“Need to get out. This place will sink into the Sea of Fog soon,” a thought not entirely her own flashed through her head as she passed through the doorway and began her ascent up the long, winding staircase.

On the way up she passed the doorways to perhaps a dozen identical chambers or more, barriers of translucent silver fog preventing entry, the tanks on the other side all empty or shattered. One floor had a wall of seared flesh pressed up against its barrier, an amalgam of all its Failures. Another was full of featureless humanoids, some impaled on the broken edges of their tanks whilst others just lay face-down on the floor.

She didn’t take the time to get a closer look, with the tremors becoming progressively stronger and more frequent as she ascended. She scaled hundreds, thousands of stairs, and with each flight she went faster, driven by a growing sense of impending doom. By the time she reached the uppermost floors, the staircase was quaking in perpetuity.

“I’ll be safe if I reach the ground floor,” another foreign thought intruded. Faster up the stairs. Faster. Faster. Though she didn’t look back, she knew the staircase was being consumed behind her. When she finally leapt through the doorway a sudden wave of buzzing static rushed over her, and as she looked back, she saw the doorway filled with a wall of silvery fog. The Fog dissipated, revealing a slab of solid marble with an occult circle etched into its center, glowing with otherworldly light that soon flickered and faded as well.

The smell of damp air and moss filled her nostrils as she scanned the room. It was an uneven hollow carved out of solid stone, with a metal ladder leading up into a shaft against the wall to the left. In the corner immediately to her right was one of the glass tubes, pristine and empty, and next to it there was a large stone table with a large cloth draped over it, as well as two shelves carved into the wall above it. “Could use something to cover myself with,” she thought, approaching the table and yanking the cloth away, wrapping it around herself like a large cloak. It was barely longer than her hair, but it would have to do. What the fabric had been covering momentarily grabbed her attention away from the ladder - it was some sort of arm harness, with a heavy wood and metal contraption attached to the gauntlet. What was the word… “A gun,” she remembered, instinctively looking for a powder horn, lead balls and shells. Both these and several loaded cartridges were to be found in the lower shelf, right next to a strangely intriguing marble tablet, bearing a bizarre pattern of carved lines and symbols. She let go of her shank, placing it on the table and reaching for the tablet.

Buzzing static filled her fingertips when she picked it up, small wisps of Fog rising from the tablet.