Essentia Animus

75-Mesmerizing Coordination

Sryine at this point was starting to feel absolutely foolish, but she continued to follow the nonsensical path presented for her. No matter how stupid it might be to follow the path of such lunacy, it wasn't as if she had anything more sensible to guide her forwards instead.

Sryine threw the blossom onto the wind again, letting it flutter a bit until a gust pulled it from her and picked another direction. She would have thought that the thing would have been completely random in what it did, fickle as the wind, but the blossom had been constant in its direction the entire time. Sryine was left wondering if, just maybe, if the place was actually haunted.. that maybe it was haunted by some actually nice ghosts. Well, maybe not some, maybe just one or two of them were nice.. no more than four at the very most. She rounded a bend and found the blossom resting beside a ladder leading into the depths below. She reached out for the blossom, which suddenly fell down the ladder instead, disappearing beyond her sight. Down then? Alright, if that's how things were going to be, that's where she was going to go.

Vwyx pulled out the map again, trying hard to figure out where the recording might have been taken from. She looked at the map again, her eyes settling on the eleventh sector of the building, the lowest level. The label there said something about a cooling lab.. or something like that, most of the words were cut off. She had a feeling that.. okay fine, so she just needed to figure out where this place was, thank you very much voice in the head. Now, if the same voice could be so nice, maybe she could figure out where she currently... Vxyw looked at the central part of the map, the very middle section was marked as a surveillance room. She didn't even need any additional feelings for that one, it just sort of made sense at that point. Now all she needed to do was to figure out the map enough to plot a route from where she was to where she needed to go. On her way out, she bid farewell and thanks to the strange feeling that had haunted her while helping her out, carefully treading a path so that she wouldn't get lost any further.

Sryine carefully descended the ladder to the shakey metal platform suspended below. Looking around, she noticed that she had entered some sort of huge room of some variety. The room had occasionally staggered lights reflecting bright spots of an otherwise dim room that expanded not only far beyond her, but also well below her. For climbing down, she was actually very high up.. an impression she suspected Vwyx would hate to also be exposed to. However, on the other hand, she could only wish Vwyx was there at the time, the construction of her footing being considerably lacking and greatly in need of skilled improvements. Traversing along the network of platforms progressing both deeper and further into the room, Sryine suddenly found herself exposed to a shortcut in her descent, the hinges of the platform giving way to drop her unto the platform below it.. which then also gave way. Finding herself a couple of levels down abruptly, Sryine brushed herself off, checking for any active bleeding. Of course, bleeding all over the fragile platforms would only make things even worse, her blood warping the metal on contact. Fortunately, her new injuries weren't serious enough to cause such problems, bruising forming most of it.

During her descent, Sryine eventually realized that the light of the room wasn't strictly caused by normal light, there was also a faint purple hue to the ambient light of the expansive room. As she got closer, she also noticed the faint shimmer around the lower levels of the room as well. There was something related to the astral flame around here, that was all too certain, something far too familiar. The regular path of descent was taking far too long for Sryine, a sense of curiosity and a frustration of the ruthless path causing her to opt for the most efficient shortcut instead. Skipping from one of the main walls, Sryine made a dramatic drop directly to the ground below, the metal forming the base of the room being much more like the regular halls she had been traversing in the meanwhile. At the bottom level, she found the room littered with a variety of unusual containment units, all of them currently empty. However, by its design and layout.. she was subtly certain that this was one of the locations where beasts had been once contained, either by the residual food or waste left in the room.. or the simple pattern of blood from beasts that struggled against their confinement. Each confinement unit was individually lit to provide a secluded environment for the select captive, a majority of the light she had seen earlier.