"Less talking. More moving." Quentin chirps out, still rubbing the torn up neck of the elite spook he's puppeteering. "Let's go."
Without any further interruptions or questioning from your party, your group heads past the piles of half dead gang members and other soldiers scattered throughout the star-shaped hub room of Floor 3. There's an odd tension in the air as you finally step into the left hallway. There's nothing that's inherently different about it from the rest of the facility's hallways.
Same steel floors and walls with layers of orange and blue paint peeling off of them. Same bright red emergency lights hanging above your head. Yet as your group travels down it, it takes more and more effort to travel down the hallway. Like the tension and dread that seems to flood every corner of this hallway is a thick, physical material.
You can feel the hairs on your arms and the fur on your stomach, hidden underneath your clothes, standing on their ends. Given the slick sweat and tense frowns on your allies, they seem to be feeling the same thing.
Your MAKESHIFT POCKETWATCH is going apeshit now. "WARNING: TWO ACTIVE ANOMALIES DETECTED. WARNING: INCREDIBLY HIGH A-ENERGY DETECTED IN AIR. PLEASE PUT ON GAS MASKS BEFORE TRAVELING FURTHER, LEST SEVERE MENTAL CONTAMINATION OCCURS."
Your group promptly gets the memo. With Kiara (being an android) exempt, you and your other allies put on your gas masks so you don't end losing every bit of RESTRAINT you have. Each of your allies seem to feel the physical tension in the air and has to struggle to push past in. <span class="mu-b">As if something is trying to ward you away from getting any closer.</span>
Goosebumps rise across your party's skin. Small sparks begin to fly off of Kiara's body.
You realize you probably should've taken this warning as a hint to fuck off once you arrive at the end of the hallway.
https://youtu.be/Wmo5bdQBb3Y - SECURITY HEAD
The sight before you is hard to process at first. A wizened old man, probably about 100 years at this point, stands in the hallway, his back turned away from your group. Every part of his body from the neck below is completely covered in a suit of armor made out of sheet paper. No, wait, armor is the wrong word.
it clings too tightly to his withered and emaciated frame. It's a part of him at this point. Quentin seems to recognize what the various layers of sheet paper clinging to his body actually is.
"THAT'S CHITIN. LIKE ME. YOU CAN'T REMOVE THAT WITHOUT RIPPING IT OFF."
That's not the weirdest part about him. His legs and arms are segmented like a bug's now and their digits on his feet and hands have been simplified, with only two pincer-like digits on his hands and tiny needlepoint-like pricks for feet.
Four arms sprout out from his torso, two on his sides and two on the lower half of his torso. Each pair of arms is holding onto a double-handed (quadruple-appendage?) long sword, which bleeds an oozing black substance from their tips.
