They hear the sounds of fighting behind them, the sounds of the fights that will determine if everyone on the ship lives or dies, stays sane or goes irrevocably mad. They are followed by things crawling in the dark, slinking--and sometimes bubbling along the walls.

This will be a fight. Some of them will have to hold off the hordes while others figure out how to free the Avatar from his prison. The problem at hand is that if they do it a moment too soon, the Nightmare King will be entirely freed, and if it's a moment too late, the last act of the Nightmare King will be to send along a pulse of energy through the glyphs that drives Aang insane, and then they'll have a mad demigod on their hands.

Those glyphs seem to be the key. They run from the room where the great stone is to the room where Aang is imprisoned in--

In a stone sarcophagus? That can't be where he's been all this time, can it? Locked away in a space no larger than a coffin?

Nearby are ugly contraptions with many tubes, stained with what looks like dried blood, and there is an experimental table set up nearby, with patterns and notes, glyphs and vials, and a computer console. The vials are stained brown with what looks like dried blood as well. The window to the room is broken, but the person who broke it--Jaime Reyes--doesn't remember it, as there had been two people he'd been with then that GLaDoS had stolen away. With his memory of them had gone the memory of this place, and that is the tragedy, that someone had known the sarcophagus was here--and then forgotten by the time this knowledge could have helped them find Aang sooner.

The tubes and things all hook up to the sarcophagus standing upright with its back set against the wall. It's a strange and horrible looking contraption, holes where the eyes should be, strange and ugly designs on the torso that were almost too horrible to be called writing--just like that around the black stone. On each arm, however, are scrawled very interesting designs that don't quite match the rest of the symbols--on an arm, swirling designs that look like air, on another, designs that look like water. On a leg, earth, on the other, fire.

If there are any doubts left at all, however, even after seeing those designs, eyes inside the sarcophagus suddenly open, glowing a bright blue that's likely familiar to a few in the room. They're very old, old, eyes.



All this time, he'd been kept alive in his prison, in a state of semi-suspended animation. Awake, aware, his body growing, his muscles kept from atrophying, his body kept fed and hydrated and clean. He'd been kept alive in a prison hardly larger than a coffin, and hardly able to move for well over a year. For some, this would have been enough to drive them insane. For Aang, it had just been all the more reasons to leave his body and use the powers granted to him by his prison to visit the dreams of the others and protect them.

If the other teams lose their fight, nothing this team does will matter. However, if the others win and defeat the Nightmare King...

They have about a minute or two to figure out how to free Aang, without accidentally freeing the Nightmare King first, before Aang's driven irrevocably insane. All while holding off hordes of horrible grotesques.

Good luck, guys!