"Heeere we go!" Szarka announces, stepping into the facility's entryway.

Mályva follows her, mumbling "Right. Lesgo," and readying their flashlight. Behind them, they hear Bianca enter as well, no doubt dragging a reluctant Rösz along with them.

Before anyone can even ask which hallways they each want to take, Szarka has already dashed off into the center door, their heavy footsteps echoing through the facility.

"So, uh... you take left I take right?" Mályva asks, looking at the other two.

Bianca seems composed as usual, a slight smile on her sharp face, and Rösz seems to be already getting scared - as usual. They look like they're trying to hide behind her, despite being a whole head taller. They glance from the left to the right door. Through the small windows in the doors, there's not much to be seen. Both branches of the facility seem pretty dang dark.

"I guess..." Rösz says.

"Okey-dokey!" Bianca grabs their arm and pulls them to the left door, swinging it open, as Mályva turns to the right door.

As he pulls the door open and walks through, he hears Bianca cheerfully state, "Oh! Looks like tunnels. Here, you go in front," their voice echoing off the concrete and stone.

Inside the right branch of the facility, the light from the main entrance only reaches a few feet before the hallways become almost pitch dark. Mályva clicks on his flashlight and looks around. The metal catwalk stretches ahead for dozens of feet, with several branches to one side. The first branch goes straight to a wall, but the second actually leads to a door. He walks leisurely down the catwalk toward it, and turns to peek through the door's small window, hopping up on his tiptoes to get a better look. It seems dimly lit inside, so he clicks off his flashlight and heads on in.

The room is filled with racks of dusty computer servers, a few dim and flickering ceiling lights, and seemingly not much else. Navigating through the maze of servers, Mályva idly clicks the scan button in his glove a few times, wondering why the machines don't count as scrap. Maybe it'd be too hard to retrieve them, he thinks. Szarka probably could lift one though, if he tried.

Finally, he reaches the end of the server room, where an open doorway looks out into complete pitch darkness. He clicks his flashlight back on, then leans out through the doorway and flashes the dim light around, careful to not step through just yet. He remembers Meeri telling him about the time they walked through a door and there wasn't anything on the other side, and he's not about to risk falling to his death like that. Even though he's never come across anything of that sort. Doorways in the facilities are usually pretty safe, it's generally what's past the doorways that can be dangerous. Still, he's not about to risk it.

Thankfully, the flashlight's beam illuminates a dull concrete floor and yellow safety railings, so Mályva walks into the next room safely. He approaches the railing, peering down into the dark space in the room's center. It looks like it goes down pretty far... is that water at the bottom? "Good thing there's rails," he mutters. "Wouldn't want anyone to fall to their death in this facility, huh."

Looking around the rest of the room, he notices a row of decrepit lockers at the other end, and sprints the length of the room to get to them. Lockers mean storage and storage means scrap. He runs a scan, and it turns up empty. He's about to turn away, before remembering a trick Remora had mentioned to him earlier. He swings open the door of the single locker that has one still, and then crouches down, running another scan. This time, the scan pings something, on one of the lower shelves. "Sick! It's a cube!"

Switching his flashlight to his left hand, he grabs the cube toy and stands back up, and then shines the light directly onto the cube. It looks like it's in good condition, the colored stickers on its faces only barely peeling. "The Company's gonna LOVE this!" He slips the cube into his pocket, and then resumes looking around the room. There's no other lockers, but there is a narrow metal staircase leading up to a narrow second level, so he hurries up the stairs.

There's a door up on the second level, and Mályva is about to hurry through it, before noticing that what he'd thought was another wall bisecting the small ledge is actually a part of the regular wall that's sticking out, and it doesn't quite block the path to the other side. So he squeezes between the jutting-out concrete wall and the flimsy safety rails to reach the other half of the ledge. Sure enough, there's another door there. He stops, considering, looking from this door to the concrete annoyance blocking his view of the other door. He gets on his tiptoes to look through. Pitch dark. "'Kay, maybe I'll try the other one then," and he squeezes past the protruding bit of wall.

The first door has a barely visible glimmer of light behind its window, so Mályva raises a hand to the handle, and is about to pull it, when suddenly a growling sound erupts from- was that in front of him or behind him? He can't tell, but the noise doesn't stop, so he quickly turns away from the door and runs past the annoying wall bit to the other door and frantically pulls the handle.

Except it doesn't turn.

The door's locked, and he doesn't have a key.

Starting to get panicked, he runs to the other side of the ledge yet again, and pulls the handle so hard that when the door opens, it throws him off balance and he nearly slips. Muttering a swear or two, he quickly gets through the door and slams it behind him.

He allows himself a moment to just sit with his back to the door and catch his breath, before standing back up, pointing his flashlight ahead, and heading forward along what turns out to be another narrow metal catwalk.

He's halfway down the catwalk when his flashlight dies, plunging everything into darkness. "Shit. Must have forgotten to turn it off at some point." But he doesn't want to go back into the room with whatever it was that made the sound, so he just keeps walking forward with his hand on the handrail, hoping the path will loop back around at some point.

By the time Mályva is at the next doorway (no door in this one, this time) he's gotten some of his composure back and, more importantly, remembered his walkie-talkie. He pulls it out, checks that it's still got charge, and then quickly speaks into it. "Hey guys it's me I'm still alive but there was some stuff and my flashlight ran out so I might need TP back."

After a few seconds, Remora's matter-of-fact voice comes out of the walkie-talkie. "Alright, noted."

Feeling somewhat reassured, Mályva slips the walkie back into his pocket and heads through the doorway, trying to keep an eye out for any branching paths to the left... or was it right? Whichever direction it was that the main entrance would be in.

He's barely gotten a few feet in when he hears something - a low growl - from behind him. He spins on his feet, looking in the direction of the sound, trying to make anything out in the pitch black. But there's nothing... no, wait, there is something. As he squints into the darkness he can see a pair of bright white spots. Eyes.

He freezes, eyes locked on the barely-visible shadowed shape, and slowly pulls out his walkie-talkie. "Hey, I need teleport back, there's a- there's a thing staring at me," he almost whispers.

Blue sparks - a side effect of teleportation - start to appear at the edges of his vision, and he breathes a sigh of relief (still staring at the creature in the darkness) knowing he'll be back at the ship in seconds.

But seconds pass and he isn't back - the sparks continue to build, but not to the intensity that they should be, and the thing in the darkness continues to stare at him.

"Guys? Hey? Can you hear me? Teleport me back alread-" Before he can finish his sentence, the creature CHARGES toward him, growl building to a roar, and sinks its claws into his neck -

And then the teleport finally takes. Blue sparks fill his vision as pain lances through his neck - and he's standing back in the ship.

Immediately, he collapses to the ground, staring up at the other two people in the ship. "Holy shit guys couldn't you have done that ANY faster?"

Remora frowns at him. "I hit the button the first time you asked, you know. The teleporter just fucked up again - didn't you realize that?"

"Well, yeah, but, maybe it'll go faster if you push the button again..." Mályva trails off, knowing he's not winning this argument.

Bianca steps over to him, and abruptly grabs him under the arms, pulling him to his feet. "Hey, get up. You're only a little bit injured, no need to just sit around."

"Only a little-" He reaches up to his throat, and his hand comes away bloody. "That thing tried to snap my neck!"

"Yeah, well, it didn't. So you're fine." She sticks her tongue out at him.

"Bianca, be nice-" Remora tries to interject, but Mályva quickly cuts him off. "This is why Rösz is the only one who likes you, Bia."

She steps back, shocked and offended. "That was uncalled for!"

Mályva's about to say something else rude to her, when this time Remora interrupts. "Hey, speaking of Rösz, where are they? Weren't the two of you going to go in together?"

Bianca shrugs. "Turret got 'em. Again."

Both of the other two stare at her with suspicion for a moment, and then Remora's attention turns back to the monitors. "Oh, looks like Szarka's on her way back. We can leave once she gets here."

Mályva mumbles, "Thank fuck," and then suddenly collapses to the floor, his head spinning.

"Shit, are you okay?" someone asks.

He manages to get out the words "Feel really weird suddenly..." but it's barely audible, all energy seeming to have left him.

"He's bleeding out, fuck, that thing must have clawed him really good!"

"There isn't that much blood, Mora, look it's barely more than a scratch, and he isn't even bleeding anymore-"

"Well then maybe he got an infection or something - either way, we gotta get into space fast, before he dies on us. Where the hell is Szarka-"

"Right heeeere! Had to smash the fuck out of that freaky leg thing, but I'm back now!"

"Alright, pull the lever, someone pull the lever-"

"I'm pulling it I'm pulling it!"

With a shuddering jolt, the ship lifts off from the moon's surface, and its doors slam shut.

Mályva feels a pinging in his skull, the neural links connecting him back to the Company servers that store his biometric data, and the wound in his neck starting to close as the ship's materialization field activates.

He opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling again. "Ugh... the fuck was that even?"

Rösz, freshly rematerialized, looks over at him. They already look close to tears. "That was the flowerman thing... I heard you on the walkie, I could've told you not to stare at it if Bia hadn't pushed me in front of a turret!" They sniffle.

"Hey, it's fine, I survived, yeah?" He tries to put a little confidence into his usually monotone voice, but with how exhausted he still is, it mostly just sounds pathetic. "Plus I meant the... the why do I feel so goddamn tired?"

Remora peeks around the edge of the terminal where he's been typing things in. "Adrenaline crash, maybe?"

"Eh... something like that, I guess. Makes sense. I'm gonna take a nap now. Sell our shit without me." Mályva scoots toward the stacked bunk beds and squeezes into the bottom bunk, and before long he's drifted off to sleep.

His dreams that night are full of eyes.