Scene #6891: Count to Ten

Owner	Pose
Lilian Rook	Via whatever esoteric specialists they have available (logically, there have to be some, or else this would have been a domestic disaster ages ago), the Immunes on deployment from the branch presumably based closest to the London have finally 'caught' the thing they're looking for. With no finer classification than the words scrawled on the wall where it'd been initially encountered, the ensuing radio message is genuinely ominous in how earnestly it has to use such a childlike designation. The Count to Ten is here. It's been known to be in this particular city --a seemingly boring and benign version of London (which can't be a coincidence) home to the Sector Zero's Commonwealth-- for almost two weeks now. 'Hunting', as it'd been put. The exponentially growing, day by day number of missing people's reports had tapered off when they'd intervened, but it'd taken days of setting up extensive coverage over the city and performing elaborate, 'round the clock divination work to continually predict and reduce the number of sites it could appear. Now, they've nailed it down to one particular apartment tower block, and it doesn't get any narrower than that. Obviously, being part of the Commonwealth, the place isn't particularly a masquerade world, but the whole ten storey rectangle of concrete balconies and park-facing flats has been cleared out for 'emergency fumigation' before you arrive, and that much is handled by fleets of plain, unmarked, government-type vans with tinted divider windows and black dressed drivers who don't speak except to say when to embark and disembark. Likewise, it's the municipal police who've been stationed, just barely, at each corner of the block, standing around to watch for dumb teens or enterprising burglars, but who must also be blissfully aware of why they're really told to prevent, or report, anyone entering. Beyond that, the front door on the ground floor has been propped open by what only appears to be a standard wooden block, attached to a steel spike wedged in the ground, and the lobby is manned only by people in dark, matte hazard suits that could only be mistaken for spray gear from a distance. All of the storage locker doors are held open. The door to the clerk kiosk is fixed open and fibre optic camera feed is run through. The basement door has been bolted open and more thoroughly plastered in white signs and sigils of unknown purpose. Even the lids to all the wheelie bins have been removed. Doors. It's known to pick doors. Any kind of door. It's always doors. Unfortunately, an apartment block like this must contain hundreds of them. You're pushed through a small crowd of blandly dispassionate professionals of vaguely governmental mien with about as much ceremony and excitement as the CIA letting the county sheriff take a look at what should be an ordinary crime scene in his small town before hurrying him far away. The security terminal (door completely removed from its hinges) is where the overt actual weirdness is going on, converted into a short of operations room where people are monitoring three other teams somewhere ahead of you, referencing bodycams with hall camera footage, constant voice relay, and a lot of arcane math.%
Lilian Rook	You can already see some of the TV monitors displaying unreadable graffiti on the walls and floor, rusted red and faded, drawn too tall and too thin, as if by someone with with five times the vertical range in their arms, but a third of it left and right. Some of it is incredibly small, only subtle hints tucked in the corners behind fire extinguisher fittings or behind light cups, while in other places it covers entire walls in so much interlocking script that it looks like someone neatly pulled all the blood vessels out of a body and laid them all out like a map. It's easy to forget that security cameras aren't actually mounted anywhere that'd be able to get any of those angles. Your instructions are simple, plain, and coldly delivered. They can only guarantee the basement, ground floor, and roof are clear. They can't tear down all the doors, or else the Count to Ten's sympathetic connection to the place will disappear, and it'll be able to move somewhere else (they presume). They'll monitor your progress, and cross reference what you're seeing with the other three teams, and if you disappear for more than five minutes, they'll presume you're dead. There are thirty two missing tenants already, and they expect you to alert them if you somehow find any remains, as well as to any generally unusual activity. Past that, you're completely on your own. You get the feeling that you're just barely important enough to be allowed to know what's really going on, but still, in some way, at least partly expendable. Nobody here laughs at any attempted levity. Nobody here smiles.
Ishirou	A young man, in a white outfit that looks vaguely military, shows up as part of the investigation community. He does look a little rough, some burns still undergoing repairs from having to deal with Jalter, but right now he's here to try and figure out a mystery and shove a monster into a box forever. Floating beside him is a small floating box with small stubby arms. The POD, as it is called, floats there seemingly looking at the markings on the wall they have access too. The man taps on one of the screens before he turns to the POD. "Scan each of them, and run them against known runes, writing, letters, or anything else. Let's try and discern meaning or pattern to them first. If we know what the point of them is, then we can better try and figure out how to deal with the door monster." "Acknowledged. Recommended investigative course is to visit each sight directly, but given the danger of the entity in question, remote viewing is the safest course of action," The pod says, and I4 nods. "Let's also look for any mana flowing through the area, or any anomalous energy signatures," I4 adds to his request, as the POD produces a small antenna on the back of its head as it beeps running his request.
Rebecca Chambers	There's no time for greetings and no time for handshakes. There's no time for any type of formality. Rebecca doesn't mind one bit with this whole thing. It's trouble on a large scale, and all Rebecca wants to do is take care of it as best as she can. "We've got a job to do and we're going to get it done!" Rebecca mutters to herself as a form of self-motivation. Looking at the graffiti makes her feel like she's dreaming briefly before shaking her head and bringing herself back to reality, reminding herself that this is no time for reflections of any kind. "I'm not experienced with spiritual things," Rebecca says to the others who have gathered, feeling a bead of sweat forming on her neck. "But..." She takes a deep breath and blows it out before looking up again. "I'll give it my all!" She's not too thrilled about the prospect of having something that's attached to doors and not being able to know unless she opens it. Fortunately, I4 seems to have that taken care of. A slight look of confidence appears on Rebecca's face as she looks to I4 and his POD and says, "I'll let you go ahead then."
Riku	Riku is here. He doesn't make any excuses for his less cerebral method of handling things. While he isn't a genius arcanist like half the people here, he has a strong intuition and a lot of experience in murdering things that prey on people. While the entire situation here is potentially hellishly lethal, Riku basically has no choice but to move forward on this. Riku doesn't bother playing the subtle power games of the local government. He's an outsider. Always has been, always will. One of the advantages of that is you don't need people's approval to get things done. While the more analytical people do research, Riku suits up when out of sight of the locals and begins working his way up the floors, checking doors to see if there are signs of tampering or if there's heretofore undiscovered corpses. On a sudden instinct, he reaches out and tries to access the darkness here, trying to see if it is particularly twisted in some manner that might hint as to what's going on here... Or if even that portal might be able to be co-opted by the Antegent here. Only one way to find out.
Doctor Strange	"I like where you're going," says Strange to I4. He couldn't look /less/ military, compared to I4. Dark, muted blue tunic, matching leggings, with wrapped cloth bracers and boots. Resting upon his shoulders is the deep red mantle of the Cloak of Levitation, a pleated cape which seems to move of its own accord. He also sports a brass amulet, as well as a finely-trimmed goatee. A streak of grey stands out amidst the field of his short black hair. At first glance there don't seem to be much options. He decides to assist I4. This he does by making a few mystic hand gestures. Orange mandalas of light burn before his hands, rings of glyphs slowly circling them. As he weaves a spell with gestures resembling an artist's brush across canvas, the glyphs lock into place, and a screen of light sprouts from the ground. Its appearance mimics the graffiti. Since the images look as though they've been stretched vertically, Strange alters the screen, stretching it roughly three times as wide to see if it becomes more legible.
Staren	Staren's a robot today. He's not sure it will help. Nor might all the weapons and armor he's got with him. Still, you never know if the antegent might suddenly manifest unexpected new properties, or perhaps something they do today will only lead to being ABLE to fight it. In the worst-case scenario in which he dies, it's a relatively small loss to the Concord to not recover his personal gear. Besides, there's some chance that TIME SHENANIGANS will occur again, and being a robot that can wait it out might be a key to surviving without going insane. Insanity. Generally to be avoided, and yet, without altered states of mind he'd have no plan today. Staren accompanies I4 and Dr. Strange to the mysterious wall runes, and begins setting up. He's brought with him a... vaguely steampunk-looking device. There's a main body about the size of a football consisting of a wooden casing with little brass-lined circular glass viewports in it and a number of buttons and switches, and hanging from it are four metal-shielded cables with some kind of round sensors at the ends -- there's also a single data port on the device, which Staren plugs into a tablet and then the tablet into himself. He places the sensor-discs on the graffiti, then starts pressing buttons and switches on the device. It starts doing... something. It was supposed to probe the internal structure of devices in a metaphysical sense -- spellwork, quantum-entangled bullshit, and whatnot -- but his past attempts to use it have instead established some sort of mystical data connection and started hacking things. In truth, Staren doesn't KNOW how it works -- whether it runs on principles he doesn't understand, or whether the process of making it stole the essence of a demonic spirit which is slowly burned away to supply a pinch of reality-bending magic. There are reasons Staren doesn't like resorting to mad science, but in dealing with the Count to Ten, he's out of better ideas. Staren hopes that connecting to or exposing the structure of the Antegent will get them a step closer to defeating it -- whether by providing understanding, or a new angle of attack.
Lilian Rook	It's a bit of a surprisingly mundane yet sensible take for someone to go with, that Strange selects. Image capturing some of the more absurd graffiti and crunching and stretching its proportions does, in fact, make it much more legible to view, more naturally fitting and filling the field of the human eye's vision. It doesn't make it comprehensible, but overwhelmingly easier to read, and for whatever strange reason, easier for I4 to scan and analyze. That is, even the POD attempting to make sense of the visuals directly from the walls finds the process immensely slower and more difficult than Dr. Strange's reproductions, for whatever strange reason. It matches no language anywhere on record anywhere. That immediately explains why it's, according to the radio, been classed 'glossolalia'. That now seems quite literal; it evinces the 'shape' of a language without actually being one in this instance. Yet, at the same time, it seems to have some kind of communicative conveyance. It's too irregular but ordered, as uncomfortably drawn as it is, to be merely a random or natural pattern. Looking at it feels synthaesiatic, like you're reading the 'emotive sounds' that go into plenty of music without real lyrics. The monitor team has only tiny bits and pieces deciphered from specialists able to decipher intent and meaning in sympathetic connections more than cryptography. The phrase originally deciphered at the London Exclusion Zone repeats itself around multiple doors, on the second, third, and sixth floors, as well as around an elevator on the eighth. Count to ten, never seen again. Only one additional whole phrase has been added, however, even more like a childlike, rhyming couplet. Dangle from the roof, leave behind some proof. That much must have to do with the three suicide victims found, in absence of any rope or anything to either hang from or jump off of. I4 can tell that the four places with the full couplet are by far the most 'active', though only in the past tense. Places where the Antegent had fully materialized for some time. The tiny bits and pieces don't amount to anything meaningful, which his POD analysis can tell just by finding fragmentary 'characters' in them, precluding a complete word or sentence. They've either been shed in passing, or where it surfaced only very briefly. They're not immediately around doors. That much indicates that either it must travel somehow between them, or that it can very partially materialize without one, but not enough to actually take someone away.
Lilian Rook	The Darkness is as Riku would expect under normal circumstances, were the place abandoned. There's an unusual profusion of viable corridors for a place that people lived in until yesterday, but nothing untoward about any of them (for a Corridor, at least). Even if he chooses to use them as much as he pleases, they remain as barren as usual. It seems very likely the entity is unable to perceive them, or has no idea that they even exist. Staren's mad science . . . device, chugs away in its own, ineffable, unknowable way. That, in of itself, somehow produces results. The little windows reflect the ways the venal scrawl is sprayed up and down and back and forth and through and across the walls. It's like it's tracing the metaphorical tagger's 'handedness', recreating how they'd paint --which stroke comes first, leading into which next, how the characters go top to bottom then left to right, but diagonally instead of orthogonally, by way of thoughtless, deep seated muscle memory of a trained artist or writer. Going with that, he can accurately tell exactly how old, and how developed, any of the 'graffiti' is --if it doesn't just spontaneously manifest, it can be determined how long the metaphorical writer was there, and which way their writing was going, in the same way he'd be able to intuitively guess by finding a sticky note vs a half full diary at a scene. It also looks like it starts with the same few characters every single time, rehearsing the same verses from the top, and then repeating it endlessly once it's been completed. The rhyming couplet is the terminating point at the end. It seems unlikely that it just leaves them behind by traversing physical space, but more like the graffiti'd stigmata starts writing itself where it intersects with real space --or, it has to write in order to be in real space. The aforementioned floors are most dense with it, but the fifth floor, with the communal lift hub, is absolutely littered with scores of teeny tiny markings. Since there's a distinction between lots of repetitions of the first few 'words' or 'lines', vs a wall covered in repeats of the whole verse, you can tell it's like it'd popped up over and over again for very short amounts of time, leaving and coming back over and over. The relative density around the middle of the building seems more like an even distribution of haunting all the floors, but with so many back and forth 'tracks' inevitably becoming the thickest and muddiest around the place it always returns to. All of the local mana and energy, unremarkable as it is, has been left completely alone. There appears to be no intersection with the ambient mystical energies at all. Not even a trace of magic (or qi, or similar). It's as if the monster were somehow entirely mundane.
Ishirou	A holokeyboard appears as various holoscreens appear in the air, like out of magic. As information is acquired, it goes across the screen as it is analyzed and crunched out. Thanks to Dr. Strange the letters are stretched out, making them somehow more comprehensible. Or course, it doesn't make them actually mean anything, but rather the information that is there means something. "Memetic?" he says out loud, as if thinking of something, "Not harmful, but communicating in such a way that the imprint on the mind instead of actually interpreting the data? Maybe a form of true speech, so that whenever you can actually read it, you can at least FEEL it? Weird...maybe just a distraction?" "The local mana is fine, nothing is draining it and everything seems normal here in that regard. No extra mana, no tempering, no draining...so whatever it is, it may be simply supernatural in an otherworldly way," I4 continues on, making sense and attempting to interpret the data. "It seems to leave a trail when it shows up, but I can only seem to track its location after the fact...I wonder if this could be used to predictively locate his next destination or current location. I just can't interface with the whole building at once, and door by door gives him a lot of room to manuever around us..." He looks to Dr. Strange, "Your input?"
Staren	Staren records from the... device onto a tablet, not yet sending videos further in case there's some weird, infectious effect. It does make it easier for him to show the others what he's found, though. Although he has to take multiple readings from different places to begin seeing patterns. "It always writes the same thing, over and over as long as it's someplace, then finishes with the bit we have translated." "I'm not sure whether it writes to live or lives to write, but I wonder if we could lure it into a place that's impossible to write on somehow? Would that kill it?" Analysis of the fifth floor reveals something about its travels. "It seems like it's always on the move. Or perhaps when it's at rest, if such things even need rest, it's in its own pocket dimension and doesn't need to write outside?" "In any case, it comes here a lot. I'm going to see if I can narrow down where it comes and goes from..." Staren pulls up the floorplan for the fifth floor, and begins investigating everywhere he can see without actually entering a door. He removes the outer elevator door (they can repair it later) and shines a light into the shaft. He shines a light into vents. He looks at the patterns in different areas around the floor -- hopefully now he can tell by sight roughly how much it's traveled somewhere, but he can always double check with the device. Trying to narrow down whether activity over the entire floor is equally high, or it perhaps might have a specific base location it's setting out and leaving from. Hopefully locating it somehow leads to destroying it. Staren will work on the NEXT puzzle piece when he reaches it, though.
Rebecca Chambers	If Rebecca is feeling uncertain about this, she's doing a good job of hiding it. Because her face is plastered with a stern look of determination and a slight hint of impatience as she follows behind I4 and the others. Even though it most likely won't do any good, one hand is planted by her Beretta hand gun just in case things do get violent. If one were to look closely, though, they'd see that the edge of Rebecca's right lip is twitching a little. With the others knowing more about what's going on than she does, Rebecca keeps her mouth shut, attempting to process the words that are being passed back and forth. She's hoping that, with a little trial and error, she can at least get a basic idea of what this whole thing is truly about. Occasionally, her eyes dart from side to side, but that's just her being cautious, not paranoid.
Riku	Information keeps coming back and forth. Riku keeps talking on the radio for several reasons. Both to keep up information exchange, but also if he suddenly cuts off, people will know what happened. Riku relays what findings he has, eventually shifting tactics. This time, he moves up to the fifth floor. The others are working to get the needed information. It's up to Riku to gather more... And maybe do what needs to be done. Once he's up at the fifth floor, Riku looks around the area, scowling at the way the patterns have proliferated. At this point, he simply starts opening doors. "Breaching 501." He calls out, attempting to open the apartment with the same number. May as well be the bait.
Doctor Strange	Strange's response to I4 is at first nonverbal, but nevertheless communicative. A look of displeased concern, a furrowing of the brow. With a gesture of his hand, he dispels the screen of light. "I'm trying to put off messing with the doors as long as I can," he says. "I could try sealing them off, trapping it in..." He doesn't sound sure. He strokes his goatee, then asks a question over the radio. "Lilian, have your guys tried sealing the doors?" It'd probably be his second-to-last resort, short of opening one and hoping the Eye could buy him extra time to find and kill it. Options are limited, and it may be only a matter of time before... Before someone gets the idea to open one. In a flash of green light, a second Strange appears. Future!Strange makes a gesture with his hand, a gentle sweep. The walls of the room begin to shift, moving kaleidoscopically. The idea is to make it as difficult to write on as possible, testing Staren's hyppothesis.
Lilian Rook	Venturing up the apartment block itself (using the stairs), you begin to feel a sense of 'presence' far different from the ground floor. Even just stepping into the concrete stairwell, a cold, stale, mildly decrepit sort of air drifts down on you, smelling faintly of turpentine and peeling paint, asbestos, black mold and blood, growing stronger, more stale and slightly harder to breathe as you ascend. By the first floor, it feels as if the apartment has been abandoned for years, not less than twenty four hours. By the second, it has the chill, stagnant air of a place that someone died in, cleaned out a month before the open house. By the third, it feels like somewhere a lonely senior might have dropped dead, still yet to be found. By the fourth, the air crawls with the familiar yet uncannily threatening sense of being somehow trapped inside your own home --the menacing trill of waking up and finding your windows and doors barred and boarded from the outside. Knowing that the rest of the building is like this, suddenly it becomes remarkable that ostensibly minimally or non-powered people had set up base on the first floor. It somehow tastes like pitted old concrete on your tongue, and pale, ugly yellow paint fumes, mostly masking the stink of a dead body just beginning to turn. The graffiti itself, up close, looks as if it were sprayed on the wall by a narrow, artist's spray can, filled with unrefrigerated blood, slightly corrosive to the surface. The fifth floor is the most strongly permeated with the feeling of the hostile being's passage. The slow, creeping realization that you're stuck in your garage without your cellphone, and everyone thinks you should be on vacation for the next three weeks. The sense of stark, mundane dread is beyond comparison. Without the constant hustle of human life here, it's as if the stench of the Antegent had grown thick and settled in the halls, soaked into the cheap, bland floorboards, beige wallpaper, antiquated light fixtures, potted plants bought at a supermarket, flickering vending machines and aluminium trash receptacles. The feeling of being watched is also intense, but also very easily imagined under these circumstances. Scouring the fifth floor intensely, there seems to be no signs of a long term materialization here. In fact, it's almost the place with the least complete stigmata. There are countless traces of it, but none of them stained deeply. Strutting around the square loop of walkways around the communal lift, however, it starts to become obvious that they turn up the most in the nooks and crannies within view of the lift doors, and the cones of the security cameras --places where one would easily be able to watch anyone entering and exiting, and wherever it is they go. This being a place lived in by average human beings, even people who live on the second or third floor probably take the lift and go down a floor or two rather than take stairs up. There'd be plenty of time and out of the way space to monitor the routes and habits of everyone living here, and pick times and places to have them disappear with the least disruption. The communal lift is like a watering hole. A place to gather resources. It also seems like the markings fade after some amount of time --they'd have to, or else they'd pile up to the point of being far too noticeable. The oldest are more like smudged rust stains, though they couldn't be more than two weeks old. It paints a readable picture of the timeline of where it'd appeared, in what order. It's like 'surfacing' from somewhere, to linger in the halls and watch the inhabitants, breaking away to tail them to an out of the way door.
Lilian Rook	Riku breaks into 501 with no resistance. The door swings open and the knob dents the drywall to his right. He finds an ordinary living room flat, looking out over a cheap balcony rail onto a public park, with the signs of being intensely lived-in, from butt indents on the sofa to dishes piled in the sink. After some looking though, the television is still on, but displaying a black screen, like someone forgot to turn it off, but it mysteriously lost a signal. Moving further in, he can hear the sounds of running water. Suspicions are confirmed when thin-stretched red lettering is curled all the way around the doorframe, tucked into the trim, just barely a day old and still very slightly wet to the touch. The bathroom beyond has a shower still running, ice cold and piddling from the long taxing of the boiler, a bar of soap dissolved down to nearly nothing on the side, and a towel still left crumpled on the floor. There two multiple bedrooms. One is a master, the other has a bunk bed filled with stuffed animals. The fifth team arrival gets Strange a return message of 'The current idea seems to be a little like a haunting. If you throw away or bury all the objects a ghost is tied to, you just move it somewhere else. The number of doors the Count to Ten has used here, or is connected to at least, in such a densely packed area is what is allowed the warding team to nail it down here. If the connection gets too thin, it'll lose most of its 'material' presence and slip through the net.' which rules out the easy way of doing it. Enforcing the other dimension that the Sorcerer Supreme makes use of frequently, however, works smoothly. Seamlessly, even. Except for the seams. Where the walls and floor are chopped up and tumbled out like origami, Strange can see the red writing penetrating deep into the imaginary cross section now exposed by his geometric kaleidoscopes, like roots grown into soil. He can see places where thin, rusty threads run from splotch to splotch, and most uncanny of all, where dissecting and unfolding old hardwood floors turns over pitted, wet concrete on the underside, and where beige wallpaper exposes slabs of cement covered in peeling old puke-yellow paint, pitted with little holes, dripping rust. The guts of room 501 are especially bad, like the apartment is bloated with the cancer of another room pasted over it. As soon as he does, the intercom crackles. The operations team only uses the private radios, not the apartment comm system. An adrogynous, inscrutably 'young adult-ish' voice crackles through it, sleepily chanting in singsong tones. "One one one. You're no fun. Where did you send everyone?"
Doctor Strange	Exactly what he didn't want to happen. "Ah." It's a noise of resigned defeat--the noise of someone hoisted by his own petard, with no choice but to see it through. With no other choice, Future!Strange disappears, traveling back in time to 'intervene' and set this course of action in motion. There is now but one Sorcerer Supreme in the room. "Well," says Strange to Staren, "I don't think there's a way to keep it from writing." He points to the cross-sections revealed by his spell, where the writing has seemingly penetrated deep into the walls. He does try something else, though. It's clearly 'here,' in that it's now aware of them and actively speaking. In order to capture or kill it, they'll need a way to pinpoint the exact space and dimension it occupies. Since it's generous enough to give them a countdown, he decides to do a couple of litmus tests to find where /exactly/ it is. First, he opens the Eye of Agamotto. The room is bathed in a brilliant emerald light. A band of congealed time, looking like an emerald chain, forms upon his wrist. He spins it, quickly, to the right. His allies within view are bathed in that green light, speeding up time, essentially giving them 'more' time between the counts. Strange quickly makes use of that extra time. Another Strange appears in a flash of green, and attempts to open an exit, by simply peeling the wall open. He expects resistance--and he's hoping that, in finding that resistance, he can suss out some way to strike out at the antigent.
Ishirou	Walking up to the top of the building was...well, I4 never ever wants to experience this again. The aura of this building has him freaking out a little. 'It's ok I4,' he thinks to himself, 'You don't have emotions...you don't have emotions...' Ok that's a lie, but he really wants to believe it right now, with how goddamn terrifying it is. Of course, the pursuit of knowledge on this creature is what keeps him going for real. He just needs an extra boost, and as they are far passed the floor that smells like grandma passed away three weeks ago but only just now found her because you are a bad grandson... The intercom comes to life to sing-song at them. If it has a connection to the intercom... "Bio-mechanical Interface System Activate," he says, firing what looks like a beam of light to the intercom system, and attempting to send that light throughout the system...and anything attached to it, like a horrible monster. If he could do that, he sends a barrage of junk energy through it, attempting to use basic light magic to light up anywhere where the creature might be...or at least reveal it's movements. Also, give it a headache.
Rebecca Chambers	At first, Rebecca begins to think she's just getting paranoid about everything, but as she goes farther and farther in, she starts to feel very uncomfortable. First there's those strange sensations, then she gets that taste on her tongue. Gritting her teeth, Rebecca closes her eyes and exhales rapidly, before realizing there's nothing she can do before continuing onward. Silently, she's praying that she makes it through this in one piece, but the harsher things get for her, the more she's starting to doubt herself. The stench gets worse with every floor, as do the negative feelings rushing through her head. Rebecca nonetheless grits her teeth and keeps going forth, until the intercom broadcasts that strange song, causing Rebecca to jump a little, before dropping to one knee as she attempts to regulate her breathing and get her heart to slow down a bit. Once she manages that, she stands up and slowly reaches for her Beretta, although she doesn't draw it just yet. She just wants to be ready...
Staren	Climbing the stairs and peeking onto each floor is a trip. Staren can probably smell and taste and sense all this even if he turns those sensors off -- that's not particularly surprising, but the sense of being trapped is frustrating. Staren does not like being trapped. Something about that combined with the sense of being watched makes it feel like a monster's going to be around the corner any moment now. Not the antegent, it doesn't work that way. Like... The combination of unsettling sensations jostles memories of a nightmare loose. The sky of earth, red with a giant eye in it. Wherever he ran for help, those he loved replaced by things too tall with too-big-eyes. Why was he running? What was he escaping? Staren shakes his head. Old dreams have no relevance now. Stay on task. Examine the floor. It quickly emerges that the thing never stays here long, and Staren's examinations culminate with the elevator shaft. Staren and his beam sabers (they can fix it later) have removed the elevator door to look in the shaft. There is no writing there at all. That's super weird. Strange's magic can't break the writing. Staren nods. At least they checked that BEFORE encountering the antegent. And then THE VOICE. Staren tenses up and his tail would bristle right now if it were real. Can it... can it affect them without them being inside it? Could it have taken them inside it without their noticing? Could it be the WHOLE BUILDING now?! He feels more trapped, panicked. Isn't 'count to ten' what you do to calm down? Staren doesn't actually stop and count to ten, but he does try to focus. And, inspiration strikes. He starts hooking his mad science device up to the PA speakers, thinking along lines similar to I4 that there might be an exploitable connection.
Riku	Riku enters the apartment. Eyes flick around the room, noting the recent occupancy. There should have been people here. He moves to the balcony, checking the doorwall. Nothing. He glances at the television. The black screen is telling. They can't have been gone long enough to get cable shut off. No sign of interruption or damage. There's latent interference here already. He moves to the kitchen, stopping at the doorway and checking it. Paydirt. "Apartment 501 has been compromised." Riku speaks into the radio. He has no idea if they're going to hear him. It might already be too late. He continues to move through the apartment, not touching anything at the moment. He pauses, looking back and forth, and closes his eyes, sighing to himself. The Antegent seems to have an affinity for childlike behavior. He turns and steps into the room with the bunk beds.... Perhaps he is saved from what he is expecting to witness. Perhaps not. But there is the matter of the world shifting and twisting around him, the Heartbrand perhaps unwittingly (or approrpiately) finding himself in what might be the core of the corruption besetting the building. Of course it would nest in the center of the place, where all roads meet. That would make sense, at least. But that has yet to be established. As Riku slowly turns, he scowls at the crackling voice. He has no specific abilities to attempt to reach out and touch this thing, so he simply... replies back. "Two, two, two. You killed the crew. What fresh new hell are you talking through?" Why not see if trying to play this game a little might open up an opportunity?
Lilian Rook	Whatever might have happened to the kids here is, maybe indefinitely, a mystery. This thing, the Count to Ten, doesn't normally leave bodies. Everyone else was put into hotel lodgings for the fake fumigation. Riku can choose to believe whatever he likes. In some ways, that's worse. Doctor Strange peeling one of the walls open flays away layers of wallpaper, drywall, insulation, concrete, rebar . . . and then more concrete. And more. And more. Once he hits a far away layer that's like the pitted and flaking wall of an abandoned hospital or public school, practically radiating cold, the material of the wall seems to go on forever. It's as if the outside disappeared and the inside is the only space left in the world. Given the strange, diffuse sort of presence, without materializing around a single door to anchor it, though, he's able to pull and fold some of the 'substance' of the Antegent's representation --the room inside it-- though boring a hole much deeper results in said hole starting to secrete, then drizzle, then even pour out some slimy orange liquid that smells of harsh, revolting chemicals, and melts the floorboards it puddles across. Staren taps into the intercom, and finds the signal completely cut off from the office. In fact, they aren't even powered on. Of course the electrical cabling doesn't really reach through dimensional pockets. It's more like the speakers are acting like megaphones; someone stands behind them, and their voice is cast into the room. Never mind that there isn't a 'behind' for something fixed to the wall. With his gizmo wired to the speaker system though, I4 shooting his interface beam through it causes harsh reverb to screech through the system --exactly like a shorting megaphone, in fact-- and the whole floor to be flooded with the ear-splitted screech of amplifying sound equipment pointed at each other. The speaker goes dead. A short while later, they begin to hear quiet little tapping sounds instead. Around the corner. Up the stairs. Behind their backs. Beyond the door. Apartment to apartment. Like children running around just out of sight, wherever they're not looking, vanishing around doorframes wherever they turn. Vaguely footprint shaped disturbances in the dust stitch up the walls and across the ceiling over their heads when they look back, up and down the elevator shaft, and into and out of the apartments. When they hear the voice again, it's as if it's occupying the same room now. A 'someone' speaking it, from the inside of another apartment. It sounds considerably less sleep-addled and dreamy than before. There's a snappy, irritable edge to it, as if shoved out of bed and about to get pissed off. "Three three three. Don't you see? All their souls belong to me." It's obviously Riku's doing. It babbled incoherently to itself before, eventually turning into equally nonsensical screaming and berating nearest the count of ten, but that was an actual back and forth. It skipped a beat too, and sounds frustrated and disheveled. It also skipped a count, though. Or rather, Riku counted for it. It's only after the count of three that the space all around the group screeches and scrapes inward, crunching several feet together, like the contraction of a stomach.
Ishirou	The screeching of the feedback loop causes I4 to wince and jump back, putting a finger into his ear and make a 'momp' sound until he can hear again. Ok let's avoid doing THAT again! Now, there are sounds from everywhere? Did they get trapped? "POD, wide-area scan..." He orders his device, trying to get something out of this. The POD starts scanning the area around them, trying to just see how the area was changing and acting while comparing it to what it was like before. I4 is calm, he just collects the data carefully, he looks around himself and his area calm and collected. He has to count to ten...in his head. Also, ignore the catchy tune. "Four, four, four, shut up and get out the door..."
Staren	Shit, it IS the entire building. or maybe the entire floor? Staren winces at the screech of sound, but can turn down his hearing with a thought. Riku made it skip a count. Great. Maybe they can go backwards? Staren calls out, "Two two two, let us through, or else we will murder you." They're going to kill it anyway and rightful, lawful retribution arguably isn't 'murder', but it's hard to rhyme on the spot! Staren detaches his device from the speakers and stuffs it in his bag. Results not as great as he hoped but better than nothing! It sounds different now. Closer. Like it's behind the wall rather than using the PA system. Well... Hmm. Staren runs over to the next room (503?) and tries to open that door. If it's locked he melts the bolt and tries to shove it open again.
Doctor Strange	The orange liquid smells awful, but it's a good sign. Not because he expects that there will just magically be something behind it, but because it's something he might be able to exploit. Staren counts backwards--a good idea. Future!Strange vanishes, and Present!Strange soon after, going back to peel back the wall. When he returns, he redoubles his efforts. With a thrust of his palm, Strange forcefully bores through the wall in an effort to unearth more of the caustic orange liquid. The other hand makes a series of complex mudras. The ring of glyphs locks into place. Rising above the revolting chemical smell, there is the scent of ozone. Sparks dance between his fingertips, and lightning leaps from his hand into the fluid. If the glossolalia is its skin, could this be its blood?
Rebecca Chambers	The strange noise catches Rebecca off-guard completely this time. She cries out in terror as she drops to the ground, her gun falling slightly beside her. She clamps her hands over her ears for a moment before gritting her teeth and grabbing her Beretta and pushing herself back onto her feet. Eventually her ears stop ringing and she breathes a sigh of relief... but then rolls her eyes. "Way to go, Becky. Good thing Billy didn't see that!" She says to herself with great sarcasm. Now Rebecca is really looking a bit on the annoyed side as she realizes she may have bitten off more than she can chew by coming to a mission like this. "I'm gonna need an extra strong cup of Green Herb tea when I get back!"
Riku	That's not what Riku wanted to have happen. The way the room shudders and closes in takes Riku aback, and he instinctively moves to the center of the room. He looks around, gritting his teeth at the horrific, rotten room that encompasses his current reality. "Focus. There's got to be a way out of this." An old voice chuckles in the back of his mind. "Not helping." He mutters. The rhyme is a key. But to what? Should he count backward? Confuse the count? Or count forward? Is it a game? Is it the first to reach 10 who 'wins' or is that the kill line? There's too much unknown here. "Wait." He pauses, opening his eyes. "Count to Ten. What if... It's not a name. What if it's instructions?" He looks around the room. The reaction was intense... If he's wrong, he could end up dead. But... No. No time for doubt. "Four. Four. Four. Out the door. Stop this now and kill no more." Riku intones, trying to remain calm despite the horror all around him encroaching and threatening to send him into a panic.
Lilian Rook	When Strange keeps carving deeper, he begins to meet proper resistance to his magic, as if he's physically digging out a section of wall now, and he's slowly gone through all of the soft and light sand into more densely packed clay beyond it. The contraction of the floor --the square walkway, apparently demarcated by the lift-- seems to have played a part in it as well. When he fires a lightning bolt into the encroaching pool of orange goo though, it blows up into a cloud of acrid-smelling smoke, and spatters lethal droplets of the stuff all over, landing pinprick points of liquid on people here and there, which burn like molten metal. The dimensions of the room quiver and spasm, then squeeze back in. In this revolting analogy, he hasn't drawn blood, but stimulated the production of stomach acid, already all around them. Staren finds 503 perfectly well locked, as its inhabitants had left in a neat and orderly fashion, but a simple cheap deadbolt is no match for him breaking his way in. Just as he does though, he hears the rapping and tapping of feet skittering across the ceiling just over his head, flicking through the corner of his vision. He barges into a dark and dusty hallway, with photographs mounted on the walls, and then the voice reaches him through the thin separating wall to room 504. Counting backwards was a nice idea, but doesn't seem to have helped. Where I4 and Riku cut it off and interrupt it again though, the ground and walls quake all around them, the intercom screeches and pops, then sparks and dies without being used. The voice returns again, this time seething with not just anger, but thick, dripping, scornful contempt and frustration. The nebulous, androgynous voice splinters in an odd fashion, sounding like several young people of slightly varying ages all not quite synchronizing exactly. "FIVE FIVE FIVE. BURN ALIVE. SHUT THE FUCK UP --FUCKING DIE." The entire fifth floor grinds and squeals plaintively now, the hallways halving their dimensions on the new count, contracting around the elevator shaft as a central axis, flooding a good third of the hall with acid. The voice picks up the page in a frenzy, get in a double count, as if it's trying to outspeed the others and beat them to it, before they can interrupt it again. At this point it's almost incoherent, just screaming at them like an incensed child. "SIX SIX SIX! FUCKING EAT SHIT! YOUR WHOLE SPECIES MAKES ME SICK!" The floor crunches inwards again on the six. The material Strange has carved away at grows denser and his hole narrower and shorter. Rebecca and Staren can see that blood red scrawl is starting to bleed through the walls around the communal lift.
Ishirou	The data was enough...they couldn't just simply brute force it, but the fact that the being calm in the face of this AND beating its rhyme was the way to beat it. There was a grin on the Android's lips, knowledge was great, but now he could wield that knowledge like a stiletto to the heart of this monster. "Seven, seven seven, give up now or see the light of heaven..." He sings, with a very calm outside. Sure it was trying to be scary and scare them, however, I4 kind of saw it as a screaming child. Somehow, their rhyming was forcing it off script and now it was throwing a tantrum. "Eight, eight eight, you ate something that's about to give you a stomach ache!" I4 continues typing on his keyboard. If he could just pinpoint the sound. This time, he tries to fire the biohacking attempt towards the sound he heard, attempting to once more cause the same feedback loop as he did through the intercom.
Staren	Staren fires his beam cannons at the skittering sound. It probably doesn't help, but it was reflexive. He actually tries to fire way more than the two shots he has without thinking, pointlessly triggering the 'this weapon is still on cooldown' notifier in his HUD repeatedly. He readies an infantry railgun and runs for the next door. He'll fly to avoid the acid flood if needed. "HEY! I'm one-of-a-kind! NINE NINE NINE! So ends your time! Now you'll pay for all your crime!" If it doesn't have to rhyme exactly, neither does he! By the time he's made it to the door to 504, Staren's remembered that he is, at the moment, a heavy, armored robot, and tries to just barrel through it! On the other side he just shoots full auto at the voice next time he hears it.
Doctor Strange	Strange's already ruined hands are splashed with acid. It burns into the scabrous flesh, but the smoke created by his explosion cuts off his anguished cry with a racking cough. He's forced to abandon his digging--which is probably for the best, given all the good it's done them. Hunched over, he retreats from the acid, hastily conjuring another spell. It isn't blood, then, it's stomach acid... which makes sense, in retrospect, given the contractions of the room. With that in mind, he takes countermeasures. A blast of freezing cold erupts from both hands, as Strange attempts to freeze the orange liquid solid. His aim goes wild in places due to the coughing, and gouts of frost are occasionally etched into places with no need of it. Also still present is the band of congealed time, slowly rotating around his wrist and gently casting its emerald glow upon him. As I4 finishes his rhyme, Strange appears again! Future!Strange, free of his cough, aims at Riku and accelerates time for him, in an effort to help him beat the antigent to 10. "'Shit' and 'sick' don't rhyme with 'six,' by the way," he dryly remarks. "Idiot."
Rebecca Chambers	Despite feeling like she's really in over her head still, Rebecca does her best to suck it up and try to focus on everything. But given how inferior her skills are to the others, she's starting to feel a little anxiety set in. No matter what, she keeps a tough face and tries to stick it out, but then she notices that something is not right here. "Am I seeing things?" Rubbing her eyes a couple of times, Rebecca realizes that she is, in fact, not seeing things after all, but instead she's seeing that the scrawl is starting to bleed through around the lift. "No, something's not right here!" Rebecca calls out, now feeling worse than when she first joined S.T.A.R.S. way back when. "What do we do?"
Riku	Everything starts going mad. The disruption is driving the thing mad. Interacting with the rhyme, along with the disruptions wrought by the others seems to be driving it mad. The thing begins screeching at them, counting faster, yelling at them. Riku clenches his teeth as the world heaves around them, diving out of the way as the hellish acid begins scorching the halls, the walls clamping in closer. The shape of the threat becomes clearer. It's trying to keep him from counting properly. To rhyme properly. Lose the game, lose your life. It's so... simple. But deadly. I4 pushes 'their' count to eight, and Riku quickly thinks, knowing the horror is pushing to try to 'win' and claim them all at this point. He has to count, and he has to rhyme. Breaking the pattern at this point would be lethal. He's never thought his life would depend on nursery-rhyme level poetry. Staren calls out nine, and Strange gives him the precious seconds he needs to arrange his thoughts. "Ten, ten, ten. Return to Hell, just where you've been. Never come back here again!" Riku yells out, hoping this will put an end to the horror's manipulations. Soul Eater flickers into his hand, manifesting from his Heart in preparation. If the thing shows up around him, he's going to need to act fast to skewer the thing... Because it's likely going to be trying to kill him in turn.
Lilian Rook	Staren can already hear the start of 'Seven' when he crashes through the door like the heavily armed cyborg he is. Skittering footsteps wind past him in impossible ways once again, his beam cannons charring holes through multiple walls, but striking no particular mark. The presence leaps to the speakers, but is driven out by I4 again when the system shorts and collapses once more. Acid surges down the corridor, flowing out from the walls in multiple places now, rendering their attempts moot if they're splattered in flesh-melting fluid, but Strange has it handled, freezing it solid for the time being, albeit the jagged icicles will impale them in short order when the quivering walls resume crushing them. Though, Strange's speed buffs on the group also pay off big time right now. I4, Staren, and Riku all belt out their counts in coordinated sequence at a temporally accelerated rate, faster than the Count to Ten can get a word in edgewise, and uninterrupted by the hazards of the fifth floor. The rhymes are shit, but so what? How's it going to count to ten if they do it instead? When they count, it doesn't warp space itself, after all. Hitting the count of ten suddenly hammers them with the deafening reverb of utterfly furious wailing and howling down every hall, echoing without losing volume in a square circle around the central lift. Glass photo covers crack and potted plant vases shatter. The walls shake and shudder with the pounding of innumerable fists thumping against them, shaking loose picture frames and causing a phone to topple off its hook, bouncing on the end of its dangling cord, loudly screeching its dead dial tone. Graffiti explodes across the walls. Red markings burst all around the landing as if thrown up against the wallpaper by a rupturing paint balloon. Something dark and oily, humanoid and pint-sized, runs around Staren at lightning speed, clambering up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the opposite one in the blink of an eye, aiming to dive down the elevator shaft, and leaving moldering foot and handprints all over, reeking with mildew, rot, and old blood. The ceiling caves in its wake. Old, corroded chairs tumble and crash from above as if the floor above were full of them and couldn't sustain their weight. Limp bodies follow, dropping through the breaches like hangman's holes, jerking to a sudden stop on coarse ropes tied around their snapped and bent necks. A forest of suicide corpses blocks your line of sight to the scuttling 'thing' and a field of chairs, all of which have surreally toppled upright, blocks your route.
Staren	Everything goes to shit. Either This Is The Part Where It Kills Them, or This Is The Part Where They Kill It! 'It' actually shows up, something he can't get a clear look at. Staren tries to shoot it, then gives chase, dashing out the doorway of 504 to be confronted with falling chairs and corpses. Well... he's... super-strong metal? If barreling through them isn't fast enough, he draws a beam sword with his left hand and cuts his way through, infantry railrifle still held in the right. If he can reach the elevator shaft he'll dive after it, shooting down. "ELEVEN ELEVEN! Four plus seven! Where you're goin' isn't heaven!" Rhyming is hard!
Riku	Riku has a massive appreciation for Strange's time manipulation right now. It gave them the edge they needed to override the Antegent, to force it to lose at its own game. And just as predicted, it's a sore loser... But the /degree/ to which it is a sore loser is beyond anything he expected. The place begins to collapse, the literal weight of its sins beginning to crush them and annihilate the area. The hundreds, the thousands of souls it has slaughtered and consumed begin to make themselves known in an attempt to block the path. But Riku checked this ahead of time. He /knows/ what he can do to stop this thing. Immediately, Darkness opens before Riku and he leaps through a Corridor, taking the short, otherworldly path to... The elevator shaft. The other side of the Corridor opens up, and a massive clawed fist leads the way as Riku's Eidolon grabs for the thing with a crushing strike, attempting to pin it to the wall so Riku's Soul Eater can decapitate it, or any of the massive number of weapons present can annhilate it. "Game over." Riku says, his voice tight and intense with the thrill of a hunt's end.
Rebecca Chambers	In desperate times, sometimes you have to take desperate measures. Even if there's no guarantee the weapon will work, Rebecca nonetheless draws her weapon and prepares to open fire when it's safe to do so. She doesn't want to risk hitting the others, but she knows on the same note that she can't afford to wait too long either. She fires a few rounds, hoping this will, at least, make some difference.
Ishirou	The whole place starts to shake, the building itself collapsing under the weight of the monstrous things this creature has done. Bodies and chairs...the grim sight causing I4's mind to go into shock for a moment. However, danger forces him forward. The desire to put this thing into a box and RESEARCH THE SHIT out of it drives him forward. The Android, reveals himself for what he is. He runs forward and bursts into a superhuman speed. Combined with very good MOBILITY, attempts to navigate the suicide forest, trying to get eyes on the creature as Riku gets through first. Once he can get sight of the creature... Another ball of light shoots out, attempting to hit the liquid-like creature in the back. He attempts to use the BMIS systems to send a feedback loop through its body. Attempting to completely paralyze it so that they could actually contain it.
Doctor Strange	In pursuit of what appears to be the Antegent, Strange ends up shoulder to shoulder with Staren, stepping through a portal after having briefly gone back in time to speed up Riku. The portal remains open, allowing anyone who needs to use it to advance to the suicide corpses. He seems to have a similar solution in mind, as well. A bright orange sword is formed from strands woven by his fingers. In tandem with Staren, he cuts them down to clear a path for the others.
Lilian Rook	Just as the blurry black shape, somehow dripping with sheer unwholesomeness, leaps down the darkness of the communal lift, Riku's Eidolon lunges out of the shadow and thrusts it right back up into the fifth floor landing with what amounts to a blow from its fist when the creature leaps back. A row of chairs is ground to splinters and twisted cheap aluminium, the Eidolon's fingers sinking into the acid slicked concrete beyond. During that time, a deep path through the dead bodies materializes where Strange and Staren cut them down. They're held up only by rough, damp rope, and thud to the ground with the flinch-provoking sounds that only a collapsing body can. It's better not to look at any of them. Keeping their eyes on the goal is really for the best. It cuts a time-saving route for I4 to run through, stepping off chairbacks like a martial artist, and zapping the scurrying humanoid form in the back to hold it, multiple shots from Rebecca's handgun driving it down to the floor, and just like that, half its body is blown away by the rail rifle, painting the far wall with a carpet of decades of spontaneous neglect and building rot, and Soul Eater takes its head clean off. Even up close, Riku never got to quite make out what it is, but only that it must have been two whole feet shorter than him. The whole landing, as best as can be determined, turns itself inside out. The distorted space collapses in towards the lift, crushing everyone in through the open door of the lift, crashes and clangs against the thin metal walls, lets loose an unholy sound of grinding concrete on steel, and then re-expands in a way that pukes them back out into the hall again, severely unhealthy for the inner ear. For the first time since getting here, they can take a breath of ordinary, stale, low income apartment air, without the chill of a forgotten boiler room or condemned hospital, and the weighty stench of death. Looking around, the red scribbles up and down the walls are smudged and faded to illegibility, no doubt set to disappear soon enough. The ground is covered with a dusting of pulverized wood and corroded metal slivers. There's a loud, heavy crumpling sound in the shower of apartment 501. It's better to not look.
Staren	Staren goes and looks. The body might be fresh enough to revive, who knows? Maybe at least ONE of this thing's victims can be saved.
Ishirou	I4 slowly walks towards the elevator, and skids down the side of it until he hits the first floor, and then slowly exits the building. He sits on the ground next to the door and just stares up at the sky for a minute. He's going to need a moment. No, he doesn't check into the bathroom. His POD follows behind him, silently watching. Silently judging. Silently monitoring his health signs.
Doctor Strange	Strange makes the gesture for Closing the Eye. The brightly glowing amulet folds closed, and it is once more just a dull brass oval with a particularly intricate lattice at the center. He silently takes an inventory of his surroundings, green eyes slowly sweeping back and forth. He inhales. No more horror movie smells. Strange exhales--a sigh of relief. The pressure has let up. Once everyone makes it through, he makes his exit. Strange gently touches down beside I4. He'd noticed the android had left. When he's outdoors, that white uniform is easy enough to spot, as is the silent gazing up at the sky. He knows that look. If it's capable of detecting lifeforms, and if I4 is watching the readouts, he'll know Strange is coming ahead of time. The Sorcerer Supreme places a scarred hand upon I4's shoulder. It's ugly, but it's human and it's alive. He doesn't say anything. After a moment, he carves a portal into the air. It leads to the rich, polished wood and antique furnishings of the Sanctum Sanctorum. He steps through, and the portal vanishes behind him.
Ishirou	I4 looks up at the doctor, there is a moment where that shellshocked robotic gaze turns towards a more sorrowfull and distressed one. However, when all else fails, conditioning that he usually ignores is hard to fight, and easy to slip into in times of great distress. He nods, "Thank you, sir," he says, before returning his gaze up.
Riku	The thing is dead. Riku does not rejoice in it. This is his job. A hand goes to his face as the world collapses back into relative normality.... And he breathes, shuddering for a moment as he releases a visible sign of the profound emotional disturbence that he had experienced. "All of these things needs to be destroyed." He says, simply, and turns to head down to the lower floors so he can provide his expriences to the G-Men below and earn their continued forbearance. After that... Maybe he's going to spend some time on a certain beach for a bit.