---

---

The man in the soiled rigsuit chuckled as the small ball of fuzz that was Rex crawled out from beneath his legs to get at the coffee pot. He chuckled even harder as he found that the pot was missing, as was the usual morning routine.

"Awwww sorry there, Lil' Fuzz, Joe's on the go, courtesy of Mean and Green Worogoro! But don't worry, once he passes it, we'll be sippin' Joe and kickin' back in the midday sun, like al-"


The blaring crackle of the ramshackle PA system flicked a switch in Amadeus' brain, because before the message had even finished, his multi-tool was drawn and switched to its modified welding torch flamethrower mode. Panicked hyperventilation crackled through his mask as he pointed it at each of the exits.

His rigsuit became only slightly soiled as he put the multi-tool away and told himself to take a deep breath. And by deep breath, he meant several anti-psychotics and a handful of what looked like Sleepytime tea leaves from one of his suit pouches.

Yeah... Tea leaves.

With his copious amount of barbiturates ingested, he shuffled his way to the meeting room, but not before pausing to stare at the-

It made his skin crawl to look at it. It reminded him of the maintenence hallway doors aboard the USG JERUSALEM. In the back of his memory, the screams of terror resonated as it stood there. Just...

"Like always," Rex began to repeat after Amadeus. Up until that point, he was confident that while there wouldn't be any coffee available until midday, it was going to be Just Another Day of doing very little indeed, punctuated only by brief naps in the sun and the occasional caffeine-fuelled burst of hyperactivity. However, as the speaker system crackled into life to deliver a fateful message about a meeting - a word that Rex had yet to fully grasp the meaning of, but had discovered that it functioned something like a curse word - his ears pricked up and, a moment later, he was seeking shelter behind the coffee machine.

For once, the word meeting did not immediately lead to explosions, the unexpected formation of anomalous time zones or their subsequent cataclysmic collapse, nor those people with the strange suits that covered their whole bodies bursting in through the windows. Peering out from behind the relatively little safety afforded by the coffee machine, Rex watched Amadeus eat something, and wander off.

After giving the room one last look over, Rex darted, not for the door, but towards the wall. Then, up the wall, his claws extended and ripping yet another set of tears into the faded floral wallpaper. Within seconds, Rex was into the vents. With one last angry stare at the coffee machine, Rex disappeared. Numerous symbols and drawings were scratched into the inside of the vents, helpfully mapping out which vent led where, along with a series of ever larger pictures of teeth to warn about getting too close to Maya's cell. Taking an up, a left, a down, a right, another right, a sort of up and a left, and then a left again, Rex arrived at the Board Room Vent.

Ever so carefully, Rex pushed at the covering and peered at the floor of the Board Room. The last time he had visited the Board Room, there wasn't even a discernible floor, just a sticky mat of thick black goo, the result of an interview process gone horribly wrong. Or horribly right, it was hard to tell. Either way, satisfied that the floor posed little to no threat, Rex levered open the metal grill covering the vent and proceeded to drop down to the floor.

Or, that was the plan; the grill snapping shut behind him caught the hem of his laboratory coat and, rather than hitting the floor, he instead just hung there, upside-down, suspended from the ceiling by his little lab coat. At least, from here, he could actually watch the meeting unfold, and didn't risk being trod underfoot.

Denny continued to play his flute for a while, and he was in the middle of a flute rendition of Another One Bites The Dust when he heard an announcement:



"Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, meeting time!" He shouts, shoving his flute into his belt and throwing his hands in the air. He then ran as fast as he could to the meeting room, laughing in excitement. He always loved these meetings, especially the parts where Mr. Philip talked. He was so cool and smart and amazing and awesome and Denny wanted to be just like him! It didn't matter that most of these meetings ended with the gruesome deaths of half the disposable, unnamed redshirts known as the staff, they were awesome!

But one thing Denny didn't like about the meetings was walking past the...


It scared him. For some reason he didn't like it, it was just so...


He meekly walked up to it, placing a hand on it. He shuttered when he touched it, and his hands felt icy. He ran away as fast as he could, and opened the door to the meeting room. Inside was, well, the meeting room. He took a seat at a chair, and played his flute while waiting for everyone else to arrive. He felt uneasy after his encounter with the though.

---

Earlier That Morning

“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” the small cellular device buzzed filling the darkened room with the uplifting sound of supremacy and oppression, stirring the figure under the mass of mangled blankets. An arm flew out instinctively in an arrow fashion, before grasping the convoluted machine and throwing it through the slim opening in the bedroom door, the sweet sound of “Über alles in der Welt” lasting for a few more seconds before the phone crashed into the tile flooring. Adolfo would have felt sense of joy if he wasn’t dead on the inside, had he not owned a Nokia, therefore the blasted thing refused to die, forcing him out of bed. Sweeping his hair to the side with one hand, the sleepy figure bitterly mumbled, “I should just burn it in an oven or something. Geez.”

Standing to his feet, cold eyes stared down the blackout curtains halfway across the room sending daggers in their wake. Behind those curtains laid a being so gruesome, so wicked, the very mention of its name made Hiltiliar cringe in the deepest corners of his missing soul: sunlight. Its gah forsaken rays of hope did nothing but mock him endlessly, attempting to bleach his hair, as if to make him one of the lesser beings. Needless to say, it would need to go, after modern art of course.

Grabbing the curtains with both hands he pulled the fabric to the side with spite. Squinting through the word which shant be spoken, the man caught is reflection in the glass of the window. “Ironically, we are both in pane,” a sigh escaped thin lips, “Another day, another opportunity to be misunderstood by societal standards and wish I’d never woken up in the first place.”

---

Many Minutes and Excessive Amounts of Eyeliner Later



The announcement resounded through the laboratory, surprisingly loud enough to be heard over both the dwindling screams of the last of the victi experimentees flames being put out, and the sound of My Chemical Romance blasting through Aldolfo’s headphones. Though the science appeared to be flawed, there was no denying the team was on the Reich er right track. Picking up the fire extinguisher (which was really just a giant can of cheap whipped cream), he placed the safety mechanism back on the rack and made his way towards the meeting room. It wasn’t long before he passed the

Personally, he didn’t get what the big deal was, nor cared enough to know either way. Despite all the commotion over it he couldn’t help but believe it was probably just a door with a gas leak or something behind it. How could something like that even be

It’s not like Adam was planning on killing anyone with it. Even Hiltiliar knew that would be inhumane.

Shrugging, he turned up his music and slid into the meeting room like a shadow.