This is a story about Greed.

In the arid ennui of The Basement, it is easy to let your eyes wander. Many young children who have blindly stumbled down from their misfortune take a step into the open, ignore the crying of the mulligans, and open their eyes. For the first time, they do not see danger. This strange feeling would not last for long, of course. Famine waits for them behind a door, and for some children, this is the end of their story. For the others, a change is on the horizon. This is the first day of their new lives.

It starts with a few coins dropped on the floor with the dying scream of a Clotty. Almost immediately, children find themselves murdering innocent mulligans, drinking their tears and letting Greed encroach their bodies as they hunt for spoils. The first boss kill is different. The box of spoiled milk seems unappealing at first, and then it becomes a drug. It becomes something to take, to collect.

Occasionally, a child will happen upon a locked door. His first instinct is to turn away out of disinterest, but then he remembers the key he found lying in a pool of coins. Surprisingly enough, it fits. As the key vanishes from his hand, the young boy enters the room and is greeted by riches. A beating heart, a key, a compass. A doll hanging from a noose watches him with its empty eye sockets. Intrigued, the boy picks up the compass. The needle quivers, and then points directly toward the door. He is about to follow its instruction, but the doll’s gaze drills maddeningly into his head. He doubles back, thinks for a moment, and leaves a few coins behind to pay for the compass. The coins vanish the moment they touch the ground, and the doll’s stare lowers. He takes another moment to think, and then dashes out of the room to follow the compass.

Hours later, clothes in tatters, the boy runs back into the shop, Gapers on his tail. He pants, desperate for the bloody heart still lying there on the floor. All his money was spent gambling in the arcade, and so, without shame, he grabs the heart, swallows it, and runs off without paying. Desperate times call for desperate measures, the sort of measures that don’t measure but rather ignore. As Greed takes the boy, his personal needs ahead of the laws of possession, the boy does not notice that some time between his first and last visit to the shop, the hanging doll’s head had disintegrated. Its body hangs idly from a noose whose purpose has died. The boy has no interest in anything that cannot directly serve him, and so he moves on, satisfied with his spoils.

Now, we shall skip forward a few floors to a dark cave. The boy once again comes upon a locked door. Without even thinking, he unlocks the door with one of the keys he stole from a previous floor. A dark deed is a deed yet to be done, and he steps into the room without so much as a passing thought for the incredulities that he has committed. However, he is met with a surprise. The room is completely empty. The boy stumbles, runs to the center of the room, and lets out a cry of anger. For the first time in what seems like months, he closes his eyes.

When they reopen, they are met with a strange sight. A gray figure, identical to the hanged doll in the Basement, stands before him. A noose remains wrapped around its neck, but the rope is cut off and hangs like a scarf. Its mouth lies agape. Its empty eyes stare into the boy’s. He tries to close his eyes, to block out the figure’s pervasive glare, but finds he cannot. He can only stare back, and wait.

Seconds pass, although they may as well have been hours. And then, without warning, the figure charges. The boy is taken aback, and it takes him a moment to start running. He heads for the door, but it slams shut and locks before he can escape. He backs against the door, and tries to scream, but before his vocal chords can muster the strength, the figure shoots three red bullets from its hands, which pierce the boy’s flesh in seconds. Money pours out of his wounds. He finally manages to let out a scream. His Greed loses sense of priority, and he stumbles to the ground, trying to collect the money. Half of it vanishes the moment it touches the ground, the rest scatters away across the floor. Lying on the floor, the boy attempts to swim toward the coins, but the foot of Greed steps down before him and blocks his way. The boy looks up into the blank eye sockets of his assailant, and finally, as he accepts his fate, his head smashes down into the wood.

He lies there for hours. For days. For millennia. He lies in a constant state of dreamless sleep. And yet, he lay there for but a second. Magnificent white wings sprout from his bullet wounds, and he unconsciously flies upward. A brown rope snakes down from the ceiling and ties itself around his throat. A few more glorious flaps of his heavenly wings follow, and then they turn black and disintegrate. The sudden force of gravity shocks the boy back into awareness. He tries to scream, but the noose around his neck constricts him. His mouth twists in despair. The rope tightens, sending a shiver up his spine which turns into a racketing tremor. The items he stole rain out of his pockets and assort themselves on the floor. His eyes focus on the gray figure staring eyelessly back up at him from the floor. Nothing moves for a second, and then, the boy’s eyes pop out. He hangs there, still alive, indifferent to everything but his possessions. Unseen, the gray figure steps out of the room with the boy’s eyes.

The boy is gone. His body may rot, his noose may slip, but he will always hang there. Some day, another child may wander into his shop, see the goods on the floor, and consider taking one of them without paying. They will consider it, but falter when they feel his eyeless sight burning into their souls. For he only sees Greed, in that eternal state of suffocating suffering, and he has learned the lesson of when it is wise for one to see, and when it would be better to fast your eyes.