Chetter adjusted the cloak that sat on his shoulders.

  The cloak was too big for him, and the scratchy material was making his neck itch. He never got used to the feel of the material against his flesh. The weight of it seemed to pull him down and make his body ache. Or perhaps that was his duties doing so.

  He let the lid of the wooden chest close quietly. There was some sort of red liquid on the edge of the box, and he used a rag to wipe it up. He was sure it was blood, but he never let himself think too long about that. He knew doing this was risky as the cloak’s magical weave wouldn’t mask the rag like it did the rest of him, but he didn’t care.

  Chetter took pride in his work even though he wasn’t fully aware of what that concept even meant. He was one of many that did this work, but he knew the others didn’t take the time to go that extra mile.

  He also knew that by doing so he was always hugging the bottom of the quota board. His chief was always there to remind him in case Chetter ever forgot this.

  He stood up slowly allowing himself to stretch as close to his full height as the corridor would allow. Chetter was a very tall, long-limbed creature with a thin, spindly body. He had to hunch over in the large hallway, and he took up more space than seemed reasonable.

  His legs and arms were so thin they gave him an almost spider look. His joints bent in ways that made his limbs fold in on themselves and this allowed him to move within the game halls with speed and agility.

  It also helped him to stay hidden, which was paramount for his line of work. He rubbed his temples with his long fingers and closed his eyes, all four of them.

  It was a rare feeling to have all of his eyes closed at once but there was an exhaustion to him today that he couldn’t shake. Usually, he left at least one pair of eyes open as was typical of his paranoid race of people.

  His people.

  Did he have a people?

  He wasn’t so sure he knew the answer to that question but still, the thought was hard to shake. He pushed this aside and pulled his map out to look at his route. The map was made of what looked like old stint’lack leather that had been used over and over again for this purpose.

  Ink stained and dirty, it had seen many years of use. He squinted, none of his eyes being as good as they used to be. The lines on the map were crisp and clean and looked artificial on the surface of the leather.

  The maze-like pattern of corridors showed him the surrounding area with Chetter in the center. He pressed his fingers close together on the surface and as he spread them out the image zoomed in. Along the edges were dots and symbols that seemed to be moving on the surface.

  He ignored these as he considered where to move to next. He spotted the area the chest was located a quarter of a mile away. With barely a visible twitch of one of his eyebrows an icon appeared.

  He closed the map. It felt like his shift had gone on longer than usual. Or maybe he was just tired. That exhaustion was clinging to him, seeping into the fine hairs that covered his body.

  Faintly a part of him contemplated what it even meant for his shift to have a time limit. He adjusted his cloak again out of habit.

  You’ve got to focus on what you are doing. Your mind is always wondering.

  Sounds began to echo their way towards him down the long, stone corridor. This section was part of a branching system of tunnels and rooms that were designed to be difficult to navigate.

  Though the sounds were quiet and distant, Chetter knew exactly what they were. He’d seen hints of it on the map while he had it out, expressed by the moving dots and icons on the edges.

  Fighting.

  There was always fighting. A slight ‘ting’ of metal on metal here, a muffled grunt of pain there. It sounded like someone trying to force too many pieces of hellkissed iron into a pile of blankets.

  He never got used to it. The sounds, the smells, the wetness of it all. There were those who worked as he did that seemed to love it – even to long for it. But to Chetter it just felt so dirty. So… beneath him.

  These types of thoughts felt like someone else when they came. They felt like something he would hear the others talk aloud about. Those that didn’t realize he was there doing the work he was conscribed to do.

  Those that fought.

  Lately these intrusive thoughts seemed to plague him and a big part of him wished they would leave, never to return. But a smaller part was also curious - which was a new feeling for him. Regardless, the thoughts didn’t pay the bills. Well, neither did the work.

  He sighed. He had spent too much time listening in on the others. Their weird expressions were infecting his vernacular.

  One more chest and I can go rest.

  He looked down the hall he needed to make his way toward. His eyes glossed over, and a beacon blinked into existence. The bright blue light sparkled around the edges, but didn’t seem to affect the world around it. It created no shadows and left dark corners untouched.

  Despite the light being artificial he swore he could feel a slight heat coming from it. It blinked twice, slowly, before shooting off down the corridor. It left a slight tracer of light behind that seemed to stall in the air before evaporating.

  He quickly clamored down the hall after it. Despite his overall size, he moved without a sound. Some of this was his physiology and some of it was the items he wore that enhanced these abilities. He made sure not to disturb the dust and the mildew and the cobwebs as he maneuvered down the stone corridors.

  While the others likely wouldn’t notice if he had, he felt it was part of his job to keep his movements undetected. The sounds of fighting faded, but he never trusted those silences.

  He picked his way through the thin halls as he followed the beacon. He knew no one else would be able to see the light, but he was still cautious. He constantly pulled out his map, looking for dots or icons or hints of others in the area. Based on the condition of the halls it didn’t appear that anyone had been through here yet.

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  Whereever the fighting was coming from, it hadn't reached there, yet.

  Whoever had used the last chest must have gone back the way they had come. That, or they had gone down the other remaining branch nearby. The space smelled stale and bland, but to Chetter this was pleasant.

  While it was a distant memory, the aroma felt familiar, and was preferred to the stench of combat. He had a sense of longing centered in the back of his mind, but it didn’t catch hold. The thought was curious nonetheless.

  More mysteries for later.

  He saw the chest on the map in front of him and became more cautious. While it wasn’t likely there was anyone else about, it wasn’t impossible. Very, very improbable but not impossible.

  He scrutinized the map and the spaces around him for any signs of disturbances. He was sure if any of his co-workers could see him now, they would laugh at his paranoia.

  “Chetter, you need to lighten up!” His friend would say. “You take this so seriously and there isn’t any reason too. Fill the chests, clean the area, change the locks and come back.”

  Stratus, his comrade, was much calmer about all of this. He was the type to never ask too many questions and to just be happy to be alive, no matter what the conditions.

  Chetter did not share that brand of optimism, but he did seem to ‘lighten up’ when he was around his smiling friend. Another phrase he had gleaned from these others he so feared.

  He closed his top eyes to let his bottom eyes focus. They squinted as he concentrated. With a slow exhaling of breath, he whispered words he had spoken dozens of times. They didn’t make any kind of sense to him. They weren’t in a language anyone seemed to generally speak.

  The words still did the job, and when he completed them a pulse shot out from his body. It left the center of him, moving out in a sphere with his body as the epicenter.

  The only signs the pulse existed were a slight shifting of the space on the edges of the spell. There was no sound to it, but Chetter still felt he could hear a soft ‘whump’ as the magic left his body to move away from him in all directions.

  Magic.

  Another word he was sure came from the others. Another thing he was sure was not something he had experienced before this… place. But he could not pinpoint how he knew this, only that it was true.

  The spell moved quickly, and as it did Chetter pulled his map out again. The incantation should tell him if anything biological was nearby - hidden or not - and it would then create a dot on the map for him.

  The spell would go out in all directions about 20 yards before disappearing. It was a common discovery spell that everyone in his job knew. It was also one that would not likely be countered or detected. Yet another layer of safety to help keep him, and his kind, safe.

  The spell reached its end and the map remained free of dots. He felt no ping of contact, telling him there was something other than himself in the hallways, or rooms, near the chest. The chest itself was only 20 feet away, but was hidden in a recess in the wall.

  He moved slowly towards it and pressed a small button hidden in a crevice. With a shift in the stonework a small alcove was revealed and the chest slid forward as if on wheels.

  Air rushed out of him as he spoke words that were similar to the spell he had just released, but contained a few changes. This version would tell him if there were any traps nearby. Again it returned with nothing. With a slight sigh he walked towards the chest and opened the lid.

  He froze.

  At first he thought he was having another one of his episodes, as Stratus called them. From time-to-time Chetter would become stuck or frozen while his mind was overwhelmed with a day dream or vision or something that always left him confused.

  He had a distinct feeling of experiencing the episode, but when he regained the ability to move he never seemed to fully remember any of what he had seen – only that he had seen something. Been shown something.

  These episodes seemed to bother his co-workers more than they did him, and they seemed to be happening more frequently as the session wore on. He never witnessed anyone else having episodes like he did and it worried him.

  But this, Chetter quickly realized, was not one of those times.

  Something was deeply, deeply wrong. He couldn’t move. His entire body seemed to have shut down. The only thing he could move were his eyes - and only slightly.

  He mentally flailed against whatever had him stuck, though nothing was helping. The panic started to rise, and this caused his eyes to water. He heard a sound behind him, a scuffing sound of boots on stone.

  “I can’t believe you were right,” a voice said.

  The words came slowly as Chetter’s neural translator labored to make the words recognizable. He was used to the delay, but the panic inside him made the words sound slower than usual.

  “I told you! I knew there had to be something filling these chests up,” someone else said.

  Both were males, or what these others considered males. The first creature that spoke had a high-pitched voice that almost hurt Chetter’s ears, but the second voice was much lower and softer.

  “Now let’s see what this thing has on him.”

  Chetter’s distress rose further. There was always danger doing this job. There was always a risk that something would happen to him and to others like him. It just came with the duty.

  He just never thought it would happen to him. He was so careful, so quiet, so paranoid. Despite being paralyzed he felt a chill cover his body.

  One aspect of his job was that he had a failsafe that he was supposed to deploy that would render the things he had on him useless to anyone else. Most of his gear was covered with some sort of protective layering that made it only activate for him.

  His cloak, for instance, would just be a piece of coarse fabric to most anyone else outside of someone trained in very specific skills. His accessory bag, however, did not have one of those layers which meant it had to be manually shut down.

  The same bag that he used to fill the chests with the lootable items these others were killing their way through these halls to obtain.

  Chetter heard another crape of a boot and time seemed to slow down further. At first, he thought this was just an after effect of whatever they were using to paralyze him. He didn’t think it was anything magical, probably something organic they had cleverly put on the lid of the chest so his spells wouldn’t register it.

  While he didn’t know how these two had beaten his other spells, he knew that none of that mattered. They were coming closer, but somehow doing so extremely slowly.

  “There isn’t much time,” a voice said.

  This was not one of the voices that came from the two others in the room with him. This was not a voice he expected to hear. It was a slightly raspy voice that almost sounded as if someone were on the verge of coughing.

  There was an expulsion of air with almost every word, a side effect of having narrow passageways between mouth and organs. It was a familiar voice, in a way, but one he hadn’t heard since he was younger. This wasn’t making any sense.

  “Do exactly what I tell you to do,” the voice spoke again.

  Chetter’s voice. Not something that sounded like him – but him.

  It had to be some sort of trick. This, just like time slowing down, had to be some part of whatever was causing him to freeze. Some sort of hallucinogenic agent in whatever these others had put on the chest.

  His people used something similar for celebrations. It was the only explanation.

  “This isn’t a trick. This isn’t the first time we have spoken, and it will not be the last. You are starting to remember and when you do things will start to finally make sense.

  “You don’t belong here, Chetter. Neither do the two men coming towards you to kill you for the gear you are wearing,” the voice – his voice – said quickly. Was the voice coming from outside of himself?

  “I don’t understand how this is possible,” Chetter said to himself, but the sounds came out muffled since he couldn’t move his mouth or tongues.

  “It doesn’t matter and you don’t have to speak aloud for me to hear you. Just know this isn’t the end for you Chetter. Death is never the end for us,” he said.

  As the men slowly drew closer, Chetter talked with himself about things that only made his panic intensify.