🕸️Correel - Abandoned :3
Trick or treat prompts
Large, empty buildings should not, by rights, be as intimidating as they usually are. Tipoca City was huge and so regimented that any time other than shift change, class change or meal allocations left most halls empty and echoing and liminal. It was home, but the oppressive sensation it produced was vast.
Mereel has enough experience creeping through empty places. He’ll be fine.
Corr is crouched behind him, tampering with a door panel in the hopes that they can use what remains of this place’s power to sneak around rather than break into every room they find. The sensation of unknown eyes watching them from the dark persists. Mereel swivels his head as frequently as he dares, surveying both ends the corridor through his low light filter.
“Got it,” Corr mutters. His voice is low, his vitals on Mereel’s HUD are only slightly elevated. He’s doing impressively well.
The door mechanism shrieks bloody murder when it opens. So much for stealth—but they probably should have anticipated that. Mereel precedes Corr into the room, casing and clearing the exact way he wants Corr to emulate.
There’s even less light in here, dingy and damp and derelicting seemingly before their eyes. There’s a pervading cold that inches under Mereel’s armour like it’s more than just uninsulated duracrete chill.
“This what we’re looking for?” Corr asks, gesturing to the server bank in the back of the room. From afar it looks like it hasn’t been operated in years, but Mereel’s HUD has highlighted the uneven layers of grime and recently disturbed patches of dust that are lighter than the thick blanket over the rest of the room.
“Looks it,” he replies, and begins pulling out his slightly more advanced slicing equipment from his pack. “Watch the door. If anyone’s in here, they know we are too.”
Grunting, Corr steps soundlessly back towards the entrance.
The only sounds while Mereel works are the occasional scraping of grit under boots and the close, intimate sound of each other’s breathing down their in-helmet comm lines. Stillness, like the old facility is holding its breath around them, makes every click and fumble echo forever. But no one comes crashing down the corridor to apprehend them, and Mereel downloads the slow, bulky content of the server and inserts his favourite little virus with only a few minor hiccups along the way.
It’s not until they’re packed up and ready to move out that a noise like skittering stones comes bouncing down the hall towards them.
Both Mereel and Corr snap towards the sound and hold very, very still.
Nothing comes.
Nothing moves.
Corr takes a step back towards Mereel, and Mereel keeps his decee levelled and resists the urge to reach for him. “Rats?”
So far down, with few utility access ways and little to no food sources, it’s highly unlikely.
“Maybe,” Mereel says.
They move further through the building. Every so often something rattles, or thumps, or scratches like a boot scuffed over the floor. And every time they reach the source there’s nothing, no evidence, not even a shadow.
The entrance they used is a turbolift at the end of a long corridor of locked doors. It’s a relief to see it now, after being kept on the knife-edge of an adrenaline rush for the whole operation. But all of a sudden that sensation of eyes on his back sharpens and amplifies, severe and heavy like a physical weight; Mereel picks up his pace and shoves a hand against Corr’s backplate until they’re nearly running down the long stretch of absolutely empty, malevolent nothing.
The lift doors slide open when called and the two of them nearly crack their plates against the back wall in their haste to get in and get it moving. For another long, breathless moment, after the doors close and the floors start ticking up, neither of them say anything.
Corr shifts his weight, knocking vambrace to vambrace and spaulder to pauldron. Mereel leans into him and doesn’t even bother to pretend he isn’t looking for the same reassurance Corr is. Their fingers brush, distant through thick gauntlets but undeniably there, so Mereel curls them together and squeezes.
“There was something very wrong with that place,” Corr mutters, once they’re far enough away that the hunted feeling is beginning to fade.
“Yeah,” Mereel agrees immediately. “And I never want to find out what.”