BLEED/HAVEN

[XXIII] LEO

The crew checked in with one another a total of two times, Leo listened in on every check in but no significant information was passed. Pertaining to the mission of rerouting power, Jet last inferred that he and Charnita were close and would be done by the next check in. The layout of the ship was conveniently simple. The most convoluted segment was the center, which was a large mechanical room of sorts. From there everything else was a long hallway leading a specific room. Of course there were the alternate routes and turns that poured from one trail to the next. However, for the most part the halls were linear.

The most difficult part of the straightforward trek was the length of the path itself. The feeling that the identical panel upon panel of silver and white metal invoked was akin to the abyss of space. It was endless and intoxicated Leo's mind with emptiness and sent tingles through his skin as cold sweats broke out. The hallways itself, while feeling as endless and cold as space, felt as suffocatingly small as a box. Looking ahead was all Leo wanted to focus on. The man was obligated to glance behind the trio every so often in order to ensure their safety, and with every glance came a temporary relief that left as easily as it came when body upon body lined the halls. Tina was leading the crusade and every so often would bravely turn her rifle down a separate hallway or through a glass doorway to check for any living. Every room they entered was grim and as barren of life as the last. Tina came to one room, stepping into it as she had done with the last several, Leo using this opportunity to grant his nerves a brief respite by checking their rear, the lights farther than three panels away shrouding the hallway in darkness. However, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Then Tina's voice came over on his headset, expressing a disgust through her tone unlike any Leo had previously heard from her,

"God why? What the hell happened to this place?"

Tina released her visor to allow her face to be revealed to the air of the ship and put a hand over her mouth as she exited the room and leaned against a wall in a sweat, Leo speaking nervously,

"Tina, you good?"

She retorted,

"I'm fine just. Just give me a second Leo."

With that response, Leo took it upon himself along with Setton to gradually round the corner into the dark room Tina had just checked. When they entered the room, the sight that greeted Leo's eyes was something no man would be  physically or, prayerfully, morally capable of. The corpses in that room were placed on display in such a way that filled Leo with an odd familiarity. A callback to the feelings that the Homunculi had about themselves, being failures, rejects. These people were rejected by whatever slaughtered the populace of their spacecraft, and it did it like a trophy case.

Eventually Leo and the others came to the propulsion control room they had been looking for for the past twenty minutes. There were signs in the spacecraft along the bloodied walls that indicated what sector they traversed and they were in the designated location. Leo noticed that Tina still went along without her visor on and appeared visibly shaken up from what they had previously witnessed in the last room.

As they entered the large control room, they were greeted with leagues of machinery that went far and wide. To the left was a hallway leading to more machinery while to their right was another room. Jet's voice came over the headset once again and Tina went to answer. Leo, upon realizing that the room to the right was more than likely the propulsion control room, deliberately made his way through the threshold, turning to speak. When he did so, he realized that when he passed through the door, the radios for the entire team had malfunctioned. He heard a muffled shout from Tina as her and Setton dove to try and reach the room before the door closed on Leo, leaving him in a dark, closet-sized area with computer monitors being the only dim source of light.