you're gonna go far, kid | ON HOLD

chapter 10

To say the least, Keith was seriously regretting his life choices right now. Namely, the ones that lead up to him ending up in the hell that was the Voltron headquarters blindfolded and literally chained to the other four prodigies of Voltron.

Momentous' idea of team building was drastically different than his own; Keith had been hoping for something similar to beginning of the school year icebreaker games like tossing a stress ball and sharing your favorite genre of music or even basketball court pacman tag. Something low key and generic, the usual thing to do when launched into a new environment with a few strangers– mostly strangers anyway, but even if mundane Keith knew Meticulous fairly well, as the wielder of the red talisman the prodigy was just another new comrade to him.

But, because the universe seemed to enjoy Keith suffering and wanted to prolong it, Momentous' first icebreaker was to shackle the Cadre of Voltron together by the wrists and climb through an odd jungle gym like obstacle course. It had been obnoxious, especially with how much Meticulous kept yanking on his wrist, telling Keith to keep up, man, but now in their second team bonding activity, Keith found himself missing the rope burns and tight wrist cuffs.

This one was so much worse.

For this, the Cadre of Voltron had to try to navigate some sort of invisible maze that would give off a series of extremely powerful electric shocks if one were to accidentally run into it. The only somewhat useful thing that came of that was that the wall glowed a faint teal every time someone made contact with it and buzz in a quick pattern exclusive to that wall and the map Pigeon was trying to make.

A large box like object was placed over their head, and inside was a screen projecting a large scale map of the maze. The rest of the sides were entirely dark so they could not see the rest of the Cadre and the Cadre could not see them. They also had a small orange object the size of a cell phone in their hand, each key raised slightly with a bump letting Pigeon identify its number.

When one of the others directly walked into one of the electrified walls, the unlucky prodigy had to fight through the pain of the shock and attempt to memorize the pattern so Pigeon could type it into the device and add it to the blank screen that would become their map.

They hadn't said anything, but Keith was pretty sure that the map was building up like a game of Hangman; every time they put in a combination of quick shocks, that entire wall would appear on the blank screen and eventually, when the team walked into enough walls, some semblance of an actual map would be formed and Pigeon could lead them to freedom. The base was two points representing the start and finish.

It shouldn't have been too difficult, excluding the fact that they each would have to endure a large number of shocks from the walls every few seconds so they could get a glimpse at the wall and avoid being stuck in there for the rest of the week.

Momentous had promised that the walls were entirely harmless, but Keith couldn't help but think that to be entirely bullshit with the intensity of the shocks. Despite it only having been about fifteen minutes since they began, they'd all taken a fair amount of static from the walls already– just one per ran into wall would've been enough, really.

From the first time Keith walked into a sharp, invisible, and electrified corner– only three minutes in– he was completely over this whole exercise. He'd received twenty four now, and each seemed to wear his patience even thinner.

Each individual set of shocks was somewhat tolerable– it was multiple walls in quick succession and the blindsiding after-shock pain is what really sent his mind into a thick, useless fog. At first Keith thought that he would be able to handle it, the feeling was similar to one of going to school after getting only three hours of sleep, something that he'd done practically every day during high school. And then he stumbled over his feet and landed fully into one of the cursed walls. After that he knew not to be so stupid and prayed that the exit would come soon.