Putting his freshly carved cat down among the rest of his soap sculptures, Alvade turned to look at the door again. Ralgax had gone out to look for Halvra, and he still wasn't back yet. Halvra had been gone for four hours now, and the longest that any of the lab rats had kept them out of the Haven had been three hours, so it wasn't like they didn't have a reason to be concerned. Of course, Ralgax had been gone for over an hour himself, so Alvade's concern was quickly escalating into worry.

He also knew that he wasn't the only one feeling that way; he'd seen the others looking at the clock with more frequency with every passing minute. He was particularly grateful to Yith for getting them that clock; it was nice to be able to keep track of the time, even at times like this when people got agitated. All of the others had stopped even trying to pretend to work on their various projects: their "after life remembrances".

Not him, though, he kept working; continuing to carve the small eagle that he'd started after he'd finished with his cat.

It wasn't that he wasn't worried about Halvra and Ralgax, that wasn't it at all; Alvade just needed to do something with his hands, to keep himself from going out of his mind with worry about Halvra's condition, and just where he and Ralgax were.

Halvra was a good guy; a good friend with a zany and occasionally perverted sense of humor, someone who could be confided in and counted on not to reveal anything said to him in confidence. All of which would mean precisely shit to the lab rats in the face of one, glaring fact: Halvra didn't have a Zoaform. All he could do was to alter the pigments of his cells so that he could blend into differently colored surfaces.

Halvra could turn himself completely invisible, he'd just have to be naked for it to work.

"That's it!" Yith shouted, standing up and derailing Alvade's train of thought before it could turn down either the maudlin or the morbid tracks. "I'm going out there, before I go crazy in here."

With that declaration still ringing in the ears of his fellow Lost Units, Yith headed determinedly for the door while Alvade cheered him on mentally. He didn't, he couldn't, say anything; but Alvade knew that Yith would understand his reasons better than anyone else could.

"What are you going to do out there, Yith?" Aunt Sammy asked.

"I don't know!" Yith paused, taking a slow, deep breath. "Sorry. I guess we're all a little bit on edge here. I'm going to see if I can help Ralgax find Halvra; or at least find out what happened to him."

Please don't drag out possibilities like that, Alvade had to bite the inside of his right cheek to keep himself from saying that out loud. For people like them, sudden and painful death was always a possibility. It was also a pretty taboo subject to bring up in a conversation; nobody liked to be reminded that their lives hung by a thread on the best of days, or that they were always at the "mercy" of a bunch of sadistic lab rats. That was why he hadn't said anything, and that was why he was going to keep his mouth shut, keep carving, and hope with all his heart that his friends would be able to return to Lost Haven safely.

There were just some things it was best not to talk about.

"You're being real calm about all of this," Aunt Sammy said, and Alvade couldn't really tell if she was just curious or accusing him of something.

Still it was kind of funny, in either case.

"What're you chuckling about?" she asked, and Alvade looked up to see her raising an eyebrow.

"You think I'm calm, and I think I'm losing my mind," he chuckled, a bit more sadly this time. "It's funny."

Neither of them had anything to say to that, and so the two Lost Units lapsed back into a waiting silence.

Alvade continued to carve his soap eagle, while Aunt Sammy picked up a book and made a game attempt to read it. Neither of them wanted to think about what was probably happening to Halvra, since he was still in the "tender care" of those sadist lab rats, and both of them wanted to be there for Yith, Ralgax and Halvra when they all made it back. All of them.

And so they continued to wait, watching the clock whenever their own personal anxieties got the better of them. An hour and a half passed, and Alvade finished carving his eagle, before Ralgax and Yith returned to Lost Haven. Just the two of them; even with their enhanced eyesight, he couldn't see Halvra. And he doubted that Aunt Sammy could, either.

"Why are there just the two of you? Where's Halvra?" Aunt Sammy asked, even as Alvade picked up another bar of soap and tried not to fidget too much.

He really didn't like the way this situation was shaping up.

"Why don't you see for yourselves?" Yith muttered sadly, dropping a slip of paper on Halvra's bed.

Alvade, who had slept opposite Halvra since he had joined this group and been comforted by the older Lost Unit's breathing, felt that he owed it to his friend to find out what had happened to him. He knew it couldn't possibly have been anything good, judging by the way that Yith and Ralgax were both acting; Ralgax was already going into full brood-mode. Something that was only marginally less terrifying to Alvade than his rage-mode.

Of course, Ralgax only went into full on rage-mode when one of them was injured, and he only really went off on the more junior scientists, and on rare occasions the humans they had been sent out to hunt.

Sure, Ralgax in full outrage-mode was a terrifying thing to behold, and Alvade continued to hope that he was never on the wrong end of his white-haired friend's infamous temper; but seeing Ralgax in brood mode was so much worse under the circumstances. Brood-mode suggested helplessness, inevitability; it suggested that something had been done that could never be undone. And for a group of Lost Units like them, that could really only mean…

Something that Alvade wasn't particularly eager to think about at the best of times; and this was far from the best of times.