When I woke up, the only things I saw were damp yellow walls with a weird pattern attached to it. It felt like the rooms were never ending as they stretched on for endless amounts of time.
Was what I thought when I first got here, it's been three months since I've gotten here and three months since I had last touched grass.
Funny thing is, I sometimes find almond water just scattered around the floor sometimes, it's what keeps me alive and going.
To be completely honest, it isn't really that bad here, there's food, and a safe place to live. Compared to the trial of endurance, this type of place is easy to survive.
But I keep feeling a strange feeling, like I'm losing something every day, or every hour. My brain just seems to deny that this place is bad.
Well, it isn't necessarily bad, I also have a couple hazmat suit buddies, they found me just when I was transported here, which you could guess was pretty lucky.
Their names are Bob and Ryan Smith. Don't ask me why he is named Ryan Smith, I think it is just a super common name, even outside the dream like place, in the real world, I have seen at least thousands of people named Ryan Smith.
Enough about that though.
I am currently in level four, which looks like the office complex that looks like where I used to work. It brings back scary memories.
Besides myself here, there are also a lot of others, others just like me. Who just randomly teleported, or noclipped, they like to say. But I don't get it. Besides myself, there were at least ten other people standing at a wall talking to each other.
Life here was rather similar to life on Earth, except we didn't use cash and we just worked, sometimes.
However, life here was also rather not simple. For example, you find a random book on the ground, pick it up, BOOM, you're in a super safe level, or super dangerous one.
But that is all I know, because of how other people say it. Although, it's not that rare and only happens every century or so.
I remember waking up to the yellow hazmatted people who wandered the first level, they said it was super rare to find someone, especially in that level. So I guess I'm lucky.
But, besides all the good things that had happened to me in this place, there were also bad things, work, and being in an office complex didn't help the thought.
You see, work here was decided by a draw of a stick, it only matters on luck. There were explorers, which mainly focus on exploring the backrooms and venture into new levels, often considered as the most dangerous job because of the fact that a level could kill them in an instant.
There were also scavengers, which scavenged for food and consumables on safe floors, sometimes mediocrely safe ones.
And lastly, there were the guards, which stay in the safe levels and guard different places or worksites where people work. Mainly in level eleven, the infinite city. But I'm not a city person.
But if people could choose, everyone would become a guard.
So in theory, there were the lucky ones, the ok sure, people, and the extremely unlucky ones, being the explorers.
Basically if you draw an explorer stick from the cup, your life is essentially over and you should just die. Seeing as the life to death ratio as an explorer every year was 1:7.
And just my luck, I drew the explorer stick.
And today would be my first job as one.
Which was why I headed to the office complex, as me and my explorermates (I like to call them that) meet up and talk about the game plan.
Today as my first job, we were assigned level 1234 which is quite a satisfying number, which they had just found the entrance rather recently. But luckily, it didn't really seem like a dangerous level as the previous explorer that found it came back alive, and with no traumatic experiences.
So it was a massive score.
To enter it, we just have to find a book in level 0, or the starting point.
Soon enough, my explorermates arrived at the office complex, it consisted of one veteran, and three other newbies including myself.
The veteran especially was quite well known, he was known for surviving dangerous levels and gathering important information.
Nobody knew how he got it, but maybe I could learn something from him. After all, this is going to be my first and last job for the next three months.
"Yo, Merak, are you ready for the job today?" I heard in the distance, it was my teammates, Ryan, Shaheer, and the veteran Ringo, he was by far the best explorer anyone had known. (Second only to Sat*ru G*jo of course)
"Yep, so where is the book that we need to find?" I asked.
I only really knew the details about the mission, not how to locate the book to enter the level.
"The book travels randomly around level zero." Ringo said confidently.
"So, is this going to be a multiple day mission?" I said, but the answer was already quite obvious, level zero was so large, that the whole ocean might not be able to flood it.
"Most likely." Ringo responded.
"I already talked to the others about the mission, are you already filled in?" I heard from Ringo's mouth.
"Yep."
"We will split up and try to contact each other if we find the book." I said, nervously.
"Good idea."
And just like that, the first mission had already started, I didn't know where to begin, so I just made my way to level zero.
As I reached the level zero however, it felt I had just lost something again, something important, but I couldn't understand what.
Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, the mission.