2020-04-27 - The Power Gauntlet (Phase One)

Stepping into the walk in cooler to just take a breath at work Easton closes his eyes as the cool air hits him, but that magnetic pull causes him to snap open his eyes. For a moment he hopes that the light just isn't working and maybe he tripped, but he knows better than that. He grunts as he tries to shift his weight on his knee and get to his feet. He can at least sense that there are people with him. He speaks, but there is no wary confusion, just annoyance, "Oh for fuck's sake. Now is not the fucking time."

Standing to his feet he pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights one up, hoping to use the lighter to shed a little light but mostly to get some nicotine in to 'calm his nerves'.

De la Vega's just leaving the precinct after stopping in to pick up some paperwork. He's in the process of digging his keys out with one hand while answering a message on his phone with the other. A glance up as he reaches his cruiser, and he goes to open the door and climb in..

..and finds himself dumped rather unceremoniously on the floor of somewhere dark, after a few hazy, uncertain seconds. He doesn't move immediately, save to flick his eyes around and take stock of what he can make out in the dark. He's not alone, and a quick pat under his jacket confirms he still has his gun. "..Marshall?" he murmurs at the sound of the familiar voice, and pushes slowly to his feet.

Lilith had been on the leather sofa with her laptop most of the evening after dinner while Byron tended to calls and paperwork and other planning in his office. But twelve minutes before she's taken with the sickening pull to shift her into somewhere much darker, she's gotten up. When it happens, she's standing under the lovely accent lights in the bathroom of the master suite, leaning into the mirror to put on a rosy pink flush gloss. The curling iron she's used on her hair is still on and hot and it smells like perfume and lotion and hair product and all the familiar Lilith smells that mingle and get left in her disappearing wake.

The brunette had been playing a little bit of dress up in anticipation of Byron stepping out of his office. She'd changed from lounge clothes into a white, body skimming silken slip nightgown with a long hem before curling her hair and doing all the pretty feminine presentation things. Therefore, when the light starts to collect and rise some after she's pitched into darkness and trying not to give into the sudden wave of nausea, she's one of the easier things to see with pale attire and skin marking her standout against such grimness like soft luminescence. She is, however, a bit apart from where the men are, and the noise of them initially puts her on edge.

But kneeling there on the floor with her hands pressed flat against the ground in anticipation of rising, she recognizes the voices with delay, then Ruiz says a name.

"... how many of us are here?"

Easton pulls in on the cigarette, it's cherry red tip briefly flaring up to life. The relief in his voice when he recognizes De La Vega is palpable in his reply of "Yea, Gunny." He can't quite make out Lilith's features by the dim lighter light and he's not inclined to just throw up some glimmer light, just yet. "You armed? I'm caught short I'm afraid."

"I think just three ma'am." Yes, Easton obviously has no idea it's Lilith if he's calling her ma'am. Not that he meant to say that, but it still slips out now and then.

Is he armed? That's a stupid question. The cop is always armed, paranoid fucker that he is. "Yeah," is all he's got the gumption to offer though. No smart assery from him just yet; they'll no doubt get there soon enough. Once he's properly on his feet, a slight narrowing of his eyes as he glances about slowly. He can't make out much, but that thrum in the background makes him tense. "Winslow?" he calls into the dark, perhaps keying off of something in her voice, or the shape of her body.. which one wonders how he'd know so intimately. A moment later, he confirms tersely, "Three of us. Yeah."

Lilith might be underdressed (overdressed?) but at least she's dressed. In fact, she's thanking her unlucky stars this didn't happen a few hours later, because showing up to this is highly cold and unpleasant and she's barefoot, but showing up naked would have made her pretty upset and she PLANNED on being naked later. Also Ruiz is here, he's seen enough, goddamnit. But it's okay that he's here. It's relief to realize that it's him and Easton as the other two, that is a good combination to face whatever needs facing. Which honestly looks like a whole lot of Void and Nothing at this point, but...

"Oh, sweet hell, this already sucks. But good. Two capable people. This is fine. We'll just..." Lilith pushes up and approaches once she really catches onto the company she's in and she looks like a little Victoria Secret angel coming out of grim darkness when she finds the pair to sync up and look around with suspicion as a trio. Rubbing her hands against her hips with palms flat and fingers fanned out in fidget of restless anxiety, she murmurs, "... seriously, I don't like this. Why is nothing happening and why's it so empty? How many guns do we have, just the Captain's?"

An annoyed puff of smoke is blown out at Ruiz's comment about always being armed. Stupid gun laws. He should just take up wearing a fanny pack full time so he can pull out one whenever. But Easton manages to get over it when he realizes who the woman is, "Lil.." He catches sight of her outfit and smirks, "Dressed for the cold I see." He's in his usual bartending outfit of black dress shirt with rolled up sleeves and dark jeans. He looks around at the floor and then up as the light rises. He looks at the looped wires and asks, "Are those nooses? Garrotes?" He grimaces at either of those options before pointing upwards, "Whatever they are, I'm not excited."

The captain's too busy prowling about and trying to make out the lay of the land, to notice whatever's going on above their heads. Though when Easton draws attention to it, he pauses and looks up; the burgeoning light allows him to make out a glint of what looks like metal here and there. Still squinting heavily, he shakes his head at the man's suggestion. "No fucking idea." His brows smoothe, and he shoots Lilith a brief glance. Then starts shrugging out of his jacket, battered thing that it is. Two steps toward her and it's held out with a bemused turn at one corner of his mouth. Not the first time he's done this, after all. "Take it. And we should see if there's a way out of here."

"Oh. This is familiar..." Lilith says to Ruiz as she's offered the jacket, a hint of a dry helpless FML kind of smile dusting at her lips before she slips into the thing. Once she's gotten into it, though, her eyes narrow and she looks up, losing her train of thought as she also sees now what Easton sees, "I hear noise. Like we're in a refrigerator or something. Cold as it is, I'm expecting to get attacked by frozen food or--"

Something is ominous about those thick and tangled, shiny masses of looped wiring and coils. It's not going to be frozen food or anything silly or benign. She knows it in her gut all of a sudden. But it doesn't really help.

What happens next happens so quick, they'd never see it coming from their view and angle.

The coil lashing around his fake leg doesn't even phase Easton until he's being yanked up unceremoniously by it. He manages to use his hands to stop his face from smashing off the floor in the process but it's just barely. He gets pulled up into the air, cursing freely as he goes. He tries to focus on holding the metal coils, stopping them from pulling him up but they're so damn slippery. "Stupid wire snakes!"

He might not look like it, built like the brick shithouse that he is, but de la Vega can move when the situation calls for it. He doesn't have time to think, when one of those metal tentacles comes whipping toward him; he simply twists away from it. And narrowly avoids having his legs lashed together. "Winslow," he bellows at the brunette, and lunges at the thing that's snared her, trying his damndest to pry it loose. Which gets him precisely nowhere. "Fuck. Marshall, can you get free? I can't fucking.. budge.. this.."

Lilith is wrapped right around the middle and immediately starts giving that metal coil hell as other supplementary lashing creeps out and snakes her way. They can sense the furious lash of power that flies out of her with as much reflex as the Captain's moves on his feet. But that coil just smokes and smolders, it's hard to get unwound as Ruiz comes in because it's winding SO tight with retaliation suddenly in response to the attack, she about loses her breath completely in the crush. Not that her breath much matters while she's kicking and hanging there, but it gives her the satisfaction of yelling, "Put me down or I will FUCKING ruin you!"

She has no idea who she's yelling at, but if it's a machine based creature as these metal wires indicate, maybe she could disassemble and break the giant machine she thinks they're inside from all the humming noise. But that's not what they're facing, really, this is just the means of getting her to where the Dream wants her to be. She tries desperately to get a grip on Ruiz's forearm while looking over to Easton stalling his own coil from grabbing him completely into the unknown darkness, "Easton, detatch your--"

Grip obtained, the coils yank Lilith straight out of view, she can't even finish that thought or work out if it's the best plan for him to actually try. He might need that thing to run. But it doesn't matter.

Lilith and her suggestion are gone into ominous quiet there for a spell.

Trying to decide between detaching his leg and making himself helpless or letting the coils drag him where they want him to go and possibly making himself helpless is not an easy decision. But in the end the desire to remain free wins out and he uses his Glimmer to release the mechanism holding it on, and tucks to drop like a rock. He slams into the ground hard and rolls off to the side. The clunk of his leg next to him is barely heard over his own groaning. "Thanks. Gunny." is about all he can get out before rolling to the side and trying to get his leg back on before something decides to snatch it off again.

Catching sight of Lilith in the box as he does so he shakes his head, "Yea, that looks like a bad thing."

He's not making any headway at all with the metal ropes that've attacked Lilith, so the cop turns his attentions briefly on his friend. A guttural growl, and he first tries to haul at the thing that's caught him by the leg, and then reaches for his still-holstered gun and bashes at it with the grip viciously. Easton drops, and then his leg clatters to the floor shortly after. And, with a huff, de la Vega shoves his gun back into its holster. "De nada," he mumbles, dark eyes on the tank that Lilith's dropped into while they were occupied. Agitated, he prowls in closer to try to touch the side of it. "You think?" is tossed back a little sharply. "The fuck is this place."

Lilith is laid out and catching her breath and not entirely sure what the hell she just got dropped into, but she knows she feels vulnerable, trapped, and away from the other two people in this terrible Void space of cold darkness, metal coils, and sickly gray light. Rolling in place, she gets onto her hands and knees and hangs that way a moment while getting her breath back, hair in her face, but then she gets up to stand on her own. She knows she's in a metal frame, but the miasma-esque shifting glasslike substance around it looks clear from the inside, so she tries to walk right out toward them in the distance.

When she does, though, she's zapped backwards before she gets to the edge of the frame, not so much with electricity, but crackle of harnessed power like a warning shot. It sends her reeling and immediately, she looks up because she remembers falling and thinks she got in that way, maybe there's no top. But while she's looking up, she notices shapes for a flick of time, things falling right at her that threaten to ground her or crush her. She's not sure what they are. She yells 'something' at the guys, they can see her mouth move, but they can't hear her.

They hear what she kills.

When she sends power with defensing lashing outward, though, to blow whatever's about to fall on her to bits from the inside, she realizes it's living matter. But it's already too late. She's sprayed and splashed with red-black blood, body parts, and violence while she dodges the larger torsos and connected humanoid pieces. When she does it, screeching echoes through the vast darkness, then turns into a wild throb of satisfied laughter.

Seeing Lilith get shocked back from whatever she's enclosed in Easton makes his way to his feet unsteadily, glancing up to try and ward off or dodge any more attempts at capture by the coils. He is about to reach out and try and do something when he sees the body drop and the blood splatter. He breathes out. He shakes his head, "Lilith! You okay?" Yea, he's fine ignoring whatever that was, it wasn't him, Ruiz or Lilith and that's about all he has mental space to care about right now.

Right before the voices startup another figure appears flitting about the edges of the space, it's not massive maybe six feet tall and cloaked in the shadows at first. It moves quickly and lets out a few hissing sounds. It seems to be circling the cage and the other two men. But it's far enough away in the darkness that it's hard to see.

During this circling Easton tries to keep an eye on this shape, and then on Lilith and then on the coils and it's a lot. He almost asks for Ruiz's gun to just shoot the damn thing even though he can't tell what it is yet.

And then the velociraptor steps forward towards the cage. It leaps at it as if it's going to pounce on it and break through but whatever energy sends it reeling backwards into the 'arms' of the coils. It gets sucked up and away before Easton can fully process what the hell just happened.

And then the voices start in.. He glances at Ruiz and shakes his head at first. But then something about it starts to make a dark kind of sense. He starts to look around wondering if there is an exit.. maybe? Shit, no. No! He can't leave someone behind. That's anathema to who he is. But it gets him agitated that he even considered it for the briefest moment and he lashes out at the cage trying to break it, tear off the metal bars that frame it.

His hand against the not-glass is repelled with a suddenness and force that has the captain stumbling backward and grasping at his wrist. Then those voices that start slipping into his subconscious, touching his mind like a hundred greasy little fingers. Leave her. Leave her. At first, it seems they might be right. Must be right. They should leave now, and let them have her. Maybe she even deserves it. Maybe-

"No." It's a slow realisation, scrabbled together from stubbornness and a dim sense that this can't be right. "No." He's perfectly aware of what's happened in there, and he looks it head-on; no flinching away, even if he has the brief urge to be ill. "Cap, you're going to want to move aside." Because, if the pale traceries of what looks like electrical current along his fingers is to be believed, he's about to zap the damned thing. The cage, that is.

Lilith really doesn't have a lot of time to recover or realize what the warmth is on her skin. It feels good, though. Standing inside this box, it feels good, like a hot shower spray. It also feels good to whipsnap with violence like that, to do SO much damage at once and let everything she holds inside outoutout. She doesn't even look afraid by what just happened, save for a stunned moment where she looks at the 'glass' as the Captain tests it with zap, then another when a whole Velociraptor is charging to... help? She doesn't slow down, she tries to attack it anyway, but she can't because it's on the other side of the wall.

This time, more figures rise, from the floor corners at all four sides, giving her nowhere safe to dodge what's falling dead center for her. Now, with these things falling from darkness, she can't tell what they are, but she knows they're alive and she's killing them and she wants to keep killing them. She can't stop anyway, what happens when one touches her? These humanoid things are never real, never real, never real. (Except that one time when Byron was Byron, Lilith.) There's another burst of blood and violence from above, more littering pieces. She gets a better look at the risen figures when her focus shifts to them next and what SHE sees isn't what the men outside the box see. Like a domino effect, as each one steps to reach for her, they snap at the spine into sickening angles and drop.

"Oh what the fuck..?" Easton tries to catch sight of what's happening but there's just a lot of blood and shark teeth people popping happening. He shakes his head and tries to focus his empathic abilities on Lilith to see how she's fairing. The initial read is concerning, a feeling that he's not expecting washes over him, one that he remembers all too well from fellow Marines back in the day. Only now he's sure that it's real, and not just something he thinks he's picking up on via body language and tone. He isn't content to let the whispers have what they want, "Fuck that shit, we're all getting out of her. Lil! Let's go!" He charges for the frame, assuming that whatever Ruiz did means he can get through and if he has to fling some shark-teethed humanoids aside to do so, so be it.

Ruiz doesn't even bother trying to get a read on Lilith. He knows her well enough to surmise that some part of her is probably reveling in this, just like he would be. Just like Easton would be. Both men have seen and done similar things, and they know. They know.

When the forcefield comes down, he doesn't waste any time thinking about his next move; he simply rushes at the thing and batters at it with his shoulder. Once, twice, three times. Maybe he can weaken it; but there's something tugging at him, tempting him. And with a snarl, he prowls over to have a look at these boxes. Circles them, panting steadily.

Lilith is seeing familiar faces from around town, locals, old high school teachers, friends, family and multiple nude Byron figures and it's wearing on her mentally, making her unsure, making her feel like a monster for the relish she can't help but feel more than is standard with each break and flay of the incoming bodies. Easton charges through some of the creatures before they get to Lilith, which leaves her room for clearing a path through to the other side of how he's charging.

They come tumbling out of the other side in a bloody heap, and it's painful again for Easton's chest, just like when he came charging in. The frame is still trying to shoot charges to prevent entry and exit, even though the mechanism is failing due to Ruiz's exerting short out of mass energy. Lilith gets zapped too with sparking on her leg, but it's more minor with the man sparking the charge like a body shield ahead of her.

With both of them reeling, Ruiz is free to examine his box.

The pain sears through his body as Easton tumbles out the other side with Lilith, but it's easy enough to ignore now in the moment. He is focused on Lilith, keeping her up and on her feet in case they need to move and making sure that she can get through this. "Lilith, not now. You can lose your shit later, but right now, stay focused. We need to get out of here." Which is always the rub right? Who knows what ends any of these crazy scenarios. Easton places his hands on her shoulders, not quite shaking but hopefully steadying.

The other boxes are the last thing on his mind. He should probably care a little bit more about them but he'd rather get just worry about getting through it.

Ruiz isn't stupid enough to actually step into the box. No, he'll pace around it slowly and furtively, tension scrawled through his bulky frame. Then the dull clack of his gun being unholstered and the safety disengaged. Finger off the trigger for now, resting lightly against the barrel as he moves, and scans the exterior of the enclosure intended for him with narrowed eyes. He's dimly aware of Easton and Lilith's absence, it registers in his mind, but is filed away as something to sort out later.

Lilith does get up, but she's staring, horrified in what's left of the box. She tries to focus on what Easton's telling her while she's held at the shoulders to steady. She tries not to focus on the fact she's sloshed over with blood of her own wrought horror and violent destruction. The man steadying her takes some of that with the talking, the voice gives her something in this close-pressing cold and dark void space that isn't blood.

But... Lilith still feels the adrenaline high and the relish that came from being in the box. She's tempted to go in for more, especially when she notices that the Captain is circling his own version of what she just escaped from with the barrel-through aid of Easton nearby. She wants to be the one again, she wants... it's wrong. She can't control herself and all the power that wants to lash out with such visceral and intense emotional response. It comes out, but she redirects it at the last moment because she's not alone.

The woman lets out a tiny screech of constrained fury through her teeth when it happens, but after that, she breathes fast and swallows down hard, nodding a few fast times to Easton.

"... What is he... what is he doing?"

"The only way out is through ..."

Easton actually says it out loud, confusing the whispers for his own thoughts. His eyes gaze over Lilith's shoulder at the box and he starts nodding as if understanding how this works. He looks meaningfully at Lilith and says, "I think I know what needs to happen. You good?" He pauses only for a moment before heading purposefully towards the box. He's not in a hurry to enter it though, he wants to at least figure it out before hand if possible. He reaches out with his physical glimmer to check for it's strength and any possible ways in or out that he might be able to use.

Over his shoulder he calls to Ruiz, "Pretty sure I need to just get it over with." He reaches down to his fake leg, hitches up his jeans and pulls out a KABAR. He flips it in his hand, blade down and out and reaches out with his free hand to see if he can push his way in.

As for the captain, he seems to have resisted, once again, the call of that darkness to him. A moment where it seemed he might cave to it, to satisfy his own curiosity. But then it touches his mind again, whispers to him, and he recoils as if hit. "I don't.. I don't know if that's a good idea, Marshall," he calls out to the other man. "We should stay together. Find a way out. I can't see anything.. fuck." It takes some willpower, but he backs away from the box that's clearly intended for him, and prowls back for the other two. "Winslow, where are you?"

Lilith doesn't quite know what Easton means or what he intends to do because she's real busy calming down. Then he's off with the drive of a man on a mission and she half turns to look after him, eyes widening with focus once she realizes where he's headed, "Easton...?" Mostly, she feels his absence and the dark around her. It makes her scared to move or turn the other way to see the carnage where she vacated her own Feeder Box. Gradually, she starts to creep toward where the other man's gone, then picks up the pace, like she might do something about it.

But then she hears the Captain's voice and he didn't go in his box, maybe Easton isn't either. Turning toward the sound, she diverts toward him, briefly looking into the dark in all directions. Then she thinks of something she can't pinpoint while staring into the ominous blackness, "... how did we get out last time it was bad?" Ruiz knows the time she means. It was barren and bleak violence as a landscape and in the end, they had to...

What's Easton doing?

Don't look at the broken bodies, Lilith. They're just doll parts.

Easton calls back at Ruiz, "I don't know if good ideas even exist in this place." Which is probably a terrible way of going about it, but Easton's pretty sure he's got it all figured out in that he just needs to get through whatever this box throws at him. And so he steps in as the door slides shut and readies the knife, expecting to have to fight his way through something but instead the walls start playing some weird reverse horizontal tetris. And manages to dodge as they start to move faster, slamming into the walls behind him with force. Watching them move he starts to wonder if he might be able to climb up them and see what's up top. Yes, that's going to be a hell of a long fall and he's not exactly the most agile person anymore but it seems like a better option than waiting to get smacked in the face with a concrete wall.

"For fuck's sake," grouses the cop as Easton ignores his advice and goes in, anyway. Which isn't to say that he's wrong. Because who the hell knows what twisted things this place wants, in order to be sated. His gun is safetied and re-holstered, and he follows the sound of Lilith's voice, touching her shoulder once he finds her. It's slick with blood, of course, and he's probably dimly aware of the fact that his jacket's never going to be the same again. "We found a.. fuck, what was it. A lever or something. A trap door. Why?" He's got an eye on Easton while he speaks to Lilith.

"A door, but that wasn't the hard part, was it? It was..." Lilith widens her eyes as the door closes behind Easton and her teeth come together with small grit when he almost gets smashed with jutting slab of concrete coming out of the wall from the inside. Her and the Captain can see what's happening through that one glass panel that opened to let the man in, and anxiously, she starts to look around at the darkness and...

"We had to go into the dark. We didn't know what was down there, we didn't know what creatures were down there too, we didn't know if there was a door. We had to go into the dark."

But you know, that was a single shaft with a guided drop and destination in the dark bottoms, this is a lot of wide open consuming darkness, which is twice as terrifying due to sheer size, so her facial expression doesn't look real sure or pleased about this revelation of hers. Lilith starts to explain about another dream, one that had something of the same idea for egress, but she's looking back at Easton dodging and it's making her nervous too because she really doesn't want to watch him get smashed.

There is a time in nearly every man's life when he feels justified in having played video games. Now is such a time for Easton Marshall. As the pieces slam into the wall he watches for something he can possibly use and after one more round he starts trying to clamber up on the retreating wall pieces and jump up to the next piece. He scrambles up onto one and swats away at something falling. The tinking noise didn't catch his attention but the sight of a grenade pin in his hand certainly does. Especially once he realizes all the of the others falling, "Well fuck you too." He tries to use his glimmer to make his ascent faster, wanting to hold pieces in place so that he can get a move on, no time to wait if there's grenades in the forecast.

We had to go into the dark, she says. And de la Vega looks a little sick with the thought of it. With the thought of what might be lying in wait for him, in the box that's clearly his. "Yeah," he murmurs on the heels of a breath that might be shaky. But if it is, he'll never let on. "Come on, come on, shield yourself," he mutters, eyes fixed on Easton as he contends with raining grenade pins. And what's surely an actual grenade, too. "You're saying that you think we need to face what's in those.." He nods to the enclosure his fellow ex-Marine is currently trapped inside. "In order to get out of here?"

"... I don't know. They want us in the boxes, it's clear, so where else is there to go, what other way is there to fight back?" Lilith wets her lips and turns anxiously to look toward the pressing extreme weight of darkness all around them, only the glowing gray hazy floor illuminating them with the box lighting strobes in this space. Then she looks back at Ruiz with her eyes full of weight.

Lilith literally means walking into the dark void of nothing all around them. It's a highly unattractive option based on challenge and faith, assuming they can even get the guts to step INTO all that surrounding them. But then the woman is watching Easton again and she makes a sudden 'oh' noise. Then another one. Suddenly, the brunette gets out of the bloody jacket to hand it over to Ruiz, taking some of the garish bloody look to her away to reveal some of the white of her nightgown in contrast to all the red violence that soaks it now.

After handing it over with apology briefly lacing her features, she points at Easton, "... he's going into the dark. That clever ass might be getting us a door instead of..."

Feeding Them?

There is sweat pouring off Easton at this point as he hustles his way up the concrete pieces. He's had to physically pin his knife to his leg since he doesn't have any time to resheath it and he needs both hands. He's breathing a little harder than he would like to admit but he's damned good at just 'going' when needed, and impending fall of grenades in a concrete box built to torture him certainly qualifies as such a time. The grenade explodes and the sound ripples through him. He opens his eyes to see blood sprayed over his hand and it's enough to get him to pause. He blinks at it and can feel the tightness in his chest spreading.

"Now is not the fucking time Marshall. Get your ass moving." Yes, he's talking to himself. In the third person. But his hands are now slick and he's lost a good amount of that 'hoorah' confidence that carried him thus far.

"You've got this, Marshall. You've got this." If Easton's receptive to it at the moment, he'll find a mental connection tenuously established with him; the brush of his friend's mind to his, offering strength in his time of trial. And despite his own demons where combat trauma's concerned, there's only the barest sense of discomfort when the shuddering report of a grenade going off is heard. He exchanges a brief look with Lilith, then paces in closer, agitated, like his proximity alone might help Easton not succumb to whatever he's dealing with in there. "Come on," he mutters between gritted teeth.

Lilith jumps a little when the noise goes off inside the box with Easton, because at their distance, she and Ruiz didn't see the falling grenade, they just heard boom and saw the blood spray on the glass. Her jaw drops for a moment with the worst case scenario that anyone would imagine and she starts to lean forward and call out before slamming her own blood-smeared hands up over her mouth to stifle it. But through that, Easton is still gripping to a slab and fighting to move, and with the woman's abilities and senses attuned to see what's broken in a body... she knows he's healthy still, that's not his blood.

There's a lot of things that they don't know about how to leave this situation, maybe there's many ways to do it. But the one she doesn't want to try? Wandering into aimless nothing and darkness with only the faith and hope that this wretched Dream will spit them out on the other side.

Lilith looks at Ruiz moving toward the box, she looks back at the dark, then she follows with a sudden crash of violence blowing the thick glass oddly substanced door apart. The pieces land like gelatin everywhere, even though it was solid before, "Easton, we're behind you, look for a door!"

Easton pushes back immediately at the mental link, but only after he realizes it's Ruiz he opens up. <<I'ma need you t'get real fuckin' mean, real fast if you want to help here Gunny. I'm a damn marine, not some pussy that needs cheering.>> He grits his teeth and grabs for the next concrete step to push out. His fingers slip as another grenade explodes and he nearly falls the whole way back down but he grits his teeth and is able to get his other hand to hold long enough to get his good leg up. He can't see much so he finally uses his ability to create a light, it takes on the appearance of night vision though casting a ghoulish green light.

He tries to make sense of the setup the rung on the later with that 'look' to it that he doesn't trust. But if can get through this, maybe they can get out. Well he didn't come all this way up to fall, that's for sure. He grabs for the ladder and starts to climb.

A sudden, and wholly incongruous grin splits the cop's face, apropos of apparently nothing. "You want mean, motherfucker, you got it," he mutters under his breath. And now that the powerhouse otherwise known as Lilith's gone and blown the side off that enclosure, he's free to prowl on in after her, ignoring the slip of blood under his boots as he moves. Ignoring the pins and gore scattered everywhere. "Come on," he murmurs to the younger woman, shoving his jacket back at her. She needs it more than him, right now. "You go first, I'll spot you, yeah?" He cranes his neck to get a good look at how far up they'll need to go, then prepares to start climbing once she's ready.

Lilith needs a moment once she's in Easton's box mechanism, surrounded by blood again, climbing through it on the stones. When the jacket is shoved back at her, though, it jolts her out of the rattled stare and instead of putting it back on proper, she busies herself wrapping it around her waist with tie mindlessly, something to do while staring upward trying to see Easton. She might be padding her ass for when she falls, because she doesn't look like she has the best faith in her ability to climb right now. Her survey sees slippery blood and jagged stone angles that need pull up strength. She's still rocked through with adrenaline and trying to block out her own personal trauma due to what just bloodily transpired in her own violent box.

She's shaking violently, she can't help it, and it's not exactly a smooth go, but she seems to have faith enough with Easton ahead and the Captain spotting her from below. It helps when you aren't alone for these things. Eventually, she gets toward the top.

The slimy grip of his hands on the ladder tries to pull Easton's mind back into that place. He ignores the smell of burning that isn't real. It's just a memory trying to re-assert itself but he mentally pushes it away. And while it would be nice to think that his intentions are noble, in getting everyone out alive, right now his main driver is that he wants a god damn drink. He can feel Ruiz and Lilith coming up behind him, he knows that the concrete pieces have stilled. And as the relief of having made his way through this latest nightmare sets in, the desire to wash away everything it tried to stir up rises.

"And I will keep fucking your shit up. Suck my dick." Easton tells the frozen french fires exactly what he expects of them, only he means it for the voices trying to whisper in his ear. He's covered in blood and in absolutely no mood to finish out his shift. He pulls off his shirt, walks out into the bar in just his white undershirt and explains, "I slipped?" before he grabs a bottle and heads to his office.

Ruiz knows full well that he got off easy, this time. Whether by luck or by design, who the hell knows. But They, no doubt, will remember. And that doesn't sit easy with him. He shuts his eyes as he sinks back down into the seat of his car, drags his bloodied jacket into his lap, and tries to bring his heart rate back down as the dregs of the Dream fade away.

And Lilith. She's not a pretty princess, she doesn't look like Snow White dolled up into sexy anymore when she's back in the Penthouse bathroom. She feels herself drop like a stone without falling at all, then she's suddenly kneeling and dry heaving, garishly decorated by mass sprays and splashing of blood.

Eventually, she's able to call out for Byron.