[H2]Abigail[/H2]

The basement was dark, the few features of the room around you cast in shadow from the light beyond the door, and it was strangely shaped too; the door and the stairs leading up to it were at the end of a long rectangular cellar, the walls made from large stone blocks - the kind that you might see in an apartment building, without paint or whitewash, rather than an older ruin or monument - and around the place was scattered rubbish and piles of refuse, all sunk just slightly into the mud. At the far end of the room, shrouded in shadow and mostly obscured from view, there is a table; a simple thing with folding metal legs and a thoroughly fake wooden surface, next to it there is what looks like a sleeping bag laid out on wooden pallets to keep it from the filth of the floor. 

There is a camping lantern on the table, unlit and cold, and a small backpack lies still next to it. On closer inspection, the rubbish in the room doesn’t seem to have come from whoever may have - or may still - lived here, but instead it has been pushed away from the makeshift sleeping quarter at the rear of the room.

The air is chill, and still, but not quite entirely stagnant; something has moved here, and may yet again. Abigail narrowed her eyes and toed the sleeping bag with some trepidation. Deciding that the dank, sour, dark cellar was not the best of places to linger, she heads back up the stairs to have a crack at the door.

The door swings open and Abi is confronted by sunlight, bright at first from the persistent darkness of the basement, and then faded and pale as her eyes adjust - pale enough that it might be morning. Morning in winter, perhaps.

The cold does not waver as she takes the steps up into… a garden? A garden. Somebody’s back garden. There is frost upon the branches of the one, bare, tree here, which itself is tucked away into the corner of the tiny, green-white place. The grass turns dark with her footsteps, the ice melting to the touch. Abigail wheeled around to take a look at the abode above the cellar.

It looks abandoned, is the first thing that crosses her mind. Made of the same stone blocks - which themselves, in the daylight at least, might have been cast from concrete of some sort - it reaches into the sky for five storeys before rounding off in a shallowly slanted slate roof. Most of the windows are broken, and there is plant life visible through most of the hollow frames that remain.

"Ah fuck. Ahh fuck." Abigail rubbed her hands together, sniffling loudly. "Might as well." She went for the nearest entrance she could find to start climbing up to the top of the abandoned building.

Almost to the rhythm of the thought, Abi noticed a door in the building’s face, with another short set of steps leading up to it. The door was flaking red paint, with a dusty, cracked, wirebound safety glass pane running down the left side. Inside there was a long hall, with a floor of cracked concrete, and doors set into the walls. Some of the doors had brass numbers screwed onto them - 1, 3, 4 - and one of them had a spot where there might have been one once, a long time ago. At the end of the corridor was another door, different to the rest but similar to the one Abi was looking through - must be the front door. Between the apartment doors and the front door, there was also a visible stairwell.

Abigail didn’t even bother checking all of the apartments, she made a beeline up the stairs as far as she could. She was lighter and faster on her feet than usual, but it made sense in the strange, lurid dreamscape that she was in. 

Progress is good for the first two floors - and then it stops entirely. A tremendous trunk of twisted vines, brambles, and what might be an especially deformed tree blocks the path.

The window, however, is broken open. Muddy footprints, a candle put out long ago by rainfall in a jar still full of the water, and… a handprint. A handprint of very old blood.

Either way it shows the signs of travel, at one point or another.

Abigail poked her head out of the window.

There was a slim ledge, more an aesthetic feature of the building than a functional one, but one which could lead along to another way back into the building nonetheless. The front of the building was densely packed with ivy, running through the concrete like veins, and another set of vines dangled from the roof - not far enough to reach, but far enough to curtain the uppermost flaws.

The street below was… empty. 

Wherever Abi was, it had not been populated for some time.

“Ah shit. Where am I?” Abigail continued to poke her head out of the broken window and looked down, immediately getting struck by vertigo. She sat down by the wall. There was no way she could chance climbing across the vines, since she had no idea how old the building was and this wasn’t a video game, it was...a something. She was somewhere. She exhaled. “Where am I?” she asked herself again. Wasn’t she in a car at one point? This wasn’t Arizona. It was empty.

Abigail jerked her head out of the broken window and yelled “HELLOOOOO?”, if only to listen the sound of her voice echoing across the street.

There is silence.

For the next ten minutes.

There is silence. Her voice doesn’t even echo.

Until there is a reply.

But Abigail does not remember what it said when she awakes, only that there was one.