Futuristic thought-altered realities ꩜ heartstringss & buttercup.

[heartstringss]

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[heartstringss]

...somewhere on Earth, circa ~2200...


꩜
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The first couple weeks on land, they said it's best not to expect too much—that you wouldn't get much work done because the body would need time just to adjust. It wouldn't be easy, they had warned. So many field agents pulled out of missions just because they couldn't handle the weight of Earth's gravity and the mental strain it caused—that was the unspoken part—in all actuality, no one talked about the numbers during recruitment and orientation, just ever the risks. Nevertheless, Ayah was determined to be stronger and more useful than the others. She'd prepared for many things before her trip (...vitamins, check-- sensible shoes, check-- special UV-blocking sunglasses and high SPF sunscreen, check--), but somehow not the crushing weight of failure that crept in every second longer she was stuck in bed. No one had prepared her for such insurmountable pain inside her joints, the sheer discomfort any time she blinked or—god forbid—swallowed, the lingering, unending heaviness inside her chest that made it hard as fuck to breathe…

All in all, it felt like death.

Somehow unsurprisingly, in all this chaos, Ayah had lost count how many times she'd caught herself secretly wishing for real death instead. It felt like failure being stuck so long inside that bed, unable to work or think or fucking just do anything at all. It was about this same time that she began hallucinating the shadowy figure of her father standing in the corner of her room. A single eye glowed in the dark, familiar long and vacant stare. Sweat beaded across her upper lip and brow. She wanted to wipe it away but couldn't tolerate the weight of her own arms any better than this newfound waxiness of skin. Where would the sweat go if she wiped it? In space, sweat pooled wherever on their bodies and their clothes—it formed like tiny rivers on whatever surface that it touched—then it was collected and recycled, filtered multiple times over to be used for plants and drinking water or whatever other purposes they had.

For thirteen miserable long days, she could hardly eat, sit up or even take a drink of water without feeling like her skin was on fire or her lungs going to explode. Ayah lost track of how many times she had hallucinated that vision of her father in the shadows. At what point the whole-body ache finally began to wear off, she wasn't sure. Even past the initial brain fog, the actual air down here was insufferably hot and seemed filled with a constant smog. The thick UV-coated glass of the space station had protected her all these years on Atmos, but down here on Earth she apparently couldn't avoid a sunburn no matter how goddamn hard she tried. The first time she stepped outside the embassy in her nice clothes, dark sunglasses and wide-brimmed sun hat over miserably frizzy, sweat-drenched curls, slathered head-to-toe in sunscreen, you’d think the locals must have taken her to be an alien. Except they didn’t run or scream or cry like in the movies of the old days—to Ayah’s horror, actually, they laughed. It must have been a new kind of theater for them, perhaps at least more pleasant than the horrors of the world itself.

She'd seen the video and pictures captured via satellite and long-range drone, but nothing could have prepared for the true level of destruction here on Earth. It was no wonder her ancestors had chosen to leave—God, this place was filthy, war-torn, barren—ruined.

Before she could get too (un)comfortable, a plane whizzed overhead, its long body spinning, engine seemingly louder than the whole vacuum of space—

She clapped her hands over her ears to protect them from the sound. Instinctively, Ayah also ducked for cover. So did everyone else in a two hundred foot radius. This was no ordinary Sunday, so it seemed.

Except the plane didn't crash to earth, instead it diverted at the last second and disappeared into the clouds. Just when it seemed crisis might have been averted, the clouds caught fire and the whole damn sky began to burn. A single ear-shattering boom echoed far above the din of fire and engine roaring, easy enough to locate if you somehow managed to survive the agony of feeling like your eyeballs were about to burst…

With one hand still pressed firmly over her right ear (was that blood or sweat between her fingers? Ayah was too scared to look), the strange, laughably “alien”-like woman chambered to her feet and began to run towards—not away from—the heart of all this chaos.

 

[Buttercup.]

It'd been relatively peaceful lately in the region. "Bahston" they called it, although the official name of it was something like "Sector A-31", she never really bothered to remember. The ancient names just rolled off the tongue so much better, and feeling like the name of an actual place rather than an abstract subdivision of the almighty overlords' dominion was a nice little side effect. People on Earth tended to cling to these little things.

Anyway, Jezz hadn't been born yesterday so she knew the quiet wouldn't last - when had it ever? She wasn't on any mission in particular right now - sure, she was one of Terra Vera's main people on the job of figuring out what the hell those occasional anomalies were, but it'd been a while since the last one had been reported in A-31. She still had no bloody clue what to make of those phenomena, but hey - she wasn't paid to understand them, just to snoop around, gather evidence and pass important information on to people with a better chance of making heads or tails of it. She was a footsoldier, and she really preferred it that way. She was genuinely curious about what the hell was going on around her, mind you, but some of the stuff she'd seen was safely beyond the realm of what she could hope to comprehend without undergoing a lengthy course in quantum mechanics, psionics and god knows what else. And good luck finding such a course in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, USA (that was what they used to call the world, right?), surrounded by bandit camps, decrepit ruins and mountains of disposable plastics from aeons past.

So for the time being, scavenging it was. Jezz got her hair out of the way, put on an oversize cloak to shield herself from the worst of the sun, grabbed her weapons and popped out of her impromptu hideout. No-one around? Good. She was just a few miles away from a promising target - one of the caches humans made in preparations for nuclear winter and allegedly left behind when anyone who could afford to jumped ship. The final exodus had only happened a couple decades ago so some of the supplies would probably still be usable if they'd been locked in a government-built shelter. Maybe she'd find some old world food that hadn't deteriorated too badly? That sort of shit always fetched a good price, and well, she was saving up for a proper firearm.

***

Almost there now. But as she followed what they once called the "Interstate 90" closer to her destination... wait, a plane? What the actual fuck? She had seen the occasional orbital shuttle dropping off or picking up deliveries and important people, sure, but this thing looked ancient, like straight out of the early 21st century - no way this was spaceworthy. Anything such a relic would run on had to be MIGHTY expensive, she was sure, so it had to be someone important. There had once been an airport east of here, she thought, but that area had been eaten up by the ocean quite some time ago. Anyway, this was no reason to get sidetracked - the shelter remained regrettably unlooted and whatever that plane's agenda was had nothing to do with this. Yes, focus.

Well, let's just say the whole "focusing" thing is easier said than done when the thing you've never seen in person before catches fire and starts violently spinning in the sky for no fucking reason. Was that the end of weird unexpected things to occur that day? She kinda hoped so, but once again the world gave her hopes the middle finger. With an ear-splitting whine the plane turned UPWARDS somehow, setting the whole fucking SKY on fire. How did that even work? Sure, it was hot as fuck pretty much everywhere and Jezz was aware of the correlation between heat and being on fire, but... okay, breathe. Surely there was a rational explanation for all this, and it still had nothing to do with her. Focus. Fucking focus.

As the whole world turned sickly orange, it finally occurred to her: No, there wasn't a straightforward rational explanation for this, was there? And that could only mean one thing: Another anomaly. Which took precedence over looting some supply depot that might've been raided before if her intel wasn't perfect (and "perfect" was always a tall order in this fucking hellhole). She sped up and made her way towards what felt like the epicentre of the weird storm now raging in the atmosphere. What was she hoping to find there? She wasn't sure. But if there was the tiniest sliver of hope it'd be something that'd help Terra Vera's efforts to get back at the spacers, it was worth it.

It didn't look as though the plane ever came back down, instead it appeared as if it had exploded into a myriad particles now slowly drifting towards the ground, gleaming in the unforgiving sun as the clouds dissipated. And they seemed to all converge in one place. It only made sense to follow them, right? What was there to lose? Jezz's life? Pah. One didn't get far on Earth by playing it safe.

It seemed the centre of this bizarre event was a surprisingly well-preserved condo, or perhaps a hotel. Naturally she wasn't the only person to come investigate - this area was relatively densely inhabited still - but the faceless crowd that had gathered around the building appeared as if frozen in time, paralysed by some unseen force that didn't seem to affect Jezz for whatever reason.
"Ah fuck it, might as well," she figured and kicked open the door to the main lobby.

 

[heartstringss]

At some point in her jog to the epicenter of chaos, Ayah loses her hat. She doesn’t realize it until she’s standing at the foot of a strangely well-preserved building looking up at all the fragments of exploded metal, leafy ash and slowly-dying embers that are swirling through the already hot and unbearably polluted air. She feels a warm breeze rifle through her hair and reaches up to catch the hat before it falls–only to realize the hat is no longer there. Her fingers dig into sweat-dampened curls instewr, nails scratching at the tender skin of what's promising to be a newly sunburned scalp. Forget the fucking hat, whatever.

It’s never-ending, all this carnage. Ash and plane wreckage swirls in the wind but never seems to land on solid ground. The sky keeps burning, and while she's watching it burn among a crowd of dozens upon dozens, Ayah remembers something from a short film she had watched one time in school. A short film about house fires, how the smoke collects and lingers in enclosed spaces, how it floods your lungs and suffocates you from the inside out. Ayah's never been trapped in a house fire but she imagines if she had it'd probably feel a little bit like this. She coughs, looks around to her surprise that she’s the only one who is. A faceless crowd stands all around but she's the only one who's coughing, the only body not completely frozen like some kind of statue.

Except one other.

Dark eyes light on a figure, the only other figure besides herself that's moving in this crowd. A woman, so she thinks. Long hair cascades over cloaked shoulders, before Ayah can get too close a look the figure rears back a leg and kicks down the building's front door. Ayah doesn't stop to question who the woman is or whether or not she's safe to follow. (You don't get anywhere in this world by being meek or cautious, do you, afterall?)

Ayah reaches up to grab her sunglasses, pulls them from her nose and folds them neatly in her jacket pocket. She nudges through the crowd, the bodies stiff as rocks--they don't bend or lean but they also don't push back. Every step feels like the first step again in Earth's gravity, after 30-some odd years pushing through the muck of zero gravity it always feels like she just can't get where she’s going fast enough. When she passes through the building's ruined entrance, Ayah is surprised to find the windows completely barricaded, nail-and-wooden boarded shut. There's not an inch of sunlight in here, just what little seeps in through the cracks of poorly covered windows and the newly broken-down front door. A tiny noise streaks through the quiet, a frenzied buzz like insect wings vibrating. It itches its way up Ayah’s spine and beds itself inside her collar, and a hundred tiny little hairs on the back of her neck rise on end, that finest of biological DANGER red-light warning signals blaring.

“Is someone in here?” Ayah shouts, before she can think better. (She wasn’t afraid per se, but these anomaly situations apparently had a way of spreading paranoia.) Where was the person with the tattered cloak and long, flowing dark hair? Where was the subject, the anomaly-creator? Whoever, wherever, that person was, they’d clearly trapped themselves inside this building for a purpose. Ayah needed to locate them, at the very least return them to a lab where they belonged. (If they could be saved, that is. After all, some samples couldn't-- some were too far gone.)

 

[Buttercup.]

Jezz had no idea what to expect in the building. In fact she had no idea what to expect, full stop - kinda came with the territory of investigating events beyond any normal person's comprehension. Still, she was about as well armed as anyone in the area was likely to be and she knew how to handle herself. That gave her some confidence and the rest of the courage it took to carry on was supplied by simply not giving much of a fuck about her survival. That combination had seldom failed her before.

It was pretty dark inside, what with all the windows boarded up. Clearly this was a hideout of some sort, everything designed to give armed defenders an advantage over any attackers, Jezz thought. Who the "defenders" or "attackers" were exactly she didn't know and didn't particularly care, all she knew was this didn't look like a government facility. It was all too low-tech for that. She pulled a small light out of her knapsack and prepared a handaxe in her other hand, just in case. This building was huge though, and the source could've been anywhere... Well, it just so happened one of the doors inside was barricaded and none of the others were - if someone was hiding in here surely they'd be behind that, right? Well either that or this was the containment area for something horrible. Either way, worth a look.

Jezz tapped on the wall next to the door - surely enough, sounded like that flimsy "drywall" crap they used to make buildings out of. She tapped a couple more times to get a feel for where the supports were and finally punched a hole in the wall with her axe, just large enough for her to fit through - so much easier than dealing with the door! She thought she'd heard someone shouting just as she was doing this, but she couldn't be sure and time was probably of the essence here. She crawled through the opening and found herself in a stairwell.

Okay, where to next? The mysterious plane had gone upwards, she might as well do the same, right? Whether that logic had any actual merit was beyond her but it wasn't like she had a better plan. Besides, there must've been at least 10 floors above and what, like one below? Statistically it was the superior choice. So up she went, reading the floor number signs as she went: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6... wait a minute! She retraced her steps to make sure she didn't miscount - indeed there was no floor 5, but... in the middle of the flight of stairs going from 4 to 6 she could hear a voice. It didn't feel like it came from anywhere out there, more like from the middle of her skull: "can't... won't... not worth it... too dangerous...". It wasn't her voice, needless to say, and she wasn't having any of its negativity.

"Who is this?" she demanded out loud without really giving it much thought.
The voice didn't like that one bit.
"GET!!! THE FUCK!!! OUT!!! NOW!!!"
The shriek was so loud she instinctively covered her ears, not that it did anything to help. But, despite seemingly existing only in her head, the scream reverberated throughout the stairwell, echoing back and forth, growing in intensity each time... Until it abruptly stopped. Leaving behind a horizontal crack in the entire building. And that crack festered and rumbled, growing in size... and eventually revealed what would've been floor 5 if the sign didn't read "Floor GET THE FUCK OUT NOW" instead. This had to be what she was looking for.

What were once double doors to the main hallway of floor 5 looked like someone had taken a military grade battering ram to them. Past that, a gruesome trail of throbbing viscera was anyone's best bet at tracking down what the fuck was going on here. Jezz said something unladylike under her breath, inhaled and followed it. She'd been through worse. Right?

 

[heartstringss]

Nobody answered her call. Ayah waited a few more seconds, counting slowly in her head, then cursed and turned back to the front entrance. She had only meant to utilize the light, but instead her attention froze on what she saw just beyond the threshold: the crowd was still immobilized outside, everything save for their eyes which seemed to be rolling constantly within their sockets, a slow but steady trickle of tears flowing from the corner of each horrified, blood-shot eye. It was hard to look away from a scene with such clear and potent suffering, but the buzzing in her ear was ever-present and its voice was oh so, so demanding…

Shifting just out of view from the crowd, Ayah drew back one side of her jacket to reveal a hidden collection of high-tech gadgetry within an assortment of well-hidden pockets. Though it was nearly impossible to tell without close inspection or a well-trained eye, Ayah actually carried quite a few things on her person—various types of environmental readers, personal health monitoring devices, and data-loggers—but perhaps most surprisingly, what appeared to be a taser. She withdrew this last from its secure holster and checked the battery life, then pressed a button on its side to activate a secondary flashlight. Only then did she turn back to the wide mouth of the building’s largely gutted and disheveled interior and finally set forth to venture further in its cavern.

Ayah walked carefully, arm extended, and swept the light in a wide arc every few seconds so as to avoid any unexpected surprises. Though it was nothing more than a gut feeling, she suspected that the person with the long hair whom she’d seen go into the building just prior to her own arrival was not a hallucination but also not likely a friendly. It was hard enough to remain inconspicuous as a space-dweller without taking into account all the fancy gadgetry, and crossing direct paths with the locals certainly didn’t make it any easier…

She gritted her teeth as she came upon a roughly punched but conveniently human-shaped large hole in a wall, its material still crumbling and the air around it still clouded with dust—likely meaning it was fresh. She looked at the hole and then swept her eyes to the barricaded door just a few steps to the left. (Had any of the other doors she’d passed been barricaded? No, but they also hadn’t revealed too much inside. This just felt suspicious...) Shining the light inside the hole first and then poking her head inside when nothing too concerning happened, Ayah looked inside and was surprised to find a stairwell. This seemed like the most natural place to start her investigation so she climbed inside, holding her breath as she passed through the cloud of dust.

Ayah was just returning to the stairwell from an uneventful (but still unsettling) trip to the basement level when an unexpected shriek broke out, startling her enough to drop her flashlight. She slapped her hands over her ears, but it didn’t make much difference because the scream only grew louder, its echo overlapping as it reverbated in the small chamber of the stairwell. Even worse, it made the bulbs inside her flashlight stutter and become a strobe, the tiny metal teeth of the stun attachment in the device’s mouth glittering with the effect. While the scream powered on, Ayah watched in horror as the taser on her flashlight seemed to activate itself. A jolt of high-powered electricity shot out and hit the wall, followed by a distant rumbling and the scream abruptly stopped.

She’d fallen to her knees at some point during all of this, and now that everything seemed to have calmed, Ayah reached out and grabbed her flashlight. She shut off the power to the taser then looked at the hot-glowing contact point where its surge had hit the wall. Nothing seemed to be damaged (on this level), so she wasn’t too concerned to leave it all behind. There were other levels she still needed to investigate, and regardless of the scream’s ferocity and message, Ayah actually did not intend to “get the fuck out now.”

She had to grip the stairwell banister to make it up the next few floors, as somehow the floor had melted and turned into a slick metal sheet going all the way up each level with each step that she ascended. It felt like what she imagined going backwards up one of those old-times play slides would feel like. When she clambered out onto the landing of what should have been level 5, Ayah stopped to catch her breath but instead let out a sharp gasp as her flashlight landed on a huge festering crack made up of nearly the entire wall. The doors were beaten to shit as well, barely hanging on their hinges as they opened up onto a floor replaced with pure and gruesome horror.

The stench is what hit her first, something like rotten meat and copper that filled her nostrils and coated the inside of her throat. Ayah tossed her arm over her lower face, eyes tearing while she coughed. With her other hand she reached into her jacket and withdrew a face mask. She put this on before she walked in any further. Unfortunately, there was little she could do to protect her shoes.

After the incident with the stairwell, Ayah honestly couldn't say she was too surprised when the room resisted and obviously didn't want to let her enter. Still, she wasn't prepared when the bulging viscera that consumed most of the floor split open and poured out its guts. She slipped, almost fell but then managed to catch herself just before the last second–

…or um. Something caught her?

Once she steadied herself enough to look around, Ayah lifted the flashlight and then promptly screamed.

 

[Buttercup.]

Jezz would've said she'd smelled worse things in her lifetime, and quite honestly that was probably true. Still, this was pretty fucking vile. She wrapped the hood of her cloak around her face in a vain effort to filter at least some of the pungent odour out and soldiered on.

This didn't really look like the remains of human beings, she thought. No, instead it felt like walking through a living organism - or rather a slowly dying one that's started to decompose while still drawing breath. The way some of the gore writhed and pulsated didn't feel right. But she told herself this wasn't real - well, not real-real, anyway. It'd go away once the source had been dealt with, and then she could grab a sample of some sort and get back to her original plans. She'd be fine.

To add to the unsettling-ness, the amorphous mass of flesh seemed to react to her presence. Slightly recoiling from wherever she trode, some smaller bits curling back as if looking at her, assessing whether or not she was a threat. If she could read the body language of surreal fleshy tentacle things she'd know the conclusion was a resounding "yes". A couple of slimy tendrils tried to ensnare her, but nothing a quick axe chop couldn't fix. It all seemed to converge on a massive steel door - a vault. The viscera was clearly coming from there, squeezing through the impossibly narrow space underneath the door, blood and mucus oozing in all directions as the tissue was crushed and rematerialised just outside. Yeah okay, this was one of the grossest things she'd ever seen, she had to admit.

Well, what now? If this was a panic room or a safety deposit of some sort the walls would've been reinforced as well for sure. Her axe wouldn't cut it anymore, no pun intended.
"Get the fuck oooout..." one of the numerous appendages howled faintly with its deformed mouth.
Hm.
Talking back to the voices had taken her somewhere last time, right? Recognising patterns had seemed to be a running theme with resolving the anomalies, so it wasn't even an idiotic idea, she thought. And the themes here seemed to be "upwards", "converge" and "ignore boundaries", from what she could gather.
Okay, here goes!
"Nah I don't think so."

Nothing.

Because it seemed the voice wasn't focusing on her this time around - instead, the tentacle she was trying to outwit was pointing in a slightly different direction. Towards where she'd come from. And upon shining a light in that direction it seemed like another human was quickly getting tangled up by tendrils and struggling to break free over there. A scream that sounded like a woman's pierced the weird bubbling ambience of the room.

Okay now, realistically she had NO reason to assume that human wasn't following her with plans to shank her. She had no fucking reason to help them. But maybe... uh, if she could get that person to 'get the fuck out' like the voice demanded she'd get somewhere? This was tenuous logic even by Jezz's standards, admittedly, but she didn't have much to go on here and getting rid of the interloper would be a net gain in any case.

So it was settled. She rushed towards the other human with her axe ready to strike. A few quick chops and a few severed unholy appendages later, the stranger was free and Jezz leapt back, ready to end her if needed.
"Didn't you hear before? I told you to get the fuck out!" Might as well pretend that was her, right? It'd make her more menacing and every little bit counted in a confrontation.

 

[heartstringss]

Something cold and sticky snaked its way up Ayah’s leg. She knew she should have reacted, could have hit it with the taser or her fist or at the very least could have fucking tried to shake it off, but instead, somehow, she wound up freezing. She could feel it on her skin, feel it like some kind of stinky, oozy pus-like slime, and against her better judgment, against all sense of logic, she gave in to paranoia. What if this thing made her sick? What if by touching her skin this thing spread some kind of nasty bacteria, and those bacteria seeped into her pores and then her whole leg got infected? What if she couldn’t return home because she got infected with some weird anomaly disease and then her people shunned her, and she never got to see Atmos again?

Ayah’s breath turned ragged, hands shaking in their balled-up fists. Instead of fighting back, she followed the beam of her flashlight to where it shone directly at her boot, spotlighting the visceral mass while its grip tensed threateningly, menacingly, around her calf. All sound was muted save for the hammering of her heart inside her chest and the squelchy murmur of unspeakable horror writhing on the floor. Five, ten, fifteen seconds passed…

A minute, maybe more. That’s how long she stood there before she finally snapped out of it.

Pounding boots across the floor. A glint of metal shining off the beam of her flashlight. Dark eyes shot up just in time to see a figure rushing towards her, long enough to register the axe but not the face of her assailant–

Another shout ripped from her lips, this one equally surprise and warning–

One hand shot to shield her face, the other crossed to shield her heart. Before she could get a handle on the trigger of her stun-gun, the whoosh of the axe flew by, and her blood ran cold… Her heart stopped for just a second.

But she was alive. The tendrils wrapped around her legs seized tighter for about two seconds then abruptly slipped off and plopped wetly on the ground. Whatever liquid coated the floor also splashed up with the impact, which in turn soaked her boots and pants nearly halfway to her waist. Ayah gagged, her face turning beet red. She felt a whole host of emotions–rage, embarrassment, disgust, frustration–but none of them was gratitude. Instead, her grip tightened on the barrel of her stun-light, practically splitting hairs from pressing on the trigger.

"Didn't you hear before? I told you to get the fuck out!"

Without hesitating, Ayah turned the beam of her light into the stranger’s face. She connected the dots between cloak and hair. Was this the anomaly-creator or just some incredibly brave (stupid) civilian? Sizing them up, Ayah recognized immediately that she was outmatched. If it came down to a physical altercation, she might only have her nimbleness, tech and wit to her advantage. Brute strength and show of force, however, clearly lied with this er… woman?

Instead of fleeing, Ayah planted her feet and squared her shoulders. She didn’t particularly like being cursed at, let alone told what to do. “I don't take orders from you,” she said plainly to the woman with the axe. And before she could get any bright ideas herself, Ayah turned the stun-light to the floor and shot a few dozen volts of high-powered electricity straight into the center of the nearby pulsing, writhing mass. Fry the whole damn thing, hell of a solution.

 

[Buttercup.]

Okay, this wasn't some random bandit, that much was obvious. The skin complexion was a bit too perfect for someone living out there in the ruins, and that gizmo the stranger was waving around looked mighty expensive. Fortunately for Jezz though, she was pretty good at smelling fear, and it was clear this person had correctly identified Jezz as a fucking menace. She could work with that. Just had to make herself appear a bit bigger, maybe hiss a little.

"I don't take orders from you"? Oh, how very quaint. She was gonna make this bitch EAT those words mighty fast and she was gonna enjoy every sec—
...well, such was the plan until the interloper electrified the whole goddamn room, anyway!

"FUCKING... ZZZZZNZNNNNGH... SHIT!" Jezz jumped across the floor in a frantic effort to avoid all the wet spots (spoiler alert: there were no completely dry spots) and eventually climbed on a wooden desk which was miraculously free of all that gross ooze. "ARE YOU FUCKING NUTS???"

Before her unwelcome company could confirm or deny fornicating with shell-encased seeds, however, a loud metallic squeak roared through the room. That bloody door! She figured the current made its way to whatever mechanism was keeping it shut and triggered some sort of override, although that was a wild guess on her part more than anything. Seemed like a pretty stupid way to design such a door, but expecting mundane concepts such as "making sense" to apply here would've been naive.

Well, no time to waste! She rushed through the door before the other woman recovered from all the chaos, hoping this would be it, no more gross shit, no more riddles.
If only she'd been so lucky.
Guess what was through the vault door? Let's just say Jezz nearly broke her nose charging into what was a fucking brick wall with a couple small holes all this throbbing goo was pouring out of. And some of the bricks looked like grotesque toothless mouths, barely audibly chanting "get the fuck out" and "can't, won't, too dangerous". And she was getting really, really tired of those words by now.

"OH YEAH, IS THIS TOO DANGEROUS?" she asked as she put all her body weight behind an axe swing at the wall.

 

[heartstringss]

Okay, so maybe… just maybe… Ayah didn't think things through entirely before she electrified the entire room. It took approximately 1.56 seconds from the time she pressed the button activating the taser for the initial shock to reach the slime-and-pus-drenched soles of her boots. A tiny tingle traveled up her leg into her spine, sending deep, nerve-wracking tremors all throughout her entire body. She gritted her teeth involuntarily, stumbled back and just barely managed to catch herself before she tripped over the ragged edge of the huge crack leading back into the stairwell. While the other woman hopped around trying to find somewhere safe to stand, Ayah did much of the same, but for her sake, fortunately, she didn't have to go as far. All the while, her thumb remained pressed on that button. Even if this had been an initially profoundly stupid idea, she still had vengeance to enact on that damned disgusting, writhing mass all over the floor.

Safely back inside the stairwell, Ayah could hear but no longer see the other woman when the shocks wore off and (predictably) she resumed shouting. She fumed but didn't get a chance to respond–which was a travesty, obviously, for someone like Ayah who preferred to always have the last word–before a loud metallic squeal broke out across the room. This confused the space-dweller who, up to this point, still had not made it as far into the room as her unwitting companion and thus had no idea about the steel-vault door.

Ayah poked her head through the crack in the stairwell and observed the floor which was now made up of bubbling-hot goo and the newly shriveled and quietly sizzling, twitching, shapeless mass (serves you right, gross fucker). A wild sort of clambering followed with the loud squeal, what she could only assume had to be that god-awful woman off on the tail of whatever awful thing came next after this disgusting floor. A few steps back into the room, Ayah paused to collect a sample of some of the goo and tissue on the floor. She tucked this safely in her jacket pocket and then, letting the other woman lead the charge (she was clearly *not* the target, or at least that's what Ayah assumed), quietly jogged on.

Unfortunately she was just a few seconds late to watch the woman nearly break her nose running into the surprise brick wall. (But not too late to get to watch the scene that followed.)

[…] "OH YEAH, IS THIS TOO DANGEROUS?"

What the hell was she going on about now? Ayah held back, not able to get close enough to make out the fact that the liquid oozing down the wall was the same as what lie on the floor, or that some of the bricks had small gummy mouths and that they were whispering, chanting–the words of which she also, thus far, personally had not heard. She'd missed some of the finer details due to her companion getting here first, and because unlike Jezz, Ayah herself had lingered too much, or in some places, like the stairwell, she had taken a few wrong turns.

She watched, horrified, as the woman lifted her ax, reared it all the way back and took it full-force to the wall. Perhaps not the best time to intervene, so instead she just held back and watched.

And watched.

…and watched?

No matter how hard or how many times the woman swung her ax, no matter how many bricks she angrily sent flying, it seemed the wall just casually rearranged itself and put up another layer.

It almost begged the question: what was on the other side of this wall that needed so much damn protecting?

Ayah grew tired of watching after a while, instead back-tracking to take closer observation of the steel vault door. It was barely hanging on its hinges, the metal cold and lifeless, door handle broken and dangling by a few loose wires. Had it been an obstacle at some point for the other woman? Judging by the state it was in now, that hardly seemed likely at all. But then what had the giant metal squealing sound come from? There was nothing else in the room that would have probably made a sound like that, and considering the “prize” that lay behind, clearly at some point the door must have guarded something. But then, of course, all this was just a big mirage… was it not?

“Save your strength,” Ayah called, finally interrupting–but still not getting too close to–the other woman. “If it doesn't let you through, you risk breaking your ax.”

She thumbed the wires on the steel door–dusty, corroded with age. Looked at the floor and how easily it'd been defeated with just a few well-placed, if not reckless, shocks. “There has to be another way. Look at this door. Was it like this before?”

Walking to the unforgiving brick wall, Ayah scrunched her nose in disgust at the vision of the brick leaking goo and layered with a dozen toothless mouths. The mouths were moving, a gentle murmur itching at the ear but she couldn't quite make out the words, so she leaned closer. Of course there was the favored “get the fuck out,” then more quietly, “...can't, won't, too dangerous…”

She lingered a second too long once again. It was at that moment one of the mouths grew an unexpected pair of teeth from fragments of all the scattered brick and– snap, snap, snap–

Ayah jerked back just as one of the fragments caught her ear. She yelped, kicked the wall one time in warning (ouch, that hurt) then quickly drew her taser in case she needed to do more. The mouth seemed to laugh, a barely-audible snicker–which like, okay, rude–but didn't pursue her any further.

She turned back to the axe woman. “What's it so afraid of?” It. Not a person, yet, or perhaps ever. “Have you tried just… talking? As opposed to, y'know, violence.”