Guardians - Death

2 - The Hall of Guardians

Still trying to figure out what the fuck just happened, I opened the old wooden door to our house. Despite being relatively rich because of Specter's job as a successful scientist and engineer, we lived in quite a small and normal house. At first glance.
I rushed upstairs to my room to put my bag away. I grabbed the Ruby the weird girl gave me and walked past the big window in my room to my bed at the other end. Taking a glance out of the window, I admired the oak tree right in front of it. Sometimes I went out here by climbing the tree instead of normally using the doors. Looking back at my bed, I noticed Specter's left a note for me. “Come to lab w.s., got sth for u”, it said.
W.s. stood for weapon section. Dad's got a giant underground laboratory only we two knew about. Probably one of the reasons why he was so successful. Nobody knew where he kept his stuff to stop him.

This is the best opportunity to show him this thing, I thought. I grabbed the note together with the Ruby and went back downstairs, through our small kitchen and into the basement. At first it looked like a completely normal basement with random household stuff scattered across the ground. I walked to the back corner of the basement and touched the cold stone with the palm of my hand. The tile started to glow as the security system scanned my hand, then a part of the wall moved back and slid to the side, revealing the secret entrance to Specter's labs.
The door closed the second I entered. The entrance was more like an elevator than a room. It led to five underground floors, each one with labs for different sciences. The Weapon section belonged to the technology floor, which was the second deepest underground. Specter even had an own first aid and surgery section on the biology floor in the middle, since he tended to get hurt trying out new inventions.

I walked to the end of the short corridor and pressed one of the many buttons leading to the different sections of the labs. While the elevator started moving, I took another closer look at the Ruby. It had a black symbol inside, looking like the head of some kind of animal, probably a horse. It had large, curved horns and two small wings on the sides of it. The word “Zhrokun” was written underneath the symbol. I wondered what all of this meant.
It took a while until the elevator arrived at the weapon section, since it didn't just move up and down but also in any other direction. I still couldn't believe Specter's built this all by himself. Must have taken a whole lifetime!

The first thing I saw when the doors opened were Specter's fancy looking guns. Shotguns, sniper rifles, assault rifles, etc. The weapon section was made of four rooms; one for ranged weapons, which is the first one I went into, and three for melee, magic and hidden weapons. Luckily Specter never really had to use all of these weapons, but he was always carrying his favourite plasma guns around wherever he went.
“Dad? I'm here!”
“Hidden weapons”, I just heard from the door to my right. I opened it and saw Specter putting a blue pen together. Wondering what he created this time, I decided to take a guess.
“An extra pointy pen to stab annoying people?”
“Not quite”, Specter laughed. Then he handed the pen over to me. “Try to find out by yourself!”
I put the Ruby on the desk so I had both hands free to feel over the surface of the pen with my fingertips, then pressed a hidden button I found near the tip of it. The pen immediately opened up along the sides and became some kind of handle, and the tip created a long, katana-shaped blue lightsaber. Or something like that. My guess wasn't that wrong, I thought, surprised yet smiling about dad's creativity.

“Where'd you get that from?”
I looked up and saw Specter investigating the gem I brought with me.
“Some weird floating girl with a pink hood gave it to me, telling me something about people needing me and some shit. Thought you might be able to tell me what this is”, I replied. “Looks quite valuable, too.”
“I know that girl”, Specter said, still looking at the Ruby.
“Really? Who is she?”
“I have no idea. But I've been seeing her every now and then, lurking around our house. She was kinda creeping me out, but now I notice she was just waiting for the right moment to do something.” He carefully laid the Ruby back onto the desk. “This Ruby”, he then explained, pointing at the symbol inside it, “belongs to the Guardian of Death, Bonnie Zhrokun. He and the other Guardians have been turned into statues for an unknown reason, and their gems are the only way to wake them up.”
Specter looked at me excitedly. “Do you know what this means?”
“That this Ruby is the key to awaken the Guardians?!”
Specter nodded. “And I have the feeling it's your task to do it.”
“Why me?!”
“If it wasn't you, why did the pink hooded girl give that Ruby to you after all?”
I just looked at him. I, a normal human, was given this important task to fucking free those guardians from their statue form? At first I had thought this was some bad joke a random girl with magic abilities thought of. But now?

I pressed the button of the pen-katana I've been holding in my hand the whole time and it folded down to become the ordinary looking pen from the beginning.
“And… how am I supposed to find those statues? And wouldn't the Guardian of Death just, you know, kill me?”, I then questioned, still wondering how I was chosen to do this.
Specter laughed for a second. “Don't worry, Amira, Bonnie won't kill you. And for where, you probably know about Terra's Tree in the forest, right?” I nodded, worrying about what would come next.
“Well, there's a unusually large bramble bush near it”, he continued, “If you go look inside it, you'll find a hidden trap door on the ground which you are only able to open if you've got one of the Guardians’ gems, which is the case. You'll enter some kind of man-made cave, the Hall of Guardians.”
“What if I get lost on my way there?”
“You can climb, right? You'll find your way. But now it's time for dinner. Haven't eaten anything since breakfast!”

I kept admiring the Ruby while sitting at my desk near the window after dinner. It was late now, the moon was shining through the leaves of the oak tree.
The Hall of Guardians, I thought. This must be the start of something big.
I looked at my bed, then got up and grabbed my jacket. Specter said I should sleep and go look for that cave tomorrow, but I wouldn't be able to sleep now if I tried. I was too curious about this Guardian of Death, I had to know who it was. I opened the window and hesitated for a second. Dad told me Bonnie wouldn't kill me. But what if he was wrong? I shook my head to get rid of those worries and jumped out the window into the tree to climb down, starting my first ever journey to Terra's Tree. At night.

Oh boy, I hope my decision won't turn out as a bad one.