You know what? I'm happy. Happy to be here.

She steps away from the dead man. Looks around the office a little. It doesn't feel like there's anything left for her here, though. It feels like she's got what she came for.

Back on the other side of the desk, she pauses before approaching the doors. Last time she went near those, somebody got shot.

But it's ridiculous to think that could've been her fault, right?

Almost as ridiculous as a gun that's alive, or a floating pyramid that talks about bubblegum... no. Come on.

She steadies herself and does her best to walk straight to the doors and open them without flinching.

Where before she had to open the door herself, now it swings open freely as she approaches them. 

Before, the hallway outside was well-lit by overhead fluorescents. Now all the lights are off, and only the waiting room in the distance is lit, suffused with a blood-red glow. 

In the waiting room are three human-shapes, hanging in the air like they were absently tossed on a coatrack. 

There's a faint hissing sound, of words, just out of hearing range, the kind where you can almost understand what far-away people are saying, but can't quite make it out. 

—she flinches.

"Fuck!"

Hesitant, unnerved, holding her new friend at the ready, she takes a step outside the office, into the red.

The words get louder as she approaches, and there's a bang

and the rooms to her left and right fill up with red light and she can hear them 

drilling into her head and the banging continues 

and she can hear the words 

and the room all around her lights up bright red and fills her and

you are a worm through time

"Ah! What is this?!"

It feels worse than getting shot did. It feels the way she imagines a heart attack might feel. It's bad, elementally bad, the pure distilled sensation of badness.

You can't let this happen.

She's clutching her head, trying to cover her ears, it's not helping at all, she's dizzy and in pain and everything is bad and

You can't let this happen—!

the thunder song distorts you

you can't

let this

The pressure lifts, all at once. She takes a deep shaky breath.

You stopped it. You—thank you—

The red light is fading and she's breathing and lowering her hands from her head and loosening her white-knuckled grip on the gun/sword/intentionally-left-blank.

That was—horror...

And her vision clears, and the floating figures are still there, and she should have some sort of reaction to that, probably. Are they okay. Do they need help.

The red light suddenly blinks away and the rooms and hallways are lit normally by fluorescents once more. The hanging figures hang there for another second, and then quickly drop to the floor in quick succession. In the more normal-colored light, Jesse can see that they're wearing some sort of tan-colored security guard outfit. She can also see it as they draw their weapons from their holsters, point them down the hallway at her, and begin to fire. 

"Fuck fuck fuck!"

She dodges to the side, flattens herself against the concrete column at the corner of the row of offices. Peeks past it to see what the strangers are up to. They kind of don't look like they're okay, actually. But if they wanted her help with that, the time to ask was before they started shooting at her.

Her new friend is a comforting solidity in her hand. She raises it, and it opens up into its ready state, blocks of stone sliding past and through each other, uncovering the gold ring of the ammo indicator wrapped around the base.

Is she really going to—?

Well what else should she do, stand here and die?

She leans around the pillar, takes aim, and starts shooting back.

The three security guards are now marching towards her in a somewhat uncoordinated fashion, and while the are aiming at Jesse, their aim is not particularly great. When Jesse hits them with bullets they stagger, sending sprays of reddish substance into the air which quickly dissipates into puffs of multicolored smoke. 

When the figures come closer, she can see that their heads loll slightly to one side, as though they're too heavy to keep entirely upright, and their faces glow with an orange light coming from deep under their skin. Their entire bodies do, in fact, though all Jesse can see at the moment is their faces and hands. 

Wow. They're even less okay than they looked.

Okay. It's just like fighting the rock people, except for how it's absolutely not like that at all.

She focuses on the pure mechanics of the situation. Where they're walking, how fast, how close, the sensations of the gun firing and recharging. There's a kind of click or hum, a soft note of rightness, somewhere inside it when she aims it directly at one of the glowing people. Shots she takes right when she feels that subtle cue always hit their target, although not always dead-on. She pays attention and tries to take them all out as efficiently as possible.

She manages to almost entirely take them out without injury, but one of them gets her in her left thigh before the last two shots finish it off. 

The corpses sit on the ground for several seconds before dissipating into the strange multicolored smoke she's seen before... as well as some familiar-looking glowing blue dots if she looks closely. 

Wait what? Those are real?

Honestly, what even is reality at this point?

She limps over to the dots, hoping they'll have the effect she's familiar with from the misty corners place.

They do in fact have the same effect! A number of them fly towards the wound on her leg, feeling warm and comforting as they numb the pain and close up the wound until it's nothing but smooth skin and it feels just as good as it did two minutes ago, and then for an encore they patch up her outfit on top of it until it's like she was never shot. 

Sure. Okay. That just happened.

That... all... just happened.

She proceeds much more cautiously back down the hall toward the elevator that she took to get here. Broken glass crunches underfoot. Out of curiosity, she tries the CLEARANCE LEVEL 1 door again; it still isn't happy to see her. The door across from it works, though, and leads to another of those little security offices like the one she found by the front door. Doesn't seem useful. Where's that elevator again—?