The lumbering creature paid no heed to Nine at all but only walked forward on feet which more closely resembled gnarled roots torn loose from the earth. Cradled in the crook of one woody elbow was the barely-conscious Doctor, the shock of events finally having caught up with her and manifesting now in an overwhelming mental and physical exhaustion which bordered on a kind of hysterical apathy.<br/><br/>The creature’s other hand was splayed, extending before it like a four-fingered bulldozer’s shovel somehow placed mid-air so it could simply shove things out of its way. It really wasn’t smart at all, in any way a human might use the term. Trees. Turrets. They were all pretty much the same, in its perception. It also wasn’t friendly; the ‘rescue’ of the Doctor was an afterthought to its battle with the ‘gator-thing as baffling to it as to Tamis herself. But, on some cellular level, where a faint smear of memory may reside, it had known her face and not wished to see her dead. Nine and the others would be afforded no such kindness, should they make the mistake of getting in its way.<br/><br/>Tamis was shaken from her fugue by the recurrent ‘blap’ of machinegun fire, curling deep into the tree-man’s embrace as bullets thudded with sickly, hollow noises into its fibrous flesh to no ill-effect aside from annoying it and causing gouts of reddish, translucent sap to trickle down its body.<br/><br/>The gunshots stopped, abruptly. There was a loud clang, and then a deafening metallic —boom— that forced Tamis' hands over her ears. The creature had reached the lab’s outer doors and was intent on kicking them in, seeing as giving them a good hard shove hadn’t worked. The boom was repeated again and again, until metal groaned and leaned crookedly off its hinges.<br/><br/>Covered in tree-slobber and sap, her legs still useless but tingling violently, Tamis Dunsany would get her first look inside the notorious Area #144, hitherto a rumour parallel to the nightmarish stories parents tell their children to pre-empt misbehaviour in years to come and put a little healthy fear of the unknown into their offspring.<br/><br/>There was nothing healthy about this place, or anything that came out of it; Tamis knew that already. But what she wasn’t prepared for was the swarm of GenMods, humans and … other things… milling around on the ground floor’s entrance level, some of them wounded, some revelling in carnage, others just looking for a way in, or a way out from the sealed-off section. It was as if a Heironymous Bosch painting she’d once seen in the city’s Museum of Cultural Relics had been brought to life. Perhaps she’d have made further analogy to that artist’s obsession with Hell, had she known this was only one of hundreds of levels, a labyrinth built in direct proportion to the enormous, if paranoid, genius of the man who’d built it.