The Platform

[sockheart]

The Platform
a Netflix inspired horror meme


There are three types of people:
Those above
Those below
Those who fall

Welcome to the Pit. You may be receiving punishment for your crimes, you may be the victim of a random kidnapping, or perhaps someone simply didn't like you. It's possible you were approached with the promise of a prize if you volunteered to participate in the experiment for a long enough duration. Whatever the case, you wake up in a cell with no doors, unbreakable windows, and a singular massive hole in the center of the floor. It stretches on seemingly endlessly, with floors above and beneath you visible if you twist to the right angle.

Once per day, a platform will be lowered. You and your cellmate will have exactly ten minutes to devour the food upon the platform, and then it will begin to descend again to the floor beneath you. What you have to eat depends entirely on the people above you - there is no fresh meal here unless you're on floor #1. As the platform descends, more and more fingers devastate the limited resources and leave gradually less for the people beneath them. Before the platform is even a third of the way down, all resources are depleted and the lower floors spend their 30 days without sustenance. Most lose their minds, or resort to darker means to survive.

Around nearly midnight, the platform will shoot back up at high speed to begin the cycle again.

➤ Attempting to steal and store food for later will result in the temperature in the room being cranked up to boiling, or dropped down to freezing.
➤ You are given 1 personal object of your choosing, excluding communications devices and firearms.
➤ Every 30 days, you will be assigned a new floor number either higher or lower than your previous floor. This decision is made by someone far above you, and no information is given as to the reason why you may be moving up or down.
➤ There seems to be a mutual agreement among the entire population: those who are above you are considered better than you, they're selfish and greedy. Those beneath you are socially lower than you, and they don't deserve your pity.
➤ Aside from that, there are no rules.

Enjoy your stay.

INSPIRATION OPTIONS

Time Duration

1. Rookie - The first day, week, or month in your cell.
2. Seasoned - The second month, after being shuffled to a drastically different floor.
3. Not my first rodeo - Moved multiple times over several months.
4. Veteran - Six months or greater, maybe even years. You've had many cellmates and watched many come and go.

Situation

1. Feeding Time - the platform is lowered with the scraps of those above you, or maybe nothing edible at all.
2. New Cell Mate - day number 30 rolls around, and you wake up to find yourself in a new place with a new face.
3. Reunited - after separating from your cellmate for 30 days or more, you are paired back up again. Were you above or below each other?
4. Those Who Fall - a plummeting body from someone above, or perhaps you're the one who chose to drop?
5. Loneliness - Maybe you have no roommate, and your only human interaction is to try and speak to the floor above or beneath you.
6. Starvation - thirty days on a lower floor, with nothing but your roommate or an unfortunate falling body.
7. Pulling the Strings - perhaps you're the one in charge, will your guilty conscience make you intervene?

Comments

[cognitivus]

He hums softly at the observation and ensuing question. Not a detective per se, although the two careers weren't terribly dissimilar to one another. The difference being the rules were a lot more fast and loose around what he chose to do, but the security was much more thin. Case and point, the fact that there is no backup, no system, nothing on his side to help him fight against the accusation that landed him here.

He chose loneliness to protect himself, and in the end that was his downfall - quite literally.

All the same, he doesn't correct the title. He only ponders the the answer to the question. Did he?

"No," he answers finally, tiredly. "But it had to be done."

And for those cases he was assigned, he was the only one who could do it. He had an obligation. A need to prevent, to save the ones who might've fallen if he didn't.

He dips his chin and angles his head a little more, enough to properly see Elias and the posture he wore - curiosity winning out over the need to keep himself from slipping in and out of the creature's mind like salmon in a stream.

They're going to be together for a month. He's going to pick things up inevitably.

Politeness and manners at odds with the antisocial traits befitting a person in isolation.

"How long have you been here?"

[gentlemanmonster]

A job he didn't want to do but had to. Somehow that was strange for someone in police work. Customer service? Sure, but solving murders was different than trying to find the perfect pair of shoes.

He stopped eating, contemplating the question.

"I think...three years. Those early months are a bit of a blur...They drugged me a lot. Tried to make me forget my life before this place. Starvation is a bigger forgetfulness drug than any concoction they came up with."

He finished his "rations" and went over to the sink, drinking deeply from the faucet and washing the blood off his hands and face before coming over to Will. Indeed he was tall, almost double the human's height and walked bipedal. He sat down criss-cross, on his side of the room, giving him a respectful amount of space.

[cognitivus]

He blinks his eyes unevenly, one after the other, an owlish and surprised gaze settled more heavily now on the creature that shares his cell. His mind paints a too-vivid picture quickly, slap-dash paint across a canvas streaked in reds and blacks.

There's a new awe in him that wasn't present at the start of this, as though seeing someone for the first time.

They tried to break you and reshape you into a new animal.

A too-familiar story, a pang in his chest. It's always these that get him the worst, not because he knows so acutely what it's like - he knows everything too acutely, even things he's never felt before overwrite his mind and invade his senses so that he experiences them almost firsthand. It's just that the injustice of it feels stronger, pain feels stronger, being used and reforged. It's one of the most precious and sinister horrors.

He sits with one foot on the floor and the rest of him on the bed, right leg curled in, previously pristine clothes now sprayed with blood and his hair in a thoughtless disarray. He sits as though he's forgotten his own body, lithe limbs angling in ways that look uncomfortable, while he leaves himself to float in a new place.

Walking down a hallway of a mind and opening doors. It's unwise.

He's learned recently that he, himself, is unwise. Might as well continue the trend, it's not like there's a worse place he could wind up.

"Where were you before? What were you before?"

[gentlemanmonster]

"Before..."

He stares up at the hole in the ceiling a moment.

"I lived in the countryside, few hours outside London. I lived in a cottage with a garden. I was a mage, a magician of fae magic. I could disguise myself to look like a human, and thus able to help the locals with medicines and antidotes for their ailments, from the extreme, to the seasonal.."

He reached up to his neck and moved fur and feathers aside to reveal a metal collar tight to his dark purple scaly skin.

"Iron with reinforced titanium. Fae cannot answer my call, nor can I use their magic, nor my own. And its beyond my strength to break." he looked around the room. "Probably iron in the walls too."

He turned his gaze back to the hole. "I miss the sun."

[cognitivus]

Will is no stranger to heartbreak. He feels it often when he looks at the wrong person, when he trips and falls into someone else's pain, when he immerses himself into the crime scene caused by a loved one. It's an achingly familiar chord strummed across the strings of his chest, and it resonates now through him.

He sees sun streaming onto a field with wildflowers. He sees comfortable mornings and the satisfaction of healing.

The heart forgotten, he pushes himself to his feet again to carefully pace toward Elias. Fingers reach out, then tentatively pause some inches away so he can ask, "May I?"

Look at the collar.

[gentlemanmonster]

Elias tenses as Will approaches him. His mouth opens slightly, ready to snap at him. He could easily rip him apart, bite off his fingers and snap his neck...

No one here got this close to him without trying to hurt him.

But the question is simple.

Its a long minute before Elias's shoulders relax and his mouth closes.

Sitting, he is eye level with Will and his red unblinking gaze looks in the human's face for signs of deceiving lies.

He wouldn't hurt him.

"Yes" he finally says.

The collar is heavy solid metal, but there are markings on it...a strange set of numbers. It was a numeral lock, with each digit able to spin.

[cognitivus]

Will has something of a duplicitous relationship with intimacy. For most of his life he avoided it, because getting lost in another person means more when you have an empathy disorder like his. It means there are no one night stands in the most distant sense of the word, and before he could control himself there were times he couldn't even get over the hurdle of the flaws and mental defects of the person he was with. In many ways, Hannibal introduced him to a different type of intimacy, and since burying himself into the loving mind of broken bones and artistically re-framed corpses, all other intimate acts seem... small. Easy.

Even with monsters.

(Although, he's starting to rethink the definition of that word and whether or not what he associates it with even applies to the creature before him.)

He waits patiently, still and calm and willing to accept a no.

He's silent at his yes, too, but there's a tenderness to his posture and his touch that acknowledges the hesitance and corresponding trust granted to him. He won't break it.

He curls his fingers softly around the metal and, by extension, the fur or feathers beneath it, gently sliding his knuckles underneath. He thumbs at the numbers, lightly testing their mobility without committing to actually changing it in any way.

His brow furrows.

"Have you seen it up close? Seen the numbers, tried to solve them?"

[gentlemanmonster]

Elias doesn't smell of death despite the countless bodies that have ended up down here, in fact he doesn't smell like anything, maybe the faint scent of the water he'd been guzzling before but that is all.

He remained still as Will examines the collar, but his head jerked a little at the statement and a red eye focused on him.

"Numbers?"

Clearly not.

He slowly lifts a hand and runs a claw as long as one of Will's fingers over the tumbler, which wrapped around half of the collar, eight digits.

He always thought it was just a texture on the metal.

But even if he had known, he was never good at puzzles...

[cognitivus]

He hums his soft assent.

"Eight digits," murmured with an air of distraction as his mind's already running through possibilities of the combination. It's less about code for him, and more about trying to understand the psychology behind the entity that put it there.

He falters, then instead of curling his fingers around the collar he slips them underneath it, palming flat against Elias with the metal against his knuckles.

"This isn't going to make any sense, but can you just- not talk or move for a few minutes so I can- I need to think."

Which... comes out a bit rude and a little abrasive, but that just tends to happen right before he does what he wants to do.

[gentlemanmonster]

"Not move or...Yes." he said, then went silent, keeping as still as he possibly can, though the other touching him is very distracting. He wants to pull away, but resists.

Trust.

He does as he's asked.

Could...he maybe free him?

Why would they put someone in here with him who could do such a thing? Why put a collar on him that he clearly could never figure out?

Trust...

TRUST.

The human had to trust that he'd not eat him, and he'd have to trust the human not to hurt him!

But they'd know he'd be fed well enough at the beginning of the month not to turn to his roommate for food...

Eight numbers.

What had eight numbers?

Not the level he was on, there couldn't possibly be over a million floors here.

How many people he'd eaten? Even after three years he certainly had not eaten that amount of people or even parts for that matter.

Maybe it was a number in Will's life?...

[How about its the last day of the month they're in (00/00/0000), but it only opens on that day, so Will has to live until then?]

[cognitivus]

The answer is met with silence.

He closes his eyes. Breathes deeply, a rhythmic in and out. He wills himself to drift, to leave himself. Behind his eyelids, he windshield-wipers away the cell, the bodies, the heart on his pillow, the smell of blood, the taste of the air. He pans around himself as though third person, a perfect circle, bare feet on a stone floor except he's not moving, and the feet have boots that thud with confidence.

He doesn't know how much of this comes out of his mouth and how much stays in his head. He's gone. Here, but months and months and years ago.

I place a collar on a beast I have no empathy for. What it is doesn't matter, who it was doesn't matter. I don't see a person. Nothing in this place is a person to me anymore. The things that are here are here because they deserve to be. I am not myself, but rather I'm a token of the system. I am small, but I'm a piece of something larger. It's larger than the lives that are lost here, and it's larger than the creature I bind to this place. It will live in the dark, it will feast on the dead, and it will do it because it is the simplest solution to an inconvenient problem. It is a wheel that will continue to turn itself as the cycle continues.

A perfect solution. A perfect cog.

I don't care who it was. I don't care who it feasts on. I only care about the system, and ensuring everything is in place for it. All things have a place, a designated purpose, even the collar on its neck. The key that opens it has a purpose too, a message, a place in this system.

And so does the pawn we pair it with. I set the date-

His eyes snap open. His hand peels away, and he paces quickly toward the wall demanding, "What day is it? I need-"

Because of course Elias won't know, three years is far too long to keep up with a Gregorian calendar, the sense of time is far too skewed and there are no markings on the walls to indicate that he'd been scribbling.

They're allowed one personal item. He'd chosen the box that stores what he uses to make lures. He dips to tug it out from beneath the bed, and from it pulls a metal hook to use, scratching upon the wall.

He was admitted at the start of the cycle the last time, July 20. Thirty days, 31 days in July-

[gentlemanmonster]

Elias heard every word of what Will said.

It was eerie how accurate it was. How well Will described what those who put him here thought of him.

Its...very unsettling, but he keeps still, and silent, trusting.

This was an odd human, he'd let him solve the odd puzzle in his odd way.

His sudden departure is pretty jarring.

"What day? Its the first day..." he says simply, but he's looking for an exact date, to which he does not know. "The cycle changes every thirty days..." he said, then went silent, he'd forgotten not to talk...

A date? Eight numbers was a date.

Which date though??

[cognitivus]

It's alright that he talks now, the time for silence has passed it's just that Will is too caught up to tell him so. He's busy scrawling things out in light-gray with the slowly dulling point of a hook he has to hold at a precarious angle in his fingers to write with - like chalk upon a chalkboard.

The bodies behind him sit in chairs in long rows of desks. He is in his classroom, and there is a Wendigo in the center of it with curving horns and a skinless face. As it speaks, all dead eyes and crushed skulls turn to it in tandem to pay attention to the question, and then look to Will for the answer.

In this fantasy he wears his glasses, and his lecture is calm.

"The key is a date, but what matters is which date they believe to be the most significant. There's always today-" He says, and in a neat list he writes 07/20/2014. Beside it, 20/07/2014, "Because we can't assume the standard American date formatting given the sheer scale of this operation. That might be too easy, so we can think- the day the collar was put on, which is a harder conclusion to draw- three years of 30 day cycles-"

And the fastest scrawling of a mockup of 36 calendars in sloppy grids, thirty days marked off in segments backwards from today- he writes that date, in standard and global format as well.

"And then of course there's the very end of the cycle, the symbolism for when it completes which is-"

He pauses.

Falters.

Scrawls that date, but his concern is about the subconscious and utterly inexplicable conclusion that it's the end. The designated endpoint. A pre-determined stopping place for the creature at the bottom of the prison, and what exactly they mean to happen to him - to the prison as a whole once that date is up.

His hand slowly drops.

"I think that's it," He says, turning slowly to face the class and only mildly surprised to see instead only a cell, and just the one singular entity sitting upright in it.

[gentlemanmonster]

Elias tries to keep up, thinking over each date Will mentions, as well as those in his own past that might be significant.

But then he comes to the end.

The end of the cycle. Thirty days...

Sometime mid August...The nineteenth? No, today counted as one.

"August eighteenth?" he came over to Will, bowing his head to show the collar, "Put the date in, let's try it!" he said.

He could get out of here...They could get out of here...

He'd go to the top. Level 0. And kill them all.

Then he could go home!

[cognitivus]

"It won't work," He breathes, another thing he just instinctively knows without having analyzed how he knows it yet. It's because there's something significant here - it's because they wouldn't be so sloppy as to allow the cycle to be broken early, and it's because there's something bigger, some other... motivating factor that he hasn't figured out yet.

His fingers curve around the collar, and they input the year.

And they input the month.

And the 1, but the second digit of the day locks up. There's a quiet pause, a flickering lament, and a cracking sort of apology in an otherwise dull voice, "It won't go past 17."

Why, why, why make it so that it can't be twisted, unless-

His eyes flicker to the pillowcase, red stains bleeding through, sitting atop his bed.

The last piece of the puzzle clicks into place with all the force of a turning deadbolt.

Oh.

And the sound that bubbles out his throat is the most choked, venomous, bitter laughter. Ironic and dark and self-defeating and angry.

He understands.

[gentlemanmonster]

Why not? Elias doesn't ask, he waits for him to try anyway. He could tell him he told him so after.

"It doesn't?"

The laugh has him draw back enough to look at Will, "What? What is amusing?" he asked, feeling the collar himself, though only succeeded in jumbling the numbers again.

"We got the date wrong?"

Maybe it was a holiday in between now and then?

July and August. There weren't any holidays he knew of...

Why stop at seventeen?

"Will?"

[cognitivus]

Oh, but it's masterful. It's truly, truly a masterpiece. Checkmate, he thinks, with no way around it. No solve, no other solution, just this.

He reels away, chin tipped to the ceiling, laughter shaking his shoulders - a sound that's fraying at the edges, a sound that trills almost more like sobbing save for the bitter, bitter smile curled at his lips. He passes his hand over them, squeezes his bottom lip too hard.

Curls those fingers into a gentle fist.

"It won't turn until that day. Until the 30th day," He explains, when he can find his voice again. Laughter dissolves, stagnates, decays. Goes fragmented, and begins to crack. "And so... to set free the shackled beast, I have to stay alive. And to stay alive..."

His eyes fall onto the heart.

"I have to eat."

And at the bottom of this pit, at this lowest level of hell to which he has been cast, there is only one thing to eat in order to ascend again. Elias is the lynch pin that keeps him from simply dying with his selfish pride and moral conviction. If he dies, he dies selfishly.

[gentlemanmonster]

Its unfair.

That's all he can think.

Its unfair.

But not for him.

For Will.

He was fine eating humans.

But Will shouldn't have to if they solved it all...

Thirty days. A human could live that long on water alone.

But he knew what starvation did someone.

He would have to eat as he had been for the past three years.

"Once a week. That's all you need." he said quietly, then looked to the pile of bodies, then up to the hole in the ceiling. he could hear it. The platform was moving. It would reach the bottom in the next hour. But there would not be anything on it except empty plates picked clean.

[cognitivus]

He doesn't respond to the quiet optimism. He only slinks slowly back toward his side of the cell, and lowers himself onto the bed. His back presses against the wall, and he stares with great apathy at the hole above them.

One a week.

It isn't so much that he has to do it at all, it's... it's the message, the symbolism. There are so many layers to this, so many artfully intricate messages built into every aspect of it that he can't help a bone-weary sense of defeat.

As though prison weren't enough, as though eventual death in here weren't enough, it has to be with the cutting grace and elegance of absolute victory.

Elias's cellmate goes quiet, and becomes a withdrawn nonentity long after the platform of broken glass descends and glides back up again. He sits for hours, staring at nothing, a heart on his pillow.

[gentlemanmonster]

Elias doesn't bother him, instead he looks over the platform for anything. A single morsel for Will.

Nothing. Not a bone. Not a crumb. Its all licked clean and broken.

It rises and disappears above them, and he goes back to the bodies, to separate the parts for Will so that when he feels the need to eat, he doesn't have to do it himself. Ribs, thighs, breast meat...he puts the stuff for him into one sheet, the stuff for Will into his own pillowcase and sets it aside.

Then, the light turns red.

Sleeping hours.

The room goes a bit cold without the lights. Elias comes over to Will, bumping his snout against his temple ever so lightly. "Sleep beside me. You'll conserve body heat, and thus your energy." he said. He was a mass of fur and feathers, better than any blanket.

[cognitivus]

The bump of snout is what ultimately drags him back into reality. He'd gone somewhere in his mind; waded out to a slow-running river, a rod in is hand and sunlight streaming onto his face. Lost as he'd been, he'd almost captured the essence of being warm.

But being warm in his mind won't help his frigid body, and as his tired eyes flicker over Elias he searches himself for any fear or reluctance. He finds none. Only fatigue that runs to the very core of him.

He's spent more than one night sleeping on his living room floor among a pile of dogs. That isn't to compare his cellmate with an animal, but in terms of finding comfort in a mass of fur, he's more at home there than most might be.

Slowly he shifts, fabric of his uniform sliding over the sheets, and he stands to pull his mattress off of the bed and onto the floor. They won't both fit on one, and a mattress beneath his back will help insulate as well. He builds a nest upon the floor with his case-less pillow and his thin blanket, then carefully lowers himself down to seated, waiting to see how Elias arranges his larger mass.

As he waits, he hesitantly warns, "I sweat. In my sleep, I sweat if things are bad."

...Profusely, a drenching amount if the nightmares are particularly unpleasant.

[gentlemanmonster]

"I imagine before the thirty days are up you will smell either way, but thank you for the warning." he said, some amusement in his voice, adding his own mattress to the floor, along with his remaining pillow and blanket, the nest as big and comfortable as its going to get.

He lays down, curled up around Will, needing to lay on his stomach due to his horns, but being big enough, they make it work.

"What was your home like?" he asked after a few moments. He'd told of his cottage in the countryside. But what of this man? Where did he come from?

[cognitivus]

He lays upon his back beneath the blankets beside this creature nearly twice his height, hands folded across his stomach and body gone soft despite how undeniably absurd the entire situation is. A normal, healthy individual would have been frightened of Elias upon first sight. That normal individual would have been doubly repulsed by the sight of him eating human flesh, or the fact that those humans plummeted to the ground before them in the first place.

It's a testament to his life and career choices that all of these things are far from the worst versions of themselves that he's ever experienced.

As a matter of fact, compared to his life six weeks ago, being here half-spooned by a horned skull-faced something almost feels comparably secure.

Not for the first time, he has to acknowledge that he is... he is something a hair to the left of human now, surely. Something else.

He stares up at the ceiling, leeching radiating heat from Elias like a parasite, and thinks of home.

"Before..." This prison, and the prison that came before it - he doesn't say these things. "Before, I lived in a farmhouse. In the woods, miles from anything, with six dogs."

It feels like telling a story, a fairy tale painted in simple words and short sentences. The simplicity of it all is nostalgic now, wistful and ethereal. Another plane of existence. "Farmland in Virginia, where I thought it was safe."

But as it turns out, safety isn't a place but rather a series of decisions.

[gentlemanmonster]

"Cottage in England. Farmhouse in Virginia. Miles away from others. So similar." he sighed

Maybe that was why they'd been paired up.

So different. A world of science, a world of magic. Collide in order to survive.

Their personal lives are not all that much different. Both seem to enjoy isolation as well.

"Dogs are noisy, but they are better than cats I think. Cats live nine lives. And they get smarter with each one. Annoying little bastards really." he mused.

He rested his bony head down. "When we get out, I'd like to see your farmhouse if you'd let me."

Not 'if'. When.

[cognitivus]

There are, he acknowledges, some distinct similarities in their lifestyle choice. He wonders if it isn't for the same reasons - because existing directly in integrated society is difficult, because it's exhausting to constantly be on your guard with people who think you're something worse than you are. Because it's the natural inclination for some people to pick their nails into people like them, digging into their strangeness like peeling off a scab, trying to see what's underneath.

He hums tiredly, and concedes, "Alright. But only because you don't like cats."

Little known fact, cats are a liquid. If you don't believe him, try closing the door on one while it's passing through the doorway.

Despite the agreement, he doesn't truly believe he's ever getting out of here. Strangely, he'd bet Elias would escape before he ever could.

(And even if he did get out, there is no such thing as truly escaping his predator.)

He drifts
tentatively
to sleep.