Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Monsters — Monster who almost made it
"Good try," the Overseer says kindly, dragging Kosta effortlessly by the ankle, and Kosta scrabbles feebly, fingernails on floor, to arrest their motion.
"No," he whines, as much as he can with carbon-fibre arrows riddling his lungs. "No, I — I was this close, I'm ready—"
Kosta doesn't know how long he's been here. Nearly as long as he's been a vampire, but not quite; he has strobing not-quite-memories of an initial rampage, blood on his face and flooding his mouth, things
(people)
crunching under his teeth and his desperate fingers.
And then: captivity.
They begin in the lowest, darkest level, the Wet Basement, half-flooded and lousy with other starving fledgelings. The stairs have been demolished; the most promising way out is the Shaft, which stretches all the way up — all the way up, to let sunlight in at the top, and its burning circle is enough to repel the most mindless among them.
If they want out of the Wet Basement, they need to get past the mindless hissing and clawing the walls and shying away from the Shaft just because sometimes it's filled with light. They need to wait for night, and climb.
After the Wet Basement, there's a seemingly endless stack of other object lessons, a warren of underground levels surrounding the Shaft. Cooperative challenges, to teach them to work together; competitive ones, to teach them that alliances are strategic and rarely forever.
Electrified door handles. Electrified floors. Searing steam vents. Ducts, underfloor crawls, suspended ceilings to teach that navigable space is a social contract, and the rule-abiding are imprisoned by it. Passive infrared, pressure sensors, laser tripwires to teach the uses and limits of the undead body's parameters; then those things coupled to minigun killboxes, to teach the futility of plans that can't be backed up by just fucking running fast enough to stay ahead of a tracking turret.
Kosta has learned to be fast and silent and undetectable, teamwork and treachery and to take none of it personally; to be unstoppable. He doesn't know how long he's been here, but he knows he's been honed into — whatever it is that the Overseer wants them to be. And he got so far this time, so far, crawled out of the Wet Basement and fought, slithered, thought his way through the ever-changing murder-puzzle meatgrinder basements, all the way up — all the way to the semi-mythical warehouse itself, standing over the top of the Shaft, a cavernous hangar and CCTV and the Shaft and a door. A door out.
They tell fractured stories about the hangar, whispers passed from ears to lips to ears to lips; nobody knows what's beyond the door. The conclusion one can draw from that is that the door goes out: death or graduation. No return.
Kosta saw the door. He nearly, nearly reached the door. And then —
The Overseer is a vampire, too. The Overseer sees them, through the ever-present CCTV, the sensors, the entire basement itself watching them squirreling within its guts. Finds them when they fail, picks them up, and—
She's not usually an active part of the basement's trials. Maybe that's reserved for ones like Kosta, ones within reach of opening the door. Pincushioned, numb with some kind of neurotoxic tips that his undead meat can't quickly chew through, and then too slow in the face of her own (basement-hardened?) barrage of steel-tipped boots and fists.
"No," he says, clawing at concrete, and then he's flying, burning: transfixed, spinning down the shaft, searing in the circle of sun, down and down and down, the myriad layers of the basement passing him by in reverse as the Wet Basement comes up to eat him. Again.