[color=MediumSpringGreen][h3]Lenora Puglisevic[/h3][/color]
[@Horrid]

Lenora eyed the anaesthetic pills, attempting to identify exactly what they were.  Although her interests were varied, she wasn't anywhere near knowledgeable enough with prescription medications to name the pink-and-black capsules.  She wondered if these were related to the medications people were given for day procedures.  Nora kind of hoped they weren't that strong - she didn't like the idea of being unable to wake up if someone accosted her in her sleep.  Well, her alternatives were limited, and she was already pretty much completely in Somiantis's power anyway, so what was a little coma between friends?  She downed the pills with a gulp of water and settled back in the reclining chair.

[i]I'm not going to be able to fall asleep.  I only woke up an hour ago.[/i]   Nora might have felt a little mellow, but not sleepy.  Her restless mind refused to allow her to fall asleep naturally, recalling the disastrous encounter with the Ram yesterday and mulling over plans to pick a fight in the cafeteria.  She was certain of her consciousness and quite unable to imagine that the drugs would have any effect at all on her.

Until Nora quite suddenly realized that she was, in fact, sound asleep.  She was made aware of this fact by the realization that she was -crouching in a coolant-stained, wire-strung tunnel, her dull grey boots submerged in an oily black puddle.  The salmon-coloured light of sodium lamps strongly illuminated the concrete conduit, and her nose stung slightly with the familiar tang of artificial chemicals.  Zone Three, her home-in-an-adjacent-reality-to-home.  

She could feel something living above and to her right, just at the edge of her perception.  The cyborg rose to her full height, rotating her neck with a faint crackle and limbering her limbs.  In addition to her flesh arm and the skeletal mechanical one, she had acquired a third limb the night before.  It was a small welding arm, articulated at three points, and it was bolted over her left shoulder blade, large, hexagonal pins appearing to spear through her grey jacket and into the flesh beneath.  In her peripheral vision, she saw the blue-white flash of the welding arc, and smiled.  She looked forward to testing it.

Without any other goal in mind, she headed for the living presence she could sense.  It felt like a large, complex animal - a Zoner, probably, given that she had never seen anything alive down here except for the Abominations and the scavengers.  It wasn't at all easy to get to. The impossibly twisted tunnels made it very difficult to navigate, and Nora had to move out of range of the other Zoner before she could climb up a level and approach again.  It didn't help much that her target was clearly moving.  She ignored other distractions as she homed in, dismissing the familiar signatures of scavengers moving nearby.

Nora crawled out of a square duct into a long hallway, much darker than the sodium-lit tunnel below.  The living thing she had been following was a short distance ahead - beyond that, she had briefly felt the blur of an abomination, and there was something hard to parse moving far below.  She approached the Zoner, intentionally letting her feet scuff against the floor to make a bit of warning noise.

"You smell awful," she whispered.  The stench was like the penultimate vomit of a fatally poisoned jackal.  Her sensitive nose wrinkled involuntarily.  "Did we meet in the cafeteria?  I am Nora."  It was sometimes difficult to link waking people to zone people, and this goat-legged scarecrow plague-victim monstrosity was too distractingly hideous for her to easily identify.  Well, he'd probably be hard to forget, too, on the bright side.

She watched in the direction he had been looking in before she approached.  A catwalk stretched out into the darkness, illuminated here and there by roving searchlights.  This was... new.