Seeking a Better Ending - Seek x Reader

Figure Out a Solution

You continued walking through the empty rooms, stopping occasionally to open a drawer or two. You found a roll of bandages in one of the drawers, and you put them in your pocket for later, temporarily considering emptying your pockets here before continuing but deciding against it. Your junk might come in handy somehow, and you had better things to deal with than the amount of space in your pockets. Besides, leaving your stuff here felt like littering. You needed to focus on getting out of here. Still, as you walked your mind kept going back to the creature that had chased you down that hallway.

Clearly it was intelligent. That much was made clear by the fact that it had spoken to you, if not also by the deliberate sense of chaos and confusion its rooms had evoked in you. You sighed opening a door labeled 46.

How many doors were there, anyway? Perhaps the creature was some kind of midpoint- like a miniboss. Perhaps there would be an exit in the 50th room. You sighed. Another locked room- and this one was completely dark.

Pulling open another drawer, you felt around in the darkness for a key. It really was too bad that your flashlight had limited battery life.

Your hand brushed the edges of a piece of paper. You would have left it there if not for the smear of wet ink that felt icy cold on your fingers. You shoved it in your pocket along with the roll of bandages.

Psst.

You whirled around, frantically trying to find the source of the noise. Two white eyes stared out of the darkness at you. A pale, white face with a toothy smile let out a blood curdling screech the moment you saw it, vanishing into the inky blackness of the dark room. You stumbled backwards, hitting your shin on the side of the bed. You swore aloud, rubbing the side of your leg with one arm. That was going to leave a bruise.

Eventually you did find a key. It took an embarrassingly long time to find, seeing as it wasn't actually in a drawer. You only found it after the blue lights from earlier gathered around it, guiding you to its location. Luckily, the screaming thing from earlier didn't make another appearance, and you were able to escape the room without any trouble.

And then the next room was also dark, because why wouldn't it be? You groaned. This was stupid. At least it wasn't locked.

As soon as you were back into the light, you pulled the worn piece of paper out of your pocket. The paper itself was the same as all the others you had seen tucked away in the drawers that littered the hallways- worn with time, any text that might once have been readable now faded beyond recognition. But there was a message in the middle of the paper, one you didn't understand.

Figure is blind.

Those three words stood out against the yellowing paper like a stain. The ink was darker than any color you recognised, and your fingers stung where they had brushed against it.

"Who's Figure?" you asked aloud, not expecting an answer. Silence followed, broke only by a faint hiss from the walls of the hotel and the constant rain drumming on the windows outside. You turned the paper over to see if there was something on the other side, but there was nothing. Hm.

You decided to keep the paper, just in case. Sighing, you pulled open the 49th door.

As soon as you turned the handle, a soft, alien noise came from somewhere in the room. You pushed the door open the rest of the way. Golden double doors marked the entrance to room 50. You held your breath for a moment. What was on the other side of the door? The exit to this place, maybe. You couldn't give up now, you told yourself, in an attempt to calm your pounding heart. It took a few minutes for you to find the determination to open the door, but you decided that an exit was worth the risk.

You turned the massive handles, and immediately regretted your decision. The doors opened up to reveal a massive library, with bookshelves on both sides of the room and a second story visible in the back, but that wasn't what caught your attention.

A tall figure stepped out from behind the bookshelves, revealing a mouth filled with dozens of pointed teeth. Its flesh was a dull salmon color, and as it advanced towards you it let out another angry warble, more akin to a scream than the soft noise you heard earlier. Its exposed ribcage glinted in the light from the lamps as it screamed again, taking a sharp right before disappearing to the side of the room. The doors slammed soundlessly shut behind you, trapping you in the library with the blind creature. Was this what the note you found had been warning you about? Was this Figure?

You crept along the sides of the room to a corner, being careful not to make a sound. The tall monster scared you- more so than anything else in this hellhole had. Its sharp, vicious yellow teeth looked like they could tear flesh from bone like it was nothing. Loud, heavy footsteps echoed through the library, shaking the ground every time they came near you. You were too scared to move from that spot for a long time. You weren't sure how long exactly. It could have been anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour. Eventually, when your heart stopped pumping so hard you could hear it, you decided to move. You didn't want to die here.

Every single noise seemed amplified tenfold- the rustling of your clothing, your breathing, even the sparkling noise.

...sparkling noise? You turned around to see one of the books hanging halfway off the shelf. A faint cyan glow lined the edges. You pulled it off the shelf, opening it to the bookmarked page. One one side, there was an X written in faded ink. On the other side, the number 3. You stared blankly at it for a moment, before hearing the Figure's footsteps coming closer. You quickly shoved the book back onto the shelf. Retreating to the corner, you watched it walk past you to the other side of the room. You took note of the number and the shape on the paper from earlier- the one that read Figure is blind in pitch black ink- and mentally patted yourself on the back for having a pen with you. As soon as it was gone, you snuck up the stairs to the massive door. To your dismay, it was locked tight with a heavy padlock.

There has to be a code or something, you thought, Maybe something to do with the books. You thought you heard sparkling on your way up here.

You found three more books upstairs, frequently glancing over your shoulder to make sure the Figure was still downstairs. Its heavy footsteps reverberated through the library, sending a shiver down your spine. Every time it roared, your hands shook a little more. You needed to get out of here before you lost your nerve.

You waited until it was on the other side of the library to sneak back downstairs. Now that you were panicking just a little less, you noticed a desk on one side of the room. You hugged the walls as you made your way over there, making sure Figure was nowhere nearby before getting close to the desk. You were too scared to open the drawers, worried that they would make too much noise, so you just grabbed the paper from off of the desk and ran.

Circle, Triangle, X, Pentagon, Square. You pulled out the piece of paper you had written the first few shapes down on, and began to fill in what you knew of the code.

9, whatever the triangle is, 3... 2? Yeah, two. Then the square. Two more books. You could do this.

You hoped.