The crack on the far side of the chamber had spread among the thousands of years of isolation. As time passed by, the crack had slowly begun to expand above the initial laceration to the wall made all of those years ago. Due to the lack of upkeep, the feature had crawled the entire way to the top. It was impossible to see from the distance that the young man and Captain of the Roehmerl were from the end of the room, but one did not have to be seen to be felt. Such was the source of the groaning noise from before, unknown to them.
"We should move, Ryanti, we should go right now. Wherever we're going, let's get there quickly."
Damn straight.
Ryanti’s eyes flickered to Sounsyy’s form backing up against him. But he could not stop a feeling from lurking into his skin, a feeling about the end of the hallway, the end of that chamber. It felt like pins and needles, and the feeling was absolutely not something that he would prefer to linger around and try to figure out more. It did not feel good, that was all that registered to him. He placed a hand firmly upon Sounsyy’s shoulder, to tell her he was there. He leaned a bit over her shoulder, eyeing the door out of there.
The door itself was bent over upon its own form. It had malfunctioned long ago, and the dark blotches upon the middle of the deformed door told Ryanti that it had suffered intense electrical damage. The door was directly across from the area they entered from, but he knew they would not be able to venture through that contraption. “The door is broken.†He said to her, her ear not but merely a fulm or two away from his lips as he conveyed his advising input to her. What caught his attention though was a little static blue light that shined from an area right next to the door. It seemed small in nature – square in shape, almost like an access hatch of some sort. Of course! They could turn the valve to unlock the hatch, and crawl their way further inside.
“The maintenance shaft. Do you see it?†He clicked his flashlight twice at the light, exposing briefly what appeared to be a level underneath that one could pull and yank off the panel with. “We could crawl our way past that door. It’s not comfortable but it beats staying here. We have to turn the valve though. I hope it hasn’t rusted.â€
She could hear the effort of his breath as Ryanti leapt up and started jogging towards the other side of the room. For a few moments longer, the only sound that echoed throughout the enormous chamber was his pounding footsteps as he made his way across the space in front of him. The details of what had occurred to his right was not lost to him, as Ryanti kept his glance locked firmly in that direction, the blood stains amongst the floor and parts of the walls causing him concern, his breaths loud as he allowed his mental stress to bleed out of his lungs along with the physical stress that was incurred by the jogging. It was obviously that he was uncomfortable in this environment, and wanted to get out of here as much as Sounsyy did. Yet what happened next would change the entire face of their mission.
The final little bits of the age old fracture which had slowly consumed the entire far end of the wall like a parasitic scar peeled away, and one side of the enormous structure landed down upon the floor of the silent room, letting loose a deafening sound which shook the very floor they were upon, causing Ryanti to look that way immediately, his ears bending back due to the massive sound that vibrated the room they were in along with the rooms ahead. The pulsating echo of the right side of the far hallway’s wall hitting the floor reverberated through his ears as he stood dead still – dead afraid of that noise for part of him feared that they were not alone. And they were not.
With a looming, towering crumble the wall toppled to the side, slamming onto the floor with a near equal thudding, still air from the chamber behind now mixing with the stimulated dust in the air from the ancient panel, masking the now exposed room beyond even further than what the absolute darkness on the other end already hinted. Ryanti could make out shapes by pointing his light at it, but they were vague and obtuse. There were… cables everywhere, hanging from the ceiling and made out of weird fiber, as if they were mechanical tendrils entangled within one another in some sort of sickening apparatus. Ryanti did not even gift himself a breath. There was a sick tenseness in the air. It felt wrong. Unnatural.
Then, it woke up.
Piercing yellow eyes shined through the darkness like flames of Sulphur from a child’s worst nightmare, only that this was all too real. Mutated fists encased in grey matter and excess body mass pounded the glass of the enormous stasis chamber that it was in, activating dormant meta-defensive software protocols within his stasis chamber. What were in past eons designed to be auxiliary lighting in the room it was in had lost competence over time, struggling to turn on. The weak and feeble defense protocols were nothing more now than white lights blinking off and on, strobing the environment around Ryanti and Sounsyy, allowing them to make out the dark shapes of an absolute sea of cables surrounding the stasis pod at the end of the exposed room that dwarfed the ones pinned to the ceiling; and the stirring creature within. Yes, this was no nightmare, this was real. It had awoken, its mind rendered godless, its flaming volcanic eyes in motion as it let out a howl of a screech.
The moaning from earlier was not the ship coming alive. It was life coming from within the ship. And now that they had traveled within in innards, they would face its beasts.
Auxiliary systems began to activate around the Chimerical Biolab Research Facility, setting loose a relenting system of alarms that immediately transitioned the quiet and sanctioned area into a sea of swirling alarms that rang desperately in warning as the monstrosity with fury and anger rammed against its confinement once more, the tank long ago losing its ability to put it back to sleep again. Billowing yellow lights from the alarm blended with the white strobed to create an absolute scene of terror and chaos.
Ryanti was frozen, his face in utter fear of what he was seeing, the features in his brow, cheeks and lips frozen in his inability to comprehend what was going on. It was only the alarm’s lights that brought him back to reality, and his stillness and pupil dilatation would indicate traumatization to an expert in body language. His heart may had stopped for a moment or two. This was a state of fear beyond being scared, beyond withering like a maniacal lunatic. No, this was frozen fear. A kind of fear that would lead to nightmares down the road. His veins felt like ice and his skin bled a sickly pale from the blood drained from his expression.
To what horrific depths have they descended to in this place?
The sight was unbelievable, the unnatural force within the stasis chamber massive. But despite all this, he was still trained. He was still a soldier. His wet meal of fear and anxiety washed over his body, causing a temporary numbness of emotion. With one gasping breath he slung his rifle to the side and upon his shoulder, gripping Sounsyy’s shoulder with a cold, firm hand and tugging her in the direction of the maintenance hatch.
"COME ON!â€
Right after, a shattering sound of glass being pierced rocked throughout the room, audible through the alarms and buzzing. The twisted form of the creature within whirred and worked its muscles as it started to break through, each and every second becoming closer to violently emerging out of its five millennium old prison. Another shrieking scream from chimerical chords roared across the open air, sending pins and needles down Ryanti’s spine as his ears stood up on end, the shock and numbness wearing off and giving away to pure fear and near panic. Ryanti was the calm and composed type; even his tails and ears only responded to extreme stimulation. Yet his ears were as tight as they could be, and his tail lifted up in a natural reaction of flight versus fight.
“OPEN IT! OPEN IT NOW!â€
He shouted as loud as he could to Sounsyy, grabbing onto the valve of the hatch and started to turn it, but he could not do it on his own as he was already struggling with the amount of force it required to turn it due to the state of the manual lock. He didn’t even know if it would work, but it was only option they had. Ryanti and Sounsyy’s shadows from the alarm and strobing auxiliary lights caught the creature’s attention, and the damn well over 20 fulm tall monstrosity punched open another hole in the glass, stomping on a shard of it and using its brute strength to force it way through the tank in its entirety, it’s terrifying image amongst the cables that provided it nutrients eons ago as it spotted them a sight to behold and burn into another’s memory.
Ryanti looked back as one would typically warn against, and his hands began to turn the wheel faster at a pace he thought he could never match again, his groans of agony of the exertion beginning to morph into howls of desperation. He did not speak any more words, but when he looked back his feelings were apparent on his expression, and he put everything he could into trying to get the hatch to open… waiting desperately to see the door budge.
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