Gray-green mud steadily revealed itself enough for Lawrence to trust stepping off of the boardwalk. Lifting his head, he found this new grove to be much darker and slightly dryer. Thick canopies suffocated the sky, making it hard to tell what time it truly was. The scanner's loud bleat scared him, immediately followed by screamed words that were utterly alien to him. He silenced it and shoved it into whichever pocket his hands found first. The preeminent dread pushed into his mind; the foreign marsh testing his memory, at least his belief in memory. A fragile lifeline, a dancing scent of sulfur, briefly secured his mind on something other than himself. Taking the moment to look around, to really look, he saw a misshapen inorganic black mass behind a few jagged trees. 

Against every instinct, he investigated. Peering from behind one of the trees he got a good look at it. It was made of what used to be smooth sides, now crumpled. The blackness shined glossy in the scarce light, broken up by seams of some kind. Some part of him, now deep, could recognize the object in some way. He struggled to bring it forward, opting to investigate further. Something stopped his footfall sooner than he expected. He found a large ridged object; perfectly round with a smaller hole in its center. Near the seams of the mass was a strange jutting-out piece of a different material. He instinctively knew he should grab on it and pull. Doing so caused the mass to creak and move towards him, startling him. The mass was now opened up to him, its movement settling back into uneasy stillness. 

Awkwardly, his eyes scanned the interior, a mess of strange shapes. Notably he found several men inside, limp and unmoving. Six sat upright, with three more behind some sort of partition; all strangely facing the same direction. Only now could he hear sounds from behind the partition. Instinct now moved him, against his logic, to move around the mass to the walls behind the partition. There he found another jutting shape, along with a window above to view the three static men inside. He pulled on the shape, the mass moved again but he was ready for it. With a clearer view, he could see the left-most man broke the symmetry of the other two by holding onto a round object in front of him. The round thing stemmed from the mass, an appendage of the thing. In front of all three men was the origin of the new sounds. A small rectangular source of light, inset to the mass with shifting amber colors. Foreign words blared from it, similar to what he heard moments ago, just calmer.