“Slowly raise your hands,” the terrifying voice ordered from behind me. Unfamiliar with such situations, I foolishly tried to turn around out of habit.
Raised in the gun-free society of Japan, it wasn’t drilled into me to immediately do as told when someone said, “Raise your hands.” Alas, my actions proved all too rash.
Sounding like a beast, the person behind me roared something incomprehensible to the translation collar. He flung me to the ground and was straddling me a second later. He pulled my arms behind me and tied them behind my back. A moment later, my entire body was struck with unbelievably sharp pangs of pain. I cried out in agony.
“Shut your trap!” he snapped sternly. Scared, I fell silent.
Someone was sitting astride my back, putting all his weight on me. If that weren’t bad enough, he was applying pressure with something lumpy, maybe his knees. Damn, that really hurt…! The places I scraped on my cheeks and lips when I was knocked over stung, making it hard to form any coherent sentences.
What was going on? What was this? I was so confused!
“Huh? Isn’t he Class D?” came the surprised voice of a flippant-sounding young man. Something hard (was it the muzzle of a gun?) was pushed firmly against my head, preventing me from looking up to see what the owner of the voice looked like.
“You’re right, that is their uniform. Huh?” the person on my back (a middle-aged man, seemingly) responded. From the sound of it, several people had surrounded me during the course of all this. Their voices flew back and forth over my head for a while. “That’s strange. I didn’t think any Class Ds were sent on this mission.”
“But that’s our uniform. Look, you can see the Foundation logo,” the flippant-sounding man said as he flipped up the collar of my khaki workwear. Apparently, the Foundation’s logo was printed on it somewhere around there.
Seeing that, the man plunked on my back exclaimed in surprise, “Well I’ll be… Wait, I’ll contact the Foundation. It’s possible this Class D is a survivor from another team we weren’t advised about. Likely we aren’t the first to investigate the Carnival of Horrors.”
The Carnival of Horrors…? Yeah, that didn’t inspire confidence.
“Damn! I can’t establish a connection. What the hell is going on? Can either of you get through on your radios?”
“No good here, Sir. Honestly, I don’t see why we don’t just ask him. Push comes to shove, we can shoot the Class D twerp if he does anything suspicious.”
“He might be Class D, but a human life is still a human life. I don’t think we should treat him like a consumable resource. For the record, I can’t get through either, Commander.”
That last voice belonged to a young woman. All of them seemed to be speaking in English, but thanks to my translation collar, I was able to make out what they were saying.
“All right… C’mon, on your feet.”
The weight of the person sitting astride my back let up. I guess the “Commander” climbed off of me. After having him weighing down on my lungs, I couldn’t help but cough as I slowly stood up. Although it was a bit late now, I held my hands up as I rose.
“Huh? Isn’t he just a kid…?” the owner of the flippant voice said, suspiciously furrowing his brow. Apparently, he had been standing right in front of me the whole time. His fuzzy hair was the color of carrots, and freckles speckled his baby-faced features. A Caucasian man, probably in his late twenties. His clothing was something a soldier might wear—he was clearly in the armed forces.
The man was wearing a camouflage jacket and matching pants. His helmet was in a similar print. There was a pouch and handgun strapped to his waist. Some model of machine gun was slung over his shoulder. I wasn’t sure why, but he had leather straps wrapped over his body fitted with countless shells of ammo.
“A lot of Asians look younger than they are,” came the crisp woman’s voice. When I turned to face her, I saw she was a woman in her early twenties wearing essentially the same attire as the man with the flippant voice. She had dark brown skin and dark eyes with a bluish tinge. Her black hair was tightly tied back. I have no idea what they represented, but I noticed heart tattoos on both of her hands peeking out of her jacket. She was keeping a lookout, hiding in the shadows of one of the flower gardens. Though there wasn’t a flower to be seen, there. The mounds of reddish-brown dirt indicated the flowers either withered away or were never planted to begin with, but the planters were scattered throughout the park.
“Nah, he really is just a boy. I can tell by the way he’s acting. I’d say he’s about the same age as my kid back home,” the person referred to as “Commander” said with a groan.
The commander was a brawny giant of a man who came across as overall harsh. His hair and eyes were the color of the desert. A deep crease ran across his brow along with a scar. Clad in military fatigues, with a helmet identical to the other two, he was outfitted pretty similarly at a glance. Yet all of his guns were broken in—they showed the nicks and wear of use. It gave the impression he was no stranger to the battlefield.
These three were the only ones near me, but all of them were overpowering in a way I had never experienced in my peaceful high school life. They gave off dangerous vibes. The air felt heavy.
“Who are you? Are you with the SCP Foundation?” the commander asked on behalf of the unit in a tone that broached no nonsense.
Pathetic as it was, I started trembling as I answered incoherently. I think I stuttered something as shaky as a child first learning to speak. I only managed something along the lines of stringing out my name, Iris’s name, and Dr. Bright’s name… But it had a dramatic effect.
The commander groaned with disgust. “Dr. Bright?”
As if those were the magic words, the tension in the air suddenly dissipated, replaced with apathy. It was as if they thought remaining wary of me was a stupid waste of energy.
“That man’s shenanigans can be a pain in the ass. I bet he deployed a Class D outfitted with observation equipment since he couldn’t participate in the survey. Unauthorized, I’ll wager,” the commander groaned.
“Now that you mention it, I got the feeling he was chomping at the bit to come,” mentioned the flippant man.
“A troublesome ally can be far worse than any foe,” the woman said.
All three spat their baleful comments before turning to me with sympathy in their eyes. And then they said things along the lines of, “You’ve had it rough, haven’t you?”
Huh? What was this all about…? What was so horrible about Dr. Bright? I didn’t know what was going on, but it filled me with foreboding. I got the feeling I should be a little more careful about dealing with that mad scientist, going forward…