"Everything we can do here's pretty risky."

"Ugh. Yeah."

"I don't want to walk near that stuff unless I absolutely have to, honestly."

"Don't blame you."

She backtracks and tries to pick up the weird TV (without looking at the screen, just in case.)

It's not very heavy, so this actually works pretty well. It goes smoothly -

Until it doesn't.

Green light washes over Phoenix, and the cracks shatter open around her, and she falls.

She gets out only the start of a yelp before vanishing.

She lunges toward the hole, arm outstretched - 

It closes before she can get even halfway there.

No - 

The cracks disappear.

The tunnel's dark, now, the TV having fallen face down when Phoenix dropped it. It's not quite pitch black, though - there's a very, very faint sense light might exist somewhere vaguely ahead of her.

She doesn't panic. A cold certainty washes over her, and her eyes dart around.

The cracks had been visible earlier, after the laundromat collapsed - when her arm was glowing, and had been trailing around her (getting larger, perhaps) as she'd been walking with the other woman -

She uncovers her arm again.

The cracks are there - larger than they had been, significantly so -

And shrinking, now.

It smells burnt, like it had when she first approached the TV. Fading, though, and -

That static had been around the girl's corpse, hadn't it? Before it flung Lily into that strange place, but - not when she saw it inert -

The TV is inert, now.

Is that - static a charge? Something that can be used up?

She approaches the TV, kneels, and touches it.

Nothing, except -

A faint sizzle, maybe. A soft there and gone feeling of soot under her fingers. Not much, not like there had been.

Discharged, then. And - it might recharge, but she doesn't know when -

And those cracks are shrinking.

She looks around, then wonders if she could break the cracks, the ones the woman fell through, and then follow her, and so -

She reaches out and touches one.

It feels jagged, rough. Like broken wood, or plastic, or - something torn and frayed. It's hard to describe.

It's horrifically cold, too, and now that she's examining it... The center of the worst cracks is where Phoenix had been standing when she vanished.

She puts her hand in one of the clear spaces between two cracks, and pushes lightly.

It budges with an unpleasant creak.

She doesn't like that sound, at all. It feels like the creak of the support beams before they collapsed. It feels like breaking things.

She doesn't know if she has any other choices.

But - she doesn't want to just punch this. She isn't really willing to injure herself like that, and she's pretty sure she'd injure herself.

She has her pocket knife, which would be a better weapon than nothing against a person, but it's not exactly made for shattering time. She wishes she had - she doesn't know, a gun or something, something to break the cracks with. The TV's probably too heavy to throw, though...

Maybe if she picks it up, like the woman did?

...She wants a backup weapon first. Or - the chance of one.

There's a faint light ahead.

She covers her spooky glowing hand, and she starts trudging forward in the tunnel, pushing down the sick feeling in her chest.

It leads to -

You couldn't call this a room. It's enormous, the ceiling dozens of feet at least above her head. The smell of the mud is way worse here, a bit different in its intensity - it smells like burned meat left to rot in the trash.

The ceiling looks like it's just mud, not stone, and there's a massive hole - possibly the same one she saw when running from Jake behind the laundromat - far in the distance. It's the source of the thin light. There's some braces that look newish right around it, but... Nothing else is holding up the roof.

And there's ruins inside, a massive tangle of old, destroyed machinery and buildings and thick pipes, all covered in the same mud. Rain pours through the hole, probably the reason everything's so muddy, and muted flashes of lightning sometimes lift the gloom a teeny, tiny bit.

This has to have been down here forever, with how decayed it all looks - decades at least, but there's no way that hole just recently collapsed - there's no way the rest of the ceiling's still there, it shouldn't be stable -

She stares at the ruins, and realizes, numbly, that she knows what this is. That she knows how long it's been here.

Astre Sucre, and the ruins have been here a century to the day, waiting to be unearthed. The ceiling, she realizes, though she doesn't know how, is standing because it can't fall, not until people come looking.

She hates this entire day.

She goes to look for a weapon. Something she could break the cracks with, preferably from a distance.

The pipes are all too large, even the ones that aren't still mostly welded into something. No tools are readily apparent.

There's some shattered glass, though, and some loose bricks.

She picks up a brick. It'll work.

And she walks back to the weird TV, uncovering her glowing hand as she goes.