Ekstrom smirked as she moved to grab the polaroid as it printed from her camera, not the least bit surprised that it wasn't enough to pull her guest's attention back to her. The state of the level that the elevator had opened onto was...abysmal, to say the very least. Never mind the layer of dust, the upended pieces of destroyed furniture, the deep gashes on the wall, or even the now fading evidence of long-dried splatters of a suspiciously dark brown substance. What made this space so uniquely off-putting...
Was the tar.
Or close enough, anyway. It was definitely a black, gooey sort of substance that reminded her of tar, but "black goo" sounded silly even to her.
Her expression had been similar to his when she first came to this floor—gone slack with disbelief, all wide eyes and a half-open mouth. In her shock, she nearly forgot to snap a photo of the room as she originally found it—though she'd left everything untouched so she still could have. Back then she was alone and equipped with only her lights, just in case, and her camera. Now, she was back with proper cleaning equipment and, more importantly—reinforcements.
"Hah!" she said, suddenly breaking the silence. "I wish I had a way of sending an exact copy of this to your family."
Ashur finally turned to her, just a flicker of irritation in his eyes before his overall expression had gone back to the initial disbelief of what he was taking in.
"You've gotta be kidding me."
A huff slipped past her lips as she offered him the photo. "I wish. Why do you think I brought you in?"
"Free labor?"
"Kinda?"
"Ha-ha."
She shot him a grin as he grabbed the photo, then sighed in turn before handing it back.
"The girls would have a good laugh at that."
"I thought they would," she said, taking it and sending it off to her subspace before finally turning to look at the wreck of space before her. The tar was absolutely everywhere, and while they had brought a hoard of cleaning equipment with them she wasn't sure if any of it would actually work against it. Not to mention the prospect of doing all of it by hand...
"Anyway, you can see why I didn't even try to touch it when I first saw it. I was expecting the dust and debris, but the tar–"
"Tar?"
"It's either 'tar' or 'black goo'."
"Tar, got it."
They both looked on at the scene, silence stretching for a time before Ekstrom finally clapped her hands together and broke it. "Well. Let's get started, yeah?"
They exchanged a look, sighed—him slightly louder than her—then grabbed a bucket of cleaning supplies and got to work.
They started with the dust—which was thick enough to coat everything—and worked their way through the room from there. Floors first, then the furniture, then whatever debris they could sort into something resembling order. It still wasn't usable, of course—there was nothing they could do about the large gashes everywhere or the broken furniture, never mind the tar.
That had proved impossible to clean. It was like the marks had been left so long they had become one with the surfaces they covered. What they did manage to loosen smeared and smudged, ruining the cloth they'd been trying to clean it with. No cleaning solution they brought seemed to have any effect on the tar either, so they resigned themselves to its permanence and moved on to focus on what they could clean up.
It didn't come off in the hallway either.
"Remind me again, why this floor?" Ashur asked, exhaustion clear in his voice. They were finishing up, the last of the hallway finally clean. The first room they'd agreed to tackle was next.
Ekstrom heaved a sigh as she put her cleaning supplies away. "Well," she started, then quickly pulled out the PC and opened it up. She navigated to the 3D map of the space and zoomed in to where a white dot was blinking at the center of the floor. Two red dots marked where they were, just by the elevator. "The Code said that my ancestor is locked away here somewhere. I did look around my first trip up, but didn't find anything. All the doors are locked, so I figure there's some stuff I need to do to fix up the wiring or something so they can open. Before I can do that, though–"
"You gotta be able to at least see what you're doing," he finished the sentence with a grumbling sort of sigh.
"Exactly."
Her thoughts circled around the question of "why" as they headed back to her quarters. Why had nothing happened so far? Why no sign of her ancestor? And actually, why were there no immediate signs of anything wrong with that floor to begin with? Except maybe the tar. But even that was explainable—something that had gone wrong thousands of years ago, left behind. It wasn't unlike any of the other walls, floors, or furniture she'd cleaned since starting to fix up her Wonder. Blood was the most common thing that needed actual scrubbing, but it wasn't the only thing. She'd dealt with substances of all kinds of colors and textures, so why not tar? Granted nothing so far had been so stubborn—so impossible to clean—but it could've been alien guts for all she knew.
The thought made her gag, which earned her a quirked, questioning look from her friend. He left it alone, though, apparently preferring to go back to their earlier conversation.
"So about the next room..."
It was a mirror of the space in front of the elevator, at least according to the map. It looked different, though. Rather than a waiting area, it seemed furnished for observation and discussion. Long benches were scattered about in front of a large observation window, completely blacked out from the inside with a coating of tar. Long tables—toppled over or otherwise damaged—sat on either side of the benches. The walls behind the tables housed large monitor panels, only visible now due to the extensive damage.
Though if the tar was bad in the waiting area, it was even worse here.
It wasn't just everywhere—it was thicker, and somehow didn't seem quite as dry as the tar they'd encountered up to that point. In fact, the floor was slick with it, which made cleaning that much harder. It was bad enough they skipped dusting altogether and instead set about righting the furniture and sorting the debris like they had in the other room.
The tar stuck to everything. Their shoes, their clothes, even their hair. But they plowed on, more stubborn than the tar itself, so they could be done with it.
The lighting was worse here than anywhere else. And it was colder. Colder. As if that was possible—and yet here they were. A sense of dread crept up Ekstrom's back the longer they worked there, though she did her best to fight it down. Ashur seemed unaffected, focused on the work. The last thing she wanted to do was make him worry, and yet...
The closer they got toward the front of the room, the colder it became. More than once she glanced over her shoulder, certain she'd felt something moving at her back. After the third time, Ashur finally caught on. When she looked at him again, he was watching—alert, even as he kept working to upturn one of the benches.
She'd been about to explain when a single step to her right, bringing her within a few feet of the window, sent a chill through her so sharp it made her whole body shudder.
Ashur's mouth went slack, his eyes widening slowly. She turned around.
"That's—"
"Not tar."
Tar would have been easier.
She knew what to expect with tar.
Mainly, that it didn't really move.
Or at least, if it did move, it didn't move like that.
It—whatever it was—was a thick, grossly misshapen...mass was the only word that came to mind. Her foot had caught on some piece of it and caused it to stutter—stutter—away from her. Like it couldn't decide how to move. Or where. Or if it should move at all—even as it did. Its edges blurred and the vague outline of a tapered end drew back, caught in the dim light.
Barely, though. Really, to say that it was black seemed like an understatement. It didn't just not reflect the light, but it took it into itself somehow. Absorbing what it could and releasing, if any, whatever was left in a random scatter around it.
The mass seemed to breathe. Then undulate. Then stutter, still as if it couldn't decide where it wanted to be. Ekstrom felt her skin crawling as she watched, not realizing that she was holding her breath until she was forced to let it go and take in a new one—sharp and quiet.
And yet despite it, she didn't shy away. She took a step forward, this time catching the tapered end of it on purpose.
The dark mass drew into itself. Stuttered. Turned over. Coiled. Uneven rows of puckered formations dotted the underside of it, and a dark haze lingered where the formations pulled away from the ground, as though hesitant to let go.
"Ekstrom," came Ashur's warning tone.
The blue light of her transcended markings seemed to shine brighter as she pressed closer still, ignoring him. Her own breathing had nearly stilled as she took her next step, and then–
SLAM.
The sudden sound broke her focus, and she slipped. Ashur quickly caught her by the wrist and yanked her back hard.
SLAM.
The mass had uncoiled and snapped forward, its tapered end stuttering as it squeezed around the space where Ekstrom had just been standing.
Ignoring the ache in her shoulder, the Mercury Knight dismissed her shield—then immediately called it back. The plain figure of Mel flashed for barely a second before the mantle settled over her again. Anger flared in Ekstrom's normally cheerful, bright blue eyes. Shield on her arm, she pressed forward again, sending her forcefield ahead of her.
At her back, Ashur called his staff to him in much the same manner and moved to her side.
In the light of her forcefield, they could finally make out some semblance of a shape.
A tentacle—or something like one—recoiled as her forcefield passed through it. Before they could take more than a few steps toward it, it retreated. The mass of darkness fled through a door just beside the window and into the room beyond.
The room brightened, little by little, until it matched the hallways and waiting room they had already cleaned. Still tense, the pair looked at the door it had fled through. It was closed, so whatever it was passed straight through. Ashur stowed his staff and went to try the door, but Ekstrom—
Something else had caught her eye. A pale blue light shone beneath a still upturned chair that had been completely hidden by the mass of darkness.
"It's locked," she heard Ashur say as she went to the chair and picked it up. She didn't hear the rest.
There, on the floor, lay a necklace with a vial of blue liquid serving as a pendant. She picked it up and set it in her palm, inspecting it closely. She felt Ashur come up beside her, and she flicked a glance over to him before bringing it back to the pendant.
"Did you hear anything I said?" he asked.
"That it's locked."
He sighed. "Well, that was the main point anyway. What's that?"
"No clue. It was under a chair that the...thing–"
"Tar?"
She shot him a look. He grinned.
"Anyway," she went on, "don't you think it's weird that it was hanging around over a chair that just happened to have something like this under it?"
He peered curiously down at it and, after a second, nodded.
"Like trying to hide it?"
"Yeah."
"Maybe? But if it was trying to hide this thing, I can think of two things to point out. One—there's probably something special about that necklace."
"Like?"
"No clue." She shot him another look. He grinned again, and then shrugged. "Put it on and try channeling your magic or something."
"I'll try that later," she said, even as she slipped the necklace on.
Artifact Acquired
"What about the second?"
The thought wiped the smile from his face, and a slight worry furrowed his brow.
"It can think for itself, or at least enough that it can sense power and know that it wants it for itself."
Silence settled over the pair as she considered this. The Code had warned her that Chaos was lingering here, though she hadn't expected it to present itself like this. She was expecting a typical youma, like the ones they fought on Earth. This felt more...alien, and was certainly unlike any Chaos she'd ever encountered before. Hearing Ashur frame it like that, though, helped to put it into some perspective.
"We should go," she said, breaking the silence. "It doesn't feel like it, but this is probably the Chaos the Code told me about." Ashur opened his mouth to ask a question, but she cut him off. "It couldn't tell me much more than that. When I first got here I thought the black stuff was the same as the other messes I've had to clean up before."
He frowned and looked on at the window, completely blacked out from the other side. Inside the room.
"Sucks to be wrong," he said.
She smirked and gave an amused huff. "Yeah it does."
Another silence, toward the end of which Ashur clapped her on the shoulder.
"Let's go?"
Ekstrom's gaze had moved from the window to the locked door, settling there until she felt his hand on her shoulder. She gave a short nod of her head before turning around and leading the way out of the room.
As they waited by the elevator, she looked over at her friend after rolling another question around in her mind.
He caught her eye and hesitated. "What?" he managed to ask.
"Got another question for you."
He ignored the nervous chill that started to crawl up his spine. "Shoot."
"What made those slamming sounds?"
The sound of the elevator's arrival broke the silence that had stretched over them again. Ekstrom wished she had the energy to pull her camera out to take another picture.
The look on Ashur's face was priceless.
