━━━━ NO, YOU WEREN'T ASLEEP.
You didn't know what time it was currently, and you didn't bother to check. Your eyes were fixated on the pen you were currently holding in your hands as you crouched down, hiding behind a pillar in the dark.
You could basically admit to yourself you had stolen the pen from Wilbur.
The glowing neon blue lights of the pillar had illuminated your hand, giving you a clear vision of what the pen had looked like. It was intriguing. Your eyes proceeded to land on the rushed numbers written on your hand.
'Can I trust this?' You thought to yourself, feeling slightly overwhelmed with doubt.
You shook your head from left to right continuously, not allowing doubt to take control of your actions from a single question. You came to a change of mind where you told yourself you had come this far, so the real question you should be asking was how are you going to contact him?
You had recently left your phone in your abandoned house, which you could assume the phone you once had was dominated with glitches. Or you should say, potential viruses, ever since the incident had happened.
'So what's your plan now, (Y/N)?'
You sighed heavily to yourself in frustration as you tried to pour over your thoughts for a possible solution.
'Okay, (Y/N). You're in the headquarters with, what you could assume, one of the most advanced technologies out there,' you reminded yourself as you slightly picked at the fingernail of your pointer finger in frustration. A bad habit you had whenever you are not sure on how to control a certain situation.
'They started off as an online communication app, right? So they must have had some things in storage or projects they threw away with a possible way to contact people,' you thought to yourself with a conclusion decided inside your head.
NOTE: RE:LIFE is an application that matches you with random people to create friends.
You proceeded to look around the empty hallways cautiously, keeping a wide eye out for anyone who might potentially spot you, before hurriedly standing up and walking at a rather fast pace.
You ended up deciding to find the storage room, hoping there would be at least a few objects that could help you, but fate had turned the other way as you found yourself lost in the middle of the place with seemingly infinite rooms everywhere, surrounding you.
Eventually, you saw one particular door with purple neon lights tracing around the outline of itself in the dark. It was strange to see the presence of purple-colored lights on this one particular room, since most of them were white decorated with blue light borderings around them.
You walked closer to it, noticing there was a slight opening gap in the door to which you proceeded to take a glimpse of what was inside the room, and saw a hall full of stored figures, displayed inside transparent glass-like boxes. You could assume that they were humanoids being stored inside the strange room.
Your mouth slightly ajar with your eyes lighting up in amazement and wonder at the sight of it all. The moment you had was soon interrupted by an unknown voice calling you from a distance.
"Aye, you! Stop what you're doing!"
Your eyes widened as you closed your mouth in alarm of another's presence and rushingly went inside of the room, attempting to hide from whoever had seen you.
'This is not a good situation to be in right now,' you thought to yourself as you ran through the room.
You kept running farther away from the entrance of the door and eventually you began to slow your pace, admiring the sight of the humanoid figures surrounding you from the roof of the room to the floor you stood on. You started glancing around, closely examining the faces of each and every one of them.
'They all seem so alive..' You thought to yourself.
There were quite a lot of them, most being labeled 'unfinished' but out of all of the labels, there was one category in particular that had caught your eye.
The bold text written in bright yellow lights could be seen from a distance farther from the rest. It had piqued your curiosity and you proceeded to walk towards it, getting a closer look at whatever it was.
If I could give an analogy for what the situation felt like, it was as though you were Aurora and couldn't help but approach the wicked needle of the spinning wheel.
You then witnessed another line of figures being displayed, but there were fewer of them and their displays seemed more safeguarded to remain contained inside their displays than the previous ones.
Your steps echoed on the hard flooring and you glanced over to the holographic documents appearing on the screens of the displays each and every one of the containers had. You continued to walk towards one of the figures, reading what was written on its documentation.
╭━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╮
VI15156
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
GENDER: NON-BINARY
QUALIFIED: REPLICATOR
VI15156 was designed to replicate
an image or evidence to support
investigations for detectives and
police officers during crimes.
REPORTED ACTIVITY:
• Detectives and officers who had
once formerly worked with them
have reported strange activities of
them doodling or drawing on
notepads that did not include or
involve any information of the
crime scenes or evidence.
• VI15156 caused an explosion
during an interrogation due to the
stress level which they were
experiencing having surpassed
the maximum level.
╰━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╯
You didn't know what or how to react upon reading the statements inside the document file. You had understood that this section must have been where humanoids who have - what they would claim as - malfunctions are kept.
Your eyes later turned onto the figure who had half of its face disfigured and remaining unrepaired, with its chrome and metallic skull peeking out from underneath its torn skin. You stepped away from the displayed figure in shock and stumbled upon another that happened to be placed behind you.
╭━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╮
CY19212
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
GENDER: FEMALE
QUALIFIED: CULINARY EXPERT
CY19212 specializes in making
Japanese food - mainly sushi, for
'あなたのお尻 ' which is a Japanese
restaurant opened by a family of
two daughters and a single father.
REPORTED ACTIVITY:
• On the date of XXXXXXX,
CY19212 was been found making
sushi from human corpses. It was
reported that she had used the
corpses of customers. Ironically
enough, one of the customers she
had killed was named Corpse. This
name is likely a pseudonym.
• On the same day, the restaurant
and home of the family was
burned down by CY19212.
╰━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╯
The file of the holographic document had started to glitch and a few words had appeared onto the screen instead.
'Okay.. maybe that's our queue to go now-'
"Greetings!" You heard an unfamiliar voice greet you, to which you turned your head to face whoever was speaking to you.
It was a blue-haired girl with short hair stopping at her shoulders, and two small ponytails tied on top of her head.
'Please be innocent, please be innocent,' you chanted to yourself, hoping that the girl that stood in front of you was sane and kind-hearted.
She smiled at you before reaching to place both her hands onto your shoulders, but a sudden appearance of a man with a rather protective posture blocked her from touching you.
"Stand down. You do not have the authorization to make unknown contact with anyone," he threatened to which you had realized that the person was Alexis, who you formerly had called Quackity.
"...." The girl didn't seem to respond with anything, and you couldn't see her reaction quite well, but you had taken a small glance at her after and you had only seen her face morph to an immediate smile.
"My name is HM15381, an interactive humanoid here to assist you. I mean no harm," she said to which you chose to grab onto Alexis's arm, gesturing for him to move over. He nodded, giving one last burning glare to the girl before moving slightly behind you in sync.
The girl whose name was too complicated for you to even bother saying remained grinning for an uncomfortably long period of time, which started to make her seem a lot more cynical to you with that permanently plastered grin of hers.
She proceeded to continue speaking to you, but the words she spoke were questions that had left you feeling tense. Your mind was empty and you felt incapable of producing any argument to defend yourself from her interrogation.
"But you don't seem as though you're meant to be here I assume? Wouldn't it be convenient to use you for repair?" You didn't utter a word, which caused the girl to start tapping one of her feet impatiently as she waited for your answer.
"She's showing me around," Alexis spoke out, defending your presence which had surprised you, but you had tried not to reveal it, remaining unchanged in order to convince the girl.
"I'm from Jschlatt's Corporation. I came here to make a report about RE:LIFE," he continued with his falsified explanation.
You swore you caught a glimpse of the slightest change in her expression to an unamused look, but once you blinked your eyes for a second, she remained grinning cheerfully.
"Welcome! Follow me then!" She said cheerfully to which she later turned on her heels and walked a few steps away from us.
You were about to follow her steps, but Alexis had quickly raised his arm to his side, creating a barrier and blocking your path from following her. You glanced at him in confusion, only to see his expression changed to one of slight anger and disappointment.
"Why the fuck are you sneaking in here at 3 am?!" Quackity exclaimed but in a whisper, letting his words remain secretive from the blue-haired girl who was still within a few feet of you.
"I- I was trying to find my room!" You shot back at him promptly, although you knew you were the one at fault here.
"Hi, hi! Just to let you know again that you should follow me!" The blue-haired girl spoke up when she noticed we were still in the same place as before.
The two of you snapped your attention back to her and begrudgingly began to follow her lead, taking slow steps and trailing behind her.
"So.. HM... something.. do you have any other name that we can call you?" You questioned with a bit of hesitance.
"Hmm.. not sure." She replied listlessly.
"What about Hana?"
"Mocha," she quipped in response, but you weren't quite sure what she meant by the word, looking at her with a rather confused expression plastered on your face.
"Mocha?" You repeated with a questioning gaze, though she ignored your confusion and proceeded to continue her trek through the many displays as you talked behind her.
"The goal of creating humanoids was to support humanity with every aspect of life. The main intent of the project was for the humanoids to complete daily tasks such as providing education, emotional support, and other menial jobs," she explained.
"However, while this is the actual purpose behind it all, humans ironically don't possess humanity," she continued as she stopped abruptly in her tracks, forcing both you and Alexis to copy her and pause your journey.
"Tell me, (Y/N). What do you think when you first see us?" She asked as she turned to face you.
"We look human, we act human. But we are not made in the same way you are," she said with a rather blank expression.
"I actually think you're alive.." you replied to her.
"T̷̜̋ḧ̴̬́é̵͚n̵̹̈́ ̷̤̚w̸̗̎h̷̯̚y̵͍͌ ̴̯̓d̸̺̈o̶̙͗ǹ̶͚'̶̳̈t̵̍ͅ ̵̺͊y̶̑ͅǒ̶̱u̷̲̓ ̴̛̝t̴͚͆r̵̪̍e̵̮̓a̸͕̅t̷̩̍ ̷̫͋u̶͍̎s̴̅ͅ ̴̞͑ḁ̷̍s̴̯̚ ̴̧̓i̴͓͑f̵̟͠ ̷̠̅w̴̥͆e̴̜͐ ̷̩̅a̵̠̋ȑ̴̦ḙ̶̅ ̵̠̾ä̷̧́ľ̸̗i̸̪̊v̵̤͒ē̴̙?̴̘͠" Her voice was disorganized and unclear, though, despite the distortion, you could still understand her words.
Alexis took a protective step in front of you while forcing you to back away from the blue-haired girl.
"Don't start anything," he hissed as he glared at her, but when you had gestured him to calm down he allowed you to walk a few steps closer to her.
You could see an unreadable expression was placed upon her face, but her eyes reflected judgment. She started walking over to a metallic capsule-like display. She knocked onto it and the cover quickly slid up, revealing a sleeping girl who... looked very similar to her...?
She looked exactly the same as the humanoid who stood in front of you. The only difference being that instead of blue hair, it had golden-brown hair, and instead of two small ponytails, she had two rigid bumps on the top part of her hair, creating an illusion that she had little bear ears. She seemed rather peaceful.
"See, unlike you, (Y/N)━" she plunged her hand into the sleeping girl's chest where its heart was located. "We can still be replaced," and pulled their hand out of the body. In her grasp, she held the still-beating heart of her 'clone'. I thought I was going to throw up when she crushed the fleshy organ in her hand and dropped it on the ground like it was trash.
"Oops, my bad. Anyways━" She shrugged it off and turned her back around, walking further into the room with her hand soaked and dripping with blue blood.
As you were about to follow her, Alexis blocked your path and you swore you had never seen him acting so serious.
"(Y/N), we need to go back. Now━"
"Go back?" Another voice questioned, overhearing Alexis and he quickly pulled you close to him, wrapping his arms around you protectively. He was ready to fight off anyone who gets near you.
"Why would you ever need to go back?" The voice spoke again and Alexis looked around for the source.
Suddenly, a hand pushed him slightly to the side, Alexis's dark brown eyes stared back into crimson-orange ones. He quickly ripped their hand off of his shoulder. Short black hair, a ring piercing their lip, and tattoos on the side of their neck. What a baddie, huh.
"That's not a very cool way to say hi to someone, bro," they said as they detached their hand from its wrist, causing Alexis to let go of his grip immediately, completely caught off guard.
Their hand crawled back to them like a horrifying spider, and they reattached it to their wrist with a simple twist.
"You seem very new here," a female's voice said. You turned your head to look at them to see a female with long black hair and glasses perched on the bridge of her nose.
You and Alexis were trapped with two humanoids standing in front of you and fast encroaching on your personal space.
"Fuck. Are there any more of you? Come out now!" Alexis demanded as beads of sweat started to form from the side of his face.
"We're all already here," another voice said and as you looked around, you were able to see three more humanoids standing near the first two.
Alexis clenched his teeth at the sight of a total of now five humanoids surrounding them.
"Hello, I am AP18912," a humanoid with half black and green hair greeted you.
"DI31240," the short-haired humanoid with crimson-orange eyes who startled Alexis introduced while playing with the choker around their neck.
"I'm DL1219." the girl with long black hair and glasses said.
"Hey, I'm LE11251," a humanoid with dirty blonde hair tied into a bun introduced themself simply.
"I'm SU1989, sorry if we come off as a little bit scary.." a black-haired humanoid introduced last of all. She had her black hair up in space buns, with chopsticks holding the look together.
"Maybe if you'd back off a bit, you wouldn't look so threatening, huh," Quackity scorned as he glared at each and every one of them, assessing their level of threat.
"I do agree with what he said," another unfamiliar voice spoke out of the blue.
Everyone turned their heads towards the source of the voice and saw a bright figure in the shadow. They had red eyes and long wavy black hair. She's sort of curvy... wait, (Y/N), what the fuck━
"Who are you?!" Quackity shouted at the unknown figure.
"Hm?" She hummed in response while walking towards him at a leisurely pace.
She trailed her hands to softly touch his arm and started moving her way up to his collarbone. She was intimidating, to say the least, and dangerously close to him.
"I am VE142119," she whispered.
She was definitely seductive, but with a hint of instability. She seemed sort of dangerous as well because of that. Alexis had only hesitated at her touch but his eyes kept glaring at her. He didn't seem to be affected by her charms the slightest bit, though he didn't seem to know how to react in this situation either.
A cough was then heard from the back and VE142119 turned her head to see AP18912 interrupting whatever moment they were in. Her hand that was on Alex looked as though it glitched for a brief moment, but you couldn't be quite sure. She then moved away from Alexis quickly but remained standing in front of them. Alexis regained his defensive stance and hastily took your hand in a firm grip. He seemed determined to get you out of this scenario as quickly as possible.
"Ah! There you are━" the short blue-haired girl, who had now returned from the depths of the room, stopped talking as soon as she caught sight of the black-haired, red-eyed female.
"Greetings, VE142119," she greeted, her smile leaving her face instantly.
"HM15381." VE142119 greeted coldly. There seemed to be a bit of undisclosed tension between them.
"Please, tell us what you are," you asked despairingly.
"We're IRISES. Soon to be, of course. We are humanoids given a second chance to live by him!" The glasses girl chirped with a clap of her hands at the mention that they were still living.
"Who is him?" You asked.
"Well, it's just him. We were supposed to be disposed of, but he allowed us to live under certain conditions - which is transferring us to another building and serving both paranoid humanoids and humans who could possibly affect the reputation of RE:LIFE badly." The blonde hair-bun girl explained.
"Oh, it's going to be so wondrous! We're even going to be separated into rooms! It would be like a roommate thing and we could do so many fun things together! Hey, you should come with us! Wouldn't that be lovely?" DL1219 bubbled excitedly, fantasizing about how fun it would be when they got transferred to a different location.
SU1989 lowered her head slightly at her statement. It seemed like she perhaps knew something about it already.
"Woah, Woah, Woah... humanoids are still a fairly new thing. How are you guys already going to be sent out there?" You asked in confusion.
"Pfft, what year do you even live in? You've probably been sleeping under a rock your whole life! Humanoids are commonplace across the entire world. Wake up, stupid! Everything crazy is normalized now, reality could even be an illusion where humans are slowly going mad at this point and no one would know," DI2124 scorned.
At that moment, you realized you didn't even know what was happening outside anymore. You might not have lost yourself, but you did lose time... just how long had you been kept in here?
"Try not to think about it as much. In fact, don't think at all about it if you could," SU1989 said, making a genuine effort to try and comfort you.
"I agree, so maybe it would be better if we were to just get on with the main topic, shall we?" you heard HM12381 said.
"I can tell you are trying to find someone. It's obvious from your curious eyes. Maybe cut to the chase of who that is?" She responded, impatiently.
You were hesitant to answer her. You clenched your teeth and thought to yourself for a second if you were able to trust her but you might as well say it.
"I'm trying to contact someone, but I didn't get their name. Only numbers," you said, raising your hand and pointing to where you wrote the numbers on the palm of your hand. She lowered her gaze at the sight of it, before forcing a smile and holding onto your raised hand, lowering it to meet with both of hers.
"I don't like how you are so sure of yourself that you can help us. We can't be helped," she said with a smile, and without you noticing, she had tried to strike the side of your neck with the missing fingers of her disfigured hand, but Alexis happened to prevent it from happening by grabbing onto her wrist.
Her expression was unreadable but she covered it with a smile directed at the both of you after taking a few steps backward. "You wanna know who 'he' is so bad?" She asked as she stabbed herself in the chest, while her other hand buried its finger through the side of her head, piercing into the skull and tearing whatever implants she had completely apart.
"Then go and contact them yourself," she said as she threw the torn piece of her head, but not before merging it with whatever she had held in her hand, to you by sliding it on the floor towards your feet.
The blue-haired girl's head began twitching rapidly and continuously until she started to stab herself, instantly stopping her twitching head. As you took the torn-out piece from the ground and swiftly grabbed it, she spoke quietly but loud enough for you to hear." T̷̺̼̆ṙ̸͉͠u̸͈͘s̷͉͇͛t̴͈̟̆͝ ̷̹̰̓n̴͎̜̆o̶͎̎ͅ ̵͇̪͑o̷̦̐n̴̼̫͊͂e̴͈̒͆."
"Please, let me help you━"
"Sprout and Michelle are two technologists that will be working there. They'll help with repairs and as far as I've heard, they're very nice. So please go," SU1989 quickly cuts you off out of nowhere.
Alexis covered your eyes to save you from the dreadful sight, forcing you to walk away from the scene as the blue-haired girl laid motionless and dead on the cold floor, beyond repair with the light in her eyes turning a dull, pitch black.
"Where are ŷ̵̹ő̸̼͛ṵ̵͛̚ ̷̢͍͊͝going, love?" VE142119 asked.
All the other humanoids started staring at the two of you with a rather psychotic look, the two of you panicked and slowly went into a run to get out of the room.
"H̸E̸Y̷,̴ ̵D̶O̶N̴'̸T̶ ̴L̸E̶A̸V̷E̷!̴ ̸D̴O̴N̸'̶T̵ ̸F̴U̴C̶K̴I̸N̷G̷ ̵L̸E̵A̶V̸E̸!̴" DL1219 shouted at them.
You sprinted away as thudding footsteps chased behind you just as quickly. You just barely reached the exit and their hands reached out for both of you, but you quickly closed the door in time. You rested your back against the door and slid down onto the floor, breathing heavily as you regained your energy from the pursuit.
You tried to process what you had witnessed previously, but you couldn't comprehend anything that had happened at all. You weren't sure of what to say or how to feel. But more importantly, you wanted to know how they feel.
Alexis noticed your lost expression and let out a heavy sigh to himself while he leaned onto the wall behind him.
"Listen, I know as much about what happened back there as you do, but you shouldn't worry about it too much," he said with a hand rubbing the back of his neck, not sure of what he should say.
"How can I not worry and be comforted when I know that there are people out there needing actual help.." you said, feeling slightly frustrated.
"(Y/N), if there's anything you want to do about it, I won't stop you," he said as he started to straighten up his posture. "But whatever happens, I'll protect you. Alright? I promise that" he said as he placed one of his hands onto your shoulder and hugged you.
He thought about giving you a small kiss for comfort, but he just knew it wasn't the right time and everything he felt might be one-sided for him. Besides, he felt as if you'd like someone else. Someone better. And if it wasn't meant to be, he didn't want to force it.
He then proceeded to break the hug and walked a few steps backward, giving a slight wave in goodbye before turning on his heels and walking away from your sight. You looked down to your hand, staring at the torn piece of what seemed to be a circular metallic reactor with glowing blue light from inside of it.
You proceeded to spin the reactor to the side and there, a hologram of a blue icon appeared from it.
The blue glowing icon seemed to look similar to a text chat bubble.
╭━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╮
「 Please enter number 」
8 1 5 - 5 1 9 - 1 3 1 4
Number Unavailable!
╰━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╯
Created on 31 December 2020
Edited on 18 June 2021
Edited by michellechair @hanamocha
_________________________________________
FUNFACTS:
SU1989 is the second version of the prototype CY19212.
HM15381 was originally a brunette but the design was later modified by GR3YSICLE and HiNewMeXD
This chapter is based on an interactive lore that took place in a discord server called "RE:LIFE"
Special thank you to Katp1234
(Omega) for leading the theorists
in the lore
michellechair (formerly part of the theorist group) for second in lead for figuring out the lore.
Thank you for the rest who have participated and create the best memories possible. I'm sorry I can't mention everyone because that would create notifications spam-
All humanoid prototypes and technologists mentioned are based on real users in wattpad.
The humanoids you had seen are the following users tagged:
HUMANOIDS:
awhlusty (VE142119)
bloodandpaint (AP18912)
egirlKermit (DI3124)
simqlea (LE11251)
DILLIELILAH (DL1219)
sushisoot (SU1989)
TECHNOLOGISTS:
LinguineLucy (Sprout)
michellechair (Michelle)
Thank you for the memories.
Love like you.
14.05.21 - 20.06.21