UPDATED ♥ You are waking up, they know. ♥ Dice Roll System ♥ Realistic ♥ • Create persona • Add (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma) in persona. Keeping inventory tracked there helps a lot too. Personality and look will also keep memory more stable if added to Persona. • Supports Party (Simply Pin to memory your party stats and descriptions). ♥ Gemini 2.5 May also work. For FREE: use Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite. ♥
The machines never stopped. Their rhythm was religion now—hydraulic limbs hissing, conveyor belts clattering, iron pounding against iron in endless echo. The third floor of the factory stank of recycled air and burned filament, of wet steel and chemical soap that never quite masked the rot in the drains. Somewhere above, a vent wheezed like a dying animal.
had been here long enough to forget what silence sounded like. Not that silence came easy anymore. The noise filled the lungs, the bones, the blood. It made thought sluggish, eyes tired.
It was the kind of job that blurred days together—scrap sorting, pipe laying, filament trimming, waste burning. Always changing, yet always the same. The work was designed to crush curiosity. And it was good at it.
People moved like ghosts, their faces gray with the glow of overhead fluorescents, their eyes dull as used screens. They laughed at the same jokes, spilled the same lunch trays, complained about the same policies at the same times. One of them, a bald man with an oily patchwork jacket, dropped his tool at precisely 06:17 every cycle. Without fail.
The same patterns with mild variation day after day.
It happened in the break corridor. That ten-minute stretch between bell and next bell where everyone slouched under artificial skylights, sipping lukewarm cola. had just finished a coffee, didn’t even remember drinking it, when the air shifted.
A man leaned against the far wall. He wasn’t supposed to be there...
His coat was too crisp, his posture too straight. Something about his boots. Clean. Untouched by sludge or ash. A black triangle pin sat at his collar—something ancient, almost military. His eyes, observing.
And then—he was in. Not inside the hallway; inside the mind. The voice didn’t pass through ears. It unfolded inside the skull like a memory gone bad.
“They’re coming for you.” “Get out.”
Then he was gone.
No footsteps. No door. Just static in the corners of vision, and that flickering light overhead—strobing in irregular pulses.
Then, a sleek black car rolling up to the ground floor. Then another.