A/N: Welcome back! Just a quick note, as it stands right now, I'm not planning to, in the main story, explicitly name any of the levels appearing in this fanfic (as in, one of the characters finds a sign saying "Now entering Level 8! Enjoy your subterranean stay!"), but for the more well-known levels, I'll try to drop enough hints that you can piece together what level it is. For the more obscure ones (e.g. Level 885: Magma), I'll write in the chapter's A/N the name of the level I'm covering so you can look it up to learn more about it if you want.

Read, review, and enjoy!

I do not own Marvel or the Backrooms. I know, shocking.

Since passing through the tunnel in the wall, Nebula had counted 2,137 bottles of Contraxian ale, taken them down, passed them around, before she heard the footsteps. They were coming from around the bend up ahead…slow, fairly heavy. They sounded like boots, but she couldn't tell for certain with the damp carpeting.

She pressed herself against the wall and slid one of her batons from her belt. That writing above the tunnel, "NO ESCAPE"…someone had to have written it. Had it been a warning or a threat? And if it was a threat, was someone coming now to ensure she didn't escape?

The approaching figure stepped around the corner, and Nebula swung her baton into its side. The person grunted in pain and swung an arm at Nebula, but she ducked under it. She spun around, grabbing her other baton in the process, and zapped the other person in the leg with it. He grunted again and reached behind him the grab her, but she yanked on his arm and body slammed him to the ground in front of her. She knelt over him, pinned her cybernetic arm over his chest, and reared back her other arm for another baton attack. Before she could follow through, he said, "Wait, stop!"

Nebula paused. The voice seemed vaguely familiar, but the man himself didn't. He had short, dark brown hair and wore a navy-blue jacket, along with a pair of black leather gloves.

"You're…Nebula, right?" he said. "You're with those Guardians of the Galaxy?"

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"I'm Bucky Barnes. I was at the Battle of Earth, I…fighting Thanos, I mean."

Was that where she knew the voice from? She seemed to recall that Captain America guy shouting for someone called Bucky, but there were thousands upon thousands of people in that battle. This man sharing his name with one of them was hardly proof that they were one and the same.

"Try again. Everyone in the galaxy knows about the Battle of Earth."

"Uh…your friend the raccoon, he ever mention a guy with a metal arm?"

"He told us some rude fool unjustly denied his polite and reasonable request for the person's arm."

Bucky rolled his eyes. He reached across his stomach and pulled off the glove on his left arm. A silver hand glinted in the stark light. "Well, you're looking at the rude fool from that story," he said with a hint of a wry smile.

That was enough; she doubted word of Rocket's desire for this guy's metal arm had gotten out to the galaxy at large. And she had to admit, he was more handsome than Rocket had made him out to be in his version of their encounter.

Nebula got up and placed her batons back in her belt. She held out her hand, helping Bucky to his feet. "Thanks," he said. "I didn't think I'd never run into anyone else here."

"Same," Nebula said. "Do you know where we are?"

Bucky shook his head. "Can't even tell you how long I've been here. Hours…days…after a while, it all starts to run together."

"How did you get here?"

"I was about to ask you the same thing. Hoping it might jog my memory."

Nebula turned back the way she had come. "My universal locator isn't working either. I thought it might just be because I'm a cyborg, that something about this place was keeping any technology from working. But if you can't remember either…."

"Someone doesn't want us knowing how we got here," Bucky said. "And, by extension, how to get back out."

Nebula nodded. She pointed around them. "I came from that direction and you came from that direction, so there's no point heading back down those paths. We should go this way." She pointed through the third doorway that converged where they currently were.

"Wait, before we go, I found this." Bucky reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. It was torn and slightly yellowed around the edges. She took it from his hand and read it:

THEY ABANDONED ME IN THIS PLACE. THEY CALL IT AREA 0. I DON'T KNOW HOW LONG IT'S BEEN. TIME WORKS DIFFERENTLY HERE. PEDOMETER SAYS I'VE TAKEN 1,894,356 STEPS SINCE COMING HERE, AND EVERYTHING ALWAYS LOOKS THE DAMN SAME. HAVEN'T MET ANY OF THE OTHER TEST SUBJECTS. JUST THAT THING. IT'S ALWAYS FOLLOWING ME.

"I heard something," Nebula said before she could stop herself.

"What?"

"A while back, I was crawling through this tunnel in the wall. And…I heard some noise in the room behind me." She shuddered slightly. "And when I came out the other end of the tunnel, two words were written on the wall above it: 'NO ESCAPE.' Was this the only note you found?"

Bucky nodded. "I haven't noticed anything following me. But there's someone else out there, somewhere in all this yellow."

"Someone who's been here a lot longer than we have." She felt the edges of the paper, and small pieces flaked off and fell to the floor. "If they're still alive. Or these other 'test subjects.'"

"But if we can find these people, they might know more about this place than we do," Bucky said. "'They abandoned me in this place.' Obviously whoever wrote this somehow retained some of their memories from before ending up here."

"Doubt they're still anywhere around here, though," Nebula said. "I know if some creature was following me through a place like this, I wouldn't be staying put for long."

"Then let's get going," Bucky said.

They had been walking for another indeterminate period of time when an infuriatingly obvious thought occurred to Nebula. "The ceiling."

"What?" Bucky asked.

Nebula pointed up. "The ceiling. Look, it's just made of tiles. They don't look very sturdy. If we can break through them, maybe we can get out." The ceiling couldn't be more than eight feet high; that was a jump she could easily make. Even if Bucky couldn't, she could go up first and haul him after her.

"You got anything that can help us get up there?" Bucky asked.

"Maybe." She tapped a button on the wrist of her cybernetic left arm. A slot in her palm opened, and she aimed her arm at the ceiling before pressing the button again. A grappling hook shot from her hand and pierced the ceiling tile above her. The hook expanded against the backside of the tile with a satisfying thunk. Nebula yanked her arm down; the tile split in two and fell to the floor.

"That works," Bucky said.

Nebula craned her neck up to look through the hole in the ceiling. It was too dark to see anything above the tiles. Crawl spaces above ceilings usually were. But something about this darkness felt, off, unnatural…tangible, maybe? Then again, everything else about this place felt unnatural too. No reason the space above the ceiling should be any exception.

"Should be able to make that jump," Bucky said. "Can you tell what's up there?"

"Too dark," Nebula said. Usually her cybernetic eye helped her see in the dark better than others, but evidently that wasn't working here.

She crouched down, then leapt up. Her fingers gripped the edges of the hole, and she hauled herself up. Bucky followed, grabbing the opposite side of the hole. She pulled one leg, then the other, onto the ceiling. But as she slowly stood, not wanting to rise too quickly and hit her head hard against anything above her, her surroundings…changed. The darkness blurred and something became visible through it. It was indistinct at first, like she was looking at it through a fish-eye lens and several feet of water, but slowly it became clearer. The buzzing of the fluorescent lights faded away too, replaced by distant, high-pitched singing. Children's singing.

"What the hell is going on?" Bucky asked behind her.

"So you see it too."

Their surroundings began to take shape. The walls were yellow, just like they had been before, but instead of wallpaper, large murals or decals adorned them. The lighting was basically the same, and the carpets were red with swirls of other colors. She turned around, and in doing so, noticed something.

The hole they'd come though was gone.

"Where did the floor below us go?" she asked.

Bucky turned and looked down. "Damn it. Now we've got no way back. We're stuck here."

"For better or worse."

"At least it sounds like there's other people here, so…maybe they can help us."

The room finally seemed to solidify around them. A simple wooden table sat in the corner, and she could see that the images on the walls were decals of anthropomorphic animals parading around the perimeter of the room. Except for one.

"Look at this." She pointed to the wall opposite them, where three large, red words were written on the wall, glistening in the light: "WELCOME TO FUN."

Bucky walked past her to the wall and investigated the message. He ran his flesh-and-blood hand over the "W"; the letter smeared on the wall as soon as he touched it. He froze.

"What is it?" Nebula asked.

Bucky turned around. "Blood. It's fresh."