It's not quite nothing, but it's far more nothing than it is anything else Clare has known in her life. A polar opposite to the tight, nervous spaces of the sewer system, this area past the door opens up- wide, and dark, into an imperceptible expansiveness. Only the walkway out is visible, which stops at a chasmous drop-off and then splits to the left and right.

Clare can feel a slight warmth blowing through the passage, inviting her through; but the air... it stings her skin.

Perhaps this is too much for a young adult to handle, especially one that has spent her entire life in the pleasant coffee-scented atmospheres of studious academia; but Clare has a reason to step forward; a very good reason.

She struggles with herself for a moment in deciding what she'll do. She expected past the door would be the truth, but not a truth like this.

"What's going on..." She says, trembling.

"...There is the way forward. We should continue," Carrie says.

"I don't..." She briefly grips Waine's chat stone. She could have someone to tell about this; she could persuade him to listen, and he could send someone down.

She wonders whether they'd come to arrest her or rescue her— probably both.

"I don't know what to do, but no matter what... I have to... find her," Clare says. She makes a wise decision. Rather than playing her hand to the people of Everhold right away, she'll take her time, and wait for more information.

She steps out onto the very rim of the mysterious, overwhelming expanse of blackness. "W-well, left or right?" She asks.

Carrie clicks a moment as it steps forward, crossing the boundary of the door. "...Either will lead to our destin-" it stops, clicking away again with a furious tempo. "You have one new message. Do you wish to proceed?" It asks.

An immense, deathly chill runs down Clare's neck, like the teeth of some hideous, unseen animal panging for her flesh in a sleepless, ever-stalking stupor. The dread is becoming so palpable that her body is failing to keep up with it. She feels a rotten, foreboding breeze pass by.

"P-play," she slides up to the expanse of the abyss, and heaves her dinner out into the darkness.

"...Inquiry: Status Report for 'Clare' User."

"I'm-" she gulps. "Play the message."

"...Playing message." There's a loud click from his head and, like a blessing or a curse, the voice of her mother seeps from Carrie's face.

"Clare... I... at least I hope it's you hearing this. Keep going down. I don't know what we're going to find, but one day you'll see what Everhold is built on, and I'll be finding out today... after I get some rest. It's quiet here, and I don't see anything to worry about. I'm going to lay back for a little bit. Please don't push yourself too hard, honey. I... I'm relieved that there was something past substation seven, though. It means I'm right. There's more, but you know that for sure now, don't y-"

There's a slight gasp in the recording, as if Mary's in pain.

"Don't hate your dad if he told you I died; that's what everyone would jump to anyway.

Stay safe. I know Carrie will do its best to take care of you, but you can't rely too much on it. I worked really, really hard on it; definitely my best work, but it's still an auto and is prone to mistakes.

Onward, to our little adventure!" Mary laughs with a slight, morbid humor before the message clicks out.

"That's all messages."

Clare just sits into the wall along the walkway, staring out into the black expanse. The welling of tears in her eyes finally reach their peak, and she lets out a gentle, quick sob.

"You made it out," she whimpers with a light smile.

"...Inquiry: What did 'I' make it out of?"

"N-" she loosens her mask briefly to reach a hand in and rub her eyes; not really a good idea in places where one would need a mask, but here, she's fine. "Just shut up. I wasn't even talking about you."

"...Define phrase: 'shut up'."

"To stop making noise," she snaps with a wry, faint smirk.

"...Noted."

Clare curls into herself gently for a moment, bringing in her knees and joining her hands as a sort of self hug. The implications of her mother getting through that slaughterhouse of automatons is significant, but to think that there's more to the journey, that there's a great, unknown darkness down below— the thought truly horrifies her. Perhaps her entire definition of the world was wrong, and that it actually goes down, rather than to the sides. Perhaps the only thing she has to await her is the crawling underworld filled with squirming, silent things that hunt for flesh.

Very gently and with great care, she leans just far enough to look down the drop off.

It's not absolute blackness down below. Faintly, on the very edge of her perception, she can see the faintest, grayest silhouettes of shapes.

"Something's down there," she says, wanting more than anything for Carrie to have something helpful, at least encouraging to say. It says nothing, just like she told it to. After another respite of uneasy breathing, Clare brings herself back to her feet and shines her light down to the floor.

Illuminated by the direct shine of her blue collar light, small droppings of what is most likely blood trail off to the left. She has her trail. She'll follow the blood.

"Come on," Clare says, keeping her nerves together with enough ability to start sketching along the fairly narrow walkway, Carrie close behind her with amazingly quiet steps for a machine. Clare is surprised by the specific ease in which Carrie can walk without making more than a slight *pat* noise. Her gaze trails at its feet for too long, and slips. Upon the slick pathway, the momentum swings her onto the floor and slides her legs across, dangling uneasily over the chasm.

With a gasp, she reaches forward to grab a hold of something. Just as her torso lowers over the edge, she feels all of her weight lifted off her, with the exception of her coat. Carrie picks her up by the collar with no difficulty at all, and places her neatly back onto her feet.

"Th-" Clare puffs in relief. "Thank you."

Carrie says nothing, but nods. She's having trouble getting it through her head that that slip could have been it.

"Let's keep going," she says, this time making good and sure to plant her feet firmly onto the ground, taking small, measured steps every time; almost like a gentle slide than a step. To add, her balance sprawled along the smooth rotary wall, she feels far more stable. The two make their way along the precipice of darkness for several minutes, the mad silence suffocating Clare's mind like an eldritch anticipation. Thinking on it, she really doesn't want to do this anymore, but she knows that if it will lead to her mother, even the slightest chance, she has to press on. After what feels like an eternity of skimming along the abyss, she sees it. A gray, crusty ladder, anything resembling color sapped from its body over the long dreary years, stands before her, leading straight down into the dark.

She stares at the ladder with an impalpable dread. "Are you sure this i-" Clare stops herself when she shines her full beam onto it. The blue light illuminates the old blood, just a small mark, right around the top of the ladder.

Mom went down.

Clare grits her teeth in disgust, knowing that this is her answer. The ladder looks incredibly old, as if it could snap from even the lightest of pressure.

"I..." She glances over to Carrie before looking back at the ladder, practically magnetic to her gaze. She has trouble looking away, knowing that in a few seconds, she's going to talk herself into mounting it and climbing down. Some of the ladder joints are so dilapidated that a kick could break them, and to think she's about to trust her weight to hundreds, if not thousands of these age-weakened joints makes her stomach crawl with yet another unique horror; like when one is dreaming and knows they have to jump into the shark-filled ocean.

Of all things, the ladder makes her short for breath again. The thought of the joints breaking, sending her straight down, or worse, the hinge joiners that hold the ladder to the wall shattering, sending her and the entire ladder in a curved like deep into the blackness. She would crash into the floor, with no clue of what she'd find, and after having her expectations disturbed this many times already, she wouldn't be terribly surprised if she fell helplessly into a bed of insects, face-first into an automaton's grasp, or perhaps the dark, cold ocean, rife with horrors untold.

"I don't...know if we..." she stops herself again. Complaining will do her no good, especially when it’s a numbskull like Carrie as her shoulder to cry on.

With an uneasy, careful movement, she leans down to get on top of the ladder. Just as she places her first foot on the top rung, she feels another tug. Carrie is pulling at her pack.

"What?" She asks, exasperated.

Carrie makes no noise.

"Okay, you can talk. Now what's wrong?"

"I would like to take your burden. This system does not think that structure is prepared for any extra weight."

She takes a breath. The robot has a point. If it fell over then it could just pick itself back up, but if she were to break the ladder on the other hand….

She sheds her pack and hands it up to Carrie, who puts it on.

"Okay, now?" She asks, understandably short considering the situation.

" 'Clare' User should exercise a high level of caution when navigating this device."

Her gas mask stretches gently as a grin crosses her face. "Sure, thanks." Clare starts down the ladder with steady, measured movements, taking great care not to put too much pressure on any one rung, and ensuring she has three points of contact at all time. The rust crumbles along her fingers, covering her gloves in a gray-orange crust. There's a steady, foreboding creak with every step she makes, the sound running deep through the ladder as if the entire structure was about to give at any moment. Clare doesn't let it stop her, though. So long as she keeps her weight distributed, she'll be fine.

The climb is long, however. Much longer than she expected. It just sprawls on and downward, like an endless gape waiting for any soul stupid enough to climb inside its dark abyss of wonder. Her climbing speed certainly isn't helping, and neither is the anticipation of what could be waiting for her.

Again, her imagination gets the best of her. She wonders if there's something alive down there, and if it can see in the dark, and if it already knows she's there. With a hushed breath, she turns off her light. There's something about just staring at the wall, while having her light on that really disturbs her. She feels very vulnerable right now, so she prays the creatures can, in fact, not see in the dark, and by turning out the light the least she can do is lower her profile.

Five minutes of this trembling anticipation continue, and then her foot hits something. She gasps from the surprise, pulling it up while simultaneously fumbling a hand back up to her light switch. With a quiet sob, she sees the area revealed to her. Looking away from the wall and the ladder is a dilapidated set of houses, miserable and sunken with the discolored scourge of mildew, suffocating anything that was once organic in the area.

The quick dip into the water and the resulting snap back up was a decisively jagged movement. It isn't until she feels the actual rung of the ladder giving way does she notice she placed both her hands tightly on the same one, leaning back with all her weight. The rung snaps, and she falls into the heavy, murky, cold water, like the embrace of death.

Her feet are still securely hooked onto the ladder, some subconscious attempt at holding onto anything that isn't wet, but it’s this action that holds her under for a few seconds. She can't pull in any air through her mask, it’s doing its job perfectly in creating a seal around her face, but it’s not long before water seeps between the filter valves and begins covering her face. The smell of the outside, muted by the safe, chemical comfort of her filter's charcoal-base screen, practically chokes her now that she can actually perceive its scent.

Old water, dust, mold, mildew, and any number of forlorn bacteria flood into her mask, and in her fight to inhale, she pulls in some of the water instead. She kicks her feet off the ladder in a fit to regain her balance upward just as she vomits into her mask. The water isn't just putrid, but it hurts, as if it had acidic qualities. It takes a few seconds, but she finally gets over herself and takes back to her feet, cold, wet, and disgusted far beyond anything her body's encountered in her entire life.

With a bitter, almost angry posture, all she can do is stand still while her body passes the rest of her digestive tract's food back up through her mask; a swirling, acidic torture that must simply be suffered through.

This is presently the most agony she’s been through

She takes a pause to lift her mask just enough to drain the fluid; surely none of the air could get in and make this any worse.

She spends half a minute just standing there, shivering as a grinding sound comes from above. It's Carrie, pack over its shoulder and sliding down the sides of the ladder in a swift decent. The auto jumps off the ladder just in time before its weight takes its toll on the ladder’s sides, and plants its alloyed feet into the water alongside her. Carrie takes a moment to look over their surroundings, and then calmly turns its head to the soaked young lady beside it.

"Inquiry: Status Report for 'Cla-"

"Shut," Clare starts with a sputter, "up." She doesn't want to talk, she just wants to be miserable and scared for a moment. It's weird, feeling jealous of an auto, but right now she really doesn't want to hear from something that cannot possibly understand how she's feeling at this moment. A few seconds pass, and she takes her first breath with any tone resembling composure. "Okay. Where now?" she finally asks.

"..."

"You can talk, Carrie."

"I only know we must continue."

"Shit," is all she can say to that.

With slow, shuddering movements, she casts her azure light over the sunken streets. There's a curtain of what looks like spores, swirling and clouding her vision, already poor through her mask, so it’s especially hard to see. The eerie silence of the upper threshold they came from is only slightly disturbed by the eerie calmness of the water below. She just knows there's something down here; call it unconscious intuition, but there's something very old inside of her that stirs from these sensations. There's nothing quiet about it. At least the substation system was familiar, and that huge precipice was wide open, but this is concealed, tight, waiting. She has the unsettling premonition she might end up as just more bacterium for the massive biological soup she's knee-high in right now.

With a quick glance behind her, she looks over at the ladder, its bottom part terribly damaged from her physical outburst, but it still looks usable. Clare doesn't even think to ask herself how she's going to get Carrie, or her pack back up, she's not so concerned about that.

She takes one more breath, thinks about her mother, and just picks a house. At a trudging pace, the two move through the putrid concoction up to her selected structure, looking to be a small home of some kind. It's design weirdly familiar to her for some reason, like something the design replicated from Everhold.

"Makes..." she only says that much to herself. She was about to say "Makes sense", but it doesn't really. The thought flickered through her mind that perhaps the founders of Everhold had a town below, like a camp, while constructing the city, but these structures seem more permanent than that.

At the door, she shines her light through a few of the holes, checks around to make sure they aren't being watched, and then pushes into the entrance. The water inside the house stirs from the movement of the door, flushing out a vile concoction of ancient, biological foam. She starts back with a hop, almost falling over again, but she maintains her balance and withstands the sensation of the heaping wave running past her knees.

"Y-yup," she mutters before shining the light into the home.

The pitch-black room is illuminated by her blue personnel light, adding a ghostly effervescence to the living room. Rotten books, decayed, curling paint and at the corner of the room, a human skeleton, all display the same sad, ancient gray.

"Thats..." Clare throws her beam around the room, making sure its safe. "A person." She'd never seen a skeleton before; it's terrifying to know that something like this is all she'll leave behind one day.

There's a lengthy set of clicking noises as Carrie produces its most thoughtful answer. "It is a calcium deposit, not a person," the automaton says helpfully, causing Clare to scoff.

"Yes, duh, of course." She waves her light around to another room, looking to be the kitchen, and she sloshes in. "What... happened here?"

" 'Carrie' system does not know."

"Thanks," she says with steadily improving spirits as she shines her light over the cupboards. She riffles through a few of them. Whatever was preserved in the jars is now an incomprehensible pile of mold. "Looks well stocked," she notes to herself, "They couldn't have starved to death."

"There is something approaching. 'Carrie' system recommends silence." Carrie says bluntly.

Anything resembling a smile on Clare fades into a cold, ready, animal gaze. She pauses, waiting for the water around her calves to still so she can hear.

There's nothing but the steady ambiance of the mold and ash brushing along her ears; a posthumous orchestra of a single, terrifying noise.

Clare still takes no chances. She remembers the feeling of that automaton's grasp upon her neck before the adrenaline overwhelmed her and told to be ready to die. She subconsciously strokes the spot of the pinch on her neck, red with hematoma She waits quietly with Carrie for almost a minute until, from the very edge of her hearing, she perceives a faint, slow, sloshing noise outside. She casts her emerald eyes over to Carrie, upright and unshaken, staring dully forward into a wall. Of course an auto wouldn't move until it were necessary; they're not quite smart enough to prepare for reaction.

The sloshing sound picks up in volume, perfectly steady, like one of the mixing machines from the processing quarter of Everhold. She visited the creamery vats as a girl during a school trip holiday; she couldn't believe so much milk existed in the kingdom, let alone the whole world. She's fairly certain it’s not a cistern making that noise.

She keeps quiet, and Carrie, as expected, also stays motionless in the room. Her light does, however, cast faintly out of the kitchen's singular window, just enough so that she can see outside.

The watery sound continues to grow ever closer, creeping up around the side of the house, and then it passes by the window. Clare sees nothing pass them by.

Her original tenseness re-firms and her already tired body calls upon another burst of attention and energy. The span of time while the unknown something passes by their house and down the street feels like an eternity, her heart rate so unbearably high that it feels like it could fail her at any moment.

The presence passes by back into silence, and Clare looses a long, wonderful sigh. The high of the adrenaline feels good now that the threat is gone; an unexpected feeling of reward for keeping her mouth shut and boots planted.

"Okay, what was that?"

Carrie is still quiet for some reason.

"Carrie?"

"..."

"Carrie!?"

Carrie turns to its user sharply. "Our position has been triangulated."

Clare looks on dumbfounded, as if reminded of a secret rule to a game she just thought she was winning. "What?"

She knows what triangulation is, but she never, ever thought it would be used for something like locating a person.

"So it's an auto?" she demands, her breathing picking back up.

"Pursuing entity is in fact autonomous in nature."

She stares at the robot with a look of pure astonishment. Of course an auto could still hear her talk from that far away if Carrie could hear it coming before she did.

She chuckles dismissively just as the sloshing sound returns from where it had just left at a faster, deliberate pace. It's coming for them.