Book One Chapter Seven

# **Chapter VII:**

## Viridan Forest, Stonemill, IZ 144/6/76 (K), Sunday, April 1, 2059, Corrie Entra - The Ugly Truth -

"This is a verbal letter addressed to my pen pal. I am sending you this to tell you about a couple of things, the first of which is about the truth, the ugly truth and how much we don't know about it. I know that may be disappointing, but there are many things even I am blind to. Another thing I have to tell you about is your excursion to Seamark. Whatever you do, do not go. I don't exactly know why at this moment, but all I know is that it's too dangerous.

I know how much this journalist excursion means to you, but the risk isn't worth it. I have to go in order to set things into motion, and I am more than willing to write all of the reports. Even if you're interested in that which I doubt you are, it wouldn't be plagiarism for obvious reasons. Back to the point, I do know what I have to do and you are going to have to trust me. There is a small but real chance that this is the last message I send to you, and if it is, please follow these instructions.

## Seamark, Ironhall, IZ 144/6/76 (M), Friday, April 6, 2059, Gemenii Anzhani - The Roar of a Distant Storm -

It was a breezy and bright evening, nights that could be typically seen in Seamark's early April season. It's the ugly time between when the dead of January ends and the growth of May is into full-force. In the past couple of days, I've heard a series of rumors about a certain complex made specifically for "Fun for the whole family", funded and headed by the Unsung Nebulas, a very popular and well-renowned band which I used to consider my favorite in the world.

They were my favorite band for years, and even at this time I still held a lot of love and respect for their music. It was always the people who everyone referred to as 'the crazies' who perpetuated these rumors about them, and though I started off dismissing them, soon enough I started to believe them. A couple of days prior it came to the point where I couldn't let it rest and I had to investigate.

That day I devised a great fool-proof plan that had no risk of danger to myself or property. Of course that's the opposite of what it was, and embarrassingly I only realized it was a bad idea when I was staring down the building about to go in. Something about being the one who was brave enough to actually go in and try and prove or disprove the rumors was so enthralling to me, especially because of how much I loved the band.

Target: StarWorld. The building is massive and imposing, standing tall over a large parking lot in Charlie's District, Seamark. It rests on the countryside side of the road, one side looking out into untamed wild plains whilst the other looks over a gloomy, grimy, industrial city. One thing about Charlie's District is that it's barely populated and located on the outskirts of a gloomy metropolis filled with gloomy people living in gloomy homes working gloomy jobs, which hopefully gives a good picture of this place.

I live in Charlie's District and I have all my life, most of those years spent on my own. I used to reject the fact that spending so much time on the streets fucked me up, but I slowly started to think that was true. I always viewed myself as hardened and mature for my age, in large part due to my past and a persistent courage which tends to lead me down questionable routes, and the road to StarWorld was one of these roads.

It was long after closing hours, thirty minutes before midnight. I didn't expect the front doors to be open, but to my surprise they were. A quiet thought in the back of my head sung that they somehow foresaw my arrival, but I tried to ignore that. I didn't want any negative thoughts in my head knowing how dangerous this could be. I collected my thoughts for a minute after opening the door just a crack, and then I went right in, silently closing the large glass doors behind me.

"It's never what it seems to be, they say," I said to myself as I walked into the empty building.

Dimmish violet neon lights lit up the round hallway in front of me, illuminating the smooth spacey-purple walls. There were overhead lights but those were off, the purple and yellow lights embedded into the top and bottom of the walls to light up the place. There were stickers of stars, posters, decorations, and murals painted all over the walls, the vibrancy of such contrasting to the cool colors of the doors and muddy grey tones of the carpet that lined the floor and a small portion of the walls.

Lots of tiny pieces of glitter and other colors were bedded into the carpet, adding a barely noticeable splash. The ceilings were painted either a very light pink or yellow, or plain white. I looked around to the benches beside decorative shrubs in long square planters that lined the hallways, and the other large decorations in the middle of the hallway, their purpose seemingly to establish two flows of traffic going either way throughout the building.

I'd been in here a couple of times in the past, without a permit of course, but it was never after closing time. The spacey-glam rock, neon aesthetic of the building seemed to come alive more with only the lights on the walls and decorations giving off light. The lights seemed to flicker in and out very slowly but I wasn't too sure. It was cool to get a new perspective on this place, though things looked rather off and unsettling in this light.

The main building I was standing in is a four-story large circle which serves as somewhat of a central hub with plenty of rooms and hallways branching off from it. Extending from the left and right sides are two shorter two-story square buildings which house most of the rooms in the complex, and at the back of the main building is a smaller single-story building which also houses more rooms. These rooms are everything from dining rooms to pool rooms, and plenty of other fun things.

A continuous circular hallway runs around the floors of the main building, the inner side housing show rooms, meeting rooms, and the like. I directly faced one of these meeting rooms as I stood in front of the doorway, guarded by a glass door adorned with a large EMPLOYEES ONLY sign. I carefully walked closer to take a look. Inside were the main bandmates Mila Doravin, Maverik Careva, Easton Lochame, Luna Aldenoy, Ash Natimo, and Chester Rekuie, my favorite, as well as a woman I did not recognize.

All of the bandmates are coronians, Chester a fire-orange feline, Mila a tabby with pearly white mittens, Easton a bright orange buck with crimson hair, Luna a pale-blue rabbit, Ash a gold and black fox, and Maverik a purply red bird with very colorful wings and deep purple stripes. The woman was a pandorian, appearing to be in her early twenties with straight blonde hair. She seemed to be some sort of manager by the way they all watched her speak.

I looked to their faces, awash with varying expressions. Chester was the closest to me and I could have sworn I saw him look at me for a second, his face wracked with guilt and regret. I couldn't understand the conversation, but I could make out a few sporadic words. From what little I could gather, the woman at the head of the table seemed to respond to the name Claire. Before I could think too much though, they all got up and I ran behind a display.

From what I could hear, all of them dispersed in either direction. I wondered what they do after closing hours in this place. When do they go home? Do they live here? I assumed they did because I never saw any of them leave, and I assumed they slept up in the fourth floor which is off-limits to guests. The brief silence was broken by one set of soft footsteps coming right towards where I was hiding. I could feel myself start shaking, but then a familiar voice spoke out.

"Hey, you don't need to hide from me, ok? I want to know what you're doing here after closing." Chester spoke in a hushed tone.

"..."

"I have a hunch on why you're here too."

"Why am I here?" I could tell he was being quiet for a good reason, and I whispered to him as well.

"Because you know the rumors are true."

"Wait really? What?" As he said that, I popped up and stood on top of the bench, meeting Chester's eyes at his kneeling height.

"I don't want it to go on any longer. We're all part of it, but I'm the only one who can't bear to keep the secret any longer."

"That's great! We can work together to expose the truth then!"

"It's complicated, it always is. I don't even know how accurate the 'harmful rumors' that we just discussed as a group are, but I assume those drove you in here. I want to know something. Can you handle the ugly truth? You look pretty young so I'm really not sure. Are you sure you want to do this?"

"Yes. If what I've heard is true then I want to uncover the truth. I think the world should know."

"Well then. I'm sure you understand how dangerous this is and how scarring it can be, correct?"

"I've heavily considered the risks and I've made up my mind to come here. Let's do this!"

"Alright. I will do my absolute best to protect you, because I want the truth I regretfully helped to hide for so long to come out just as much as you do. Now, to start things off, it'll probably take us two nights, but that depends on a lot of things. It could take more, it could take less, but I'm shooting for two."

"Why nights?"

"I want you out by sunrise at 6:30 AM. There are a couple of emergency exits so it won't be too hard as long as things go relatively smoothly. It's also a lot easier to do this outside of operating hours."

"Right. Let's get started, what's first?"

"I'll guide you through everything. First thing's first-" Suddenly he stopped speaking and pretended to fix the plant. I was confused but he mouthed the phrase "sit down" and I silently slunk towards the bench, hiding behind the little wall with the planter boxes. After a minute, Luna approached us and talked to Chester.

"Hey C have you seen my bass? I can't find it anywhere."

"Uh sorry I haven't. Check with Maverik he's the tech guy, or even better Claire she seems to know where everything is. Have you talked to them?"

"Haven't found them yet. I swear this place gets harder to navigate every day."

"Good luck,"

"Thanks, I'll need luck to even find the last room I might have left it in this shithole." She walked off into the barely lit hallways and disappeared around the wide corner to the right. Before we went on, he gave me a small cellphone-like device with two earpieces connected to communicate through voice and text which he could give me instructions through. He mentioned that the process of getting where we needed to would be rather complex. He didn't quite say where it was we were going at the time though.

He told me to go to a specific room on the second level labeled 'Security Control C-a" where there would be a computer. Chester would be looking around to gauge the whereabouts the others were while I went off, as well as to try and act natural. It felt exciting to be on my own in the dark, but it was also terrifying. The main stairway I went up was located on the back of the first level, and the lights seemed to either be really dim there or they gradually became dim going down the hall.

I slunk up the dark stairs and walked across the second level towards the security room. I opened and very slowly closed the door as to not make a sound. Inside the small room was a desk with a computer with several monitors with a large comfortable chair, as well as some boxes and large air vents labeled MAINTENENCE VENT. I sat down in the chair and turned on the main screen, being pretty confused initially, but when Chester explained it to me, it was rather simple.

The audio quality wasn't the best, but I could still understand what he was saying. I managed to unlock all of the doors to the series of stairwells that we would be using. He finally explained to me that we were headed to the basement, and then to the sub-basement which was referred to as Basement 2. When he said the name of the level his voice seemed to tremble a bit. After I clicked open on all of them, I clicked a button on the keyboard that read FINISH OPERATION.

Right after I pressed it, A small speaker tucked into a corner on the ceiling kicked on and spoke "Maintenance gates 1 through 7 now open". I went into a panic because I didn't know if it was on the loudspeakers in the hallways or not. I hoped it wasn't, and by the way Chester spoke when I told him it was open I assumed it was only in here. Although I had opened the stairwells, there were a couple more steps to go, one stop in Basement 1 and another in Basement 2.

I stood at the door ready to open it as he gave me more details about the next step. I would have to go into another one of these maintenance rooms and do a similar thing as to what I just did, although this would be much harder. For one, the basement levels are a lot larger than the main floor layers, apparently spanning underneath the entire complex and part of the parking lot. Another large fork would be in how Basement 1 is a giant maze.

Originally the large maze was intended to be another attraction to this 'Theme park' but it was deemed to be too difficult and dangerous. Before I went outside I paused a bit to make sure the coast was clear, and I quietly asked what the deal with Claire was. He told me something rather surprising, and that was that she joined the team rather recently and had been just as scared of what they were doing as Chester, and just as powerless to stop it.

"She went to the police and they told her to shut up. I've gone too and they didn't believe me. She seems to be a bit more willing to do it than I am so I'm assuming there's some kind of incentive for her, or maybe the opposite."

"What do you mean by the opposite?"

"... um just meet me in the Basement 1 level of Stairwell D-b ok? It doesn't have an entrance on the second floor so you have to go up a level. The staircase is your best bet and it's on the opposite side of the level. Good luck,"

The feed cut out and I was plunged back into isolation. I opened and quietly shut the door and briskly walked down the curve of the hall. The lights on the walls were just as dim as they were near the staircase on the first floor. The large third staircase came into view, made the same shiny and modern looking style as everything else. I slowly went up, my quiet footsteps echoing in the stillness of the building. Even the ambience of the building was rather quiet.

Other than the sounds I made, the only other sounds were distant clamor, the buzz of the lights, and the electrical hum of the AC and other electrical units. The sound of my shoes on the steps felt so loud. It was even darker up here for some reason, and the lights were barely on at all. Tall, thin windows on the wall poured moonlight sparsely onto some parts of the room. I decided to try and make a run for the stairs, but I went the full loop and missed it.

I hid behind another one of the displays in the middle of the wide hallways for a moment to catch my breath. Just after I sat down, I heard footsteps rounding the corner. I covered my mouth and slowed my breathing for a moment. I couldn't tell who it was at first when they were rounding the corner, but I could hear them muttering to themself about something. She got *very* close to me and when she passed, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Just as I did, she stopped dead in her tracks and started looking around for a moment. I held my breath. After a long pause, she pulled out a walkie-talkie and said that she heard something near the stairs to the third floor. She said something about a possible intruder in the building and walked away. As she went back down the hallway, I took a peek to see that it was Claire who nearly spotted me. I felt slightly betrayed that she was the one to call me out, but then again she didn't know why I was here.

When it fell quiet, Chester spoke to me, startling me a bit. He told me that they all have sensitive hearing so I had to be *really* careful about everything I did to not get caught, but it looked like it was too little too late for that now. I asked where the staircase was and he told me it was on the inside wall, but if for some reason I couldn't get to it, I could go to the first floor and take one of the three that go to Basement 1.

My feelings were a weird mix of fear and excitement. It seemed like I had really overshot where the staircase was so I had to backtrack quite a bit. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to find the right stairwell because the rooms are all labeled in a very arbitrary way, but when I did find it, I heard footsteps behind me. My heart dropped into my chest, and I saw two options: Go into the stairwell or make a run for it, but I didn't get enough time for the first option.

"Hey! It's past closing!" I glanced over my shoulder to see Easton standing in the darkness. I made a run for it, sprinting down the hallway. I could hear him running after me, his footsteps heavy and loud on the carpet. He ran a lot faster than I did, but I managed to hop behind one of the displays before he rounded the corner.

"Where are you? Are you lost? I'll take you home if you just come with me," I knew he was trying to lure me out, and I wasn't falling for it. He walked slowly down the hallway, as if he was trying to sniff me out, but I barely made a sound. He walked by just as I shifted my weight. He stopped just like Claire did when she noticed me.

"Come on out," He said. I didn't say anything and stayed silent. He seemed to give up and walked in the other direction. Once he was far enough away I made a run for the nearest stairwell and went down to the first level, running into another nearby stairwell that led to Basement 1, coincidentally at the stairs on the other end of the basement. This was no problem though because that's where we would meet to get to Basement 2.

Before I could go in, I heard passing footsteps in the distance. Conveniently, there was a large tree which was the perfect size for me to hide behind. I curled up and didn't even look at who it was, only focusing on the voices. Whoever was talking seemed to be pretty heated. They kept blabbering to each other, likely about some behind-the-scenes drama. Once I could tell they were right beside me, they stopped in their tracks and the conversation escalated.

"You know, I've had it up to HERE with you!" I could tell one of the voices was Mila's, but the other one was dubious. "I feel like sometimes you're only here to spite me with everything you do, or you're blaming me for something completely pointless like stealing your shit!"

"You're just mad because I stole your man aren't you?" I couldn't tell whether the second voice was Luna or Maverick due to Luna's lower tone.

"SEE? This is what I mean! You like to rub that in my face all the time! I don't care about it you know I don't!"

"If you didn't care you wouldn't react like that."

"Why you BITCH!" Right as she said that, I heard a slap connect. Out of all the things I expected, a catfight wasn't one of them. I could hear them going at it for a bit before one of them ran off seemingly in tears.

"That's right, go run off to your man!" Mila shouted. She started mumbling to herself about how much of an asshole someone was as she walked the other direction. Once they were both gone and I processed what just happened, I made my move for the stairs. I thought I heard someone else behind but I ignored it thinking it was just Mila walking away.

I took a deep breath and opened the door, immediately being hit with sharp fluorescent lights and cold air. There was a heavy dingy smell in the air, and in front of me was a maze of large light beige plates held in metal borders. I couldn't tell quite what the material was but it looked like soft particle board. I took a couple of steps towards the maze open in front of me, and just as I did the doors swung open behind me.

"Better start running, kid!" I glanced back to see Ash standing in the doorway. I turned back and ran through the maze, hoping I'd get to the center faster this way. I felt my throat dry up and I intentionally went down a dead end to catch a short break. Surprisingly, I could access my pocket dimension in the basement, but it didn't have anything useful other than my water bottle. It made a noise as I drank, and he definitely heard it.

"Somebody's thirsty haha," He was rather far from me, and I put the bottle away and started going forwards to keep my distance. As I went continued along, a good idea popped into my head. I realized I could use noises to distract him and throw him off course because sound was likely the way he was tracking me. Before I could use it though, I climbed onto some nearby boxes and looked over the walls to see how close I was to the center.

The room was pretty far off, which put into scale for me how big this place is. I realized the direction I needed to go and plotted a rough course judging by the openings in the walls. On my way down I found a stone resting on the concrete ground and threw it over the walls, making an audible plink sound as it hit a metal border. The sound broke over the ambience of fluorescent hum, but he saw through my rouse and called me out on it.

"Trying to distract me, huh? I'm not that stupid," His voice was very close by, probably on the other side of the wall from me. I decided to take it slow to stay quieter and went through the maze at a slower pace, scratching the walls on the right track with a jagged piece of metal I found on the floor incase I needed to go back. I checked when I could and threw stones over to check my distance, hearing at least one noise from him which marked our distance, getting larger and larger.

When I stopped to listen one more time, I heard his footsteps come close and then stop. I assumed he was behind the wall I was crouching in front of, but when I looked back, I saw him staring at me with an awful grin across his face from the corner of the maze. I immediately got up and started running, hitting a couple of dead ends on the way. I didn't look back or set my bearings for a full two minutes, my mind being dead set on running.

"How fuckin big is this place?" I could just barely make out Ash say as I sprinted towards the middle.

I ran until I couldn't and I stopped to catch my breath for a moment, taking slow and quiet breaths. I took my metal water bottle back out and took a quick drink too. As I put it back I could still hear his footsteps, thankfully farther back this time though. I peeked over the walls and saw that I was pretty close to the middle, so I decided to wait for the right time and just run for it. I made sure he went a different route and then I went off.

I kept running and I only needed to head in a direct line to get to the room. When I got to it, I looked back and saw him behind me, running as fast as he could. The door was heavy and required a couple of attempts to open, but I got it open and then slammed it shut right as he got to it, hearing his body slam into it. I slid the heavy lock on the door and waited for him to stop banging on it and yelling. I saw him stare at me through the thick window, glare at me and then walk away.

The thick metal walls of the room were painted black, and the layout of the room was fairly similar to the other security rooms, though a lot more cramped and with more clutter. I was sure he would alert the others to my location, so I had to act fast. I assumed Chester would stop them from going through the staircase he was waiting in. I waited for a minute, but he didn't tell me anything. I unlocked every door in Basement 1 and then all the doors to Basement 2.

Another automated voice came over the small speaker, but this one was garbled and distorted. Before I left, I grabbed a notepad off the table and made a sketch of the route of the maze from one side to the other so I didn't forget, and then put it in my pocket dimension. I used the map to get to the other side much quicker than it took me to get to the center, and I was met with another really heavy door. I tugged hard on it and it nearly hit me in the face as it swung open.

Walking into the bright light of the staircase, I saw Chester standing quietly next to the door. He was standing in a closed off way, and the fur on his face was wet with tears. He looked up at me and stared at me with guilt in his eyes. I felt so sorry for him, having had to bear what appeared to be an immense weight on his own shoulders. Judging by what I've observed from Chester, it seemed that whatever these secrets held were different from what I had initially thought.

The stories of fraud, embezzlement, and shady dealings were what I had been told cast a shadow over this place. Over the past couple of hours I slowly begun to realize how naïve I had been over everything. How I hadn't picked up the very obvious hints Chester dropped and how defensive they were about whatever was going on here. I also noticed plenty of other things which finally hit me at that crucial moment, like how weird and deflective Chester was acting.

"This is it, the last barrier. I've held this behind me for so long, I hope you're ready. It's down a couple hallways from this door." He spoke with shame in his eyes.

"It's not your fault, don't blame yourself for this. If what you told me is correct, you and Claire had the least involvement, and I'm assuming they threatened you. Am I correct?"

"... yes. That's why I'd been so hesitant and I still am. I don't know if I'm even ready," His voice started to tremble as we spoke.

"I'll go in, we'll go together." My words seemed to make him tear up a bit.

Chester nodded his head and opened the large, heavy door to the second basement level. Ahead of me was a long hallway with a hard metal floor partially covered in coarse sand, the walls crowded with metal fence-like walls and various boxes and metal objects. A couple of the dim light blue fluorescent lights cast dimly over the area we stood in. Chester explained to me that this was a storage area where they kept a lot of the machinery that they use throughout their theme park, as well as an area for maintenance and the like.

Dirty steel and copper pipes and wires spanned across the walls and ceilings, jutting into the darkness behind the grates that lined the hallways. As we took a few steps, the rest of the row light up one by one, each making a shutting sound as they turned on. As we went a bit further in passing under flickering lights, we begun to kick up a lot of dust from the ground. The air was filled with a fine mist which I initially thought was dust, but it didn't match the colors at all.

As well as this, I noticed that everything was covered in a thin layer of grime, and some of the shelves were rusted. This place is pretty popular which made me wonder why it was so dirty down here. We kept going through a couple of twists and turns, passing by a couple of rooms. Chester would point these out as we walked past them, and mentioned they contained a lot of robot parts and plenty of other things like mascot costumes.

"They even have some old mascot costumes laying around, but we don't use those anymore after.. nevermind."

"You mentioned the size of this place earlier, do you know how big it really is or is that a guess? I heard Ash being rather confused by the basement's size earlier."

"Yes, it is a rough guestimate. Most of the others haven't done much poking around down here except for the few important areas which are all concentrated around this old and rickety maintenance stairwell which I didn't even know about until last week. I had been through that hallway so many times but I never noticed it because it was tucked away."

Chester didn't know for sure, but he assumed that one of the purposes of the robotics and some other machines stored about was "to make their... process easier". I wasn't sure what he meant by that, but I would soon find out. He changed the topic off of that pretty quickly after accidentally bringing it up. I noticed a lot of very precariously stacked boxes, one of which was only held by a broom. I didn't pay much mind to these.

"There are plenty of things down here. Some things I know about, some I don't, some I wish I didn't. These robots fall into a gray area where for some of them I can only assume."

Not too far into the basement, Chester instructed me to take off my earpiece and shut down my cellphone so we couldn't be tracked or our conversations tapped into. He didn't want to take any risks of letting the others know we had made it down here. I put the earpieces into their slot on the bottom of the device and set it down without thinking, and then we kept walking down the hall.

There were a couple of random things he pointed out, the most important of which was what he referred to as the 'tube room'. He didn't explain anything about what the strange machinery in it was for but he said he had a hunch we'd be going back to it later. All of it seemed so odd to me, yet there was so much deliberate planning and meticulous placement that seemed to go into everything in the basement.

Shortly after this room and a couple more down the hall, we came to a long metal wall that extended from the fenced wall from the left and stopped at the concrete wall on the right. There were two large sliding doors with large handles. There was a passcode dial to the left of it, its cover door hanging open. I looked at him and he looked at me, and the both of us nodded to each other. He approached the pad and input the code 6-6-6-6, a small ringtone played and the lock was opened.

"What's up ahead? I wish I didn't know. There's no turning back now." Chester spoke.

"I suppose I'll find out,"

"It's time the truth comes out. . ." He spoke softly, tears welling up in his eyes.

Chester paused for a moment, staring at the large doors in front of us. I could almost feel the emotions bleeding out of his head. The sorrow, the agony, the regret. The more and more I picked up on his feelings, I begun to realize that whatever this was was far worse than what I thought, far worse than what I could have ever imagined. I noticed him look to the right of the doors for a moment where there was a small plaque with an inscription.

"Destruction breathes life." He read quietly. "It's not fair. One hundred seventy-nine."

He grabbed onto the large handles and pulled the doors apart, revealing another area. There was a pretty big distinction between the two areas right up to the dividing wall. The floor was a lot softer, and seemed to be made out of dirt, or something similar rather than some sand on steel plates. The color of the floor was a deep crimson or brown. There were only a few shelves here, and much more dust lingering in the air, becoming very visible in the beams of the flickering ceiling lights.

We stood at a bend in the hallway and continued down the turn, Chester walking ahead of me as we did. As I followed him down the turn, I got a horrible shiver. After another short turn, a long hallway opened up in front of us, splitting off in three directions. We walked towards the middle of the junction and opposite the middle of the three hallways was a large metal door with the number 1 painted over it.

Only the middle hallway was illuminated all the way down with lights and doors spanning all the way down the path, stopping at what appeared to be a circular room with a large door at the end of it. I couldn't make out much of the features of that room due to it being so far. The side hallways were dark and ominous. They were just as wide as all the others, but there didn't seem to be anything down there, as if I was staring into the open maw of a creature about to swallow me whole.

"What have I done?" He whispered to himself. He stared at the door for a moment with tears streaming down his face, and then opened the heavy door.

The room was dark with dirty dark turquoise padded walls, although they were hard to the touch. The floor was the same color but made of concrete. The walls and floors were covered in spots and streaks of various deep desaturated colors. In the center of the room was a large ritual circle, and around it were six masses of bone and rotten tissues. Whatever they were, they didn't appear to be people, or perhaps they once were. These were amalgamations of decay, blood, and death.

When I saw it, I threw up onto the ground and fell to my knees. My body felt heavy, almost as if there was an invisible force pulling me on a rope towards the floor. I didn't think I would want to run so badly until I saw the truth. Although this was a terrible sight, I knew that I had to see the rest. I wanted to know how deep it went. I wanted to know how bad it was. Even knowing how badly I reacted to the first, I knew I had to see the rest to fully understand everything.

"I want to see the rest." I said coldly, my voice shaky.

"Really? You haven't seen enough?" His voice cracked as he spoke.

"I have to see it all. Not just for me to fully picture it all, but for the victims, to commit their existence, even in this state to my memory."

"I understand. There are twenty-nine more rooms." As he spoke he gave me an awful glare before he quickly looked away.

He took me down the main hallway, having doors on either side of the hallway. Due to the way the hallways intersected and how the left and right hallways came out at different angles, the rooms on the left side were staggered from those on the right, the first on the left being closer than that on the right. The numbers were staggered as well, the first on the left being numbered two while the other was numbered three.

Every door was the same sorry scene, each with variations in the inhuman lumps of rot and the color and patterns of the blood-stained walls. As the numbers went up, it only seemed to get worse as the bodies became less and less rotten and more and more humanoid, although all of them were anything but. These were merely approximations of the figures of pandorians and coronians of various ages, horribly disfigured and destroyed with awful proportions. Riddled with bones and teeth jutting out everywhere.

"The eyes., oh God those eyes." My whispers barely came out through my parched throat.

They stared into the depths of my heart, oh how they stared. It was as if going up in numbers was watching the figures slowly decay in reverse. I threw up so many times, my heart was racing the whole time, I cried so hard I got thirsty, but I didn't stop. I couldn't. It wasn't like staring at a trainwreck, I was seeing the remnants of something I didn't understand, something I couldn't comprehend at that point. I didn't know what the symbols meant, I didn't know why or how this happened, but I was going to find out.

The state of the rooms seemed to get worse as we got deeper into the heart of the facility. It all became more violent and less rotten, the disfigured faces and jagged teeth becoming more clear and bone more harshly and deeply scared, coming to the point where they were shattered and broken. As we both walked down the hall, I realized I wasn't even scared anymore as we got closer to the end. I was just appalled, solemn, and otherwise emotionless. It all had the same impact as before, just with the absence of fear.

We approached a large circular area and stared at the large metal door, made of the same off-jade colored metal as all of the other doors with the same crisscross reinforcing beams across it. Chester mentioned that he had never seen this door before, even though I knew had been to these further rooms, but apparently he had never been through the door or even noticed it before, so naturally I hesitated to open it. I expected it to be something worse than all of the other rooms combined.

My expectations were broken by there being nothing in particular of note. It was scarily average, yet it was very unique. The floor and walls were made of a brighter concrete with the same fluorescent lights as everywhere else. The room was fairly large, around the same size as the other rooms on this side of the basement, though this one had two staircases on the back wall which faced the front and turned to the center, meeting at a small landing and going up a while, with a landing at the top and two red doors.

I decided to walk up the stairs and inspected the doors. They had warning tape on the top and bottom, as well as large handles. I tried pulling them but it didn't budge, and then I tried pushing them. I could hear chains rattling on the other side, signaling that it was locked from the outside. Whoever locked it clearly didn't want anyone getting out of here.

"There are two chains on the other side. You're not getting out this way." He said. I walked down the stairs and back into the room, and then I noticed it was past 6.

"Oh fuck it's 6:05!" Out of time, I scrambled for an escape plan while I spoke.

My comment sent a shocked expression across Chester's face, but he jumped into action quickly. He mentioned that there was a way out nearby, instructing me to climb onto his back. He ran swiftly back down the hallways with his torso bent forwards so I didn't eat the ceiling or any lower pipes. I could see the rooms that we passed by earlier, now flashing by in dark green and red glimpses. He went through the gate and into the tube in the mechanical bay, where he stopped and let me down.

He headed to a computer that was sitting on a table on the left side of the room beside some giant tubes and turned it on. Chester told me that they were escape tubes, their purpose was for easily eliminating clutter in the basement. As far as he knew, they were only used during the basement's construction. He showed me how to operate them as well, just incase I had to do it without him if we ever got separated from each other and I needed to escape without detection.

It seemed like a rather simple mechanism, not too different from an elevator that just went really fast. There were three tubes, all with a large opening at the bottom and a sort of pedestal where the waste or whatever was being ejected would be placed. The openings were pretty big, larger than one would expect for something designed to eject robot parts and building materials. He told me how to use it, and it was much easier than I expected.

Looking around the room, I noticed just how oddly empty it felt. The bare concrete walls seemed to lack the clutter that was persistent in the rest of the basement. Beside the open entrance which oddly lacked the old steel doors like every other room down here was a sharp corner, and further left of it facing the door from the computer was an empty shelf. The only other thing in here besides the computers were some faded chalk circles on the ground.

"You're probably the bravest person I've ever met, but there's still more. More to find, and possibly a more.. safe exit." We ran back through the mech bay up to the stairs and made it into the main floor. Before I went through the door, Chester had one more thing for me.

"Oh yeah, one final thing I promise. Probably."

"Is it important?"

"Yes it is actually. Do you still have your LSCCD? localized shortwave communications cellular device?"

"The cellphone thing? I don't I think I left it somewhere. Do you want me to run and find it?"

"No time. I have like 5 so it's fine." He gave me another one and I promised I wouldn't lose it this time. Chester headed for the door and we went through. The door closed hard behind us, sending a jolt of fear through my body. I was crouched close to the ground while Chester stood tall looking over his shoulder. He seemed to notice something down the hall. A shocked and strained expression washed over his face, and he looked down the hall and then back to me.

"I am so sorry, I have to go," He said quietly. Before I could speak, he ran down the hall to the left leaving me in the dust. I was stunned for a moment, but then my mind snapped back into motion. I stared into the darkness into the opposite direction Chester ran, and I could make out two pairs of eyes staring down at me, one unlike any of the others. My heart skipped a beat in the second it took for my inner voice told me to run for my life. The front door was blocked off by the two eyes so my only option was the tube room.

"COME AND GET ME YOU ASSHOLES!" I shouted out into the darkness. As my words echoed throughout the halls, I saw one of the pairs of eyes come forward. Before they could reveal themself, I ran back through the door and down to the mech bay, confident I could beat whoever it was down the stairs. I managed to make it half way to the tube room before I was tackled by Ash. He was heavier than I thought and his weight nearly crushed me against the hard ground.

"You're not goin anywhere, kid." He said in a sinister voice.

"Let go of me!"

"No, you're coming with me!"

"Wait a second, can I get your autograph?" I tried to distract him by throwing him off, and somehow it worked and just before he could take out a pen he realized how I'd tricked him.

"What? Now isn't the time for this shit!"

"Hear me out."

"No, you hear me out-" I bolted away as he was talking. "HEY GET BACK HERE YOU LITTLE SHIT!"

I ran through the basement with Ash following close behind. He kept shouting at me as we ran about something but I wasn't paying attention. On the way I remembered the broom and sure enough it was right up ahead. Once I got to it, I kicked it sending a flurry of boxes flying all over the ground. I glanced over my shoulder to see him picking them up hurriedly and then he looked up at me with a worried expression.

"Fuck this, I'm not riskin' it for some kid." I wasn't sure if those were his words, but I'd later find out they likely were if my hindsight guess on what he meant was true.

Without much time to spare, I made it into the room. I fumbled around with the computer for about a minute trying to remember exactly what it was Chester had told me. I set a timer on the computer and stepped inside the tube. I braced for the impact, but to my surprise it didn't go up nearly as fast as he had described it going. I assumed he was either wrong or it went up slower the more weight was on it.

The tube sent me up, and right as I got to the top, my watch hit 6:30 AM. The area I was in was a small exterior room, and when I opened the doors, daylight flooded inside the tiny area. Fresh air tasted weird, being exposed to the grimy and dust-filled air down in the depths of the complex. I walked away from the building, out of the parking lot, and into the nearby library, seeing if I could dig up anything about the place, or any other useful information.

Once I had some time to think, the weight of everything begun to hit me all at once. The weight of all of the crimes mostly, but also the actions of everyone else. The fleeting glimpses of conversation and observations on the actions of all the bandmates other than Chester gave me a small idea of how dangerous they were and what their personality was like. Even after all of this time I hadn't known much about their personalities, except for my favorite, Chester.

I knew the most about him going in, and he was the only one I had actually talked to before. A couple times at StarWorld and once when I came across him on the street. I always observed him to be very kind and rather shy. You wouldn't expect him to act like that from how he projects himself on-stage and in most very public areas. He also seems to trip over his words quite a lot and he's rather bad at keeping secrets.

Though he does tend to reveal plenty of things he clearly doesn't, I don't think it's due to him having bad intentions, or at least I hope it's not that. It's clear he's hiding a lot from me but I didn't know anything quite yet so I decided to hold my judgement, though I would keep my suspicion. Even though he seemed pretty strong on the outside, it was clear to me that those closer to him know just how vulnerable that was, and that vulnerability was revealed to me by a mass message which was sent to my LSCCD.

"HEADER: DISREESS SIGNAL

Someone, anyone, please help me. I am being held against my will. I am scared, I am fearful for my life. I'm not alone. Help me. Someone. Please."

Looking at the words sent chills down my spine. Although there was no way I could know it was Chester sending it, I had a nasty hunch it was. I couldn't think of anyone else that could send it, and the time didn't make too much sense. I got the message at around 9:30 AM, so it was possible that in that time Chester got taken into the basement where *something* happened. It would also make sense for him because he had multiple LSCCDs, though that raises the question of who else has them.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason I couldn't send texts through mine so I couldn't respond, and peculiarly, the message was gone within a couple of minutes which was rather suspicious. A couple of hours afterwards while I was doing some research I got another mass message which talked about telling the others to not send joke messages with worrying connotations. Extra suspicious, but I couldn't do anything about it until nightfall.

Turns out I spent the whole day in the Library down the street, trying to dig up anything I could about the place. I looked through records about the place's existence and anything related to any of the disappearances in the area that I now knew were all related to StarWorld. I felt sick just thinking the number 179 aloud. It conjured the images of the ungodly horrors that existed in those rooms with the ritual circles buried deep underground.

Unfortunately, the information I did find wasn't very useful to me because none of any of the incidents I looked at could be linked back to StarWorld in any way; only a slight few even mentioned the complex. It seemed to me as though information about individuals would be useless to me and impossible to find, but it seemed to be as though there could be a bigger picture. It seemed to be as though there could have been useful information here after all, even though it may not have seemed that way.

When I had first seen these tragedies firsthand I assumed their victims were people who visited the place during the day, but looking at the locations of all the missing reports; where the victims were last seen, only six were last seen at StarWorld. There didn't seem to be a correlation between disappearances of groups of six together, and some were last seen as far as Hollow, located on the opposite side of the country of Ironhall. These bastards were smart.

Slowly, the scope of the operation became very clear to me. It was much larger than I could have ever thought. The rumors I heard those days were so tame compared to the ugly truth. I had gotten myself wrapped up into something larger than I ever could have imagined, all sort-of by accident. I looked deep inside my soul and saw that I didn't want to turn back. Seeing the ruin and decay set something off inside my heart. I knew that I would go back, and as the clock drew near to midnight, I left the library.

I stared up at the building again, a distant storm looming over the Sea whose rain was slowly starting to fall all around me in the parking lot. I felt a mix of emotions; fear, sorrow, anger, pride. To me, it felt like the final door that I was staring down. Another large, greenish metal door that stood four stories tall in the middle of a broken city. I was ready to end this, once and for all. Chester told me that there was more, deeper into the heart of this hell and I was ready to uncover it.

...

I wasted no time, getting inside just after midnight. They were still in their meeting which seemed rather heated at that point, one of their points probably being my appearance. I decided to wait for them to disperse on the second floor in one of the security rooms. I wanted to hold off for Chester's call to open the doors, but I could still use the cameras to find him so we could decide what was going to happen next. I saw him in the same stairwell that we went down yesterday, and I made my way down.

"Chester! You're alright!" I spoke hushed but excitedly.

"Yes I am. You got my message, correct?"

"I did. I'm glad you're alright."

"There's more I have to show you..."

Chester looked very solemn, but he seemed ready to take the weight off of his shoulders. He told me everything that we needed to do tonight, and it would be a lot of back and forth repetition like what I did last night. Almost the entire building was on lockdown, including most of the rooms on the first two floors and the entire third floor. I was given a specific floorplan and order of rooms to go by in order to regain access to the basement.

The plan was to unlock the rooms on the second floor from the first floor, then to make my way to the newly unlocked third floor to unlock the rest of the doors and the doors to Basement 1, then go from Basement 1 to Basement 2. Now that everyone was alert, it was going to be a lot harder to get around, but then I remembered the large box vents that I noticed yesterday. I asked Chester about them, and he mentioned that they were made to be crawled through.

"Let's do this!" I said.

I made my way to the nearest security room and swiftly unlocked the second floor, hatching a plan to use only the vents to traverse floors. I had gone around these halls so much last night that I had the rough floorplan committed to memory, so this wouldn't be too difficult to pull off. The hardest part was unscrewing the grates to gain access to the vents, but it became somewhat easy once I found a screwdriver in a room on the second floor.

Once I got to the computers I was able to go around and unlock entire floors as a whole rather than unlocking just the stairwell doors, and although I wasn't instructed to do so, I figured giving myself more places to hide would be a great idea. Knowing what I was getting into and recalling all of the close calls I had last night drove me to do this even though I assumed we'd be spending most of the night in the basement again.

From bottom to top to Basement 1, the whole process took around an hour and a half. A good amount of that time was spent either opening the vents or in the vents. Even though I could imagine that I made a lot of noise in there and the walls seemed pretty thin, I felt safe up there. I would sit in there for hours on end, listening to all of the distant faint sounds to get a sense of what was happening around me in brief moments of pure loneliness.

Though it got rather lonely and claustrophobic in the vents, one of these moments got broken up by a conversation between Chester and either Luna or Maverick. It was similar to the voice I heard fighting with Mila yesterday however it was a bit higher. Similarly to that conversation, the topic was seemingly on Mila. By the way they talked, it almost seemed like the two of them were rather close.

"I feel like she's been rather worked up lately, though I'm not sure because I didn't see her last night." Chester spoke.

"Now that you mention it, I didn't see you last night either."

"I only ran into Luna, Ash, and Easton. Nobody else which is rather strange, even stranger now that you bring up Mila because according to everyone else she was seemingly going around and giving everyone grief yesterday, even Claire."

"Yeah, she's a real firestarter. I had a fight with her yesterday but she ran off."

"Wow. I never thought she'd be the type to instigate so much drama."

"You know how overconfident she is, *especially* with relationships. Something must have sent her over the edge last night."

"Maybe it's how close we are."

"What does our- oh you mean the 179 huh?"

"Yeah. I've observed it slowly pull on everyone more and more, even on myself. Also, what were you about to say?"

"I thought it was about our relationship. How close we are, and how close we are to being found out. I'm worried about that and you're even more worried."

"We both know I have a lot more than that to worry about, especially now, anyways I should probably go.

"I'll see you later Chester, alright?"

"Bye bye honey," I could make out the sounds of hugging and kissing. I nearly let out a noise trying to stifle my cringe.

A couple of times I came really close to being caught, so close that I decided against going into the vents. As well as moments like those, I also was able to occasionally peer through the grates of the vent into rooms where the bandmates were. When I was going around the second floor, I observed Ash and Mila together with cleaning equipment. It looked like they were previously cleaning one of the show-rooms, but they seemed pretty preoccupied with each other's lips. Perhaps what Chester and the other were talking about were spot-on.

When I got to the security room in Basement 1 and opened up the last door, I got the idea to lock the others out just in case they tried to come after us. Chester wasn't sure if the maintenance stairwell could be locked though, so he thought it best not to take our chances with it. I was also reminded of the cameras when I was down there, and used them to spy on everyone else. There weren't any cameras in the basement levels though, probably due to the nature of how they were used.

My heart dropped a little when I realized they were all looking for me, likely tipped off from a near-miss earlier. Seeing how good they were at following my trail gave me an interesting idea; to make them think I was hiding upstairs when in reality I was back down in the basement which would hopefully buy us some time. I knew that this wasn't going to be like last night when they weren't organized or motivated so the extra help would likely be needed.

Chester seemed pretty opposed to it, stating that it was stupid and risky, but I could tell he saw the value in it. My plan was to go up to the third floor, make a shit ton of noise and then sneak down to the basement before I could get caught. If I was careful enough I could evade detection and effectively vanish from them, but I begun to doubt myself once I exited Basement 1 and started heading up for the third floor.

He stayed in the security room and watched me on the cameras as I got back to the main levels of the building and set the plan into motion. I didn't bother to be too quiet, but I also didn't want to alert everyone to my exact location. Finding a good balance was very important. I walked through the quiet halls until I got to the first staircase, when I began to hear footsteps. I stopped in my tracks, but instead of running, I walked slowly up the stairs pretending not to notice they were there.

"There you are! You can run but you can't hide!" Mila shouted up to me from down the hall below.

I froze a little for a second, but I jumped into gear when she started sprinting at me. I ran up the stairs and down the wide hallway to the second main stairway. I thought I lost her and I took a short break. A small moment of respite was needed after a scare like that. It felt like everything was going smoothly now that I was so close to the third floor, but then everything crash-landed. As I neared the stairs, I heard pounding footsteps on the soft floor behind me.

Claire, Mila, Easton, and Luna were all running full-speed towards me, nearly tripping over each other, Claire falling to the back of the group. I managed to swiftly get up the stairs and open the door to the nearest security room to make it look like I went in there. Once it was open I quietly slipped into the stairwell nearby and silently opened and closed the door, remaining just out of sight to the others. I stared at the door, hearing a click indicating it being locked, sending a wave of relief throughout my body.

Without time to waste, I silently crept down all the way to the entrance to Basement 2 where Chester was waiting for me. He opened the door with the same solemn expression on his face, however this time he looked much more serious and angry at me. We both walked into Basement 2, through the machine bay, and into the second section past the wide wall. All the doors were still open, and I got a shiver as we walked by the rooms.

Everything still felt the same though things were noticeably different. Other than the remnants of some of the knocked over boxes from last night, there were plenty other things which weren't as I remembered them. At one point we passed by a box which seemed to contain a robot lookalike to Chester, kept in near-mint condition. I didn't bring it up nor did I bring up most of the differences except for the one that stuck out the most to me. The air felt warm and heavier today.

Chester noted that he felt the change, and on top of the difference in weight and temperature, something else in the air felt different though I couldn't place what. I assumed part of the feeling was from knowing what was lying here, in the rooms ahead. We were headed down the main hall with all of the awful rooms, the doors still open revealing the gore of past destruction. We stopped at the circular room at the end of the hallway, the door on the other side still slightly ajar.

"There's more. There's a third level, but it was sealed off. If I'm correct it should be just below here." Chester spoke in a grave tone.

"There's a third basement level? What could be down there?"

"If I'm not mistaken, then the vague idea I have is correct. I've only been down there once, when they found *the source*, the trigger to all of this."

"You're losing me Chester,"

"I know it sounds crazy, and I can't really explain it either, but you have to trust me."

"Alright. Let's get to work, do you have anything we can use to dig with?"

"Right here," He pulled a large tool bag out of his pocket dimension, mentioning that he grabbed it from the mech bay earlier in the day. He tossed it to the ground.

"Hand me a shovel, I'll start us off." He tossed one of the three shovels that lay in the tool bag. I caught it with the blade about an inch from my face.

I continued to dig into the soft dirt, Chester using one of the other shovels to sweep the dirt to the corner behind him. He stopped for a minute to run back and look for a rope or ladder so that we would be able to get out of the hole we were digging, and I continued on. Keeping the images of the distorted decay and the crimes this band had committed fresh in my mind helped me to keep going, to push through the burning pain, digging deeper and deeper into the core of this complex.

He came back with the rope just as I hit metal, the two of us looking at each other with solemn excitement. I pushed away the rest of the dirt, forming a nice and wide entrance. Chester motioned for an electric cutter from the tool bag, and I tossed it to him as well as the batteries which he loaded like shotgun pellets. The metal floor was similar to the grated floor present in the mech bay, and I could just barely see a room beneath, bathed in harsh light.

The motor of the electric saw roared to life, sawing through the thin floor with ease. He sawed almost a full circle into the ground and operated it like a trapdoor, opening and closing it. He motioned for the rope and stood wide on the floor. I climbed onto his shoulders with the rope in hand and tied it to one of the thick metal pipes that held close to the ceiling of the room. I made sure to tie a tight knot, and we tested it to make sure it held well.

Now it was time for us to descend and with plenty of slack, he tied the rope loosely around my waist and ripped off the severed part of the floor. The hole in the dirt down to the metal was roughly my height at around 5 feet, putting the depth of this third level into perspective. I lowered myself into the room below, sitting on the floor and slowly descending down as if I were doing a pull-up on the jagged metal, hopping down once I was ready, ready to finally unveil the final secrets this place held. . .

***To be continued.***

## ?, IZ 144/6/76 (T), Wednesday, April 14, 2059, placeholder - Fireflies -

A pink sunset crept over the sky between the trees. Golden clouds cast shadows across the clearing around me. I laid face-up in the cool grass and stared past the canopy into the evolving sunset. The clouds seemed to form somewhat of a coup in the sky as the light of the sun faded from bright blue to shades of orange, red, yellow, and pink. I didn't know where in the world I was, but I thought that in the future I'd want to come back here again to watch the sunsets.

Earlier that day, I was marooned into this forest by a wormhole. I had intended to spend one night on a trail through the more forgiving mountain regions of northern Stonemill, but now I was completely lost. I suppose it's best that someone who knows their way around the wilderness should get lost rather than someone without hope does. Even though I'm fairly experienced in the outdoors, this time felt different. As night drew closer I begun to feel a faint sense of dread.

I thought little of it and enjoyed the sunset that was developing around me. As the brilliant colors begun to fade to deep blues and purples the night begun to come to life. The forest around me grew dark whilst the last traces of the sun over the canopy begun to slowly die out. The sky above me was filled with technicolor streaks of varying colors, spreading outward from the sun and bending around the clouds that hung above.

Something about the way the sun gripped the dying lights of the sky as it fell was so mesmerizing; like watching a black hole suck in a blanket of starlight. As I watched the colors fade to a dark, dark runny indigo the faint sense of dread begun to return. Even in a place filled with so much life, I felt more alone than ever. Once the sun was long gone past the trees and forest floor, the stars came out and the fireflies begun to float around me.

After I found a nice spot to set up, I pitched up a tent and set up a hang for my food. It didn't take me too long to get my camp set up and after a long day of wandering around through endless trees I was pretty tired. I decided to go to sleep rather early without much concern, and before long I started to doze off. Slowly and peacefully I begun to fall asleep, but as I grew more tired the sense of dread begun to grow back.

Like a tiny little spark in the back of my head it started, growing louder and louder as time went on to the point I couldn't simply ignore it. My eyes flew open and I scanned the walls of my tent for a sign of anything, but there were none. I passed out pretty quickly after that spook, the feeling having died down. It was about 3:30 when I woke up with a start though, feeling the same dread return. This time I didn't get up though, I felt like I couldn't.

The air was filled with the distant chatter of crickets and nightbirds, but over it there seemed to be something else. I could barely make it out at first over the conversations in the trees around me, but slowly it started to grow closer accompanied by heavy footsteps. The noise was breathy and akin to strained breath. It sounded like whatever was making the noise was letting out final breaths through a throat forced shut, or something similar to that of wind running through a tight seal in a window.

I didn't move a single muscle, hoping what I thought was a goose would pass soon and leave me alone. In my daze I didn't take the time to consider that a goose wouldn't make loud footsteps, or any at all. It was only in the morning when I woke up again that the memory of the incident started to ring alarm bells. I wasn't sure how long it stayed near my tent but I hoped it wasn't a long time. The thought of something unknown stalking me in the middle of the woods at night wasn't very pleasant to think about.

My decision was to throw out the thought of whatever could have been outside my tent as I packed up my campsite, preparing to go looking for civilization again. It didn't take as long as it normally did, and I couldn't tell if it actually went faster or if it felt like that because my mind was racing the whole time. I went due East, knowing that if I ran into coast or something else I at least had three other cardinal directions to go.

Past the edge of the clearing was a swath of tall pine trees growing on mossy ground. The air was fresh with the smell of sap and rain. The flowers on the ground had recently opened up, signifying the arrival of the spring season which explained all of the bugs. It seemed to be a bit too early for the fireflies and June bugs, but nature can be strange like that sometimes, and I didn't have a clue where I was and therefore no knowledge of its climate.

Over the walk, the damp moss turned into short grasses as the tall clustered trees transitioned into sparse bushes and oaks forming some kind of meadow. The grass was overgrown in the areas in direct sunlight, fighting for the most light over all the other flowers blooming in the area. I went through a couple of transitions like this from forest to meadow or thick clearing and back to forest again, but then I smelt something new.

If you've ever been near freshwater lakes a lot, you'll know they can give off a certain smell. About 5 or 6 hours into the walk that day I begun to smell it. At that point, the ground was reddish dirt and clay with a layer of pine pine needles, rocks, twigs, and small mushrooms and vegetation thirsty for a sip of the light breaking through the tightly knit canopy of pine up above. I followed the smell of water and the natural downwards slope to a type of clearing, this one of a new kind.

A large open lake filled the horizon in front of me as I stared out on the edge of a cliff of red ground. From where I was standing, I could see the land around transition to the more alpine terrain that dominated the area, forming a perpendicular edge to the ledge I stood on. I stepped over to it and looked out to see a series of massive rocks half eroded by waves, appearing almost as if there was a natural bridge of the same red-orange clay I stood on that had been slowly swept away over time.

The forest floor crunched below my feet as I walked to the greener side where the reddish clay met the old stone, meeting on the backdrop of crystal clear turquoise water and the sun on a clear day. The mostly clear sky was a big contrast to the cloudy skies of yesterday, finally breaking at sundown. Perhaps it was due to the open sunlight but that day felt unseasonably warm for the middle of April, but then again I didn't know where I was and I assumed I was somewhere more South than I had thought.

If I were a bit more well versed in geography I'd attempt to guess where in the world I was. For as avid a hiker/explorer as I am, I know a *shockingly* small amount about geography. A gust of wind blew through the trees as a strange thought crossed my mind. I put my camping gear down next to a tree on the alpine ridge, took a few steps back and ran to the ledge. I hopped over to the first large rock which didn't even budge as I landed on the small mossy patch in the center.

Making a jump to the next and so on wouldn't be too difficult due to their proximity to each other and the angle of the rocks. Some of them sloped to one side, every single one having a small grassy or mossy patch in the center with a couple of small plants growing inside of the circle. I landed on my hands and feet, and I picked myself up and kept going from one to the next, soon coming out to form a very smooth rhythm. I hopped along all the way until the end, stopping on the ledge out of breath.

As if I was scouting out the area beyond the rocks, I looked into the woods ahead and only saw more of the same coastal red clay and thick forest. I took the less fun way back to get my gear and walked back through the woods, figuring I'd follow the trail. It felt like a sign that I was going in the right direction. People tend to live near water so finding a lake and possibly a river somewhere down the line were a great sign.

Unfortunately my long and arduous journey around more than half the perimeter of the lake turned up empty for both any signs of people and any rivers, so I carried on heading off East. Ahead laid more and more of the same tall trees and red ground covered in the shed of the canopy and various plants. Unlike the area preceding it, the scenery didn't change much for a long time and though I liked the colors of the forest, it got boring after a while.

It was hours later, after I stopped for lunch and kept going on for much longer that I finally encountered another change in the scenery. The forest had gradually thinned out for a short distance and the red rock gave way to hills of prairie grasses and meadow smells. The hills weren't very difficult to climb even with all the camping gear, though I was still careful as to not go down too steep of a hill. There were plenty of large rocks and jagged trees here too.

Once I got to this point it was already starting to get late into the day. It was around 4 PM when I got to the hills, and it took another hour and a half before I stumbled upon a more suitable area to stop and pitch a tent up. It was another small clearing like the one I was in last night, though this one was less defined as a clearing due to how sparse the trees to the west of it were. There were plenty on the eastern side as the forest became more dense again, and should I had continued down east I'd be headed into another thick wood.

Within an hour, I had my stoves going to prepare my dinner perched in a short patch of grass in the flat clearing I had chosen to sleep. Something about the feeling of staring into the late afternoon glow was the reason I enjoyed going camping and exploring. Seeing the colors of the dying lights dance in the sunset as I eat my dinner was enchanting. There were only a few sparse clouds overhead, slowly marching over the clear blue sky.

There wasn't much else to do other than read and sketch, so that's what I did for the last couple hours of daylight. I took out my things and begun to sketch the forest around me, trying my best to encapsulate the aura that emanated around me that day, and the golden hour above me. The woods seemed deathly still in the absence of movement beyond that of the clouds and the flora swaying in a slow, occasional wind.

Other than the light breeze through the canopy and the sounds of birds somewhere far off in the distance, it was very quiet. Even the noise that was present was distant and quiet, seemingly far too quiet for a typical wooded area like this. Just last night, I was next to a similarly wooded area and the bugs and birds wouldn't shut up. Why was it so different tonight? I wondered if it was the location or the weather, but it didn't seem to make sense any way I sliced it.

A long, long day of walking east for hours had worn be down and I was ready for sleep just after sunset. I didn't see the familiar red streaks of sunset that usually tell for a clear day ahead, but the sky shone brilliantly nonetheless. It seemed almost dreamlike how the sky looked at those hours, but I was sure I wasn't dreaming, proven by a couple of embarrassing slips and trips I had decided to not mention until now.

Just like how it was while I was still sketching the woods, the night was rather silent. Not a single hint of beating wings or chirps from the bugs was present, only distant birds and faded grasses swaying with the breeze made any sound outside the walls of my tent. That night, in the absence of anything else to break my mind away from the thoughts of my situation, they stole the forefront of my imagination.

Rationing food would become a necessity soon if I wasn't going to find a way back to civilization, and seeing as I'd gone this far in two days and I was still in the middle of nowhere made me start to accept a new home. My hunting skills were above average but they were nothing special, though if it came to it I figured I'd be improving them soon if I didn't get a good plan set in stone. Though I had a rough plan, it was very basic and just barely enough for me to scrape by on.

Going in one direction like I had been seemed to be a good choice, though it was essentially pointless if I was very far from the nearest anything; a shot in the dark with a high rate of failure and a large consequence if it missed. Energy was my most important resource and seeing how I was completely on my own, falling into the trap of consuming too much was something I couldn't let happen, thus I wanted to avoid large detours if I could.

The constant anxiety eventually lapsed long enough for me to fall asleep. That night I dreamt about finding some weird awesome massive cave in the middle of the woods I was exploring earlier today. I can only recall distant images of it, but it stuck with me because of how real the images in my mind were. I wasn't sure what was so captivating about the massive open maw of the earth that made my brain latch onto it, but I didn't question it.

I woke up to notice a slightly off feeling. I hobbled out of the tent just before the crimson dawn rose above the horizon, an old omen of a coming storm. I wasn't afraid of a storm and I was determined to go as far as I could before the rain caught up. As I opened my tent to take it down, a group of fireflies flew by in the low dawn light, reminding me of their existence and absence since the night before last.

Just another random strange thing. There begun to become a point where the tiny bits of weirdness added up too often for me to simply brush them off, and this small thing was getting close to that turning point. After breakfast and teardown I continued my way on east, into the thick wood across the clearing. It was more of the same thing, just tall trees and grass and all that. The scenery gets boring after a while, but it never loses its serenity.

The sky above was overcast and dreary, confirming the suspicions of last night. Highs and lows, a beautiful day followed by a yucky one; such is life. Things can change fast overnight, especially in nature. She's a cruel mistress with many tricks up her sleeve, and an outdoorsman like me knows a lot about these; mostly from experience. I've done too many stupid things to trust myself around cliffs over bodies of water anymore.

Even though I was expecting a storm of some kind very soon, I didn't feel scared or uncomfortable at all. I owed my ease to being in a calm and beautiful environment. Who knew being lost in the middle of nowhere could look and feel so great? The smell of pine, bark, and rot combining with the fresh, moist air brewed a sweet cocktail for the senses. The way every smell and sight weaved together seemed far too meticulous to not be intentional in some way, like how dreams weave the most perfect paths.

After two hours of a walk through more thick woods, the air begun to get more noticeably wet and the smell of petrichor begun to find its way to my nose. I didn't care too much about getting caught in the rain which was sure to start soon so I went further on. I wanted to see how far I could go before the rain started, maybe see another biome change like the many I crossed through yesterday, but I didn't get the time.

Distant at first, the sound of rain hitting the leaves on the trees and the forest floor began to draw near. It was just before 10 in the morning when the rain started, and I decided to pitch back up to get some shelter from the rain in case it got worse. It started out as a soft morning rain forming a quiet ambience as it hit the tent walls around me. I took out my sketchbook and started sketching scenes from my journey over the past two days.

Outside my walls the storm begun to slowly increase in intensity, pounding harder and harder as my cool hands worked against the paper. The intensity of the storm only fueled the sketches and it begun to weave itself into them. What previously represented the red coast in sunlight begun to morph into waves crashing against the rocks on the shore as a deluge engulfed everything around, with a figure of myself standing small in the center of the image.

In all of my sketches of this place, the last detail I would include would be a small silhouette of myself standing and staring into the distance in the very bottom of the frame. I'm unsure of what possessed me to start the trend, but it continued in every sketch I did of this landscape, working its way to become a series of works all housed in an old leatherbound sketchbook of mine which I used to document the world around me. Sometimes I wonder if it was a way of coping with the loneliness of it all, or if I was trying to capture the scene.

I went on for hours sketching away, only stopping for an hour to eat my lunch at 1 O'clock. At 2 I started another new drawing, this one of the massive cave I saw in my dream the previous night. It was still pretty fresh in my mind which made it rather easy to visualize and sketch out on paper. Around this time, the storm had come to a short lull and for a couple of minutes I thought it was starting to pass until the distant sound of a thunder clap broke the serenity of the soothing soft rain.

The noise jolted me awake even though it was so quiet, letting me know what was on the horizon. I felt safe in my tent, but I was unaware of just how chaotic the storm would be. Its slow approach took it roughly forty minutes to reach me, and once it started, *it started.* The rain picked up immensely, pounding on the tent and trees and ground like bullets raining down from machinegun fire. The thunder was immensely loud as the lightning struck all around me.

Nothing could have prepared me for a storm this violent, easily taking the prize for the most insane storm I've ever had the displeasure of being caught in. The winds raged and whipped the forest. I could hear the distinct sound of trees snapping and falling in the heavy wind all around me, making me fear that one could fall right on top of me. Because I had everything in my tent it wouldn't be light enough to get blown away, but that didn't stop my brain from pushing those thoughts.

During the chaos I positioned myself between my camping bag and the floor, the bag angled upwards resting on the platform for the stove. My head was right where the edge of the stove platform was, the bag laying tilted to the floor between my legs. It was far from proper cover but it made me feel safe as I gripped on for dear life. A raging crash of wind and rain kept pelting the tent to the point where I begun to wonder if it would go through the netting.

Over all of the rain and thunder, I could hear the noises of the birds going wild. It was unlike anything I'd ever heard before, like a completely guttural call of the forest screaming in agony as the storm pelted it. The rain begun to turn into hail after around ten or so minutes of this chaos. I could hear the pellets of hail breaking against the thick trees and smacking into the ground around me. Judging by the sounds they made on impact, they were large.

As the hail came down the birds and distant indistinct chatter of the fauna became more loud and harsh, reacting in real time. It felt like the culmination of a horribly vivid and brutal nightmare. The noise and intensity begun to climb a couple of minutes after the hail, and slowly started to grow in intensity. It was clear that the storm was on top of me once the thunder became deafening, the lightning could be seen directly through the mesh, and the hail did its best to pummel the tent.

The only light outside was from the flashes of lightning every couple of seconds, and even though my eyes were glued to the bottom of the bag and my arms wrapped around it like steel chains, I still felt no more exposed than the trees just outside the thin walls. It climbed up in intensity throwing everything it could at the forest below, growing into a cacophony of previously unseen scale to anything I have ever witnessed, and then silence.

I was in the eye of the storm. I crawled out from my hiding spot and crept out of the tent, stepping onto the soaked ground. The pellets of ice were roughly the size of tennis balls and they littered the forest floor along with fallen trees, branches, sticks, and needles of the tall fir trees that stood all around me. I stared up into the sky and into the deep blue sky above. The clouds all around it were a cold dark grey, casting deep shadows over everything.

What I felt in that moment was almost indescribably raw. The breakneck winds clamed to a breeze here and the moist air and smell of destroyed pine and the freshness of the woods flew all around me just as the fireflies did that morning. I looked down only to glance at my watch, seeing the time 3:33 flash across the screen in the bright afternoon atmosphere. All I could react to it with was a slight, dejected "of course," before I turned back to the sky.

Lingering on more of these random coincidences wasn't something I wanted to do then. All I wanted was to enjoy such a sacred moment before the world was plunged back into the hellish storm that was looming all around. I tried to ignore the dark walls of hail and wind all around me. I wasn't sure how I long I stayed in that spot staring into the sky and taking in the moment of respite, but I ducked back into the tent right as the edge of the eye begun to pass over me.

Heading back inside with perfect timing, I waited out the rest of the storm in fear and panic, knowing that the worst was finally over. It took a long time for the storm to dissipate, and for a chunk of that time I remained hidden in the same spot between the camping kit and the stove platform. I stayed there until the heavy rain returned in place of the hail as the storm continued its long and grueling march down the canopy.

I decided to continue sketching for the next couple of hours as the storm begin to pass, the two drawings I started and finished in that time ending up violent and vivid depictions of nightmares from years past. I don't remember what those two drawing contained but I remember shuddering a bit when I looked at them later. It felt like the horrible storm had awoken something primal inside my soul which faded as the storm begun to pass.

Once it did and the once mighty chaos of the powerful storm slowed and twisted and faded into a very light rain, I closed the sketchbook and waited a couple more minutes for the quiet pitter patter to fade into only the sound of the breeze rolling over the soaked ground and trees all around. I felt rather tired after a long day of doing nothing but waiting out a storm. A bout a minute after it stopped I stepped outside and looked at the carnage all around me.

The sky was overcast, but it was a lot lighter than it was during the storm. Broken trees rose up all around me, their branches resting on the ground. More than half of the trees were missing branches, and a good chunk of them were broken. Branches and parts of entire trees were littered all over the forest floor, one of them fully uprooted landed right beside my tent. I looked down at my arm again, and it was just past 6:30.

Almost 9 hours is crazy to think about when talking about the length of a storm. The fact that most of the day had passed on seemed hard to comprehend at that point, every hour of it having blurred together in hindsight except for a coupe of moments. The minutes in the eye of the storm felt like real minutes and not tiny glimpses of time speeding by like the rest of the storm was. I could barely picture in my head what I had just been drawing due to how blurry the day was.

Dinnertime was upon me then and I brought all of my kit to a drier and more clear part of the woods nearby in sight of my tent. The late afternoon was fair and moist, being much warmer than I would expect from such a gloomy day that started off so cold. I ate half of a meal kit and called that my dinner, but I didn't decide to end the day just yet. I quickly packed up and went further east to try and find another place to set up.

I had forgotten about the clearing a couple hours my back bearing, but even if I had known I wouldn't have taken that choice over chance. The forest turned hilly again and I strained over some higher bluffs in search of a more consistent area. I could see mountains off in the distance to the south which I hadn't noticed earlier which allowed for the change in terrain to make much more sense in my head. I thought about what laid beyond and made that my goal to figure out.

The further I went into the wilderness the more I realized the scale of the storm. The extent of the damage seemed to be everywhere around me and completely unavoidable. Even as the forest grew back into a more meadow-like area filed with tall grass, the signs of damage were all throughout the area too. The grass was windswept and most of the trees here had been managed by the wind and hail; an easy target as they stood in the open elements.

Luckily, I managed to find a flat clearing on the edge of the meadow nearby another forest just before sundown. The lightshow was rather disappointing. Not to say that not all sunsets don't have beauty, this one certainly did with its deep reds and oranges and purples, it was simply unremarkable. Even a pretty average sunset half obscured by slowly parting hanging clouds is a nice sight to behold.

Just like last night, no fireflies or really anything. I thought that things would be different now that I was in a very different area but I was wrong. One would think the borders between biomes like these would be a lot more active than they were that night. I didn't understand why, and there probably wasn't a good reason for it other than another random small detail of weirdness or coincidence that happened along the road.

Only when I was in my tent and climbing into my sleeping bag after watching the sunset and reading that my mind floated back to the screen of my watch. I recalled how unbelievable that was, but again I brushed it off without too much second thought. Similarly to the sunset hours after, the series of odd occurrences had become simply unremarkable; course for routine now just as the meals were and the daily pitch up and teardown of the sites.

After a while of dwelling on my situation for a good while, I naturally fell asleep. In that dream I saw a boat resting on a shoreline, the waves gently lapping against the sand. I got the feeing I didn't belong which made me think I was somehow in someone else's dream. Up ahead on the grassy bank up the shore there was a figure sitting with his butt on the grass and his feet on the sand. He didn't have shoes on and he seemed to be enjoying the view.

Features begun to pronounce themselves as I cautiously approached. Long golden hair with black streaks trailing down, deep orange eyes, long antlers, and somewhat short stature. He was staring off at something in the distance, but I wasn't sure if it was much of anything. When I got close enough to make out his eye color and some scars on his arms, he turned to me and smiled at me with his eyes closed.

"Hello there, ya look a bit lost."

"Well um yeah I've been lost for like three day-"

"No I mean here, silly! This isn't your dream is it?"

"I-I don't know I guess not?"

"Well, hopefully you come back soon, and next time maybe he'll be here. Anyways, while while you're here enjoy the view while it lasts."

"Where even are we?"

"Somewhere in Strial. If I'm being honest, I'm not sure exactly where."

I looked around and saw a large cliffside behind the two of us, stretching closer to the sea going off to the left. The dark rocks of the tall cliff seemed to cuff the forests of pine against the soft sand of the beach. I sat down beside him and we both laid back in the grass, watching the clouds roll and the sunlight beam across the waters, but the moments were fleeting. I felt myself starting to wake up, and I could see myself begin to fade out of the dream. He got up and smiled at me as I left.

"Hopefully I see you soon!"

I woke up slowly in the middle of a quiet night and fell right back asleep, though I was left with a hollow feeling. I didn't know who the man I saw in my dreams was, nor did I know where we were in that dream. It felt so real and I assumed it was a real place, but I had sure as hell never been to a place like that because I surely would have remembered it. Being as tired as I was then I decided to just ignore it completely and forget about it until the morning.

When I woke up, I instantly remembered it and tucked the memory into my growing folder of mental notes on every strange thing that happened, and that morning was no exception. A couple of fireflies flew about in the low morning light as I started to set up my breakfast. Even though the overcast dawn was shady, it still felt very warm. Warmer than the other day when it was summer weather, even in the morning before the sun had come out.

Sunrise broke through parting clouds as I ate my breakfast. Within two hours the clouds had all but completely vanished from the sky similarly to the other day. Once I finished my food I packed up and headed on my way. I veered off towards the south as I continued into the unknown. I had a thought of there being some kind of city beyond the mountains, built along the rivers which would likely split off from it. Though it was a pretty big risk, I decided that I had nothing to loose as I was going blind.

The fact that I was essentially looking blindly without anything to lose made me stress a lot less, but my mind liked to return to the thought at the back of my head that I was wasting my time and energy. The truth of it was that I wouldn't know how far I was until I could stumble upon any sign of civilization. I hoped to find at least something that showed any sign of people but I knew I was probably too far out into the wild to have a good chance at that.

All I could hope to do is somehow stumble upon something out of sheer luck; either a town or another wormhole. I went into the forest next to the meadow and climbed up and down the hilly terrain, battling off growing heat exhaustion. Even though I was in mostly shade, the storm had broken a good amount of the branches of the canopy allowing a lot of daylight to spill down onto the forest floor. It wasn't nearly as bad as where I was the previous day, but the storm left its scars everywhere.

For the first time in a couple days I actually saw animals. Most of what I saw were birds flying around, rabbits, and squirrels that darted away the second I saw them, but there were exceptions. Not too far into my journey that day, I came across a fox. It slunk out of the bushes and glared at me, and then stared. It didn't move, just stared. I glared at it for a bit too and then continued walking through the trees.

It stayed in the same spot for a second and slowly followed behind me for a bit. I assumed it wanted me to feed it, but I had nothing to offer. I was surprised that it just kept following me as I continued seeing as usually foxes are pretty shy. It was nice to have company for a bit after a very lonely four days in near complete isolation in the middle of nowhere. Even when I left the shade of the woods and into the harsh light of day in another windswept hilly meadow the fox still followed.

The fox's bright orange and black fur seemed to almost glisten in the daylight, its fur flying in the breeze like frou-frou frills as its black paws padded lightly against the forest floor. It had a large scar over its right eye, likely from a long ago battle. If some distant and forgotten battle happened in a forest and nobody was around to witness it, did it even happen? If someone got lost in the woods and he vanished without a trace, did he ever exist?

Lunchtime came quick, and before I ate I made sure to pick up some things a fox would be able to eat so I wasn't feeding it anything unnatural. We went a bit further to the shade under a nice intact tree on a hill and we ate our food. He sat beside me and curled up into a little ball in my lap. I grew rather attached to him even after just a couple of hours, possibly because I never had anything close to a pet or companion. I decided to name him Fraser.

After a short respite we kept going through the hills and towards the far off mountains. Once we continued on into the plains, I noticed the elevation was slowly increasing. We trudged through the endless sea of grass and flowers with the occasional tree dotted like buoys all around. I felt so isolated here being entirely alone in such a vast area. Thinking about why I felt so isolated forced my mind onto the thought of just how remote I was.

Never before had I really come to terms with just how alone I was here. Not the first day, not the second or third. Being plunged into the middle of nowhere was pretty common for me, though most times it happened it was voluntary. This time was different but for some reason I didn't see it as any different. I was completely alone in the middle of nowhere, slowly running out of food and water, without a hope for any sign of anything.

Emotions begun to slowly crawl up my spine as the midday sun beat down without a breeze to hold us. Tears started to run like the outer edges of a massive storm which silently missed this part of the expanse. For lack of a better term, the expanse is the best phrase to use. It best fits what it's like to be completely alone in the wilderness without any means of escape, as if you were floating in the great big expanse of space without so much as a raft to hold on.

The only thing I could do was press on, and that was the only thing I did. The afternoon air grew hot and it started to take its toll on me. I had changed into the lightest clothes I had on me but I was still sweating through them. The other day must have been around 23°, and if that day was 23° than today had to have been 30°. I never would have expected it from an April day, though I had learned to expect the unexpected out here.

It did not seem like there were any rules out here, as in it felt more wild than the wilderness a couple miles away from cities. Not to speak of its remoteness, the feel of it was far off. Most of the trails I ran and camped on were either beaten by yours truly or by someone long ago looking for gold or berries or some other resource, but those weren't too far away from the distant lights of home. It never felt this raw, this beautiful, this primordial, this massive.

After a short break I managed to calm myself down and we carried on. The meadow stretched on for a while but as we approached its outer limits it begun to fade into something else. The meadow slowly gave way to a real alpine region, not like the north side of the red rock coast which was merely reminiscent of one. The grass changed slightly in color to more of a pine color. There were many parts of exposed rock underneath the ground, with large buffeted stones jutting out from the stone and grass in all angles.

Small bits of ore stuck out from the rocks on the ground and sticking up into the air, glistening in the harsh sunlight. The place reminded me of a national park near my house where I used to camp out and hunt a lot. Seeing such a similar place brought back memories of long ago. I was much younger back then and even though for many reasons those days took a toll on me, I still remember them fondly looking back on them. Maybe it's rosy retrospection, maybe I've learned to forget the darker bits.

Going over the windswept plains, I realized how close one of the peaks was. It couldn't have been too far, perhaps a couple of miles away. Its shadow lingered over a higher area way up ahead in front of us, cast from its seat across a river in a thin canyon off to the east. I never got close enough to the canyon to see just how far down it went or how shallow it was. Detours like that were not in my plan for that day. My plan was to keep going and going until I couldn't.

For some reason I had a very strong drive that day. Maybe it was because I had company, maybe it was to make up for a day of almost no forwards progress. I assumed it was a mix of both. Normally I'm not this active on hot days, especially when I'm running on very limited resources. I used to have a bad habit of not packing enough food for a camping trip. This time I had learned from those mistakes and packed more than I needed for one day, though I didn't regret that decision.

Late afternoon sunshine beat down hard over the open plain, but by now a very light breeze had been introduced. The sky was still void of clouds though, and it had only gotten hotter throughout the afternoon. I considered stopping for a break on one of the many rocks that sat awkwardly on the ground, but I thought that I would wait until dinner to take a break. One of the things keeping me sane was having such a strict adhesion to the schedule.

Over years of going camping or just in the outdoors in general, I've found that keeping on top of myself is one of they keys to success and good morale. Ending up in the middle of nowhere is a pretty big hit to the feelings so any kind of boost was important. Little things like that can make a very big difference in the long haul. It was that day when I started planning ahead like this was my new home, and while that sounds like a bad decision, I think it helped me to adapt.

As the nearby mount jutting out from the hills to the east got close, I could see the terrain change as it eclipsed its metaphorical shadow. Ahead of me was a very large and very lush meadow area, still plagued by the same rocks sticking out from the ground, though they were covered in vines and surrounded by shrubs and short trees. Seeing this new and beautiful area, I decided to take a stop here for dinner. It was just past that time anyways.

I found one of the segments of exposed rock and sat down on it to eat. I managed to collect more food for Fraser so we both ate at the same time once more. It didn't take long for the two of us to finish eating, and once we did I decided to take the rest of the hour as a break. Something about laying in the sun on a rock covered in plants and moss felt very natural, and I could have stayed there all day if I didn't have an alarm on my watch at 7:30 to get me back on track.

Back on track and through the tall grass once more. About forty minutes or so into the brush from there, I could make out the details of a thick forest coming up on the horizon. Most of the terrain was a series of hills which obscured the trees in front of me. I could see trees distantly to the west and mountains and valleys stretching for miles on to the east though I didn't change my direction. Something seemed perilous about both routes.

The forest wasn't too similar from the one I hid from the storm in yesterday, comprised of of mostly tall pine trees and other evergreens. This one had a key difference though, and that was its abundance of dead shrubs, bushes, and twigs laid all over the ground. There was a whole bunch of dried out dead shit which is usually a red flag. I was rather surprised how it could be so dry and dead here, especially with a lush plain beside it and a heavy rainstorm the previous day.

Perhaps I had exited the reach of the storm by entering this forest. I never considered the size of the storm, but I suppose it made sense that it could have been either light rain or simply overcast this far from its eye. All of the clutter on the forest floor of packed dirt made it rather annoying to navigate. Fraser seemed to have no problem going through the sharp stickily brush though. As I got deeper into the woods and slowly cleared a path, the bramble only thickened.

Even two hours into my way through the woods and as darkness fell over the land I was still cutting my way through. That damn drive didn't leave me for a second. There did seem to be a turning point some way through where some kind of path was laid out in front of me, widening up into a small clearing where I took a second to collect myself. I considered stopping here for the night and pitching up, but Fraser started acting skittish.

I didn't even notice that since sundown the entire forest was filled with fireflies. Looking at the last two times I had seen them, I begun to think they could be some kind of omen for danger. I stood in the center of the clearing for a minute watching them all swarm around me, their buzzing being the only sound other than a slight breeze through the forest floor, until the beating of wings came over.

Through the canopy against the deep blue sky, I saw a hawk fly over with something in its mouth. A split second before I realized what it was carrying in its beak, it let it drop to the forest floor through the hole in the trees and continued flying. The large branch in its maw had a flame on the end, burning half of the piece already. I had heard of birds that do this to get easy prey, but I never thought I'd see one, let alone get caught up in a blaze it causes.

Once it hit the ground I watched in slow motion as the scrub on the ground caught alight. The light breeze carried it and within seconds an entire wall of flames was staring me in the face. I couldn't move in the moment and I stood frozen as the fire spread all around the ground and up the trees. I was amazed by how fast it spread. The action of Fraser climbing onto my back sent me back to reality.

Without looking back I turned around and started running through the path I made for myself, just barely outpacing the flames that bellowed all around me. It felt like I was racing them to get out of the forest as I nearly tripped over myself trying to run through the thin path I had cut for myself prior. I couldn't tell if the heat I was feeling begin to bear down on me was the warm night air or from the walls that were closing in around me.

It took me a while and a lot of pain but I managed to get out of the forest with the flames behind me and sticks, bushes, branches, and a fox dragging me back. I stopped as I stepped from thick brush to short grass to catch my breath, having run for a long while. I wiped dirt and smeared blood across my exposed legs, let Fraser down from my back and took a long stretch after checking if his claws had dug into my shoulders.

Covered in dust, blood, and scratches I turned around and stared at the blaze before me. The pillars of flames piled high into the night sky, swallowing what was once a forest. The tall trees close to the grass stuck out of the bellowing flames engulfing the ground beneath them. I felt almost transfixed by the swirls of the flames as they ate up the ground below them and the trees around them. My deep trance was broken by movement in the orange field.

Through the flames and burning trees, I saw a figure slowly emerge. At first I couldn't tell what it was but as it got closer I could make it out to be a man, or least the silhouette of a man. It walked to the edge of where the tree line once sat and stopped. Its body was all black and it looked to be the shape of a man but made of shadow. It had two piercing white eyes resting on a face without depth.

Seeing it gave me chills, and I'm unsure of why. It stared deep into my soul as it stood there, but it was unmoving. I noticed my breathing become heavier and my nose begin to bleed, so I gave into what was screaming in the back of my mind; to get the fuck out of there. I wasn't sure what it was, why it came to me, or why I was so scared of it but I was too tired and panicked to care about that.

We ran until I felt as if we were safe from it, and that's where I pitched up for the night. Surprisingly, I slept well despite the events of that day. I woke up later than usual and when I ate my breakfast in the dawn light I looked to the south where the flames still ate away at the horizon. Slowly the smoke rose up from the tops of scarred trees which the flames relinquished, having fallen shorter than their height last night.

My mind begun to race as I watched the flames, sending me back to the night, to the fire, to the shadow. Surely it would have found my tent if it were looking for me, but then again I couldn't be sure because I didn't wake up at all until the morning. There was only one way to look and that was to check the dry cracked earth around where I put my tent to see if there was any sign of anything that might have followed me there.

The ground was too dry for anything to have made a noticeable dent, but I did see some shapes which could have signified footprints in the hard ground. Maybe it did follow me and find my tent, but if it didn't *do* anything than why would it follow me? If it seemingly wasn't going to hurt me why did I get such awful vibes from it? Why was I scared of it? Perhaps it was the unknown, perhaps it was the stare or the suddenness of its appearance, perhaps it was how unexplainable it was.

If I told someone I saw a shadow man emerge from a forest fire, they would probably assume I'm crazy or dreamt it up. Every little strange coincidence came back to my head following that thought, reminding me that I was either going crazy or experiencing some kind of glitch in the matrix. I didn't think reality could ever be this strange, nor did I ever think I would ever question if the place I stood in was real or not.

. . .

The next ten days were nothing but the monotony of routine, wandering through the middle of nowhere, and hiding from the occasional burst of rain. I backtracked completely, opting to head north and then back west around the shattered forest I had passed through a while ago. I had to turn around to avoid the wall of fire that was tearing up the woods. Seeing the damage of the storm as I came back into the path it tore was a bit heartbreaking.

When I passed the red rock coast, I noticed some of the massive rocks were angled differently and the cliff looked heavily weathered, buffeted by the ice and wind. Broken trees laid like bridges to the massive rocks spanning over the waters which looked both closer and deeper than they did before, but I couldn't trust my memory of something I didn't get a good look at five days previous.

I continued on and went past the area where I slept on the first night, and a little ways west the place where the wormhole dropped me off. That was four days out of the blaze, and I continued into the unknown again for the next six without much to note. Those days weren't too different from the first and second, other than they felt far more like mid-April days rather than sometime closer to the summer.

The most notable thing that happened all ten days was something that happened few and far between. Every other day around the late afternoon hours I'd catch a glimpse of that damned shadow man from the fire in the corner of my eye. It was always off in between some nearby trees or behind a rock for a split second. Always just long enough for me to know what it was but just before I could turn to properly see it, it would vanish.

Every time it happened I managed to convince myself that I was making it all up, that it was a fabrication, but things would be different on the eleventh day. The day was normal, painfully average almost. Unremarkable scenery, overcast with sunny breaks, cool temperature, slight breeze but not enough to noticeably change the temperature. We were still walking in the shadow of the storm that had come by so long ago.

After dinner but before I set up again, I went about walking further like I did a couple of other times to get a final push for that day. Following the trend of the shadow man popping into my peripherals for a second, it should have showed up again today but I didn't see it. I thought that I had simply missed it, but I always seemed to know when I had seen it because it would be preceded by a short burst of dread about five seconds prior like a bomb fuse.

Maybe my subconscious wanted to go this last little bit to get one more chance at being frightened by the shadow man for whatever reason. I was still scared of it, and I ran from it whenever I caught a glimpse of it but I still didn't have a reason to fear it, or feel anything else other than apprehension towards it. I was sort of indifferent towards it though my natural instinct was to run from it.

The sundown hours were cold as the dusk light poked through the thick canopy of tall oak trees. The shadow of the canopy was illuminated by the light of the fireflies. I haven't seen them in days and their appearance sent a chill down my spine. Fraser was looking bewilderedly at them as we pressed onwards. I begun to feel that dawning dread again, and I started to go into a sense of heightened focus.

I realized I was beginning to notice every little thing around me. The distant chatter, the occasional breeze, the crickets, the sound of our footsteps nearly in sync with each other. Crunch crunch crunch, along the forest floor. I repeated the pattern until it became burned into my head, the tempo ever still like a constant metronome. It set the beat for the birds and the crickets to shout at, for the fireflies to buzz by at, for the wind to blow.

Crunch crunch crunch, like a dance of the woods. Everything was accounted for in my focus, everything counted in and out on time with the crunch crunch crunch. It was like conducting an orchestra without lifting a finger, or more accurately as if I was leading a march of all of the things in the forest. The routine was starting to build up again into that dreadful monotony. Crunch crunch crunch, crunch crunch crunch *crunch*.

Dead silence, no more movement. Everyone shut up and I stopped in my tracks completely. The offbeat step seemed to be an intentional warning of something or some*one* far off, as if they were making their presence obvious to me and everything else. Fraser looked up at me with worried eyes, but he didn't dare turn around to see what was behind us, but I thought I'd be the brave one.

Just as I expected, it was the shadow man. It couldn't have been more than twenty meters away, but no closer than fifteen. Now that I was much closer I could more easily make out its height and more of its features. It was looked around 6'7 though I guessed it was shorter than that. It was taller than I was but not by much, and I was just over 6'0. It appeared to be the figure of a man made of complete shadow, though it seemed to lack any hair except for a tiny tuft on the center of its head.

It was naked but there weren't any genitals. Its body was muscular and it had a nose and seemingly a very hard to see mouth unlike I had initially thought. It looked on at me with curiosity and interest with its two beady white eyes. There was no mouth or pupils to sit in the glowing outlets but I could still tell exactly how the creature was feeling. Perhaps I was right to not fear it, and then it lunged at me.

The shadow's legs almost flew as it closed the distance between us. Everything seemed to slow down in those moments it sailed through the air. I could see the interest in its eyes grow as it got closer. There wasn't anything I could do I thought. I fully expected it to go right up and kill me, but I should have known better than to expect what was going to happen here. Before it could reach me, the blue hour was illuminated by a glow from underneath.

A wormhole had opened up right underneath my feet; my heart dropping just as fast as my body. I felt myself fall through the ground just as the shadow reached me. The forest below came into view as I fell through the sky like a fallen angel, right above a group of tall, thick trees. Although I had gotten whipped a good bit by the branches on the way down, I was still alive. Cold, alone, afraid, but alive.

Panic set in pretty quickly after I realized my bag was gone. I laid there in shock on the forest floor for a while trying to catch my breath and snap back to reality. I had spaced out for a good while but I snapped back and into action. My left arm was bleeding a lot so I cut off the sleeve of the shirt I was wearing and tied it around the wound after cleaning it out with a water bottle. I had a bunch of other small cuts but not enough bandages to cover them all.

I didn't feel like doing anything. The cold night loomed all around, though in a somewhat peaceful way. There wasn't much noise at all. No distant chatter, no birds, no crunching, only the occasional breeze through the canopy pushing the leaves and branches against each other. I listened to the silence as I sat on the ground with my back against the tree I fell through. The world was quiet, all was dark.

There was something so surreal about the silence. It felt like it was swallowing me but all was tranquil. As I begun to space out and blend into the monotony of the endless night however, the fear begun to slowly set in. I felt so small against the massive trees all around me, rising up from the forest floor like pillars of a massive palace, standing just as steadfast and imposing.

Little thoughts of what could be lurking all around in the silent dark came in waves like the sound of wind through the trees. The only thing that seemed to hold me together that night was the whoosh of the breeze every now and then. It begun to take the role of a bell chime, coming in every couple of minutes or hours to tell me that I was alive and alone, completely alone.

Crushing was a good word for what it felt like. A force from all around me that I couldn't place, smothering the positive thoughts that still remained. The little sliver of hope that whatever I saw was too far away to reach me still remained throughout, though as the thoughts came through on and off, I slowly begun to grow more doubtful of it and fearful that it wasn't true.

Feeling the hope slowly drain as I drifted into a blank space was bad, but the isolation was worse. I can't bear to be alone to an extent, and this was the vast extreme of that. It felt like I was cast out to the night sky to live out the rest of my life alone among dying stars. Just like the hopeless thoughts, the isolation hit in waves, though more infrequent and striking more powerful each time.

At a certain point, the blurry line between conscious and out of it was passed. I wasn't asleep but I wasn't awake either. It was like I was viewing the passing hours through blurry lenses, sitting alone in the middle of nowhere, though at that point nothing really bothered me anymore. Time didn't seem to pass any faster or slower from my perspective, remaining as perfectly still as it was before.

The only times it ever didn't seem so slow were when the wind blew through the grass every couple of years. Years from the perspective of physically sitting in a forest while mentally sitting in space, though it very well could have been minutes. It remained like this; hazy and all fogged out until the endless dark overcast faded away to the slowly approaching morning clouds and shades of sunrise.

Even when the march of dark clouds begun to slowly break, everything felt the same. Almost impossibly slowly the black skies turned into violet, then to indigo, then into shades of deep blues with orange and yellow streaks all across the skies. Once the brighter purples and blues begun to show up, the world begun spinning again and I begun to slowly return from wherever it was I had fled to.

. . .

The next three days were hard. It wasn't easy to adjust to having to survive completely on my own but to my luck the temperature wasn't so bad. I was still pretty hurt from the fall. I spent most of that first day travelling blindly around an unfamiliar part of the expanse, the compass that was supposed to be around my neck being conveniently tucked into my bag in the middle of the woods.

After a while of wandering blindly through the late afternoon sunshine I started to look for a place to rest. In just three days I had covered a lot of ground, or at least it seemed that way. For all I knew I could have been going around in massive circles around the same large area, though the place up ahead seemed different for some reason. I couldn't place why at first but it begun to clear up when I approached it.

It was another thick forest area like the one I had been in last night but this one was very different. The wildlife was far more diverse, the canopy was far more open, and the forest floor was dotted with small shrubs and low hanging trees like the one I slept underneath. Soft grass and wildflowers covered the forest floor instead of leaves and twigs. Maybe on the surface it didn't seem like a big change but any break in the monotony stuck out.

The way it all seemed to snap from one scene to the next reminded me of what happened three days ago. I could almost hear the same crunching as I did before as I continued into the unknown. The late day light shone sparsely through the spaces in the leaves, spilling golden hour onto the greenery all around. The moisture from an earlier burst of rain still kept on the leaves and reflected oranges and reds back to me.

As the dying lights of sunset slowly got replaced by the dim of fireflies and moonlight, I started to speed up my pace hoping I might find something tucked somewhere into the abyss. The land only started to get less flat and more wavy as I went along though I still decided to go forwards. After an hour or so, I actually did find something out of the blue.

Something up ahead was glowing. From afar I could only make out a faint green glow, but as I got closer I could make out a glowstick tied to a string resting on a wooden pole. I was very confused by it at first because of how out of the blue it was, far more out of the blue than most of the other things I've seen. The shock and confusion slowly turned into hope.

Even just the smallest, tiniest sign of civilization was screaming out to me. I decided to take the glowstick necklace and put it on, pressing onwards just after. There was a slight incline in the ground going forwards from the post, and I walked down past some tall trees into what seemed like a very old and dried out riverbed. I looked to the left and there was a tiny little outhouse.

It was like all of the ones you see in campsites, complete with the slanted rusty metal plate roof and the outline of a crescent moon carved into the wood of the door. I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw it. Not out of surprise, but out of fear. I could sense that something was nearby but I couldn't make out what it was until I got closer to the building and crossed over to see the left side.

Beside the outhouse there stood a large creature, possibly some type of coronian but certainly none I'd ever seen. It was taller than the outhouse by a fair bit, it looked almost entirely black but I assumed that to be from the darkness. The only thing that stood out were two big deep blue-green eyes. I couldn't make out much else because of the distance and its posture.

Whatever it was faced down towards the ground, almost as if it were hiding from something. I took a couple of steps closer in order to see it better, being careful as to not alert it. I took seven steps and stopped completely. It still stared into the ground unmoving while I was able to see it more clearly. I could make out the difference in colors of the patches of fur on its body.

Most of it was either dark green or dark brown, with red, orange, and yellow stripes crossing in patterns across its body. Its face looked like that of a fawn but its ears were canine. Its arms and legs went from fur to scales halfway up the forearm and lower leg respectively, a pattern of different autumnal colors mixed in with subtle blues and pinks here and there. I couldn't tell if the red on its claws was just the color of the bone or dried blood.

The way the fur transitioned into scales reminded me of the legs of a chicken, and the beast's legs didn't look too different from that, although they had the same posture as those of most mammals. Its stance was slightly lowered and as I approached I was able to see the whites in its face and the stripes and scars all over, including several across its chest and one over its left eye and a hole in its left ear.

Unlike many other coronians I've seen this one had some clothes on too. A black bandana with two thin red lines across it was wrapped around its head just over the ears. It wore two tight bands on each arm right above the bicep which had the same type of strings hanging off of them, however these ones were baby blue and warm orange respectively.

It wore a black belt over some short, tight pants akin to some kind of sportswear. It wore black wrappings around its knuckles and feet, the bandages wrapping between each claw on both the hands and the feet. The final thing I noticed were two dark brown leather buckles which crossed over from its shoulders to its waist just above the black belt, likely part of something it was wearing on its back.

Seeing how intimidating this beast was, I didn't dare take another step. It looked like its only purpose was to roam the land and kill whatever it came across. The only hole in that idea was why it looked like it was hiding in the middle of nowhere. I feared if I wanted to find out why that was I'd have to gauge by its reaction, and so I decided to step a bit closer yet again. *Crunch.*

This time it was my feet that snapped the branch. I stood frozen as I watched it turn its head up at me lightning fast. It ran up to me, shaking the ground with every step and grabbed me by the shoulders. It reared its head up to the sky and opened up its jaw further than anything should, the skin around the mouth intentionally coming apart like it was a zipper, and then it bit down.

I didn't expect it to bite the glowstick around my neck though. It held it in its jaws for a second, showing off its rows of sharp teeth in the moonlight. It pulled its head back and snapped the thin twine of the rope in two places giving me a nasty rope burn on the back of my neck. The glowstick went flying into the air but the beast caught it and broke it in its bare hands.

"Darkness. That is your cover."

"..." I was speechless. I fully understood what he was referring to but I didn't know how to express any of my thoughts.

"I understand why you're silent, I probably scared you didn't I?" I stared into those deep eyes. They looked like monsoons floating over oceans.

"C-can you let go of me please?"

"Sorry." It spoke in a sort of hushed tone, though its voice sounded dead serious and clear. "Here, let me take you somewhere safer."

The beast lowered itself into a squat and motioned for me to hang on. The straps were clearly meant for two hilts which weren't anywhere to be found. Just before I could ask any questions it took off like a rocket. I could feel the smooth leather start to work its way into my palms as it ran through the trees. I had no clue how it managed to navigate such a thick forest so fast in the dark.

We didn't stop until we approached another of the more mountainous regions. The ground was a rocky red-tinted shield with sparse grasses growing in between holes in the stones. Tall pine trees jutted out of tiny patches of dirt on a large hill all around us. Even more were on a higher place above us on a cliff, but that wasn't where we were going. The shield rock formed somewhat of a pathway.

Just up ahead there was a small break in the rocks where it instructed me to go through. I went ahead of it and though it was a bit of a tight squeeze, it opened up a lot on the inside. The cave was massive and covered in an assortment of random things which all seemed out of place in the middle of the woods. The only light source was a small gas lantern situated in the center of the ovular room.

## Seamark, Ironhall, IZ 144/6/76 (M), Saturday, April 8, 2059, Gemenii Anzhani - Dusk over the sea -

I landed inside a small room, not too different from the other 3x3 security rooms around the base, however this one did not have any computers. The walls were painted black and it had a large window facing into an empty expanse of metal floors and floodlights ahead, clutter covering up the fogged out window. The style of the room appeared older than the others like the room in Basement 1. There were papers and file folders strewn about the table and all over the floor, as well as sitting neatly in the desk drawers.

As Chester slowly descended the rope I begun to sort all of the papers and put them into neat stacks, picking up the ones off the floors and in the drawers and laying them all out onto the table so they were in one spot. When he got into the room we both looked through them together. It was a tight squeeze in the room as the back was filled with black boxes and a bunch of other clutter that lined the wall on the other side, obscuring the exposed jagged rock.

Most of the papers were records and bills; things you'd find in the accountant's office of any theme park which gave me an idea of what this room was, though some files were different. One of the folders that I started looking through and then handed to Chester was on all of the victims, the writing on the front reading *The 180*. The pages felt heavy knowing that every one was another life taken by these monsters, and I couldn't bare to keep looking so I put it aside and looked at more tame writings.

While I sorted through more papers looking for anything that could be used in court, Chester went through the files on the victims just as I was. It seemed as though we were both trying to piece this together. I saw him looking distraughtly at one of the papers from the 180 file, the paper moving as his hands trembled. I looked over at it as he laid it on the table, the image sending a shiver throughout my body. It was *me.*

They didn't have much to write about me, they didn't even know my name. They only had a picture of me sitting on a park bench from September of last year. It seemed like they had started picking out victims earlier than I had thought. The fields for name, age, date of birth, and parents were empty and there was only a brief couple of lines about me, not counting their notes on the back of the page. I read the little blurb aloud to Chester.

"Child is homeless and is aware of StarWorld and seems to be fan of UN, but has never been recorded to have visited. Easy Target." The last two words jumped out of the page to me.

It felt weird to me to see how little others knew about me; It never occurred to me just how secretive and insignificant my life was. I hadn't told Chester my name, or anyone for that matter. I don't think anyone even knew it. The name I hold isn't my original name though, it's one I came up with by myself. I was on my own living in the streets for as long as I can remember and as far as I know, I never had anyone to call me by my true name so I never committed it to memory.

As I begun to think more and more about it, I realized so much. I don't even remember what my parents; or parent looked like or anything about them really. I remember specifically only having a father once upon a time, though I'm unsure if my parents split up or if I was adopted. All I know about my father is that he abandoned me at a young age and left me to die. I can't for the life of me picture anything about him, but I'll always remember the words he said to me that one day:

"You've ruined my life enough. You disgust me. I hope you die."

Just thinking about it sent me to tears, not that I wasn't already on the verge of an emotional breakdown. It didn't take long to realize that if I died here nobody would remember me, only Chester would. To the others it seemed like I was just a number, just an objective, just the final piece to their sordid puzzle. I didn't know enough about the others to know if they truly would, but I assumed most of them didn't care enough. Only Chester did, and so I looked him in the eyes and told him my name through tears.

"Chester, I don't want to be forgotten. My name is Gemenii. Gemenii Anzhani. Promise me that you won't forget me, please." He gave me a sorry look and hugged me. I felt warm in his embrace.

"It's ok, I won't. They won't forget you either," he said, crying as well.

I didn't want to leave him, but he pulled away and the cold reality set back in. Even just pulling away from the hug felt like we were miles apart now. I decided to go back to looking through the records and we managed to find some rather shocking information. According to the books, they were in cahoots with some pretty powerful people, partially helped by Claire's relation to the Chief of Police. As well as this, we found out that they managed to hide from the law and scoot by using a bunch of legal loopholes.

As well as this, they seemed to be connected to some unlisted organization which allowed them to get away with quite a lot, and specifically one man whose name was blacked out. There were a lot of names blacked out, but this one referred to as Mr. R kept popping up throughout the files. There were some other black squares of the same size that kept popping up which seemed really strange. Usually it isn't a good thing when there are this many redacted names.

There were a lot of really weird things hidden in these archives, and Chester decided he would hold them all inside his pocket dimension so that once we made it out of here, we'd be able to go through everything. The papers allowed us to understand more about their rituals and to confirm my suspicions of what the purpose of the crimes was, although Chester was still rather cagey about what they were building, driven by a mysterious source.

We had gone through everything inside the tiny confined room, but there was still something else. I peered back through the foggy window into the blank space beyond it, finally able to make out *something* in the distance, but all I could see were reds and beiges. I wanted to see if there was something on the other side but before I could move the boxes Chester told me to hold on. He opened the bottom drawer and pressed a large red button which would opened the doors.

The door on the right opened up fully, but the door to the left didn't. We walked out into the blank empty room, onto the same metal grate flooring that could be seen in the ceiling of the security room down here and in the mech bay. Below the grates seemed to be black ground, almost like a gaping void. It looked like its purpose was to act as a drainage system for this particular area, though it didn't make sense to me why it was in other places where there wasn't much that needed to be drained.

After quite a bit of hesitation Chester led me beyond the room and into the area in front of the window. In front of us there laid a giant mound of what appeared to be flesh, biomatter, and several different colors of blood, all congealed together into one awful thing. There were three circles drawn in chalk on the solid dirt that surrounded it, the floor transitioning to the grates at the end of the outer circle. The circles were adorned with several strange symbols and phrases written in Latin.

I was in complete shock when I saw it. He led me up towards the thing, and as it became more clear I noticed it was *breathing*. The thing almost reached the ceiling which must have been around three and a half meters. It seemed to be making occasional rumbling noises, though I wasn't completely sure of those came from the mound. There was also a distant drone of humming, though that was coming from somewhere else.

"I know what this is," Chester said in a low voice.

"W-what could this *thing* even be?"

"It's the collection of all of the souls harvested. Notice the ritual circles, they share symbols with the ones in those rooms. It's time I told you their purpose."

"Why didn't you tell me earlier?"

"You would need to see it to believe it. They're building an angel. This is the angel, though it's not fully formed. They need one more soul."

"An angel?"

"Yes. The source, or trigger wanted us to build one, though its influence on some was stronger than others. I was the only one who could free myself from its hold."

"So you were driven by it too? How did that happen?"

"Exposure to the source is how it happened. See those blue lights down there? That's it." He walked to the right of the deformed angel and pointed out into the distance, and sure enough there was a distant blue light behind the angel.

"Wow,"

"We were all called down here by the source, having discovered this third basement level during the construction of this hellhole. One by one, we were all called to the blue light, and I think that's the only reason they've kept me alive. Most of them I don't consider friends anymore, except for Maverik and maybe Claire, but she's too unstable to know for sure."

"Do you think they would spare me if I touched it as well?"

He didn't comment. I walked past the angel, heading deeper and deeper into the darkness towards the distant lights. I watched the flickering light get closer and closer, but I ran into a barrier. It was like an invisible wall blocking me from the source; a hope for salvation. I tried to hit it, and even threw my body at it, but the wall did not budge. Bursts of blue light flashed as I hit the barrier. I kept going until I decided to give up. Before I walked away though, I noticed a tiny crack. Maybe there was hope after all?

Such a small hole in the barrier meant nothing to me though, and I decided to save my energy and go back to Chester. He went back up the rope before me and helped be up from the rope. When we got out of Basement 3, I realized the time, and just like yesterday it was getting close to 6 AM. He led me back to the machine bay, however when we got there the door in the wide wall was locked. A brief wave of panic ran through me, but Chester told me not to worry.

Chester reminded me of the nearby maintenance stairs. As we walked to the stairwell, he calmly told me that the others knew that we were here. He followed me as I ran up the maintenance stairs to the second floor, located the computer room and sent the power back to the gate at the wide wall. It didn't take as much time to send the power back, and I realized that I might be able to send power to Basement 3 through the computer, but I didn't bother to try it then.

Knowing just how often I use the computers, I'm sure I'd get a chance to hop on the next night and try it very quickly. At some point, the two of us got separated from each other briefly. I tried waiting for him outside of the security room for a minute. Seconds felt like an eternity as I waited in the darkness. He came from behind and startled me, though I was only happy to see him. We pressed on without pause.

Just as we thought the end was in sight, Maverick spotted us from around the hallway as we exited the security room. We both ran to the third floor and then back down to the first to evade Maverik, and Mila and Luna who had followed him. When we got to the first floor, I had to take a breath. I had been running so much I could hardly breathe, and Chester knelt beside me as I caught my breath. My watch showed 6:16 urging me to get back to the basement as soon as possible.

I brought it to Chester, and he gave me another minute. He stated that if I ran fast enough to the basement I could make it to the Machine Bay and into the ejection tube room with ample time. I brought myself up off the ground, ready to get out. We both knew that we'd have to go back later that day and I was already looking forward to ending it. I gave him a smile and a hug but before I went down, he wanted to tell me something.

"You've done great work. You're the most courageous per-" His speech was cut off by a blade going through his chest.

The knife swung upwards, cutting a straight hole in his back. I looked up to see Claire pulling the knife out, staring blankly down at me. There was another silhouette behind her holding her arms from around her back, but I was too frozen in fear and anguish to notice. We both stared coldly at each other, her lack of emotion in heavy contrast to my overflow of emotions. The voice behind her called out to me, mocking me as I cried. They kept attacking him, and all I could do was stare.

Claire let go of the knife and ran off into the darkness leaving Ash standing tall behind him staring menacingly. Mila came up from behind a bench right beside Ash and walked across to stare at me. I looked at their faces and down to Chester's body laying face up on the carpet. He looked up at me and smiled awkwardly. I stared deep into his eyes, wiping them as he opened his mouth to speak. He could barely force out words through coughs.

"I'll be fine. Run."

I didn't waste another second and I ran to the right where Claire went. Luna came out of completely nowhere to run after me and I glanced back to see Easton going down another staircase to intercept me, but that's all I could make out. Everything for a while was merely a blur of tears which only subsided once I came to about halfway through the mech bay towards the tube room. I started to calm down a bit and stopped running.

Only then did it start to hit me that I was completely on my own now. This was the first time I was down here all on my own without a clear threat of immediate danger or any company. It felt so hollow and lonely down here. I walked to catch my breath for a couple of minutes and continued down the way. There wasn't much besides the cold and the distant sound of machinery somewhere in the place.

Some of the boxes were moved around, and one of the doors that was previously blocked by boxes was opened. I stopped to peer inside, and it was just a bunch of mangled robot parts. There had to have been at least twenty in here of various types which were all decimated in a fit of rage. The mechanical gore unsettled me and sent me back on track to the tube room. I almost tripped inside and sat back against the wall to the right of the door and slid down.

Alone on the cold concrete floor I started sobbing again, nearly uncontrollably. The only thing that snapped me out of it was my inner voice telling me to check the time. A jolt went through my body and I raised my watch to see it was 6:30. I didn't know what was about to happen, but I would soon find out. All that did was send me further down into a spiral of emotions, and I couldn't hold it all in anymore.

"WHY? WHY? WHY COULDN'T IT HAVE BEEN ME?" I shouted.

Just after the last word escaped my mouth, the power went out. The descending tone of all of the machines cutting power sent a wave of fear through my body. Everything was pitch black and dead silent. I thought about going into the tube to hide, but it felt too far away. In my mind I was the safest curled up in a ball in a corner between two concrete walls where I was the whole time.

There was no sound for a while. The absence of everything became almost peaceful in a sense. I thought that this was what Chester was seeing for a second and I let out a low cry. I thought nothing of it until I thought I heard something else. At first I assumed it was just the echo, but it was something else. I slowly raised my hands over my mouth and slowed my breathing to keep quiet as I heard something approach.

It started out as a distant sliding noise and then a stomp. As it got closer I could feel the vibrations of whatever this thing was taking a step. Its paces were slow and deliberate, and it seemed to be coming from my left which didn't seem to make sense because that's where the wide wall was. The questions of what this thing was and where it could have come from begun to drown as I kept telling myself to stay silent.

Poom, sssh, poom, sssh, poom, sssh. Step, slide, step, slide, step, slide. My guess was that was either hurt or deformed judging by the sound of it walking. As it got closer I could also make out a low breathy noise it was emitting. It sounded like a pained cry for help, and the way it walked and sounded reminded me of a wounded animal. I could feel my entire body shake as it got close to the entrance, and right about where the entrance should be it stopped dead in its tracks.

"Hello?" It said. Its voice was strained at first and sounded vaguely familiar. "Hello? Is anyone there?" To my horror, with every word it got closer and closer to sounding like an exact copy of my voice. It nailed it down within 5 or so words. I kept silent.

"Someone, is anyone out there? Please. I'm so alone. I'm scared. I'm *horrified."* The accuracy to my voice it spoke in was horrifying. It spoke as if I was crying out.

"... I know you're there." It said, this time in Chester's voice. "I know why you're here. You're scared. You're a coward. Don't you know that you can't keep running all your life? Someone's gonna catch you eventually."

"..."

"I can feel your fear. I can read your thoughts. I can see you. What are you so afraid of? Is it me? Or me?" It started cycling through voices asking the same question. Ashton's, Easton's, Luna's, Claire's, and then an unfamiliar one. It was high pitched and whiny, almost taunting. It spoke expressively, and I assumed this was its natural voice.

"What are you so scared of? Is it me? I'm sure I'm not \*that\* bad if you saw me in the light. If you could see my face." It let out a horrible laugh afterwards. I could feel it in my bones. It shook me to the core, but I tried to stay as silent as possible. I wasn't sure how long I could keep it up.

"Open your eyes. Embrace the darkness, let it consume you. Stop hiding and I can give you whatever you want. I can give you happiness, I can give you what you seek; the truth." It stopped talking in its whiny voice and slowly transitioned into a mix of its own and my voice, and then from there to a mix of its own and Chester's voices.

"I can be you. I can be the better version of you, or I can be what you love. I can be Chester. I can be whatever you want if you OPEN YOUR EYES!". The voice was much closer this time, but somehow the sudden change in volume didn't cause me to flinch or even move at all. I felt a sinking feeling knowing that it could somehow see where I was, or I was simply too loud. The uncertainty of it was eating me up inside. It continued to talk in its own voice.

"You only have everything to fear. You're all alone. You're in the dark. You're in a tomb. Think about how many lives they claimed down here, and how you might not even be the last, haha. Doesn't it just TEAR YOU APART? ANSWER ME, COWARD! .. oh. you're cold. What have they done to you? I'm sure it's nothing I can't fix. I'll see you soon." As it finished speaking, I felt a hand reach out and touch mine just before the power kicked back in.

The room in front of me was empty. No sign of anything even being inside here was present. The floor was still coated in the same layer of dust that had been present before, and the old twin chalk circles were seemingly untouched. Now that the lights were back on, I felt more safe, but just a tiny bit more safe. I still felt so vulnerable and alone, unable to process what happened over all this time. It felt like hours sitting alone in the corner, but it couldn't have been more than minutes.

All I could do was sit there in the corner and cry. It felt like the only thing I could do after all of that. It was almost like everything couldn't be processed; couldn't sit still inside my restless mind. Everything still felt so unreal to me. The thought of what happened to Chester, the thought of whatever that *thing* that came to me was, and the thought of where I could go from here, but everything was drowned out by distant footsteps.

"Hello?" The voice was only vaguely familiar at first, but as it got closer I recognized it to be Maverick's. "Are you still down here?" I didn't respond. I wanted to trust him but I thought I couldn't. The time I wasted trying to weigh whether or not I could trust him forced me to stay silent once he came into the tube room.

"Are you in here?" He called out. I didn't respond. He walked up to the machines and inspected them, saying something to himself while he did and then he turned around. He looked stunned to see me sitting in the corner covered in Chester's blood and my own tears; stunned but not surprised. I was able to get a good look at him and saw that he was covered in his blood as well, silently acknowledging my previous theory.

"Get up. You have to go before it comes back."

"How can I trust you?" My voice came out broken and horrified.

"... It came to you didn't it."

"Yes."

"I'm sorry but you need to go. You're going to have to trust me. I know how to hold back the influence of the source. I'm like Chester. Please, listen to me before it comes back."

"The creature or the influence?"

"Both!" He spoke sternly. I got up and turned around to look at the wall behind me. There was a message written just above where I was sitting in what looked like Chester's blood. I nearly fell back once I read it. *What a tragedy, all alone. Not for long :).* I knew exactly what wrote it, and even such innocuous words sent me shivers. Maverick didn't seem to notice the message, or maybe he didn't care.

I got up and walked into the tube. I peered at him through the glass as he typed some words on the nearby computer. I saw a look of shame and sadness wash over his face before it was replaced my anger. He quickly turned away and took a few steps back, trying to hold himself back. I couldn't make out what he was trying to say while his back was turned, but if I had to guess it was an apology to me.

That same familiar rushing noise came up all around me and there I was in the small exit room. I could hear a soft rainstorm starting outside the room. I walked through the doors and screamed into the rain, the falling water mixing with the tears scarring my face and washing my hands clean of Chester's deep blue blood. I sat there in the wet grass for minutes, maybe even hours in my own regret and despair until I had a moment of clarity.

"There might be a way to bring him back..."

Images of the ritual circles and chalk outlines filled my mind, and the one place where I thought I'd find answers was the nearby library. I had remembered seeing lots of books on the occult so it didn't seem too far out of the question. Although there were only a few, it was enough information to do what I needed to. The whole day was a blur for me, almost every minute spent in agony and despair, but once the time came, I was ready to stand; ready to finally finish this once and for all.

...

By midnight, the storm that had been going on and off all day had been brewing, by now becoming quite the deluge over Seamark. I stood in the rain staring up at the building with a purpose to bring him back. I silently crept into the building and snuck through to the basement, surprised by the doors being open. As I ran through Basement 1, I noticed the concrete floor was covered in chalk circles drawn all over the floor, reminiscent of those on the far side of Basement 2.

Using my newfound knowledge of the occult, I knew the purpose of them. Just as I had assumed it was used in the creation of an angel, and it practically ripped the souls out of their living bodies in a horribly painful process. They have to be living in order for it to work, which made me know the real reason they kept me alive. Although the victims need to be alive, they don't need to be unharmed and it was easy to assume that their victims weren't in the best state before their 'ascension'.

When I finally got to the ejection tube room in the machine bay of Basement 2, it was just as empty as it was before. All there was in his place was a large stain of blue blood on the dusty ground where Chester must have laid waiting. Seeing that his body was gone, there was a chance he was still alive and somewhere in this building, but why would he come down here? Was he taken down here or did he go looking for me? I couldn't be sure.

Chester was good at hiding, and all I needed to do was find him. I walked out of the room and to the service stairs past the wide wall, taking them up to the second floor. I came up in one of the poolrooms on the right building. The room looked like it was frozen in time, clogged up with the smell of chlorine. The skylight was open and spilt moonlight over the pool, casting reflections of the water all around the dark room. None of the lights were on.

After being entranced for a moment, I headed for the security room to check the cameras. As I snuck around the hall, I heard a faint shuffling sound from behind one of the benches nearby. I approached it and when I peered over, it was *Chester!* I felt tears of joy flood my eyes and I jumped onto him, enveloping him in a hug. He was clearly very surprised to see me just as much as I was to see him.

"Why did you come back? There's nothing else,"

"I thought you died. I was going to bring you back."

"Woah really? I-I didn't think you cared that much about me." I saw tears well up in his eyes.

We talked quietly for a bit, and although my research was seemingly in vein, I didn't mind anymore. I had a bad feeling that it was going to come to use in some way, and no matter how much I tried to brush it off it never went away. He talked about cutting off power to Basement 3 to see what would happen, and I was on board with it. We stopped talking for a moment and I thought I heard a faint ringing somewhere nearby.

"Do you hear that ringing, or is it just me?"

"I don't hear anything,"

"Oh fuck,"

Before we turned to look down the hall, I already knew what was about to happen. The bandmates surrounded the both of us, and even though Chester laid horrified on the ground I knew I had to put up a fight. I spotted a jagged piece of metal pipe underneath the nearby bench, and I grabbed it in order to defend myself. I stared them down, standing in front of Chester. They all looked like they didn't want to do what they were about to do, but they didn't stop themselves either.

Ash jumped forwards at me and I tried to fight him off, but he was far too strong. I managed to smack him with the pipe but he grabbed it from my hands and threw me across the room. I ran back and grabbed his legs as he was about to lunge towards Chester, bringing him onto the ground. Maverick came from behind and held me above the ground. I looked into his eyes, deep into his eyes. Past his blank and enraged expression I saw his regret, I saw his guilt, I saw his trauma, I saw his love. He knew what he was doing was horrible, though he couldn't stop himself.

"You don't have to do this," I said.

"Yes we do, he betrayed us!" Luna shouted.

"You know damn well why he did! Was 179 too low for you? Not enough bloodshed? Not enough death? Not enough decay? Not enough horror?" They all stared at me, and I swear I saw the humanity return to their faces, even just for a brief moment.

"Don't do this Gemenii, let me die." Chester said.

"He has a name? What?" Luna interrupted jaggedly before I could speak.

"I can't. I can't leave you."

"Leave me, I'll see you on the other side, don't worry." He smiled at me, his face covered in tears.

"NO!" I screamed in protest, but it was far too late to do anything about it.

"I'm ready. I can't bear to see any of this anymore. The trigger has driven you all to the ground but you clearly can't see that, or you can't control yourself. Gemenii, this was inevitable. Thanks for everything, I'll see you soon," Chester's speech moved me to tears. "and to all the rest of you, save yourselves if you can. I'll forgive you if you can change somehow." Chester looked deep into Maverick's eyes. Something changed within him.

"DON'T DO IT!" Maverick shouted. Chester looked at him with surprise and shock. I got up from the ground and turned to face the others. Ash, Easton, Mila, and Luna all stood menacingly before us. I stood beside Maverick as we stared up at them, Chester still on the ground. "You don't want to do this Maverick. Don't let *him* drag you back! Fight it! All you know how to do is get in our way, the both of you." Easton said.

"Never. Never again. I don't want to turn back again, no matter how much you try to pull me back, no matter how much the trigger tries to pull me back. I can't let you hurt him." He was nearly in tears as he spoke.

"Good thing it's not up to you." Luna said coldly.

Everything happened in slow motion again, but this time I was moving slowly too. Slower than all of them, the most powerless to stop anything out of all of us. I turned around to see Claire running from behind towards Mila, crying out in anger. Mila turned around just before Claire could stab her, hitting her square in the face with her fist launching her back to the ground. She tried to get up and attack again but she was too late. We all were too late.

Before Maverick and I could react, Luna and Ash pulled him away from us. I screamed and cried nothing came out, as if I was in a nightmare. I wished it was a bad dream, I wished so hard I almost believed it, but cold reality gripped me so tight I couldn't breathe. Maverick screamed out in pain. I could feel the agony in his voice because I felt the exact same thing. I tried to close my eyes, but Maverick held them open and forced me to look; to stare at the carnage before me.

"I'm sorry Gemenii, you have to look. You have to see it if you even want a chance to bring him back." They tore into him like wild animals.

"..."

"Look at what they've done. Stare at it, embrace it, commit it to memory. This is the trigger, this is what it does. This is the effect of it. A curse, a horrible, horrible curse. Destruction breathes creation, and his destruction breathes the creation of fear, despair, loss, hope." Maverick spoke to me amidst the violence.

"I don't understand it." I said.

"It's nature at its most raw. Tunnel vision to the end of the road. The angel's light shines from within you. If I can turn my head and vomit at the sight then I have not shielded myself from its grasp, I have merely played into my own cowardice." He continued.

I looked to my right down the hall to see Claire watching from afar. Luna and Mila were calling her over but she kept shaking. She wore the same horrified expression that Chester had when he saw them coming towards him. For the first time I believed Chester's words that she wasn't driven in the same way as the others. Claire seemed to be the beacon of hope that I needed to go on. It seemed as though the totality of her resistance against the trigger was the destruction of Chester.

"It is finished Claire, go forth. Look." Maverick stared at her and commanded. They all spoke as if they didn't see her run up and get clotheslined by Mila's fist. Maverick was more correct than I knew about their tunnel vision.

"You're all monsters," She said.

"You heard all that I said to the boy. Watch."

Maverick brought me over to his corpse and set me to the ground beside it. I stared deep into his dead eyes, one of them closed as if he was winking to me. It felt like all of them knew of my plan, as if it would be some sort of test. I had thoughts of going against it though. I loved him deeply, and seeing his corpse made me feel like a piece of my being was dead as well. Despite my hesitance, I couldn't stop my emotions.

"Why? All for nothing. Take me instead, please! Take me. KILL ME! FUCKING KILL ME!" My voice broke as I shouted into the night.

It felt like my mind was breaking. They didn't answer my pleas. Some of them laughed at me, the only ones who didn't were Maverick and Claire. Maverick stared down in disgust and Claire stood beside me, in absence of feeling or any reply. I laid there atop his corpse in a daze, the same nightmarish texture enveloping reality. My life had been horrible up until this point, but I never could have imagined a pain like this, a feeling this deep and horrible.

Ash kicked me in the back and they left me there, laying on top of his mutilated body. I hugged him one last time, sharing in his embrace. Ash, Easton, Luna, and Mila all left, leaving just Maverick and Claire. I thought Maverick was going to continue with his speech, but he just stared down at me. Claire ran off somewhere, leaving just the two of us. He knelt beside me, his heavy body making a large thud as it hit the ground beside me.

"He was my best friend. I never told anyone that I loved him. I'm sorry, Gemenii. I didn't mean to hurt you. It took me so fucking long to snap out of this trance and to see that you were just like me, one who loved Chester more than anything in the world, which is why I wanted you to watch. Use it. Channel that. I heard you talking with him just before we came in, we were waiting around the corner. Bring him back."

"Thanks Maverick. It means a lot that you came to me like this, especially in the morning."

"I'm glad you forgave me. I've done so much horrible shit, the least I can do is help you. The power of the source makes spells easier to cast in the way of their physical affect on the castor, but be warned that this is going to be hard to cast, many don't even survive."

"Right. Thank you."

"One moment please, don't take him away just yet." He laid over his body and kissed him, one final time. His eyes were filled with tears as he pulled away from the cold embrace.

"I'm sorry."

He nodded and I started getting to work. With tears in my eyes, I picked him up in my arms and limped all the way down to Basement 2. He was very heavy but I managed to carry him back down the service stairs and into the mech bay through the gate at the wide wall. I laid him on the ground of the ejection tube room and pulled out one of the books from the library. I found a piece of chalk resting on one of the weird concrete shelves that jutted out from the walls and used it to draw the circle over the old one.

I followed the instructions written in the old book, painting the symbols as accurately to the diagram as possible. There were two side-by-side double-ringed circles, somewhat reminiscent of the three-ring circle around the angel. I learned from the book that three-ring circles were the most powerful, then two-ring, then single-ring. The outer rings went around the old circle which had no rings, signifying it was a much weaker spell. I was about to find out what that meant.

Once it was finished, I laid Chester's body off-center in the middle of the circle, his blue blood covering my body. I retrieved his robot duplicate from where I'd seen it on the first day and laid it right beside the corpse with its feet where the other's head was. If the spell would be successful, the two non-living bodies would be fused and the soul and the mind and all of their facets would still remain alive and intact inside the newly created vessel. I held the book with blood on my hands and read out the incantation with tears in my eyes.

"Though the body has been destroyed, the soul is blazing and live. Lift up the soul, rip it from the dead and fuse these two vessels. Create a new vessel of the ashes of two discarded ones, rise up from the flames. Give them live again!" I smacked my hands to the ground in a kneeling position, placing them with one hand on the side of each body.

The spell wasn't even finished yet but I could already start to feel the burning energy begin to surge through my body. It started as a tingling pain but it begun to feel like a constant stinging in my arms, as if a thousand angry bees were swarming my body, judging me for all of my crimes. The last part of the incantation would be an addition the book did not mention was required, merely a final rite that I wanted to add myself because my soul told me to.

"YOU CAN TAKE MY ARMS, YOU CAN TAKE MY LEGS, YOU CAN TAKE MY EYES, YOU CAN TAKE MY HEART OR ANYTHING ELSE, BUT YOU CAN'T TAKE HIM FROM ME!"

As I finished the spell, flashes of white light flew up from the outline of the circle, and then everything went white and a wall of noise embodied me. I could tell it was working because the pain was increasing. It flooded from my arms to every inch of by body, growing in a crescendo. I kept screaming, the shouts coming out strong and broken over the constant loud drone of energy that came up from the ground and flooded the entire room.

Images begun to fade in over everything, approaching like a swarm of hornets out of the white. At first, the images were faded and distant, but they became more and more clear. They were memories, but not mine. They were Chester's. I saw random moments of his life rush by, and then Basement 2. Images of everything that happened whirled around me, horrible, horrible images. I felt like I was drowning in an infinitely deep ocean of pure terror.

Everything remained constant, and it felt like my entire body was on fire. The pain was almost impossible, but I had to hold on. I held on for dear life; I held on for him, I held on for everything that this journey hinged on. The world started to fade but I kept pushing through, as if I was running through a valley of light up a hill. I kept pushing and pushing, tearing my vocal chords in a primordial yell. Everything became more and more intense, far more than I could bear, and then nothing.

Impossibly bright and bathed in light to darkness. Impossibly loud to deathly silent. I was in the room again, but it looked like the power was off. I wasn't sure how long it took to complete, and though it felt like hours it couldn't have been more than minutes. It took my eyes a while to adjust from the blinding white to darkness. When they did adjust, I saw a body laying on the ground. The body laying in front of me appeared to be him, although just as the spell seemed to imply, it was a fusion of his mangled body and the metallic one.

He wasn't conscious, but he seemed to be slowly breathing. His new form was interesting to say the least. The arms and legs had the same orange fur on the front and plates of bio-metal on the back. They seemed to be fused together. His face was the same but his torso was mostly made of plates that wrapped around over the shoulders like a vest. He wore long fingerless gloves on his hands and something similar on his feet.

The metal part over the torso almost looked like an uneven dress, splitting apart at the middle of the chest and exposing the natural body complete with rough scars from the incident underneath. His shorts were still resting where they should be, and the tattoos on his arms were intact. He was adorned with some other accessories too. He wore a necklace with a bright blue gemstone inside that seemed to flicker. I wasn't completely sure, but it looked a lot like the trigger in the basement.

On top of his head there was an ornate crown with a halo sticking out from the back, seemingly being an indicator of his ascension. The crown as made of gold, the same as a small belt he had which had a short red cape coming down from it. The bio-metal plates were roughly the same color as his fur just as the robot double was. The plates were decorated with symbols from the ritual circle, and on his upper back the words I added onto the inscription were written in small black text.

I tried to shake him awake, but he didn't budge and I had a good hunch of why. Chester's new body was likely connected to StarWorld's computer systems just as all of the robots are. Chester mentioned it to me when we first came across the robots, and I scrambled through the basement to find the blueprints he pointed out on that first night. It didn't take too long and with them, I found instructions on how to separate their power supply from the building's systems.

Getting him off the generator would require a short process of going onto three different computers and separating his power from three mainframes, one on each main level of the building. Running up and down these halls never gets old. I made sure everything was correct using a computer guide next to the computer in the room, and I set off to turn on all of the generators so there was power in the basement levels. It seemed like there was in the main levels, but it was noticeably darker than it was before.

The staircase from the mech bay side was locked, so I had to go back to the service stairs in the second part of the basement. Luckily, the gate was open and I was able to go in. I took the service stairs to the second floor, and I went up to the third floor to start turning them off from the top down. On the computer, I had to go through a quite lengthy process to disconnect Chester from the main system, though it wasn't too difficult or time-consuming.

After I finished the first operation, I decided to go through the vents to get to the second floor so I wouldn't get caught. I had discovered the previous day that there were some areas that had ladders inside the vents which struck me as odd, but I took them down to the second level and made my way around the level to one of the computer rooms without second thought. This time the process was to switch them all to rely on their own power rather than the generator's, and surprisingly, Chester's was listed in the running robotic units which told me that I did something right.

Connecting him to his own power didn't take too much longer than disconnecting him from the building's power. The whole time I was so curious as to what was happening to him down in the basement, if he was waiting for me, if he knew what I'd done. I finished the final step it in about five minutes just like the one on the third floor. I walked quietly out of the room and turned to the right to see Mila down the hall, an evil grin spread across her face. We both stopped for a moment and stared at each other.

"So you're still here, huh?" She said in a sinister tone.

"My work is almost done here,"

"So is ours, haha"

"Not if I have anything to say about it,"

I ran down the nearby staircase to the first floor with Mila hot on my trail. I ran around the corner of the hallway, and then doubled back trying to trick her. It somehow worked and I managed to get to the computer room without getting caught, although it seemed as though I would have to act fast. I was also somewhat certain she heard the door close even though I closed it slowly judging by how close she was.

According to the blueprints, the final step was the longest and most arduous. At this step, I had to boot up all of his systems so that he could run independently off his own power and internal parts, at least for the parts of him that were mechanized. It took a really long time, and by the end I was worried I would be caught if I left the room so I climbed into the vent in the corner, the grate still tucked behind the nearby boxes from yesterday.

Jumping up the boxes, I climbed up the ladder in the vent and started to walk around. Looking through the grates I saw that Mila, Easton, and Luna were all talking at the back half of the first level, so I made my way to the front and then I would exit the vents and go straight into the basement. As I crawled through the vents though, I had a strange feeling of dread, almost as if something was oncoming but I didn't know what just yet.

I kicked out the grate and jumped down to the ground, ending up right in front of the main entrance. As I got up, I heard the doors opening. A man walked through, noticing me right as he came in. He was a very good-looking man wearing black pants and a fancy blue coat. He had medium-length blonde hair and big beautiful blue eyes. His neck was adorned with military tattoos and he stood at the doorway watching me like he owned the place.

Through the large glass doors behind him, I could tell that the storm that had been raging through the night had reached its peak. There was thunder and lightning, and the sky was nearly pitch black with dark hanging clouds. The parking lot was starting to flood a bit due to the biblical amount of rain that was pounding Seamark. At least to me, it almost felt like the storm was mirroring my journey; its rises and falls mirroring mine.

He walked towards me, and I told him everything that happened prior. Luckily for me, he seemed to agree to help me get back to Basement 2, as well as agreeing to help me escape with Chester afterwards. Something about him was familiar, yet he seemed so off at the same time. I was sure he wasn't corrupted, though I had told my entire story to someone I realized I did not fully trust, and the way he reacted to some of the things I said didn't make me like him too much.

Once I was sure he couldn't be trusted, I decided to get away from him as soon as possible. I headed down to the basement and luckily he didn't seem to follow me, but I still felt a dreadful aura coming off of him. I made my way back through Basement 1 and down to Basement 2, trying to think nothing of it, but his glare kept coming up into my head. By the time I made it into the mech bay though, I had temporarily disregarded him as he wasn't an immediate threat like most of the others.

Chester's body was still limp, though he was definitely breathing. I propped him up as if he was sitting and found a small flip-up window just above the base of his neck. I opened it and found a switch, flipping it on and closing the window. Just underneath this was the memory storage in another window, though I wasn't sure how this fusion even functioned internally with all of these colliding pieces doing different things. At first it didn't seem to do anything, but there was another button just below the memory cards.

Pressing it caused a loud click. I closed the bottom window and then turned him off and back on again, and then he started to move. His eyes flicked open and dull for a second, though they grew wide when they met mine staring into them. He was ecstatic to see me, and we wrapped each other up in a giant hug. We were reunited! Even though we had only been apart for an hour and a half or so, it felt like years.

"I can't believe you did it! You saved my life, I don't think there's any way I can properly thank you Gemenii," He said, his speech slightly muffled by my shoulder being beside his face and the tears coming down from the both of us.

After a while, I let go, still staring into his eyes. It felt amazing but I realized we should probably get the hell out of there. The both of us ran back to the main stairway at the front of the machine bay and up to the main area, but the doors were locked again somehow. We took the long way to get through Basement 1 through one of the backroads down one of the empty menacing hallways in the second half of Basement 2.

When we entered the maze, Chester expressed his sense of a looming dread. He decided to hide out in the maze, mentioning he could monitor me remotely via the cameras which he still had access to somehow. I wasn't going to question it because it was a giant help. I promised I would come back for him once I was sure the coast was clear and all of the doors were unlocked. He silently nodded to me and wished me luck as I ran off. I walked through Basement 1 and into the main computer room to open up the doors to the main levels, but once they were open I felt a cold dread.

I exited the room and saw Easton charging at me through the maze from behind. I nearly jumped three feet in the air out of fear and ran as fast as I could through the maze. He was shouting and laughing at me the whole time we ran, his heavy footsteps pounding hard against the ground as he ran after me. I was fast but Easton was faster. I managed to get distance by duping him into mistakenly following me into dead ends for brief moments like I did with Ash on that first night.

His breathing was hard and loud but I tried to ignore it and focus on getting back up the stairs. He knew the layout better than I did and we came face to face a few times. Every time we did, I saw something slightly different in his expression that I couldn't place until a moment where I took a short break behind a wall. I could feel the impact of his back against the same wall, but it felt like it was out of exhaustion rather than anger this time.

"You know, I didn't think I would ever find myself telling you this," He said, seemingly reminiscing. "You remind me of my little brother."

"..."

"His name was Cherry and he was one of the most positive people you'd ever meet. Hope, hope, hope that's all he'd go on about. You'd think nothing could hurt the guy because of how hopeful he was that nothing would go wrong. And then he went missing." His tone shifted from positive recollection to bitterness and shame.

"They never found him again. It was like someone picked him up and took him off the earth. Why do you have to remind me so much of him? Why do I have to stand there and pretend it doesn't bother me? Fuck, here I am sitting beside you talking about it to your face. What have we all become?" His voice was shaky by this point, almost as if he was on the verge of tears.

"Monsters." I replied.

"You're damn right. It's coming back. Run."

Before he could even finish his sentence, I took off for the door which couldn't have been too far away. He was faster this time though, almost as if he brushed off that brief moment of clarity as quickly as it came. It didn't matter though because I managed to beat him to the door and I slammed it on his face. I felt the impact of steel and bone, but I wasn't sure how bad the damage was. He kept pounding and kicking on the door as I stood helpless behind it.

Seeing how strong he was and that the door was already starting to break, I quietly slunk up the stairs to the first level and slowly operated the door. As I closed it and went out into the main floor, I heard the door fly off its hinges and hit the wall behind it. When I got out into the main area, I noticed I had dropped my earpiece somewhere, but it didn't really matter too much. I had forgotten about it completely, and I probably hadn't removed it since yesterday in the rain.

Easton was still following me though so I had to be very quick. I went all the way up to the third floor to get away from him and hid in one of the security rooms. I used the camera system and speakers to go around and see what they were saying, and I saw that bastard telling the others where I was. I snuck through the vent systems and made my way all the way back down to Basement 1, and asked Chester if there was anything else I had to do before we escaped, and he said he wasn't really sure.

"I think you should hide somewhere, wait it out. We can leave together just before time runs out."

Taking his suggestion, I went back through the vents and into a different computer room, this one on the second floor. I blocked off the door as best as I could, and I listened in to what the others were saying and doing again. I could see the man who came in lurking around and entering the service stairs. I had no clue what he was doing, but it seemed like he was in some level of cahoots with the others. I managed to catch a conversation between Claire and Maverik, where she mentioned someone named Lurio.

My intuition was telling me that they were probably talking about the same person, although there was no way of knowing what. I kept observing the nightly lives of them as they talked and cleaned. For hours I watched them on the cameras, a tense moment arising when Luna and Easton walked just outside the room. I stayed silent and they didn't notice me, especially because they started making out right there in the open hallway.

Just before they came by I turned off the sound system, and thank goodness I did. Hearing the sounds on their own from behind the wall was gross enough. I was tempted to tell them to get a room, but I knew that no matter how funny that thought was it would certainly get me killed. It was little moments like these that I saw where they interacted like normal people which seemed to humanize them in my mind, although I knew that once their final goal was in mind every ounce of it was thrown away.

Seeing how they seemed to be just normal people with normal struggles broke my heart a little bit. It was so unassuming, but I tried to not let myself feel bad for them. None of them apologized like Maverick did so I didn't view them in as high a moral standing as the others. I thought a lot about these things until I noticed something on the screen. Claire and Maverick were obviously hiding from the cameras, and before I realized just how close they were I heard the door open behind me.

Hearing the click of the handle turning behind me made my heart drop. The two of them leapt into the room in front of me, leaving the door ajar behind them; a clear opening hanging just out of my reach. I turned around and stared at them, almost as if we were in a standoff. Not a moment after the pause Maverick lurched forwards and grabbed me off the ground. I managed to break free from Maverik and when I did he quietly told me to go along with it and let him take me.

"Please trust us, you know I don't mean harm," There was a certain inflection in his hushed voice which I couldn't quite place.

It occurred to me that I may have placed far too much trust into someone who didn't deserve it, so I decided to run. I glanced back and saw that they didn't chase after me, but I still ran like hell like I always had. I ended up in one of the vents on the third floor, probably having been seen by at least one of the others. I went to check my watch and it was around 5:30 AM, so I decided to try and wait it out up in the vents. I reached for my water, but I realized that I couldn't grab it from my pocket dimension.

Within a short amount of time I realized that I couldn't access my pocket dimension at all. It took me a minute to think of a reason why, but when I did it made a lot of sense to me. I must have destroyed my pocket dimension in the ritual. In order to do these rituals something must be given up, and when I noticed not a scratch on my body I thought it rather odd though very fortunate. The universe must have taken my pocket dimension from me, but it didn't matter too much because Chester still had the files inside his.

After the brief pause I continued to crawl through the vents to try and gain some information on what they could be doing so I had some idea of what to do next if anything went wrong. As I got closer to the ladder down to the second level, I realized it was getting hotter. I thought nothing of it at first, but I deduced that they must have turned the heat up on me. I crawled back down the nearby ladder and through the vents back to the nearest security room to get out, but the grate was sealed tight.

The temperature climbed up and up, the metal around me rising in heat as well. I scrambled to look for an exit, and as I was going through the vents a knife shot through the metal right in front of me. I let out a small scream in shock. I pulled it through the hole it left in the ceiling and ran through the tunnel, evading more that came afterwards. I wasn't sure who was throwing them but I managed to get away from them, crawling to the side of the vent that wasn't exposed and took a short break.

Once I was sure the coast was clear I braved through the burning pain all around me and went back to the exposed area of the vent to cut through it. The walls were surprisingly thin compared to how strong they were. One of the most mysterious things about this place were how strong the random maintenance vents were compared to the thickness of the metal. Even though the metal was some what easy to cut through it still required a lot of effort. I sawed a hole in the ground beneath me and braced for the fall.

When I landed on the ground, I felt light-headed. I thought that I just needed to cool off. I knew there were air conditioned rooms on the third floor so I slowly walked towards those steps, and as far as I could remember, the temperature control room was on the third floor as well. The general heat in the building had seem to have risen a lot as well. I made my way up the main stairs but when I got to the room it was locked. I tried shaking the door but it didn't even budge.

I had been so focused on trying to turn down the heat that I didn't notice the faint footsteps behind me which drew closer. I turned around and saw Maverik standing there with a knife and a sorry look on his face. His body trembled and he reared his arm up to throw it, but he pulled it down. He mouthed the words 'run' and I continued down the hallway. It looked like he could just barely control his urges, which seemed to give me more reason to not trust him as much.

Down the hallway I ran into Mila and Luna, nearly slamming right into Mila's back. They continued to chase me back down the main stairs to the second floor and right down the first. I knew at that moment I needed to get out of there and quick, because they were starting to close in on me and I wasn't planning on dying tonight. I managed to evade them for the time being and I crept into the nearest stairwell to go down to Basement 1.

As I approached the spot where Chester was hiding, I realized he wasn't there. I had begun to panic, the thought of him having left me fresh in my head. I thought that maybe he went down, so I ran to Basement 2 in search for him, but he wasn't there either. I even checked Basement 3, but wherever I looked he wasn't there. I ran back to the service stairwell to hopefully find him in there, but it was empty. I opened the door to the main floor and saw Easton and Luna waiting for me.

He kicked me down the stairs, knocking me out on the cold concrete below. Everything went dark for a moment, and I had a brief dream of nothing but fire and loss. The budling looked like StarWorld though the surrounding area was a bit different. There were unfamiliar people around me telling me to wake up, and in a moment I did. When I woke up, I was laying in the middle of a ritual circle in the room at the end of the second area in Basement 2.

"Look who's finally awake," Mila called out.

I looked up at all of them. Luna was standing above me, Mila sat right in front of me, Easton, Ash, and Maverick were all on either side, and Claire was behind Mila, almost as if she was hiding from me. I looked down at my body and realized I was bleeding out, sending cyan rivers across my shirt and the ground. There were three knife wounds inside my stomach, one of them being occupied by a knife similar to the ones they all wielded. Even though the situation was shitty, I knew I had to stay calm if I wanted to survive.

They started to taunt me, Ash ripping into me about how Chester left me. It implied that they all knew Chester was still alive which made my efforts to hide him in vein. I accused them of hurting him again, but they all looked at each other in confusion. I knew they were being honest that they didn't know where he was, but I didn't want to believe that he had abandoned me again; the very thought of it hurt far too much.

All of this petty shit started to matter less and less to me as my hope begun to dwindle. Mila passed the knife to Luna who stepped over me in a scarily suggestive way. She looked very excited and begun to lick the flat edge of the knife. She got really close to me, licked my face, and dragged the knife across my legs. She gave the knife back to Mila, saying she had a better idea. I didn't like the evil grin that spread across her face, the same horrifyingly sinister stare she always had.

She produced a large fire axe from her pocket dimension, and as she did I felt my heart drop. I saw expressions of shock and excitement on the faces of the others. The axe was reflective and caught a gleam of light, sending it across the room and into my eyes. She nodded at Easton to my right, and he grabbed onto my right arm. I saw Maverick and Claire try to jump into action, but her arms were in motion before they could cross over Easton's massive frame.

In slow motion, the axe went above her head and fell down on my arm like a guillotine. I screamed out in agony as loud as I could, but it was of no use. The pain was almost impossible just as it was to bring back Chester. I felt a whirlwind of emotions and pain envelop me like a raging storm. Most of them laughed at me as I cried out in a blinded rage of agony and emotions, all except for Claire and Maverick, the former of which was being held by Mila.

Through this storm I tried to pull myself together and keep it in. I knew if I kept crying they would only be worse. Luna threw the axe to the side, nearly severing Maverick's leg as it flew. She pulled out her knife and played with it a bit more until they finally got serious. Ash pulled out a book and started to read the incantation, Mila, Luna, and Easton joining in with him shortly afterwards. As they read out the spell in unison, I saw my life flash before my eyes. I closed my eyes as they finished.

"Open your eyes kid, I wanna see your pain!" Luna commanded.

Ash readied his knife and stabbed me twice. I tried not to cry, though I could feel my soul slipping away from my body. I held on for dear life. They begun to pass on the knife, and it went to Easton next. He went crazy for a minute, and then passed it off to Mila, then to Luna, then to Maverick. He didn't do it on his own, his arms trembling. I could feel my sense of hearing fade out to ringing. They started screaming at him to do it, and after the pressure caved he stabbed me once in each leg.

Everything around me, mostly the noise started to blend together and become fluid. All of the screaming and yelling went from a confined struggle in a cold room to a crowd crying out in terror. The room started spinning above me briefly, but I felt like I caught my balance once it stopped. The noise didn't change though, it all got worse and begun to grow into a cacophony of evil voices. Finally, the knife went to Claire.

She started sobbing and shaking with the knife in her hand. Mila knelt down beside her to her left and drove her arm forward. In. Out. In. Out. She stabbed me over and over again, but I still held on, staring down into the four pairs of eyes in front of me, studying their expressions. The lust and excitement in Mila's face, and the shame and horror in Claire's. I could feel everything getting ripped away, but a memory of what Easton told me seemed to change things.

"Hope," I whispered in a broken voice. It seemed like only Maverick and Easton heard it.

Hope, I thought. I have to hold out hope. I repeated the words in my head until it clicked. As my body got torn to pieces, I saw a bright golden light begin flash up from every wound. It reminded me of the light that rose up from the circles once their spells were cast. It got brighter and brighter, but none of them seemed to notice it. I kept holding on, until she stopped. Everyone stopped. For a moment I didn't know why, but then my hearing came back.

"FREEZE! HANDS IN THE AIR AND PUT THE KNIFE DOWN!"

"Wait you don't und-" A hail of gunfire came down from the top of the stairs to Claire for a second, stopping as she hit the ground.

I looked up and saw a SWAT team running down into the room from the newly open doors at the top of the stairs. They pointed guns at the others and put them all in handcuffs. As they did, a couple of the officers from the team stared down at me, one of them shouting to the others that the victim was alive. Two of them picked me up off of the ground on a stretcher and carried me up the stairs into the harsh light of the morning. It all felt like some kind of daydream.

The parking lot was still flooded from the massive storm, and judging by how drenched the officers and cars out here were it looked like the storm had left right as they brought me up. The sky was still mostly overcast, but a break in the dark imposing clouds shone a light on this side of the building. It felt almost poetic that the raging storm inside my head had subsided right as the one in real life, though at that point I was too dazed from blood loss to notice the irony then.

Sitting nearby in the parking lot there was an ambulance, and a bunch of officers talking by one of the police cars. As the officers walked out with my body in the stretcher, they shouted to the other officers and paramedics. They all came over to look me, wondering how I was even alive. I didn't know how I was alive either, all I knew is that I had made it. When I got lifted into the ambulance, I saw Chester by the police car. He turned around and ran over to me.

When I noticed him, I gave him a large smile, but I couldn't even speak without blood pouring all over myself. I was in so much pain, but I was alive, I had done it, I held on. I knew Chester wouldn't abandon me; I figured he just left to call the police and ambulance to StarWorld, accurately predicting that they would successfully capture me and attempt to murder me. They lifted me into the ambulance and drove me off to the hospital where they rushed me into the ER.

As the ambulance was getting started, I watched the other coronians get walked out of the building in handcuffs, though I didn't see Claire get lifted out. For a moment, I felt a sense relief, then everything seemed to go silent for about a minute. "Is it just me or is everything quiet?" I said. Just when I finished my sentence and the van began to drive off, I saw a golden beam of light burst through all of the windows and doors of the building as it left.

They put me under before I could ask about it, and when I awoke, they were done applying stitches and cauterizing my wounds. When they noticed I woke up, I already knew what they were going to ask. Where's your parents? Where's your family? Are you hurt? It was awkward to keep explaining that I didn't have any, and it didn't help that my voice was so low and gravely because of the throat damage from Easton's fists and my own screams.

During their procedures they realized that I didn't have any public records and I had to explain that this was because I was dumped onto the streets They looked really shocked, and asked if I wanted a foster home, but I said someone else offered me a home first. After they asked me a bunch of other very personal questions about my life, they asked me how I didn't die. It was an interesting question but one I'd already been asked. Just as I said to the police I didn't know.

"I don't know, all I know is that I held on."

Every single police officer and nurse that came into the room asked me the same things like robots, and by the end of the day I was tired as hell. I was surprised that they allowed Chester to stay in the room past visiting hours, though I was very glad they did. We talked at night about everything that had happened that night, and though there were many things that I couldn't get out of my head one of the most pressing was Claire.

She had taken a couple of bullets to the chest and though that's not enough to kill a person, I still really wanted her to be alive. I knew that most of them did miss, and I know I saw plenty of bullet holes in the wall behind her when I was lifted out; I wanted to be sure she was alright. Chester seemed to have less sympathy for her seeing as she just stood around when he was murdered but the way I saw it, she was frozen in fear like a deer in headlights.

He'd seemingly lost all sympathy for Claire, but when I brought up Maverick he acted differently. It seemed like his emotions were slightly different in his new body. More serious and slightly less tender. He was still the same Chester I knew and love, but it was as if he fully realized everything that he had done wrong at once and was trying to process it just as much as I was. I tried not to focus on his bitterness.

Another pressing thing I couldn't get out of my head was the flash of golden light. There was only one thing that it could possibly mean, and that was that they successfully built the angel. I had hoped that it wasn't Claire who was the final piece to their puzzle. The question of who cast the spell was easy, and that'd be the man they called Lurio who had come in earlier that day. I didn't trust him for a second and it seemed that I had a very good reason to if it was him.

. . .

Though I was still hospitalized, I wanted to go back so badly. Two days later I asked about it, and they asked me if I could walk. I was very surprised that they'd let me go so soon, saying that I just needed to be back at the hospital by 6:30 PM. How ironic. Although the looming threat of danger was all but gone and I wouldn't be on my own, I was still very scared of what I might find. Both the curiosity and fear were killing me.

When we approached the building there was caution tape all over the doors and boards over the windows, though Chester knew another way in. I thought he'd take me through the door to Basement 2 where the police went through, but we went through another door that was far less likely to be blocked or locked. He took me around the back of the complex to the shortest building. Sure enough there was another red door at the back on the left side of the wall, almost the exact same type as at the exterior doors to Basement 2.

It took a little but of force, but the door went open in no time. We walked into one of the main dining rooms just behind the stage. We walked across the room and to the large double doors which opened wide effortlessly. I was quite surprised that the side doors were open, but I shortly recalled how they weren't locked on the third night. To my surprise the stairwell doors were open too, and once we took the long way through Basement 1 we discovered the door to Basement 2 was also unlocked.

Past the mech bay, through the gate at the wide wall, down twist and turns, and down the long hallway, Passing the open doors to bloody rooms. I saw that the ruins of decay were no longer there, possibly having vanished once the angel was created. There were small piles of ash where the ruined bodies once sat, forming runes inside circles in place of the ruins. My guess was that they all burnt up or turned into piles of ash.

Once we approached the room where it happened, all that remained was chalk, bloodstains, and bullet holes. Her body wasn't there which I hoped implied that she had ran off. The pool of her indigo blood still remained though, partially soaked into the concrete ground. I counted nine bullet holes in the wall, and two in the ground just barely visible through the thick blood. Luna's axe was still resting over by the wall, still coated in my own cyan stain.

We both stared at each other in slight shock. I wanted to keep looking for Claire. We turned back to the hole into Basement 3 and checked around. She wasn't in there, but neither was the mass of souls. The place looked far more empty without that *thing* in the middle of the area, making the distant light of the source look further away. The large floodlights on their stands were still on and illuminating the blank ground.

After a moment of hesitation, we climbed back up the rope. I was quite surprised the hole in the floor and the rope were still untouched, but they were all probably too overcome to do anything about it when they passed by it. I had one thought left before we gave up our search, and that was the two side hallways that split off from the hallway of horrors. As far as I knew, both hallways were only used for additional storage, and possibly other exits though Chester didn't mention anything about them.

I scrambled to find a flashlight, though Chester was able to produce light from his mechanical eyes. I never noticed the LED embedded in his corneas, nor did I notice a lot of other elements that his robot double had which were fused into his regenerated body. Even in the light, the hallways were still eerily dark. We decided to take the one on the right first, but it only led to a single room filled with boxes. There was a very noticeable layer of grime and dust on everything in the room so I assumed they weren't important.

Other than the sealed boxes that littered the ground, the only other thing inside the room was another old jade-tinted steel door. I'd become all too familiar with the vault-like doors that littered the bottom levels. Some of them had handles and others had giant wheels like on the bottoms of ships, and some had windows while others did not. I walked through the boxes to reach it only to find it was locked.

The hallway on the left was very different compared to the one on the right. The left one was far longer and it felt more like an access tunnel than a hallway. The first room was filled with more boxes, though a few of them looked like they had been disturbed very recently. There was a metal door on the other end which had seemingly been swung open very violently as seen by a chip in the concrete wall where the had hit. The cold-jade colored metal door was still ajar.

Compared to the security room-sized area at the end of the other hallway, this room was a lot longer and a bit wider. We both looked at each other, slowly piecing together what could have happened and proceeded cautiously through the open door. There was another long hallway ahead, though this one had overhead lights which were off. This one wasn't nearly as long as the first and the door at the end was closed.

We opened up the door, and there she was. The overhead light in the room harshly illuminated the sorry scene. The room was rather spacious, though there were some chairs and random boxes strewn about the room. There were stains of blood on the floor and the wall, as well as scratch marks on the wall. It looked like there was quite the struggle here. There was yet another door down the hall which was open slightly ajar.

Claire laid on the ground in a pool of her own blood with several stab wounds through her shirt. Her hair was messy and wet with blood. It looked like whoever had come in here came in and out with a hurry. I could feel tears start to well up in my eyes as I stared down at the ground. I looked at Chester again, and then knelt over to her side. I carefully reached out towards her bloodied neck, and somehow there was a faint and slow pulse.

I hopped back in both shock and excitement, Chester being able to tell what happened by my body language. He immediately sprung into action and armed with a map of the layout of StarWorld, he deduced that this tunnel led to one of the buildings down the road from us. Chester phoned the police and an ambulance remotely like he said to have done the day before while I picked up Claire. He pulled open the door exposing a long illuminated tunnel ahead.

Praying for the best, I followed Chester down the long tunnel. This one was far more open than the other areas, feeling a lot more like a sewer tunnel than a hallway. I felt my arms slipping away, but the adrenaline kept me going. A large door appeared in front of us, still slightly open. The damp air from the abandoned building above filled my lungs. We ran into a dark and empty room to a stairway that was illuminated by natural light.

Once we approached the top the ambulances and police cars came into view. They took the three of us back to the hospital. It turned out in the sprint some of my stitches had opened up. I requested that she be in the same room as me, and surprisingly they granted it. I wasn't expecting them to be so lenient with me after I left without being discharged, though the police and doctors seemed to be very thankful and understanding of me.

Their words made me finally realize that I had saved Claire, something I hadn't even considered when I was looking for her. She would have died alone tucked away in a back room in a now abandoned tomb. Ever since that creature spoke to me on the second night, the idea of the basements being a tomb got stuck fresh in my mind. Just like the building above what was essentially another complex below it, the basements were an empty shell of what they were meant for.

As far as I knew, it was closed indefinitely at that point. It only made sense that it'd be shut down just like all of the other failed projects on the street. I doubted many people were surprised that it was closed either. It almost seemed like the destiny of this place was to be left to rot, to be used as a vessel to create something horrible, though I didn't quite know what yet. They all referred to it as the angel, but I still had no clue what that could mean.

More and more the curiosity and mystery of what the angel could be begun to dig itself into my head, the curiosity of it corroding me from the inside. Before I could think too hard about that though, Claire woke up. Chester wasn't in the room when it happened. She practically jumped up from the bed in a scream with a horrific expression on her face. She stared blank at the wall in front of her, slowly realizing where she was. Her face was practically glued to the wall, transfixed in its soft pale complexion.

"It's over. . ." Her voice was broken and shaky.

Tears begun to flow out from her eyes, washing the blood from her face and neck. Her face was bruised and her dirty hair was messy in strands over her face. Her breathing was steady as she stared, and then finally she looked around. Her head trained to the right, meeting my eyes. Her expression changed when she realized it was me, turning from abject shock to sadness. The tears came fast and she looked down. It was clear that she couldn't even look at me.

"..."

"Why did you have to be the first person I see?" She spoke between sobs.

"You don't need to cry. All it'll do is make me cry too." My voice was already starting to shake.

"I nearly fucking killed you. You shouldn't have saved me. You should have just let me rot in there. I'm just as bad as they are."

"We both know you're not-"

"But *they* won't know. For all they know I'm a dirty bitch that helped them build their angel."

"We both know how complicated the truth is."

"Again, but they don't. They never will. I cant decide if I want to disappear or if I want to take revenge. I'm guessing you pieced together what he did."

"Yes. I'm sorry that happened to you."

"I don't even know what to feel now. My life had been ruined by these monsters, and now *he* comes back, one of the same bastards that led me down this path. If I could prove a single word he said I'd bring him to justice. . . but that's a foolish dream."

"I never expected you to be this emotional when I first saw you."

"I thought you'd be more emotional seeing how much you cried when- *that* happened."

"The truth is I don't even know what to feel right now. Sad, angry, solemn, hopeful, it's all a daze to me. The closet emotion I can use to describe how I feel right is empty."

"Maybe that's what I'm feeling, other than immense guilt right now. I'm guessing you can't process all of this either."

"...and rage too?"

"Yes, rage too. Though emptiness and guilt are invading my mind. It feels like I'm drowning."

"We're drowning together then, like two sinking ships calling to each other for help to no avail."

"It seems we are," She smiled a bit as she spoke, though she was still crying.

"Maybe we're not too different from each other either, victims of tragedy and desperation, driven by different things though ultimately coming towards the same end,"

"You have a way with words, but we're very different."

"Thanks I used to practice poetry."

"I never thought you'd be the way you are on that first night I saw you. I heard them identify you as an easy target."

"They wrote that in a folder on me. They kept all their victims on file down in the third basement."

"I heard of that place but I'd never been. Didn't have the courage or the knowledge. I don't even know how *they* got in or out, other than the massive hole which I'm assuming you and Chester dug."

"Correct. There's some crazy stuff down there, well there was but the angel's not there anymore."

"The angel. . . I know they were trying to build one and that it got finished by Kiff but I never got to know what it looked like. He taunted me with that fact actually, knowing how I felt about never being able to know what it was."

"Is Kiff the man who came in on the morning of the ninth? His name is Lurio right?"

"Yes. This wasn't our first time meeting either. I'd met him on other occasions with the band, like my interview to be what I thought was an assistant team leader for the 'theme park'. I was strapped for cash even though my family is filthy rich, all thanks to my asshole brother who hoards it all; no, gets whatever the fuck he wants from our parents while I'm left to die."

"That's horrible I'm sorry to hear that. You're not the only one with shitty parents and a desire to see that angel though."

"You saw it before it was formed though, right?"

"Yeah, it looked like a bloody mass of congealed bodies. I shudder even thinking about it."

"Yes. I remember Easton saying that the ugly duckling will turn beautiful so that's probably what he was talking about."

"Only one way to find out. Do you want to come with me?"

"I'd love to but I can't go back. I'm too broken, too weak."

"Don't say that, look at how far you've come, what you've pulled through."

"You're right, but I want to save my strength for something else. Perhaps the plan of vengeance isn't such a daydream after all."

"Still foolish though no doubt, right?"

"You are more right than you know."

"What's the big deal with this guy anyways?"

"You seriously don't know? I assumed you'd at least heard of him before. He's pretty popular from his movie roles and albums."

"Nope. I can't say I've seen a lot of movies."

"I should have assumed that."

We talked on for a while for what felt like minutes but ended up being nearly three hours. There was something so great about being able to bond with our shared trauma, especially after all that happened to the both of us. Not too long after we stopped talking, I decided to get some well-deserved rest. With one of my most burning questions finally answered in the safety of Claire, it felt like I could finally drift off. . .

***To be continued.***