January 19th, 2001… the worst day of many people's lives.

Ruby Rose woke up in an uncomfortable hotel bed when her alarm clock went off, this was the third day of a school field trip to Washington DC and today the plan was to go to the Smithsonian air museum. and she had intentionally set her alarm to wake her up a few hours before the rest of her classmates that were sharing a room with her. As a certified plane nerd, this was one thing she was looking forward to on this trip.

Her group of about a dozen students. All of them had made straight A's and demonstrated a level of excellence at their home school that they were being "rewarded" by being taken on this trip to the nation's capital.

As the girl sat up and looked around all she was met with was darkness, which was abnormal as she set the alarm for 6:30 am that morning and her room was facing the eastern side of the building... As she sat up, still feeling incredibly tired from the night before when she and her friends sat up watching movies for half the night. Looked around in the two-bedroom hotel room she was assigned with a few other girls from her school, her half-sister being one of them. As she started to get her bearings in the still not fully familiar room she took some time to understand the scene laid out before her.

Her "Roommates" had all left already, strange on its own sure, but she'll get over that. But the fact that there was no light coming through the window at all except for some lights from the street lights outside and an unfamiliar orange glow bothered her...

"Oh, hell did one of them change the time on my clock?" Ruby assumed that, as she had pulled on her shirt from the previous night and went to the hotel window as if to not give anyone outside an unintentional show.

What she saw outside made her mentally snap back fully awake. The building across the road, another hotel, was currently dealing with a fire from several of its upper floor hotel rooms, some fire crews were already working on it, but in the darkness in the distance of what she still assumed was the night, she saw several more fires were burning in the distance in the direction of the capitol building.

"Hey, Yang?" Ruby called out loudly to where her sister was forgetting for a moment she was the only one in the room still for a brief moment "Are you awake ye-" she started to say as she turned to face where her sister was.

"Oh yeah, they all left already…" Ruby said to herself staring outside the window "What in the hell is going on out there, did we get bombed or something?"

Ruby felt an uncomfortable chill from her train of thought, if her sister and all her friends had all woken up early, then why didn't they wake her up as well? What had happened that caused the scene she was seeing outside?

Realizing she wasn't going to get any answers this way, Ruby got up and started to make her way out of the hotel room, putting on a hooded sweater to beat back the strange cold in the hotel as well as her comfortable well broken-in sneakers before she left the room to try and track down her sister and her friends.

The halls of the hotel were not much of a better sight if she was being honest, the lights of the hall were dim, only being lit up by some emergency lights, and the alarms that normally accompanied those lights didn't seem to be working as well. Many of the other hotel room doors were left open as she walked down the hall implying that people ran from there in a hurry. From one of the rooms, the light of the tv got her attention. Ruby knew that room itself was the room of the teacher that was leading this field trip and a few of the male students on her trip that were sharing a room with him to keep the rooms separated by gender.

As she poked her head into the room her eyes went wide. As the shock of what she was seeing set in.

Blood caked the walls and the beds of the hotel room. The outer glass of the hotel window was shattered, letting in the sounds from outside, fire department sirens, screams of panicked people, and the roar of the nearby hotel fire across the way all flooded her ears. She also could swear she was hearing gunfire out there as well. Then she scanned the room as she felt bile forcing its way up her throat as she saw the bodies of her teacher and two of her classmates violently stabbed and carved up almost beyond recognition. Ruby wasn't even sure the bodies were even fully intact, her brain couldn't process the fact that her teacher appeared to have been missing large chunks of his face as the corpse looked in her direction with a single unruined eye.

It took a few moments before she realized that the screaming she was hearing in her shocked state was her own.

A few moments of panicked screaming later she managed to compose herself, she checked her watch .it was now barely 9:00 am. The view outside was not any brighter which now was raising even more questions. Where the hell was the sun? Why was it still dark outside?

Ruby continued her search for her missing classmates from her room, now more out of sheer terror than anything else. The fear that she was alone and she was potentially seconds away from seeing the mutilated bodies of her sister and her friends gripped at her rapidly fraying mind, threatening to steal away any still barely rational thoughts of the young teen she might be still clinging on to. "Yang! Can you hear me!" she shouted out into the darkness of the hallway, which didn't get a response from anyone.

Fighting back her traumatized Sobs for now. She feared that she was going to stumble on her mutilated sister at any moment. Her whole body shook as she rounded a darkened barely visible corner not ready, and frankly terrified, to see what was around the corner as entered the lobby of the Hotel.

The front doors were smashed wide open, apparently, some large cargo van had smashed into the front of the hotel lobby pulverizing the front doors and was now partially wedged into the lobby entrance.

"How in the hell did I manage to sleep through all of this?" Ruby said out loud as she tried to make her way to the dining hall where they were supposed to all be eating breakfast right now, her classmates and sister were still nowhere to be seen.

As she stepped in she saw the room was empty of people, tables and half-eaten meals were sitting undisturbed where people were likely eating not long before she came into the dining hall. The tv mounted on the wall in the corner was dialed into some local news station and was running a news headline saying "UNNATURAL NIGHT: THE SUN DIDN'T RISE THIS MORNING" As a pair of panicked-looking news anchors were talking at the camera. Ruby couldn't make out what the anchors were saying as the sound was muted, but she was seeing them show scenes of other cities that were also apparently trapped by the same unnatural darkness that was affecting the skies outside the hotel as well.

"The sun didn't rise? What the hell is this?" Ruby said as she backed up and sat in the first chair she could find, panic was starting to overwhelm her as her entire body shook.

"I don't know where the hell anyone is, I'm a couple thousand miles from home, our teacher is dead, and I can't find anyone." she sobbed out as she wrapped her arms around herself and shook in her seat. "Is this the end of the world or something?"

As she spent a few precious moments trying to calm her shattered nerves and racing thoughts she heard what sounded like something being knocked over, as her head snapped over to the corner where the sound came from, she saw… her mind couldn't comprehend what it was at first.

It stood about seven feet tall, it was black with dark armored plates that looked like were fused directly into its flesh, it looked vaguely like a wolf standing on two feet and it was carrying what looked like a wicked spear.

And it was looking straight at her.

Ruby was halfway out the door leading back towards the lobby when she heard it starting to give chase. She didn't know where she was going to go, the main doors of the lobby were still blocked by the cargo van, she didn't pay attention enough in her time in this hotel to know if there were any side exits she could sprint out through.

If that was even a good idea right now considering the hell that was waiting for her outside the hotel walls.

Her train of thought was interrupted as she felt a powerful hand grab her by the back of her head and throw her halfway across the room. She hit the ground hard and the breath was battered from her lungs as she hit the hard ground. Looking back she saw IT was standing where she just was and it was slowly walking towards her scraping its long spear on the ground, leaving a gouge in the carpet that was even cutting into the concrete floor below it.

"No, no no no no not like this, not like this!" Ruby shouted to herself as she scrambled to her feet and started to run towards one of the side halls as she tried to escape from the thing that was ready to tear her apart and paint the walls with her. The creature didn't seem to be in a hurry to catch her but she heard the heavy thuds of its feet as it was slowly following her through the halls.

Ruby's thoughts raced as she ran as fast as her legs could carry her "Is there anywhere I can hide from it, is this the thing that killed our teacher, did it also get my sister?"

As she ran she tried to see if she could find any open hotel room doors, or if she could find some kind of emergency exit, she didn't know the layout of the hotel nearly well enough to have an escape plan.

Not that one can have a "plan" for escaping from something that looks like it clawed its way out of hell and ate the fucking sun when it did.

Ruby managed to slip into an open hotel room door which she closed behind her, she quickly looked to see if she could find anything to defend herself with, a weapon, some kind of heavy object, the beds were bolted down and it looked like the room was being cleaned before whatever the hell was going on was happening. All she could do was lean against the closed door as she heard the sounds of heavy feet stomping down the hall accompanied by the sounds of a metal object scraping against the floor.

"Please god don't find me here!" Ruby begged in her thoughts as she held both her hands to cover her mouth to keep the sound of her breathing from escaping and giving away her hiding place.

To her horror, it stopped moving right in front of the door to the hotel room.

"Shit, shit, shit, please keep going, please keep going, please keep going, please keep going, please please please please please" Ruby's thoughts screamed as she tried to fight panic and terror, praying to anyone that would listen that something would make the monster on the standing just on the other side of the thin wood hotel room door move on and leave her alone.

As she looked outward at the window she thought to herself, this room was, at least on the first floor, if she could find anything to break the window she could at least leap out and run for her life.

But what was waiting outside, if there was this one single creature, in the hotel, one that might have already killed three people, God only knows what the hell was going on in that unnaturally dark world on the other side of the glass.

She didn't have a chance to dwell on that thought as she saw the wood splinter next to her as the hands of the creatures punched clean through the door. Ruby barely had the time to get to her feet before the door was ripped clean off its hinges and tossed aside down the hallway!

Ruby screamed as she scrambled to find anything she could throw at the window, or at least try to fight the creature as it slowly stepped into the room. She reached for a chair, picked it up, and tried to smash the window with it only for it to bounce off, it seemed the glass was reinforced against someone doing exactly what she was trying to do.

As she froze up in terror at how hopeless her situation just became, she felt the cold iron-plated hand of the monster grab her by the neck and turn her to face the monstrous wolf-faced creature's open drooling maw. As terror overwhelmed her leaving her only able to scream in mind-shattered horror as she swore she heard the creature let out a deep chuckle as it squeezed her neck threatening to pop her head off.

Unable to breathe, unable to think, and only functioning on sheer desperate instinct she reached out and grabbed its arm and tried to pull it away from her throat.

She didn't even notice that her hand was different, that her whole body was changing in the creature's grip. That the monster that was holding her off the ground by her throat had stopped chuckling at her. That her previously dangling feet were now touching the floor.

She only noticed something was off in the most fundamentally simple sense when she yanked the creature's arm and tore it clean from its shoulder joint spraying black blood all over the wall next to them. The creature let out a bestial cry of pain and rage at her.

Ruby lashed out of blind feral instinct, hitting it in the jaw with a razor-sharp chitinous claw she didn't have seconds before, letting out a cry of rage that sounded almost insectoid in its tone. The creature's jaw was torn off its head and hit the wall with a heavy thud. As the creature was slapped out of the room.

With a surge of strength, she didn't know was even possible she threw herself at the creature ripping and tearing at the monster, tearing armored plates off of the beast before finally ripping its head off and throwing it down the hall away from her. The whole time she barely felt like she was controlling her own actions, or was even aware in her shock as to what she was even doing.

Once she was done tearing the monster that was seconds from killing her. still only barely functioning with an only instinctual and utterly incomprehensible mental state. She leaned back against the wall with a faintly metallic thunk noise as her back hit the wall. Ruby watched as the monster that mere moments before was trying to strangle her to death faded into nothing before she started to take stock of her own situation.

She looked down at her own hands, both her arms were covered in a black insect-like exoskeleton material with what looked almost like metal bones sticking out in spots, even though he could see blood oozing from where the metal bones were visible on her body, she didn't feel any pain, the only pain was from her throat where the creature was strangling her and even that was fading…

The shock she was feeling started to give in to dread. Her arms didn't look like her arms, the parts of her own body that she could see didn't even look possible, with her limbs bending and moving in strange unnatural ways, joints bending in strange, even sometimes backward ways. The fact she was moving these twisted quasi-mechanical limbs like they were natural disturbed her more.

"What... What the hell just happened…" Ruby said as she reached up and felt her own face, her hand touching the hard insect shell-like surface where her skin should be, her own voice sounding alien and distorted "What am I? What happened to me" she muttered repeatedly to herself as panic set in.

As the horror finally set in that something… monstrous had happened to her she let out a primal panicked scream at the top of her lungs. Before she started trying to tear at her own limbs leaving deep scratches on her own arms and legs.

"Please, someone, anyone, tell me what the fuck is going on!" She cried out to anyone that could hear her cries. Falling to her knees crying out uncontrollably she finally heard a voice nearby.

"I swear I just heard someone crying out over here," a voice from around the corner said as they got close. "Ruby can you hear me!?"

Ruby froze, the voice sounded familiar and she wanted to run from it not wanting whoever it was to see her in this… shape? Condition? She didn't know. No matter how hard she tried she couldn't make her body move from where she was slumped over.

Just then, she could see it, the form of her sister coming around the corner, and froze up upon seeing her, Yang's eyes fixed wide in terror at the monster she was seeing in front of her.

"Oh dear god, I just came back to find my sister, what is this?" Yang said as she started to back away from the monster slumped on the floor in front of her.

As Yang started to turn to run, Ruby called out "Yang, stop!" Causing Yang to stop stiff in her place and slowly turn back towards the thing in the hallways in front of her.

"Please, Help me…" Was all Ruby could say through a pathetic sob in her voice that belied the tall monstrous form she was wearing. "I… I don't know what the hell is going on!"

Yang with a shaky hand pulled out a handgun that she had found and aimed it at Ruby…