The investigation of Happiness Through Taste ;) took place.
The Extractors were all put to the side, and they watched the guards entering their building.
When the guards saw the insides of the building, they looked uncomfortable.
What the fuck was this design?
Was this a Manufacturer or a nursery?
"Alright, boys!" one of the Experts shouted. "We're going to take everything apart! Leave no stone unturned! Look into every single Containment Unit! Question every single Specter! Break down locked doors! Tear open the floor! Tear open the walls! The Governor wants everything investigated!"
The guards shouted their confirmation before starting to look around.
Doors were pulled off their hinges.
Some of them were excited since they got to destroy an entire building, basically.
Others were nervous since they didn't look forward to coming into contact with unknown Specters.
Floorboards were pulled up.
Within an hour, over 50 Extractors were searching through the building.
Paper was scattered across the floor.
Walls were torn down.
A couple of guards just sat at one spot with a mountain of paper in front of them.
It was their job to read through every piece of paper that seemed even the slightest bit important.
BANG!
100 kilo of paper were dumped in front of one of the readers by a female guard. "This is from the office of the secretary working for the CZE," she said.
Paper was scattered across the floor.
A couple of guards just sat at one spot with a mountain of paper in front of them.
The reader frowned when she saw the mountain of paper, but when she heard about the owner of the paper, she grew interested.
She pushed the papers she was reading to the side and started reading the papers from the secretary.
Meanwhile, someone broke through a wall beside her but didn't walk through.
Instead, the person looked at the inside of the wall with interest.
They were really looking at everything.
The guards needed almost an entire day to look through the building, but they were not done investigating yet.
While the building had been searched, huge piles of papers were still in the process of being read.
Additionally, there was a part that they couldn't investigate.
Naturally, the guards found the secret tunnel that had collapsed, and they could immediately tell that there used to be a tunnel there.
Getting rid of the stones wasn't difficult for Extractors, but they couldn't find where the tunnel led to.
The walls of the tunnel and the mountain were made of stone.
There was nothing that told them where the tunnel went.
Well, for one of the tunnels, at least.
The tunnel leading to the central storage wasn't hard to find.
Sadly, that didn't tell them much.
In the end, there was nothing they could do about the collapsed tunnel.
Whoever was backing the Manufacturer had done a good job hiding their tracks.
Most of the investigators left the building. The remaining ones were busy reading through mountains of paper.
However, even though they finally left the building, their job wasn't done yet.
Today was the day all of the Extractors had to be interrogated.
One by one, the Extractors were interrogated by the most advanced interrogators.
Most of the Extractors seemed to be victims as well.
They had to live in this awful environment and had to act like little kids.
As adults, they had not been the biggest fans of that.
However, there were also a couple who seemed quite suspicious.
When the interrogators found someone suspicious, they sent them to their superior.
The superior brought the suspicious people to a special Containment Unit and left them there.
He didn't know why he had to bring them there.
He only knew that it had been the Governor's orders.
Interestingly enough, he was only bringing them there.
He was not bringing them back.
Whenever the superior brought in a new person, the old person had vanished.
The superior had no idea where they went.
That was until three days later.
Three days later, the superior brought in a new person just to open the door and find the old person still there.
"What are you still doing here?" the superior asked in surprise.
"Sir, I was told that you would escort me out," the Extractor said carefully.
The superior furrowed his brows.
He hadn't needed to do that before.
"Alright," the superior said. "Get out."
The person inside the Containment Unit walked out, and the superior shoved the person he had come with into the Containment Unit.
"Follow me," the superior said after closing the door.
The two walked towards the exit.
"Sir, if I may ask," the person said, "what was that in there?"
"What was what?" the superior asked.
"The… dream… is that the right word?" the person asked.
"Explain," the superior ordered.
"Well, shortly after you left, all the lights turned off…"
When the superior heard that, he grew shocked.
They turned off the lights?!
Was that how they tortured them?!
That was beyond cruel!
"But instead of feeling pain," the man continued, "I just entered some form of trance. I saw visions of my past happening, and I felt like all the people in the city began to talk to me."
"I didn't know what I was doing, but almost automatically, I just answered all of their questions."
"What was that?" the guy asked.
The superior frowned.
'This sounds dangerous and confidential,' the superior thought. 'I shouldn't have asked.'
"That's confidential," the superior answered, acting like he knew what was going on.
"Oh, okay," the guy said.
The two of them continued in silence, and eventually, they reached the exit.
"I'm going now," the guy said before turning to walk to the city.
The superior just nodded.
The guy began to walk.
"Why are you the only one?" the superior suddenly asked.
"Excuse me?" the guy asked, turning around.
"Why are you the only one I had to escort back?" the superior asked. "I didn't see any of the other ones."
The guy seemed a bit nervous, but the superior could tell that this was a kind of nervousness coming from being put on the spot, not from hiding some kind of secret.
"I don't know," the guy said. "I don't even know what happened."
The superior looked at him for a bit.
This guy seemed to be a good guy.
Was that the reason?
No, things couldn't be that easy.
In this world, people didn't get rewarded for being good.
In fact, they got punished for being good by other people taking advantage of them.
There was no way that this person survived just because he was a good person, right?
After a while, the superior walked back inside.
A couple of hours later, new orders arrived.
The guards received a list of names.
The people on this list would be arrested and contained separately.
The guards followed the orders and contained all of these people.
There were over 50 Extractors and over 150 normal but quite wealthy people.
The families of these people became worried, but they knew that they would see their loved ones again.
After all, the guards said that these people would only be captured for interrogation purposes.
All of these people were sent into one big Containment Unit, and they looked at each other nervously.
Almost all of them knew each other since they had had secret dealings with each other for quite a while.
While they were playing innocent, they knew why they were there.
The Governor found out about their shady dealings.
They reassured each other. The city couldn't possibly imprison all of them!
All of them, put together, owned almost 10% of all the businesses inside Black Mine City!
After a while, a guard opened the door.
"Dimitri Aerol," the guard said.
An older man stood up and approached the guard.
The guard motioned for Dimitri to follow him, and the two of them left the Containment Unit.
Two minutes later, the same guard opened the door again. "Stasia Aferio," he said.
An older woman stood up and left the room.
Over the next 30 minutes, one person after the other was called.
"Jenkins Garvulnir," the guard spoke.
Jenkins, a younger man, stood up and approached.
The two of them left the Containment Unit, and Jenkins followed the guard.
The guard led Jenkins down a flight of stairs and into a thin hallway.
The guard stopped in front of a seemingly random door, opened it, and stepped to the side.
"Enter," the guard spoke.
Jenkins approached and walked through the door.
BANG!
The door behind him closed, but Jenkins didn't even notice that.
All of his focus was on the pile of bodies in front of him.
"Jenkins Garvulnir?" a voice asked coldly.
Jenkins looked to the side.
The Governor was there, looking at him.
"Y-yes?" Jenkins asked in shock, not registering what was going on.
The Governor nodded.
Then, she pulled out her gun and shot him in the head.
Jenkins' body flew back, landing on the edge of the locker room.
His body was on the side of the pile, but it would soon be beneath it.
The Governor took a deep breath as she nervously glanced into the corner.
There, she saw a discreet black shadow of smoke.
She decided against talking to the shadow and just focused on the pile of corpses in front of her.
Naturally, she had been the one who made that pile.
She tried to stay calm for a while.
Then, the door opened again, and another person walked in.
The Governor looked at the list of names as the person looked with shock at the pile of corpses.