Fingers of piercing cold ran up Rusk's spine, arcing across his back, standing up the little hairs and raising goosebumps as they traveled. It felt like icy hands were gripping his wrists and ankles, holding - no, no. Rusk opened his eyes and saw carrots, lettuce... something wasn't right here; Rusk looked up and saw faint lines from the ground, as if thousands of thin green threads hung from the remnants of the Statue of Liberty, trailing into the water, along the ground. They were wrapped around her broken, upraised arm, forming a hand and blazing torch, lighting her face from above and below, casting flickering shadows on her eerie visage. Underfoot were green wisps composing a thin, low-hanging vapor. Rusk blinked once more and the noticed the pallor of his skin against the black soil, but quickly returned his hands to his pockets to warm them. Another glance at the Statue showed lit only by the faint glow just before night goes all black. Her robes were gray again, her arm just a broken stump. Her face disappeared into shadow and seemed to suggest that after hundreds of years, she'd finally changed her expression to a pained grimace.<br/><br/>Rusk reluctantly followed the group into the hole Raymond had made, hesitation marking each step until he lowered himself slowly into the compound. He still wasn't sure why he'd agreed to this crazy night raid, but some part of him compelled the rest to comply. He'd fallen silent after having his concerns shot down - it seemed far easier to follow along than ask more questions. Until later, at least - then the questions he'd bottled up would come rolling out in a jumbled stream. Rusk's eyes followed Raymond's gaze, watching strands of fatesilk slowly be spun into rovings, woven into bolts... the agonizing slowness of the process was somewhat mesmerizing.<br/><br/>Rusk felt decidedly un-stealthy tramping through corridors in a winter coat and boots, as he'd not had time or the means to change into something more fitting for this expedition before suddenly departing. "Looks expensive," he said. "What kind of people would have the means to build this facility? To fabricate this kind of technology?" Rusk came around a corner, following the man in front of him - the man who had stopped suddenly just after turning the corner, causing Rusk to bump into him and clatter around as the two regained their balance. The loud clomping of Rusk's boots echoed for long seconds in the sterile halls, and the color rushed out of his face as he locked eyes with Raymond. Rusk mouthed a silent "Sorry!" but that would do little to dampen the racket he had just caused.<br/><br/>Rusk was no stranger to feeling out of place, but with these people -- they looked like seasoned adventurers, and none of them acted as if anything was strange about meeting in an abandoned warehouse and being told they had been sought after to do some work for the crown, unraveling a conspiracy to assassinate the king. To Rusk, all of this was like some hyper-realistic drug trip. The absurdity of being pulled off the road by someone seeking you, when you were trying to disappear from your old life, was disorienting at best, and at worst an existential crisis waiting to bloom. But Rusk had gone along with the mission, just like the others, and was steeling himself against the nerve-wracking experience. To go from a fairly simple life to creeping around in an ultra-high-tech lab was far from his normal day, but he was starting to see why the other hires took it in stride - they'd done this many, many times before.