35M3R4LD4: An Asunderland Tale

7H3-V4UL7

35M3R4LD4 began to doze after a few hours of waiting, but she continued to clutch onto her tambourine tightly, afraid that if she let go, she'll never see the only item that has brought her joy again. She awoke with a start when B.B.W0LF3 dragged his club along the bars of the cells in an irritatingly noisy fashion.

"Lock down is going to begin momentarily," he growled, stopping at 35M3R4LD4's cell and glaring at her through the hole he made in the door before he moved on. "No funny business from any of you or it's a trip to see the scientists for ya."

The other patients in her cell block all hunkered down for the next half hour. When the power cut, so did any generated heat, so everyone tended to huddle under their thin blankets to try and keep warm.

But not for 35M3R4LD4 -  she had a mission.

There were shouts that they could hear coming from the floor above as they counted down the seconds until they pulled the power. "Three... two...one!" one worker yelled, and the lights and the sounds of the facility promptly turned off.

Show time.

35M3R4LD4 carefully placed her new instrument on the floor and gripped the still powered-off flashlight firmly in her hand. She felt her way to the door and tried to regain her bearings in the pitch darkness to locate the hole in the door. Good, she might just be able to slip through it. She held unto a bar and slipped her legs through it and eased her body past her hips outside of the cell. When she cleared it, she paused, listening intently to hear if anyone was stirring or if a guard was coming. She really didn't want to be sent off for experimentation is she was caught.

As quietly as possible, she tiptoed out of her cell block and entered a large, empty, concrete hallway. Then, and only then, did she turn on the flashlight. She walked down the hallway silently, her bare feet hardly making a single sound on the concrete flooring. She wasn't sure where to look that would hold some of her old belongings, so she started to open up any door she saw. Every time she would open a new door, her heart would jump into her throat with the thought that someone could be in there, but everyone seemed to have cleared out from that level for the blackout, so she seemed to be safe.

One of the rooms she peaked her head in caught her by surprise. It was full of screens that showed footage from security cameras - cameras and screens that somehow were still in working order and still on despite the blackout. "Odd," 35M3R4LD4 muttered to herself, deciding to step inside and take a closer look. There were a handful of screens, and they seemed to be watching certain patients, but she couldn't tell why. So she began searching the area, sweeping her flashlight around the small room that was basically a glorified broom closet.

"Well, lookie here," she murmured, picking up a top-secret paper with the headline Le Risque Group. "Interesting," said 35M3R4LD4, squinting at the headline curiously. The words Le Risque were French for 'the risk' - and luckily, she was fluent in that language. She looked back up at the monitor. "So these must be the patients who pose a greater risk - the more dangerous ones."

She tried to figure out who was who, but there was some on the monitor she couldn't recognize - probably because they were hidden deeper into the Rabbit Hole than her. That was when she noticed that there were tiny labels next to each monitor, which identified each person shown on the screen. "Imbécile," she scolded herself. "Work smarter, not harder!"

35M3R4LD4 peered at the labels with squinted eyes and whispering the names to herself under her breath. She froze in her tracks when she reached the last one.

Patient #00386

Esmeralda, serial #35M3R4LD4. 

Her. It was her.