Lost In Thought

Who: Keto
Where: Some far corner of a warped Better Than Life
When: Time is an illusion in all nightmares
====================
Keto crept slowly along the dark street, jumping at every shadow.
He didn't know how long he'd been here now. It seemed like an
eternity since he'd last seen another human being - and those had
been Trisees and Sara. At the sight of a giant Shakespeare and a
regular-size Wildflower, Keto had just had too much, and had run out
into the fog.
The fog had cleared after a while...but only to reveal more horrors.
For the next infinite expanse of time, Keto had travelled through
more nightmares than he knew he could produce. Burning buildings,
brains in boxes that oozed slickly and laughed a gurgling laugh that
echoed in his ears, all the people he had known and who had loathed
him (which was a lot, naturally)...Keto had seen all of those, and
they had all exacted revenge upon him.
And still the damn machine hadn't overloaded. He was still stuck
here.
This place looked different, though. The scene, while most
definitely from his own mind (Seventy-Fifth Street, where he was
mugged for the first time, in fact), there were tiny signs that
something was different. Occasionally, bricks in the wall would be
replaced by metal lumps. Streetlamps would flicker with neon
brightness for a second. Holly's distorted image would appear
emblazoned on the night sky. Things like that.
All of these, to Keto's mind, were symbols that BTL was breaking
down, starting to crash. He was on the outskirts of it now, in an
area where the machines could no longer afford to expend enough
processing power to maintain the illusion.
If he could keep going, reasoned Keto, maybe the simulation would
simply cut him out, dropping him back into reality and focussing
instead on the other two unfortunates.
Even as he thought it, there was a deafening crackle of white noise
that caused Keto to drop to his knees, clutching at his ears...
...which came off.
This moment of terror passed swiftly when Keto realised that it was
not his ears which had come off, but rather a headset. A VR headset.
He was kneeling in the middle of the VR suite, headset in hands,
while Sara and Trisees sat prone against the walls, still deeply
entrenched in Better Than...or Worse Than...Life.
Crossing to the main control panel, Keto muttered something about
unreliable ointments and incompetant VR maintenance people, before
switching a few controls around.
"There," he murmured to himself, "The normal exit routine is
available now, at least. All they have to do is clap their hands..."
He looked at Trisees.
"Damn."
Pulling a roll of duct tape from his laboratory jacket pocket, Keto
quickly taped the exit button on Trisees' empty glove into the down
position.
"All he needs to do is clap one hand, then. And if they both clap,
they should both escape. Simple."
Except, of course, that not many people tend to clap in the face of
nightmares. But that was a minor consideration, thought Keto as he
set about trying to clean up the spilt ointment.
============================
OOC: Tag, Sara or Trisees. If you want to escape, you can now...or
if not, feel free to have more nightmarish terrors. ;)