Take a good look, cause this is the last anyone will ever see of Grayson Pontificus Pyke.

After a grueling thirty-second countdown—traditionally given by the warden of the local prison, who cruelly likes to yell it from a nearby balcony in either his bathrobe or pajamas—he will be lowered into The Hole—a cruel man made abyss initially constructed for the special purpose of criminal punishment—by the straps of his harness, which is equipped with various compartments containing “essential resources,” everything a competent human being would need to sustain a basic agrarian lifestyle (seeds, water, dried food, canned beans, collapsable farming equipment, etc). 

After many controversies surrounding their cruel and unethical treatment of prisoners, the state of Blin transferred all incarcerated persons from cramped, humid prison facilities to the open-air construction site/quarry which would eventually become The Hole. Overseen by authorities, the transferred prisoners were made to dig into the ground until The Hole grew so deep that light could no longer reach them and they became impossible to view from the surface. The plan was this: once the prisoners had dug themselves completely out of sight, the state would drop them packages containing “essential resources” in the hopes that they would use them to somehow create a sustainable and utopian underground society.  The big idea was that their invisibility and the resulting ambiguity, paired with the fact that they were technically given everything they needed to survive, would void the ethical dilemma regarding their treatment and place the burden of survival into the prisoners’ own hands instead of the hands of the state. Once The Hole was dug, it became the only form of capital punishment exercised in Blin, with condemned individuals being lowered into The Hole one by one, each strapped into a special harness just like the one Grayson Pontificus Pyke is wearing right now. His crime? Vandalism. Poor kid.

Nobody knows what’s going on down there, in the depths of The Hole. Right now, Pyke—along with all the other prisoners queued up for the harness—can only hope that, whatever it is, it’s better and brighter and somehow more ideal than the life they’ve lived topside.

If you’re gonna do crime in Blin, don’t get caught.