"Remember My Chains, Edi"

Drip.

Drip.

Drip-a-drip. "What in the..?", Edi exclaimed, not used to being woken up by anything other than the alarm bell. This time, by water dripping on him, hitting him right on his forehead. He wiped the water away, and squinted hard, in an attempt to try and help his eyes adjust to a sunbeam, hitting him right in his sleepy, annoyed face. He rolled over and went back under again.

Drip. Drip.

Drip - Edi yelled against the wall, the sound bouncing back out to where the guard was supposed to be. "Guard, there is a freaking leak in the roof. Fix it!" - He tried calming down, and, again, closed his eyes.

Drip-drip. Drip. He jumped out of his bed, his whole figure vibrating with pure frustration over all the lost, sweet sleep. He had a nice dream, for once. Peculiar. While pacing for a second, he immediately became aware of his surroundings. They were... Unrecognizable.

He had never before seen the room he was currently in. The walls were of some tiger-striped, chalky substance. The walls would disintegrate slightly at his touch, though they were solid. Approximately as thick as the length of a bus. He could tell from the way his own cell was designed, and by looking over to other holding cells, through the incredibly clear glass in his door - one was empty, with the door open, but he could not see inside the actual room because of the length of the wall. It made it more into a kind of hallway, leading into that vacant holding cell.

A loud thud made the roof shake off residual dust, and the glass in his door and walls went opaque, cloudy. Movement resounded off the hallway walls, right outside his cell, muffled. There were holes in the glass and walls, patterned together in a diamond shape, which all shut tight - simultaneously, as if someone had flicked a switch. Then, silence. His ears popped, painfully hard, and the glass went clear again.

Edi was now aware of the low, rustling noise outside. Maybe there was vegetation out there. He looked outside, through the small, square window by the end of his bed, which he had to tiptoe on a kind of wooden box he had found under his bed, to be able to reach up to the window and get a view. The glass here, too, had holes in it, put into diamond patterns as in the door. He tried lightly punching it with his fist to see if it would give way, but it would not shift or crack, not at all. It seemed to be organic in a way Edi had never seen before - though he was no glass-maker, nor was he any sort of expert regarding minerals.

Outside his cell, there was an open sort of agricultural field, making room for triangular, wooden shapes, holding something that surely had to be hay or grass, surely some sort of vegetation - it was hanging there to dry, to be sure. It seemed to be a community garden or a recreational space close to these constructions. Perhaps activities for the captives - fellow captives, of course. Edi just had never seen anything here ever before, and he started experiencing anxieties since he was in a prison cell somewhere God knows - Edi sure did not know. "A prison in a wet cave?", Edi mumbled.

He got tired of all this wondering and trying to imagine what in the world was going on - "Guard? Guard? Anyone?", he shouted out, carefully, through the holes in his door, frantically trying to establish contact with any other human life form.

He went over and started banging on the door, which, unsurprisingly, would not bulge or give.

He tried kicking it outward, putting all his weight behind the kick, like a police officer would break down a door of a suspect in any cool police show ever, but nothing happened. His hands and feet were not made for such physical endeavours, so he had to stop after embarrassingly few, potentially bone-breaking attempts, and went back to his pacing back and forth, around his few, designated square meters.

After pondering about whether he could scrape or claw his way out of there with a spoon or an otherwise, possibly, acquirable tool, or just by hand and fingernail, he - finally - laid down on his bed to calm down an angsty and spiralling mind.

As his head hit the pillow, which, slowly, shaped itself after the imprint of his head like a dry sponge, he shut his eyes for a moment, but, immediately, opened them wide again. There was a hole in the roof, almost as big as his own head! And, way up there, in the palate of the grotto, a row of stalactites were hanging down, as a grouping of teeth, that threatened anyone below them of chewing them up, of spearing them like a harpoon overlooking innocent, scattering fish. One of them was also staring Edi down - it was hanging directly over this roof hole, and, without a doubt, was also the object responsible for dripping on Edi's head. It must have been there for quite some time, dripping away down on the roofing of the cell, digging away, until it got through, and then, would begin digging, dripping and picking away at whatever was between it and the pillow.

"Guard? Are there anyone around?", Edi began shouting at the top of his lungs, this time with confidence. He was getting tired of feeling like he had been locked away in an, otherwise, empty prison. "Guard!", he belted out. "Guar... Blagh", he stopped himself mid-syllable, despising his own helplessness.

"Yep, yep. Knock it off with all the racket", a low, dry, churning voice said. Edi went up to his door, trying to angle his view to try and get a glance of the approaching figure. A pale, short, uniformed man came through the hallway and stood behind the door. "Step back, or I'll surely ink ya. Trust me, ya do not want that. It'll bother ya for days", the warden warned him, now revealing the most magnificent moustache.

"You'll 'ink' me? What do..? What?", Edi stuttered out, somewhat shocked that he actually had not been locked away in a wet prison to die, and relieved to see another, seemingly humanoid creature. And in plain awe of his majestic, upper lip broom. Edi followed orders and quietly stepped back to allow the warden in, without him pulling out this aforementioned "ink trick", though Edi's curiosity had been awakened at the promise of a kind of self-defence he had never seen before. "Come in, chief warden", he invited. The guard scanned Edi from tired footwear up to fuzzy bed hair and soon pulled away his examining gaze to control their surroundings.

"I'm no chief, thank ya", he grunted, marching around the room, lifting up a thin mattress from rusty bedsprings, most likely searching for objects that did not belong. Edi stood straight and held perfectly still, in line as a private ready for inspection. "Right-y. How're ya settling in, are ya all slept in?", the guard asked, now done inspecting, with his back to the door. Without giving Edi time to respond, he kept talking: "Ya were in a horrid state when we got ya, see. Bo found ya, see - on his morning walk. Ya had been deposited just by the reserves, see", the warden rambled out, taking it as a given that anyone would know everything about anyone and anything that happened every day, wherever they were - and now Edi had to know.

"Mister Guard, can I ask you something?", putting on an over-polite face and tone, trying to get a say in this conversation. "Where are we, exactly? Like - where in the world?", eagerly waiting for a response from a conversational partner who seemed to be pretty selective about which topics he wanted to expound on. He grunted, and was, obviously, processing something, maybe considering what answer to present.

"Well... We're in Nuja - or, rather, a suburb of sorts", he let out, a bit disgruntled. He went on his way at once, depriving Edi of a chance to follow up on this newfound information.

"Huh, 'Nuja'? Where is that?", Edi asked. The guard was on his way out, locking the door after him.

"You'll see once", he responded. "Lunch and yardwork at noon", he semi-shouted, raising his voice while strolling down the jailhouse corridor.

"The stalactites", Edi squeaked out, trying to make his voice reach out to the warden. "Do they ever fall from the cave ceiling?"

The small holes in the doors and windows all shut, like sessile barnacles, or the horizontal pupils of a goat - and the glass in the door and windows went opaque again, like ink being sprayed into glass-clear ice or water. Silence, and no entrance for fresh air, other than the hole in the ceiling.