Indigo's Owl [Indigo Rewrite]

Chapter 33 - Project: Spectrum

Shift followed Athira down the stairs of the grey-tiled hallway as the cold bite of the air conditioning nipped at his face.

He'd known what he was agreeing to when he'd shifted the tracking Colour, yet now, with the shifted Black roiling in his veins, he couldn't quite shake the unease that came with it.

It'd been one thing to embrace the Owl persona when it was a few Underground thugs who got a little too confident, but if Athira was correct, this was an Elite-funded facility. Anyone inside wasn't going to be a criminal he could justify using force against. They were going to be people who shared his goals of protecting Sirah and its civilians — and the prospect of fighting them felt like a hard line to be crossing.

He just had to hope that whatever they found here tonight would be worth it.

The stairs ended at a sturdy-looking door. Athira reached back for Shift's hand, and after clearing the door of its various runes and locks with Black, she pulled them both through.

The other side of the door was more of the same. Another corridor, this time curved and perhaps a little wider with grey tiles and a bright, white light illuminating the corridor that made the whole thing feel weirdly sterile.

The faint, Blue pulse that raced away either side of the wall they'd come through, however, was new.

"That's not good," said Shift, watching the pulse vanish around the curve.

"More reason to hurry up," said Athira, taking off at a run.

Athira speared tendrils of Black through the wall as she ran, likely hoping to confuse or overload the alarm system as pulse after pulse of Blue zoomed away across the tiles.

Apparently, her strategy was working. Some twenty metres ahead, a round-looking individual in a white lab coat stepped out of a door on the inner side of the hallway. Tablet in hand, he looked rather annoyed about something — right up until the point he spotted Athira.

She launched herself at him. Her palm was pressed to his forehead the same moment he started yelling for help. Black engulfed the man's head, and a second later, he went limp. Athira caught him, roughly lowering him to the ground as she coalesced the Black into a new tendril and shot it into the room he'd come from.

When Shift reached the doorway, he wasn't surprised to see a second person in a white lab coat lying unmoving on the floor. The room appeared to be a laboratory, complete with microscopes and a whole lot of other science-y looking stuff he had no clue how to use.

After a quick check for potential threats, Shift knelt down beside the second person and checked for a pulse with an uncomfortable knot in his stomach.

"They're alive, just unconscious for a bit," said Athira, dragging the body of the first scientist deeper into the room with a tendril. She closed the door to the hallway and sealed its edges with crystal Black before glancing around the lab. "Any idea what all of this might be?"

Once he'd been reassured by a steady pulse, Shift stood up and looked around. The walls were covered in screens, all displaying various graphs, tables, and data featuring abbreviations like 'SL 1W G Y' that he couldn't make sense of. Raph or Kione might have been able to figure it out, but he had no way to communicate with them.

"No clue." He glanced down at the unconscious scientists. "We could have asked them if you hadn't knocked them out so quickly."

"I like to look around before I start asking questions," said Athira, poking through some files. "Besides, I doubt they'll be the only two in this place — and if they are, it'll give me plenty of alone time with them when they wake up."