[From here]

Starting off down the hall, he took it at an even stroll, checking doors one by one.

Trial 1: Not a supply closet.
The washing machines might make good material though.
Trial 2: Not a supply closet.
The filing cabinets *see above ref.
Trial 3: Locked.

Setting down his sack of goodies, Sho fished out his tools. Taking a moment to assess the correct angle and vector for his next experiment, he proceeded to bang away at the handle with the drawer.

Scientifically, of course.

[From here]

The next chamber was in three parts, and for the first Scourge was fine. But the shower room, and the one beyond that, gave his nose the surges.

The rooms smelled like...Scourge wasn't really sure how to put it, it was more a lack of smell than anything else. Sterile. He'd gotten used to all the little background smells, sweat and grime and breath, but this room has nearly nothing. The set of rooms was the olfactory version of "quiet...too quiet" to the tracker and it gave him the chills. Being this bare was unnatural, and his own scent was nearly overpowring compared to the bareness of the decontamination chambers.

What did this place consider contamination, anyway? Organic material? A place like this might melt the flesh from his calcified support structures, if that spigot decided to turn on, or destroy him completely.

Scourge hurried through and tried not to look at it. At least the next door opened for him without protest.

[To here.]

[From here]

Beds plus lab. No guesses what sort of experiments went on here. Scourge kept to the other side of the room and didn't dare touch them.

He was a superstitious mech, a foolish trait for a Decepticon but one he refused to give up. Straying into the resting places of the powerful dead was just asking for trouble, he hadn't needed the appearance of an actual ghost to tell him that, and who knew what sort of monstrous things were performed here? Especially right next to the "morgue", which Scourge understood to be a place where human stored their dead. He couldn't see any actual corpses around here, but if he had he would have probably offered a short apology for invading their personal space.

Sure, they were gone. Mostly. But Scourge didn't want to risk their wrath if they decided to come back and take an accounting of the wrongs done against them.

A soft squeak made Scourge's head snap to the side and his blade whip out to wave trembling in the cool air. Nothing. Scourge pressed the side of his head to the nearest door, feeling his internal systems quiver. He could smell living things again, their faint scents clear in the cold sterility of the laboratory. Not humans, the smell was wrong, too dank and musky. They were something he hadn't run into before, and not something he particularly cared to investigate further.

They were moving. Little--bones, claws, teeth?--made loathesome scratching noises against metal and plastic. Scourge could hear their growls and hisses, and twisted gurgling noises that shouldn't come from any natural vocalizer. It was only the suicidal draw of the horrific that kept him from running away from the door as fast as possible.

He shifted uneasily and the pommel of his blade hit the door with a soft 'thunk', making the creatures on the other side growl louder and shuffle more excitedly. Something outright shrieked, and Scourge nearly tripped over his own feet as he scampered backwards with his blade held out against a nonexistant foe.

Just animals. Weak, squishy, most likely caged animals with a thick door between them. Scourge inflated and deflated his lungs several times, getting a grip on himself before turning to focus on getting into the storage room.

The door was locked, as Scourge had expected. It was the last door between him and his goal but he still bounded and broke the lock as quickly as he could before scurrying inside and shutting the door firmly behind him. In and out, as fast as he could, and then he could spend the rest of the night hiding under his bed.

[To here.]

[From here.]

Finally! Now maybe he could actually get something done.

Scourge opened up his pillowcase and switched on his flashlight for the first time that night, holding them together to keep his hand free. Sure enough, the chemicals had those little colored and numbered diamonds Lord Recluse had sketched out for him. This would be a lot easier if he'd had some actual chemical names rather than orders to just pick out the most dangerously numbered ones, but it did give him somewhere to start.

He went for the acids first. Scourge knew very little about chemistry and most of that from listening to Mixmaster babble about things nobody really cared about, but he knew that Acids Melt Stuff and that they had to be beneficial to weapons that made the bad things go away. Glycerin had low numbers on it, but it sounded a lot like nitroglycerin and that was a dangerous substance indeed, so maybe it would be helpful. Magnesium chloride also looked useful, he'd seen someone set a cube of magnesium on fire and that had gotten very interesting very fast.

He packed the chemicals into the bag in generally equal amounts, being as gentle as possible just in case they exploded or caught fire on their own. When he could barely close the pillow up again, he offlined the flashlight and stuffed it into the top of the bag before heaving it over his shoulder and stumbling out of the room again.

[To here.]

[blindly stumbling from here]

His original plan of keeping by the wall forgotten, Kenpachi pushed forward in the darkness. There was a faint light at the end of this hall, probably from more of those light-thingies the other patients all seemed to have. Stepping a little further, that small amount of light was just barely enough for him to realize that wherever he was, it had just opened up by a lot.

He reached his hand to the right and felt a door. A locked door. So instead he reached his hand out to the left and felt the expanse his instincts had told him was there. Another hallway, probably. He was pretty damn sure he was supposed to turn left at some point, wasn't he? There were a hell of a lot of left turns in those instructions, so his best bet was probably to turn left.

The first door down this new hallway, surprise surprise, was locked. The second door, however, was not. First damn not-locked-or-broken-locked door he'd found up here, this had to be the right door. He turned the handle and stepped into the darkness.

[to here]

[from here]

Kenpachi stepped into the pure darkness of the room. If he were lucky, this was the kitchen. If he were really lucky, this room was filled to the brim with those nasty non-hollow monsters people seemed to talk about. Knowing his luck, however, it was probably filled with cute fluffy bunny rabbits or some other thoroughly disappointing surprise. He stepped forward, one hand out to feel for the counter, but instead his hands curled around something leather.

A chair like this? In the kitchen? There was only one reasonable answer to this conundrum. He probably wasn't in the kitchen.

"Damnit all to hell!" Kenpachi growled, picking up the chair and flinging it blindly across the room in frustration. He needed to find a weapon and find this rec field before the lack of a good fight drove him nuts.

[from here]

The foursome rounded the corner of the wall in nice time, and Senna glanced around. Now to veer away from the wall... the girl headed towards the forest, the faint sounds of water running over rocks available to anyone that listened.

Nothing had happened so far, but Senna was anxious. Maybe it was just the events of the day, or maybe it was because she was responsible for her friends, but she felt jittery. Her eyes kept scanning the half-dark for things unseen.

[From here]

Eureka!

This closet, small and cramped as it was, was a veritable data cache of supplies and materials! A practical Au mine! Industrial-strength chemical cleaners in non-Euclidean containers! Buckets of varying sizes, concentrically stacked! Cylindrical lights! Bulbed lights! A hand truck! Duct tape. Sho felt like a little boy in a slide-rule shop.

Pulling open a garbage bag from one of the shelves, he started loading it with all sorts of goodies: bleach, toilet paper, brushes, spray cans, doorstops - it all went in. Filling a bucket full of light bulbs, he duct-taped another bag over the top so they'd stay put. After filling a bag full of metal pipes and other sensational cylinders, he started loading it all onto the hand truck along with his sheet full of broken wooden furnishings from his room. Duct-tape was a key element in adding this lot together into a complex polynomial that didn't look like it would fit out the door.

He paused to take a breath and suddenly the room became a lot quieter. Sho came to acute realization that he'd been cackling madly the entire time.

After a few seconds, the cackling resumed.

Duct taping the toolbox to the bottom of the hand truck and slinging a roll of extension cords over one shoulder, Sho looked about for anything else he might need. After a moment's consideration, he filled another bag full of batteries, spare rolls of duct tape, a hand vacuum and a couple cans of paint, securing this new addition to the top of the scooter stool. He pushed it out into the hall to give himself more volume within which to maneuver. After judicious application of mass*acceleration, the over-loaded hand truck followed.

"Now, for the finishing touches," he said with a grin, adjusting the coils of cords on his shoulder. He looked around, several items catching his eyes.

A few minutes later, he had a flashlight taped to each arm and the roll of duct tape, now quite thin, over his wrist. There was a "Wet Floor" sign around his neck.

[To here]

[from here]

Force of habit almost had Sam moving ahead without much thought, but he slowed in time, let Dean take point instead. Though when it came down to it, when you were travelling in a pair, it didn't quite matter as much who moved up front; the other was always gonna be bringing up the rear and that carried its share of risks if something rushed them from behind.

He eyed the broken door as they passed by it. Probably the same patient who came through, but even so, he didn't want to be running into anyone if they could help it. There was another way in up ahead. They might as well take that.

Glancing at Dean, he gave a slight shrug of the shoulder, and it seemed Dean was on the same page because a minute later, they were down the hall with a kicked-in door. Sam winced internally at the noise. Not the greatest approach if they were trying to avoid attracting attention. He'd never looked down on the presence of a decent paperclip, but he was starting to appreciate them even more now that there were absolutely none around whatsoever.

The temperature dipped noticeably as he stepped inside. He swept his light cautiously over the area, half-expecting a revenant to crawl out from somewhere. Wouldn't be the first time.

He started moving through the room, taking one half while he figured Dean would take the other side. They were looking for a needle of some sort specifically, yeah, but it wouldn't hurt to do some extra investigating while they were here. Even if he wasn't sure if they should linger too long, but weigh that with the risk of getting back up here another night to re-check something, and lingering came out as the lesser evil.

Sam flipped through the pages of the clipboard. After about thirty seconds of squinting in the glow of his flashlight, he gave up on trying to decipher the illegible mess. He might've considered taking it back to his room to examine later if it wasn't pretty clear that there was no reading anything on it, good lighting or no. It was beyond scribbles.

God, these dead ends were going to drive him insane.

He frowned, turned his flashlight on the morgue coolers instead. Most of the drawers were unlabelled, probably empty, but a few were occupied.

He reached for the first one and pulled it open, eyebrows going up as his eyes landed on the body that slid out. No matter how many corpses you handled, it was still never a pretty thing.

Not looking up from the body, he directed a, "Hey," at Dean to get his brother over.

Whatever got at this guy tore him up pretty good, but it didn't narrow down their suspect list by a large amount. Ghosts could do this kind of damage as much as a shapeshifter could, if one had a mind to. At least the fact that his heart was intact meant they could rule out werewolves. The stab wounds combined with the slashes did suggest that it was something that actually used a weapon rather than just natural claws. And what the hell was that on his chest? Was that a—

Weird. Definitely weird. He'd never seen something like that before, a giant branded "8" almost, ringed in by a pentagon. He recognized a lot of sigils. This wasn't one of them.