Who: Max Eisenhardt Where: The Upside Down When: During Rogue's 12 hour period [Or like probably two and a half weeks Magneto time] What: A simple escape room attempted by a man with rage issues. Warnings: Blood, spookiness, ghosts, general horror.
F-I-N-E.
Max let out a petulant huff and tossed a hand up into the air. With the gesture, the nail he had been using to communicate across space flew wildly across the room as if shot from the barrel of his annoyance. Max was sick of this, the captivity, the games--even those he could understand the sadistic joy their captors might take, but the constant uncertainty of his volatile powers attacked the central core of his identity.
To return volitionally to that? He would be better served as king and sole inhabitant of this lonely world with him and his powers.
But it was lonely.
He rose from the couch turned throne and looked around the living room of the abandoned house. He had come here from the street, into a brownstone nestled between a hardware store and what seemed like a doctor's office, both perhaps more interesting for a man like Max, but none quite as inviting nor easily accessed.
Because it had been nice, for a while, the respite. The comforts of stolen civilization surrounded by another family's things. The water that ran warm and private, unlike the camp showers, the food that was aging, but warm. He had known decades ago that he wasn't a man made for the comforts of a family home but that didn't mean he had never tried.
Max moved towards the door looking out to the electric and dust-swept street. He thought back to the metal filled building behind him. He wasn't made for a family home, but he wasn't going back to that wilderness tedium without a weapon.
Max's hand left the doorknob and he left the foyer.
--
The house was beginning to feel as oppressive and ominous as the street outside. The mechanical buzz of the air conditioning droned like cicadas and made the hair at the back of his neck raise to a degree he wouldn't admit. Something scurried in the walls.
He shouldn't have investigated, but he opened door that had been a pantry and peered inside.
He really shouldn't have investigated the stairs that were now where shelves had once been.
--
The door had slammed shut behind him. The knob wouldn't turn, the lock was set, resisting even his powers which tore at the bolts in the walls, the nails in the stairs, the hinges and knife he had taken with him from the abandoned kitchens. The oven ripped from the unseen wall and slamming against the door had no effect.
He could tell when he was being corralled. It happened far too much these days. Max rolled his eyes and went down the stairs.
He found himself entering into a basement office. Trophies lined the back wall cheap and plastic markers of questionable achievements of someone he didn't care about. A computer desk with an ancient machine sat there and a sinking couch along the wall that concealed the stairs. The ground was cold like concrete permeated by winter which strangled the air above. The decor dated. On the other side of the room was a door.
Also locked.
"Great." Max muttered. He heard a creak on the stairs and glanced back towards him. Two exits, both locked. He didn't see anything up the stairs that could have made the noise, but he couldn't go forward. Max started back up the stairs to see if the cellar door would open again. It didn't.
But from the basement, a warm woman's laugh shrieked and a door slammed.
Max did not care to be fucked with right now. Beyond that, he was 90 years old (... give or take.) Far too old and irascible to be sent on a goose chase up and down steep stairs. When he made it back down to the basement, the room was in disarray. The computer tray toppled, papers scattered, blood sprayed across the wall. Arterial spray, he thought due to an over familiarity with the way humans died. Blade probably.
But the locked door was now open. Max ignored the crime scene. He didn't care, and adjusted his grip on the knife, even though for all intents and purposes, he was the knife. And reached out first to assess the metal in the room before him. There was a sink. Two large appliances. Aluminum mostly, some steel. Some small parts he couldn't quite place--rivets? Whatever it was, he moved forward. The room was dark and claustrophobic. The air circulated like hot breath regardless of the chill that filled the previous one. In front of him, something fell down with a clatter. A light shone out from under a plastic washing sink. Max knelt down to retrieve it, his hand groped through a sticky and wet puddle.
Of course
He pulled his hand back and retrieved the flashlight with his powers. His hand was dripping with aging blood. He shone the light around the room, it skimmed over piles of laundry, vials of liquid, and landed on a door with a pane of crossed glass like a crucifix.
Max wasn't religious and even if he were, he didn't care about crosses. But he knew an exit where he saw one. He move to the door. Through the window, through the window he could see a yard and gaunt forest. But it was not this house, which might mean a way back.
It wasn't that he wasn't impressed with Rogue, he would always thought she would make a lovely terrorist. But she was green, far removed from Raven's cultivation, she was now so like one of Xavier's children. He coddled them so much sometimes that their first kill really had to be more significant or they'd never have a second.
He could taste the evening air as it swung open. But he found himself back on the stairs leading into the basement.
--
Maybe Rogue would get her fire after all.
He moved back down the stairs to the office, taking some time to look around. The office seemed to be a man, who left notes of phone numbers and appointments stickied around his desk. The trophies belonged to Rosie, a gymnast and Alex, a football player. Both athletic laurels loosely applied to fraternal twins who couldn't have been more than nine in the yellowing photographs. There were photos--probably from the 70s or 80s of boring children and their inconsequential parents. The same photos that decorated the house in which he had been squatting for the past few hours.
He hadn't cared about them earlier. They annoyed him now. Max raised a box of pins from the desk behind him and threw them like darts at the eyes of the humans in the room. It was a petty pleasure, but he was often a petty man. When he started to pull the nails holding portraits out of the wall which bled from the injury, the lights cut out.
Max took a hint and turned around. He saw a large and grey form crouched over by the laundry room door. He didn't call out, but the knife flew on instinct at the creature as the master of Magnetism drew a barrier to himself. He thought of the pipes in the walls--copper, began to shred the computer like shrapnel. But the knife went through the spectre which let out a visceral scream and retreated up the stairs.
Maxed edged his way to the laundry room, keeping an eye on where the creature (a ghost) had fled. He backed into the room and closed the door behind him, turning on the flashlight and examining the bottles on the shelf. Drain cleaner--basically acid. Bleach. Fabric softener. Brands he had not heard of since the 70s. The clothes, folded last time were rumpled and toppled over.
Something slammed into the door behind him. He drew in a sharp breath. Max had seen the horror humanity had to offer time and again. A few mind tricks wouldn't do him in. He took a moment to compose himself and moved to the door outside.
--
He found himself on the stairs. Of course he did.
The pounding he heard through the laundry room door was omnipresent as he descended down and into the makeshift office. It was as if something was in the walls, desperate to get out. It caused the lights to flicker on and off like dying fluorescence.
There were differences. When he paused to examine them the pounding stopped but an inhuman howling reverberated through the room. Max tried to ignore it as he examined how notes had moved, trophies were rearranged. A grocery list lay printed out next to the computer that wouldn't spring to life. He did find a desk drawer which finally would engage to open.
Inside he found a digital clock set at 12:00. It was far too modern for the room and began to count down. He didn't want to know what happened if it reached zero. He set down the timer and sat down to try the computer. To try reassembling it and checking connections. Perhaps there was something in there, but he couldn't figure it out.
Finally he decided to start again. He went through the cellar door.
--
Seven more times he went through the room. The timer was constant. The trophies began to tarnish. Monuments to Rosie and Alex replaced with corporate achievement awards for Eric (He didn't appreciate that) He began to swear he saw things moving in his periphery. A suicide note lay printed out in the printer. Blood dripping down the walls, temperature changes. Once centipedes dripped down like a poisonous fringe. The basement was trying its hardest to keep him on edge.
And if it were possible for Magneto to be honest with himself, it was actually starting to work.
He tried throwing the acid out the window at the doors. Mixing the chemicals. He tried ripping doors off their hinges and boring holes through the wall. He went through drawers, shelves, laundry.
But every time, the room reset, perhaps more degraded, but ultimately the same.
--
On the ninth time the light in the room was red
--
On his twelth attempt, he sank into the couch, it felt as though it had been days and he had worked through rage to exasperation to near exhaustion. He ignored the rattling and wailing of the walls and set the timer across from him. He picked up a dog eared copy of Burr by Gore Vidal and let the timer start down.
It's not like he could sleep with the haunting anyway.
When it hit an hour remaining, the fire started from the woods and moved quickly across the dead leaf covered lawn. He could taste the acrid smoke in the air before he could see it through the only available window.
He found himself trapped when it entered the basement, against all sense cornered back on the stairs conflicted between asphyxiating in the rising smoke and burning.
He pulled down a rafter and climbed into the house's skeleton.
He woke up on a concrete floor in a metal shed. But it wasn't the stairs
--
He didn't feel exactly rested, but he could tell in his bones that he had slept. Max pushed himself up, closing his eyes and reminding himself why he was doing this. It wasn't even about Rogue anymore. He hoped she had killed them all. But he wasn't about to give them a win and felt the handle of the shed door for a pregnant moment.
It opened easily and flooded the seams with daylight.
"GODDAMNIT"
Magneto swore when he opened the door and found himself on the stairs again. The light was red again, the pictures of a father and the kids he had tossed aside for work had been replaced by eratically moving eyes.
And Max did not care. He tore that room to shreds. Every piece of metal he could latch his mind onto was torn from the walls, from the couch, from the floor. Parts of trophies and the computer, the washing machine and sink were torn from the walls in a maelstrom of magnetism causing the basement to sag dangerously.
But The walls couldn't rattle if they weren't there. Appliances couldn't bleed if they were dismembered.
--
He wasn't sure how, but he woke back up in the shed.
He exited and found himself back on the stairs. Back with the red light. Back with the moving pictures of eyes replacing the boring humans he had come to hate most of all humanity. Back with the scratching in the walls and the rattling of the pipes, the cockroaches that scattered from the pools of blood when he moved to close. He set to examining the room.
He found one of the picture frames missing, revealing an eyehole into the Laundry Room which was locked tight. He looked inside. He saw a cold and vacant eye staring back at him. Max's jaw set as he glared back. When he felt a piercing pain in the back of his right shoulder.
The weapon he had brought down to this dungeon and discarded ages ago had been turned against him, lodged deeply in his shoulder. The eye left the hole, and something clanged in the sink. Max sunk to his knees and caught his breath.
This was why you wore capes. People -- or poltergeists--couldn't sneak up on you in a cape.
Max steeled himself and tore the knife out of his shoulder. He dropped his head between his arms on the floor before willing himself up. He had to get out, but before that, he probably had to see what had been dropped in the sink. He turned on the light, the room was empty of course. And looked in the sink. Whatever it was had gone down the drain, but he squeezed it up, and reached down gingerly with his left hand to pick it up. He found a ring.
Max slipped it in his left pocket. And turned on the sink. The tap ran red with blood.
He was beyond tired of this basement.
But he was bleeding steadily. Unwilling to wait nine hours for fire or returning to his shed, he doused a shirt in drain cleaner, and generated sparks from a wire ripped from the ceiling.
It was probably incredibly toxic, he cracked the basement door to let fresh air in--funny he could do that but not leave through it. but he didn't need to breathe it long. Max worked off his shirt, using the knife where range of motion wouldn't permit and with the same iron hot knife that that had stabbed him in the first place, cauterized the wound. He still wasn't the most inhuman scream in the basement that round.
He took a shirt from the pile, and the bloodstained knife and left out the door quickly.
--
He was back on top of the stairs.
The room didn't attack him for another seven rounds, though the same could not be said for Max, whose rage had recharged. Every step of progress had another block.
He turned on the computer. It needed a password. He destroyed it.
Two rounds later, he found the password on the back of photo. The machine was empty. The background image only said LOOK BEHIND YOU.
He didn't need to. He could see in the black mirror of the screen that the shambling and skeletal woman was behind him. And despite his efforts, he woke up aching and back in the shed. The next time he was in the room, the spray of arterial blood on the wall felt like his.
The next time, he tossed aside the ring from the sink. She left him alone--ish again.
--
On his 40th round, the computer began playing a German language soap opera. Max listened to it for nearly 7 hours. as he rifled though papers, books, notes, knick knacks, laundry. Anything. He found an empty picture frame. Toward the end, he found a fragment of a torn up picture.
It took him five more rounds to find the remaining seven pieces and reassemble the picture. It looked like the ghostly woman, when her jaw was attached and her neck unslashed. Even if she was a human, she was vaguely familiar, and that made her pretty. And it made him hate the scientists for clearly using his long dead wife as a tool.
Max had found the picture frame six runs ago. He got it back out of the filing cabinet and assembled the picture behind the glass. When he removed the matting, he found it.
Who the fuck used a plastic key?
45 tries in total and he had a key. Max went up the stairs and managed to use the plastic key to open the pantry door. The kitchen at least had the decency to have stayed chaotic as he had left it. Magneto stepped over the corpse of the oven and made his way to the door.
And this time he didn't end up on the stairs.
And he'd left his knife.
Max cast a sidelong glance at the hardware store, and a contemptuous one at the brownstone, but he knew better than to go in either again.