Chapter 18: The Pictures Always Lie
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Chapter Scheduling wacked out on this one and accidentally posted a day too early. To the 1 person who was accidentally able to read it before the chapter bomb, soz.

The elevator doors opened to a hall, carpeted with chartreuse, the walls lined with rows upon rows of red polished doors. Each door had a set of four-digit numerals in its centre, and flickering vintage wall lamps hung over the alcoves of those doors. Those near identical doors seemed to repeat off into infinity. The hall itself seemed to stretch off into the horizon, and if you were unlucky enough to be saddled with a room at the end of the hall, you might end up spending fifteen minutes walking down the hallway here to commute to work. Though I could see a few people slowly ambling into their apartments, the halls were mostly empty.

It was a solitary place.

As I headed left from the elevator, I wandered down the hallway - counting the numbers of the doors on either side of me as I walked. 2500, 2499, 2498, the endless descent of the digits boring me out of my skull as I walked nearly two-hundred doors down. There was no interruption from the boredom of it, no pictures on the wall, no decor, not so much as an interesting stain on the carpet. Just the hallway. Finally, as I counted down: 2350, 2349, 2348, I reached apartment number 2347. Fiddling with the key in my pocket, I took it out, and shoved it into the keyhole as I pushed open the door. 

They say home is where the heart is, but my heart's never been here, and I was sure it wouldn't ever belong here: no matter how long I lived in this place.

With a click, I flicked on the lights as I entered. 

My apartment was an old room, minimalistically decorated and spartan in its appearance. Across the left side, in a lowered dining area, was an eight-person table next to a massive trophy cabinet. I didn't earn much in the way of accolades, and I didn't often have guests over, so both were relatively useless. I definitely didn't need a table of that size. The largest amount of people that had ever sat at that table was two, when I had dinner with Vincent. It was nice, but the eight chairs were rather overkill, I thought to myself.

Inside the trophy cabinet was only a single trophy: the silvered lump of plastic that I had gotten on my first day for simply being a new employee. I hadn't earned anything since from this ghoulish place, and I took that fact as an accolade itself. If you were earning accolades here, that didn't mean you were doing something right - it meant you were doing something horribly, horribly wrong.

I wandered into the kitchen, grabbing a Tikka Masala microwave meal from the freezer and shoving it into the cream-coloured standing microwave that sat on the kitchen bench. As it whirred with intensity, I took that bag of clothes that I'd been sweating in, and dumped them into the machine - letting it spin. Coming from a world of magic and having to adapt to all this machinery was an absolute pain, and even now I still had no idea how most of the contraptions in my apartment worked. I barely knew how to use them. 

As I waited for the microwave meal, I stood in the lounge-room, looking out at the swirls through the tiny window - the only natural light you could get in here. Unlike in my boss's office or on the office floor, where full windows opened up to that beautiful ocean of colour, up here only a tiny porthole allowed in the light of the outside world. Up here, on your own time, they didn't want you dreaming too much about a world beyond this one. 

Beneath that porthole window, in the far corner of the room, was a television that I never turned on: that I refused to turn on. Those TVs were where the suffering we made was aired in technicolor. The immortals could get the full, up-close experience using the Isekai System, but even without it - you could still get the highlight reel of human misery on those televisions. In fact, it was the only thing you could get on those televisions. Since I wasn't a sadist or a monster though, I'd rather avoid watching what their TV programs had to offer - hell, I was pretty sure even someone like Dalton couldn't bring themselves to watch what they had actually done. 

With a familiar monotonous beep, the microwave called out to me. I went into the kitchen, opened the microwave, and sighed. The dull contents of the packet were little more than an unsavoury facsimile of the beautiful image on the box. The pictures always lie, Vincent told me. Taking a fork from the drawer, I sat at the kitchen bench, eating the strange meal and trying to get it down my throat. It was dry, incredibly so, and the curried taste in my mouth felt like licking straw covered in pepper. It looked vaguely like curry, but tasted nothing like it. 

As I reluctantly scoffed down what I could, I scraped the rest into the bin. Wandering around the apartment, doing nothing in particular except waiting for that laundry load to go through, I entered my bedroom - taking the jean jacket and hanging it in the cupboard. It was a cool jacket. I might wear it at some point, but honestly, I somehow doubted that suit shirts and suit pants blended well with denim jackets - and I didn't have much else to wear.

It was getting late, and as the washing machine continued to cycle, I undressed - getting into my pyjamas as I placed my head against the pillow, thinking, hoping that I'd helped those people that I'd worked with today. I drifted off, falling into the world of dreams once more as I sat there, wondering how those people I'd helped were living now in their faraway lives. As much as I wanted to know, I didn't want to turn on the TV to find out. 

As I thought about the worlds and lives of those people, my fatigue overtook me - dragging me into the drowsy pits of sopor.

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