An hour.  A whole freaking hour to get up to the top of the shaft.  "This is not what I had signed up for when I agreed to come out with you, Alex..."  Dan groused halfway through the climb.  Then again, there was definitely a whole sense of 'didn't ask for this' when you considered the whole ordeal that they were going through right now.  The worst part, for him at least, was the fact that that shaft was clearly long - while the rock was was rough enough that you could find spots to hold on to, he knew the higher up he got, the more likely it was significant injury, if not actual death, would result if he ended up falling.  That didn't happen, but the threat of it was always there, at least until they hauled themselves over the lip and up into the next room.<br/><br/>Dan heard the scraping, too.  "I don't think so..."  He replied when Alex said the noise was 'just a rat.'  "Have you not noticed that there are no living things down here?  It's like it's all sealed off from the rest of the world.  No plants, no tiny animals, not even insects.<em>Bugs</em>, Dan, how can you be underground and have no bugs?"  That was when the piles and piles of dead people were revealed.  "This is definitely not..."  And then the flashlight hit the one thing in the room that was still active, and it soon began to make even more noise.  It had spotted them by the light, and even turning it off did nothing to hide them from it.  "Holy crap!  That thing is a skeleton, how the hell is it still moving?!"  There was good news, though, so Dan decided to share.<br/><br/>"Alex, forget it.  Just run.  I haven't the slightest idea how to fight it," Dan started to pick his way over the corpses to try and get to the end.  "Unless you've got some magic spell that can disintegrate dead stuff, getting out of here is our best option.  Look at the pile it's buried in!"  He pointed in the direction of the thing.  "It looks like it's about half-ready to fall apart anyways, and there's no guarantee that it won't tear itself to pieces just trying to escape!"  Dan looked at the other, narrow end of the room - if the thing had to haul all the dead bodies it was attached to, could it actually get through the portal at the end of the door?  If it was stuck in this room, then getting out of the room was, quite simply, the quickest and most effective solution.