Eleven knew a bit about Richard's abilities. Her expression changed drastically, guessing that Richard was seeing spirits or something similar that they couldn't see.
Hopper felt a chill in his heart and asked, "Who are you talking to, Chade?"
Carly also realized something and immediately stood up, positioning herself beside Eleven to protect her. She stared warily at the wall Richard was focused on while nervously scanning their surroundings. She felt that even if she were to die now, she should at least protect Eleven, her sister in suffering, and not let another innocent person die before her eyes.
After a period of silence following Richard's words, the girl's reflection in his eyes took on a slightly sinister look and said, "No, I just want to play hide and seek. You be the 'ghost,' and find me. If you can't, you'll all have to die here and turn into toys."
Boom!
As soon as she finished speaking, Richard felt a massive force impact him, sending him flying backward.
Eleven and the others didn't even have time to react, their faces only showing panic as they failed to grab the flying Richard. Once Richard was thrown out of the room, the door slammed shut instantly.
Richard crashed into the wall at the end of the corridor and fell to the ground, his head spinning. In his daze, he saw the room a hundred meters away suddenly vanish into thin air; the door disappeared, and Eleven and the others were gone with it.
"Forced out of the party... what a cliché plot point," Richard muttered, waiting a moment for the dizziness to fade before speaking to the owner of the ubiquitous laughter. "If you want someone to play with you, that's fine, but with such a forceful attitude, you're never going to make any friends."
Clang!
A fire hydrant in the corridor fell over, as if the girl hiding in the shadows was expressing her displeasure at Richard's remark.
Richard smiled slightly, as if indulging a child. "Alright, alright. Your big brother will play with you."
He gripped his machete in one hand and walked into the dim corridor... Question!
When playing hide and seek with a ghost—if I'm the 'ghost' who has to find the hider, is the hiding ghost a 'human' or a ghost?
Richard couldn't figure out the answer to that question. He simply explored the rooms one by one along the way, memorizing the maze-like route. When he reached a room labeled "Raw Material Processing Area," he pushed the door open and entered once again.
The moment he entered, Richard had a sense of déjà vu, as if he were back in Hawkins Lab. This place didn't feel like a factory workshop at all; instead, it was filled with instruments and incubation tanks one would expect in a biotech facility.
Several of the incubation tanks were severely contaminated and corroded. Richard knew exactly what had happened inside them. When the organisms in the tanks were deprived of nutrients and necessary oxygen, they would die and slowly rot. The murkiness of the liquid in the tanks was largely due to the decomposition of the creatures inside.
Richard tapped on the glass, and a rotting, mangled corpse slowly floated over, revealing its decayed state. Looking at the rows of corpses, he couldn't help but sigh, "What a bunch of bastards who deserve a thousand cuts."
Richard searched The Lab for any clues and found something like an experimental report under an instrument console—to be precise, it was general information on a certain subject.
Subject: No. 1312
Transformation Result: Great Success
Detailed Performance: Formerly known as Shante Damon. Following the experimental procedure for this project, after injecting the subject with Elephant Valley Flower extract and following the original procedure of radioactive irradiation, Biological Sponge Cells were implanted into No. 1312's body, ultimately yielding unexpected results. No. 1312 transformed into a blue, furry creature with a bowl-shaped head and exceptionally long limbs. Its mouth resembles the oral disc of a lamprey. Despite having no bones in its body, it can still walk upright, which allows it to move freely through narrow spaces. Additionally, its vitality is enhanced, and it possesses high-intensity self-healing capabilities.
After completing the transformation, No. 1312's temperament became violent, and its intelligence increased to a level extremely close to that of an adult, yet it can perfectly obey human commands. It is the biological weapon experimental result sought by the Consortium Executive. It has been decided that No. 1312 will serve as a mass-production template for cultivation experiments. At night, it will be deployed into the pipes for use as secret night-watch security.
Subject Weakness: Almost none.
Richard flipped the file of No. 1312 over and found a photo stuck to the back. It was the same blue doll creature that Richard and Eleven had killed before.
"So you were No. 1312," Richard realized. He continued his exploration and found a crumpled piece of paper inside a broken incubation tank. Opening it, he found the data for another subject.
Subject: No. 1313
Transformation Result: Null
Detailed Performance: Formerly known as Martha Allen. Based on the original experimental procedure, human cells of unknown origin were implanted. No. 1313 experienced full-body atrophy within two hours. After two hours, she had transformed into the size of an infant, and cracks began to appear at all her joints. She now looks like a living doll... Subject Weakness: Null
After reading it, Richard noticed that the records in this report were unfinished, which was very unusual. He couldn't help but look around, speculating on the identity of the potentially omnipresent girl ghost: "Could you be this Martha Allen, the girl Shante was thinking of until the moment he died?"
The surroundings fell into an eerie silence, an unnatural quiet as if he were in an absolute, soundless vacuum. Richard knew he had likely guessed correctly. He flipped the report over, and on the back was a sketch of a strange doll.
Ignoring those soul-stealing, black-hole-like large eyes, the doll looked cute, with long, curly red hair and a delicate, two-head-tall chibi body.
"Have I found you?" Richard asked the air, holding up the sketch.
The air remained cold and indifferent. After a long while, the girl's voice whispered into Richard's ear, "Keep looking for me. Find my true body. I am right there; I have never moved."
"You want me to kill you?" Richard thought he heard a hidden plea in her tone. He was somewhat surprised; how could this girl ghost, who had forcibly turned an orphanage into a toy wonderland, have such an emotion?
The girl didn't answer, so Richard changed the question: "You should at least give me a hint."
"Hide and seek isn't supposed to have hints, you know," the girl said giggling.
Richard suspected the girl was a bit schizophrenic. Gripping his machete, he walked out of The Lab and said, "Alright then. Wait there for your big brother to arrive. Be patient. You've waited years already; a little longer won't hurt. I'm coming to kill you soon."
Pshhh—
The moment he stepped out of The Lab, Richard found the corridor had brightened. The sound of machinery operating came from within the factory, and the faint sound of steam spraying reached his ears.
Richard's gaze sharpened, and he immediately quickened his pace of exploration.
This sound meant the factory's power supply had been restored, but it also signaled an approaching crisis for Richard—those killer dolls he had seen in the hall were about to be mass-produced again!
Richard ran through the corridor toward areas he hadn't yet explored. Suddenly, he noticed a section of the corridor where arrows and the words "go here" had been spray-painted.
Richard suspected these were markers left by the orphanage employees as they tried to escape, perhaps intended to guide others.
Of course, Richard was still very skeptical about the logic behind it. These subjects possessed a certain level of intelligence; leaving such markers was no different from telling the rampaging subjects, "We escaped this way."
But on second thought, since there were almost no survivors from this orphanage in the end, perhaps they really were just that stupid.
Regardless, Richard decided to follow this rare clue and tracked the markers.
After running through a stretch of corridor, Richard entered a stairwell area that looked like an emergency escape route. Following the arrows, he ran up two floors and reached the 5th floor.
Clatter, clatter, clatter—
A rapid sound of plastic shells hitting the floor echoed from the stairwell. Richard poked his head out and looked down through the gaps in the stairs. Seeing the figures of the killer dolls, he took a sharp breath, turned, and ran.
Entering a dark corridor, he unknowingly ran onto a metal elevated walkway. Both sides were brightly lit, and as Richard looked around, he realized this seemed to be a massive entertainment area for teenagers. Many recreational facilities could be seen here, such as a Taiko Master-style rhythm game, and even a carousel, a roller coaster, and bumper cars.
Bang!
Suddenly, the sound of a door being burst open came from below. Glancing back, he saw the group of killer dolls rushing in. They spotted Richard running on the elevated walkway at once and, with sinister grins, began climbing the walls and the tall amusement rides to hunt him down.
"I can't fight this many," Richard realized. Unable to fight them in such an unfavorable environment, he ran toward the end of the elevated walkway.
At the end was an entrance with a flower pattern painted around it. Richard recognized this flower; it was the very scourge that Gunsmoke had destroyed years ago, and now he had no choice but to step into the heart of that scourge, regardless of whether another one was lurking inside.
"Damn! Another magnetic lock!?" Richard reached the end and found the door locked. There was a magnetic sensor device next to it, so he hurriedly pulled out his Tiger ID card to swipe it.
Beep—
The device emitted a red light, displaying "Insufficient Permissions."
"This is getting as thrilling as a horror movie escape," Richard grumbled. He fumbled through a stack of ID cards he had collected from his backpack, pulled out the herbivore ID cards, and checked them one by one while keeping an eye on the approaching killer dolls.
Richard knew there were two ID cards that were highly likely to work on the scanner. That's right—those two bastards, the Giraffe and the Black Bull, who had assaulted Miss Leopard.
"Found it." Richard pulled out the Giraffe's ID card and quickly tapped it against the scanner.
Beep beep—Click!
The door actually opened. Richard gave the killer dolls outside a standard middle-finger gesture and slammed the door shut with a bang.
Bang, bang, bang!
The killer dolls pounded frantically on the door, but the specially made electronic lock could not be forced open with brute strength.
It was then that Richard guessed the intent of the person who had left the escape signs in the corridor. They were indeed pointing the way, and they weren't stupid; they just hadn't been pointing the way for ordinary staff, but providing VIP escape directions for the 'elites' with high-level clearance.
Of course, it seemed that regardless of whether it was a VIP route or not, there were ultimately no survivors from the "accident" back then. Richard looked at the corridor before him, which was strewn with corpses.
At the end of the corridor was a room where a beam of light fell, illuminating an item display case. Inside was a locked-up doll with curly red hair and twin tails. She sat quietly in her glass cage with her eyes closed. As if sensing Richard's arrival, the doll opened her large, azure eyes, which crinkled into a smile, and a soft, sweet voice came from her mouth: "You found me."