Depression (G:AF Remix for CP Wiki)

There lived a young boy named Ted.

Ted was no different from other people. He did not possess special talents. He was not a genius. He had no famous ancestors. But Ted and his mother had an unusually strong maternal relationship, possibly due to the fact that Ted was an alleged only child and that his father had left when he was born, supposedly to war. So all he had was his mother.

Ted's mother had taught him to be inquistive, thoughtful, and observant. She taught him to be caring towards others and to not be bloodthirsty. She treated Ted with more motherly dotage than any other mother could. And Ted loved her right back.

The two people lived in a small condominium in a rural village. Most of Ted's life was wartime; His country and the enemy nation were brawling once again. Young men were called to the army in a selective service act. Ted was too young to be admitted to the army, but it was only a matter of time. He was excited to join and fight gallantly alongside comrades; However, when he told this to his mother, her normally serene expression darkened, and she pulled Ted closer to her and wrapped him in a tight embrace. Later that night, as Ted was drifting off to sleep, he thought he could hear his mother sobbing in her cot.

Then tragedy struck.

An enemy soldier apparently had too much booze to drink. Half-crazed, he stumbled into the rural village, and in his drunken rage he barged into Ted's house.

"What're yer'll idiots doin' here, huh? Filthy scum, I'll teach y'all a less'n y'all won't ferget, good fer nuthin' pissbags!" he drawled. The soldier brought forth a slick rifle and waved it around maniacally.

"Please, put the gun down and talk this out civilly. There's a youngster in here," the mother said. Ted cowered beside her, but his mother's tone was firm without a hint of fear.

A deafening crack rang out. There was a hole in the roof. Ted flinched.

"YOUNGSTER? Greedy little scumbags, y'all are! I swear 'n me life I'll kick yer forsaken ar-" he paused and smiled gleefully, the smile of a drunken man pass Step 3 of hangover.

"Godforsaken youngsters."

The soldier readied his rifle. The mother stepped in front of her son.

The soldier pulled the trigger.

A month later Ted was admitted into the army.

He was lucky to be alive. Had the soldier not passed out after firing his rifle thanks to the booze, he would've been a goner for sure. But what good is life when your beloved mother is gone?

Ted felt nothing. He could not process the fact that he was alone in the harsh reality now. He looked around his soldier's bunk. Looked at the roped noose on the wall. But he reconsidered his decision. No, he thought. He would at least give his mother a proper keening funeral.

Ted trotted out of his bunk and into the bloodstained battlefield to have a word with his squadron general, a burly, gruff man who had a constant smell of tobacco around him.

"Hmm? You want WHAT?" he said when Ted had asked for a funeral.

"A funeral, sir. For my mother."

The general gaped at him, and exploded in laughter.

"Funeral? FUNERAL?" he spluttered.

"HA! You footsoldiers think you're all so important. But you know what you are? You're nothing. You're the filler. You're the stuff that tires out the enemies and die so the rest of the army - the better part of the army, I should say - can finish them off.  Do you know how many soldiers die every day?  Do you think your kind is worth even a bouquet of flowers?  For God's sake, your family could be dying writhing in flames and come back here and see if I give a single damn!  Now get back to your station, soldier!"

That night Ted seriously thought about hanging himself again. Oh, the indignity! The humiliation! The offense given to his deceased mother was a stab to his heart.

"Your family could be dying writhing in flames and come back here and see if I give a single damn!"

The ugly phrase swam in his mind the whole night.

In this moment he remembered a conversation he had with his mother:

"Mother, where is my father?"

"...Son, your father has gone to a better place," she had replied. "He is waiting for you in the better place."

He hoped his mother was with her father in that better place.

The next day, Ted was out for trench warfare in Sector 5. Whilst he was taking a breather as the enemy forces begin to retreat, he asked his nearby friend, "Steve, did you know that we're just the filler for the army?  Did you know that we're the stuff that dies so the better armies finish the enemies off?"

Steve replied, "Where do you come up with this nonsense?  Us footsoldiers are just as important as the rest of the army.  Have some pride in yourself!" He then resumed the job of inserting ammunition into his rifle.

"Steve, did you know they don't give funerals for us?" Ted asked again.

"Hush Ted, I'm going to scope that enemy bitch there."

And so Ted leaves, while a ear-tingling crack of a rifle shot well rings through the air.

Ted's mother had used to sing him to sleep with the Day is Done lullaby. It was a gentle, sweet-sounding angel music that could've comforted the beasts of Hell themeselves. It went like this:

Day is done,

Gone the sun,

From the lake,

From the hills,

From the sky,

All is well, safely rest,

God is nigh.

So he blamed his recently frequent nightmares on the absence of the lullaby. While he was too old for such things, Ted missed his mother's lullaby out of all the things her death has taken away from him. He had never had a nightmare once in his life, only sweet dreams. But now, but now...

Flash. He was inside a rusty metal edifice. He'd seen meatpacking slaughterhouses in better condition than where he was right then: Old, grimy bloodstains splattered on the walls, leaking pipes with goopy clogs caked around the edges, crude steel placement, and the creaks and groans of an ancient, worn building.

Ted ventured through cautiously. He saw a rusted green pipe, oddly shiny and lucid in contrast to the bleak surroundings. Although reason told him not to enter, dreams are not ruled by reason. It is quite the opposite.

Ted chose to enter.

He entered and he fell through a giant hole, like a Rabbit Hole, falling faster, faster, faster by the second, passing steel and blood and chains which seemed to be all in a big blur, falling, falling,  falling...

Oof.

He hit a cushioned sack, a worn but still soft and bouncy one. Ted sighed in relief. Then he saw what he had done.

There were two extremely narrow chambers on both walls that enclosed the hole, just big enough so one person can fit in. Multitudes of children were stacked on top of each other and they seemed to be in great pain. In fact, the bottom five children of each column seemed to already be dead, squashed from the weight of its brethen. They were stationed on a tiny platform, the type that retracts by pressing a switch.

When Ted had hit the cushion, he had pressed the switch hidden below it.

The platforms retracted into the walls, and the human columns slowly began sinking into the lava below. A rancid smell of flesh being cooked alive, as well as evaporating blood, made Ted gag. But the smell was nothing compared the horror, the shock, and the guilt.

Guilt of having killed a massive amount of his fellow people, even by accident.

Ted could've sworn he had heard one of the children say, " Thank you...  "

And with a start Ted woke up. He leaned over and checked his Caesium clock. It was still 3:00 am.

The nightmares persisted in spite of Ted's efforts.

He had tried multiple things. He listened to calming music on the small VCR radio. He counted to 100 in his bed. He drank milk and exercised till he thought his heart would burst. But nothing worked; The horrendous venue he had heralded as the Death Purgatory was all he could dream about. It had gotten progressively worse - After the horrifying event of the mass genocide of children by fire the first time he had the nightmare, which he knew he had caused, it just escalated from there.

On the oily ceiling were hundreds and thousands of exsanguinated human corpses tied up to the ceiling by their own intestines, like a noose. Ted could hear screams echoing throughout the walls, being emitted by an unseen presence in suffering, a strangely feminine cluster of screams that might as well as made Ted himself scream as well.

But he had heard that tone of the scream somewhere. Who was it...?

And then there were the Trial Rooms.

Ted assumed the Trial Rooms were theoretical atrocities dreamt up by him after the recent savagenesses of multiple people. Whatever they were, they made sure the dark side in him was forced out lest he would kill himself in real life. The way he saw it, completing the Trial Rooms were the only way to get out of this Hell of a nightmare.

The first Trial Room was marked with a bloody  1    on the doors. They were sliding doors, the type that appears on elevators. Despite himself Ted stepped through... and regretted it as soon as he did so.

For in the room, designed so as that in the background there was a maze-like structure with a lake of blood beneath, with another door on the foreground where Ted was that was locked, were multiple people with crazed expressions on their faces as well as bloodshot eyes. They were all maniacally trampling themselves to try to get through a large slab of wall. On the other side of the wall was nothing - just a pitfall that lead into the lake of blood. There was a switch on the floor where Ted was standing.

In this nightmare, switches were a bad thing. Ted himself found this out after Day 1.

But the locked door...

Just then a sudden impulse made him dash up and flip the switch. He stared in horror, then slowly turned his head to the maze.

The wall had been lowered. All the trapped humans jumped out of the maze and into the lake of blood, in which they howled shrill screams of euphoric joy as they drowned in crimson blood. It was beyond sickening. A panel slid out in front of Ted, and on it was the key. With trembling fingers, he took the key and inserted it into the lock on the other door. It unlatched. Ted watched the doors open, then walked through.

He saw a messy message scrawled onto the walls:

CONGRATS, YOU PASSED THE FIRST TRIAL ROOM. THAT WAS A TOUGHIE, WASN'T IT? GG, YOU ARE FINALLY BECOMING WHO YOU REALLY ARE. -- CORRVPTVS

With this, Ted hoped for a better, easier end to this nightmare.

But it only got worse.

It was Day 15 of the nightmares when Ted came across the second Trial Room. The second Trial Room had a bloody  2    scrawled onto the sliding doors. He entered it. This time, the room was elegantly designed with a red glow presiding over it. Ted could not find lamps or anything that might be emitting the red glow - it seemed to be purely superficial. On the walls hung glowing red humanoid skulls that had a satanic, upside-down pentagram etched onto their foreheads. In the front of the room was one child. This child was a young male, about the age of Ted back when his mother was alive. The young child was whimpering. Behind him was another locked door. Beside him was a ivory table with a shotgun placed on it.

Ted went up to the child and tried to speak to him, comfort him, soothe him, but found that he could not. The child wouldn't talk but instead looked at him with big innocent eyes tearfully, as if expecting something. Ted had to save the child and get out of the Trial Room. But the key was nowhere to be found. The only things in the Trial Room were a young boy and a shotgun...

Wait. ''No. No! NO! I'M NOT DOING IT!''  his thoughts screamed as the realization slowly dawned upon him.

As if in response, the feminine screams started again. They kept getting louder and louder, threatening to make Ted's ears burst...

He couldn't stand it anymore.

Without thought Ted grabbed the shotgun and aimed it at the terrified child. He squeezed his eyes shut.

And just like that drunk Toad soldier who took the life of his mother, he pulled the trigger.

Ted was back into the nightmare again. It was Day 27.

The feminine screams were getting louder now. Ted thought he was getting closer and closer to its source. By this time all the grime, blood, and steel no longer bothered him in his nightmare. He was used to it - how could he not when that was all he had dreamed of for the past 27 days?

Ted cautiously tiptoed into a tiny backdoor room beneath a row of stairs. This backdoor room was filthy with vermin crawling all over and only housed another door opposite to its entrance. The screams were deafening. Ted was sure they were coming from the said door. And as he thought this, his eyes could make out a barely visible, ancient, crimson  3.

It lead to the third Trial Room.

This was it. He could finally escape this nightmare if he passed this. Without a single thought, Ted opened the door wide and confronted the source of the screams. The oddly familiar screams.

The room was dull and looked like a gloomier replica of Ted's own condominium. To be specific, it was his own room. It was grayscale and was one of the few rooms not to be made in steel and covered in blood and waste.

In the middle of the room was a chair. His chair, the wooden cushioned one that he sat on to work.

Someone was strapped onto that chair. That someone was balled up by metallic chains. That someone's mouth was gagged by a piece of green scotch tape. That someone was bloodied and exsanguinated all over and seemed to be in great agony. There was a polished glass table with a Glock pistol on it.

That someone looked at Ted with tear-brimmed eyes. That someone screamed again. And at once, Ted saw the future, the present, and the past all in this mangled, pitiful someone.

That someone was his mother.

Ted grabbed the gun, aimed it inside his mouth, and fired. Nothing happened. It fired blanks. He tried it again, and again, and again. The nightmare was taunting him, not letting him kill himself but rather fire bullet hell onto innocent living people. He went to his mother and tried to unchain her, soothing her and using calming words. He sang the lullaby she always sang to her. Ted's mother didn't seem to hear her, she was screaming her head off. Every minute a tac floated from Ted's well-polished desk and embedded itself onto his mother, causing excruciating pain. There were already too many on her to live, yet she still lived with all that as the torture the nightmare had brought forth on her for 27 days straight had condemned her to. Ted was sobbing, screaming in anger, punching the cold, hard ground. He knew if he fired the gun at his mother he would escape the nightmare, but he would be scarred for life. Ted's mother looked at him pleadingly. She finally mouthed, "Do it."

With trembling fingers, Ted raised the gun. He looked away. And he shot.

Suddenly the room was bathed in a bright light. Ted could make out a barely visible, anthropomorphic face in the light.

"HOW DID YOU LIKE OUR LITTLE FUNHOUSE, HMM? SHAME I HAVE TO LET YOU GO. TOYING WITH YOUR SANITY IS VERY ENTERTAINING. AT LEAST I'VE SEEN YOU PASS THE THIRD TRIAL ROOM!" it roared.

"Damn you! Damn you!"

The face got clearer and clearer. Then Ted finally realized with wretched shock that the face was none other then his own.

"THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE."

And as that demon promised, the nightmares were over.

But it wasn't the end of Ted's mental aberrations. His mind replayed the part where he shot his mother over and over again - and it was maddening.

He was at the battlefield again, right up in early morning with the sun spouting glorious beams, right next to Steve, who was cocking his rifle at the enemy squadron's lieutanent. The general was screaming orders mixed with an impressive amount of profanity at the cannoneers, stationed behind tall steel cannons mounted on the edges of the smoked battlefield's mountain.

Then it happened.

A large flash of light exploded in front of Ted and blasted him clean away. Some of the more unfortunate ones who were nearer to the explosion were simply incinerated. Dazed, as Ted looked up, he could make out the shape of an enemy bomber jet.

Ted was later escorted by officers to a white hospital tent to be examined upon. He was told to lie down on a stiff table covered by a white sheet. Soon after a genial military doctor in a tattered lab coat bustled through.

"Mornin' sol'er, I heard them 'xplosions 'n thought I'd take a look at you.  By the way, m'name's Jacob," he spoke in a redneck accent.

"Are you going to examine me?" Ted asked.

"Yup, dun see 'ny serious 'njuries but there could be 'nternal problems." Jacob got out his shining stethoscope and checked Ted's breathing, and performed X-Rays and other examinations on the footsoldier.

Ted stared intently at Jacob for no reason whatsoever the whole operation. The doctor turned to him and asked, "No minor 'njuries, sol'er.  You're good to go."

"Thank you."

Suddenly, the doctor's face contorted to a demonic, reptilian one complete with a fang-toothed maw. Ted screamed.

"YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD HIDE LIKE A COWARD FROM YOUR MEMORIES?  YOUR NIGHTMARES?  FOOL.  YOU CAN NEVER ESCAPE." it laughed like a demon from Hell.

Ted bolted up and raised his hand to slap... Jacob's shocked face. He reared back, winced, and rubbed his left cheek.

"Dud, dafuq was that fer?"

"Oh, sorry, I just thought... I think I'm hallucinating."

"Hallucinations, eh?  PSTD, per'aps?"

Ted was released from the hospital tent a few hours later, but the image of him shooting his mother swam in his head all day.

It drove him mad.

5 days later, Ted barged into his empty bunker without turning the lights on.

He blankly stared at a photo of him with his smiling mother, framed by a black wooden hem decorated with red ribbons. He stared at it for a long interval of time, before he nodded as if making a tacit decision to himself.

Ted grabbed a pistol from the wall and poised it to the side of his head, then went back to the picture of him and his mother. He then stared once again intently at it, never taking his eyes off.

He wanted the last thing he saw to be his mother.

Day is done,

Gone the sun,

From the lake,

From the hills,

From the sky,

All is well, safely rest,

God is nigh.