You follow the guide stripe through the tower's corridors. The place isn't exactly a maze, but you still might have trouble without a proper floor plan. For now, however, the guide stripe suffices. Curiously, they all ran in the same direction. The deeper you went into the tower, the more pronounced the smell of rot became - apparently the life support running on back-up power couldn't filter it out well enough.
The strips split up upon reaching a stairwell. The "Elevator" kept going, "Rail" pointed down, the remaining three pointed up. There was something more on and around the stairs, however...
Bodies, and quite a few of them. Here and there, a lightly armoured human, mutilated and already decaying, empty casings, spent magazines and the weapons of the fallen left lying around. Most of the corpses, however, were decidedly not human. The light and conditions weren't exactly favourable for an in-depth examination, but you could at least get some basic observation done.
The creatures seemed about the size of large dogs, though they were a bit more bulky in build once you got a close look at one. Four legs, with broad paws ending in short, though claws. A pronounced muscular tail. A long head. The lot covered in something hard and slightly shiny, perhaps chitin. An overwhelming majority of the creatures fell facing upstairs, and they were thoroughly riddled with bullet wounds - by the look of those, mostly assault rifles, though there were also a few that could've been made by a sidearm, some that seemed blown apart, perhaps from explosive ammunition... and something that was definitely a high-calibre machinegun. The floor along the stairs and around them seems to have been partially... digested by something, or at least the metal plates and faux-stone slabs have lost their smooth surface. It doesn't seem to have affected the structural integrity of the place much, but it's made a mess of the aesthetics. Or at least finished off what aesthetics the gun battle marks and corpses had left behind.
At any rate, the trail for corpses - mostly the odd creatures, with the occasional human... bits... mixed in - seems to come from the lower levels and run further upstairs. As luck would have it, that's where the "Engineering" stripe went as well...
