Congratulations on Being Eaten by a Grue!

You’re unique in that you’re one of the few people whose favorite Tom Hanks film was the 1974 made for TV movie Mazes and Monsters. You love Hank’s awkward portrayal of an introverted young man for the purpose of showing a group of social outcasts to be wrong in their outcast-ness.

You love it so much that you spend your weekends reenacting Hank’s trips into the “steam tunnels” below various universities. You’ve done a number of stints in the midwest, hung out under MIT’s campus and you’re about to start your investigation of utility tunnels on the west coast. This is where things are going to go terribly wrong.

At UCSC (go Banana Slugs!) you’ll enter the tunnels as you always do, carrying enough food and water to last a week and copies of your favorite alarmist novels from the 70s about Dungeons and Dragons and how it’s going to kill us all. You’ll have a flashlight and, for once you’ve really gotten into those books and you want to wander around pretending that you’re pretending that you’re losing your mind, a torch made from gasoline soaked rags. You’ll be as prepared as anyone can be to enter the tunnels beneath the campus of a major university.

The one thing you won’t be prepared for is the prevalence of real-live monsters beneath the UCSC campus. See it turns out that UCSC’s bio program has some skeletons in their closet, and many of those skeletons take the form of hideous skeleton like creatures, goblinoid freaks of nature and genetically modified gila monsters that spit acid.

We’re not sure which part of DARPA funded these experiments, but you’ll be contending with them for three days in those tunnels, believing that you’ve finally gotten really, really in to those subpar books of your youth. You’ll be so proud of yourself and the strength of your idiocy, as you dodge claws and strip clothes off to avoid permanent scarring, that you won’t realize that the genetically engineered horrors surrounding you are all completely real.

This blissful ignorance will continue until you wander down a dark hallway after all of your light sources have been destroyed by various unspeakable horrors and you are eaten by a slavering creature of teeth and fangs which has never known light and has no need for it.

Congratulations on Being Eaten by a Grue!