Nightshift 39: Main Hallway 2-East

[ruthless_hunter]

[from here]

Lockdown checked the map again with his flashlight. He was almost where he needed to go. Hopefully Starscream was still holding out. Lockdown knew that he could always find another employer if something happened to Starscream, but that did not mean he would not try to hold onto the one he had now.

He went over Starscream's instructions

Comments

[loyal_despair]

((From here.))

It seemed like this hallway was devoid of enemies so far, but Kira kept his guard up. He glanced back once to make sure that Hanatarou was still with him before pausing at the first door they came by to pull out his map. It was confusing here, but ...

"That hallway." He pointed to it with his flashlight as he tucked the map away again. "It should be on the right." The fourth door of so many. How large was this place, he wondered, that it could hold so many of them and so much energy, and yet keep them all subdued?

[mitase]

It wasn't hard to tell that Hanatarou was still with him - the healer was sticking close enough that he could almost be Kira's shadow at this point. When the vice-captain paused to check the map Hanatarou realized what he was doing and forced himself to move away just a little. Just enough that he wasn't quite so clingingly close.

He turned his head to follow the flashlight's beam toward the hallway indicated, and nodded a little, hand tightening about the pillowcase-bag he held as though for reassurance. With a silent and fervent prayer that there not be anything else to test his nerve in the near future, he moved on.

[going here]

[hajike_tobiume]

[from here]

Stopping at the top of the stairs, the shinigami listened for the sounds of combat or anything alarming. She could hear something coming from the west, but she couldn't place the sound. No matter. They're destination was not that direction. A part of her was ashamed for feeling that way, but she would not seek out conflict - not with the human in her care.

[uruz_vii]

Even if there was a sound coming from the west, Sousuke wasn't about to get mixed up in it. Not when there were only two of them, and one couldn't fight with a dead eye. He moved quickly across the hallway to the one specified at the beginning of the night.

[ To here.]

[hajike_tobiume]

[from here]

A few patients were in this hallway, but thankfully they had yet to encounter a monster. Hoping she didn't just jinx them, Momo followed Sousuke.

[rocksthecourt]

[from here]

As Klavier continued moving, the sounds of movement grew distant. He slowed his pace just a little, enough to pay closer attention to the immediate area. With the exception of Kristoph, there didn't seem to be any other signs of life over here.

"I think we made it past everyone," Klavier said, though that much should have been just as obvious to the other. Since there was currently no people around, he clicked his flashlight back on. He swept the light over the area as best he could with the limited range. A door to the left, stairs on the right, and a stretch of more darkness ahead. Wonderful.

"It is... in the last most hall, isn't it?" He was fairly certain he was right about that, but Kristoph would likely know for sure. The question had barely gotten out when the radio in his pillowcase suddenly came to life. He suddenly scrambled to cover the radio's speaker before it could make too much noise, but then a woman's voice emerged from the static.

Wh-what? A... broadcast? It seemed to be directly addressing the

[dasgift]

Mild interruption aside, they had made it out of the central hallway alive and well. Though, in hindsight, the situation appeared not as terrible as originally anticipated. A cat in a sour mood was marginally better than being caught in the wrong end of a fight.

It did beg the question, however: what exactly had the Gavins narrowly avoided?

Switching on his own flashlight, Kristoph moderated his pacing a bit, enough to stay fairly close to Klavier. He paid the obvious statement no heed, focusing instead on the more relevant question. "You are correct," the man murmured. "The third door on our left."

But any thoughts of doors fell by the wayside as a mess of static and voice emerged from Klavier's pillowcase. The younger man's attempts to muffle the sound failed miserably, only Kristoph did not appear put off. On the contrary, a vague expression of interest fell across his features.

"Oh." The attorney adjusted his eyeglasses. "She lives. I was worried."

[rocksthecourt]

...Incredible. Some people were really something else. And here he was assuming no one outside this hospital network was aware of what was going on. No, this little lady at the very least was fully aware. Likely, she wasn't the only one if she was talking about hoping someone would replace her soon. And of all the things she could be doing, she was wasting her time sending useless radio broadcasts?

Oh, this was rich.

"Hmm? You know who she is?" At the very least, his tone showed no sign of ill opinion. He didn't sound very jovial either. "Does she... always make these announcements?"

[to here]

[fuzzy_diablo]

[ From here.]

Kurt stopped in the middle of the hallway and pulled out his map again. Now which way? He supposed that he'd gotten them there now, and the priority now was what kind of supplies Tony would need.

"There are a bunch of storage closets down this way," Kurt indicated down the hallway. "But I don't know what kind of stuff you need, Mr. Stark." Kurt swallowed a little and held out the map.

[i_dont_paint]

Tony waved the map off. After almost a week spent trying to get down the hall, he had it memorized. For all the good it had done him so far. "We're heading for the last hallway up here. Third door on the left. I'm looking for a toolkit. I doubt we're going to find anything more precise than a handyman would use, but keep your eyes open. Pipes and wiring, too. The possessions room should be up the same hall."

He headed east, keeping his stride steady even as his level of tension crept up. They were getting close to the area he and Wally had been ambushed in their first time up, and it wasn't exactly easy to convince himself it wasn't likely that tonight would end in a similar way. He searched for distraction, and found one readily enough in the odd behavior Kurt had demonstrated so far. "So, when are you planning to let me know what's under that sheet?"

[fuzzy_diablo]

Kurt blinked, pulling the map back into the recesses of his sheet. Right, Tony had probably been here longer than him, so he knew the layout. That made sense.

The mutant followed behind Tony obediently, looking around for any sort of threat. He jumped a little when Tony asked the question Kurt had been silently expecting. His ears drooped a little.

"It's not pretty," Kurt said. "People... back in Germany, they used to attack me. Before I moved here. To America."

Hopefully, that was enough of a preparation. Kurt looked around the hall and, finding no one, he pulled the sheet down and off his head.

[i_dont_paint]

Even with the warning, Tony's first instinct was to recoil from the appearance Kurt revealed when he dropped the sheet. He jerked as though scalded, though he managed to catch himself before actually vocalizing his shock. Intellectually, he knew Kurt wasn't one of the monsters stalking the hallways. The ones he'd run into had been all hunger and base instinct, and the ones he'd heard of had sounded much the same. They certainly hadn't been coherent enough to talk, integrate into a group, and generally behave like normal human beings. That still didn't stop the gut-deep holy shit response to someone so alien in appearance

[kanpekinasenshi]

[from here]

Just shining her flashlight down the hallways, it looked as though things had been picked over already. That was no surprise... it was the same every night, people rushing for the same supplies. With new patients all the time, and the disappearances, there was no reason for supply and demand to ever change, was there? Seiya wondered if there weren't some more efficient way to get supplies to those who needed them, and keep others from collecting more than they needed, but the Clubs seemed closest to that and it was obvious that even for those organizations it was just too big a job.

She paused in the hall, considering. "You said that you've been in some kind of situation like this before... was it more normal to be attacked more often then?" Before letting that unpleasant idea dwell, Seiya added the suggestion, "It might be rarer here because there's so many patients everywhere."

[themotherreborn]

"Yeah," Eileen said, nodding. "All the time. It...hardly anywhere was safe." She couldn't remember a place, besides those stairs going down to hell, where there weren't creatures. And when Henry had left her alone, she'd had to fend them off herself. Sometimes he had tried to find safe places, like the cells in the prison, but....

"Maybe you're right. There were just two of us then...and sometimes I was alone, and everywhere was teaming with these...things." She shuddered, hating to remember, feeling the curse stir under her skin at the memories of fear and desolation.

[kanpekinasenshi]

Seiya paused, listening to the story, before turning back and giving Eileen an awkward, hesitant smile. "That sounds difficult. But here, you've already got two people, just in our group--and lots of others. It's true that you can't trust everyone here, but there are a few decent people here and there too... at least, I think so. This place isn't like where you were before."

Where had she been before? And why? It sounded only slightly familiar, like the sort of traps made by would-be queens and Chaos's influence to try and distract soldiers from their duty of protecting the Princess. Those could usually be broken through with logic or time or just the purifying essence of the true Princess herself... Eileen didn't seem like a soldier or a princess, just a frightened woman, for now