The Catacombs

Avie and Tviblindi accompanied our group to the AMU campus after our meeting at Murphy's. Once we got there, Tviblindi whispered something to Avie, and Avie said their goodbyes, that creepy smile still on their face.

Courtesy of Tviblindi, we were supplied with additional firepower and had escape vehicles set up outside of ARC headquarters. We were also accompanied by several Martyrs, the Archive equivalent to soldiers. Frankly, I was starting to get paranoid that the whole thing was a setup and they'd turn on us, given that there were a few more of them than there were of us.
 
I won't describe the person who opened the door to the Catacombs for us, as per her request.

Other than the possibility of betrayal and death, our group entered without issue.

The Catacombs are difficult to describe. They're not really supposed to be... seen, I don't think, at least not by humans. It makes me think of the Newborn's true form back at Seattle. It was impossible to really parse.

(Maybe that was just me, though. Nobody else seems to have said anything like that, including the other members of our group.)

The closest my brain could really figure out to a descriptor for the Catacombs is that they looked like a seemingly-infinite maze of tunnels, bookshelves lining the walls. Given how cold and damp it was in there, I assumed the fact that I didn't see any books that were even slightly damaged was a result of the Catacombs' true nature, i.e., hellish and wrong.

There were... spiders there. Not quite spiders, really. They had too many legs even for spiders, and their many eyes were placed irregularly around their heads. They were white as bone, and they covered nearly everything that wasn't being walked on, crawling about on their too-many legs.

In short, they looked like what I imagine arachnophobes see when they think about spiders.

They all moved in one direction. According to the Martyrs accompanying us, that was the Archive's patron Fear the Blind Man guiding our way. We followed the bone spiders, and we made it through the Catacombs.

Eventually, we came to a massive door made of dark wood. The doorway was made of bone, or at least, I thought so at first. As I moved closer, I realized that it was actually made of countless bone spiders pressed tight against one another. I couldn't say whether they were dead or just very still, if concepts like death even apply to them.

I moved past the rest of the group to open the door. With that, we stepped out of the Catacombs and into Robin's cell.

Most of what happened immediately after that was a blur, if I'm being honest, but I remember bits and pieces: Robin hugging me, me having to pull away from her and try to explain what was going on, Jameson cutting through several of the bars with a circular saw, Samuel shooting several guards' legs out to incapacitate them, Jameson picking the lock from the inside and opening the door, all of us leaving the cell with a now-terrified Robin in tow.

We fled the cell block, but there were a number of guards stationed at different points. We tried not to hurt any of them and focus on just getting out before we were trapped, but there were points where we had to.

The problem with not killing the people who want to kill you is that they can still try to kill you.

As we ran out of the cellblock and into the meeting room, we were followed by two guards we hadn't already injured or... neutralized. One named Ivan- nice guy, brought in doughnuts once- shot Jameson in the chest twice. A Martyr named Merel shot Ivan in the head. He collapsed to the ground, blood flowing from his temple. Ivan's partner George knelt down beside him, about to... I don't know, check his vitals or something, but Merel shot him too.

I was starting to feel sick to my stomach.

But there was no time to grieve. We kept running even as we were being shot at, even as more guards were called in from other rooms, even as they killed all but four of the Martyrs. We kept running even as we fired back at the people who had once been my friends, who probably would have agreed that Robin didn't deserve to be imprisoned but just couldn't be trusted to keep a secret and had to die for it.

If you couldn't tell, I'm still processing what happened that day.

We ran out of the meeting room and into the hallway. There was a staircase leading up to a door I knew said "Staff Only" on the other side. I pushed the door open and held it as Leo, Jenn, Samuel, Merel, and the surviving Martyrs ran through.

Robin looked into my eyes as she saw what I was doing. For some reason, I thought for half a second that she would refuse to go through, but just like the rest of us, she entered the door to the upstairs hallway. Just like the rest of us, she shot and killed the guards stationed there as we made our way to the office, and from there to the reception room, even though she didn't really know why any of this was happening. Just like the rest of us, she left the building and got in one of the escape vehicles Tviblindi and his people had provided us, even though she didn't recognize anyone there but us.

What kind of person am I that Robin didn't question any of this from me? Or does that say more about what being imprisoned for so long has done for her?

It doesn't matter. All of us are either free or dead. I didn't even know the ones who died that well.

That probably sounds cynical. I don't really care. Robin is safe, and she's with us.

She's just such a different person than she used to be. She's like us now: scared, exhausted, and ashamed. Or maybe she was always like that, and she's just lost practice at hiding it. It's hard to say.

I'll update more later. For now, I just want to get some rest.