Worms In A Hamster Cage

Chapter One: Dasein

I don't know how we came into existence. Nobody does. I and the rest of the world exist with no memory or knowledge of what came before the awakening. It's like we were simply thrown here. We're all loyal to a cause. We fight for control, but none of us knows why it's like this.

This world we live in is called the Garden. Rather than for cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants, it is a planned space set aside for violence and conquest. Monsters, demons, and game roam the outskirts. The very few sentient beings around here go into factions that are forever at war with one another. There are four of them: the Entities, the Autocrats, the Raincoats, and the Warriors.

The Entities, as the name suggests, are nine-foot-tall, cenobitic, otherworldly beings with purple-white shapely bodies covered in a black dress-shaped substance as hard as concrete with tree-like textures. They wear huge, oddly-shaped headgear and have teeth everywhere in their mouths and holes in their freakishly long tongues. While they rarely attack anyone and normally stand like statues anywhere muttering dark words of power, these things are malicious beyond comprehension. They kill their enemies slowly, molding them like clay and leaving a gruesome sight out of their corpses. The worst thing they can do is alter the reality of things in their perimeter, although I think they rarely do that. They're the least active of the four factions and only have eight members.

The Autocrats are the most hostile faction. They are tyrants in black, wearing CM-7M military gas masks with glowing red eyes and impenetrable armor, whose main goal is to subjugate the Garden. Their precision and accuracy with firearms are unmatched. They're the worst, and hubris and drive propel their allegiance to bring forth unnecessary violence.

The Raincoats are armed civilians, all donning yellow raincoats even when there's no rain. They hide their armor from enemy sight with these. Their troops lack discipline and effective battle tactics, and their strength relies solely on numbers and witless aggression. They are highly territorial and wary of outsiders. One wrong move can provoke the whole group. As of today, they have twenty-three members.

The Warriors, to which I belong, are painted defenders of the land and currently have twenty members. Our uniform consists of a hoodie with or without sleeves (depending on the person), propped with chain mail-like vests, harnesses with strips hanging loose from our limbs; boiled leather bracers and ankle boots; and kneepads. We wear fingerless gloves that kind of resemble worn-out bandages. In armed conflicts, we're the most resilient and stalwart, unflinching even when we're overwhelmed by enemy troops, ready to die but never to lose.

We wear cat-themed makeup and body paint to signify our pride over the unending cycle of rebirth, our wit and flexibility, and our resistance to all forms of injustice and violence enforced by our warlike foes.

While the Warriors have the same function in the Garden as the other factions, what makes us unique is that our culture revolves around the hunting and stalking of dangerous life forms. For that reason, besides our painted bodies, the Autocrats and the Raincoats alike view us as some kind of tribal society in the present day. We are, in a way.

It is part of our culture to attack life forms that can provide us with a challenge, for sportsmanship. We hunt down monsters and demons mainly for sport. We sometimes kill them for food when they don't produce enough offspring, which are our main source of nourishment, to feed the whole group. We don't have to worry about hunting them to extinction, for there's no end to them, anyway.

The Garden has seven vast realms in it, and we're all capable of traveling to any of them by simply pounding this so-called secret button on our chests (the Entities, on the other hand, use their magic), just a step away from our left shoulders. Everything around us will blacken for a few seconds, and then—poof!—we're in a different place. You can say we can teleport.