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there could possibly be a few dozen man-eating creatures in the area, as well as the normal Avalon underground compliment of zombies and beasties, but he was completely unconcerned. He wasn't even surprised! Instead, he ignored any mention of monsters and was just extremely excited to see the armor and find out what it was. I wondered first if he was just crazy. As he talked, I got the feeling he knew a lot of things about a variety of subjects, so I began to think he was just some mad scientist who wasn't very practical or conscious of the world. Whether this was true or not, we just knew we needed to get him to the armor and keep him and his assistant alive.
    His assistant was a woman about our age named Abby Connors. Redheaded and pretty, she displayed the appropriate unease I expected for an underground expedition into monster territory. Unfortunately for her, Szandor kept trying to hit on her. He kept failing to pick up on the Not Interested vibe, a one whose vintage I recognized as the I Have A Boyfriend variety. She also seemed to have a great interest in documenting the expedition because she carried a camera with her. After this trip, I mentioned her to Paulie, who not only recognized her name, but was impressed that we had met her. Supposedly she had a Youtube channel or something popular with conspiracy theorists and Avalon truthers.
    Since they were civilians, we gave them the whole preamble about danger right before we went down into the tunnel system. I should have known something was up when they shared a look with each other and smiled. "We're not worried about danger," said Dane. They even had their own gas masks. We clipped LED lights on them - basically a small disc of light that provided short range light, enough at least for your personal space. We all also carried flashlights. Dane and Abby didn't carry weapons - that was the exclusive realm of my brother and I. Szandor had one of his beloved lead pipes and a crowbar in his pack. I carried my katana, a few flares, and a combat knife. We were ready for the typical residents of the underground - zombies, ghouls, maybe some snakes.
    If you've never been underground in a space with no lighting, nothing ever gives you the idea of just how dark it is. I love movies, but I can't say if I've ever seen a movie that really conveys the darkness. Movies that use too much darkness just look black and are hard to see, so that's not good cinematography. But real life is not a movie - it actually is really hard to see underground. There's an impenetrable blackness that surrounds you. You're never more aware of how short a distance light goes and how weak battery powered light is until you're underground. An LED light gives you a small bubble of light and a flashlight gives you a thin beam, but outside that, there's nothing. It's a world where nothing seems to exist when your narrow beam hasn't fallen upon it. It's an uncomfortable feeling where our brains can't build a visual map. We can't see the danger we want to know about. That dark is unnerving. It makes us walk a little closer to our companions, to want to hear their voices even when they have nothing to say. Something in the back of our brains always reverts to strength in numbers.
    In the dark, sounds are louder, especially ones that seem to come from outside the area you can see. Smells are sharper, which can be even worse since underground areas tend to have lots of lingering scents. You hear that tired statement that when blind, your other senses adapt. Down in the dark places, it's not exactly about adapting. In that darkness, where your light barely reaches anything, your mind is starved for sensory data. So if there's a scrape from far off, the chitter of a rat, or the sound of something falling, your mind snatches onto that as a big deal. Up in the light, such details will be forgotten, but in the dark when you have nothing to work with, everything is loud, everything makes you tense.
    And if, like my