Little Nightmares: The Damned Child

Chapter VIII- The First Key to Freedom

Her neck went back down, my body shuddered as I stifled the sound that escaped my lips. Once she resumed spanking the child I used the ties bedsheets to climb higher. I guess even if I distract her she'll continue to punish them. I balanced along a frame of wood to a vertical plank facing another platform.. I pushed the plank over. The Teacher made a screech to the loud noise of it falling over and I ran to the vent on the other side. 

The sound of her neck rising threatening to make me freeze up. I wasn't paying attention to where I was going and fell down a drop in the vent. There was a ladder a small ways ahead of me. I climbed them to the other side of the vent dropping on top of a bookcase. The room smelled of must leather and paper. A library. The Teacher's loud footsteps echoed from the hallway just behind the bookcases lined along it as a sort of divider. 

I dropped down and proceeded to grab the shelf ladder and pulled it across to get to the other bookcases. Once up there I got off of the ladder to run across the bookcases, a few books slipped off of the shelf crashing to the floor. The Teacher made a quiet screech. I froze staring through the books on the shelves.. The Teacher was right behind them, I was a deer in headlights. It felt like years had passed in absolute silence, but it was really only a few seconds. 

When she didn't move I jumped across a gap in the shelves when her head crashed through the shelves. Books flying off of their shelves to the floor. I climbed onto a higher shelf, her head snapping where my legs were as I pulled myself up. I sprinted towards a gap between some books, it felt like her breath was on my neck as I slid in between them and into the back of the bookcases. Out of her reach...

~*~*~*~*~~

She had moved me into her private quarters after learning the others liked to rattle the bars on my cage. I was set atop of a table. There was a large chess board in the center of the room. A little boy was tied to the piece in the center. He had a gold paper crown on his head. The King. I knew him once.... He was one of the other surviving kids, like that girl with the paper bag boy. She was also here at one point, but she left so why she came back was beyond me. I saw her around the school but we never talked directly to each other. We only talked to King. The other children were the copies of him, a base template for an endless line of fake life. The door to my right opened. 

'That's weird... I didn't hear her come up the stairs this time. Who is it?' My back pressed against the bars closest to the wall, I eyed the door. At first I thought it was one of the porcelain kids. Getting up to mischief was their kind of thing, and it's not unlike them to seek me out just to torment. But it wasn't one of them... It was the paper bag boy. He was carrying the top piece to a Rook. He stared up at me curiously. Running up to the chess piece by the table, he placed the rook piece on top and used it as a stool to be closer to my level.

"Hey." I shifted myself forwards, my hands wrapping around the bars bringing my face closer to his. Our gaze shifted from each other to the padlock on the cage. He got down from the Rook and left the room. I untied the laces on my boots, retying them tighter than before. Doing the same to the drawstrings on my cargo shorts so they didn't fall off when I stood up. The boy came back into the room shortly after holding a key. He climbed up onto the Rook again. Inserting the key the padlock fell to the floor. The boy got off of the Rook to let me get out on my own. I dropped off of the table to the carpet, rolling my shoulders back to be rid of the creaks. I smiled.

"Thank you..." He tilted his head. "I uh... I'm Jordan." He held his stare for a moment, the silence ate away at me beginning to think I might've introduced myself too soon.
"Mono.... I'm Mono... My friend was taken by those... others...."
"I can help... I don't want to be here anymore..." He looked around the room for a way to proceed. "You need a key to the door below right? It's behind those shelves. There should be a map of what to do somewhere here...."

So the mystery child here is called Jordan... Can Mono find his friend with the help of this one?