Steam pipes hissed and whistled. Humid air smoked the bricked lined walls and misted the small maintenance tunnels. Running along the centre line of the city, The Watcher followed behind Nadier, Adelaide, and Tinarya, walking the mile long final stretch towards The Tower. A familiar wave rushed over his body and The Watcher felt the tingle of energy run down his spine. His hair stood on edge as he whipped his body around to find the source of power, only to be faced with the path he had already walked.

“What's wrong?” Adelaide asked from the front.

“Did you feel that?” he replied.

“Feel what?”

Time. He wanted to say it. The trace of chronal energy had swept over the surrounding in a powerful burst. A much more powerful level of energy than he could summon in one moment. For him, it would take a few seconds to build up that amount of energy.

Instead, The Watcher replied, “Nothing. I'm just imagining things.”

They continued down the tunnels for what felt like ages. The walls blended into a single view of brown bricks and grey concrete shadowing by. The copper and steel pipes started to look like a video running on repeat. Finally, they reached a T-Junction, where a ladder in the centre led straight up into another tunnel to climb. Tinarya led the way up.

He climbed after Nadier. The moss at the corner of each step of the ladder made for slippery grips, so he proceeded slowly. The silhouette of the dark elf above disappeared as he climbed out of the tunnel, the light at the end a flickering yellow. The Watcher ascended into the glow.

Lit by two incandescent lamps at opposite ends of the room, the small space was filled with water heater tanks and pipes that ran around the room into what looked to be a generator with a whizzing pressure gauge. Clanks and hisses were more prevalent in the room than they were in the tunnels.

Tinarya gleefully announced, “This is generator room thirty seven!”

Nadier added, “We're right next to the portal room. How did you know this was where we wanted to go?”

“I'm smart like that!” The girl danced on her feet laughing. Nadier nodded with a smile and ruffled her hair.

“Alright. We're going to take a look. Stay in the tunnels. If we're not back in half an hour, just leave without us.”

Tinarya nodded and gave Nadier a playful salute. The trio of “adults” left the room, stepping out into what seemed to be an empty hallway. The sudden quiet they walked into was almost deafening. The noise of steam pipes clunking and whizzing that was rife in the generator room was muted in the corridor. A clunk of metal echoed from far down the passageway and continued on down a bent.

Adelaide and Watcher looked quizzically to Nadier, who returned the expression with a confused hike of his shoulders. None of the three had expected the abandonment the place held. Nadier held gaze with Adelle, pointing to his eyes and followed by gesturing to the pathway down. Adelle nodded and teleported to the end of the hallway. Peeking around the bend, she paused and surveyed the area before teleporting out of their sights.

Moments went by as the two men stood at where she had left them. The silence was starting to mess with The Watcher. He hated long periods of quiet. They never boded well in movies and had almost always followed with someone being picked off by a serial killer. Luckily for him, it was usually the black man. The steam pipes hissed again. He wanted to make a fart joke.

Then, Adelaide jogged back from around the corner. “It's empty,” she announced confidently. “There's not a single person on the entire level. Are you sure we've got the right place?”

“How's that possible?” Nadier replied in surprise. “This is definitely the location.”

The Watcher concurred. “I remember this corridor from when they arrested me. Could it be they've moved the experiment?” The trio shared a period of silence before he continued, “No use standing around here. Let's check the portal chamber and see if we can find some clues.”

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Proceeding down the hallway Adelaide had checked, they turned left where she had vanished right and walked the short final stretch down to the heavy steel door of the portal. They stopped before the door, looked to the slightly rusted handwheel, and exchanged glances.

Adelle let out, “Well?”

The Watcher insisted, “You two open it. I'll keep watch.”

“How about a 'no'?” she replied. “You two muscular people can open it and I'll keep watch.”

Nadier added, “How am I muscular?” He pointed to his more lean than meat body. “You've got more skin than I do!”

The Watcher held out his left palm, opened face up. He placed a closed fist on top of it. “You've got this game here?” The elves looked at him and nodded, before taking their positions.

“Break wrap cut!

“Ro sham bo!”

“Break wrap cut.”

The two elves looked at The Watcher, who threw a closed fist while they had open palms. “Damn it!” he let out.

Breathing deeply in acceptance of his lost, he set himself by the side of the rusted handwheel and began pushing up. The wheel creaked as it slowly turned. Then, Nadier stepped in and added his strength to the other side, pulling the crank down down. Adelaide grabbed from the front and twisted the wheel. In silence, the three heaved, and the wheel turned with a clank, unlocking, the door swinging slightly inwards. They pushed into the room.

Above them, the hole in the reinforced glass where Akaras was thrown through had not been repaired. Nadier and The Watcher both looked at the broken segment and dented metal behind it before turning away and focussing themselves back on the task at hand.

The room had been emptied. The batteries that once lined the walls had been unplugged from their stands with wires now dangling and strewn around the room without meet. Where was once the portal generator was left with an empty space littered with leftover parts. Nadier stepped into the portal room with Adelaide to investigate while The Watcher stayed in the research chamber.

He flipped through the piles of notes and paper that were left of the work desk. Carefully but quickly, he glanced through them, finally landing on a blueprint hidden under a stack of folders.

He called out, “They've moved the portal!”

The two elves came back into the room, with Adelle asking, “What did you say?”

“They've moved the portal project,” The Watcher explained, showing her the blueprints. “This is a design for a geothermal generator. I'm guessing they couldn't find a way to power the portal constantly over a long period of time and needed to work from scratch.”

Nadier asked, “Where would they move such a thing to?”

“From this design, I'm guessing somewhere higher up the levels. You'd need to be a dozen or two stories above ground for this to work.” The Watcher handed over the blueprints. “What's the date written? Third of Winter. When was that?”

Adelaide answered, “Twelve days ago.”

The Watcher continued his deduction. “If all these plans were changed just then, it means there's nothing we can do here. It would take at least thirty days for them to build this new generator. And a year for it to fully power the portal.” He picked up one of the folders and handed it to Nadier. Adelaide looked as if she was about to hit something to make the numbers go away. “There's nothing we can do here. Nothing for us to destroy or sabotage.”

Nadier set the folders aside and asked, “So, what do we do now? We don't know what happened to the Titan Rangers. We might never have another chance to break into the city again. We can't stay at the orphanage, or anywhere in the city for that matter. The patrols are too tightly packed.”

He stood there, thinking, for a time long enough that Adelaide went for a walk inside the field-sized portal room and came back. Finally, he said, “I'm going to wait.”

“What?” was their simultaneously shocked reply.

“I'll wait here. In The Tower. For a year. Once they've rebuilt the portal, done their research, got everything working, I'll break everything and force them to either give up the project or start from scratch again, which they probably won't have the resources for.”

Adelaide scoffed, “How are you going to survive in The Tower for a year?”

“I'll sleep it off,” he said. Looking to her, he continued, “I'll find a corner of The Tower to hide in and put myself in a temporal bubble, just like how I was after we escaped the prison here. A year would go by from the outside, but for me, it would be just a few hours.”

They stared at him wide-eyed. He was not surprised at their reactions. After all, he was talking about a form of time travelling. A very basic cryo freeze time travel, yes, but time travel nonetheless.

After having a moment to absorb the information, Nadier finally sighed. “I'll tell Tina to pass a message to Miguel. We'll need them to hold the line outside for a year and do what they can from there.”

Surprised, The Watcher asked, “We?”

“Yeah, stupid!” Adelaide slapped him in the back of the head. “We've come this far. I know I don't look it, but I really don't want you to become a light beam pincushion.” Before The Watcher could say his thanks, she quickly added, “I want you to become my pincushion.” She tapped her quiver of arrows with a smile.

The Watcher looked to Nadier and caught the dark elf glimpsing up at the hole in the glass and the crater in the wall left by Akaras. Their eyes met, and the time traveller sighed. “We'll need a place to hide.”

Nadier noted, “I've got just the spot.”