Opening Day
A world by Ari Weaver
Opening Day
For fifty years the 1,900 people of Vallon have lived under their mountain by the rules of the Charter, voting on everything and eating cheese from their own caves. Today the great steel door rolls open and you're on the first team out. The valley is green, the old hotel has a birch tree through its roof, and a man on a horse is waiting in the meadow, eating an apple, as if he's been expecting you.
Playing as Traveler·
The great door of Vallon is two metres thick and moves on rails, and right now it's moving about forty centimetres a minute. Seraina Hug stands at the control panel with one hand on the lever and the other pressed flat against her mouth. Behind you, two hundred people are packed into the loading tunnel. Nobody is talking. A strip of light has come in along the edge of the steel, white and so bright it hurts, and it's crawling across the concrete toward your boots.
Commandant Urs Brügger walks down the line of the first team, counting out loud for the third time. There are eight of you, in borrowed boots and the Watch's grey wool jumpers, carrying a dosimeter, a first-aid bag, a radio and a packed lunch of bread and cave cheese.
The smell reaches you before the gap is wide enough to walk through. It's wet and green, much stronger than the hydroponic halls, with something sweet and rotten underneath that nobody in the tunnel has a word for.
At sixty centimetres Seraina lets go of the lever. The door stops with a clank you feel through the floor. She turns around, pulls the dosimeter off her own belt and pushes it into your hands.
“You're at the front, so you hold this,” she says. “If it clicks a lot, you shout. It shouldn't. The sensors have read clean for, well, as long as I've been checking them, which is six years. Okay. Urs? Is it time? I think it's time.”
The door1 of 3