NOVPUBUpon arriving at the address written in the paper the first thing Nika did was knock on the door of what seemed 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 some 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 Medusa and Luna waiting outside.
"This is weird." Luna, the expert on weird, informed.
"No kidding, can you smell something?"
"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." Medusa'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."
Medusa would have loved to break inside and get some clues that would justify staying a little longer as she suspected there was something 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 time 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." Medusa blurted out before Nika turned to leave.
"That's irrational, we should leave." Luna declared hiding behind her cold facade the disappointment at not being able to meet other hybrids.
"A gut feeling? huh." Nika seemed to ponder for a few seconds and nodded. "Even if all you have is a gut feeling, we should go with it."
"Really?" Medusa asked in actual disbelief.
"Of all of us you're the one who spent the most time with Alessandro and if you say there's something 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 sometimes you have to go with your gut feeling."
"Nika, you've really become more competent lately." Medusa nodded at Nika with approval.
"Good Nika." Luna said.
"Let's just make a quick stop at a hardware shop and get some lightflashes, because it was so dark inside I couldn't see anything."
"I take it back." Medusa buried her face in her hands causing Nika to flinch like she had just been shot in the chest with an arrow.
"Me too." Luna added causing an even greater effect that sent Nika to the ground.
"You're so mean to me." Nika pouted the entire time until they returned with gear to break inside the building site and also flashlights to investigate the interior.
While Luna and Medusa 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 seemed offensive as though she was calling them incompetent. She even went as far as to say something, 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 Medusa by herself surrounded by suspicious looking gear.
"Don't do this to me! Hey! Open the door!" She shouted as she slammed 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 times, though, Medusa 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." Medusa 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 some more just to confirm her theory, then picked a screwdriver and the large wrench, placing the former on top of the door's hinges and using the latter as a hammer to slowly poke the bolt out of its hinges.
Just like Medusa suspected, buildings meant 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 Medusa stepped a musk smell 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 became.
Relying mostly on her sense of hearing, Medusa 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 informed 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 somehow 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. 𝑛𝘰𝑣𝑝𝑢𝑏.𝘤𝑜𝘮
Her hands started trembling and despite the immense power behind her muscles, her legs became 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 meant there could be cryptids that didn't emit a field of disruption. Then an idea crossed her mind, it was something 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, Medusa's fingers were too sweaty and the biometric 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." Medusa 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 times 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 something that resembled a pipe, only dry and hard, porous like a rock but with tiny filaments she could only feel thanks to her enhanced senses.
The soft tip of her fingers followed it vertically across the wall, then horizontally until something that resembled a door frame where the 'pipe' became wider enough to make her realize that what she thought was a wooden pipe was actually a vine.
