Chapter Text
Crime doesn’t pay, you had to learn this the hard way. You aren’t a particularly rotten criminal, but grand theft auto is unfortunately very much illegal. You aren’t particularly sure how things got as bad as they did as fast as they did, but a number of stressors came together into one maddening moment where you convinced yourself to steal a car in a moment of blind madness. The resulting chase lasted over an hour, and didn’t help with shortening your sentence.
Now you sit in your cell and really want to leave. Whatever just happened definitely wasn’t worth sitting in a dirty old cell in a dirty old prison with guards that yell at people every five minutes. In fact, you guess that things couldn’t possibly get any worse, I mean the food they had in the cafeteria was the worst meal you’ve ever eaten in your life. You just want to leave, this place sucks.
As soon as you say this, the finger on the monkey’s paw curls and some men in strange vans show up at the prison searching for some inmates for their secret organization. They start walking down the hallway while they talk with the warden, inspecting each of your cellmates like kittens in a shelter. When they reach you, the man in the fancy suit looks at you like he sees some kind of potential in you. You feel doom sink in your gut, they’re probably gonna stick a probe in your bowels and inject poison into your bloodstream.
It starts to sink in that you’re going to be treated like an alien abduction victim for stealing a car. It wasn’t even that nice of a car from what you remember. It had a really nasty shade of vomit green and the steering handled like you were driving in an earthquake.
Anyway, the warden returns to your cell and tells you that the strange men in suits have chosen you along with a couple of your cellmates to participate in some weird government program. You ask who else was chosen, and the warden yells at you to shut up. You sit in the lousy little bed for a minute before the men in suits come and tell you to follow them. The strange men briefly explain to you that you will be involved in something that no normal man knows about before they hand you a jumpsuit with a label reading “D-8268”. This is gonna be the start of something truly weird.
The men in suits have you sit in a bus they brought along with their FBI-esque vans and you find that they have been to every prison in the nearest area. Prisoners from multiple different prisons are discussing random things amongst themselves as you go to take a seat where nobody else has decided to sit. You look out into the night sky and notice something off as the moon looks like a blinking eye. You quickly wipe your eyes and the moon is back to normal, so you assume that you are still going insane.
The bus ride is long and extremely boring. As you look out the window, you can’t help but keep your eyes on the moon. Even as you assume you’ve cracked, you still try to make sure something wasn’t actually going on with the moon. You decided to sit at the back of the bus, which means you get to deal with the craziest bumps. It’s the only thing that keeps all of these new stressors off your mind as you are tossed into the air like a ragdoll.
When the bus stops driving, you notice that you’ve all been driven out into the middle of nowhere to a weird sci-fi facility. Everybody starts walking off the bus and you are all sent into a part of the facility for keeping prisoners, or “D-Class Personnel” as they like to call you guys. You move from the ugly little jail cell to an equally ugly little cell in a weird government facility. Looks like you’re moving up in the world.
That night, you have a really strange dream about the moon. You are sitting in your nasty little jail cell and you hear a pair of guards talking about some kind of monthly termination. You wonder what the hell a monthly termination is and why something like that would exist in the first place. Before you get the chance to think about it further, your cell opens and two guards, presumably the ones that you heard talking about monthly termination, and they tell you to follow them.
You, along with a bunch of other faceless D-Class, are brought outside and led into the middle of nowhere. Once the facility is far out of sight and there is nothing but sand and cacti around, the guards force you to stand together in a straight line. You end up at the end of the line and the guards begin shooting each D-Class with their sidearms. You feel stuck there and then you hear a loud cackling in the sky. You look up and notice something chilling, the moon has been replaced with a monstrous mouth. The moon laughs like a wild demon as each D-Class is executed and its laughter gets even louder when you are the only one left.
Right before the guard pulls the trigger, you wake up and fall off your bed. The rest of the night you stay awake and keep thinking about the dream you just had. In the morning you are briefed on your new job as a D-Class and the responsibilities that come with the position. You’ll be working with strange anomalies, many of which are extremely dangerous. If you can stick around for about a month and deal with the hellish conditions, you will be let out with no parole. You consider your options and decide to accept the offer.
A month goes by in a flash and things have been relatively uneventful. Unlike the other D-Class personnel that joined the same time as you, you have been used in tests on extremely mundane anomalies. You feel rather lucky that you’ve been working with cars that bounce in place of driving and a beer bottle that makes your hair green for a day while your peers have died to reality benders and basic horror movie monsters. Just a few days left and you get to leave, and you can live a normal life.
Or, at least, you would be if your dream hadn’t come back to bite you in the butt. You are sitting in your cell with a plastic cup of lukewarm water as you hear a pair of guards talking about something that causes you to drop your cup and water splashes all over the cell floor. One guard talks about how it’s time for monthly termination, and you immediately have awful flashbacks of your nightmare. It’s happening all over again, unless the guards decide to just walk right by your cell this ti- and suddenly your cell opens up to reveal the same two guards from your dream.
A group of D-Class, this time with worried faces, are herded outside and you are sent on a march out into the middle of the desert. If it weren’t for the abject horror, you would have realized this place is the exact same as the area you were brought to in your dream. Suddenly things start going off script as the D-Class are placed in a queue line rather than standing side by side and the guards form a circle around the first D-Class of the line.
They all do something with their helmets and then they all turn away from the line of extremely confused D-Class. Things start to get really weird as the D-Class standing in the center of the guards begins to float and they kick their legs out. Despite the D-Class’ screams of terror and pleas to let them down, the guards don’t pay attention and things only get worse.
Right when things don’t seem like they could get any worse, the floating D-Class is shot into the stratosphere by some strange unknown force. As soon as this happens, the rest of the D-Class scream in terror while you stand perfectly still, frozen solid by shock. Things only get worse for you as the rest of the queue is brought into the circle and sent off into space.
Everything starts to pile onto you and you feel your sanity drain from your body as more people continue to be sent into the circle of guards. Stress piles up on top of itself as you begin to black out. Blind madness takes over just as it did a month ago and you scream at the top of your lungs and charge at the guards. You’ve spent your month here and you’ll be damned if you aren’t gonna get to live your normal life again.
The last thing you see is a view of the moon blinking at you.