Light crept under Rip’s eyelids. He fluttered them open, trying to focus. Sensation came back all at once.

He tilted his head up. The first thing he noticed: he was naked.

Also, he was lying on his back on a concrete floor.

He sat up, cheeks scraping the cold floor, and he looked around.

What a drab place, he thought.

Walls were uniformly metal and gray. They looked like they came from a tired old battleship.

A wooden bench stretched across one wall, facing a phalanx of lockers. Everything looked old, worn, and in need of paint.

Rip stood up, barefoot, and looked all around.

“Where’d my clothes go? Where am I?”

He scratched his head, dirty blond hair cut short in a military flattop.

The wall opposite the lockers looked bare, nothing but metal. So did the back wall. The front wall had a door, though, with a latch handle on it.

Still confused, he walked to the door and tried the handle.

“Locked. Of course.”

He looked around the room and walked back to the lockers.

He opened a couple, finding them empty. On the third try, he found a pair of overalls.

“What is this?”

A window opened in his mind’s eye.

[You have found an ordinary pair of linen overalls.]

His eyes narrowed as he gazed at the readout.

“Is that my implant feeding me messages? It’s gotta be. Am I in a new game or something?”

Shrugging, he sniffed the overalls gingerly. They smelled clean.

Deciding prudence was the better part of valor, he put them on and covered himself.

He opened four more lockers before finding a pair of boots.

[You have found a pair of ordinary worker’s boots.]

“Thank you, Mr. Obvious.”

He sat on the worn wooden bench and slipped his bare feet into the boots. To his surprise, they fit perfectly. So did the overalls, even though he stood an even six feet tall.

“Huh. What are the odds?”

He tried the door again, rattling the handle. He banged on it a few times.

“Hey! Anybody out there? Let me out!”

After a few minutes, he gave up. Looking around the room once more, he saw something in the corner he had overlooked earlier: a wrench.

“Don’t tell me. I found a wrench.”

He walked over and picked it up.

[You have found an enhanced adjustable wrench. It can be used for a wide variety of tasks, even as a weapon in a pinch.]

“Adjustable? Is that right? Well, then, where’s the little wheel to adjust it, hm?”

He looked, but could not find any way to adjust it. It looked to fit a three-quarters inch nut on one end, if his eyes did not deceive him, and a one inch nut on the other. But it did not look adjustable.

Slowly, his gaze drifted back to the locked door as he gripped the wrench.

“Alright. I’ve played this type of game before.”

He walked over to the door and popped the latch with the wrench as hard as he could.

The lock broke with a clang, and the door swung open.

“Right. That’s how you do it.”

Rip slipped the wrench into one of the big pockets on the front of his overalls and stepped out into a hall.

Like the room, the walls here looked drab and gunmetal gray. Dim lighting came from sconces on the walls, set every 20 feet or so.

He squinted at the closest one.

“Is that gas? It is. Gas lighting. What is this place?”

Confused, he took a few steps to the left and headed down the hall that way. It looked to be very long, with doorways interspersed between the lights. The hall curved in the distance.

The first door he came to was on the right. It looked identical to the one he opened. He tried the handle and found it locked, too.

Rip shrugged, his bare shoulders moving under the overalls. He kept going.

He walked about a hundred feet, he estimated, trying five different doors. Two on the right, three on the left. They were all locked.

On his way to the sixth door, he heard a woman scream. He broke into a run and approached the entrance, which appeared to look exactly like all the others.

The woman screamed again, a horrendous sound filled with dread and despair.

Rip rattled the handle and found it locked, as expected. He pulled out the wrench and bashed the latch, breaking it. He pulled it open in one smooth motion.

Inside, in the dim light, he saw cages lining the back wall of a slightly larger room than the one where he woke up.

The cells were tiny, the size of old-fashioned phone booths. Two of the five cells held men, one older fellow and one younger. The third on the far right held a beautiful young woman with long black hair and a horrified look on her face.

Her scream split the air.

A greasy, stoop-shouldered man stood in front of her, arms reaching through the bars. But no matter how often he tried grabbing her breasts, she somehow evaded his paws in the narrow space.

“Don’t make me come in there,” he said with a leer.

Rip noticed the man wore similar light blue overalls as he had found in the locker room. These were dirty and stained, though. The man stank, like he had just spent hours in the bowels of a mechanical beast. In his mind, Rip named him Oily.

He turned lazily to look at Rip, standing there with a wrench in his hand.

“Where’s your shirt? No matter. You can help me get some before you go on shift.”

He pulled out a key chain with a malicious grin and turned back to the woman’s cage.

“Get away from there.”

Oily turned again to look at Rip.

“Look, I know the boss said hands off until he comes back with the suits. But ain’t no one gonna mind if we get us some. I just got off shift and I want her. Now, you gonna help me or just watch?”

A switch went off inside Rip at the words. Without even thinking, he pulled his arm back and threw the wrench at the man. It sailed across the room and thunked into his forehead, sinking halfway into Oily’s skull.

The dirty old man dropped to the floor without a word, blood pooling on the concrete.