Chapter Text
The crackling of the fire woke him from unconsciousness. Issac looked around to find himself in a completely different set of surroundings. The forest was dense on all sides of him. When peering into them, it was an infinite void of darkness and branches. The only wildlife he could see were crows stationed in the trees, watching him.
Beside the fire, sat a handful of people who didn’t immediately notice him. None of this was making sense in his foggy mind. He patted down his uniform to find nothing he normally had. No plasma cutter or med packs were available, and his stasis and kinesis abilities were not functioning. He was stripped of everything. He reached for his helmet, which was securely fastened to his head, but the power was dead, and with it went all information about his health.
I think he’s awake, guys.” A woman's voice, soft-spoken. He looked in the direction it came from and saw a dark-skinned woman with glasses. She looked at him with a faint smile and compassionate eyes.
Issac sat up and quickly scanned the group. There were six people seated around a fire. He was about two feet from it, lying on the ground. Some looked at him, some didn’t, and all looked dirty, battered, and bruised.
“Where am I?” His voice was rough; it felt like he had been screaming for hours. But what happened before this? The last thing he remembered was Kendra leaving him for dead on Aegus VII. He was fighting, and he doesn’t remember much after that. A fog took over his mind, covering those memories in thick black smoke.
The woman’s smile faded, and she looked to the group for reassurance. When no one stepped forward, she answered his question. “You’re in the fog.”
“What does that mean? Am I back on earth? Is this a different planet?” Issac looked to the group for answers, but most of them ignored him. He decided he was tired of this game. He stood with a groan and walked over. “Engineer Issac Clark, I was answering a distress call from the USG Ishimura. My crew and I experienced some… disturbances. We were in the middle of escaping when I woke up here.” He spoke with authority, staring down the rag-tag group. One of them perked up.
“You’re an engineer too. I don’t recognize the ship you're talking about. You’re not from my universe.” A young brown man spoke, looking up from the fire.
“Your universe?” Isaac questioned. The more information he got, the less he understood.
“I don’t have the energy to do this again.” A young redhead fashioning twin braids said, shaking her head and poking the embers with a stick. She didn’t look up at him.
“I’ve got it.” A curly-haired woman looked at him and stood. “Take a seat, Issac.” She seemed to have some authority among the group.
“I’m fine where I’m at.”
“Suit yourself.” She shrugged. “I’m Elodie. I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’re the newest victim of the Entity.” She sat back down on the ground and leaned against a log. She crossed her legs and folded her arms, waiting for a barrage of questions.
“Who’s the Entity?”
“Think of it like a God. We don’t know its name or what it is. We do know that it controls this place. It’s like a separate dimension outside of where we all come from. It takes you and brings you here.” Her explanation sounded rehearsed, like she’d done this dozens of times. Issac felt his stomach lurch.
“Why? What does it want?”
“You’re pain and suffering. We think it feeds off of it.”
“How do we escape?”
“We don’t.” Another woman answered. Her brunette hair was cut into a bob.
“Get comfortable.” The blonde man sitting next to her said. He was leaning against a different log but seemed more at ease than Elodie. Issac looked around the group, dumbfounded by the admissions. Everyone was stolen and dumped in a giant forest to feed an unseen nightmare god. He might prefer the necromorphs.
“None of this is making any sense.” He started to pace. It helped him think. He was resourceful. He would be able to figure out how to get out of this place; he just needed time.
The first woman to speak to him was standing near him now, and she placed a hand on his shoulder. “It’s going to take time to process this. Why don’t you sit down and try to relax? We can get you some water.” She offered, knowing full well that he would probably deny both.
“No, you don’t understand. I have people counting on me. Whole planets are at stake if I don’t get back.” He was looking around now, trying to see if there was any end to the forest. That’s when he noticed several other groups of fires. They were varying distances from the one he was at. All filled with people looking tired and defeated. It was starting to sink in now. If escape were possible, someone would have figured it out by now. If this thing could keep dozens of people trapped indefinitely, then who was he to think he could escape so easily? It wouldn’t stop him from trying, though. He was snapped out of his panicked thoughts by a question.
“We had people counting on us, too.” It was the woman with the bob. She looked at him sullenly. “What was your world-ending event?”
Issac paused, trying to find the right set of words to describe what he had witnessed. Nothing seemed to fit the horrors correctly. “My crew had boarded a planet-cracking vessel. We were answering their distress call. What was inside was something I have a hard time explaining. The corpses of the crew were reanimated. Most of us didn’t survive the initial attack.”
“Zombies?” She raised one eyebrow, and Issac shook his head like it was a silly question.
“No, necromorphs.”
“What the hell are those?” The redhead asked, her interest being piqued again.
“I’m not entirely sure. What I do know is that they are corpses infected with an extraterrestrial infection. It transforms their bodies into killing machines. The Ishimura was infested with them. I barely made it out with my life.” He let himself think of his friends for just a minute. What they turned into. How they suffered before they died. It put a hole in his heart that he wasn’t sure would ever fill back up. The group was silent, imagining what the creatures might look like.
“That sounds worse than what we got.” The blonde man said, turning to his companion sitting next to him. She nodded in mild horror.
“Does that mean?” The dark-skinned woman asked, covering her mouth in horror.
“It might not. A new person doesn’t always mean a new killer.” Elodie said, swooping her hands in an X motion.
“Killer?”
“The Entity feeds off of our emotions. It seems to thrive on negative emotions, so what better way to induce an excess of them than to put us in life-or-death situations? Four people against one killer. Survive or be sacrificed.” Her tone was deadly serious, her expression of anxious resolve.
“We could be dealing with a new killer?” The bob asked.
“Maybe, we can’t be sure yet. Jill, will you gather everyone for a meeting?” Elodie asked the bob-haired woman. She nodded curtly and stood, walking off towards the other people.
“Issac, we need to know everything you know about these things.” The rest of the group looked at each other with varying degrees of anxiety. Issac was starting to put two and two together.
“They could be here?” His blood ran cold. Without his plasma cutter, he was defenseless.
“Just one. The entity very rarely brings more than one killer into each game. I doubt this is an exception.
“Even one would slater us all.”
“There are rules here. It can’t just come and kill everyone. It’s contained to each game, and when it’s over, it’s sent wherever the killers go.”
“How do we fight them?”
“We don’t.” The rest of the people were gathered around. Roughly fifty people stood at attention, looking between Issac and Elodie. “I’m sorry, everyone, I know you’re resting, but this is important. We might have a new killer. Has anyone experienced anything new?” The murmurs all concluded that no one had seen anything new. Elodie put her hands on her hips and sighed heavily. “Okay, we’ve yet to find out. Issac is, for lack of a better term, our newest member. He comes from a universe where there are man-eating mutated corpses.”
“They’re not cannibalistic.” The group looked at him with confusion. “Their goal is to spread the infection. They rip you apart, and the virus takes over and transforms you. It can take a planet in a matter of hours.” Issac recalled how quickly his friends turned when attacked.
“Great, world-ending virus monsters were exactly what we all needed.” The person who retorted was a young Asian woman dressed in once nice clothing.
“We’re not even sure if they came with him.” Elodie tried to regain the conversation.
“Of course, they came with him. They are the perfect monster. How could the entity pass that up?” A different Asian woman spoke this time. She was dressed much more casually, her thick black hair pulled into a bun. The whispers of the group grew louder, and the tensions rose with the volume.
“What matters now is that we are prepared for what we might see. Issac is going to explain how these things work. It will increase our chances of escape.” Elodie looked to Issac, and before she could say anything else, he felt a tingling throughout his body.
“Damn, I guess I’m going in this time.” The blonde man from earlier grimaced.
“You’ll be fine, Leon, you were fine last time,” Jill said, grabbing his shoulder in reassurance.
“One of these days, my luck will run out.” He looked towards Issac, who seemed confused. “You feel it too?”
“Yeah. What the fuck is that?”
“It means you and I are heading into the next game. Grab that toolbox over there before we run out of time.” He pointed to a rusted metal box a short distance from the group. Issac grabbed it, reassured to have his hands on some tools. It was something familiar in a scary situation. “Who else?” Leon asked loudly. A woman with red curly hair and glasses raised her hand, then a large man with a dark undercut followed after.
Leon sighed, beginning to stretch his limbs. “We might make it out of this. Issac follow my lead and try not to die.” Before Issac could ask a follow-up, he was enveloped in a black fog once again.