Sins Loom: The Unwilling Weaver

The room grew quiet as Masami stared blankly at Ed. Everything she had gone through in the past day had turned her life upside down. She didn’t know what her future would bring, but she doubted it would be anything good. So when she heard Ed’s words, she was quite confused.

“What?” The words ‘new job’ were not what she was expecting at all. She had been taken away from her family and forced to sleep in a room where she had no chance to escape and had no clue where she was. Her future looked bleak, and she felt like she could die at any moment.

Is the work force situation that bad? Do companies have to resort to kidnapping people now? She felt that it was completely absurd. While she was trying to sleep, she dreamt that she was being used as a test subject for some wicked experiment and that she would be senselessly tortured. The only thing that blocked that thought from growing stronger was that the man before her seemed relatively friendly.

“Allow me to explain.” Ed smiled gently, trying to keep her calm. “My name is Ed, and I work for... Well, they never actually told me, but we all just call it ‘the company’. The company does many things, and is capable of things that your prior knowledge won’t be able to explain.”

“Is this some type of super secret shadow government? Are the conspiracy theories true?” she asked nervously, looking at Ed without blinking.

“Sort of,” Ed blinked, his mind quickly spinning things together around these questions. “You can think of it like a secret government. I’ll explain everything to you at a later date, when you pass your internship.”

After having her suspicions confirmed, her mind became a whirlwind of activity. She really didn’t like the sounds of that. She hoped she could just go back to streaming, that was so much easier than this right now. She felt that Ed was just being kind and that she would soon be whisked away and become some kind of lab rat.

“You said earlier that this was my new job. What do I need to do?” She didn’t want to ask, but she had to find out if she was going to be experimented on or not.

Ed’s smile faded, becoming serious. “It is our duty to punish sinners and give them a chance at redemption. Have you watched the Saw movies?”

“Mhm,” she gulped while nodding, not liking where this was going at all.

“Well we do what jigsaw does. We design deadly traps and situations that people will have to try and survive. You will see people die. And you will be the cause of their death,” Ed answered honestly, not wanting to sugarcoat anything. She deserved to know the truth.

She paled at his words, her body shivering. “No. No, I can’t do that. I won’t do that.”

“You’re going to have to, you have no choice.” Ed reached out, trying to place a comforting hand on her shoulder, but stopped when she flinched away from him. He sat back in his chair, giving her some time to think through everything.

“What happens if I refuse?”

“It depends really. You might get skinned alive, have your limbs torn off, or turned into a writhing pile of mush, forced to feel every moment of pain. It all depends on the situation at hand.” He said everything without batting an eyelid, like it was a normal conversation about the whether.

He had been desensitised to violence over the past few months of working here, and while he knew all of this was among the worst torture imaginable to normal people, he had grown accustomed to it. “And if you fail enough times, you will fail the internship.”

Masami’s face was now completely white, and she was on the verge of passing out from fear. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to run for that door and keep running until her body gave out and she returned home.

But she knew that was all a pipe dream. She didn’t even know where she was. How could she possibly return home? Not only that, she would be stopped before she could even reach the door, she felt it in her bones. She didn’t want to experience those things Ed had said. She would do anything to not experience that level of pain.

What was even worse was that when Ed mentioned that she would fail the internship, he made it sound like that was by far the worst of the things he said. “What happens if I fail?”

“You will die and will probably have your entire life erased from history. No one will remember you even existed.” Ed explained based off his own experience back then.

She gulped and looked down at herself, tears falling down in a steady stream, staining her shirt. She was shivering and felt like she was at death’s door. She didn’t know what to do. Her heart and mind were in utter turmoil.

Eventually, she let out a long, defeated sigh. “What do I have to do?”

Ed reached out to pat her on the shoulder, and this time she didn’t move. She didn’t have the energy for that. Ed moved his chair next to hers and turned her to face the computer screen. “Every morning, you will receive a document on this computer, pertaining to the life of a sinner. From that information, you will have to design something suited to the person’s sin to test their willpower and resolve.”

The screen lit up, showing all of the same things Ed had back when he started. The file hadn’t arrived yet, so he explained a few more things to her. “Everything you make will have to give the person a chance at surviving, while also being dangerous enough that they have a good chance of dying. Once your file comes in, I will teach you how to use the provided software. With your experience in game design, you should be able to pick it up fairly quickly.”