The first level of the building was barren. No light, no sound except for the quiet foot falls of the two XCITE agents, moving through the eerily empty building. However, there were claw marks that bit deep into the walls, almost scraping all the way through to the outside at some parts. Hard, flaky black lumps decorated the walls in bursts and arcs giving away the hint of an unknown dance performed far before Niles and Sinclair had become involved with XCITE. Tasha would probably be the first one to recognize the graceful curves and hedonistic spots for what they were--dried blood. The furrows in the walls matched those in the ground and ceiling, but that was to be expected given what had happened on Honshu, and none of them appeared recent.<br/><br/>It was only a relatively short ten stories to the top of the building, easier said than done, as it turned out to be. After cresting the ninth flight of stairs, they ran into a problem. Someone, or most likely something, had decided that stairwells were not only offensive, but clearly a sin to the greater god of architectural design. They had excised the tumorous infection of easy manual access by either tearing the stairwell out of the walls or blowing it up, either seemed likely given the amount of debris and the twisted, almost burned looking metal. That meant they had to get onto the fourth floor of the building and find another stairwell if they wanted to continue to ascend to the top of the building.<br/><br/>If they managed to get to a window facing the overly excited bunch of red dots that had been flickering on Mara's visual display, they would find nothing. Just concrete and overgrown plants. However, if one of them did so much as look up they would probably notice the vivid red growths along the ceiling, pulsing with life, almost overwhelming hot to touch. It did not, however, show up on Mara's display.