>>5452311The climb down may have only taken a few minutes, but it may as well felt like hours. Instead of scaffolding or any kind of safety equipment common at a proper underground expedition, there’s just an unsteady set of stairs that moan and groan under your weight.
Jack has no such issues, one of the niche advantages of an incorporeal form.
With each step, you feel like you grow closer and closer to snapping them in twain and plummeting to your doom, but they manage to hold until you reach the bottom. Unfortunately, it looks like your presence served to be the last straw, and the bottom portion of the stairs crumbles into a mangled heap of splinters.
Looks like you’ll have to find another way back to the surface.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gryP9yJm7UWhile Jack hangs back a moment to investigate the wreckage, you peer down one of the nearby corridors. There’s a diesel generator nearby, huffing and puffing to keep the cheap mining lights from dimming completely. As it stands, they give you just enough light to see, but not enough to assuage your worries about what you might be missing.
Something about this place has you on edge. Could be the tight spaces, could be the overall provenance of the area, could just be pre-firefight nerves threatening to kill your edge.
Either way, part of you is starting to wonder if it’d be best if you had just given this one a pass.
As if to punctuate your doubts, a bloodcurdling scream of primal terror echoes through the winding paths of the catacombs. The acoustics of this place make it hard to judge where exactly it came from, but it had to be nearby.
Seconds after the godawful screaming ends, the few flickering lights desperately holding back the ceaseless tendrils of darkness are snuffed out in a single instant.
The sudden transition into blindness is startling, but you force your nerves down and think logically. It’s probably just an outage of some kind; it’s not like Intergang are the kind of guys that would check with the municipal zoning official before jury-rigging makeshift power lines.
You just need to keep your head for a few moments and wait for power to be restored. If not, then you’ll start to worry about it. You’ve got an emergency flashlight, with a couple spare batteries just in case.
