DarkWing (Final Editing in Progress)

Chapter 17 - Your Princess Is In Another Castle

"What happened to you?" Jinx asked.

"They got me after I found Wulf," I answered. "There were just too many of them."

"How'd you get out?" She asked. I  turned my head and glanced at the hole in the ground from where I broke through. Jinx saw where I was looking, walked over to the hole and looked down. Her eyes grew a bit. "I see. Not bad, flyboy."

"Well, DarkWing, it's good to have you back," said Wulf. I looked over at him, he knew my name. He smirked at me, seeing the confusion on my face. "Jinx explained it all when I got back to the warehouse. I personally think those cops had it coming. Protect and serve my ass, we are people too." I smiled at him. He motioned his head towards Death, who was now back on my shoulder.

"She's a good bird. If it wasn't for her, we wouldn't have gone through with our plan of attack."

"What? Why's that?" I asked, then I turned my head to Death. "What did you do?"

"Hahaha." Wulf laughed as I turned my attention back to him. "Our party of four turned into a group of three. We were unsure we could hold our own with the four of us, let alone three. But Death flew back to us after you were gone. We knew instantly that something was wrong. Death was at the warehouse, but as I'm sure you noticed, you weren't." Drake cut in.

"There was a language barrier, but we got the basic idea. When Death first came in, she just perched on a bar in the warehouse looking depressed, and we couldn't help but take notice of her. We were suspicious something was wrong, but when you never came back, our suspicions were validated. An hour ago, Death just screeched, obviously trying to get our attention, once she had it, she flew circles around the room, then flew out. We all had this strange feeling that we were supposed to follow her. Strangely enough, none of us were going to argue with a bird. She brought us here, and we sort of figured it out from there." Jinx then started talking.

"We were counting on you joining the battle like you did. Hoping somehow you'd make it out right when we made it in. Otherwise, well, I don't know if we would have done so well."

I smiled for a moment. After my mom died, I had felt so alone. For months, I'd felt alone, but now I knew. I had a family again. I was wanted, needed. But then I remembered why we were there.

"Let's go find Shadow," I said as I jumped behind the secretary's desk. I began opening all the drawers and running my eyes through all the folders.

"What are you looking for?" asked Jinx. I found it.

"A map!" It was a pile of large folded pieces of paper with all the different floors of Corrector Corps on separate pages. I unfolded all of them and spread them out on the ground. There were hundreds of different rooms, each one equally likely to have Shadow in them. "This is going to be more difficult than I thought."

I designated everyone a fourth of the pile. We stole pens from the secretary desk, and marked all the places she could potentially be. The amount of ink we had put on the pages was daunting. Basically, what we learned was that she could be anywhere.

"Well never find her like this," said Drake. "But," he continued as he lifted up one of his pages, "I know someone who might know where to find her." He pointed to a room on his page surrounded by a thick, black, ink circle.

"The Administrative Office," said Wulf. "Good thinking. These assholes knew basically everything about us before we signed up. Who wants to guess that they are still keeping tabs." We all smiled at each other. I then looked at the page.

"Top floor," I read. "Well, what are we waiting for."

We walked over the the elevator and hit the call button. It never came.