It was near silence in those six small rooms despite the twelve people crammed into them. Red emergency lights had long since taken over from the humming, stuttering white ones. They had patched up the drip which had consumed half of the Smaller-Room-of-Important-Machinery, silencing it at last. Not, of course, before it had fizzled out the incessant whirring of the machine they had at first been sure was the oxygen filtration system; after a month of inactivity they had decided it probably wasn't.

In the concrete lined store cupboard they had been relegated too Doivid, Broby and Key had fallen silent. Perhaps asleep, perhaps lulled into something trance like by the strange chanting game they had replaced inane conversation with. Next door Nargle wandered wraith-like into the kitchen, no matter how much food she wolfed down she still seemed to shrink until everyone suspected some wasting sickness. Hounded from room to room she had come to drift like some vague metaphor for the pointlessness of their plight. Turning the corner, before the airlock room Awson was hunched over the oldest radio in the Larger-Room-of-Important-Machinery, which was truthfully a glorified corridor. Though one wall was computer banks, sparing the sizeable hole they put in it when they suspected a room behind, only the oldest radio seemed to reach outside. Awson desperately turned the rusting dial muttering to hypothetical survivors that they could rebuild. Turning a leisurely (after all, there are no places left to be) right into the Smaller-Room-of-Important-Machinery Hank and Smiral jealously guard the drip they know would be their salvation, if they could just bring themselves to start knocking their way through it. At other times they would have been occupied yelling out who couldn't follow them through their escape tunnel, but they too had fallen into glowering silence. Crossing straight through the Larger-Room-of-Important-Machinery two bunks stand in a room slightly smaller than the store cupboard beyond one wall. These bunks have been allocated to Halo and Larfleeze. Halo is currently asleep, hardly leaving the bed when awake apart from to occasionally spread his existential mumblings to the kitchen, the top bunk fell to him by default. Larfleeze on the other hand was assigned a bed by unanimous agreement as it reduced the volume of his screaming nightmares. Currently, he is awake and between pacing scribbles the remnants of his fractured dream-scape on the walls in broken equations and disturbing visual elaborations. Overwatch is... nobody is quite sure where Overwatch is, though his rations are eaten at a rate that convinces all but Larfleeze whose recurring nightmares include one where everyone else conspired to eat Overwatch alive.

Sat in the cramped kitchen Sherlock reflects that even Nat seemed to have stopped his gibbering. Though outside it is baking sunlight, night seemed to have fallen. It takes a moment for Sherlock to remember why Nat stopped gibbering and that there are now only eleven of them left. A sick crunch rings out in her head. Instinctively her hand moves to the hammer on her belt. She is seldom without it now. It seems a futile tool against the quiet creeping sort of madness which has proved the true threat. Bringing her hand back to the knife she stabs one last time at a rusting, defiant can of fruit cocktail before sighing and giving into the cans of spam which open with maddening ease. First she boils the can whole to heat it without any congealing to the filthy saucepan. Then she brings her hammer down on it hatefully, before shifting it to a metal plate. Despite her hunger she picks delicately at the fractured can and daydreams she is eating cracked crab claws. Some days it barely improves the flavour, but today she gets carried away. So optimistic is her flight of fancy she almost imagines she can hear a knocking on the outer airlock door.