Let me level with you man, as someone guilty of the game

15. Project Olympia but they exposition this time

The room was white. Just like it had always been.

Tubbo had been stuck in the Olympia compound long enough to know that everything always had been, and probably always would be, white. The padded walls, the cold floor, the high ceiling. Just plain, boring white. The only colors Tubbo saw on a regular basis were the bright orange of his explosions when he was allowed to use them and the deep red of Schlatt’s tie. Tubbo dreamed of strangling the man with that tie almost every day. He knew exactly how he would get out of the complex if he could. 

And oh, Tubbo knew he could. 

He just had to wait for the right time. Luckily, the right time seemed to come sooner than he had been anticipating. 

Schlatt had let Tubbo out of his room. He had been put under tight watch, sure, but he had been allowed to wander the facility. Which meant that he was one step closer to being out. Being free. He just had to figure out how to take that last step through the door to the other side.

The step came in the form of a boy. He was tall for his age, probably no older than Tubbo himself at the time. Tubbo knew he must be another subject of the Project, no other people would be held in this facility. The boy looked almost Enderian, half of his skin a deep black and sharp horns sticking out of his head. What caught Tubbo off guard was the clean, bright white of the other half of the boy’s face. His cow-like ears twitched back slightly when he caught sight of Tubbo, and his two colored eyes flashed ever so slightly at the boy.

The boy, Tubbo found out later, was named Lethe. Well, that obviously wasn’t his real name, but it was his subject identification, which was good enough for Tubbo. For now, at least. Lethe was his ticket out of Olympia. And Tubbo was planning on cashing his ticket in as soon as possible.

Tubbo didn’t remember much of the night they escaped. Ranboo always said afterwards that it was because of how traumatizing the events were. “Your brain tends to make you forget extremely traumatizing things to keep you safe.” Tubbo thought that was bullshit. Because if it were true, then why was he still able to remember Olympia?

The first time Ranboo had seen Dream on a news story, he had had a panic attack. It had taken several days of coaxing before Tubbo managed to figure out why. Dream was the one who had been in charge of Ranboo in Olympia. He had been responsible for all of Ranboo’s mutations, all of his strange features. It seemed that Dream was to Ranboo what Schlatt was to Tubbo.

Almost two years after their escape, the two found out something staggering. There had been others. At least two, if they had done their research well. One was dead. The obituary was boring, to say the least. The other… Tubbo didn’t know. They just didn’t know. 

…………………………………..

“So none of us got a childhood then?” Tommy asked blandly, leaning back in his seat to hide the fact that his body was shaking all over. Tubbo sighed, running a hand through his hair to pull it back out of his eyes. For the first time, Tommy noticed a large burn mark that marred one side of Tubbo’s face. It crawled across his skin, singing part of his eyebrow and turning his eye a milky white. 

“Schlatt burned half of my face off when I failed to hide my mutations at first. You know that all avians are able to hide their wings, but most other hybrids aren’t. Part of the Project was making sure that we, the ‘special ones’ or some shit, could.” Tommy blinked, and suddenly the white color of Tubbo’s eye was fading, along with the dark burns on his skin. After a moment, any sign of the scarring was completely gone, along with his antennae and wings. 

“Shit,” Tommy breathed, feeling his shoulder blades prick in pity. Tommy let out a breath before letting his wings out, the limbs flopping across the chair he was lounging in. “Do you know how they did it? The mutations, I mean.”