Sawyer sees a figure running over the railing, and when he comes closer it notices him and stops.
But what he finds was not an "it" - not a cryptid on the loose, but a girl. A young woman with long blonde hair, in her early 20s, covered only by miscellaneous white cloth and a terrified look on her face. Her whole body is shaking from fear.
"S-stay away!" The mystery girl mutters.
With no clue as to who she is and how she got to the facility, Sawyer approaches slowly.
"How'd you get in here?"
The girl shakes her head. "I - I don't know, I just woke up here and… I tried to leave."
Sawyer thinks to himself that if she's telling the truth, she might be affected by an anomaly like Richard, thus explaining why she'd been brought here. However, she didn't look or sound "off". She simply seemed like a normal girl who's simply terrified of being hurt and confused in a place which most people don't know exists. Maybe it all felt like a dream to her, so the idea of just knocking her out and taking her home, hoping she just forgets about all this. But how could anyone?
He quickly takes that thought out of the list of possibilities, deciding not to do anything rash on the small chance she is connected to an anomaly. However, he knows he has to hurry this along as the escaped cryptid is still out there, and eventually others will get here.
"Where did you come from?" Sawyer questions the girl.
"I - I don't know. I mean, I'm from Devon…"
"England?" Sawyer asks with confusion. The girl had no noticeable accent, though British people all having a strong accent are just stereotypes.
The girl replies, "Yes. W-where am I?"
Sawyer, about to answer with 'The USA.' stops himself, now fully convinced that this girl is connected to an anomaly. Giving away information might be a mistake.
Her raspy, quivering voice pleads out to him, "Please, I just wanna go home."
Sawyer notices blood on the cloth wrapped around her. Of all people, he knew best that an innocent look can be deceiving. He reaches for his gun.
The girl realises that the man in front of her is suspicious due to the blood on her. She lifts up her palms, which reveal more blood.
"N - no, this isn't… it's mine, I didn't hurt anyone!"
But even so, Sawyer still points his gun at her.
"What's your name?"
"I'm… Claudia." She replies.
"Alright, Claudia. I need you to come with me. You're here for a reason, I just need to find out what that reason is."
"No!" Claudia shrieks. "I'm not going back to that room!" She backs away instinctively. "I - I didn't do anything. I don't remember how I got here. Just… just let me go home."
Having compassion for this girl, Sawyer does feel for her situation. But, it doesn't change his job. If the blood staining her clothes is hers, yet there are no wounds on her body - then it's evidence enough to confirm she isn't just a regular person who happened to waltz into the facility.
Suddenly, a voice calls to him on his radio receiver.
"Sawyer. Dawn informed me that you went out looking. Where are you?" It was Director Campbell.
Sawyer answers, "Generator hall. I found-"
"Excellent. Sawyer, keep Lavender there any way you can until we get there!"
Sawyer's look of puzzlement is obvious to even Claudia - who doesn't hear the conversation on the other end.
"Lavender?"
"Professor Morris Lavender" Campbell confirms. "Whatever you do, don't let him leave. He's killed another researcher and is on the run."
Sawyer's thoughts were seized by deep confusion, which was obvious even to Claudia. He snaps his head back to Claudia, causing her to take two more steps back.
"In a couple of minutes, this place will be swarming with guards ready to take you back to be locked up." Sawyer proclaims.
Claudia whimpers under her breath. She feels a choking feeling, not allowing her to get any words out.
Noticing her clenched up fists, Sawyer continues, "Fighting your way out would be useless. You wouldn't even get past me."
Before Claudia can react, Sawyer raises his voice, interrupting any train of thought she might have had.
"You'll decide right now - either you're on your own… or you come work for me, and stay under my jurisdiction."
"Work for you?" A thousand thoughts run through her head, but all of them stop as the man in front of her appears to offer a droplet of help, though under an unknown condition.
"Under unit 24. This place is a facility to hold cryptids - entities that defy the laws of nature and have no known origin. They've been responsible for countless missing persons and unexplained events. However, the average person doesn't know they exist, and never should. We are the only organisation that hunts them and prevents them from harming civilians." He bombards her with all this information with a straight face. To her, it's ridiculous. But it's the absolute truth.
"I… how am I supposed to believe any of this!? You people are insane!"
"You have no choice but to believe me. But it's the reason you're here in the first place. I assume you were being studied because you were affected by a cryptid, and now, you've somehow escaped."
"Studied?"
Several footsteps are heard in the distance, approaching rapidly.
His face stern, Sawyer attempts to hurry Claudia along with his ultimatum.
"The only one who can save you is me. Fight alongside me, and I'll ensure you won't go back to being a test subject."
She glances behind her looking for an escape. Her eyes water at the thought of going back to that room - where she'd temporarily wake up for a moment to see parts of her body being cut off and regrown. It wasn't necessarily painful, however, the sight and sensations made her head spin as if she were in a nightmare. These experiments on her supernatural body were performed by researchers whose faces she never got to view. All she remembered was lab coats and voices.
Trying to process how her life has been flipped on its head, Claudia replays this man's words in her head over and over. Eventually, the panic-stricken girl nods.
"A-alright."
At that moment, several guards come rushing in. Among the bunch is Dawn, who looks at the unfamiliar girl.
"Sawyer? Who is this?"
Sawyer simply turns around and walks past Dawn and the guards.
"She's with me as of now. Give her some proper clothes and a meal."
Back on the ground floor of Facility:Null, the atmosphere was still tense and everybody frantic. As Sawyer might've puzzled together - Claudia wasn't the cause of the alarm. In fact, only a handful of high-ranking researchers knew about her being in the facility. The real root cause of the mayhem was yet to be found. No traces of the madman - only scenes of his crimes.
Claudia was being held in a room until everything had settled. But for now, Director Campbell was taking Dawn and Sawyer to see something.
Richard, who had been wandering around the facility after the alarm had woken him up, had now spotted Sawyer.
"Hey! What's going on?"
Before Sawyer can answer, Campbell tells Richard, "You're welcome to come see."
His tone of voice wasn't inviting, however. His cold way of speaking to Richard was to indicate that even though he was alright with Richard joining them, there may be some things that he wouldn't want to see. Something brutal, or so he anticipated.
Richard follows the three of them until they once again make their way down to the second underground layer of the facility, the elevator taking them past layer one - where they would briefly hear the impatient chatter of researchers.
At the second underground layer were high - ranking researchers and managers of the facility, all huddled in front of a single holding cell.
Several of them turn to face Campbell when he walks in with his little entourage.
"Director Campbell."
"Director."
He makes his way past their chatter, and makes way for Sawyer, Richard and Dawn to join his side to look inside the holding cell.
"Here it is." Campbell gestures to Sawyer to look inside.
Observing the inside of the cell, Sawyer witnesses the state that the victim has been left in.
A head researcher in the middle of the cell. Even though he was dead, his body was still standing. His mouth was hanging open. The most peculiar thing about the scene was a black box made up of an unknown solid, fleshy substance had replaced the man's upper - right side of his face. The skin and veins of the man's face contorted around the box, and one could imagine that a death like this would have been agonizing.
"The anomaly that caused this man's death was moved to another holding cell for the meantime." As Campbell explains, the others also view the inside of the cell.
"This was Professor Walter Dahlberg. Lavender must have somehow forced him inside that cell, leading to his death. And I presume that before his disappearance, he freed her - the girl that you found, Sawyer."
"So one of your workers loses their mind and starts killing? What set him off?"
In response to Sawyer's question, Director Campbell unexpectedly opens the door to the cell. As Campbell steps in, Sawyer follows right behind him - though, nobody else dares to set foot in there.
They walk past the still-standing corpse of Professor Dahlberg and observe a carved out message on the wall. It simply states - 'Death to the cages'.
"Think of this what you will but in truth, a man's mind collapsed under the existence of the unexplained. That's all there is to it. Some people aren't fit to grasp the fact that creatures with no source of origin lurk our world, only known by a select few. Those select few are required to hold on to reality while minimising the damage that these beings can do to the general populace. That sort of responsibility can't be put on just anyone. Seeing the things we see, it's dangerous mentally too - at any point, something could happen to make a man lose his mind."
Sawyer stays silent, not having a response on his tongue at this moment. Though, he did take in the director's monologue.
"It's unfortunate, but that's all it is. Morris Lavender is out there, and chances are he'll become an even bigger threat - however, I don't want you to concern yourself with this situation, Sawyer. You have your hands full with the experimental unit, and if a highly dangerous cryptid becomes our next target, then I would rather entrust you to it than anyone else."
The two of them leave the cell, and just before Campbell has to depart from the others once again, he turns to Sawyer to tell him one last thing.
"Oh, and that girl that Lavender set free... I think having her as a member of your unit is a great opportunity." He nods before leaving, satisfied with Sawyer's choice to employ Claudia, and as the director of the facility, approving of it. Though unorthodox, Sawyer believed Director Campbell to be a man who tried his best to make something good out of unfortunate situations.