She appears to be in a roughly-cut stone tunnel, partly natural but clearly enlarged with the use of tools. It's dark. In one direction it is darker and there are unsettling noises; in the other direction, it is less dark and more quiet.

This is her hazmat armature, of course it has some nice features even if she can't requisition many parts. A navigation light, for example. And rudimentary SONAR. What do the unsettling noises resemble?

The unsettling noises resemble spiders, but louder! Much louder. Way too loud.

Ah-huh.

Let's put the power wrench away and take out... Arc welder on one arm and nailgun on the other. And quick-march in the opposite direction.

In the opposite direction there are fewer spider noises! In fact after a few minutes there are no spider noises at all!

There are a few miscellaneous sounds - lizards skittering, small mammals squeaking - but she seems to be frightening the wildlife away with the sound of her approach.

The source of the increased ambient light in this direction turns out to be veins of glowing blue rock running through the walls of the tunnel at unpredictable intervals.

After she's been going this way for a few minutes, she may begin to notice a horrible smell wafting toward her from up ahead. There are undertones of rust and rot, death and decay and blood, but the main component of the smell is something completely unfamiliar.

There isn't really a way around her hazmat armature making a lot of noise. She's definitely not going to go without it. She can shift into low gear, at least. Saves fuel if nothing else.

...Okay she wants samples of this blue stuff since it doesn't look obviously alive. She picks bits of it out with a claw-like tool and subjects it to various instruments, crushing, water, electrical voltage, and so on.

(She doesn't notice any of the smells. Hazmat suit = isolation)

The blue stuff glows, and glows brighter when crushed or zapped. It's fairly soft as rocks go, and an unusually good conductor. Crushed to powder, it dissolves in water fairly readily, yielding glowing blue water.

If she has no way of noticing the smell, then she's going to be really surprised when five short humanlike creatures with swords and axes spring out of a side tunnel and attack her.

She has enough time to drop the piece of glowing blue rock one arm was holding in surprise and start to turn towards them before-

An axe clangs off her hazmat armature, and then a sword half a second later. They don't seem to like her navigation light, though; they squint and turn their heads away from the brightness.

She doesn't think to turn the floodlights instead of just the navigation light on yet because she's not thinking she is panicking and screaming inside the suit. Sword-holding monster gets a voltmeter and more importantly the hundred pound arm behind it down on its shoulder with crushing force. She would have fallen over, backpedaling, if the suit weren't designed with a gyro and limiters to prevent just that.

Sword-holding monster is not happy about this! Sword-holding monster is now on the tunnel floor and screaming. Its friends trample it on their way to attempt to hack the hazmat armature apart.

And arm goes limp- and arm back up- why is the pressure so low she's still in low gear. She takes two seconds to fix this and as the engine roars she finally notices the light aversion and thumbs the floodlights on.

The suit's developing some pretty alarming dents, but now she can properly aim for the head of the second disgusting thing with a swing of the grabber-arm...

In the sudden blaze of light, they scream and fling their arms up to shield their eyes. Crunch goes the second monster. She can probably get the rest while they're all flailing and hiding their faces, if she's quick.

It's debatable if hazmat armatures can be described as quick. Maybe the combat-designed ones piloted by a combat-tested soldier could do it but she's still kinda screaming and has never actually been in a fight before. She hesitates a bit, then sends one flying into a wall headfirst, but there's easily enough time for one of the things to recover from the glare and put a sharp thing into her slightly softer back while she's swinging to dispatch Mr. Crushed Shoulder before he gets back up.

That's three monsters down, one still cowering in the light, and one swinging its axe at the back of the hazmat armature.

She starts to move on the one she can see but when the axe hits she swears loudly - turn off breach alarm I know I'm in danger - turns around with one arm stuck with its elbow bent thank you cut tubes and - okay there's still one behind me they're humanoid so hopefully not that fast - she charges at it, tackles and physically carries it, squeezing the neck with the still-good grabber arm. She keeps running a bit after it dies before turning around to face the last remaining hideous Darwinist monster.

Oh, god, she can smell it now.

The smell is really unpleasant!

The remaining hideous Darwinist monster runs at her yelling and waving its sword.

It is no match for a hydraulically driven gore-covered grabber arm.

But then she has to open the canopy and lean forward so she doesn't fill the cockpit when she inevitably throws up from the combination of disgust, shock, and adrenaline crash.

The dead monsters have no commentary on this turn of events. They're just going to sit there leaking foul black blood and smelling really bad.

Okay. Okay. Wherever she is she obviously really needs her hazmat suit so she shuts off the engine, slowly climbs out and investigates the damage.

She has spare tubing and crimping, so that's probably fixable, but she doesn't have an easy way to refill the half liter or so of slick blue hydraulic fluid now making bits of cave floor alarmingly slippery. She'll tune the valves down a little and keep it in mind...

She keeps glancing both ways down the tunnel and listening carefully while she replaces the sliced-open tubes.

No further monsters show up in the next few minutes, although there are some unsettling spider noises.

Oh you can just bet she's doing this as fast as is safe. A few minutes is more than enough to get that arm unstuck, stitch the thick rubber skin back together and spray a whole lot of foul-smelling sealant on it, and declare the voltmeter a lost cause and discard it.

She climbs back in and grabs the sturdiest looking weapon - the rusty sword - and heads in the same direction as before. Being more careful and watchful this time. Jumping at shadows.

The shadows are fairly nonviolent. One time she startles a family of dog-sized lizards with horrible worm faces, and they all flee into a crack in the tunnel wall.

The tunnel seems to be leading her in a generally downward direction. Now and then there are more blue rocks in the walls.

She takes some more and stuffs it into a big sealable sample jar. Now she has a lantern if her electricals die.

And down is not a particularly good direction but she doesn't have a map so she'll keep to one path where she can backtrack by the faint scratches in the stone her suit's feet are leaving if she needs to.

Down, and down, and down. Her path is somewhat constrained by the size of the hazmat armature; most side tunnels she sees aren't wide enough to fit her.

But eventually, she finds signs of civilization. An underground ravine spanned by a massive stone bridge, with a set of gates on the other side so large that at first they look like a huge iron wall. The place seems deserted from out here, and possibly like it's been deserted for decades or centuries... except there are a bunch of dead monsters lying around.