On October 17, 2632, on my birthday, I was turning sixteen. Sixteenth birthdays are the only ones we do something for. The others is just a Happy Birthday, you’re one year closer to dying. Sixteenth birthdays though, Those were special. If you lived outside in the city, your parents would buy you a personal DJ, they’d throw a huge party at the Mansion, They’d get you a huge, sixteen layer cake, and all the food you could handle, AND they would invite the whole city. We don’t live out there. We don’t have parents to buy us all that. But it was still a special occasion for us. We’d get a one layer, rectangle cake. And we’d all sit in one room. It sounds quite sad I’ll admit, but it was one of those special moments that you have when you play ping pong in the basement with your family. The kind that you never want to end, and you laugh and talk, and nobody yells at nobody, and it’s so fun even though all you’re doing is practically nothing. It’s like that, but with a one layer rectangle cake. In my defense, it’s really good cake, especially all you live off of is water bottles that the people in the town throw away and some bread. Problem is, it only happens once, and all you want is for it to be perfect. It usually isn’t, but it is still incredible anyway. And, today is my birthday. The sixteenth birthday. I was about to blow out my candles when something strange happened. A candle flame stopped flickering. It froze solid, like a clay candle model. I reached out, and very cautiously touched the frozen flame. Immediately when I touched it, a single drop of blood fell out of my finger, and directly onto the top of the candle. I looked down, but there was no puncture on my hand, no source of the blood at all. Suddenly, like a glass model coming to life, the flame turned red, glowing much brighter than before. I wondered as I stepped back, “what's going on?!” I was used to strange things happening, but this was unlike any other, never been researched. The flames all turned a blood red, and grew, dancing up almost two feet tall. They faded to blue, then all of a sudden, everything flashed red, a flash so bright, it left us sightless, just bright red everywhere. A high pitched sound fills my ears, and the red faded to a dark grey, and I blinked my eyes open. I knew it was dark in here, but I didn’t know it was this dark. Everything seemed so dark, that it all looked black and white. That wasn’t normal. Everyone else seems just as stunned as I am, all looking around, maybe even seeing all of the colorless features like me.
“Who else sees this?” Ben asks. Ben is the second up to the leader of our group.
“Sees what?” I ask.
“Um, nothing?”
“Yup, I’m seeing it,” I reply, knowing exactly what he is talking about.
“Same.” A few other people say. We all stand up, and look around. The once neon green and silver cake was now just black, white, and shades of grey. Only the red in the candles was still visible, anything that wasn’t red was now black and white. Nobody speaks now, we all just look around and take it all in. Sometimes you don’t need words, you just have to see it for yourself.  My blood red tank top is still it’s vibrant scarlet, Jett’s denim jacket, or Verity’s jeans are now a soft grey. A sickly shadow seeps in across the floor like black fog, almost liquid, sloshing across the ground, little ripples and waves like a dark gas ocean. The shadow rises up to our knees. This is not the world I know. The shadow starts screaming, and wraps itself around Bailey, one of our fighters. Katherine tries to grab his wrist and drag him out, but she can’t get him. The shadow drags him under it’s watery surface, we hear his choked yelling for help, but it’s too late. We stand for a second, thinking about our friend’s loss. The shadow interrupts, letting out another ear piercing scream, and we all rush to the door, helping each other get out of the gap, about four feet in the air. We made it high up so no one would suspect it to be an entrance to anywhere special, but when it comes to escape, it might have not been the best option. We all get out, and the shadow calms down from what we can see through the narrow crack of a door, and just ripples like a calm lake on a windy day, resting in our base. We turn around and finally see our surroundings: it’s the same as inside.