'No! That's not fair! All these people are going get an advantage,' he fumed bitterly making his way to the hallway. He saw Sam in front of him.
"Ohh yeah, your number was way lower than mine" Azario verbalized aloud, feeling slightly relieved he wasn't alone.
A deep scowl was embedded into Sam's usually cheerful face.
"It's not fair everyone else gets to learn from the people who took the test except us!" Sam sulked indignantly.
They walked alongside each other to the entrance of the sliding doors, where they arrived near the intimidating vertex enforcer robot that seemed to pay them no heed. They felt fearful of messing up and earning its ire but it gestured for them to go into the hallway, so they complied.
Azario's eyebrows narrowed in confusion.
"I can't believe it just let us in like that," Azario voiced.
"Well, our numbers are written on our hands so obviously," Sam stressed mockingly.
"Oh yeah," Azario realized feeling embarrassed.
They continued walking wordlessly, the only thing conversing now was their ever-present anxiety. They saw another vertex robot with a gun in its arms, as they came close to it they realized they were at a dead end.
It pointed to the expanse of wall on its left.
"Take this path," the vertex enforcer commanded with the same male voice as the robot.
The apparent dead end opened up.
Azario and Sam proceeded on.
"Do they all just have the same voice?" Azario commented haphazardly.
"Probably," Sam responded, looking strangely drained.
Azario recognized that Sam didn't feel like talking so he opted to walk in silence.
The wall opened up into another great hall but as they made their way through they saw many vertex enforcers lined up in the middle of the hall. They diligently monitored the strange pitch-black human sized pods in a contrasting world of pristine white. The pods had glass windows, displaying inclined seats within.
"Go to a pod," a scarily close voice demanded.
"What?!" Azario accidentally exclaimed, feeling startled.
Some of the surrounding people smiled weakly in response, making Azario feel slightly embarrassed.
These pods seemed to hug the hall the whole way round, scattered in droves there seemed to be hundreds of them. Some with the glass windows open whilst others were already occupied. Several people inside looked with distressing pleading at the duo. Sam and Azario's faces stiffened as a result, as there seemed to be a series of black straps over their bodies keeping them fastened to the pod as if they were utterly incapacitated.
'****! What the hell are those' Azari panicked, the fear in the room contagious and perpetual, crushing the spirits of those within.
"Go along," the voice commanded with a firmer tone.
Azario and Sam were seemingly rooted to the spot.
'Are they going to experiment on our minds, no, no, no. The people from before were able to come back, but I wasn't paying attention if the same people got back or if they were unaffected.
Azario's mind raced with the implications of his damnation.
'What does this mean? Did the people who went for tests get their body harvested or something? Did they just tell us all of this so we wouldn't panic?!'
"Aaaah~" Azario began to suck in a sharp breath presumably hyperventilating, his brain paralyzed with the seemingly infinite possible terminals of his sanity as he knows it.