"Yeah." She nods and resumes walking.

Jesse has just enough time when she rounds the corner to see a small metal elevator platform set into an alcove, before the light suddenly goes scarlet, and the alcove is blocked by a barrier of undulating red. 

With a whooshing sound, three beams of red light appear, narrow, and coalesce into three men in security guard outfits, their orange-glowing heads lolling to one side or the other. In unison, they rise slightly up in the air as they finish materializing, levitate the last few inches to the ground, orient on Jesse and Dairine, draw, and start firing their pistols. 

Dairine has been carrying the shield in the back of her mind like a song stuck in her head; now her fear reflexively pulls it into focus. The bullets slow like they've hit a lake of cold molasses and clatter to the ground.

When the light changes, she instantly scrambles for cover; she's not quite fast enough to get a shot off before their feet touch the ground, but it's close. She tries to focus on her aim and not worry too much about the shield slowing down her return fire.

Any bullets that are getting farther away from Dairine can go as fast as they like! She stays a few steps behind Jesse to avoid being in the way and stares at the glowing people in case this produces some idea of what the heck.

The guards continue to open fire on Dairine and Jesse, circling around them in opposite directions in an attempt to flank them. Dairine's shield is ignored as they fire, even though any bullets fired towards her simply slow and fall to the ground. 

Wherever Jesse shoots one of the glowing guards, there is a puff of multicolored smoke that explodes into short tendrils before fading away into the air, and when one of them is shot enough, their entire body is instantly transformed into an explosion of same multicolored smoke, which dissipates in but a few seconds. 

When there's only one of the guards left, there's another beam of red light, which forms into another figure. Their form is clearly human, but at the same time, it clearly isn't. The body is twisted, bent painfully in half, its stretched limbs and shredded clothing nearly scraping the ground as it slowly levitates closer to the pair. Its torso glows orange-red, growing brighter and brighter as it floats closer and closer to them, revealing the dark shapes of its ribs through its pale flesh. 

"Exploding guy!" says Jesse, scrambling back. "I think so, anyway!" She shoots the exploding guy. Several times.

Dairine also scrambles back, falls on her butt, and scoot-rolls to one side just in time to avoid Jesse tripping on her.

Several times is enough for the twisted figure to be sufficiently damaged by the bullets to fall to the ground. It glows more brightly for a moment, its shape distending, before it explodes, in a blast of force and sound and cracked concrete and a riot of multicolored smoke. 

The shockwave is enough to take out what remains of the last security guard, who dissipates just like the other two did. The barrier vanishes, and the red light disappears as well, as though it had never been. 

Dairine instinctively throws her arms in front of her face even though the shield handles the concrete fragments; the shockwave would have knocked her down if she wasn't down already.

Once her ears have stopped ringing, she realizes she's still sitting on the ground like a dumbass and gets herself vertical again. "Yup. Exploding guy. Thanks for the warning."

"I haven't seen a lot of them but they're... memorable."

She looks around. Which way to the power plant?

There's a sign by the elevator, with a pictogram intended to depict an elevator, with the caption "elevator" underneath. 

Underneath that pictogram and caption, the sign has two further lines of text. The first says "Ventilation" and is followed by the number "2" justified to the right edge of the sign, the second, below it, says "NSC Power Plant" and is followed the number "1". The box around the "2" is filled solid, to indicate the current floor. 

"So what were those guys? They looked like--like they used to be human."

"Yeah. I think they were, or—some of them were, or something. The evil noise did it."

"Ugh. Spot's blocking it for me but he can't do it for anyone else. What's your situation there?"

"I... also have something blocking it for me." It's just about the closest she's gotten to talking about Polaris since—well. Let's not dwell on that. "Everybody else around here who's not already screwed up seems to be wearing HRAs—I'll try to remember to point it out if we see anybody wearing one, so you can know what they look like—except for Ahti, who... I have no idea what Ahti's got going on, but I'm pretty sure the noise didn't get him. It's not... really subtle."

"I admit it would be worse if they could sneak up on us." She keeps moving toward where the reactor supposedly is, keeping an eye out for anything else weird or dangerous or for any useful signage.

At the bottom of the elevator is a largish storage room with a single other exit, and through that door... 

There is a very large open space, the ceiling quite very very high above, almost too far away to see. In the center of the room (if the curvature of the walls around them is the same for the whole room) is a large cylindrical object, with the markings "NSC-02" painted on with white paint through a stencil, with various pipes leading off of it in all sort of directions. Similarly stencil-painted letters adorn a large squat concrete structure forward and to the right of the doorway, with the faded words reading "NSC SECURITY". Further concrete structures and ramps are strewn haphazardly and sparingly throughout the room, at least as far as can be seen in the ominous red light spilling outward from the center of the room. 

Just in front of the entrance to the SECURITY structure, at the bottom of a ramp, there is figure with a large weapon standing there, their features somewhat difficult to discern from so far away. Above and to the left of her, on the top of some other concrete structure, there is another figure with a similar-looking weapon, walking from one end of the structure to the other. 

"I think I see HRAs..." she says, squinting. "Those chest harness things."

"I can't tell but at least they're not glowing or shooting at us."

"Both good signs. Let's see about getting closer."

As they approach, it's more obvious that the figure is in fact wearing an HRA, and she's not glowing at all. 

"Hey, are you new?" she says, as they get closer. "Go talk wi-" she stops short, before lifting her weapon and pointing it at Dairine. "Who are you two, and what are you doing here?" 

"My name's Jesse Faden," says Jesse, stepping protectively in front of Dairine. (A slight, easily missable sigh before she continues,) "I'm the new Director. I'm here to fix the reactor."

"The new director?" She lowers her weapon for a moment, but then lifts it up again. "Ma'am, if you would step aside please. I'm not sure what the entity behind you is, but it's probably dangerous, and it isn't supposed to be here." 

Huh, so Jesse's like officially in charge of this stuff instead of just passing through like Dairine. "I'm Dairine, I'm here to help Jesse fix things. You really don't need to shoot me?" That wasn't supposed to come out sounding like a question.