While it was true that she had not quite paid the attention to the area that she felt might have been needed, having been more focused on making sure there would not be any sudden nasty tricks, she could still tell that there was something distinctly wrong when sight was once more returned to her. The space she had wandered into was a workspace, one of which had slipped into disuse, if the fact it seemed more dusty - does dust move like that in the lamplight? - than the rest of the dusty old house was anything to go by, but it had been a perfectly ordinary in its design. That was not the case anymore. It was still a workspace, of course, and there were still the dolls of which were being created there scattered about, this had not changed.

What had changed was the nature of which did not change.

The space, which had once seemed to be rather cosy, shaped by the care of which the owner clearly had for the craft in which she - Mia presumed the woman of whom had her portrait hung in the entrance hall was the one who worked in the space, as she had seen no other signs that would suggest it being otherwise inhabited - had honed, and yet there was now something distinctly clinical about it all, more like a doctor's surgery than a workshop. If she was not mistake, Mia could have sworn she could smell a few overlapping smells that seems altogether out of place there. Antiseptic and sea salt. The dolls, it seemed, had changed to accommodate for this too. Once dressed in what has been certainly the Sunday bests of days gone by, they now donned what seemed to be a bastardisation of hospital gowns.

"What...?" was all she managed to offer in reply, her gaze dropping down to her empty hands, and then to the empty chair below them. She was quite sure she had picked up the flask, but there was not a clue to suggest that there had ever been a flask there at all, let alone the doll that had held it to its chest with such care and protectiveness.

Evidently she was not going to be given the luxury to ponder what this meant, however, for the silence that filled the room as if it were a body if its own shattered in an instance. She jumped when the ringing of the phone cut through whatever thoughts that she might have been inclined to entertain. She hadn't even noticed that there was a phone there at all, but it sat upon a little side table, watched over by a doll that had rather eerily not been finished, leaving the features altogether blank.

While she was there, a stranger in a stranger's house, she was left with the strangest and most distinct impression that the call could not be for anyone but her.

"Hello?" she asked warily into the receiver, having no sooner picked the device - out-dated, but of a rather elegant fashion that make her briefly wish that they weren't - before she began speaking.

"No, my husband is still none the wiser. You don't need to worry about him interfering."

It was her own voice that met her on the other end of the call, as impossible as this was. The Mia on the line seemed a great deal more certain about things than she really was.

"Same as always, sir. He doesn't suspect a thing. He even offered to give me a ride to the dock, but I obviously didn't agree. No, of course I wouldn't. Really, I can handle him professionally." There was something in her laugh that seemed more unnatural than the fact that she was hearing herself over the telephone was, and that was saying something as it was doing a mighty fine job of bothering her.

At the moment she realised she remembered the phone call, the call dropped out, a shrill beeping replacing the smugness that she could hear in what she could not deny was her own voice. It was the call she made with her superiors the day before leaving for the SS Annabelle. Or at least a portion of the call. But really, hearing any part of the call was off-putting, not just because it had been from the other end, from a secure line that couldn't even be traced let alone recorded, but also because she was hearing it at all after finding herself worlds away from where the conversation had taken place. There were a lot of factors at play and each of them added to the overall sense of wrongness that the call had brought.

The silence following the phone call seemed to be a great deal more noticeable than it had before. There was not even a beeping on the other end, as if the antiquated phone had never been connected to begin with, and she was not entirely sure if she wanted to take the moment it would take to find out either way. Instead of satisfying her curiosity, she simply set the phone back down on the hook before turning to leave the room to resume her search.

Mia's plan to leave lasted for as long as it took for her to walk to the door she had come through, which now found itself to be thoroughly and stubbornly locked.

With a sigh that came with the same degree of theatrics that stage performer might offer, she turned back again. There was another door, she noted, but it did not seem to be the most accommodating. It had found itself behind what she could assume was a shelf, covered by a cloth. Biting back a second sigh, she took a quick loop of the room to see if there was anything at all that stood out to her. Evidently the room was enjoying making her loop around to no real end, for she ended up by the very same empty chair she had started by. Only it was not quite as empty as it once was. A note, faded by age yet still with ink so fresh it shone wetly, sat upon the chair as if it had always been there.

'How many had to break for the greater good?'

Mia didn't quite understand what the note was telling her, but there was nothing else to it so she simply placed it back where she found it before moving to the covered shelf. Which quickly became an uncovered shelf as she wanted to know how heavy it was going to be. She wasn't sure what to expect, but the rows of numbered but otherwise identical blank-faced dolls sitting there that there was seemed to be the most logical outcome. Just because it made sense, however, did not mean it was not any less unsettling to see.

In her haste to remove the cloth, she had managed to knock the first of the dolls off, creatively labelled '1', which fell to the floor. The way the doll fell really was a great deal more dramatic than it had any cause to be, for the moment it struck the floor, its head shattered. In the little pile of broken porcelain was another note.

'All for the end.'

This note was no less vague than the first, but if she was to assume that the two were, in fact, correlated she was able to piece together a safe assumption of what she needed to do. Well, assuming she was supposed to take 'break' and 'all' on the face value that she did.

The second doll joined the first on the floor, but did not reveal much of substance. This was the case until she reached the sixth, which had a large centipede inside, which didn't seemed to be particularly pleased with having its home destroyed and seemed to look at her before crawling off to some place underneath one of the tables. In fact, beyond the singular insect it was beginning to seem that the destruction was to no actual end at all, right until the moment something actually did come about from it. A key, visibly too small for the lock on the door she had been looking at, sat among the ruins of the broken dolls.

Careful to not cut herself in the process, she fished the key out of the ruined porcelain, regarding it for a moment before straightening up. The symbol on the key matched that of the door behind the shelf, and so she did not need to think too hard on what that could mean. She nudged the shelf out of the way without too much of a fuss, busying herself with the task of unlocking the door. In her opening of it, she stepped on the stiff cloth body of the very first doll that had fallen, and she could have sworn it squelched.

Possibly squelching dolls were the last of her problems, however, as she stepped down into the next room and found her foot submerged in water. The water was not too deep, only reaching as far as her ankles, however it didn't have the sort of smell that she might have expected. Or, perhaps, the smell was something she had expected a little too much, for it was just familiar enough to cause her breath to catch in her throat.

Mould, mildew, and a swampy smell of stagnant water.

The smell of the Baker's house basement.

She didn't want to go down there.

She didn't have any say in the matter.

The room was not just dark enough that she could not piece anything out of it, it was so dark that she genuinely wondered if light had ever reached it at all. With no way of telling whether her eyes were open or shut, and the air just thick enough to be unpleasant to breath, she pushed onwards as she walked. Her one source of comfort was that she had left the door open so her whole world was not entirely reduced to nothingness.

So, of course, the door swung shut, leaving her in darkness.

"Where'd you get to, girly? You're just gonna run away and leave her all alone?" Somewhere in the darkness, the voice of Marguerite Baker shouted accusatorially. Logically, the room could not have been so terribly large, and yet the voice echoed horribly, giving a sense that it really could have been coming from anywhere at all and she would have been entirely incapable of determining where the speaker was.

Whatever more coherent thoughts Mia had were quite entirely replaced by a repeated screaming of 'I have to hide!' which was all well and good, but she had absolutely no idea where she was, what was in the room with her, or even if it was possible to hide at all. As a rational person might when facing impossible hardships, Mia sunk to the ground, making herself as small as she could, hands covering her ears as if on instinct.

"Mia? This way. Come on, we have to get out of here." the voice of Ethan Winters called from her right, a nervousness evident in his hushed tone.

"This way, mummy!" the more concerning voice of Eveline called from her left, sounding very much like a child playing a game.

Both of these voices were impossible, and the part of her that was able to think anything at all beyond panic knew, but the rest of her was more willing to listen. Briefly, she was unsure of which to listen to. The poor, sweet, oblivious Ethan who had, in the most literal sense of the word, risked and lost life and limb to try and save her from forces he had no way of understanding? The bioweapon, Eveline, she had played a part in creating who was just as likely to wish ill upon her as she was willing to claim her as her mother? Neither should be there at all, so it seemed to be a play of where her trust lay.

When she was quite sure all was silent, she dashed off to her right, feet splashing uncomfortably loud in the water, following the vague direction her husband had seemed to be. She crashed into the door there a little faster than she had expected, jolting her shoulder uncomfortably, but she threw herself through it with a reckless speed. But, then again, if there was no way for her to assess the location of her perceived threat, there was nothing to be gained lingering for the time it could feasibly take for her window of escape to be closed for her.

The doorway lead into a little hallway, one of which was not familiar to her. There were bookshelves lining the walls, though each and every book there had been so water damaged it was impossible to tell what the were originally. At the end of the dead end hallway was another telephone, which began to ring the moment she got a little too close to it.

"Send backup!" her own voice hissed in a frantic whisper on the other end of the line the moment she answered the call, "Its unstable, Alan's already turned. We're-" there was an audible bang on the other side of metal door, "We're doing our best to hold out, but we need reinforcements sent out before it breaches containment completely and she leaves the ship and-" The call cut out. This was a result, she recalled, of the storm cutting the phonelines out prematurely. They never did send anyone out to try and help them, and perhaps it was a little too optimistic to think that they would have.

When she turned back to the hallway, she noticed that several things had changed. The first thing she noticed was that she was no longer alone, the figure of a child in a tattered black dress was staring at her from the other side of the hall until, suddenly, she was gone with a flicker of the light. What had appeared in the child's absence was particularly insistent, repeated writings upon the wall of 'YOU LIED' in an irregular, childish script that she knew was not there when she had come through. She was not particularly pleased by either of these, but it seemed her being pleased did not have any real sway in how things were going.

With no other option but to go back the way she came, she reluctantly inched her way back the way she had come. She passed the bookshelves again, briefly offering them a glance. In this glance she noticed the books were very much picture books, when she had not been particularly capable of identifying any one of them previously.

When she had no other option but to open the door, she was not met with an all encompassing darkness, but rather a crude recreation of the cell she had spent far too long in during her unwanted stay in Louisiana. The bars were painted onto the far wall, but the wallpaper was peeling in an all too familiar way - she could even see where she had picked at it to count the days before ultimately giving up on this - and the bed she had spent much of her time on seemed identical.

She shouldn't be there. There shouldn't be a there at all, the house was destroyed and all that was left of it was what haunted her nightmares, her quiet moments, her thoughts. But it felt as if she had never left. Her freedom had been nothing more than a cruel dream and she had woken up again.

It was not perfect, she could see this, but rather looked like someone had recreated it out of a limited collection of supplies, and had since abandoned the supplies there before they were done, if the sewing scissors on the pillow of the bed was anything to go by. It was these imperfections that screamed wrongness at her, reminded her that she had claimed her freedom and was not truly trapped there anymore. Ethan really had saved her and she had left the house that served as her prison for all too long.

Lying upon the bed was a mannequin that had been dressed to resemble her husband.

There were no notes this time, but the answer was all too clear all the same. The mannequin's wrist where the hand screwed onto the rest had a dotted line painted on it, much like - the way his hand had been stapled back on after she cut it off -the dotted line to show where to cut paper. She shuddered at the reminder, even if the memory itself had the strangest sense of watching herself through a window and trying to piece shapes together in a mist. Rather than letting herself get too bogged down on the severed limbs of the past, she focused on the severed limbs of the future.

The screw made a rather dreadful screech as she unscrewed it, but before too long she held the dainty porcelain hand in her own. As she examined it, she could have sworn she heard a noise, but it was not until she set eyes on the drawing of a heart surrounding the screw was the fact she was not alone proven.

From under the bed, something grabbed her leg.

She only just managed to hold back an alarmed screech, which was harder still when she glanced down to see the clammy, almost hand of a moulded creature. It did not actively hurt her, but there was a clear threat in its grip. As much as she would like to kick it away, her other leg was clasped into place by a second.

Even as her breathing came hoarse and loud, and her heart pounded louder still in her ears, the inhuman rasping of the hidden Moulded came louder still. But, even in the growing panic, she was not hurt and so she had to wonder if that meant she was doing something right.

Trying very hard to not appear afraid, she examined the uncovered mark once more, and, assuming it must be a clue, she moved to the mannequin's chest. It felt a little odd unbuttoning the shirt, but it paid off as there were a series of arrows all pointing to where the heart would have been had it been a real person. Unlike the rest of the figure, which was a fine porcelain, the area was squishy. She investigated the area for a moment and, while she located something oddly hard in the centre of it, she could not find any immediate way to get it out of the chest capacity.

Or so she tried to tell herself.

She had not thought nearly as long as she would have liked to before she took the sewing scissors up in one hand, the other having been caught by yet another of the moulded at some point between the time she had opened the shirt and found herself aware of it. She took the moulded as a sort of timer and, not wanting to know exactly what would happen to her if she ran out of time - she had seen how horrifically deadly a single one of the mould creatures could be, and she did not want to find herself on the receiving end of it - and so she raised the scissors high. There was something almost clinical in the way she brought the blade down and into the chest of the depiction of her husband, not letting herself think too much about the implications of this as she snipped away the false skin.

The solid object she had felt was a glass heart, and within it was a large key.

Worrying her bottom lip, she smashed the heart onto the table - when did she stop thinking about it as a bed but instead a surgery table? When did it stop looking so much like a bed but rather a clinicians' slab? - letting it shatter into a vaguely red coloured pile of shards that did not even slightly resemble a heart anymore. In her haste to draw the key out of the shards, she managed to nick her fingertip, causing her to flinch away, the little beads of blood forming by the time her fingertip found a place in her mouth.

In this moment of distraction, she had looked up and managed to find herself utterly bewildered. She had no longer found herself in an almost accurate approximation of her bedroom cell, but rather a laboratory space. It was not a clean laboratory, pulsating mould stretching up the walls and obscuring anything of substance in the way of identifying specifics. Rather than take the time to reflect upon this, she simply snatched up the key, taking a little more care to not cut herself a second time.

It took a great deal of effort to pull her other hand free, and in order to free herself from the hands that were holding her legs in place she needed to haul herself up and onto the slab. The grips had not been hard enough to hurt, but they were stubborn, but she did manage to get away. At least for a moment. The creatures reached up from wherever they were hidden beneath the table to try and resume their task of securing her in place for the rest of time, and so to avoid the rather unpleasant fate this implied, she launched herself off the table and over to the door.

Mia took a moment to catch her breath the moment she slammed the door shut behind her. She hadn't realised she had so completely lost her breath with the effort to not give away her fear to not provoke the creatures, but as she stood there, she could feel the fear she was trying to ignore crash over her all at once. She needed to shake out her hands not once, or even twice, but rather thrice to try and dislodge her discomfort before even trying to turn her attention towards the locked door.

On slightly stiff legs, she made her way to the door, freed it from the lock, and pushed into the hallway.

The hallway was rather well decorated by a great many different repeating phrases on as many empty spaces as could be found. The phrases were as follows:

'Why did you leave?'

'come back come back come back come back'

'Was it worth it?'

'Will you abandon Rose too?'

'You killed him'

'LIAR'

'What did you do?'

And as she hurried past the graffiti, she could have sworn she could hear the accusations being whispered right into her ear.

Even if she was imagining the whispers, she definitely did not imagine the sound of something dropping down behind her. Her first instinct was to ignore this, to pretend that nothing was there and just pick up her pace a little more, but she didn't act on this. She glanced behind her and saw, on the ground after having dropped down from the ceiling, another of the mould creatures that looked like a gross approximation of what a person might have looked like. Just as Mia saw the moulded, the moulded saw her, and began to skitter towards her with alarming speed.

Hissing under her breath, she broke into a run, hurrying down the corridor with the hope that she was remembering her way correctly.

Thankfully it seemed she was, as the shape of the elevator coming into view was one she did not think she would be quite so relieved to see until she was flinging herself into the bars of it, slamming the button to open it hard enough that she might have wondered if she would break it. But it didn't break and, no sooner had she gotten into the elevator and its doors shut, did the moulded fling itself into the bars. While it made a mighty crash, its attempt at an attack was harmless.

As the elevator rose, she dared to try and once again catch her breath.