Chapter Seventy-Four: Please Present Your Identification (Patreon)

[Sorry for the delay. My computer died. I had to go find my old Gen 1 Chromebook to post this.]

Ten minutes after First Blood ended, Anna slowly tiptoed out of her living space and into view of the cameras. While her bedroom was not in view of the cameras, the communal space and door that separated her from the maze of hallways were visible. I was keeping watch over all of the monitors with heightened interest, looking for any evidence of what might have happened or what might happen next.

Anna approached the little white box near the door and pressed the button. A little light blinked on the monitor. I turned on the audio.

“Any trouble there, sis?” I asked in my most casual voice.

"Is everything OK?" Anna asked. "Just got a weird feeling. Thought I heard a noise."

I couldn’t tell if she was on screen or not.

"Everything looks OK from up here," I said. "I’ll ask around."

"I’ll ask Kimberly if she heard anything," Anna said.

She looked up at the camera and then crept over toward Kimberly's room. I switched off the audio in Anna and Kimberly's common area and then switched it on to the one that Antoine and Camden shared.

"Antoine, Camden, just checking in," I said over the loudspeaker.

It didn't take long for them to crawl out of their living quarters and come out to where I could see them. I doubted that they had been sleeping.

"Is everything alright?" Antoine asked.

"Looking good," I answered. "Anna said she heard something. Did you guys?"

They looked at each other and then Camden said, "Didn't hear anything here."

"Me neither," I said. "Just checking around."

"Do you need me to do a patrol?" Antoine asked. He did not seem too eager.

"No, you're good. There's none scheduled for tonight. You can go back to bed," I answered.

And so, I continued my watch, waiting for some evidence of what First Blood might have been, some clue to our characters of what had just transpired. I had no idea if anything we had just discussed had been on-screen. For me, it wasn’t. I sat in front of the monitors, waiting and watching for the rest of the night. 

I never saw anything move. 

There were no distortions.

The longer I saw nothing, the more nervous I became.

~~~

As the minutes ticked by, I eagerly watched for the elevator to open. When it did, it would bring a flood of NPCs and, with them, information about what had happened at First Blood. After all, the defining trait of First Blood was how the characters reacted to it.

It was difficult to react when you had no idea what happened.

7:58…

7:59…

8:00…

And… Nothing.

The elevator never dinged.

No one walked through the door. There should have been nurses bringing food and medicine. There should have been scientists ready to work with Camden to study the Mercer family.

There wasn’t. The elevator never even opened.

I clicked on the audio for Kimberly and Anna’s common room.

“Was there something special going on this morning?” I asked.

A few moments later, Anna walked out into the common area. “No,” she said. “Not that I remember.”

She started to walk back to her room but then paused.

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s time for the day to start and no one has come down,” I answered.

“Hmm. Wonder why,” Anna said.

“I’ll ask around.”

I repeated the conversation with Camden moments later. Obviously, I knew that something was wrong, but I was playing it like I had no idea.

“Who didn’t show up?” Camden asked.

“No one has come down,” I answered.

“That’s strange. My supervisor was going to work with me on a special project of some kind this morning.”

“I’ll call upstairs and see what the holdup is,” I said.

I walked across my room to the phone on the wall. I brought the receiver up to my ear and pressed the button that was supposed to send me to the switchboard where a chipper operator would direct my call to whomever I desired.

Except it didn’t.

No one answered.

I thought about what was going on for a moment.

Once again, flipping on the audio for Anna’s room, I said “Didn’t they have some sort of meeting last night?”

A few moments later, Anna said, “Yes. Companywide. Except for those on duty.”

That was what I thought. The meeting was where the custodian from the night before was supposed to be going when the distortion joined her on the elevator.

“I’m going out to check on things,” I said.

“Wait up,” Anna said. “I’ll get the others. It'll be a minute.”

I looked over at the monitors. The Mercers were beginning to wake up.

What were we going to do?

~~~

Ten minutes later, Anna, Kimberly, Camden, Antoine, and I were standing next to the elevator. Still, not a single person had come down.

On-Screen.

“What’s the hold-up?” Antoine asked. “I have a debrief with the Head of Security in half an hour.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.

“Can we go up and check on things?” Kimberly asked.

Camden grabbed his badge from his shirt and walked toward the elevator. “I don’t even know if we have access.”

He held his badge against the small electronic box next to the elevator. Where normally it should flash green, it flashed yellow.

“I guess we don’t,” Anna said.

“No,” I said. “Red is no access. Yellow is an error.”

I had managed to learn that in my attempts to travel around the floor on my first day.

“Error?” Camden asked. “What error?”

“Like when the higher-ups reserve a room so the average employees cannot enter it temporarily,” I said.

“It's not like someone could reserve an elevator,” Kimberly said.

I shrugged my shoulders and pressed my own badge against the device. Yellow again.

“It could just be an old fashion error,” I said. “Broken elevator.”

Antoine tried his badge next.

“So how do we get up now,” he asked. “Is there a stairway in case of a fire?”

I shook my head. “We have a state-of-the-art fire suppression system. I don’t know of any stairways. They may not be marked in case one of the… patients… escapes.”

Anna turned to the camera on the ceiling. She looked back at us. “You think they're watching?”

“If they were, why haven’t they said anything?” Antoine asked.

“I imagine at this point, we’re the only ones left alive,” I said sarcastically.

“Don’t say that,” Anna said. "You're not helping."

“I was just kidding. But I have seen this movie before,” I said. “Now all that’s left is for us to get picked off one by one.”

“As long as you go first,” Kimberly said.

“I just might,” I said. “You’ll probably make it to the big climax. Being pregnant and all.”

“I don’t want to talk about this. We are not in a horror movie, much to Riley’s disappointment,” Anna said. “We need to figure out what’s going on.”

We discussed what we would do for a while. It wasn't clear what our next step should be. I began worrying that perhaps we had missed something in the Party Phase.

“Operating under the assumption that any emergency exits are disguised so that the patients can't escape we should start looking around for something like that,” Camden said.

Everyone agreed. As we did, we all got a temporary double-point buff to our Savvy stats. It was nice to see Camden’s new Immobile Genius trope in action.

“What about the patients?” Kimberly asked.

“We can't open their rooms without a nurse badge,” Anna said. “Unless Riley can open it from the control room. Or maybe Antoine?”

“I'm not allowed to have anything to do with the patients. I can't even get into their common areas unless they're already open,” Antoine said.

“Same here,” I said. “You need someone with authorization to open up their individual rooms. And to be honest I'm not sure we should mess with them right now anyway. We don't have their medicine. We don't have their food.”

“Well, we can't just leave them there,” Kimberly said.

“Maybe we ought to,” I argued back. “If you haven't noticed, they're prisoners here. There might be a reason for that.”

“There are children in there!” Kimberly said, as always, her performance was quite convincing. Of course, it was possible she actually was concerned about the NPC children.

“They're just a liability,” Camden agreed with me. “We haven't even been told why they're here. You aren't being logical. Besides, they’re safe in their cells.”

“Watch how you talk to her,” Antoine said. “She's just concerned about other people's well-being. That might be a foreign concept to you.”

He started staring down at Camden.

“Enough!” Anna said. “We can't even get them out of the rooms there's no point in arguing about it. Right now, we need to save ourselves and work together before we have any chance of helping them.”

“Fair enough,” Camden said. “Sorry,” he said to Kimberly.

“Now let's go find that exit,” Anna said.

As we walked away all of our Savvy received another small boost. Personally, I thought our performance was lackluster, but it was our first intentional On-Screen quarrel. We would get better. It wasn't a real fight unless curse words were used, as I saw it. Still, it was enough to activate Anna’s Let's Not Fight trope for a quick buff.

Off-Screen.

With our standard buffs out of the way, we began our search for a way out.

I went to my room so that I could supervise over the loudspeaker. In the Rebirth phase, the monster could attack at any time, even to lethal effect, assuming that there wasn't something in the script preventing it from doing so. With this storyline, I had no idea.

Kimberly and Antoine more or less made a beeline to go pick up Antoine's bat. I had hoped that by pointing out the potential danger we were in it would be enough justification for him to seek out a weapon better than the baton and pepper spray that he was assigned with his uniform.

Anna and Camden stuck together and went to explore the laboratories and offices where Camden worked. I got the impression that he had seen things over there that were worth looking at now that he had a narrative justification.

I watched the Mercers as they banged on their doors and yelled for attention. I considered sending them a message to calm them down, but I thought better of it. If we decided to help them later, they would never need to know that I was ignoring them. If I spoke to them before we could help them, they might grow frustrated with us if we took too long.

I still wasn't sure how they fit into the narrative. The distortion did appear to emanate from the same part of the floor that their cells were on. Whatever this thing was it was tied to them at the very least.

I watched as Anna and Camden explored the offices that I recognized as belonging to Camden’s supervisor. I watched as they walked off of one monitor and didn’t reappear on any other.

I quickly flipped on the audio for the last room that they had been walking in.

“Whoa, you two. Where is it you just went? I don't see you.”

I didn't receive an answer for a few moments.

“I think we found something,” Camden said. Camden's hunch must have been right.

I quickly alerted Antoine and Kimberly. They came by my office so that we could walk to Anna and Camden together. I didn't want to be walking around alone.

As soon as we walked into the room that Anna and Camden had been in, I saw the area that they must have walked into when they went off-camera.

As I entered, I went On-Screen.

“My boss was constantly coming back here and telling me that I wasn't allowed to follow him,” Camden said. “I figure we should take a look at whatever it is we weren't supposed to see. He comes in here for hours at a time. I was always curious. Now I'm even more curious.”

What we weren't supposed to see was... another office. Where the first one looked like a real place of work, where someone actually spent time, with paper strewn about and signs of life, the second office looked like it was staged and sterile. It almost looked like it wasn't even used.

“You're saying he comes in here?” Antoine asked. “What for?”

It was a valid question. This room did not have the look of a secret hidden location. It was strange that it wasn't on camera. It was stranger still that Camden’s boss would need to come in here when there was no evidence that the room had been used. There wasn't even a computer at the desk.

“Can't you hear it?” Camden asked.

We got silent and listened.

Once it got very quiet, I could hear something,

“Is that someone talking?” Kimberly asked.

“No,” I said. “Not someone.”

It was something.

I had to listen very closely to pick up what was being said:

“Please present your identification. Please present your identification. Please present your identification.”

It was a computer voice. The same voice could be heard whenever you stood in a doorway for too long and the system needed you to present your credentials in order to keep the door open.

“Where is that coming from?” I asked.

After a few more moments of silence, Anna moved closer to a bookshelf against one of the walls.

“It's coming from back here,” she said putting her ear up against the wall.

“Maybe there's some type of switch that makes the shelves move out of the way,” I said. It looked like we were staring at one of those Scooby-doo bookcases that would open up if you pulled out the right book. The only problem here was that this shelving unit had no books on it. It didn't have anything on it.

Anna pulled on the bookshelf, and, with a click, it came swinging open like a normal door. No leatherbound book to pull out, no marble bust whose head opens up on a hinge. The secret door opened just by pulling on the shelf. Lame.

“You watch too much TV,” Anna said.

As she pulled open the door, the voice got louder. “Please present your identification.”

What we saw when we opened the door was a stairway that led up as well as another that led down. Next to them, was an elevator. A private elevator.

“Please present your identification,” the voice rang out.

The elevator doors opened, sending us back in shock.

Lying on the floor of the elevator, covered in blood, was Camden’s supervisor. I didn't know what could possibly have done it, but he was bleeding from the eyes and the mouth. His torso was mostly intact, though there was a large gash in his chest that exposed some shattered ribs.

“Please present your identification.”

The elevator doors closed.

And then opened.

And then closed.

“I hate being right,” I said.

“Please present your identification."