I looked at the calendar and I couldn't believe that it had already been three months since I first met Pyramid. In that time period, he had 'punished' about twenty-six people, and during that time, people started to leave me alone. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was now involved with the missing persons, but little did they know, they were already dead. To them it was just all a mystery, and everybody at school began to realize that whoever pushed me around, hurt me, or harassed me, either went missing or their body was found mutilated in some manner or another.

Some of my tormentors lost their heads, others were split in half, some skinned, and some…I couldn't even tell what had happened to them. All what I knew was that they deserved it.

I was happy about it. They left me alone after they started to realize that trend. The only downfall was that the police had me as a suspect, but they didn't know anything about Pyramid. There was no possible way for me, with my eighty-pound body that was under five feet tall, to destroy bodies in such a manner that Pyramid did. I was glad that my looks could deceive, and since they also had no knowledge about 'the other world,' there wasn't any way for them to prove that a human being could have committed the crimes. There were no human footprints, no human hair, no one else's blood other than the victim's, and no weapons. Just a body and no evidence of me.

I smiled at the picture of Pyramid that I pinned up on my wall and kissed the tip of my finger, then pressed it against his helmet. I loved Pyramid. With all of my heart. He wasn't just my guardian; he was my best friend and my brother. Every morning and every night before I went to bed, I gave a kiss to a picture of him. Every time I saw him, I would always give him a big hug and kiss him on his helmet.

Our friendship was amazingly strong. We were inseparable and I promised to him every single day that I would always be his friend.

I laid down on my bed and put my hands behind my head. Pyramid had changed my entire life so dramatically (for the better). Sure, I was a social reject, but I wasn't asking for friendship from other people. I just wanted them to leave me alone.

I eyed my sketchbook and grabbed it. I started to flip through the pages and couldn't help but smile at the pictures of the monsters that I had drawn. Apparently I hadn't met all of the monsters, but I kept a record of those that I knew.

The first was Pyramid, then Spike. Then there was Mannequin. (By the way, there was an indefinite number of Mannequins in that hellish place. There seemed to have been an indefinite number of all the monsters there, but there were specific ones that I personally knew. They would come up to me and I could distinguish them from any others that were nearby.) She (or he, I wasn't really sure) was two pairs of legs attached to a torso that walked around like a spider and often did front-and-back flips to move around.

The other that I had met was- what I called her -a Hanging Figure. She hung upside down in a cage with her legs fused together to the metal while her discolored arms hung down loosely by her head. She was a rusty-color and had black hair, and her arms looked like they were burnt. I could easily distinguish her from the rest because she had a large gash drawn from her abdomen to her lower thorax.

She couldn't speak, but instead made strange mumbling, gurgling noises. She appeared to have the ability to listen to me. Even though she was hanging upside-down from a cage, she could control where she wanted to go. Unfortunately, she was confined to the one room that she couldn't leave. One of the things that I thought to be strange was that the ceiling of the room was so tall and stretched so far that it faded away into darkness, and the chain connected to her cage didn't seem to have an end to it. Whenever she moved, there was the sound of metal and gears being moved, so I figured that there must have been some sort of contraption all the way up there in the darkness that allowed her to travel.

Then there was Wormy. He was the body of a man covered in dirt and gook and had a sideways mouth stretching from his chin to his forehead that had razor-sharp teeth. His arms were free, but his legs- like Hanging Figure's -were fused together in one lump of flesh, only his were stretched out into a long tail. He moved by crawling around on the ground and he also couldn't speak, but he seemed to like to follow me.

He also taught me how to play hide-and-seek.

Creeper was probably the weirdest of them all. He was a little shorter than Pyramid and had a thin body, except instead of legs, he had needle-like blades and his arms looked like a praying mantis's arms. He also didn't have a head. Instead, there was a very thinned-out neck with the tip of a white vertebrae sticking out. His body was so thin that the skin was tightly wrapped around the bones, which caused his neck and his spine to look like bumpy sticks.

And, of course, there was Rupture. He was the body of a person nearly sliced in half vertically and could open-and-close himself like a mouth. He had no organs, so nothing obviously fell out. When he was put together in one piece, he looked like he wasn't cut at all. When he opened up, the muscles and bones had a slight red glow to them and let out an intense amount of heat. He had sharp teeth where he was severed, so when he closed himself up, he would easily be able to bite onto something.

There were several others that I had seen, but I didn't know them too well. I'd come to know them better someday, but I had spent a lot of my time playing hide-and-seek with Wormy. He was really good at it, especially since he could climb around, up, and under objects. Thanks to his method, I was forced to climb into the smallest, tightest, and most difficult corners. My goal was to always wait at least an hour before he found me, but he always found me within forty minutes. Either way, it was fun and I enjoyed it.

I stood up, got off of my bed, and pressed my hands to the wall. I felt like playing hide-and-seek and Wormy.

I fell out of the wall and was quick to get up. I walked over to my bureau, grabbed a black-haired doll, and skipped out of the room. I went down the metal hallway and squinted at the bright, red lights that leaked through the walls. I felt happy…I was always happy to be here.

I heard a scuttling noise behind me and I turned around. I saw Mannequin, with her snowy-white skin and all, approach me in her spider-like walk. I smiled at her and stroked her smooth skin like I would to a dog, and she reacted like how a cat would (she even stretched). She wasn't a small monster, no; she was tall, about five and a half feet, and I was four feet and nine inches.

She followed me out to the room where Pyramid's sword-contraption-instrument thingy was. She and I climbed down the thick metal meshing to the first floor and I called out Pyramid's name.

"Pyramid!" I called. "Where are you? It's me, Tetsu…and Mannequin."

I heard the screech of iron doors opening and Mannequin started to jump up and down on all fours in excitement as Pyramid walked into the room. I joined in her enthusiasm and I ran up to Pyramid. I wrapped my arms around his waist and gave him an embrace. Since his hands were free, he picked me up and carried me to the other side of the room like how a father would carry his young daughter. I gave him a kiss on the side of his helmet and he set me down, then gestured for me to step up to where his sword was being held by the metal contraption.

"I want to teach you something," he said.

I said with excitement, "Are you going to teach me how to play this…thing?"

He nodded his head.

I smiled broadly while Mannequin scuttled around us in her excited state and I stepped up to the strange instrument-thingy. Pyramid was next to me and we both grabbed onto the handle. "Push forward," he said, and I did as I was told. The only problem was that it didn't budge.

I tried again, this time with the help of Pyramid, but it still didn't move. Pyramid firmly planted his feet into the ground and used all of his strength to push forward. Without notice, the sword jolted forward and I stumbled at the sudden movement. With the thing now loosened, we gently pushed forward. Pyramid pulled the sword outwards and I copied his movement, then pushed it forward.

I had been studying the way how he played it for the past month and constantly noted the placement of his feet and his hands. I would often just sit in the room for hours, listening to the beautiful songs that he could compose with the sound of screaming metal….

We pushed it inwards, then forward more quickly, then slowed it down. I still didn't know what the purpose of the songs were, but whenever I asked him, he didn't want to tell me. I shrugged it off and figured that it was none of my business. Who was I to question him, anyways? Besides, it was fun to play this instrument…especially since one of the notes required me to jump into the air and the sword's momentum kept me suspended for a good three or four seconds.

We ended the song, but my smile remained on my face. I loved it here so much. I just wished that I could stay here forever….

Wormy slithered next to me as we walked. He used his arms to help support himself and could easily keep up with my pace. Even when I ran, he could pass me.

He crawled through a small vent in the corner of the room and I followed him. I had to get down on my stomach and crawl forward with my arms, but I didn't mind. I thought that it was fun. I noticed that every time he made me crawl through tight spaces, he encouraged me to go a little faster. I didn't really know why. Maybe he was testing me, maybe he just wanted me to go quickly. Either way, I didn't really care.

As we crawled forward, I noticed that one of the sides of the vent was missing pieces of metal. I could see a fiery background and saw huge, metal fans turning. Something about it was peaceful and I wanted to stay and gaze at it, but Wormy urged me to continue forward.

We came out to a new place that I had never been in before. It was just a simple empty room, except for one of the walls, which had nine perfectly-shaped holes in it, all in an array. They were dark on the inside and I couldn't see what was there.

Wormy supported his weight with his arms again and then reared back like a cobra. He held his arms close to his chest and lolled his head towards me, then towards the holes. Did he want me to choose one? What was he doing?

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

Wormy pointed to the second hole on the ground.

"You want me to go through?"

He made a gurgling noise and seemed to have nodded his head.

I only smiled and walked over to it. I had no clue what was on the other side, but I liked Wormy and I trusted him.

I got down on my hands and knees and crawled forward. I kept one arm in front of me to make sure that I didn't bump into anything, but the interior was smooth and free of objects.

It took me three minutes to reach the end, but once I did, I could see a small light at the end of the tunnel. I was careful when I got down, but when I jumped out of the hole and landed, I felt something very cold cover me from the waist down. At first my mind didn't register what it was, but I realized that it was water.

A lot of water.

Wormy slid down from the hole and entered the flooded room. He swam like a snake and circled me twice.

"The other place was fire…this is water?" I asked, but got no response from him. "Why is it flooded? This water's freezing!" I exclaimed and looked around the room. The walls had moldy wallpaper on them with dark, woodened panels. There were no light bulbs, but the ceiling seemed to have produced some sort of strange, eerie, light-bluish glow that allowed me to see. Water dripped from the ceiling at a steady rate, which gave the silent place (or world) a bit of noise.

"Is this where you live?" I asked and walked forward. It was difficult to travel through simply because it was water and was up to my waist. Wormy was lucky to be able to glide through the water with ease, whereas I had to practically hike through it. "Why'd you bring me here?"

Then I thought for a moment. I didn't know how to swim, so was Wormy going to teach me how to swim?

Seven hours passed and I had obviously been drenched with water the entire time. My skin felt rather tender from soaking up so much water and my fingers and toes were pruned. I wasn't in hypothermia, but I had been cold for most of the time. However, I had somehow learned how to swim. Or…at least I could dog-paddle. I was taught the rudimentary elements of swimming, but I was thankful.

Of course I was thankful…swimming was a life-saving skill, but it was never really something that I had thought much about. I remembered Pyramid saying that Veronica was going to push me into a body of water in January and I shivered at that. With that thought in mind, I became very determined to learn how to swim.

Who knew that I could learn something so important from a non-human creature in such a short amount of time?