Soon after breakfast the next morning Liana left Nuanderra with Marah again through Akhina's portal, the destination this time being her own world. The shock of the transition was even greater this time than last time if possible: she stood in a world of inky darkness and dazzling electric light, on a strange Orranderran continent in a different time zone, and probably surrounded by creepy enemies. Her only companion now had been an enemy last time but a lot had changed since then: She knew Marah was trustworthy and would do anything for her now, though that was the only certainty she had at the moment. She had no idea what they were going to find here, and what they were going to do, but it seemed that improvising was just how these kinds of missions worked.
This environment was very confusing to all of her senses: she had gone from full daylight in the quiet Nuanderran oak forest that teemed with life to a nocturnal factory site. She tried to scan the area, and noticed that their target seemed heavily guarded and was brightly lit with a lot of background noise going on in the background everywhere. Outside of the site there was only pitch-black darkness, but they had materialised inside of the heavy wall with electric barbed wire that was supposed to protect the complex. Not only was the wall heavily lit; it was certainly both visibly and invisibly guarded.
It took her eyes an irritatingly long time to adjust to the dark and the lights here, because of the sudden transition and she noticed that thinking was not easy here, most of her other senses were bombarded too. Somewhere in the background all sorts of machines buzzed and on irregular basis beeps, strange explosion sounds and all other kinds of unidentifiable noise came from all directions. There was a strange chemical smell in the air that was not particularly pleasant, and there also seemed to be a very dark atmosphere in the more invisible dimension that distracted her thoughts, like a dark miasma. What was going on here in this place?
They stood in the shadows for a moment, disoriented, surveying the surroundings until Marah prodded her and talked to her without words.
"Carefully now. There's security there. And not just them!”
She spotted a small dimly lit booth with a few guards a few hundred yards away. It took a moment for Liana to realise what she was seeing.
“Drotnira? The Onnobolda are still here then?” she whispered.
Marah nodded. She paused. Liana knew she was thinking about what the STC had done to her kind, and to other Drotnira. Marah switched to telepathy again.
“If there are only Drotnira on guard here, we can use the side dimension. Take my hand to get past hem.”
She reached out her hand to Liana, who hesitated.
"Wait a second."
Suddenly, she heard a beep indicating that her smartphone was picking up a Wi-Fi network, and she remembered the promise she’d made to her classmates. The first thing she had to do was to put it in silent mode before it would give them out at the wrong moment.
“It won't take long. I already typed and saved a few emails in Nuanderra to send to my family and to the family of my classmates. I'm going to send those first now that I'm in the right world."
Marah didn't protest, but she had a clear disapproval.
Liana quickly sent the pre-written messages and then turned to Marah.
“Shouldn't we let the council know about the Onnobolda being still here, at least some of their Drotnira?"
Marah shook her head. “Don’t forget the law of impossibility of communication between the worlds. We can't send a message out of this world via kah-yito any more than you can with that technological device of yours. And it would be stupid to go back now already. We should at least find out more before we can go back. The council needs more information than that if we’d want them to interfere. Which is a possibility again now though, if this place still has Nuanderrans.But this is far from enough. All we know now is that we are on the right track,”
Liana recognized a grim look in her eyes, and feared that Marah would get carried away by lust for revenge.
“But if there are still Drotnira here, then maybe there are Nummerfa here too. They can see us on the side dimension and they can feel our presence, can't they?”
Marah was silent, probably wrestling with implications of the possibility that not all of her colleagues had died in the explosion.
“Yes, there could be Nummerfa. Maybe…”
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She clearly didn't have much faith in it.
“But this place is full of them then, and of Hmana anyway, so they probably don't know who they're feeling. There’s so many nawa here that we don't get noticed immediately… But it doesn't make much sense to be invisible then, that’d be suspicious. Especially if any of the STC agents has one of their side dimension glasses.”
Marah paused and she looked bitter.
“I just wonder if they know what their new bosses have done with Andira. She can’t be alive, and I really can't believe how anyone here is still following those hell demons. That means that they don't even know about it. They don't know they're collaborating with the murderers of their own leaders! With the killers of all those Drotnira who were still there at the moment of the explosion. And they’re working from them, in this toxic world full of shadow!”
Liana looked at the scene and had a paradoxical deja-vu feeling. On Kavanderra it had been the Americans who had not belonged at the Onnobolda base, and here it was the other way around: Nuanderrans in an American factory was the opposite situation, but still just as illogical.
“Do you think that the Nummerfa who disappeared just before the explosion are still here?”
Marah nodded now.
“There must indeed be Nummerfa here on this site. I feel them now. There's something completely wrong here. We need to find out what's going on here. Come on, let's use the side dimension and get into that building over there. That's how you got through the base on Kavanderra too."
She pointed to some dark barracks a bit further, closer to the main building. They had to pass the booth of the Drotniril guards to get there. Liana grabbed Marah's hand and the world became even stranger than it already was. Both the lights and the darkness grew brighter, and the structures became less visible. She also had the feeling that there was a lot of negative energy around but she could perceive it clearly. Possibly there even were all kinds of strange entities lurking in the background. But she couldn’t think of that now, she had to focus on not attracting attention.
Cautiously they walked, still hand in hand, passing the guards; they looked almost identical to how the Drotniril guards had been on Kavanderra: the same clothes, and the same mix of weapons from different worlds. Like their colleagues at Nuanderra, they were not very observant either, something she could only sympathise with in her situation. They now had darkness on their side, too, although she didn't really know how well these dwarfs could actually see in the dark. If they lived under the mountains they probably had superior night vision.
Invisible and virtually inaudible, they reached the open barracks, which lay unlit in the shadows. Liana really didn't like the combination of this light, the heavily polluted spiritual miasma, and the strange sensations of the side dimension, so she was very relieved to release Marah’s hand into the deep shadows in front of the barracks and her senses returned to normal. In normal mode, her senses were already overstimulated here, as if she was receiving signals all the time on her inner mixing console that were completely in the red.
Liana looked around, letting her eyes adjust. The barracks turned out to be empty indeed, but a little bit of twilight came in through some sort of window opening, enough to see in the twilight that there were two chairs once your eyes got used to the dark.
Inside the barracks Marah and Liana sat down for a moment to discuss. Through a window they couldn’t see the main building from this angle, but they saw and heard a variety of frightening machinery in every direction. They both froze when they suddenly heard something very close-by outside. Luckily the patrol just passed without paying attention to the dark barracks. For a few seconds Liana could clearly see the slate-coloured faces of the two Drotnira in the light of the nearest lantern, but it was the fact that they had been assisted by two Nummerfa that had made Marah freeze. But now they knew that there also were Nummerfa here, and that they were walking around in the same uniforms that Liana and Marah were wearing. Maybe they didn’t have to be invisible after all!
The patrol seemed to be looking for something, but they didn't come close to the dark barracks and quickly disappeared back into the play of light and shadow. Liana, meanwhile, struggled with a shaky flashback to the last hours she'd experienced in Kavanderra, and she knew Marah was doing the same from a very different perspective. This place really closely resembled the base of the Onnobolda in Kavanderra.
"What do we do now?" asked Liana.
She couldn't see Marah's expression, but felt her mood and heard grimness in her voice again.
“We must warn my sisters here about what happened on Kavanderra. If we can convince them of the truth, their collaboration with the Superior Tech Corp is immediately over. But that must be done without these despicable Gorchbolds noticing. And for that we need to know more about this place. come!”
She beckoned Liana to come along, who winced at the slur used for her kind and energy behind it. Yet she went along, there was nothing else they could do.