Xaviers!

"Clever boy." one of the crewmen says as her reaches for the neck of another one. Claws tear through jugulars and trachea before the 'crewman' picks up the dieing sailor and throws him into the one who was about to enter the engine room.

Then Tosh blinks and it's just the three crewmen again, unharmed and kind of looking at Tosh oddly.

Tosh looked terrified then deeply confused. "I just... you were..." he said before getting scared again, "oh God... it's still in my head..."

That meant he couldn't trust anyone, anything, or even himself. Not even Bruce. The prospect made his spine feel like jelly.

That's when the alarm cuts out. Along with all the lights.

He shot to his feet. "Please tell me I imagined that," he said with a gulp.

The surprised Russian yelling and the accented "No. This bad." tells him that he probably didn't. Unless he's also imagining the other crewmen entirely.

"I'm going to use my powers so I can see. Please don't shoot me I'm not the monster," he warned. He shifted into Bruce for the shark dark-vision and charged up just enough for the membranes not covered by his X-suit to glow.

The crewmen look nervous in the flickering light of the giant shark-monster but it seems they at least listened to him. Kind of. They are nervously placing their hands on their side-arms as they keep an eye on Tosh.

"Something not right. Should find what tripped the lights. Probably fuse on deck above us." one of them informs Tosh while the other two mutter in Russian.

"This is not just a blown fuse guys. It's gotta be the creature," he said, keeping a watch. "But that's where an intruder would do this isn't it?"

"Whole block with no power. Must be the fuse." he nods.

"Then let's go fix it and show this thing it picked the wrong ship," he said bravely. Bruce wasn't having this whole fear thing just yet.

"Yes... You go first." the crewmember nervously gesticulates for Bruce to take point.

"Sure thing," he said. After a few steps he stopped, "Aaaand which way is it I'm going?"

"Ahead, door on left into stairwell. Up." he says, clearly annoyed because he doesn't want to stay in the oppressive semi-darkness any longer than he has to. The other two seem very twitchy as well, one of them even nudging Bruce in the back to get him to move.

"Okay okay, chillax, I'm going," he said as he went on his way. Truth be told; Bruce was getting a little nervous too. That thing could be anywhere and the crewmen wouldn't stand a chance against it.

As he opens the door to the stairwell he can hear the distorted echo of voices coming from above, along with the faintest impression of a blue glow filtering through the metal grates that make up most of the stairs.

He tensed, made a shushing motion that was probably lost due to his fishy features, and dimmed. Stealth wasn't his forte, okay?

A voice, distorted by the stairwell, says in Russian, "<Who goes there? Identify yourself.>"

Bruce may get a vague impression of feathers nearby as someone unseen tries to find the telepathic presence in the area.

Why am I thinking about feathers? Wait... "Sam?"

Bruce's mind-voice sounded unusually tentative.

"...it's Bruce," Sam says quietly to whoever is with her.

"Okay Bruce, I can appreciate that you're a bloody huge shark, but the Admiral is loaded for bear right now. You're going to want to take this slow."

As Sam stretches out her mental feelers she not also finds Bruce down there but also something else. Something lurking in the proverbial (and to her ravens somewhat literal) shadows. Something that in response turns her attention to her.

"I see you... So many sparks on this ship but yours... Down! Down to me, into the belly of the beast!"

Even in the low light the sudden change is noticeable. The stairs, the walls, everything is suddenly flaking away as if rust was rapidly tearing at it and with a sudden lurch the entire staircase gives away. Sam, Siberia and Bruce go tumbling down the dark shaft that seems to go on and on for much longer than the ship should be deep. Around them they can see others stumbling into the empty stairwell, falling along with them. Sam's ravens swirl around her and where she passes the walls seem to momentarily sprout black feathers themselves, creating a strange ribbon of rippling plumage that seems to follow their descent. When they finally land the impact isn't nearly as heavy as they might expect, they just suddenly come to a stop in some kind of cavern made entirely of ice. Countless distorted faces reflect in the clear walls almost as if they're trapped or maybe just moving around on the other side of the clear ice.

Siberia reflexively reaches out with her powers to try to grab control of the ice, trying to get a sense of how thick it is as she rolls to her knees. "<Status?>"

Sam grunts as she rights herself.

"...didn't tell me you had the bloody rabbit hole to Wonderland in your ship."

"Uhh... what the hell just... right... this... probably isn't real," Bruce said.

The ice feels strange, sluggish, only pliable in the way that liquid rock is. Slow and heavy.

"What's the matter?" female voices echo through the ice cavern in Russian yet somehow perfectly understandable to Sam and Tosh. "Can't get a good grip?" the voices laugh as the ice around them groans and shifts, the cavern they're in twisting and warping as it seems to shrink around them, the occasional narrow passage opening between chunks of ice as everything moves around.

Siberia growls and creates ice of her own, jamming it into the walls. Once in, it tries to worm its way in and stabilize the shifting structure. "<I am not amused by your choice of theatrics.>"

"Doesn't matter if it's real if we can't see past it," she says to Tosh.

She mentally gathers the flock around her, trying to create a small area of stability centered on herself and start to feel this out.

Siberia manages to force some stability into the cavern, although it's a constant process of shoring it up as 'her' ice seems to slip out of her control as it molds into the ice of the cavern.

Sam meanwhile seems to summon a flock of ravens to her that seem quite real, circling around her and taking up quite a bit of space in the cavern.

"...am I the only one that's seeing those? I mean... really seeing those?"

"I am indeed seeing them," Siberia says through gritted teeth as she continues wrestling with the ice walls.

"Yep, those are birds alright. So... we're in brainland then?"

"How are we supposed to even fight a shapeshifting monster with mind pow... ohh... Oh!" he said, excited by figuring something out.

"It shapeshifts too? Bloody hell."

Sam pulls the flock back into herself and tries to concentrate on envisioning the stairwell around her as she remembers it.

"Its gotta be your evil double right?" he asked.

"Are we seriously thinking mirror universes where everyone's evil exist? I mean, the Admiral's not evil."

For just a moment Sam feels like she can picture the stairwell. Tilted ninety degrees, the metal grating of the floor cold against the side of her face, Siberia on the ground a couple feet away. But then it slips away like a dream in the morning sun. Meanwhile Siberia's efforts seem to be driving wedges into the dreamscape, cracks appearing in the ice and spreading throughout the cave.

The moving shapes shimmering through the ice are bisected by fissures, occasionally splintering into small kaleidoscope fragments as if the figures weren't behind the ice but rather shadows trapped inside. With a sudden crack sections of the walls give away and bloated corpses tumble out, purple and black from frostbite but strangely preserved by the cold and all somehow resembling Siberia. And then they begin to move. Not significantly, more slowly writhing on the ground as they groan accusations in Russian.

"All your fault..." "Why..." "Let me die..."

"<I put you away long ago,>" Siberia says without emotion, her efforts shifting to creating small constructs to confront the shambling corpses.

"Well this one's evil," he said.

"Here's hoping we're unconscious," he added before rushing in to punch ice-zombie Terezas.

"I... think we are. It's pushing back pretty hard."

"And it doesn't have to be me we're up against."

Sam tries to push as well, focusing back on the stairwell, aiming to trace its contours on the area around them in this frozen hellscape.

The cavern doesn't seem like it wants to match the outside world at all. It almost feels like an intentional design. Or possibly instinctual but serving the same effect of denying that very trick by mismatching mental construct and real senses. Meanwhile the small constructs reach the corpses but intended by Siberia or not, where the two touch the constructs begin to slide over the corpses, slowly coating them in ice while they wail and convulse before ultimately freezing in contorted shapes all around them, the room growing quiet save for the wind howling through the circle of frozen corpses, a faint voice being carried in it.

"So little remorse... Numb all the way to the core." The room is beginning to feel rather frosty. Not that it was pleasant to begin with but it feels like a biting cold is suddenly radiating out from Siberia. "Unmoving. Unchanged. Preserved forever like an fly in amber in my mind."