you can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

[cestrumnocturnum]

Who: Benji Ryans and You?
What: A transdimensional kidnapping might give anyone restless dreams.
Where: In your head. Or her head. Something like that.
When: Various nights through the week.
Notes: Please see the OOC post. Beneath the cut is a general idea of the setting in which you can tag in, but let me know if you'd like me to threadstart!
Warnings: Possible violence, depictions of ruined New York City.

Of those that know a traditional and contemporary Earth, maybe you can see the eroded shadow of a New York skyline which has had such a hard twenty-first century. The buildings are reduced to the skeletons of giants, ribcages and spines and skulls with gapped teeth. Yellow tape lies like dead snakes and dust covered from where it had once cordoned off areas but now it's all the same corrosive danger, every block this way to Harlem and back. It's war wrecked from the black crater radioactive heart that had cut out the soul of the city some thirty years ago and change, through to the slow decay of street terrorism and citizen warfare.

Night and day casts grey both and presents different dangers. The bright lights of a rebuilt and prospering Staten Island seems like an eternity away, and fences that once defined and regulated spaces have been torn apart, cut open, climbed over. Abandoned attempts at construction are like a graveyard for hope. Unbelievably, some people still live here. Some people even live in the tunnels beneath the pavement of the intact buildings boarded closed. Hazard symbols are spraypainted on the faces of buildings.

They come out at night, the robotic hellhounds that breathes steam out their ribcages, whose eyes turn red when they sense you are near. Needles in their mouths, sharp feet, klaxon howls, seven hundred pounds of steel, and artificial intelligence networked between them that sees herself as a pawn and a herd at the same time but carries out her coded marching orders because she lacks a name.

Tanks in the streets, but these are rarely abandoned. A wind howls through the once crowded city streets. The dream is vivid enough to taste ash in the air.

Comments

[controlledvariable]

At first she thinks it's Gotham, but the destruction is too great even for her home city. It got bad during No Man's Land, but not like this, the buildings were crumbled, destroyed by the earthquake but this is different. The destruction is worse, like something tore through the city. So, no, it's not Gotham and that's troubling. No matter how messed up Gotham is, at least she knows the city like the back of her hand; she doesn't recognize this place.

The second thing she realizes is that she's in civvies, which is also worrying, because having body armor and a utility belt full of crap makes life so much easier. Instead, she's in jeans, combat boots and a dark green military jacket over a black t-shirt. She checks her pockets for her phone - CiD - something but there's nothing to be found.

When she looks up at the sky, she notices that it's starting to darken, and she slips into a side alley with barely a second thought. She'd go up, but she can't judge what conditions these buildings are in (those that are even standing) and doesn't want to risk them crumbling under her feet. Staying quiet and hiding in the shadows will have to do for now, as she walks through the city searching for a sign of life.

[cestrumnocturnum]

As the sky grows dimmer, the shadows on the street grow longer, giving Stephanie the cover she needs to get wherever it is might be safe. Signs of life will, at least, be easier to pick out when everything is so dead around you, and so something snags her attention -- painted in unofficial sloppiness in yellow spray, and X marks a spot in the middle of the street she's found herself upon. It looks old, but not so old that whatever it indicates is irrelevant. Further down the street, marking an intersection headed right, there's another cross much like it, printed by the same, hurried hand.

But it isn't just the streets, plotting some unknown direction -- on the wall just beside her, printing over brick and mortar and the boarded over buildings, are words in big yellow, a warning:

-->
EVO HUNTER ROUTE
BE WARE

[controlledvariable]

Somewhere along the way she picks up an abandoned tire iron, the weight reassuring in her hand - and she'd think it was ironic, maybe, if she could think about Jason Todd and the first time he met Batman. But she doesn't think of that, her mind too focused on the city around her, and the itching at the back of her mind like something is following her. Sometimes she catches a glimpse of orange, sometimes it's black, sometimes it's white gloves curled around the corner of a building. No matter what's there, it disappears when she turns to look.

She follows the X marks, of course she does, but the warning makes her pause. It's something to consider, whether continuing on this route is more dangerous than wandering, lost.

Something flutters by her, then, fabric caught in the wind and she reaches out to catch it despite already knowing what it is. Black, two white circles where eyes go. It's her Spoiler mask, except it's covered in blood. She lets it go, blood from the mask staining her hands in a way that blood shouldn't, but does now.

She follows the arrow.

[bodilesswarrior]

It feels like she's trekking through No Man's Land, hands tight on her wheels as she manoeuvres around cracked and crumbling pavement, but somehow this is worse. Even at its worst, Gotham never felt quite so desolate - so hopeless.

She used to welcome the night, but as darkness falls a cold shiver wrack her body. A sense of foreboding as thick as the ash-stained air tightens her chest and quickens her breath.

The distant howls of the hellhounds sound, in their echoes, almost like laughter.

[cestrumnocturnum]

There's something mournful, about the klaxon howling. Which might make it appropriate, for what she sees next.

As her wheels rattle over debris, observing a street that, once upon a time, was once packed with business people in their suits, their dresses, their Gucci and their Hugo Boss, a sight may or may not have her stop. Hanging from the streetlamps are thick black chords of rope, almost military in issue and make, but what hangs from them is more important. Men and women both, with grey to black skin, missing shoes, faded clothing -- perhaps five? Their ages impossible to tell.

She has an alien urge -- she wants to cut them down. It's entirely incongruous with what she is capable of doing but also very external, a dream-memory implanted like a seed in her heart with sudden mourning. There are words in black paint on the glass and brick behind them, difficult to make out, but they ultimately say:

the road to hell
paved with good
intentions

[bodilesswarrior]

Her throat goes dry as her eyes fix on the swaying corpses. She's seen carnage before, but this...

She'll saw at the ropes, cut them all down -

She can't.

So she focuses on the words, inscribed as what she can only guess is a warning.

"Good intentions," she mutters, and her voice echoes oddly in the deserted street.

She bends down, intent pulling a throwing star from beneath her chair; it probably won't work, but she can try.

When she pulls her hand back, she's holding a batarang.

With a smile that aches, she aims at a rope.

[gramarye]

Before, he never slept. He'd spend days running from it, take any pill he could, legal or not, drank pot after pot of coffee -- ran, literally, sometimes, because holding still would make it so much harder to stay awake. It is impossible for the human body to not sleep and it caught up to him eventually, weakened him with microsleeps, fogged his brain until he could no longer function and then dragged him under with the bad dreams. The ones where he always died, and they felt so real, like memories -- he'd wake sweating and screaming and still feeling the knife in his throat, the bullet in his eye, the loss of a leg.

Now sleep is all he does. For hours. Sometimes at least half his day is spent asleep on whatever surface he collapses on first -- if not his bed, then a desk, the kitchen table. The floor. It's annoying but it's not so bad, because sometimes there are no dreams at all and the ones that do come are softer. They're still memories, but they're as often good as they are bad. In most of them, he's still a child, and he remembers parents that aren't truly his anymore, friends he's never actually met. The rest are usually women.

That's why he doesn't realise immediately that this is anything but really real; it doesn't have the same feel to it, that sense of memory, a soft sort of deja vu. And he isn't used to being a man.

He also has no idea where he is, which is going to be a little embarrassing later, and that is wrong. He always knows exactly where he is because he lived there once.

This can't be real, but it has to be real, it's not one of his dreams so it has to be real, but it can't be because he's in Baedal, unless Baedal ejected him again, but it should have sent him home, this isn't real, it is real, it can't be real, is he dead?, it --

He sees something moving -- something big and mean, what is that, a dog or something? what the fuck is that? -- and he swears under his breath and ducks behind a building. His hands are starting to shake, not from fear of it -- although there's a bit of that, too -- but at the sudden raging doubt about whether or not anything he is witnessing is hallucination. He doesn't, in the way of normal dreams, realise that he is dreaming.

Either this is real or he's mad.

[cestrumnocturnum]

The dog is not making the same sounds of a dog, even though it casts a nearly canine shadow. There's a sudden hiss that sounds like gas or air or steam expelling through metal, although there are no tin-man creaks or groans with movement. Whatever this is, it's too sleek, too well designed to be clunky. There's a soft green tinge of light ahead of it, casting illumination long enough for Wolfgang to be able to see it where he's ducked and hidden around the corner. All of the fine details-- someone's details-- are there for consumption, the creeping light as the thing goes closer, the rubber-dulled steel feet, all four of them, quiet but unable to disguise exactly how heavy it sounds.

It's not organic, although it creeps as if the programmes and coding that drove it forward act like it might be.

The street doesn't bear much in the way of refuge. The abandoned buildings are just that: abandoned. Some boarded shut, some left in peace, plastic covering broken windows because almost all of them are. There's a shell of a car that sits, looted and gutted, on an angle on the curb.

When the thing moves forward enough to be sighted, it's head first coming around the corner -- a silver skull, almost maniacally creative with a sordid sense of humour, with green light glowing through its steel sockets, a lower jaw missing in favour of a long, charged needle that extends beneath fangs. The green light suddenly switches it red.

[gramarye]

Wolfgang stills when he sees that head coming around the corner, fear tightening his stomach into a hard ball. It doesn't make him question his surroundings at all, the impossibility of this -- very much the opposite, it's the sight of that machine-thing that convinces him this is real. It suddenly makes sense to him.

Because that thing, right there? It has Technocracy written all over it.

Identifying it is slightly less pressing than getting the hell away from it, though, and he immediately takes a few slow, cautious steps back, staying out of its green headlights. Can he outrun it? He's fast, but he has no idea if it's faster. Four legs, but made of metal, it looks like. If it's Technocracy, it might be Primium, which means magic might be useless. He won't know unless he tries it, but if he tries it, the backlash could --

Well. It won't be pleasant.

He glances behind him. Can it climb? (Can it fly?) If he can get up somewhere high where it can't follow, he has a better chance than trying to outrun or attack it. There, a few meters behind him, he can make out the skeletal remains of a fire escape, like the exposed spine of a building. It looks like it's barely hanging on and is definitely not safe but it's his best chance for getting somewhere defensible, so he starts slowly backing up in that direction, not wanting to run yet because doing so will almost certainly attract that thing's attention.

[catiana]

It doesn't seem odd to Tatiana that she's in costume, or that her mask is missing. Even the devastation of New York - of her home, once upon a time - doesn't daze her.

No. She's merely sad as she walks the barren streets, examining the decaying shells of the city's structure. She can almost taste the fear and despair with the ash in her mouth.

It all feels so inevitable, somehow. She almost expects -

"MUTANT TARGET IDENTIFIED."

Well, fuck.

She turns just in time to see the giant robot lumbering toward her. She can smell the blood on it from here.

[cestrumnocturnum]

What--

What is that?

It's an intrusive shard of memory that disturbs the fabric of this reality, and in some ways bearing some familiarity enough that the spell of unconscious dreaming is not yet broken. Suddenly, there's the blast of shotgun fire knifing through the sound of the street -- it doesn't aim at anything, but serves to get attention. A slender figure is half-shadowed at the mouth of an alleyway, holding awkwardly the shotgun she just fired. Benji is in her element in that she would rather not be, dark hair pulled back off her face, clothed in pragmatic cuts of clothing.

Too scared to shout out, voice lost, she gestures for Tatiana to hurry. To follow.

[catiana]

The blast shocks her out of stunned terror, and her head jerks towards the source. She almost doesn't go, but she knows she's no use against these things, not without a form to steal.

So she runs, boots crashing down on the street, breath burning in her chest. The sentinel will fire any moment, she knows it will. Her body feels hot and raw, almost as if it already has.

[wontturntofoam]

He's in Baedal. Shrieky doesn't question this, in the way that you just don't question things sometimes. This is just what Baedal is like now, or maybe what it's always been like, there's a sense of dread hanging over everything here, but none of it seems unusual. None seems unexpected to him.

He isn't wearing shoes, and the floor here is all broken glass and crumbling stone. Even the parts that shouldn't hurt him do, and he feels a very thinly repressed layer of anger at having to exist in any way shape or form. It's always terrible. Everything, everywhere, is completely and irredeemably painful and hated, and he is entirely certain of this.

He picks his way through the rubble, of one of the buildings, trying to figure out what neighborhood he's in. It's hard to tell now, but if he can find someone then he can ask for directions at least.

He can hear the distant buzzing of insects, like a swarm of flies just outside of the range of his vision. It sends a prickle of discomfort down the back of his neck, but he pushes the feeling aside.

[cestrumnocturnum]

Something crunches, a metallic twang as rebar snaps beneath immense weight.

Behind him, far enough at the minimum possible distance such a thing could ever hope to sneak up on a person, is a shape. Shrieky won't have a name for it, but because this is a dream that is not entirely his own, the word sentry springs to mind. It's tall, an equine shape of a creature with a long neck, horse-skull head hovering some ten feet above the floor with glowing green out its steel sockets. Where a lower jaw would be, there is instead a tangle of tentacle-like sensors, glowing gently blue and bobbing in the air. At the end of its long neck is a body of silver, made of hot metal and sharp edges, and out its ribcage-like sides, plumes of steam eject.

It stands on four legs, one of which is raised, frozen in position, ending in a knife-like taper. It has come to a halt, those two expressionless green lights staring at Shrieky.

It doesn't register the humming of insectile buzz in the background. Arguably, Benji does. If the other shadow is Benji, anyway. A flash of light snags at Shrieky's periphery, a flashlight that is then throttled, wavering in a panic, switched off. It came from the direction of the yellow abandoned construction machinery away from the robot, as a slender, dark-shadowed shape darts behind one.

[wontturntofoam]

Shrieky twists on his heels, his attention torn between that thing (That sentry, a voice in the back of his mind whispers) and the brief flash of yellow torchlight off to the side.

He wants to run, away from the sentry and towards the light, but his feet feel hot with pain, and he knows that if it pursues him he stands no chance of outstripping it. For the moment it seems to be holding still, he doesn't know if it has any reason to try and hurt him, and he certainly doesn't want to give it one.

Swallowing hard, the idea crosses his mind that he can befriend it. It's just like a horse, only metal and swelteringly hot and sharp and terrifying, but he likes horses, so perhaps if he can communicate to it that he doesn't mean it any harm, and hasn't done anything wrong, perhaps it'll just pass him by?

He lifts both hands, in a gesture of peace and surrender, then opens his mouth to speak. At first, nothing comes out at all. It's like the words stick in his throat, and he can't exhale hard enough to make them come. Then he pushes, and what comes out is a creaking, clicking noise that can't be deciphered.

Shrieky stops, briefly, then tries again. He focuses on forming the words, but what comes out is the same, a strangled, broken string of shrieking noises. Realization dawns, and he claps a hand over his mouth, suddenly aghast. He can't speak. He's forgotten how. The words are still there, the sentences he wants to make fresh in his mind, but somehow they won't come. Fear of the sentry is secondary now, even if it doesn't kill him, the thought of losing his connection to the rest of the world petrifies him.

[hehaseatenthepancake]

The urban ruin with its devastated skyline and blood-red skies is no stranger to Hellboy's mind. Sometimes it's New York, sometimes London or Singapore or any of a hundred other cities all around the world that he's traveled through over the years. Half the time, the reverie in which he sees these visions of What Might Come To Pass happens when he's at least ostensibly awake, albeit usually induced by circumstances that remind him of the destiny he's fought to deny. The one thing unusual about the dream this time, though, is that rather than Anung Un Rama, Great Beast of the Apocalypse, horned and crowned astride the seven-headed dragon Ogdru Jahad, Hellboy is merely himself, looking around cautiously as he wanders the streets.

When the first hellhound appears, green-eyed and on the prowl, it's almost a relief. "Okay, here we go," Hellboy says, mostly to himself. He doesn't know how he ended up in whichever city this is, but it was inevitable that something would come out to start some trouble. The hound's eyes turn red, and Hellboy sets himself and shouts, "Come on!" He doesn't have Excalibur, but his massive stone right hand serves well enough to catch the hound's charge short and send it flying back in a twisted heap of metal.

"BOOM!" He shouts, punctuating the force of his punch with satisfaction for how easily the robotic dog went down. Then three more pad out of the alley, with hints of metal glinting in the shadows suggesting that there are far more.

"...Crap." As tempting as it is to take on all comers, he knows that even he can be overwhelmed with sufficient numbers, and that sometimes it really is better to run. (He can thank Baba Yaga in particular for that hard-won lesson, and for just a moment he thinks he can hear her cackling in the distance.) He's not a terribly fast runner, but he's better than a guy his size might be expected to be, and he occasionally tosses a backfist with his right that sends the hound in the lead sprawling into the ones just behind it, opening up just a little bit more of a lead than he lost in taking the shot.

The chase takes them out into progressively larger streets with each turn, until Hellboy finally finds himself in blasted, wrecked Times Square, and what he sees pulls him up short and makes him think he might've had better luck with the robo-dogs. The square is host to a congregation of large, humanoid frog creatures. A small number in the middle are standing on a mound of human corpses, and holding up offal, skulls, and various other parts torn from the bodies at their feet as sacrifices. Many more surround them on the street, their hands outstretched, and extend long, tentacular tongues into the air. The tongues seem to glow a soft blue as they radiate out a cacophanous drone, while the frogs in the middle begin chanting prayers from a time long forgotten.

"Son of a..."

[cestrumnocturnum]

It's sort of a curse of her own power that Benji is limited in the department of true surreality. A stitched combination of dreams can make a patchwork quilt of incongruous images that border towards the strange, but true creativity of things she's only imagined never fully resolve into her mind's eye solid enough to manifest in dreams.

Meanwhile: chanting frog people.

She panics, a temporarily invisible presence in her own dreaming, centred in no one place but instead infused throughout the fibres of her own dreaming, although the frog creatures and Hellboy's own fearsome presence are alien and exotic to her, toxins in blood. She cannot simply rend them apart, she is not her mother, she is certainly not her mother's mentor, Hokuto.

Slowly, her own subconscious inks into the gruesome display. Corpses can be identified as objects, dead meat that's quickly spoiling, to be buried or burned or offered in ritual. To Benji, they take on faces. The pastor, the ex-FRONTLINE officer who had been her friend, her aunt, all long pale limbs and scraggled dark hair, and countless others who had passed unfairly and too soon, always-- just piled like a podium, homogeneous flesh, as if dug up from the Ferrymen graveyard simply to serve these creatures--

The protesting sentiment is not spoken with words, but Hellboy can probably feel it, a mournful disgust that tremors through the fabric of the dream, before the dreamer finds feet on which to move, almost mindless. Either brave against danger or simply ignorant, Benji suddenly darts forward, appearing from the shadows out the corner of Hellboy's eye - a skinny figure, dark haired and dark clothed, apparently unarmed.

[caballero]

Of all the Gothamites to be caught in this subconscious tide, the projection of a man walking along a burnt rib of a skyscraper is the one to harken no mental association with his home; instead, Bruce Wayne, dressed in an improbable mixture of textiles, runs a quiet but efficient elimination game in his head in an effort to determine where he is. Combat boots make barely a whisper over steel, long wool coat catching the night air but doing nothing to unbalance him, ash and the smell of ionized particles touching his bare face.

It's not Baedal, and it's not anywhere he's been before - not in this state, anyway. He puzzles out an approximate year and location easily, but the reality, which slim card in a loaded deck faced every which way - that's harder. His PINpoint, which he usually carries even when it's supposedly on the fritz, has vanished from his person, as have most of the other things he usually has on him. But he's calm, watchful, walking from one end of a ruined highrise to the other, fingertips brushing against the corner beam when he gets there.

So far, he's alone.

[cestrumnocturnum]

But not quite.

The sound is minute, but up here, anything that isn't the wind rushing by or the general giant groans of these wrecked structures is probably noticeable by those keen enough to listen for it. It's sort of like a camera's shutter whir of machinery, but the actual impact of its feet are completely silenced, dulled with rubber and whatever suction function that makes it able to crawl up the side of a nearby piece of exposed iron. Insectile and less than a foot long in length, it remains at a distance from Bruce around the corner, some piece of its 'body' slickly turning until a red eye focuses on the shape he's made at the corner of the skeletal highrise.

One gets the sense, if one believes in that kind of thing, that one is being watched.

But just as immediate as this little robotic creation has come into view, there's the sudden crack of a handgun going off from within the eviscerated building, down a level. There's a twang as the bullet hits metal, but not the insectile robot it was probably aiming for. Unless it was aimed for Bruce, but then the gunman would be even more inept, although as it stands, it's a tricky angle to score.

The robot doesn't really react, in the way that machines. Don't.

[andyoullmissit]

Clarice believes she's home for a moment.

It's impossible - that place doesn't exist anymore, not anywhere, and yet the ruins of Manhattan are so inherently familiar, she can't help but catch her breath. But the lights from downtown are wrong - she blinks up to the top of a building that looks mostly intact to get a better view. The wind whips at her, and she draws her cloak tight around her before porting back down to the ground.

She considers trying to go to Westchester, but no, that can't be there either. Not the way she remembers. She starts walking with no real sense of where she's going. She feels lost in a way she hasn't since she was a kid.

[cestrumnocturnum]

Where she finds herself is what some may call the beginning.

It's not that Clarice isn't watching where she is going, but it's suddenness is just not detectable in dream logic. A glance behind her will show ruined concrete barricades that she'd merely crunched through, a warning of old of the first destruction to descend down upon Manhattan. But suddenly, all the same, she is confronted with a sight worse than simple urban decay and war ruin;

The blasted site of the crater, the nuclear heart of the Bomb that ignited so many years back, sweeping aside city scape, melting iron, turning concrete into dust, and salting the earth with radiation. The land abruptly starts to go downhill in front of her, cutting right into the earth, the subways, the gas pipes, all of it blended together in the same blurry mess of destruction.

In her peripheral hearing range, there's a sound. Boyish laughter, here and yet maybe not, but she can almost sense him, smell washed hair and laundered clothing, see dirty fingernails and red hair like a memory.

She is being watched.

[thewaythatiam]

It is not New York as Astrid remembers it when awake, but dreams are funny things that way. She doesn't question the destruction, or the differences. She stands in the shadow of a building across the street from where the Fringe Division building should've been.

It's been replaced. It's been replaced and she has no data on it and Lincoln and Charlie and Olivia were inside, they were all inside, they must've been because she was on her way to work, wasn't she?

She's not a field agent, she doesn't know what to do, and there's no one to give her direction. She tries to call Olivia anyway, and gets no signal. So she stays where she is, waiting for the right building to come back. It will come back. It has to come back.

[cestrumnocturnum]

Warmth tickles up her spine, and if that isn't enough to bring Astrid's attention around, then maybe the sudden spill of red light does.

Heat and light aren't the only things that fire gives off, though. Smoke will shake off a haze that smogs the open street, its stench as obvious as the way it makes eyes water. The sound, too, an engulfing roar that almost masks the breaking of the building its eating. The fire has only just begun, but it's reaching its peak; Astrid can still see the make of the two floored safehouse-- yes, safehouse, that's the word for it implanted into her mind as if she herself had always thought of it that way-- still standing even as fire begins to devour it from the inside out.

A door opens. A woman with black hair, her ethnicity disguised in ash, bursts out into the street, distraught, choking. She falls to her hands and knees, gets up, staggers.

[wingwalker]

Xas doesn't know where he is, and wouldn't know even if the place weren't a shadow of itself: the last time he was in New York City, it was 1823 and he was looking down at it from above. This is like nothing he's ever seen before. But it's swollen with its own emptiness, aggressively hopeless, and it tastes like burning. His mind, reaching for sense, supplies Hell.

On cue, someone wails in the dark.

Turning toward the source of the sound makes feathers rustle, brings wings into Xas's view, unexpected but not surprising. What does surprise him is that he can't stretch them out, can't beat them to lift himself off the crumbling pavement. When the wail is followed by a howl, Xas begins walking blindly in the opposite direction, panicking with an angel's instinctive, quiet dignity. The howl is as unfamiliar as the landscape.

Maybe Lucifer lost control of the demons. Maybe there was another rebellion. They might have destroyed Xas's garden - his centuries of work, the protective black glass dome and the careful irrigation.

His wings are nothing but fifty pounds of dead weight and air resistance, primary feathers dragging on the ground. Still, the instinct to go up is overwhelming, and with his mind still fixated on dead bees and shriveled roses, he finds himself standing beneath shell of a skyscraper. Even hindered, he can leap past the first story, landing ungracefully and precariously on a beam of warped steel, grasping for a handhold to keep from falling backwards again when he forgets to balance the unfamiliar weight at his back.

[cestrumnocturnum]

A hand is what Xas' hand finds instead, but not for long.

Long fingered, conventionally mannish and sporting neat nails, an arm that extends from the shadows and makes sure the angel is not granted the indignity of falling back. That grasp transforms even before Xas can get a sense of who helped him, turning into steel jutting from concrete, like this is how it had always been.

Through the gutted interior of the skeletal skyscraper, a moment of someone that intrinsically owned the hand, but further away. They pause like a spotted predator before disappearing into the inner spine of the building, a blasted stairwell that creaks and moments beneath movement, but has enough concrete and iron to it to conceal as much as it supports.

The klaxon that Xas had heard continues to sound out. Maybe a little closer than before.