Greetings! The following is part of an interactive fiction project we’re running on Meh for April Fools Day. Feel free to join in, or, if you’re just shopping, ignore all this and scroll down to the features.
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You walk as lightly as you can around the back of the hut, careful not to snap even a twig. You see a small shed and decide to check what’s in there. You’re about 10 feet from it when the ground gives way below you and you fall into a deep pit.
You land on your thigh, but you’re okay. You see movement in the darkness and imagine it’s mice, or worse snakes. But when your eyes adjust you see the pit, which is bigger than you’d realized, is occupied by four other people. And they look… well… a lot like you. All of them wear jeans and ironic sweatshirts.
“Hey, welcome,” one of them says. And they introduce themselves. Fritz was working as an Associate Quality Assurance Assistant for a company that made a fits-all-bottles lid when he found the door in the mail room. Kathy was an Assistant Project Management Associate at the corporate headquarters of a company she describes as providing a service “like Uber but for haircuts”; the portal was under her desk one day. Georgina was a Secondary Database Subordinate, working for a dating app that linked users based on the tenor of the comments they made on user-submitted recipe sites, and found the door while smoking in the alley behind the office.
The last guy identifies himself as Dale. “I’ve only been here a few weeks. I worked for a deal site as a Junior Marketing Assessment Associate. I found the door when I was sent to get a drone for the photography department.” He holds up a box and you see it’s the exact model you were sent to retrieve.
When Dale’s finished, you ask: why are you all being held down here?
Kathy smiles a sad smile. “We’re be held by the witch. She’ll take us out one at a time. So she can use us in a stew.”
