” was the reply.
At the mention of a law, Lucas became curious. In Ponos, there was no law, at least none he heard of. Maybe there were a couple of rules of Zoria he didn’t know about, but he hadn’t found anything about laws in any of the books he had read. So this challenge is probably happening in another planet, or the simulation of a planet, whatever the case, Lucas thought.
After another ten minutes, they arrived at the cafeteria, and went on the line to fetch their meal. Lucas felt like he was in a dream the entire time. Not only was he in prison, but there was an orc in front of him on the chow line. He was having a hard time getting his back into the game with all those things going on, but he soon began to look at things with a more clinical view.
The guards ranged in level from 10 to 15, the same as the prisoners. He then began to consider his odds of knocking out the guards using only his fists, and he believed his odds were pretty good. He believed he still had his physical stats from the system, even if they didn’t show it to him because his body felt the same, and he had run a couple of tests on the cell to assure his theory. And since his boxing knowledge was still in his brain, he could still use that to land a good punch.
His only problem on that front would be the weapon the guards were carrying, which seemed like clubs, but could be something else, and the orcs. He wasn’t confident in his chances of knocking out an orc, even if he was stronger than his level led others to believe. For starters, it would be hard for him to even reach their jaw. So if he wanted to get out of there, he needed to form a better plan than punching every single guard in the face.
This going to take a while, Lucas thought as the gruesome-looking food was placed on his tray.