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Confiscate any runics? Was that what her life had become? Caroline wrinkled her nose and began to reconsider many of her choices, leaving her lost in the thought of where she'd gone so wrong until she heard Lucky call out her designation.

"Huh?" She turned and moved the short distance into the hallway, catching a glimpse of the blinking USB before anything else. "Oh! Ha, she left you something else, huh? What's it--"

Intending to look at the screen with him, she'd stepped close enough to discover the shadow smiling behind him.

"NO," she barked, clawing for the doorframe as she scrambled to take hold of it and pull herself back out of the room. "No. No--no. No, how's SHE--no. <******** the sound of her loud and panicked voice wasn't enough to indicate her distress, the sight of her confirmed it: the color was gone from her face and she'd fearfully started to cry. This was not her strong point in the slightest.

"Get out get out--no god--s**t--" It was taking all of her willpower to not just leave him here. "Lucky get out of the room!"

"Yes," the shadow churned, separating now into what could only be explained as intertwining, severed heads attached to long branches. They spread further until they covered the entire ceiling in just a branch-cobweb of heads severed from jawline upwards. Sometimes two of them would tangle together to make the illusion of a complete mouth.

"We can talk," whispered the heads. "come closer we have a gift."

Branches were beginning to curl down along the walls now, slowly covering up the exit.

"Yes. You definitely c-can." Well, now he knew where it was hiding all the teeth. Branching, severed heads, far too many of them, were now hanging overhead and oozing down the walls, chattering away in whispers all around him. He wasn't sure whether its apparent intelligence was a good thing or a bad thing. But if it could talk, it might be reasoned with. Lucky was sick with a mixture of fear and disgust, and cold with adrenaline.

He could also see Caroline beside the doorway. collapsed on the floor in a panic, and in no state to run. Abandoning her left her to be beheaded by this... thing. The longer he took to decide, the more shadowy branches began to blot out what remained of the light from the hallway outside. Pretty soon, escape would be out of the question.

"That's very generous of you," he stammered, giving the doorway one last longing look out of the corner of his eye.

"Rogue nine," Lucky murmured into the headset, practically under his breath, keeping eye contact with the original corner the thing occupied. With any luck the microphone would magnify it just enough for her to hear it before the tangle of severed heads could parse it. Maybe his time in Delta had taught him a little bit of responsibility and maturity - maybe he was a tiny bit curious what Charlotte was hiding. Either way, Caroline didn't need to die for his curiosity. "Get out now."

"Okay. Okay." He finally tore himself from the safety of the far wall, and willed himself to walk toward the darkest corner of the room where the creature had originally been hiding. It didn't do much good to plant himself between it and her, as it could probably see the entire room from the ceiling. But if he could keep its focus, maybe it wouldn't react in time to stop her from escaping - the branches still took time to grow. At a certain point he noticed he was no longer moving - his legs felt rooted to the spot. He could hardly move at all - his whole body was paralyzed by fear. "What sort of gift...?"

There was always that small, small chance the gift was not the sudden and violent separation of his head from his body. Even so, his hands crept carefully toward where had holstered his runic torch.

Just in case.

That was enough to terrify him on an even baser level - and that lizard-brain part of him finally and wordlessly ran. Even Lucky couldn't - or wouldn't - fight his instincts on this one. It was well over a minute later, when the wild static in his ears died down just slightly, that the full realization would hit him: if he hadn't been sure before, he was now - Charlotte was far from done messing with the Grail.

And having his brain disassembled by that Legacy was not an experience he cared to repeat.

Later on, if Caroline tried to examine that phone recording, all it would show was a strange blur of black, and then a flash of bright green, no shadows, no face, no branches, nothing else.

The amalgamation did not give chase, and it was pretty uneventful all the rooms down the hallway until Lucky ran right into the Death lead.

Adrenaline had not yet given way to relief, not entirely convinced that the danger was over, which was keeping Caroline firmly captive within flight mode as she ran down the hall. It didn't take long for her vision to clear enough to allow some confirmation that it was Lucky that she was following - unfortunately, that became apparent at the exact time that the presence of the Death Lead did.

This left her with an impossible choice to make and no time to make it whatsoever. She definitely had no desire to turn around and run towards that creature again, but running towards this one wasn't appealing either.

So she pressed herself as flat as she could against one of the hallway walls, as if it were a legitimate form of camouflage. To add to her invisibility, she kept one eye closed and the other open just enough to see when she should probably run.

This was her only option.

Lucky stared at Caelius, then the hand, then back to Caelius. Every part of him rejected the thought of even touching the severed hand - but he couldn't exactly say no here. Lucky tried not to look at it or the body it had been carved off of while holding it out at arm's length, as far away from himself as he could. He just focused all of his energy on not throwing up.

"Yeah. Give it to Mark. Got it..." He didn't sound terribly enthusiastic, but then again, most people holding severed hands rarely did. Mark's dead body was not going to get any more use out of that keycard than its previous owner.

Lucky was about to breathe a sigh of relief that the death lead had finally had enough of being around him, when Caelius suddenly stopped and shouted at him. He shrank back like a scolded dog - he knew he was in trouble, but couldn't understand why.

So he just stayed where he was, watching until Caelius was out of sight, and trying to position the severed hand so as not to drip blood all over his shoes. He could see Caroline sneaking her way over from out of the corner of his eye. He sounded pretty defeated already - Caelius had that effect on people. "Oh, good, you're alive. Let's just find Mark's body and get out of here."

The key card detached itself from the arm quite easily, once again questioning the Death lead's unusual methods of limb severing - maybe in his previous life he had been a really angry chef.

There was a sharp static through the headset and then what sounded like two people talking through it, highly muffled. If they strained, they could hear some words, someone saying 'server towers' or something-

- "There you are!"

And then there was Mark, clutching a clearly bleeding side, his dramatic limping making it look like he was hurt more than he actually was (the bleeding was actually coming from his left hand that was clutching the side). "I-I'm finished," he began dramatically, leaning against a wall and purposely leaving one bloody handprint to trail downwards, "go on, without me..."