Thomas couldn’t see anything, but he certainly heard the sound of his new motorcycle-riding friend rev up their engine and blitz down the first hallway. Thomas was currently leaning against the wall, trying not to collide with something in the third hallway, which he remembered led to the security room. Memory was his only source of navigation from this point forward, forcing him to attempt to guess where the security room was based on passing glances at one of the many eyes he created. He could hear the motorcycle, however, which allowed him to figure out where not to go, but otherwise, he was left stumbling in a haze, and even if he knew when the motorcycle got near him, he might not be able to get away fast enough.
Thomas eventually felt a set of stairs heading upwards midway through the hall and found himself unsure where to go from there. Okay, there is no way I’m getting to the security room on the other side of this impossible place. I need somewhere safe to rest until my eyes heal. Maybe a bathroom or something. The only issue being that Thomas had no idea where a bathroom was; all he could remember was a few hallways and staircases that all kept that same concrete industrial look to them, winding and doubling back on a series of identical gray hallways like the world’s most drab corn maze. Fuck, why’s my memory so shitty! Wait, that’s it! Thomas leaned against a nearby wall and began fiddling around in the hidden pockets of his suit, and pulled out a vial that he assumed was blue and pink. This is either Chorus or a bottle of mouthwash. Or alcohol. God, I hope it’s alcohol. Thomas took a sip after unscrewing the cap and tried to relive the memory of looking at the hallways through his phantom eyes. Then, as though he was seeing it all for the first time, a projection of many of the Neonight North Reactor’s halls was plastered over his vision. He could memorize as much as he needed now, and then take another sip if he needed a refresher. Thomas needed to go down this hallway, then take a left, then a right, then continue straight ahead through a massive room housing transformers and boilers and all sorts of electrical junk Thomas didn’t understand; then, it should be the first door on his left. Easy enough to remember, right?
Thomas went to screw the cap back onto his small bottle but realized he wasn’t holding it. He had somehow dropped the cap on the ground, and now he couldn’t see it. He had a choice between going speedy and risk losing his Chorus or going slowly but risk getting caught by motorcycle guy. “ ‘Oh, Thomas, this should be easy,’ they said. ‘There aren’t any Civ users,’ they said,” Thomas whispered in his best exaggerated impression, making stupid hand gestures and rolling his blind eyes as he did so.
* * *
Blair had been hyper-focused on finding the mysterious Civ user who was hiding out in this building. So hyper-focused she hardly noticed when she crashed and fell down the stairs on her bike because she got mad air off of the staircase. Blair was sitting in a heap of busted tires and torn-up junk after falling down two flights of cement stairs on a cheap motorcycle. “Fuck, who the hell put stairs where somebody would be riding a motorcycle?” she groaned, feeling her injuries as she stood up off the ground. “Oh, wait. I get it. The problem is with me. SUPERHOT!” Blair shouted, cauterizing her wounds instantaneously and reforming the bike. She had always kept her bike just a little bit melted so that she could restore it to a previous state if necessary. Having an undo button for Blair’s abilities was something she didn’t figure out how to use until later in life, and it was the most useful feature of her ability for someone like Blair. Getting back on her motorcycle, she found herself down two floors in one of the main hallways. Right in front of a screw-on bottlecap that was lying on the ground. Blair might’ve missed a lot of things—for instance, stairs—but her hyper-fixation brought her a few advantages. She knew that there was no way that bottle cap had been there before.
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Blair sped off in that direction, and then hung a left, before speeding past one of the facility’s main power rooms. She knew “Neonight North Reactor” was a bit of a misnomer. It was really an electrical facility that harvested, stored, and distributed geothermal energy. Blair got off her bike and went inside, taking a while to inspect the various towers and wires. It was a marvel of engineering. She had been here several times on field trips, and because of this, she knew that a few floors below was the central harvester where geothermal power was collected. It was a lot of rocks and heat and steam and tubes, and also a very deep pit with burning gas coming out that powered several fans. Blair walked around, stepping off of her motorcycle and investigating the machinery. She had almost completely forgotten about the Civ user, who was currently cowering behind one of the electrical boxes.
* * *
Thomas knew the motorcycle guy had followed him into one of the main rooms. He could hear the whirr of their bike zooming behind him and into the electrical room he now found himself in. The sheer volume of their movement was the only way Thomas could keep track of them through this massive facility, but now they had quieted down and Thomas was left blind and confused, constantly looking over his shoulder to try and see his foe, but it wouldn’t do any good anyways. He knew it would be hours until his eyes returned to normal, the burning of his retinas eventually ceasing and being restored to their previous form, as Phantrana’s damage luckily wasn’t permanent. But again, he would need to hide for hours to do that, and it seemed as though he had, at most, a few minutes of secrecy.
What was just as bad, he had gotten turned around while hiding from his pursuer, and no longer knew the way to the bathroom, which was the one place he could lock the door and nobody would come in. He had also spilled almost all of his Chorus in the panic of attempting to hide. He needed to know where they were so he could know where to hide. Now movies would suggest to Thomas that having extremely good hearing allowed people to “see through sound”, but that isn’t what happened when Thomas made a phantom copy of his right ear and gave the energy back. Instead, everything just got REALLY loud, which was ultimately what Thomas wanted, but it was extremely annoying regardless. What was originally just the background noise of electrical equipment became a dominating presence in Thomas’s mindscape. The loudness of it all caused Thomas to almost double over in shock, but despite this, it allowed him to hear a particular set of footsteps stomping throughout the same room. He had removed his suit a little while ago at the front desk, seeing as he didn’t need to fight anybody, but now he wished he had it.
Thomas could hear his lumbering pursuer on the other side of the machine Thomas had his back pressed up against, and it sounded like they had just stopped to start fiddling with the machinery. He wondered if they would even notice his presence and if he could just make a run for it. But he didn’t even know where he’d go, and running into a transformer at full sprint carries far more hazards than running into a wall. He decided it’d be best to just stay put on the opposite side of the box for now and wait until they made a move. And suddenly they did. The sound of sparks flying out of a machine that was directly behind Thomas filled his ears, sending him reflexively screaming and falling to the floor as the vibration of his eardrums cursed him with a migraine.