“After so many months of imagining what the place looked like,” Adam raggedly drew in a breath, “Now I get to see the outside with my own eyes.”
Having stopped their car a quarter mile down the road from the think tank’s facility, he and Princess Luna had walked the rest of the way in to make their entry a little stealthier. They both had figured there were bound to be many guards protecting the compound, which they believed warranted the silent entrance. From their position atop a rocky desert hillside looking down into the place, though, they couldn’t see any visible patrols of any kind.
“You’re sure this is their fortress?” Princess Luna asked as she looked over at him, “I cannot feel Celestia or the artifacts from within the structure.”
“It is,” Adam confirmed darkly, and he pointed to an emblem emblazoned on a large sign set outside the front parking area that read:
Apogee Systems and Technologies
Research Subsidiary of Torchwood
“I’d recognize that symbol anywhere. I have to admit though that I expected it be a little more..evil looking than it does.”
“You’re sure they will have firearms?”
“I wouldn’t bet against it.”
The Princess closed her eyes momentarily before she opened them again, “I cannot sense the portal of theirs that you mentioned either. If it no longer functions, then our original strategic exit has just evaporated.”
“It’s down really far underground, I know that much. The elevator ride was almost a minute long.”
The Princess scowled deeply at the nondescript concrete and white plastered building. Even though she had been regularly checking it, she looked at her hair once again. While the majority of it was still in its usual astral state, there were one or two more locks of hair towards the front of her scalp that were depowered. A frontal assault was sure to be suicide, but if these guards Adam had made large talk of were merely hiding, then they were expected, and surprise wasn’t going to be an option either.
Then a stray thought came to her as she truly processed what Adam had said. She then looked at him hopefully, “Adam, do you remember your time in this place well?”
He waved his right hand in the air a little, “If I wanted to, I could probably walk what I remember of it in my sleep. Why?”
She grinned at him, he realized what he had said, and then made the connection for himself, “Oooohh!”
In the command center beneath Apogee Systems, the analysts looked to their monitors in anticipation, with their Executor just as keenly watching a screen from her own seat. The Heisenberg hotspot had been waiting in a rocky outcropping forty feet above the lobby’s parking area for ten minutes now. She had a team ready to mobilize should it try and make for a retreat, but why wasn’t it moving at all? They continued waiting.
Suddenly, there was a momentary blip in the lights. As they flickered more sporadically, people began to readily look up from their workstations.
“We having trouble with the generators?”
“What’s going on?”
The electrical system completely crashed in the end, and the blood red emergency lights came on.
“Get me visuals,” the Executor commanded her subordinates crossly, “This has something to do with our prize.”
The monitors came back up, and the white indicator for the hotspot was gone.
“Get me a full security sweep of our interior,” she called out, and then she began checking her comm head set, “Alpha, any sign of intrusion? We were dark for fifteen seconds.”
“Same up here Madame Executor,” Agent Thompson’s voice replied, “You don’t think they slipped passed us that quickly, do you?”
“I won’t be certain until the compound is cleared,” she replied, “Bravo? Any sign of life?”
“Not a peep Ma’am,” the radio squawked back.
“Charlie? Delta? Echo? Foxtrot?”
All their replies were in the negative.
“Security, stay alert!” she finally called out, “They’re here somewhere.”
“Stay sharp,” one security guard told his partner as they patrolled their route, pistols unholstered and but not raised, “These guys are pretty resourceful, and they could be anywhere.”
The two of them came around a corner in the hallway, and saw that a door to a small closet was open. Judging by the yellow and black tape creating a box around the door’s swing space, the closet housed the local collection of the level’s circuitbreakers.
The guards slowly approached the door, attentive to movement and with their guns raised.
The first guard crouched while the other stayed fully upright, and together they slowly peered around the corner into the small closet. Apart from what they were expecting, that being a few randomly thrown breakers, there wasn’t anything out of place.
"This is Sanchez-“ the first guard called into his mic, before he suddenly lost sense of the floor, and fell through a multicolored portal beneath his feet without another word.
“Tony?” the second guard called out, as he stood and turned around to see where his partner had gone. He then unexpectedly found his face full of elbow, and fell to the floor out cold.
“Nicely done,” Princess Luna commented as Adam began to rifle through the security guards coat and shirt pockets.
“Same,” he replied curtly, before looking up at her, “Where did you send the other one?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” she replied with an ominous tone as she stood up from her squatting position next to the still present guard, and began to move down the hallway purposefully.
Snagging the guard’s ID badge, Adam hurried after her, “Do you know where we’re going?”
“I have read that guard’s mind. We will need to go down two levels to get to the prison cells.”
As they reached a corner to an adjoining hallway, the two of them heard several sets of footsteps approaching at a fast pace. The Princess looked back at Adam and nodded, “Do it.”
Adam focused as hard as he could. His goal was seeing Lyra again. He needed to see her smile, hear her laugh. As he found his harmony, he backed up as close as he could to the wall, and willed himself and the Princess invisible. Their forms began to vibrate and fade, until all that was visible in the hallway was the single unconscious security guard.
A group of four soldiers rounded the corner, and immediately made their way to their fallen associate, with two taking up positions looking down the hallway’s ends and the other two looked into the situation, “Where’s his buddy?”
“His ID is gone. They’ve got access to the lower floors now.”
“That’s all we needed to hear,” Adam whispered, and the two of them rounded the corner away from the guards.
As they ventured further down their new hallway, they could see through many glass panels that offered glimpses into the laboratories of the facility. Odd experiments, tools of unusual design and purpose, data and formulae mysterious, all of the things they witnessed from their veil of invisibility seemed ultimately sinister. Finally, after many turns and twists, they found an elevator, which was now guarded.
“I can’t hold this much longer,” Adam hissed to Princess Luna quietly.
“Stand close to the wall,” she commanded.
As they leaned flat against an area of concrete wall separating two of the nearby labs, the Princess drew her sword. With a slit twitch of the blade, a schism opened in the air further down the hallway they had just come from, and from out of it came the security guard Sanchez, screaming as if he were in the middle of a waking nightmare. One of the two guards posted at the elevator quickly jogged towards the howling man, while the other remained at his post.
As the first guard passed them, the Princess murmured, “Run, now!”
Adam’s concentration was faltering, and as they made their break for the elevator, the charm failed.
Two intruders became visible out of nowhere.
Even as the second guard shouted “What the hell?”, he flipped the safety off of his rifle.
Princess Luna swung her sword through the air, and the two of them passed through the rift.
For fear of accidentally hitting his partner through the lightshow in front of him, the guard didn’t take the shot. All he could do was be amazed that his two targets had vanished into thin air. From behind him, he heard a low thud from within the elevator, and he realized that the lift was descending, “Command, this is level one elevator. The lower levels are breached! Repeat, the lower levels are breached!”
“They’ll be waiting for us when we hit two floors below,” Adam commented as he rubbed his forehead, and he let out a small groan of discomfort, “is it normal to get migraines after using magic?”
“Sometimes when you’re practicing early on,” she replied as she examined the length of her blade, “At least, that’s what I’m told.”
All of a sudden, the Princess weakly felt them; several arcane powers were nearby, with one very large one deep beneath them.
She fist pumped the air and exclaimed, “Huzzah!”
“What?” Adam exclaimed, excited by the Princess’ excitement.
“I can sense them all, and the portal is still active!”
The elevator dinged the second floor, and the two were reminded that their ordeal was still far from over.
“Right, ok. Celebrate later,” Adam said as he waved his hands, brushing the distracting mood away, “You do have a plan with how to deal with the many guards that’ll be waiting for us, right?”
The Princess checked her hair once again; she’d only lost a little bit of magic, so she had plenty to spare. She grinned deviously, “Oh, naturally!”
Adam was a little unnerved by the way she had responded, and he hesitantly pointed out, “We agreed on not hurting anyone intentionally. You remember that, right?”
She shook her head with a smile, “Oh, I’m not going to harm them. I’m just going to use a little something I created for Nightmare Night! That is, with a few changes, of course.”