A proud looking man, wearing a black suit and a strange white mask hid his messy appearance and disheveled black hair, walked calmly towards the center of a dimly lit room. Greeting him was a man wearing a blood-soaked apron and a white mask. The aproned man bowed and stepping to the left presented a white mask that rested on a pedestal. If one were to look closer, they would notice the macabre scene of piles of bodies strewn across the room.
The bodies were mangled and bloody, as if they were thrown there with little care to their appearance or dignity. The sharply dressed man callously ignored the bodies, as if this was a common sight for him, and walked forward towards the pedestal. The craftsman looked at the man and appeared to hold his breath as his work was inspected.
Inspecting the mask, he nodded in approval quietly. Picking it up off of the pedestal, he felt the smooth material for any defects. He admired the unblemished face of the mask, admired its purity and flipped it over to look at the inside.
Lining the inside of the mask is a set of dull red runes etched into the strange material. The red runes stood in broad contrast to the white mask and had a sense of wrongness to them. As if their existence in this world was unwelcomed.
The craftsman smiled and in a hoarse voice, spoke aloud as if trying to validate his work, "The runes held quite nicely sir."
Holding the mask in his hand he nodded in acknowledgement before speaking to seemingly no one.
"The quality is acceptable; shall I begin testing?"
He stood in silence for a few moments before a response came from a strange box above the only door inside of the room.
"Approved, stand by."
The craftsman looked away as the man began taking off his mask. The man's face was laid bare against the air of the room, though the craftsman dared not look. A massive scar ran from his chin up to his left ear, disfiguring his otherwise beautiful face. He handed his own mask to the craftsman before he affixed the new one to his face. As the mask touched his face, he could feel his skin crawl and a manic light entered his eyes.
Could this be the one?
After a couple of seconds passed by, he heard a heavy clunk come from the door as it opened. Light flooded the room from the hallway and as he turned around, he saw a pale young boy with his hands tied behind his back.
The boy was wearing a tattered pair of pants and a poor excuse of a mask over his face. A man in a clean grey uniform wearing a white mask pushed the boy inside with little resistance and closed the door behind the poor boy without uttering a single word.
The mask the boy wore was poorly painted a blue, with wood chips fraying the paint and an uneven texture as if its craftsman who created it was of subpar quality. Various symbols were painted in various other colors onto the mask and the sight of such poor quality made the man disgusted.
"You may begin." A voice echoed into the room.
A frenzied smile was hidden behind the man's face as he looked at the boy in front of him shaking in fear. Raising his hand, he could feel the power just waiting to be called upon. He clenched his fist, but nothing happened.
What?
He shook his head in confusion, he knew the runes that were etched into the mask, and how to activate them. The boy should be bleeding out of every orifice, and yet he was completely fine. Then he noticed the taste of iron on his lips, and a wet substance roll down his face from his eyes. In a panic he released the command, and suddenly lost strength in his legs as he fell to the ground.
The craftsman quickly responded, helping the man back to his feet.
"Another failure." He spit with a venom in his voice as he stood back up, feeling quite lightheaded.
A deafening silence hung in the room as the boy shakily asked if he may leave. The man ignored the boy's request, put his hand out for his own mask. Taking off the cursed mask, he wiped his face with his sleeve and just as he suspected, it was coated in his own blood. He threw the defective mask onto the ground and placed his own mask back onto his face as he walked towards the exit.
"Dispose of the materials, we will try again another day." The man stated viciously as light flooded the room once more.
"Gladly, sir."
The craftsman began walking towards the boy as the door shut.
Screams could be heard coming from the room as the man began to walk down the brightly lit hallway. After walking a couple minutes and taking a few turns he stopped by a large office. Inside a well-groomed young woman could be seen through a window, wearing a white suit and a white mask, as she was writing onto a piece of paper. Knocking on the door, the young woman looked up and waved him in.
"How did it fail this time?"
"The mask was indeed empowered, but the runes were directed onto oneself, not onto another."
"I suppose that is progress, thank you for your continued cooperation in this endeavor. Come here for a moment, I think I might know where we went wrong."
The man approached the desk and began talking with the eccentric researcher.
***
Leo woke up and felt the familiar pang of hunger clawing away at his stomach. He slowly sat up and put his pale-yellow mask back onto his face. Many in the slums had gotten used to sleeping with their masks on, but Leo just couldn't do it no matter how many tips his fellows slumfolk gave him.
Sighing, he stood up from his improvised bed of blankets and scraps of clothing he bundled into a pillow. He looked around, seeing that the shelter he was currently occupying was slowly emptying as people began their days.
Unlike those puritans in the upper part of town, the beginning of a day was a mad rush to the food lines before they ran out. If you were late, it meant hunting for food by almost any means. If you had to steal, so be it, even if it was out of someone else's hands.
Leo himself found such means as distasteful, but he wouldn't say it wasn't effective in a pinch. The growling of his stomach grew louder, and he began to walk outside. Since he woke up later than most, he was certain that the food lines would already be full and the food available greedily eaten. Cursing his luck, he decided that since food was off the table, he could at least start his job early and hope to find some scraps of a meal that the puritans had thrown away in their wastefulness.
Walking through the slums, it was mostly quiet this late in the morning, with a few fights breaking out every other block or so over the scraps of food that could be found. A few individuals with black gang masks on eyed him, but with a scan they understood that Leo had nothing worth even harassing him over. Some recognized him by his mask during the commute to the dump, but very few in the slums would even bother to say anything unless you had something they wanted.
Approaching the dump that he worked at, Leo was glad that at the very least he was accustomed to the smell of the slums, since the dump wasn't that much worse. A few of his coworkers who were already working saw him enter the dump and gave him a cursory nod of acknowledgement. Looking around, Leo didn't see Cal, the only coworker that he bothered to befriend in this hellish place.
Must not have gotten here yet.
Leo walked into the main building of the dump, and seeing some familiar masks among those who arrived early, he clocked in. His stomach growled and he sighed. One of the others who were nearby looked over.
"Wake up late?" they inquired.
"Yup, missed breakfast lines entirely." Leo replied in a sour tone, "I didn't get dinner last night either so I'm starving. Hoping to get lucky and find a full three course meal those bastards threw out."
They chuckled "Yeah and maybe I'll find a pure mask and buy my way out of this place."
Another person yelled over "Sure, they will even make you the governor of this trash pit, just think about it, all the trash you could ever want!"
Leo cracked a smile underneath his mask; it seems that his coworkers were in a better mood than he was today. Looking back to the task at hand, he put on gloves and an apron that the dump provided for the workers.
Various different gangs had tried to steal these precious pieces of fabric in the past, and shortly after there was a gang war as the workers tried desperately to keep the one decency that the puritans gave them here at the dump.
The puritans treated the slums as their personal toys for the most part, so even just providing them gloves and an apron to sift through their garbage was a luxury. Most people in the slums had to sell themselves for food to provide pleasure at the sick games those bastards hosted so that they could get their kicks. As much as it pissed everyone in the slums off, there was really nothing they could do about it.
Years back, before even Leo's parents were born, that anger had reached a boiling point and there was a massive revolt from in the slums. The result was a bloodbath that no one in the slums could have expected. The pure masks, the white masks that the puritans wore, had a strange power to them. It was as if even being around them would give off a feeling of wrongness and make a fellow feel sick.
With inhuman strength and endurance that the pure masks provided them, the puritans firmly put down the revolt within a day, slaughtered the leaders of the revolt and their families as if to tell everyone of the slumfolk living here 'We own you, don't forget it'.
Since the revolt, the treatment of the slumfolk by the puritans has only gotten worse. Luckily the puritans still had use of the slums and so they were allowed to live. However, they wouldn't do much more than provide the bare minimum to make sure starvation didn't eliminate large swaths of their pets.
Leo had thought of running away and escaping this place when growing up. That hope was completely crushed when he realized that freedom was an impossibility after four of his childhood friends were slaughtered at the city gates for even daring to attempt to leave.
So, he resigned himself to finding a job at 16, leaving his parents and siblings 'home' to strike it on his own. That, and to no longer burden them with finding him food, was the least he could do.
His thoughts wandered as he entered the dump proper. He pulled out a trolly and placed it under a chute that trash would flow out from. As he pressed the button to allow trash to flow into the bin, he felt a weird pressure bearing down on his very soul for a brief moment.
Something felt wrong but he couldn't quite place what changed about the world. Leo looked around to his nearby coworkers, but no one else seemed to react to whatever the feeling was.
I'm losing my mind, need to eat something soon...
Shaking off the feeling he pressed the button once more to turn off the chute once the trolly was filled to the brim. He grimaced as he pushed the heavy trolly towards an open sorting table. Looking at the trash in his trolly, the feeling of wrongness returned. Pushing through the feeling, he began the tedious work of sorting the trash into their appropriate piles. As he worked it only seemed to worsen though, his face going pale under his mask as he continued to strain.
He thought about calling someone over to take over, but that would cause his pay to get docked, and he couldn't help but to have this nagging feeling that he would regret doing so. After a few minutes of sorting through the puritans' trash, Leo's eyes widened with shock as he saw a strange pure white material in the pile of trash and his blood curled. His heart rate quickened, his breathing labored, his hands shaking, and an overwhelming feeling of terror crashed over him like a wave.
A pure mask?!