madness and ecstasy // leo valdez

-dead teenage mutant ninja turtle-

Of course, no AC.

On the bright side, there were also no lines and no admission fee, only a security checking thing, where some people in uniforms scanned them with metal sticks that flashed green when Teqi held her arms up.

The interior was pretty impressive, considering it had been constructed two thousand years ago. Teqi had never been to school, so her idea of history was pretty off, which made it all the better to see cool places like this. The marble floor was patterned with squares and circles like a Roman tic-tac-toe game. The main space was one huge chamber with a circular rotunda, sort of like a capitol building back in the States. Lining the walls were different shrines and statues and tombs and stuff. But the real eye-catcher was the dome overhead. All the light in the building came from one circular opening right at the top. A beam of sunlight slanted into the rotunda and glowed on the floor, like Zeus was up there with a magnifying glass, trying to fry puny humans.

Teqi wouldn't have been surprised is if was built for that exact thing. She chewed the bottom of her lip when her eyes caught on the golden statue in the corner. Gold. Gold. Gold. It was like a mantra in her head she really didn't want to think about. Luckily, the blaring of security alarms going off drowned it out nicely.

'That's someone else's problem,' She thought smugly, following Hazel to the centre of the church.

"Teqi, Teqi! Over here! I'm your problem!"

She turned around with a glare, only to see Leo grinning at her happily, surrounded by security guards. How they had thought the same thing was beyond her, but he was also right, which was even more infuriating. It still made her stomach flip at the thought, though.

Teqi turned to her other friends, rubbing her face tiredly, " back in a second."

The security guard had to pat him down, and then scan him again, and at one point they tipped his toolbelt upside down, which unleashed the contents of an entire forge. Leo was staring in wonder at the building as he was being cleared. He pointed up at the roof, where the Romans had made the dome out of big stone panels, but they'd hollowed out each panel in a square-within-square pattern.

"It makes it lighter and easier to support," Leo rambled, and then let out a string of complicated words about joints and panels that Teqi honestly didn't understand. She nodded though, happy to just stare at his pretty face instead.

"All clear," The woman in uniform grunted, and turned to the next person behind them. Leo took Teqi's sleeve and they left the entrance.

He ducked his head with a wide smirk, "good to know I'm not a terrorist."

Hazel stopped in the middle of the room and turned in a circle once they pair had caught up to them. "This is amazing. In the old days, the children of Vulcan would come here in secret to consecrate demigod weapons. This is where Imperial gold was enchanted."

"But we're not here because of that," Leo guessed, raising an eyebrow. He looked a little disappointed that he wasn't getting to make cool magical weapons.

"No," Hazel said slowly. "There's an entrance—a tunnel that will lead us toward Nico. I can sense it close by. I'm not sure where, exactly."

Frank grunted. "If this building is two thousand years old, it makes sense there could be some kind of secret passage left over from the Roman days."

Teqi watched as Leo scanned the room, eye flitting to details and squinting like if he could stare hard enough, the secret tunnel would flash a neon sign saying, 'over here! Hey, lost demigods that just want to go home but are instead being forced on this quest cause the gods can't get off their butts! The tunnel's right here!'