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You wake up to the sound of a crackling fire close to you, you get a strange sense of foreboding and you decide to keep your eyes closed for a little while longer. Your ears adjust themselves and you can hear the slow breathing of others around you. You feel the ground you're laying on, it's flat and even, it feels cold to the touch, like plascrete or concrete. There's a light chilly breeze blowing across the opposite side of your face from where the fire is coming from.
Then you catch a whif of a strange odor, it's the faint nauseating smell of charred flesh that you've come to know so well over the last couple of weeks while running around the Astral, interacting with Horrors. With that shocking realization you open your eyes and look around. You and your fellow runners are in a desolate abandonned city that looks awfully familiar. You stand up and look around to see that it's probably somewhere in the afternoon, judging from the overcast sky. Your companions are also standing up and brushing themselves off. You're in the middle of one of the larger roads running through the Seattle downtown area, next to you a half burned out car is still smoldering, a body his laying across the hood, smashed through the windshield, also half on fire. The car used to be blue, but now is the brown-blackish colour of rust and soot.
Many of the buildings around you have been badly damaged, and look as if they've been assaulted by General Saito's third regiment of Japanese imperial fighters. Windows smashed, ferrocrete charred, whole buildings collapsed, watermain's have burst and have created large pools of water in the streets. Gas pipes have burst open and are sending jets of flame up into the air through cracks in the road.
There are bodies laying sporadically throughout the street. Most of them have been horribly mutilated, some of them are still locked in struggle, killing eachother with brick, belt, knife, stick, anything that they can find to inflict hurt upon another. Some of them are laying in broken bits on the ground, as if having jumped from a great height in desperation. To your right you can see a body strung up, spread eagle in an alley between two buildings. Chains attached to the building, with nasty hooks on their ends, hold the body up as the hooks have been viciously impaled into the body, the blood underneath the body is dried and old.
You suddenly see some movement coming from a block up. You hear the servo-sounds coming from Roadblock's cybereyes as he zooms in on the figure. Shortly after he says "It's a woman, she naked and carrying something. I can't make it out." with his heavy southern drawl. As you move closer, you come across more atrocities; a boy having jammed his own arm so far down his throat that he's died from asphyxiation. A once beautiful black skinned woman, impaled on a broken off, traffic light post. A dwarf having tried to rip out his own headware memory, his brutal strength taking almost half his skull with it, his brain exposed. A troll, shot in the back of the head, still with his hands firmly wrapped around the throat of an elven woman, her face purplish blue. And many, many more horrifying examples.
Before reaching the woman, Six has thrown up twice and is enduring constant gag-reflexes. Roadblock is comforting her and is oddly quiet and less boisterous in his step. Masterson is strangely distant and has taken up a poise that make you realize that he's seen thing similar to this before, in the Containment Zone. Anastasia...Anastasia! Through all the confusion and horrible images you totally forgot about her. She's not there. You temporarily forget about the woman, half a block up and start looking around.
From your right you suddenly hear a low rumbling growl and you look over to a large building standing further away from the road, than most. It's a 50 story building or so and along the side you see an humongous, undefinable mass of tentacles and fur. In one of it's large tentacles, which reminds you of the tail of a devil rat, you see the lifeless corpse of Anastasia. With a movement best described as a whiplash it sends the body sailing through the air and landing about fifty yards in front of you. With a few tumbles and turns it comes to a half at 30 yards distance. There's very little left of the naked body, but a chaffed, cut up, bloody mass with blue hair.
The creature whips it's tentacles into adjecent buildings, through windows and into ferrocrete, sending shards of glass and rubble falling down to the ground, and like an ape slinging it's way from one building to the next.
"Help me...do you want my present? I have a present for you...help. Help." a voice says behind you. You turn around to see the woman approaching you. She doesn't have any eyes anymore, but she's looking directly at you. Her body is covered in blood from her belly downward. You see she has a small piece of broken glass in her hand with which she's slashed open a small wound in her underbelly. She's retrieved some of her own intestines and offers them to Six, who takes a few steps back in digust.
"Help me. I have a present for you."
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