Upon arriving at the address written in the paper the first thing Nika did was knock on the door of what seed to be a construction site. Judging by its design, it will end up looking a lot similar to the Dolminico's restaurant that fell along with the city, though for so strange reason there were no workers and nobody answered their calls.
"I'll take a quick look inside." Nika said as she disappeared in the shadows, leaving dusa and Luna waiting outside.
"This is weird." Luna, the expert on weird, inford.
"No kidding, can you sll sothing?"
"Uhm... no. Maybe I'm wrong."
"Nothing, there's nobody here." Nika shook her head as soon as she returned.
"Abandoning a building like this makes no sense." dusa's head spun at high speed. Contrary to Uriel, seeing the bigger picture was difficult for her which is why she tried to turn it into a math problem.
"Or maybe they just ran out of funds, which explains why they couldn't pay, why they abandoned the building like this and also why no one spoke to the dryad."
dusa would have loved to break inside and get so clues that would justify staying a little longer as she suspected there was sothing going on, but she didn't know how to pick a door, let alone an alloy reinforced one like that. Besides, she would still need her sense of sight if she wanted to even find anything.
The more ti she spent outside the zeppelin the more weak and vulnerable she felt and she couldn't wait to find a way to get her sight back.
"We should stay a while, I have a gut feeling." dusa blurted out before Nika turned to leave.
"That's irrational, we should leave." Luna declared hiding behind her cold facade the disappointnt at not being able to et other hybrids.
"A gut feeling? huh." Nika seed to ponder for a few seconds and nodded. "Even if all you have is a gut feeling, we should go with it."
"Really?" dusa asked in actual disbelief.
"Of all of us you're the one who spent the most ti with Alessandro and if you say there's sothing off we believe you. Besides, you're also a heavenly rank hunter and possess what Uriel calls mystical sense. I don't believe in any of that mumbo jumbo and there's probably an explanation behind it, but I don't know or care about it. All I know is that sotis you have to go with your gut feeling."
"Nika, you've really beco more competent lately." dusa nodded at Nika with approval.
"Good Nika." Luna said.
"Let's just make a quick stop at a hardware shop and get so lightflashes, because it was so dark inside I couldn't see anything."
"I take it back." dusa buried her face in her hands causing Nika to flinch like she had just been shot in the chest with an arrow.
" too." Luna added causing an even greater effect that sent Nika to the ground.
"You're so an to ." Nika pouted the entire ti until they returned with gear to break inside the building site and also flashlights to investigate the interior.
While Luna and dusa struggled to open the door with a steel crowbar that bent like spaghetti, Luna climbed to the top of the building and looked them from above with the usual stony face, only now it seed offensive as though she was calling them incompetent. She even went as far as to say sothing, but due to the distance they couldn't see exactly what she said, only that it was offensive.
"Why am I even doing this? See you inside!" Nika poked her tongue out as she left dusa by herself surrounded by suspicious looking gear.
"Don't do this to ! Hey! Open the door!" She shouted as she slamd the door with all her strength yet causing no damage to the structure. She needed to figure a way inside the building, but not being able to see didn't play in her favor.
Contrary to most other tis, though, dusa didn't feel helpless. She wasn't abandoned by her friends but treated fairly instead, which let her think that they trusted she could find a way inside on her own.
"I can do this." dusa said as she focused on finding and answer, then crouched on the ground to feel the different tools at her disposal. Different sized screwdrivers, a large wrench, a boltcutter and a few crowbars were all the items she had at her disposal. Of course there were the flashlights, but she had no use for a source of light.
She probed the door so more just to confirm her theory, then picked a screwdriver and the large wrench, placing the forr on top of the door's hinges and using the latter as a hamr to slowly poke the bolt out of its hinges.
Just like dusa suspected, buildings ant to be aesthetic didn't focus much on security design which caused hidden flaws like exposed hinges trusting that just because it was built with reinforced alloy no one would bother trying to bring it down.
As soon as dusa stepped a musk sll reached her nostrils along with dust particles that caused her to sneeze. She walked inside unhindered as it was spacious enough for her to not stumble upon any walls unaware that the further she walked the darker everything around her beca.
Relying mostly on her sense of hearing, dusa listened to the sound of her footsteps and the ensuing echo hoping to hear from her friends. She was tempted to call for them, but her heavenly rank sense inford her they were nowhere close.
"At least there's no cryptids here." She heaved a sigh then stopped in her tracks as the sudden realization that even if there were, she had no way of knowing. She couldn't so much as look at her cellphone and now she realized that leaving the flashlights behind was an utter mistake on her part.
Although she would have been unable to see its light, she could have felt the warmth emitted by the halogen bulb inside. "What if they were LED? Those don't emit any heat." She spoke out loud in hopes that her voice would sohow reach her friends, but the uncanny echo produced by the empty building and the smooth walls prompted her to fall silent.
Cold sweat trickled down her forehead as she tried to reassure herself over and over that everything was alright and her friends were nearby, though every passing second without feeling their presence or even hearing them brought her closer to lose control.
Her hands started trembling and despite the imnse power behind her muscles, her legs beca flaky to the point where even taking a step felt like a challenge. By that point she couldn't help but think back on the cryptid whose presence they couldn't feel and could only be seen in the reflection of a mirror.
She didn't see it, but just knowing that not all cryptids stuck to the rules everyone thought they followed ant there could be cryptids that didn't emit a field of disruption. Then an idea crossed her mind, it was sothing that Uriel did and she always nagged at him for it. Whenever he had the chance, Uriel played music on his smartphone out loud.
She knew he had no need for earplugs since he could listen to the music with the smartphone still inside his museum, which only made it more annoying when he played music out loud for everyone to hear.
Due to her stress and the anxiety built up inside her, dusa's fingers were too sweaty and the biotric lock didn't work.
This only amounted to her fears and she rapidly slid her finger across the screen in a futile attempt to unlock it with the pattern until she had no choice but to give up on her endeavor, admit she bit more than she could swallow and go back to the entrance to wait or her friends.
Unfortunately to her, in her previous daze she lost the sense of direction and now she had no clue where the entrance was. "I need to stick to the basics, then." dusa muttered as she leaned on the wall with the intention to follow its lead to wherever it went. It was a strategy that had worked for her many tis in the past, even when she still had her sense of sight but lacked a source of light.
Instead of the smooth wall she expected, though, she felt a strange texture. It was sothing that resembled a pipe, only dry and hard, porous like a rock but with tiny filants she could only feel thanks to her enhanced senses.
The soft tip of her fingers followed it vertically across the wall, then horizontally until sothing that resembled a door fra where the 'pipe' beca wider enough to make her realize that what she thought was a wooden pipe was actually a vine.
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