Scene 4: Primal Force

Sabine is want to search the house from the ground up, as her eyes narrow trying to see the best she can down the stairs to the basement. She looks back to Mikael. "Either way. I wanted to start where most people wouldn't look first. People often hide their biggest secrets where others wouldn't think to look. Well—and in their computers and devices of course."

"Its what I would do anyway."

"Maybe we can be in and out of this place faster if we split up?" Mikael suggests. "I don't want to be in this place any longer than we have to. I'll take the hallway to look for the patient rooms or an office, see what I can find. You guys can go hit the basement if you want. The sound shouldn't carry outside the house, just yell if you think I should come down. Anyone want to come with me?"

Sabine nods and heads down the stairs toward the basement, shining her flashlight's beam along the walls ahead and then down at the steps themselves, so as not to trip or be caught off-guard.

"Sure, lets split up and search! Yumin, Peter, what are you guy's doing?"

Eric follows Mikael along the corridor.

"Should we check out alternate rooms to speed things up? You check one while I check the next?"

Yumin motions her head to Sabine, as she heads down the stairs. She tries to stay as quiet as possible.

"She shouldn’t go by herself. I’ll go.

What are you doing, Peter?" she doesn’t dare assume he’ll follow her everywhere.

"Agreed," Mikael spays to Yumin, "It's a good idea to at least go in pairs, just in case."

Mikael nods at Eric's suggestion, "Sure, good idea buddy." Mikael takes off his backpack and pulls out a small emergency flashlight of his own and shines it down the longer, adjoining hallway. "You take left, I take right? Peter, up to you, where you going?"

If Eric agrees, Mikael will go down the long hallway and slowly try to open the door to the first room on his right.

"Sure! Let's go! Just shout if you see or need anything!"

Eric follows Mikael and takes the first door on the left.

"I'm coming with you, Yumin!", Peter says immediately. "Someone needs to keep you two girls safe, right?" He chuckles nervously and you both realize that if push came to shove, Sabine would probably be better able to keep you safe than Peter.

Eric opens the door to the left. The room is large and there is a bookshelf covering two of the four walls. The third has a writing desk and some simple hospital machinery against it, things to measure blood pressure, brain activity, things like that. And the last wall has two large windows to the garden outside. There are four comfortable looking armchairs arranged in a circle. It seems like this is Dr. Himmelshöjd's "treatment room".

At the same time, Mikael opens the opposite door and enters a kitchen. The first thing he notices is a mouldy smell. When the power was cut, the fridge and freezer died and the food inside quickly spoiled. There is also a puddle of dirty water in front of the large fridge.
The second thing he notices, however, is that there are clear indications of a struggle. Chairs have been knocked down and the large dining table is broken. There is even some blood on the table.

Yumin, Sabine and Peter head downstairs. A weird smell comes from beyond the door at the bottom of the stairs and Yumin is startled when something grabs her hand. As soon as the first surprise is over, however, she realizes it is Peter who looks very pale in the darkness of the staircase. He seems really scared. So much for protecting the girls!
As Sabine pushes the door open, the smell immediately becomes recognizable. Animals.
Along one of the walls of the soundproofed basement, there is a wall of cages. It contains two monkeys, howling with hunger, a dead rabbit with its legs replaced with caterpillar tracks and mice with strange technology implanted in their bodies. Tool racks with drills, saws and pliers cover the walls. A high pressure washer sits in a corner and a steel slab is bolted to the floor in the center of the room, holding bloody tarps, rusty screws, jars of rotting organic tissue, broken eletronic components and multi-colored wires. On a shelf and work bench against the wall opposite the cages, there are jars of chemicals, growth hormones and painkillers, though most of the containers are empty.
There is also a strange radio sitting in the middle of the work bench.

Zipping her hoodie all the way up and pulling it over the bridge of her nose, Sabine enters the stench-filled room. The beam of her small flashlight lingers on every horrible aspect of the ghastly sight before them. The blood, the organic tissue, the animal-machine hybrids, and finally the screws and drills, bring home her own personal experience when approaching this place. She leans one hand on the top of the workbench and lets it all sink in.

"So much for therapy." She utters to Yumin and Peter. "More like Dr. Frankenstein."

"Our brilliant Dr. Liv..." She uses the descriptor her aunt, Wicked E, had when referring to the woman in question. "...is the root of all the weirdness everyone has been experiencing. What has she been trying to create in her torture chamber? Something both animal and machine, but neither." Her eyes fall on the slab bolted to the floor.

"Since she was kidnapped before Mark was murdered, that means she is either still experimenting under the watchful gaze of her captors or—its her creation that's making us all sick." Sabine points down to the slab and bloody tarps.

"Gah!" Mikael exclaims quietly to himself, "Okay, that's definitely not holiday dinner. What the hell..." He starts maneuvering around the kitchen, looking for anything of interest. He will carefully pull the door to the fridge open to check inside and will look for any trail the blood might have left so as to indicate which direction the source went.

The remnants of Yumin’s breakfast threaten to fill her mouth. She swallows hard, but she can feel the threat of it resting in her throat.

"It’s so… disgusting."

Her eyes wander over the abominations. The machine parts, she can understand, but biology had never been her strongest subject. She saw the how, but couldn’t fathom the why.

She comes finally to the radio, and hunches down in front of it to inspect!

Eric looks around the room and imagines himself sitting here with the doctor. To add to the immersion he takes himself to one of the comfy chairs, the one he thinks would most likely be a patients chair and sits in it, imagining a conversation with this Dr Liv he's recently heard about. He gets up, checking the other chairs, finding the comfiest and then sits there for a while scanning the room.

Where would I keep important documents??? He thinks to himself.

Eric looks at the desk, walks over and examines it closely, trying to open any drawers on it. He brushes his hand against the underside, looking for any hidden buttons.

He heads towards the bookshelves and pulls randomly on and books that stick out to him, looking for any secret entries into a hidden room beyond. He also looks to see if there are any files stored on the shelf itself.

Mikael checks inside the fridge but finds nothing but spoiled food inside. Definitely nothing that he wants to be looking at any longer than necessary.
There also isn't really a trail of blood. Just some splatter that indicates that there was a fight and someone got hurt. Even if he could find a trail leading out of the house, it's doubtful it would give him a proper indication of where the doctor has been taken.

- - -

Eric browses through the desk and the shelves next to it. There are some folders that look like they should contain patient files but they are all very sparse. He finds a couple of quick, printed out notes on a handful of people, including Eleonora Vass, but they are no more than bored thoughts. The only people who have some more extensive notes on them are Mark and his mother.
It seems that the doctor wasn't that enthusiastic about her therapy practice, as if something else held much more of her interest and this was little more than a cover or a way to pay the bills with little effort.

The only place left to check for information would be Dr. Himmelshöjd's computer on the desk but without electricity in the house, there's no way to start it up.

- - -

Sabine inspects the whole room in more detail. She finds some crates which are marked with KAB-III. Most of them are empty but a couple still contain electronic equipment. The same name, KAB-III, is also embossed in some of the electronics and tools in the basement, including the radio Yumin is inspecting.
Looking at the poor, dead rabbit and the bloodstained steel slab, as well as the growth hormones and chemicals, it seems obvious to Sabine that Dr. Himmelshöjd was creating... something down here, some abomination of flesh and steel. What exactly it might look like, she can't say but whatever it is, it's no longer here. She must have moved it somewhere else when it was no longer feasible to keep it in her basement.

Yumin inspects the radio and finds that it has been extensively modified with complicated technology. She tries to turn it on but nothing happens. It appears to not be working. Yumin can't quite understand at first what it does but then she spots a small note with names written down in the same scribbled handwriting as the dedication in Mark's book. Some have been crossed out, some marked with a "?". Going through the list - Peace Maker, Back-At-You, Empathy Enforcer, War Ender - she finally puts it together. This radio seems to have been a failed attempt to create a device that transmits human emotions as radio waves.

Peter meanwhile has gone even paler and looks very much in danger of losing his lunch. He tries to pretend like he's alright, but very poorly, and he does his best to avoid looking at or even getting close to the animal cages.
"Maybe we should just leave and forget about all this," he suggests. "I don't like this at all!"

Sabine looks for food to feed the screaming monkeys and points out the KAB III markings on the crates to Yumin.

"I don't like this place either, Peter. Hold on for a minute and we will get out of here. Whatever Dr. Liv was making down here is gone now, along with her. I want to feed these poor animals if I can, before we go."

Nothing more of interest in the Kitchen, Mikael walks across the hall to the room Eric earlier went into. He shines his flashlight around until the beam lands on Eric's face. "Sorry," Mikael says, quickly pointing the beam downward slightly to his friend's chest, "didn't mean to blind you. You find anything over here? Nothing across the hall really, except it looks like someone got into a fight."

After feeding the monkeys, Sabine gives the basement a final look over and then motions to Yumin and Peter she's heading back up stairs to communicate their discoveries to the guys.

Mikael surveys the office room that Eric is in and spots the computer. "If we can get the power back on, we could check the computer for any notes or clues," he posits.

Sabine finds some old bread and dried fruits in a bag as well as food pellets for the mice. It might not be good food but it's definitely better for the critters than nothing. After feeding the surviving animals, she, Yumin and Peter head back upstairs. Peter in particular seems to be happy to be out of the basement.

They find Mikael and Eric in what appears to be the therapy room, looking over a powered down computer.
"Holy shit," Peter tells them. "You're lucky you chose to stay up here. You do not want to know what we found downstairs!"

"What did we find?" Yumin asks, more to herself than anyone else.

"A machine? A transmitter? And some experiments…" the bile threatens again.

"On animals. Poor animals…"