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They made their way through the winding corridors of the Baxter Building, taking each turn like they had never left the place at all. It felt like walking through a nightmare. Every room felt like a new liminal space, somewhere they recognised, but had been changed just enough to put them on edge. Where before there was the laughter and nerdy banter of the young geeks that swarmed the building, now there was just sterile silence and the hum of fluorescent lighting. Surveillance cameras tracked them like predators in every room they passed through. The air smelled of ozone and cleaning chemicals instead of burnt coffee and microwave burritos. The heart of the Baxter Building hadn't stopped beating, but it definitely had some poison pumping through its veins now.

Sue led the way, holding a palm-sized tracking device she'd cobbled together a few weeks ago from salvaged lab scrap and a stripped-down Agency scanner. It looked like a half-gutted remote control, copper wiring exposed along the sides, the screen flickering every so often from a soldering fault she hadn't had time to fix. She'd tuned it specifically to pick up the exotic radiation signature beneath the Baxter Building. A steady pulse echoed on the small display, a glowing dot blinking in rhythmic intervals that was bringing them closer to whatever was beneath the building.

"Getting closer." she muttered, more to herself than to Reed. Metallic doors slid open, letting them into a room with various scientists in lab coats working at their desks on computers or gazing through microscopes. A few of them glanced up at the pair, but the majority were too engrossed in their work to notice the would-be handymen enter. Sue nudged reed with her elbow and nodded her head towards the back wall. "Reed, the old service lift is behind that wall, I'm sure of it. We've got to clear this room if we're going to get to the sub-basement."

Reed gave a short nod, eyes scanning the room with quiet calculation. "Alright. let me handle this." Without waiting for a reply, he stepped forward spoke with authority. "Excuse me," he said loudly, addressing the room. Heads turned. "We've got a priority-level systems maintenance request from LordTech, tied to one of the bio-refrigerant lines in this room. Might be a pressure fault. Not sure what they've done to your coolant system, but if that thing blows it'll take half your sequencing array with it."

That got their attention. One of the younger researchers stood up. "I didn't get anything flagged on my work queue."

"Because it's not in your queue." Reed shot back, with a look that could kill. "It's in the emergency failsafe log. Go ask whoever's running ops upstairs if you want to double-check. I'll be here, trying to fix your mistake and make sure you don't all end up doing gene therapy in a puddle of melted alloy."

There was an awkward pause. Another scientist looked uncertain, but the threat of bureaucratic disaster and blown equipment was enough to stir motion. Several people got up, a few murmuring to one another, and within a minute the room had mostly emptied, either in search of confirmation or unwilling to be nearby if the 'pressure fault' went bad.

Sue sidled up next to Reed as he watched the last of the researchers leave the room. "That was actually quite impressive! Much better than talking to the security at the gate."

Reed smirked. "I spent most of my young life writing protocols like that, no one wants to be the one at fault when the boss comes down, that I know for sure."

"Preach." Sue replied, turning to face the back wall. "Looks like they walled over the service lift, this might be trickier than we thought." She moved closer, running her hand along the wall trying to find any groove or marking that might make this easier. With a deep breath she focused her energy and the wall disappeared, turning completely invisible under her touch, revealing the lift just behind. "Bingo." She started using her other hand to knock on the wall, trying to find any soft spot they could use to break through. 

Eventually, she did and a smile grew on her face. She had to admit, this was all very exciting. It felt like they were [i]Mr. and Mrs. Smith[/i], on a secret mission to infiltrate the evil scientists lair. She took a step back, putting her hands on her hips, taking one last look at the wall.

"Alright, Reed I think it's time for your talen-" She stopped mid sentence as she turned to see her fiancé sitting at one of the desks typing away on one of the computers. "Reed, what exactly do you think you're doing?"

Reed's hands moved across the keyboard like he was playing a familiar piano piece. "Their system's running duplicate diagnostics loops." He murmured. "That's why everything's lagging."

Sue moved closer and leaned over the desk, staring at the computer screen. "Reed we're breaking in to Lord's research hub and your take away is that you want to help him speed up his system?"

There was a beat of silence as Reed stopped typing. "Fair point." pushing down on the backspace key and deleting several lines of code as he spoke. "It's just weird how inefficent this all is. They're running the same analysis script through two different subroutines, wasting half their memory allocation every cycle. It's like trying to proofread your own email by CC'ing yourself twelve times." He pushed himself away from the desk and rose to his feet, happier now knowing he'd just given whatever IT team oversaw this building the biggest headache they'd ever had. "I can't believe they replaced us with these amateurs!"

Sue smiled back at him, laughing slightly. "Alright, genius, Lift's behind door number one." She pointed towards the wall with her thumb.

Reed didn't respond immediately. Instead, he took a step back and drew a long, deliberate breath. His arm began to stretch, the fibers of his body elongating as if his skeleton were made of taffy and his muscles reknitted themselves on the fly. His hand swelled, fingers widening, palm expanding until it was nearly the size of a manhole cover.

"Going with the oversized fist approach?" Sue asked, amused. "Classic."

"Newton's Second Law," Reed muttered. "Force equals mass times acceleration. I just happen to have a very variable approach to mass."

Then, with surprising speed, he brought the enormous fist back and slammed it forward into the wall like a whip. There was a deafening [b][i]CRACK-THOOM[/i][/b], like a wrecking ball hitting the side of a bunker. Dust exploded outward in a gray cloud as a spiderweb of fractures raced through the panel. On the second blow, the whole section buckled inward and collapsed in a shower of fractured cement and shredded insulation, revealing the old service lift shaft behind it.

Sue shielded her eyes from the dust, coughing once and waving her hand. "Subtle, as always."

Reed flexed his now-normal hand, shaking off bits of concrete. "It's a lost art."

The air beyond the breach was stale and cold, whispering out from the dark shaft like breath from a tomb. The old lift was still intact, just barely. Rust gnawed at the walls, and old warning signs peeled from metal long since stripped of polish. It didn't look like the most steady thing in the world, but it was this or nothing. They stepped inside and glanced at the controls. Reed tried the switch a few times, frowning as only small shudders of power rippled through the frame. The lift groaned but refused to budge more than an inch with each attempt.

"Motor's still got juice." he muttered, flipping open a scorched panel to reroute the auxiliary relay. "But something's jamming the—"

As they struggled with the controls the galloping sounds of boots filled the room. Within seconds, armed security poured into the lab. A dozen men and women in full tactical gear swept into formation, rifles raised and pointing at the couple. They fanned out in a crescent, surrounding the lift like wolves circling a cornered deer.

"Freeze!" barked the commanding officer, his voice amplified through a helmet speaker. "You are trespassing on restricted U.S. government property! Comply immediately and submit to a detention centre under Order 619-B or we will open fire!"

The two glanced sheepishly at each other. Sue quietly wished their disguise had included masks when she'd planned their infiltration. Becoming an enemy of the state wasn't exactly on her to do list for the day. They both slowly raised their hands as the security forces edged closer. Suddenly, a barely visible bubble shield appeared.

Sue's shield shimmered as the first volley of bullets slammed into it, flattening harmlessly against the invisible surface. She gritted her teeth, hand outstretched, maintaining the barrier's curvature while focusing her other palm outward. With a twitch of her fingers, a razor-thin force construct lanced through the air, slamming into a guard's chestplate and knocking him off his feet.

"Never a dull moment." she muttered, launching another sharp-edged disc that clipped a rifle clean from a second guard's hands.

Reed stayed just behind her, crouched low inside the lift as his arms snapped outward through narrow gaps in the shield. One fist stretched and coiled like a whip, socking a soldier square in the visor with enough force to drop him. Another limb snaked around a desk, sweeping it forward to scatter two others.

Sue's shield flickered for a heartbeat as she redirected a chunk of its mass into a sudden spike that jutted out and swept a pair of boots out from under a third guard. She pulled it back just in time to block another burst of gunfire.

"We need to move." Reed said, glancing up at the emergency hatch and breaking it open with a punch. Reed hoisted himself halfway through the emergency hatch, eyes scanning the rusted guts of the shaft. "Winch motor's dead." he shouted. "We're not getting anywhere with controls."

"So we're stuck?" Sue called back, still holding the flickering shield as another round of gunfire rattled against it.

"No," Reed said, reaching upward, his arm stretching like a rope of muscle and sinew. "We're going manual!"

Before she could ask what that meant, he shot his other arm out the hatch, snaking it around a thick support beam ten feet above. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he snapped the main elevator cable. The platform lurched violently, Sue stumbled, catching herself just before the shield dropped.

"Reed!"

"Got it!" he shouted, teeth clenched. His body elongated upward, anchoring them as he braced his feet against the inner corners of the lift, stretching like a living suspension line. The whole carriage jerked, then began to descend, guided only by the elasticity of his limbs resisting gravity. Sue held the shield in place against the torrent of gunfire, protecting Reed's ever stretching limbs as the shouts of horror echoed down the elevator shaft from the terrified security team.

"Next time we're taking the stairs!"

"Where's the drama in that?" Reed grunted, inching them down floor by floor, the darkness below rushing up to meet them. 

"Whatever's down there better be worth it!" Sue shouted, her shield still deflecting the last desperate shots from above.

Reed winced as his limbs strained under the weight. "Knowing our luck?" he called down.  "It's not."

The moment Reed let go, the lift groaned one final time and settled with a juddering thud. A hiss of dust rose around their boots as the two stepped out into darkness. It wasn't what either of them had expected.

Instead of concrete, the corridor before them opened out into a yawning cavern, so vast it seemed to swallow the remnants of the Baxter Building's foundation. Jagged rock walls curved outward like the ribs of a fossilized beast, and far above, the ceiling disappeared into shadows. Glowing strands of bioluminescent fungi clung to the stone, casting a ghostly teal light across the floor in uneven, pulsing waves. Pools of water glimmered at random intervals, reflecting pale light like broken mirrors.

Sue lowered her scanner, forgetting for a moment what they had come here to find. She expected they'd already found it. "How deep does this go?" she whispered, stepping forward. The walls were cracked, eroded by time and what felt like something else entirely. This hadn't been a collapse, it was a tunnel.

"It's a world under a world." Reed replied, trailing behind her, glancing at every wall in awe. His silhouette flickered in the eerie fungal light, stretching toward the unseen distance ahead. "No wonder the signals were scrambled. I've never seen anything like this before."

A faint sound echoed from deeper in the cavern, as though something moved just outside the range of their vision. Then silence again. Reed and Sue both turned instinctively, but saw nothing. Just the cavern, neither of them spoke for fear of the worst.

[hr]

Commander Elbridge dropped the last few feet of rope with a grunt, landing beside the ruined elevator. The rest of his unit fanned out around him s they finished rappelling down behind him, visors scanning the shadows, rifles at the ready.

"Target signatures stopped transmitting thirty seconds ago." one of the techs said over comms. Elbridge continued tapping at a wrist-mounted screen. "Dropped below our grid. You're too low for us to give support." The voice on the radio was already fizzing and cracking due to the bad reception.

"Figures." Elbridge muttered, flicking on his shoulder-mounted floodlight. "Typical nerd shit. It's not like we needed em anyways, right boys?" 

A few of the soldiers chuckled or called back in affirmation, their footsteps echoing in the vast space as they fanned out behind him. The sound was swallowed quickly by the cavern's damp vastness.

Elbridge moved like a man who'd kicked in more doors than he'd opened, sweeping his rifle across the darkness with the practice of someone who'd done this a million times.  He stepped over a strange root, glowing faintly beneath his boot. He didn't seem to notice. Taking a moment to stand and survey the area ahead before addressing his team.

"These meta scum bleed like the rest of us." he boomed "Stretchy arms and invisible shields or not, bullets'll still do the trick. Sweep formation, stay tight. I want eyes on them before they start pulling that sci-fi crap. Shoot on sight."