The Moon, chapter 35: Light

Usually in a situation like this, Susie would fall asleep shortly after a breakdown. Whether this was a coping mechanism or a symptom of circumstance, it helped her calm down at the very least. She realized this the harshest when she couldn't fall back to it. For several hours Susie huddled in the back corner of this hellish prison cell, eyes bloodshot, face and ragged clothes stained with innumerable tears until there was nothing left to fall from her eyes. She was afraid to blink, as who knew what would creep upon her in such a vulnerable state? Certainly not her. With nothing left to do, she thought.

She thought about the visions that she was bombarded with by the moon creature in the old world. She remembered one particular one. She was being dragged through a red hallway by something she couldn't see. Then she was shown that Hometown was directly above this hallway. Could this really be the case? Was she really so close to being home, safe and sound? And what of the vision that came directly after, of the lake to the east of Hometown proper? What significance did it hold? No matter if these visions were correct or not, she thought she had to try. It was the very least she could do.

This train of thought was quickly derailed when Susie spotted a lurching figure come into her view. From behind the wall to the right side of the hallway came an incredibly tall humanoid figure, shrouded in a sort of dark fog that kept itself congealed enough to form the figure, but not enough to keep dark mist from falling from it's body and to the floor. It was so tall that Susie couldn't even see it's head, as it stretched into the hallway's ceiling that was far taller than that of the cell's that she resided in. The dark figure reached out a shadowy limb to the door, the arm ending not in a hand, rather tapering off into a slim, tentacle-like extension.

The shadow figure slowly opened the fleshy door to her cell. It wasn't even locked. Though maybe the addition of one wouldn't matter. If anyone was caught outside of their cells when they weren't let out by something else, she was sure there was a far worse fate awaiting for them outside their cell than in. Susie stood up slowly and cautiously, keeping her eyes both on the figure and the half opened door. The hallway was so cramped that the door could only open halfway before it collided with the other cell's bars. Susie wasn't sure if it was letting something in, or letting her out. A quick frantic tapping from the creature's other arm on the bars gave her the answer she wanted.

Susie, not used to walking at all and in no such condition to do so, stumbled her way outside her cell. In the hallway now, she could survey more of her surroundings, and more of the creature. The hallway actually stretched far upwards into an inky black abyss above, with a lot of tightly packed cells dozens of meters up. The cells above her didn't even have some sort of walkway or balcony, anyone in the top cells that would walk out would fall at least a couple meters to the floor. There may have been walkways up there at some point, but they were long gone now. In addition to her location, she saw the rest of the creature as well, though she never saw it's head after all. The neck of the creature simply extended far into the ceiling and into the abyss above until it became one with the darkness. Maybe that was for the better, as who knows what such a creature would have for a face. And perhaps the body was simply an extension of the darkness looming above the hallway? The less she knew, the less her mind was burdened.

The creature closed the door behind her, and pointed behind her, further down the hallway. Both ends of the passage ended in a flesh covered metal door. Susie was surprised any doors here worked at all, and hadn't been grown over by the flesh that pervades the area. Susie taking the hint from the shadow creature, she turned around, hoping that this thing's intentions weren't malicious, and began to walk in the opposite direction of the creature. She instantly noticed the cell a couple cells down from hers had it's bars completely removed, forcibly so, in fact. Bits of the barrier's remains mixed in with various unrecognizable bits of flesh and organ matter sat within a fresh pool of blood right outside of a cell mere steps away from her. The blood didn't stop at the pool either, and formed a small trail that ended halfway between the door at the end of the hallway and the blood pool. She knew this as the aftermath of the confrontation she heard just hours prior. The sight of all of this, mixed in with a pungent smell of death that hadn't quite hit her till now, nearly forced what little she had in her stomach out.

Thoughts of Hometown, Kris, Toriel and Hazel were the only things keeping her going. She tried her best to not breathe in any of the foul, stale air that permeated this place, and carefully stepped over the pool on her way to the end of the hallway. She could only be thankful she still had her shoes on, because if she stepped on whatever just made a sickly, wet crunch beneath her feet without them, she was sure the bile reaching the bottom of her throat would rise a lot higher. Only a few more cell's lengths away, and she would hopefully be far away from here. Susie tried to keep her eyes away from any of the cells in addition to her previous precautions. Even though all had been relatively quiet since the encounter that caused the mess, she had heard enough of their screams to know that whatever was inside was something left unseen. She could still hear muffled sobs and gasps occasionally, and that was more than enough to keep her gaze averted.

Susie made it to the door and with perhaps too much haste, swung it open and closed it behind her. The room in front of her was really only half of a hallway, with half of it being a pile of steel and metal rubble covered with flesh. Susie was about to wonder why the figure led her here in the first place when she noted the quite large hole in the left of the hall. Susie cautiously approached the opening in the wall which looked to be made with some sort of explosive. Inside the hole, she saw a few metal elevator cables dangling from a ceiling far above where she could see. Below, the shaft went far down, a couple miles at least, until at the very bottom she spotted a small blue square that was the exit.

This was the elevator shaft that she fell down. If she had to guess, she was about at the halfway point between the sea of mistakes and however far up Hometown was. Which means she was somehow carried several miles vertically to the entrance of whatever this area was. For an unknown, and most likely sinister purpose, at that. Such a creature probably had great strength, and especially in this condition, she had no way of fighting back something like that. She also knew there was no way she could climb the elevator cables in the state she was in either. There had to be either another way up, or she had to find some way to reach the top of this elevator shaft and climb back up into her own world. Whichever possibility she went with, actually having even the vague concept of a plan of action gave her some much needed hope. The light at the end of the tunnel was in her grasp.

She only needed to figure out how to reach it.