“Alright, so it happens sometime this week,” I said to Roby as I handed him a gear. Roby grabbed the gear with his small metal arms and began equipping it onto the sleigh's engine. Roby is my robot brother who’s been with me for about 5 years now in this… Prison.

“Yes, that’s what Grandpa said,” Roby said in the floating blue text bubble above his head. He doesn’t have a way to verbally speak, so he modified himself with that ability 2 years ago, it made conversations easier, along with arguments. “But he could also be lying :, and we will be stuck down here for much longer.”

“He wouldn’t,” I sighed while holding the cross Grandpa gifted me after my 13^th birthday and looking at the coffin in the back seat of the sleigh. “Not after this. Not after all of this preparation.”

“He’s no saint, Nigiel, heck, I’m pretty sure he’s comparable to Satan after hearing all the things he’s done before adopting us,” Roby turned his head toward me.

“I never thought he was, nor has he ever claimed to be.” I stood up, walked toward the giant engineering bag, and brought it closer to the sleigh. “But the proof is in the pudding. He has improved lately from who he previously was, and so far he’s been pretty honest about things in the outside world.” I looked up at the dark ceiling that holds nothing but trash and stone.

“We don’t know that. The only things that fall down here are either monsters, Undead, and trash :[.” Roby turned on his little wheels to grab a tool from the bag. “And were expecting that little beacon he brought here to not do the same thing?” He settled with the wrench and swiftly returned to his work. “And he hasn’t been honest about everything.”

“What hasn’t he been honest about?” I asked while walking around the sleigh.

“Where we came from? Who our parents were?” He answered immediately.

I continued walking as I gave him the same answer that Grandpa gave us the first time. “You heard him the first time, it’s better not knowing. But if we are really desperate to find that out, we need to defeat him, and he said any method is allowed.”

“Yeah, so we should start binge-searching planetary-destroying weapons }:],” he joked as the sound of an electric drill came from him.

“Yeah, hopefully that does something,” I sighed as I leaned against the Sleigh. I began looking around the surroundings and immediately felt the tiredness fill my bones at the sight of it. The Area was nothing but an underground trash-filled cave that the world had most likely forgotten about a long time ago.

What makes it worse is the fact that neither me or Roby has any memories of the surface or our lives before falling down here. The only thing I remember is one day looking up at the trash-filled ceiling, covered in black and red blood.

I placed my hands up to my face and began walking towards our home. “I’ll start packing our things and placing them outside!” I didn’t bother as I was approaching our door. Our home is basically one small shack with only 4 rooms. The bedroom, the bathroom, the storage room, and finally the kitchen.

I opened the black door to our shack and immediately made my way to the bathroom. Once I got there, I flipped the light switch we made out of a bunch of flashlights and began to look at myself in the mirror.

I placed a hand on the deer skull I have for a face, then moved my hands up to the antlers on top of my head, which I should really cut because of how often they get in the way. I then locked eyes with myself in the mirror and began staring deep into my mismatched color eyes. MY pupils glow a certain color while the rest of my eye is pitch black. I also don’t have any eyelids for some reason, doubt I cut them off.

My right eye is lime green, while my left eye is blood red, and for some reason that I can’t explain, both don’t feel like they’ve always been this color.

I sighed through my nose as I looked down at my hands, tightened the black gloves around them, and checked the bandages around my arms to make sure they were still tight and secure. I then stuck my hands in my red jacket pockets and slowly walked out of the bathroom, beginning to pack our essential items. Like food, water, weapons, and medical items, despite me having a healing factor. Nice clothes that had fallen down to the place over the years, some books with a lot of information on them that Roby likes to read.

I continued to pack them all into boxes and black bags for what seemed to have been an forever, and once I was finally done, I walked back outside and headed toward the sleigh. “Hey Roby, I finally got done packing everything we need.” I then walked around the corner of the sleigh’s wheels. “Is there anything you want to b-” I stopped as I noticed the lack of movement. I smacked my teeth as I quickly walked up to Roby and picked him up. “You have to start keeping tabs on your battery life man, especially when we were about to head to the surface.”

I carried Roby’s powered-down body back to the shack and into our room. I then placed him on the worn-down bed that we found in a trash pile a couple of years ago. I then opened up Roby’s chest and locked my sights on the giant cube he has for a battery. I pulled it out, turned around toward the multiple batteries that are currently on charge with a car battery that I kind of always feared would one day explode.

I grabbed one of the batteries and replaced it with the other before slowly grabbing Roby and inserting the battery back in its place.

The sound of his body slowly began to shut back on, and I sat back on the bed, looking at the ceiling. After 10 seconds of his system rebooting and turning back on, Roby immediately got off the bed and headed back outside as if nothing had happened.

“Wait up,” I said while getting up off the bed.

“Dude, hurry up. You’re 3 feet taller than me :/,” he typed before turning the corner. I followed him out of the shack and back towards the Sleigh, but instead of heading back to work on it, we just climbed onto the Sleigh and sat down in the seats in silence.

The silence felt like something that needed to happen with something so important could be coming around the corner. The silence was loud, with both of us wanting to ask the one single question we’ve both been wondering about for the longest time possible.

What do we do when we finally get out of here?

“Hey Nigiel :|,” Roby typed.

“Yeah, man?” I responded.

“W-… what are you planning to do once we make it out of here?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said with a smile. “Helping you find your creator.”

Roby looked over at me with his shining red eye. “The first thing you want to do is help me find someone who created me. What if the creator died a long time ago, and I was just made in a factory?”

“Well,” I placed my hand on his shoulder. “Then we will know, and hey. I don’t doubt my parents are in the same condition. Why else would Gramps hide so much about my past from me.”

Roby’s text bubbles flashed for a moment, but no words were written. Instead, he just faced forward and went silent. And I mimicked the action and just enjoyed blissful silence.

BOOOOOM

We both turned around in shock and saw a massive blast cloud fall from the far ceiling, followed by a bunch of solid objects falling down as well, 2 of those things looked like people.

I turned around to face Roby who shared the same shocked expression, despite not even having a functional face. “Well, that was faster than expected.”

I grabbed the Worn down wooden sword next to the door and quickly ran toward the blast site with Roby who was currently carrying his engineering kit because he argued that it would be useful if there was anyone that was hurt.

After a minute of running, we finally made it to the spot and were immediately met with stone and old wooden floorboards all around the area. As I began searching for anything or anyone that had fallen down, I began to hear a struggled scream for help, as if someone was struggling too much to breathe to speak properly.

I quickly began to focus on the nearly silent noise as I walked over the debris and kept walking until I ran into an oddly large piece of wood. I slowly brought my head to the wood to try to listen for anything, and that’s when I heard.

“Help,” A muffled voice attempted to scream.

I immediately placed my hands underneath the large piece of wood and began lifting as hard as I could until it was completely off the person, then dragged the piece of wood to the side until it was a safe distance away from the person.

After I dropped the wood, I looked at the person I just saved and saw a young girl in some kind of white owl costume, wearing an owl mask, while holding a sheet of paper in her hands.

The owl girls slowly looked over at me. “Man your ugly.”

I flexed my hands in a friendly gesture. “Ouch.”