The four journeyed down a short hallway with the wheeled bed before it opened into a large, brightly lit room. Along the concrete walls of the room were two openings into five-foot by 10-foot cells. The wall with the hallway entrance had only one cell. Beside each cell were a numeric pad and numerous small monitors. Each cell was covered with a transparent yellow field of energy. Six of the cells held occupants that stirred as the group entered the room. The doctor led the bed to the empty cell across the room, where the orderlies proceeded to move the boy to the cot lying inside.
“Yo, what’d you do him?” a black man in his twenties, wearing simple, loose, one-tone cotton clothing, standing in his cell, demanded. The group simply ignored him. He tried again. “Hey, girl, I’m talking to you! Why don’t y’all talk back, huh?”
“Yeah, where the hell is this, and what are we doing here?” a woman with dyed-blue hair, also in her twenties and in the same simple clothing as her cellmates wore, asked, but she too was ignored. “This is ridiculous, you have no right to keep us here!”
Once the unconscious boy was put in the cell, the doctor pushed some buttons on the control pad beside it and a yellow field covered the opening to it, too. As the orderlies rolled the bed back down the hallway, the armed man looked at Dr. Kalam questioningly. “You can leave. I’m just going to monitor his vitals for a few moments. I’ll be fine,” she said, waving her hand at him as she turned toward the control pad beside the boy’s cell. The soldier followed the orderlies down the hallway.
“Let us out of here, and we’ll see how fine you’ll be,” a young Hispanic man said from his cell.
“Yeah, what he said, man. I’m gonna mess you up!” the black man added. A large, olive-skinned man simply sat on his cot in his cell and glared at the woman through the energy field, his nostrils flaring as the others taunted the doctor.
“If it were up to me, I would let you out, but it’s not,” Jaya finally responded without looking away from the monitors, her voice low, but forceful.
A young Asian man, sitting cross-legged on his cot then spoke, his voice calm, “But that is not true. You enter this room often and have the codes to open our cells. You have done so many times in the past. You may believe you cannot free us because of what others tell you, but it is within your power to do so.”
“That’s right, you could!” added the Hispanic man. “Hey, we could, like, throw you in a cell and maybe even rough you up a bit, or something, to make it look like we caught you by surprise. Just give us a chance.”
“Not likely,” Jaya responded coldly, though her face showed signs uncertainty. She gave the monitors a last glance and turned to leave.
“Dammit, let us out of here!” the blue-haired woman yelled.
At that, the last prisoner awoke from her sleep, a red-haired woman in her twenties. She gracefully leapt from a curled-up position on her cot and started clawing at the energy field, to no avail. “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!” she continual shrilled as Jaya made her way down the hallway. Jaya paused before reaching the door, her face stricken with grief. She stood and thought for a few moments before settling herself down and opening the door.
As the door closed behind her, she looked to Micheal, still standing guard at the door. “See you in a few minutes, baby,” he said with a grin.
Jaya, seemingly distracted, didn’t smile in return. “Okay. I need to talk to you about something…”
). This is an account of the first session, played some time ago, as a table top game.
