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

[gentlemanmonster]

"I suppose anyone says that. I certainly didn't think I'd be eating humans. But I'd rather live and not face the very unpleasantness that is starvation." he said, continuing to hold out the heart to her.

"It is better warm." he said, setting it down a few inches away from her before retreating to the corpses, licking his fingers of the blood. "I'd rather keep you as company for these days than make a meal out of you. You're the first I've seen in all this time..."

He looked up at the hole. "I could climb out, but I cannot jump the distance and my abilities are stifled." he moved some of his coat out of the way to show a tight metal collar around his neck.

[filthyandfine]

That was reassuring... Sort of... She stared at the heart, swallowing hard as she tried to come to grips with the idea of eating human flesh...

"stifled?" Her gaze rose to that collar. "What are you, anyway? What are your abilities?"

[gentlemanmonster]

"That's a bit of a loaded question" he sighed "I'll keep it simple. I'm a mage. A magic user of fae magic." he replied, starting to pull apart one of the corpses, keeping as much of it out of her sight as possible. Humans were squeamish.

"As such my abilities with magic are practically limitless. However between the iron in the collar and no doubt the amount of iron in this facility, I'm cut off from the faeries I depend on for more powerful spells, and the collar itself seems to limit my own magic like shapeshifting."

He looked over what he'd pulled from this human. He was sick in life, many of the organs were in poor shape. Over the time he'd been here, he'd learned more about human bodies than he ever thought he might. Every body told a story. Perhaps this man had bargained time here in exchange for a cure for whatever ailed him.

"What of you? Do you have any power?" he asked her

[filthyandfine]

Most humans were squeamish. Kelly had killed a demon by putting her head in a deli slicer, finishing the job with a meat tenderizer. She wasn't squeamish. She just wasn't a cannibal. But he was right that she'd have to do something if she wanted to survive.

Contemplating her options, she reached out and poked the heart, feeling how tough it was.

"No. I've been possessed a few times but nothing stuck around. Faeries, huh? How'd you end up here?"

[gentlemanmonster]

"They wanted someone for the basement. Killed many of them before they took me."

They knew exactly how to subdue him, knew the world of the fae, and without his abilities or a cleansing pool, his body could not morph back to his more humanoid self, so, here he was. There was the possibility that should he escape they could try to retain him again. But there was somethings strange about this place.

People traded things, favors, prison time in exchange for being here. But all had a choice except him in coming here. So was he still meant to break the cycle, or was he a piece of the puzzle and there was something else by someone else's hand that needed to be done?

He ate his fill and finished separating out what she could probably ingest without getting ill.

He went went to the sink and washed his hands and bloody snout as if he grew up in a proper English home before laying down on his cot, well, as best he could, he was obviously too big for it, but he seemed to find a position that worked.

[filthyandfine]

She hadn't chosen this place, either. She'd pissed off the wrong people and ended up there for her efforts. They likely put her in the basement hoping either he'd kill her or she'd die of starvation. Either way, she wouldn't be a problem anymore.

She shook her head "That fucking sucks, man. I'm sorry."

Watching him, she couldn't help but feel sympathy for the strange guy. He really did seem like a nice enough person who was h just forced into an impossible situation. She looked at the heart again, her mind running over new ideas. Ideas that wouldn't work is she was dead. Fuck... She had to.

Swallowing hard, she reached out and picked up the still-warn heart. Maybe if she pushed where it came from out of her mind it would be easier. People ate cow hearts all the time, right? Wasn't that a thing? Okay. So that's what this was. A cow heart. With that image in her mind, she leaned in and took a bite of it. She still had to fight down her gah reflex, but she managed to choke it down.

"You know.... Maybe I could figure out a way to get that collar off."

[gentlemanmonster]

He watched as she examined and then finally bit into the heart. She'd gone from strictly no, she wasn't going to consume human, to doing so.

She was a strange one, but he supposed some humans would do anything to survive, as he did.

He was just about to consider trying to get some sleep when she spoke up.

"Could you?" Hope, a flicker of hope seemed to bloom within him.

Elias got up, coming over to the invisible boundary that separated her half of the room with his. He sat and waited, expecting her to have a look at it now, but not wishing to get closer without permission.

[filthyandfine]

She was a complicated person. And he was right... If she was going to do anything, she'd need her strength. As loathe as she was to resort to cannibalism, she didn't see any other choice.

When he moved closer, she set down the heart, wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her leather coat. He was a scary dude... But he'd given her no reason to think he'd hurt her. And if he was as powerful as he said, maybe helping him could be her ticket out.

She pushed herself to her feet, holding the wall for balance for a moment. But having a goal gave her strength. She crossed the floor to him.

"Yeah. Let me have a look and see how it's locked."

[gentlemanmonster]

Elias dipped his head a bit, even sitting he was taller than she was, and moved some of his fur and feathers away from the collar to show her where it was.

Even if he didn't have his horns, it was pretty much flush against his dark purple skin and couldn't be pulled off. He smelled of nothing, no musk, no stale breath, like a shadow, though his form gave off enough body heat to tell her he was indeed real.

Despite having been here for many years, the collar showed no sign of wear, though upon feeling around it, it was quickly discovered there were a series of numbers upon it. Numbers that rotated.

An eight digit code.

[I figure the code is the day the cycle ends and that in order for it to unlock she has to enter in the date upon the day it does, pretty much a trust exercise that he won't feed upon her for the cycle and she needs to remain alive in order to put the code in. However if you have other ideas lmk!]

[filthyandfine]

[I like it! That's such an awesome idea!]

She wasn't a very tall person, so she appreciated him bending down for her. Though she was still wary of him, she moved close enough to look at the collar. She gently touched it, moving her hands over the smooth surface as she felt for any sort of locking mechanism.

Then her fingers brushed against something rougher. "Hold on, there's something here..." Moving around him, she leaned closer and brushed some of his fur out of the way so she could take a look. "Numbers." Experimentally, she shifted one of them. "It looks like a combination lock. 8 numbers."

[gentlemanmonster]

“A lock?” He said, incredulously.

With a numbered sequence on the collar? Why?

“A puzzle?” He suggested. He was average when it came to puzzles, jigsaw ones especially, a puzzle with a clear path from start to finish. But an eight numbered sequence with no clues?

He hoped she was better at such things...