The Case of Amelia Kearney

Chapter 9

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Scene Three Part Three-
The Food Situation

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Vonia hadn't been working under the head of the facility for that long. It'd been over a month, but not by much. Though, despite the time being brief, she'd already seen witnessed countless things that to her young mind seemed rather incomprehensible and downright horrific. She'd seen the aftermath of horrible injuries, and she'd heard the sound of bones shattering. Every time she was close to dozing off at night, she'd wake up to the foul memory of the crunching.

However, despite the fact that most of what she'd witnessed in that month was brutality, she'd still learned a lot.

This facility she was working for was, to put it into simpler words, very morally dubious. Though the Head and staff treated her nicely, the same could not be said for how they treated the "patients" of this place.

Vonia didn't know much about the world in terms of morals, so she really wasn't an expert when it came to deciding what was right and wrong in the world.

But the screams, the pained, terrible screams of that rang in her ears whenever she'd lay down to sleep — Those alone were enough proof that whatever this facility was, whatever it did, and whatever the staff were doing to the children inside it, it wasn't in the moral clear.

As little as Vonia was able to sleep these days, however, it wasn't the most terrible job. For her, at least. Vonia's job in the facility was simple enough that she could do it with ease, which was an upside.

Write stuff down. Read the day plans every morning. Follow the head of the facility around and try to look smart. Don't talk to patients. Don't talk to guards. Ignore the pleading and crying of the patients.

That'd essentially been what Vonia had been told to do by the head of the facility's other personal staff member, Gale.

And she'd attempted to do just that, to the very best of her limited abilities. However, for her specifically, it was a bit difficult to read the day plans and write stuff down, as she'd had never been properly taught how to read or write by either of her parents. She'd always lived too far away from civilization to go to a proper school, so she'd been poorly homeschooled by her parents and older sister. However when her sister disappeared, the schooling itself mostly stopped, and since both of her parents worked 40-60 hour workweeks, it had slipped their mind to finish teaching her even the basics of literature.

Though luckily, it seemed that none of the work Vonia submitted to the Head or to Gale was ever looked over, seeing as neither party had ever bothered to ask her why all the work she was submitting was just poorly misspelled incoherent "words". Which, while good in many ways, was also a bit insulting. I mean come on! You asked me to work here, and then you don't even bother to look at the work I do?! That's insulting!

All of that though, really, was irrelevant. It didn't matter how Vonia worked, or how lazy her boss's were when it came to actually looking over work, or how horrifying the screams were — no. What really mattered was that the job was getting repetitive. While there was the occasional ear-splitting scream of somebody going though horrors, the main job itself was always the same. Vonia scribbled away, she got paid, and then on the weekends she went home and her parents asked her how her "internship" was going. Then her mom would take her to town and she'd spend all her hard-earned money on pastries and art supplies.

And as easy as that was, it was just too tiresome for Vonia. She wanted fun, and non-horrifying excitement. And, with all the repetition in her daily work, it was making for a very dull environment to work in. Quite honestly, wandering around all day, following some guy who's entire job seemed to be chewing out people for doing their job's wrong, and scribbling away on a clipboard near a bunch of kids her age who she was forbidden from talking to? It sucked.