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+---- Thread: CHATEAU MARMONT, SHANGRI-LA — house oneshot (/showthread.php?tid=10014)
CHATEAU MARMONT, SHANGRI-LA — house oneshot - RED - 08-03-2019
[align=center][div style="text-align:justify;width:55%;font-family:verdana;"]He’d gone exploring not because he wasn’t aware of Tanglewood’s landmarks, but because he wanted to learn the details. There was a town, a swampy marsh, the crater, the shore - but the coves and dunes of the beach held secrets in the same way that the massive hatch doors that appeared as cellars under houses led to something less expected. In this way, Red had discovered the bunker complex. It appeared to stretch for what felt like miles, but in reality, it just dove ever-downward into the earth and left one struggling to recall how many times they’d seen the same door, the same hall. It was a labyrinth that could be used to trap prisoners indefinitely - and it did, for among the occasional dead rodent that dotted the ground were larger skeletons, their jaws open in what appeared to be a lonesome cry for help. Perhaps Tanglewood had been a bit more gruesome in the past than it appeared today.
But Red’s senses extend beyond peripheral - he can latch onto auras, little specks of life that dart around in the shadows, and gauge his distance from said point with reasonable accuracy. Plus, it seemed that the more his head began to pound, the closer he was to the crater - which led him to avoid the darker, rot-laden tunnels that cracked under the force of the blow that created such a massive dent in the earth. Clearly nothing could survive down there.
He hates to think that a similar underground prison is the closest thing he has to a childhood. As he carries his lantern through the halls, the familiarity becomes uncanny. The latches on each vault, doors that seal him further away from the nuclear crater, rouse muscle memories of prying open heavy doors and locks. He was never allowed out alone, never allowed to open the locks himself, but he recalls gripping the massive valve wheel on his "bedroom" door, trying to pry it open and escape just for the rush of freedom. He was going through a rebellious phase at the time. His father would have never stood for such impersonal containment as Red aged - but his father was sick, and when he stopped coming to work, a lot of his younger liberties were taken from him.
As beloved as he was in concept - a child saved on a reconnaissance mission, a posterboy for the war machine - not many others were keen on a hell-bringing demon running around a military facility, and felt a little safer when he was sealed behind a steel door. In fact, he’d felt a little more like a court jester from the medieval fantasies and classics his father would read aloud. Something to watch for entertainment - something to shut away when that entertainment loses its appeal.
Thus, the labyrinth of Tanglewood's bunker feels like home.
He has to duck a little in the maze of halls. The rounded hallway leaves little space for more than two people abreast, and when both of his arms start touching either wall he starts to feel a bit claustrophobic. The stench of dead rodents is overwhelming, as is the musty odor of rotting food, rotting leaves, rotting everything. Even the concrete walls seem to ooze mold and decay. The Bureau was far more sterile, white-walled - but he'd never expect Tangle to maintain their makeshift prison of all places on the map. Pools of stagnant rainwater glisten with oil, likely dripping from the pipes overhead. Occasionally, he steps in something unidentifiable that squishes horribly underfoot, and he has to hold back a full-body cringe. But he’s aware of one thing: the deeper he goes, the further from cracks and faults where rainwater and swamp runoff lets in, the cleaner the bunker will become. As clean as it was when it was abandoned and left for rot, he supposed.
The hallway cuts into a series of lesser paths - he seeks the one which slopes downwards, occasionally broken by a few short stairs. The flickering glow of a fire-lit lantern, probably dangerous in a tunnel that smelled like it had a gas leak (to anyone who wasn’t fireproof), gives him just enough vision to make out another sealed door at the hallway’s end.
He plunges ever deeper, and pries the massive door open with a heavy hand. What he discovers is a place untouched, hidden perfectly among the maze.
The safehouse he enters is reasonably small, compared to the other bunkers that dot the underground complex. Something about this place feels right. His. Red thinks of the high ceilings in the Bureau, how the place always seemed so carefully self-contained and yet abuzz with activity. The bunker was silent but for the occasional drip of water, the rustle of a mouse, but with some work the environment could be the same. Before this moment, he was more of a squatter, sheltering in the empty houses that sprawled throughout the center of town. He could live here. He could live here and never come out - and he’s fairly certain nobody would notice the absence. It only seemed fair to let himself revel in that not-so-comforting nostalgia of a childhood in hiding.
He’d like to guess that ten, if not twenty people could fill the space out nicely. The stairwell opens out to a room that appeared to be some kind of command center; desks lined up in neat rows face an arc of chalkboards, infographics pasted to the walls, and opened supply crates. There’s a boiler room, the door cast off in the corner. The two doors on the opposite wall, he discovers, lead to the sleeping quarters and stock room respectively. The rooms are spartan at best, but he figures that with some effort he could move most of the rusted, crumbling furniture that lined the walls and replace them with better things. The heavy crates, he wasn’t sure. (Nor was he certain if there were any merchants in the Beyond that could supply him with something better.)
Red toes aside the shriveled corpse of a rat at the landing of the steps, once he's made his way around the place. It smells vaguely of old C-rations, and there's hardly room to walk with the number of clothes, radiation suits and open boxes that had been emptied across the ground. It was a real fixer-upper, Red thought, but it was home.