Miles pressed against the dusty wall as everyone else went by, not wanting to make anyone angrier by being in their way or saying something out of line.
However, what looked like a trail of blood following Basil on his way out prompted Miles to speak up.
“Hey, are you sure you’re alright? If you let one of us see we might be able to help.”
Another flight of stairs. Longer, this time. The floating is easy, nice, lung-cloyingly dusty, gradual, slow, enjoyable, even-
Another leveling out. Two more doors, a light fixture, this time a ceiling fan, its naked lightbulb barely emitting light.
What is this? Not what you expected, that’s for sure.
Fear, confusion, and distraction are very good painkillers.
Walking up stairs is not. The first step feels like a shotgun blast up your leg. The second one is less severe - maybe knitting needles in your knee? This is not the kind of pain you feel in dreams. This is not the kind of pain you feel in real life.
The air rushed out of Basil’s wrinkled nose like two bullets, his lungs squeezing tight as he tried desperately to bring his other leg up and support his weight. That… was really painful.
Bracing an unnecessary amount for the second step, Basil gritted his teeth and placed his foot… And it still hurt. He managed to limp up the step without it appearing too obvious, but the remaining steps appeared quite daunting.
And the pain… It was almost a taste, a flavor, sitting on his tongue, burning with an inhuman, searing smoke, clouding his nerves with a numbing savor which unwillingly drew all sensation into that one spot on his leg where it was stinging for some reason. It was an addictive, surreal, unreal pain; it was an intolerable addiction and completely unlike any pain he had ever experienced before.
Third step. Yeouch. Fourth step. Yikes. Fifth-
Freeze.
Jerkily rotate your upper body around even though you really wanted it to be a smooth and possibly thought-provoking transition okay maybe you didn’t put that much thought into it but he’s still waiting for you to turn around okay hurry it up already he’s still waiting and probably metal girl is going to punch something if you don’t hurry it up will you ugh finally you did it that took way too long.
“What?”
He looks a bit smaller from up here.
Miles starts walking over to Basil, trying his best not to scare him farther up the stairs.
“Can you show me what’s hurting? We won’t get very far if you’re limping everywhere.”
Miles squats down at the bottom of the stairs, gesturing for the large bat child to come back down for a moment.
The silence was deafening. It beats against Basil’s eardrums with the fury of a hurricane.
Had there been some indicator that he was in pain? Could this lawyer man tell he was hurting somehow? Did his experience as a lawyer let him have some kind of sixth sense that let him know when people felt like their leg was about to fall off from pain?
The rest of the room seemed to grow darker as all light focused in on the sharp image of that fellow in the suit framed in the stairwell. The idea of there being people behind him fell away from his train of thought as even the previous confined room seemed like an irrelevant concept. Was he truly being genuine, and trying to help? Could Basil afford to take such an immense risk as to approach him? Revealing his appearance to everyone was entirely out of the question and the last time he felt that genuine comfort and care was being offered to him, he woke up to be staring directly into an eyeball as big - or maybe even bigger - than his entire head.
He opened his mouth to give some kind of false answer to the question to act naive as a tactic of deflection, hoping to buy some other kind of suggestion. Maybe he would shrug it off, or even decide not to care.
“…H…”
Try again. Even if it ties your stomach in a knot to do it. Which, by the way, definitely feels like that’s what’s happening.
“…Hurting?”
Alexis continued up the stairs: her heart still raced from the encounter with the beast. Alexis felt almost as if it was just over her shoulder, waiting for her to drop her guard.
No
She needed to calm down; panicking wasn’t going to get her anywhere, it was only then that She realized she was gripping her gun with a force so great it had gone completely numb. She took a deep breath and return the weapon to her pocket. Alexis returned her attention back to calming down.
Inhale
One…Two…Three…Four…Five
Exhale
One…Two…Three…Four…Five
Inhale
One…Two…Three…Four…Five
Exhale
One…Two…Three…Four…Five
She had done this many times prior, but never had it been in a situation like this. No one in here had control, they were all subject to the whims of whoever put them in this hellscape. All these people were similar to her in that they possessed some unnatural ability, perhaps this was a series of tests to find the root cause?
Alexis froze as she laid her eyes on the next room, she thought she had heard a voice echo up from lower down on the stairs, it sounded like a child, Then it clicked for her. The tightly wrapped blanket she had bolted past in her blind panic, it was a child, there was a child in here.
Miles laughed for a second and sighed.
“Look, you don’t have any reason to trust me, but you’re never going to get help if you don’t tell anyone what’s wrong.”
The lawyer looked down at the floor for a moment, as if he was trying to figure out how to say something that wouldn’t scare Basil back up the stairs.
“Could you open up your blanket a bit? You don’t have to show anything you aren’t comfortable with, I just want to see what’s bleeding.”
Wrong? What was wrong? There wasn’t any indication of anything being wrong, was there? He was just having a little difficulty getting up the stairs. He hadn’t cried out in pain, he hadn’t said anything about hurting, he- he hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t. Nothing was wrong, nothing could be wrong, it simply- it couldn’t. He couldn’t know. He couldn’t know.
A mild sensation in his ear told him the last person on the stairs had stopped moving just before reaching the top. He didn’t know who it was, but the idea alone made him beg the universe to give him a handrail to clutch on to.
The light in the stairwell lit up Basil’s eyes and beamed the incredibly confused expression down upon the man speaking to him below. Bleeding? What on earth was he talking about?
“…Bleeding?”
Basil looked at the mechanical woman in the anticipation that she might have some kind of answer, and then immediately stopped because that was never a good idea. Then he saw something scarlet coming from the lawyer man’s shoe. It was reflective, glistening in the light; it was blood.
“Blood.”
Honestly, Basil may have to see a therapist about his eyes, given that they widened so frequently to such an almost physically impossible degree that it was astonishing and possibly indicative of some medical emergency. Regardless, they were once again widening now, as with an unwelcome thrill he traced the streaks of blood up the stairs directly to where he was standing. As if on queue, some droplet of something collided with his foot. The stinging in his leg grew worse.
“B-Blood.”
The smeared blood had not been trodden upon, so what caused it to be scraped across the concrete step like some foul brush had passed over it all? Out of the corner of his eye Basil saw the crimson stain on a slightly upturned corner of the blanket, which had been displaced due to him turning to face Miles.
“B-Blood-”
Shifting away from the tail end of the blanket instinctively, Basil set his leg down at a horrible angle, and it felt like it would split down the middle. His knee buckled to relieve him from the pain, and Basil threw both hands out to clutch into the wall to stop from tumbling down the stairs. The blanket did not give way, however, and Basil was left wildly trying to stop his fall as he neared the bottom of the stairs, his good leg occasionally scraping against the step in an attempt to stop himself.
For the rest of the party, the blanket was now almost flying down the steps after attempting poorly to stop its descent. Why, Basil?
The small figure quickly looked at jung, flashing a pair of gleaming, yellow eyes. Rather than anger, they presented the frightened eyes of a small child. The being then confidendly followed the eye’d woman, exuding an air of bravery around him.
“Ok. Maybe he’s just scared is a-” Jung thought to himself when:
“Good, he’s helping too. Wait is he actually okay then?” Jung suddenly realized. He quickly moved to the doorway and into the light to get a better look. The light blazed brighter in his eyes despite its relative weakness. Jung blinked, grateful to have such light again. He looked back at the child, seeing that the businessman was now talking to him. However, leading up to the pair was:
“Oh he is very much not okay” Jung thought. “Do we tell him he’s bleeding or will that make things wor-”
Too late
Jung could hear the fear in the child’s voice
“…don’t freak out…”
"Oh please don’t freak out kid…"
"Crap!"
The now panicked child was careening down the stairway. Jung quickly moved to attempt to catch him.
Sue stopped.
Given her eagerness to go up and investigate the upstairs, it seemed unlikely for her to stop. Even her earlier concern about letting the rest of the party go first had been forgotten in her curiosity, and she hadn’t checked to see if Eve had taken her offer to go ahead – maybe when other girl ran past, Eve assumed that her bizarre proffer of “ladies first” had been satisfied.
Either way, Sue found herself behind other girl, who was moving swiftly up the steps…
The girl stopped. There was enough room for Sue to slip past, and she almost did, before realizing that pushing past a panicked party member with a pistol was probably perilous.
right, the kid! shoot, he was bleeding? She turned to look… and stopped halfway.
Sue suddenly found herself frozen in place. She’d never seen blood before – mainly because she hadn’t seen before, if her fragments of memory were to be believed – but she knew some people were disturbed at the sight of it, some even fainted. Should she turn to look at a potentially grotesque sight she’d never seen before?
Yes. She’d gone to all this trouble – at least, she assumed she had – because she wanted to see, and being able to see meant seeing the beauty as well as the ugly. Not that there was much beauty around here, except for maybe the people. Were any of them “attractive”? She realized she had no way to know.
Irrelevant, and a distraction. She forced a blink, then turned to look…
she was so going to regret looking, wasn’t she?
Eve follows behind Basil, stomping up the stairs while glowering non-stop towards the top. About halfway through she notices there are odd little streaks of color on the stairs that she’s been treading on, and pauses her omnipresent glowering to look at them.
They look red. And bloody. Did one of the other peopl-dreams start bleeding?
Eve crouches and scrapes a talon along some of the red stuff, sniffing it. Definitely blood. Or maybe red, liquified copper, I’m not sure how attuned to reality the dream is.
“Which of you is-”
Halfway through her sentence Eve makes the mistake of looking up to see the child-sized figure falling, one of the other men trying to catch them, and all headed for her.
Eve blinks in confusion at this rapid and unexpected sequence of events, sort of standing there and looking offput.
Alexis turned just in time to witness the child tumble down the stairs; All the horrible things that could happen when it reached the bottom of the stairs wormed their way into her brain. Alexis wanted to help, but she couldn’t force herself to move and avert the potential disaster that was unfolding in front of her; She only watched in frozen horror as the child in fell, hoping, praying that something would stop the child’s descent.
“Oh sh-”
Miles leapt forward from his crouch with his arms outstretched, trying to catch Basil if he kept falling and completely oblivious to whatever else was happening behind him. Hopefully nothing happens that would make the situation even more complicated.
It had been a long time. For Basil, at least.
The stairs were wood, expertly constructed, and waxed with a fine polish. Which is a combination Basil had never walked on before in his life, and at the age of four it was a really horrible time to experiment wile wearing socks and almost hopping down each step.
So down he had gone, hitting his head and freefalling towards a likely fatal collision with the floor below. On almost the complete opposite end of the room, someone had noticed and broke into a sprint, colliding with - and through - the expensive and ornate railing, and slamming into the stair wall just in time to save him from his self-prescribed fate. That someone was his father.
After that Basil couldn’t remember many of the details. There was an awful fight, with lots of yelling and threats, and his family had to pay through the nose to avoid a lawsuit. His father never said a word to Basil on the topic, being characteristically stoic and gentle, for almost a full year since the incident occurred. When he did comment on it, is was a very soft-spoken reminder to grow from your failings and to never falter again, with some mentions of wisdom and smarts and other oft-repeated topics.
Now, however, was not the best time to reminisce on past guilt, but to try and stop from colliding with the concrete floor and smash your skull to smithereens. Sadly, Basil couldn’t really do too much in the blanket.
Miles was significantly closer, catching Basil perfectly upright, and possibly noting how light he was. A split second later, Jung bumped into him, not with enough force to disrupt his attempt, but just enough that Miles had the option to be annoyed if he so desired.
Basil creaked his head around to find himself facing a purple tie - not that he could tell what the color was since he was so close - and sharply pushed away, slipping out of Miles’ grip and slamming rather painfully into the hard concrete steps behind him. He looked up at Jung and Miles, who were in his mind almost hovering over him at this point, almost anticipating a strike from one of the pair, when his peripheral vision informed him of something truly horrible.
His hand was exposed.
Basil sucked it back into the mass of cloth, partially refusing to accept that everyone in the whole room had more than enough time to get a very good look at it, and ran a pair of frightened, questioning eyes from Miles to Jung and back again, hoping to the highest of heavens that he would wake up soon.
Miles was incredible relieved to have caught Basil without hurting him, letting out a huge sigh before he got annoyingly bumped by Jung. He shot the other man an irritated look before turning back to the bat child that was now cowering on the floor.
“Hey, you’re fine, alright? We aren’t going to hurt you.”
The lawyer got up onto his knees before speaking again.
“Now, could you please show us where you’ve gotten hurt?”
“Good, he’s-”
Jung was moving far too quickly to finish the sentence before he bumped into the lawyer. Said lawyer was quite irritated he had done that.
“My apologies, and good save.” Jung said in response
The poor child looked traumatized. Jung quickly realized he had every right to be though. He had seen strange beings, smelled horrid smells, and was trapped in a decrepit structure of some kind. Jung only felt pity for him.
The lawyer seemed plenty able to take care of the child, so Jung continued his way past them up the stairs
Alexis breathed a sigh of relief and began making her way down the stairs, squeezing past the eyeball-headed-lady and the man with the sunglasses, all the while keep her eyes trained on the room they awoke in. Then she noticed it, the blood on the stairs in front of her, “He’s bleed-" She stopped before finishing her sentence, realizing that if the child heard her he would surely freak out and possibly make the injury worse.
Alexis gave miles a short wave, signaling that’d she’d be nearby in case he needed any assistance.
That’s incredibly debatable.
Basil’s eyes continued to shift between the pair, unsure of what was about to occur. Floor man- well, perhaps it wasn’t really fair to call him ‘floor man’ anymore seeing as he had abandoned the floor he rested on a while ago. He wore sunglasses, so maybe he should be called sunglasses guy. Or shades guy. Or hoodie guy. He also had a hoodie.
Regardless, THAT fellow had advanced past him and up the stairs, and no wait come back he can’t face lawyer man alone and expect to survive his go through wall powers! How could you do this to him, sunglasses guy?!
Alexis had intended for this to be unheard, but with ears the size of Basil’s, nothing was hidden. If the room was any stiller, he would likely be able to hear Miles’ heart rate, but all he could hear in that moment were the words He’s Bleeding echoing inside his head over and over.
As soon as she cut herself off, Basil’s head moved slightly, indicating that, like it or not, he had heard the message. Whether her presence was a comfort or a concern not even Basil knew.
Oh no.
There was no way to run, no way to object without possibly hurting someone’s feelings, and no positive aspect about this. There was pain, sure, but no pain compared to having to reveal his appearance to these complete strangers; having a bleeding wound tended to by these absolute strangers. In the moldy musty stairwell underground at a completely unknown location. Please wake up.
And yet, he was there, standing on his knees… Waiting…
For Miles, Basil’s eyes broke away from contact and tried desperately to resume it, but could not find the willpower to do so. His hands traveled under the cloth, pulling away at the largest pile of wrinkles in the center and slowly splitting open a gap in the fabric.
For everyone else watching, there was a twinkling of light as the rays from the hazy bulb above refracted out of the shard of glass in Basil’s right shin. It was smeared about the base of the wound with blood, and still appeared to be bleeding at a noticeable rate. At first Basil was very careful to show the bare minimum, but at the sight of the wound both hands flew up to cover his mouth in shock, exposing his entire lower leg.
And as for Basil, he didn’t really seem to concerned about fixing it right now. This ghastly, insidious, surely fatal wound - in his mind, anyway - was far more pressing at the moment to his admittedly fragile psyche.
And for some reason, he couldn’t take his eyes off of the blood…
Up, up, up. Three more flights, four more doors. A standing lamp, low to the ground, a lantern hanging from a clothing hangar, and a flashlight lying on the ground, casting the shadow of one of your brethren on the wall. Not as handsome as you, of course.
At the top of the stairs, at the last platform, a single door inset into the wall. Above you, some sort layered metal sheet set into the ceiling … a trapdoor? Set into the left wall is a dust-coated, faded green panel, about twice as large as you.
Even as fear and shock, disgust and fascination, pain and shock, suffuse the mind; even as your brain and your stomach switch places; even as you realize that you are going to die - you’ve never died in a dream - even as you are caught by suit man, even as you are caught by pure self-consciousness, something … tickles … at the back of your mind.
Tasty.
Wait, what?
Wait, WHAT?!
The thought - the very idea, the suggestion of such a concept - was absolutely insidious and abhorrent. In no possible set of circumstances in any preconceived dread would such a suggestion have been developed from his young mind. Basil felt compelled to thoroughly reject the idea as being completely beneath both him and the entire human race; this was inexcusable. Whoever concocted such a cerebration should be tarred and feathered and repeatedly called a stingbum until he went home and cried.
And yet he had thought it.
No one had entered his subconscious and pried his mind open to drop the idea inside. There was no secret suggestion that coerced him into cohering with the notion, or admonished his conscience to disregard compunction and consign with the suggestion, just his lonesome lonesome.
That was hardly a comforting thought. And not wanting to go down that rabbit trail yet again, Basil forced himself to break contact with the hideous, awful, and most definitely fatal wound to see how lawyer man would react.