By the second step into the cafeteria, Troy knew that something was wrong. The people normally sending him glances were nowhere to be seen. No groups sat around, chatting about whatever dumb fancy they had at that moment. There was no overbearing line for coffee, nor were anybody made to stand around in tandem with others, as their insides were displaying their need for sustenance.

The cafeteria was wholly empty, except for the two people, only one of them having been there for more than a second. Charlie, looking as refreshed as ever, was quietly sitting at the normal table, going down on a plate filled with eggs, beans, and sausages. No hints of anything being amiss was present.

Troy, being the stead-fast denier of everything that did not make sense to him, just took it as him having a visual delusion, deciding to go through his usual routine, grabbing a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of coffee to the side. While some may have stated the need for variance in intake, having the same for breakfast every day was a pleasure that nobody had the clearance to ever criticize. Forks were small enough to enter the human eye for a reason.

“Good morning,” Charlie said, finishing up two forkfuls of beans with a gulp of orange juice. The muscular man was going through his food at a steady pace, almost no time wasted on talking, that fork of his already moving ahead for a third fill-up.

“And good morning to you as well,” Troy said, sitting down opposite the man. A slight deliberation was set on if he wanted to sit next to him instead, but the idea had just seemed too awkward. They were the only two there, and he just had to sit as close as possible? Being at the same table was more than enough to talk. Though, that did bring up one line of questions that was felt needed for the current situation. “Might you know why… there are no people here?”

Without the bodies to take up the sound, their voices had a slight echo to them. The room around the two men was designed to accommodate for hundreds, making the small number cause effects. They seemed like ants in the full scale of the room. It might have seemed luxurious for some, yet it was having an adverse effect on Troy. Some people were uncomfortable with small spaces, yet Troy had the exact opposite problem. Small rooms were easy for him.

Nothing wrong with being locked in a box for a few hours. No, it was the idea of being exposed to the outside that was blocking him from relaxing. Large spaces equalled no cover to hide in, no place where he could easily hide. It might just have been some odd survival instinct, but it affected him more than he liked to admit.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Charlie answered, trying to grin but being forced to close his mouth again quickly so that nothing unwanted spilt out. Comments would have been made about the lack of decency, yet Troy knew he would be in a similar predicament in a few seconds, starting with the first spoonful of hot, steamy oatmeal. It tasted delicious but any wrongdoings would make it burn his tongue in a way that would make him remember it for several hours. “There is a multitude of people present here.”

The mildly confused tone made Troy double-check that he was not imagining things, and there certainly wasn't anybody around. This did include being a slightly terrible person, flicking a piece of his oatmeal over at the nearest table. Usually, a large group of nearly six people would sit there, three woman and two men, talking about the complexities found in the feline genome. He had never bothered to listen in too carefully, but the topic nearly never changed around too much. And there was just normally never a time where he would not be able to listen in, with the group being there almost every time Troy had been in the cafeteria.

Oatmeal landed on the table without a problem. If there had been anybody sitting close to it, they would have gotten some on them. No reaction was seen, heard, or other seen. Nothing was there to react, just like he should have guessed from the moment Charlie looked to be stopping himself from cackling.

“It must be you that is a little blind and deaf today, then,” Troy surmised, looking away from his miniature food-fight with him and a table. If there had been any napkins, he would have cleaned it up hurriedly, yet nothing of the sort could be seen close to him. Did the facility expect people to eat like civilised people, never spilling anything somewhere it did need to be? “Because there is nobody else here than us.”

“Of course there isn't,” Charlie said as if Troy had just said the ocean was lightish blue. “I just said that there are people here. If you had not noticed, the two of us are human beings. Sure, we might bleed black some days of the week, but that doesn't mean anything on the long rainbow.”

Okay, Troy was beginning to understand just what that man was trying to do. It was their first talk of the morning, and Charlie had already decided that fucking with him was the funniest thing in the world. Wonderful. He could not have asked for anything better in the whole wide world. Maybe a blazing unicorn that was disguised as a brown-glazed sugar-doughnut, but that was just too realistic for him.

“I know that the two of us are here, yes, but I just want to hear if you know anything about the lack of people around us. Was there any evacuation or something?” Troy asked back, deciding it would be best for everybody if he ignored the comment about their black blood. It was meant as a joke, yet the image in his head was not something safe for a work environment. Those old horror-flicks really had messed something up in his mind.

At the mention of other people, Charlie comically did a double-take on his surroundings, going so far as to deeply gasp. Troy knew for a fact that the muscular man had noticed the lack of people, and was just doing it to mess with him, yet the situation was a little humorous for him. Not that he let him see that he found it funny, but it was still there in his head.

“No evacuations have happened in the time that I have worked here, so I do not think that it's going to start now,” Charlie said with a shrug as if he did not give too many neurons the task of worrying about the lack of people. “Maybe they collectively decided that breakfast was for dummies? You know how it is nowadays, people just jumping on all of those trends that they find. What do you know, maybe there was something about skipping breakfast today on the shared network? Perhaps it was not said directly, being more of a threat from an anonymous source that promised the secrets of anybody entering these confines being revealed to everybody.

Maybe there were even a few who tried to disprove it but got themselves a taste of the poison for trying to deny it all. Maybe there are a few people who got away with a few illegal deals, who now have so much evidence against them that we will likely never see their faces, putting them up as examples of just why you should trust anonymous messages ordering you to refrain from doing specific things. Not like people could not eat breakfast at one of the other cafeterias if they needed to.”

That dump truck of speculation ended off with Charlie downing the rest of his juice, and getting up to get some more. As Troy was not feeling confident with sitting with his thoughts, and that he wanted to know more about what the hell the man was talking about, he decided to follow Charlie up to the buffet, his cup of coffee in hand. The intention was to get down the first cup of it, so he could refuel before they got back down, but the liquid was as hot as one could guess, and the pitiful attempt to get it down quickly only resulted in Troy getting burnt on the top of his mouth.

“So, you are attesting to threatening over a hundred people with blackmail, so that you could, what, not make them get breakfast today?” Troy asked, not understanding the motives of the day. What was that man trying to do, making people hungry from the start of the day? “I can not say that the benefits outweigh the risks with this one because I genuinely do not see anything you can get from this.”

“I see some peace and quiet and a distinct lack of people trying to record the both of us for the change of people recognizing their names,” Charlie clapped back, sipping some newly acquired tea. They walked back to the seats, Troy still having his original coffee in hand. “Yet, wherein those ramblings did I say that it was me behind those messages? I am a person, after all. I go on the same media as everyone else, so it would be normal that I would get the warning as well.”

“If you got the same message and saw what not taking it seriously did, then you would not have come here. If you were under the same constraints as everybody else, then just going to another cafeteria would have been better, just like you said before,” Troy countered with, trying to make the other man confess his illegal activities.

The two sat back onto their normal placements, Charlie being the only of the two to have gained anything from their journey. Well, Troy did technically gain himself a lesson in patience and a burned mouth, but it was not like he was going to brag about that fact anytime soon.

“You could say that I am immune to blackmail, in a way. It is kinda hard to threaten me with revealing information that people already know,” Charlie said, sounding casual about his darkest secrets being out in the open. But not too out in the open, as Troy had never heard of it before. Or, at least he did not think he had. “I can't say that I see any reason to be moved by any of those threats if I have already suffered the consequences of disobeying. And, really, it is beginning to be fun with how many people think they have one over me. They believe they can force me into doing what they want me to do, not knowing I am one level over them already.”

“What is that secret of yours, then?” Troy asked, finally beginning to get to the bottom of his coffee. Yet, it looked to have been improperly brewed, the lower parts of it not being even out enough. He went to grab one of the new utensils on the table, but his arm was grabbed by Charlie.

“I’ll tell you sometime later,” Charlie said, his voice switching over to one that showed his finality with the subject, not because of what it was becoming, but due to what had now been seen. “Would you mind telling me why you have bandaged your arm? Or better yet, could you tell me who sliced it with a knife?”

… Right. The man had the equipment inside him needed to fully scan another body. It had been a stroke of luck that Charlie had not done it sooner. Yet, Troy had hoped he would have neglected to do it at all, just letting him pass the needed time for it to heal naturally. It might have been a few days, yet he was sure he could have gone through it without any larger mishaps. Fitness might have been a hard thing to accomplish with agitating the wound, but Troy was sure he could have pulled through with any larger problems.

Being shown that Charlie knew of the wound was an unsettling thing, as Troy truly did not know how to answer it. This culminated into him just staring at the older man in silence, his mouth remaining unmoving, his eyes widened like a deer in headlights. He truly did understand what fear paralysis meant. He also knew how little he tried to combat it, as it would have required him to lie perfectly so much more.

“I feel stupid for even asking that, honestly,” Charlie finally said, ending off the silence with a sigh of his own, leaning back in the chair while he was at it. The man seemed to age a decade in those seconds as if the pressure just got to him more than it normally did.

“Troy, I don't like to advertise this too much, but I do have a few connections in higher places. It might not be on the levels of what you usually work with, but it is more than enough to get an official hearing going. If I mix some publicity in with it, forcing it to happen within a day or two. Now, I cannot promise about the results, but it will allow you to change over to another department if you even want-”

“Please stop talking,” Troy requested of the man, cutting into what was likely meant as an aide for him. He knew Charlie meant it well, and he could find that he would have done more drastic things if the positions had been switched.

“You are not supposed to have this happen to you,” Charlie fired back, sounding remorseful for having let it happen. “She is not supposed to do this. I do not know why she is doing it, I don't know what made it all start, but I know that you should not be the one to feel the effects of it. Troy, nobody here expects you to adapt to this abuse. We don't want you to adapt to it. This is not what life here is supposed to be for everybody. I can help you stop it from happening. I just need you to say-”

“No,” Troy said. “I know that what is happening isn't okay, I know that it's because of something out of my hands, and I know that it would continue happening to me if I do not get away from it. But… I don't expect it to continue for a long time. Charlie, I don't expect to be here for much more.”

The reaction he got told Troy just how he should have shut his mouth earlier.