A Second Chance

Part 64 - A concerning plot

I heard the sirens getting closer and made my decision quickly.

Staying to answer questions wasn't an option I was interested in. 

I had no official standing in this city, a fake badge, and a deal with a man currently lying face down on a service road. The last thing I needed was to spend the next several hours in a police station explaining who I was and what I was doing on Colvin Street at seven in the morning.

I pulled my collar up and walked back the way I'd come, down the east end of the service road and onto the parallel street before the first police vehicle turned onto Colvin. And just like I planned, there was nobody down this street. 

That said, the drive back to the hotel was quiet.

I kept replaying the moment I'd opened that crate, such as the careful arrangement of components, the foam lining, the way that faint pulse of light moved through the one I'd picked up. Whoever packed that crate knew what they were dealing with. 

I got back to the room, sat at the desk, and opened my laptop.

I started with the physical description and worked outward from there. 

A crystalline structure, fist-sized, individually wrapped, emitting a low recurring light pulse. I searched every combination of those details I could think of against anything in Ninjago and came up with nothing that matched closely enough to mean anything.

That didn't surprise me.

I leaned back and thought about the realms I'd been to, like the Cloud Kingdom, The Never-Realm,  wondering about if I saw anything strange and trying to match what I'd seen in that crate to anything I remembered encountering. 

Most of them I could rule out quickly, because the geography is too off, some of them were in the stone age, and they kind of had the wrong kind of energy. But there was one that kept coming back to me the more I thought about the way that light pulsed.

Slow, rhythmic, almost like a heartbeat.

There was this realm that Master Wu said his father visited, one that was technologically advanced like crazy, much more than Ninjago, and they had some sort of energy source. The structures there, I don't know, but aside from whatever this city is, this is all I can think of. 

But if this was another realm, this meant someone used a portal or realm crystal to transport those components here. 

I pushed back from the desk and stood up, because sitting still suddenly wasn't working for me. The Vipers didn't just have influence in Ninjago or just this city. They're purposefully making alliances with other realms behind Ninjago's back. 

It makes perfect sense... Ninjago is the most powerful realm out of the 16 realms, so they can't just attack us full-scale. So, they're working for one big take-over, using this city as its distribution point. 

And it makes perfect sense... the isolation that made the City of Glass so difficult to get into was exactly what made it perfect for moving something through without anyone on the outside noticing.

I walked to the window and looked out at the skyline.

If The Vipers ever get into power and succeed, then Ninjago City and this city itself will end up just like Chicago. Ninjago will be controlled by The Vipers, and the sixteen realms will be forced under their authoritative regime. 

The operation was bigger than I'd built it up to be in my head, and what I'd disrupted this morning was one thread in something that was still very much running. Finding the storage point, wherever the rest of the crystalline was being kept, was the next problem, and a considerably larger one than tracking a single drop.