Deciding discretion is the better part of valor, you take advantage of Talbot's transformation to make a dash for the stairway. Heart pounding in your chest, you steal a glance over your shoulder and immediately wish you hadn't: a lupine form is loping across the carpeted floor, rapidly gaining ground, while a colossal bat wings its way toward you from above. Arms pumping, lungs burning in your chest, you hear the wolf's eager howl from far too close behind and imagine its hot breath on your neck. Throwing on a last burst of speed, you plow through the double doors and half leap, half fall downstairs, taking them five at a time. Great leathery wings assail your face, and on the final step your ankle wrenches, eliciting an involuntary gasp of agony; forcing yourself through it with a last heroic effort, you dive out into the lobby to land in a crumpled heap on the floor.

But as you look up at the frightened faces of the theater patrons and hear the snarls behind you, you wonder if perhaps you should have thought this through a bit more carefully. Did you expect to be safe when you got back to the lobby? Unfortunately, you're not in a video game and there are no safe rooms, as the horrific carnage of the next few minutes attests to. And when rescue workers break into the theater tomorrow morning, a lobby full of mauled, partially devoured corpses and bodies drained of blood suggest that when the time came, you learned your lesson very, very well indeed.