The weather proves advantageous yet tricky for surveying, with rolling clouds covering the city in a thin shade at one moment and allowing bright sunlight to cast deep shadows at another. While puddles still linger, the mess from the storm has been cleaned up, meaning many people are out and about in the city. Regardless, Niel will survey the storage facility so he can come back at night and make his move.
He soon arrives at the stone wall surrounding the facility. The gate is open, but as he doesn't have official business here, he decides not to enter and passes by nonchalantly. Rather, he looks for a spot along the wall that's covered in shadow, which will serve as his entry point. Unfortunately, such a spot doesn't exist as the shadows from the buildings inside and outside the complex don't reach the walls, meaning one side is always being shone on. Niel is forced to wait until the clouds cover the sun to make his move.
He finds a secluded spot nearby free from view and falls into a Shadow Dive. It's not a perfect shade, but it's the best he's got. With cameras covering the inside of the complex, he chooses to enter where the inside of the wall is facing away from the sun so he can have the most amount of coverage possible on his entry and exit. It's slow going, and he needs to splay himself thin to stay hidden in the light shade, but he moves around the facility and memorizes what he can. It's an open facility with units lined in rows, and each garage door is held shut with a padlock. Even with the cameras, getting in at night will not be an issue in the slightest. The only snag is that he won't be able to take anything larger than a few sheets of paper out with him. With unit B-17 located, Niel gradually creeps out the way he came and returns home.
No red flags are raised when he arrives home. He plays it cool and goes about his business throughout the day so that it ends uneventfully. Once everyone is gone to bed, he waits another half hour just to be safe, and he quietly cracks open his room window by less than a centimetre. The crisp night air wisps through his pyjama top, giving him faint goosebumps along the tops of his scarred forearms. It's refreshing, but also scary. He has done operations like this in the past, but back then, he had nothing to lose should he be caught. Now it's the inverse.
Despite the risk of him being found missing, he slips through the window and shuts it behind him—but before leaving the area, he turns around and peers up at the house from below the shadows. The sharp edges of the blackened roof cut through the light-polluted night sky like a void. There are no stars visible tonight. Niel hopes that one night they will be, and he'll sit on the roof to watch them. It's a comforting thought.
The heat from the day's sun still lingers in the ground, heating one side of his phantom body while the cool air chills the other as he sneaks through the city of souls. Traffic is minimal, but there are more people around than he initially predicted; drunks, the homeless, or just people out to enjoy the nightlife. Had his circumstances been different, he may have been among them. Perhaps, in a way, he is now. But he has a job to do, so he continues unerringly to the storage facility once again.
A problem arises once he reaches his objective. He spotted cameras when he surveyed the place earlier, but he didn't realize they came with spotlights. It makes perfect sense as there's only minimal security otherwise, and Niel feels sloppy for not noticing them sooner. It's not a major deal, thankfully, as they don't move and don't cover the whole area. He'll just have to go around them.
Within the shaded walls are not only the storage units but also the security booth, which draws Niel's attention. He wants to see what the guard sees, so he sneaks behind the booth wrapped in shadow to steal a look. Inside is a single guard in attire lazily clicking through the different camera feeds on a single computer monitor. The cameras can barely see anything that isn't in direct light. This makes his task significantly easier, but he shouldn't get sloppy.
He relocates unit B-17 from the safety of the shade and primes the padlock to be picked, but he holds off and returns to the security booth. He doesn't want anything to be seen moving on camera, even if it's hardly noticeable. Once the feed is switched away, Niel quietly unlatches the lock and opens the door the tiniest bit from across the facility, and he waits with bated breath for the guard to look at the camera again. Everything is set like how it was before, just slightly moved upward and with a touch of Dust added to help disguise. The guard scans the feed... and moves on to the next. He didn't notice! Niel puts a tracker on the guard in case he moves and silently creeps back to enter the unit.
There are no cameras inside the unit as far as he can see, so he uncloaks and looks around. His Dust shows that there isn't a lot of stuff inside, just a few storage totes stacked on top of each other and nothing else. It's too dark to see with the naked eye, and Niel is afraid that the light from his phone's flashlight may be strong enough to bleed to the outside, so he uses the screen's light in tandem with his Dust to see all he needs to. He'd also rather not make his socks dirty on the unkept concrete floor, so like before out in the woods, he shapes footwear out of Dust, just this time with a pseudo-gelatinous viscosity to muffle his footsteps.
The only place to start is with the totes, so he unstacks one column and begins his search. He doesn't know exactly what he's looking for, or if there's even anything worth finding in here, but it's all he has left. Inside the totes are various objects more miscellaneous than Niel was initially expecting, such as antique-looking tableware sets, tools he doesn't know the function of, and a disassembled clock. He makes sure that he puts everything back the way he found it. There are also other items that he did expect or isn't surprised to see, like folded clothing and photos that are not of the Brookes, but it's among a stack of papers in one of the later containers that something catches his eye: a small notebook the size of his hand.
He's been reading what he's been finding, so he flips through the pages of the notebook as well just to be thorough. Some of what's written inside is in pen and some in pencil, but it's always information not related to the other pages. None of it looks important, either, just random notes or reminders. He eventually hits the point where the writing ends, so he puts it back in the tote with the other items and closes the lid. But... his gut tells him to look a little more. Niel fishes the notebook back out and skims the blank pages just to be sure. And, he finds something. On the back and bottom of the second last page is something written in what looks like highlighter. He nearly missed it in the low light. It reads:
'Some people think that all of reality is theirs, that all they touch and perceive is all their gain. Not everything belongs 2 them.'
What does this mean? It's nothing but gibberish, and... ironic, if this was written by them. Niel assumes it's some kind of code, so he takes the first letter of every word and lines them up to make a sentence, but all he gets is more nonsense. He tries a few other methods of organizing key letters into words, but nothing makes sense still. Fatigue is catching up to him now. Niel pockets the notebook for further study, and after checking through the final totes and finding nothing more of value, he calls it quits and sneaks back out. If he needs to return later, he can. He makes sure that locking the door isn't caught by the guard, and he returns home.
>>>>>>
Niel awakens to the sound of his alarm—a safety net Mabel suggested he use in case he sleeps in again, and given how he was up late last night, setting it ended up being a good call. He forces himself out of bed and past the notebook hidden beneath his dresser so he can get ready for today's classes.
Once the day passes him by, he secludes himself in his room to study the notebook further. He was too exhausted last night to give an in-depth analysis, and he still feels more tired than he usually does, but Niel feels that he's awake enough to give a better effort now. He digs it out from underneath his dresser and opens it to the second-last page while sitting on the floor.
'Some people think that all of reality is theirs, that all they touch and perceive is all their gain. Not everything belongs 2 them.' He saw it before and never questioned it, but why is there a number? It substitutes the word 'to', but there has to be more to it. Is it a hint? After all, it hardly saves any time writing the number compared to the word. But, what kind of hint would a two be? Niel is fixated on his first-letter theory from last night, so he takes the first letter from each word and strings them together again. The result still doesn't make sense. How about...
To go with the '2' hint, Niel separates the line of letters into two groups, with each group consisting of the first letter of every other word. The first doesn't make sense still, but the second... 'startonpage2.' Start on page 2! That's it! Niel excitedly flips the book over to see what the second page has to offer.
The second page contains notes and what looks like appointments, but there has to be a secret somewhere here among the ordinary. He scans through the page multiple times, but yet nothing jumps out at him. Similar approaches as before yield nothing as well. What's the trick here?
Drawing a blank, Niel decides to take a look at adjacent pages. The first page of the notebook also looks ordinary, but Niel notices something peculiar on the third: there's a small red circle little more than a centimetre in radius drawn on a random part of the page. It isn't circling anything in particular. Looking to throw whatever he can at the proverbial wall to see what sticks, he traces the location of the circle with his Dust and places it over the second page, and it perfectly encapsulates a word: 'river'. He looks at other pages to see if he can find any more of these circles, and after combing through nearly the entirety of the book, he finds twelve others. He uses these on page 2 and notices that all but five circles encapsulate words nearly perfectly. This has to be intentional. The list of circled words consists of 'library, of, 22, page, of, east,' and 'north.'
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'Page 22' immediately jumps out to him, but the remaining six words are more confusing. It's two sentences, with each composed of a cardinal direction followed by a location. He's being led to something—that much is clear. But which direction does he need to go from each location? North of the river? East of the library? Or the other way around? Actually, what library is being referred to here? Niel does a quick check on his phone, and the first library that pops up is that ornate building he's seen twice before. He forgot that it's a library, and hopefully, it's the right one.
Page 22 is almost identical in layout to page 2, so he tries using the remaining five circles for the circle trick again. 'Lookout, 76, page, of,' and 'south' are the result. 'Page 76' and 'south of lookout' are simple enough to string together, but right when Niel starts feeling clever is when he runs into an unforeseen problem. He's positive he's counting correctly, but page 76 is completely blank. Did he mess up somewhere? He retraces his steps, but no matter how different he looks at this, he arrives at the same result. Did a page get lost somewhere, causing him to overcount? Unless several are missing, he's far away from a page that isn't blank. Niel is struggling to understand. Now his back is starting to hurt from sitting hunched over on the floor.
Niel decides to leave it for now and focus on what he does know. The river, the library, the lookout, and three different cardinal directions. To start, what is the lookout? His phone gives him an annoying three answers: a hilltop lookout located to the southeast of the city, a pub called The Lookout Glass in the city centre, and a hill aptly named the Lookout Hill next to the city's northern park. So, which one is it? That cleverness from before is quickly turning to frustration. Niel shifts the focus of his search again. Which direction does he need to go from the river and the library? He looks through the notebook again for clues, and he comes up with nothing. Maybe the answer is on page 76? But how does he—
Niel gives up for the night. He's getting too frustrated, confused, and fatigued to continue on, so he hides the notebook back under his dresser and stretches the hunch and cracks out of his spine. He'll pick it up again tomorrow.
>>>>>>
If he's being honest, Niel isn't feeling very enthusiastic about the notebook. While it's his only lead, and despite it clearly leading him somewhere, he has no idea what lies at the end of the line or if it'll be of any use, and thus if this is even worth the effort in the first place. He laments this during his classes with Louise, but something pulls him out of his thoughts momentarily.
"We're back early!" Reed announces from the doorway. Lydia pushes past him as grumpy as usual.
"Why are you back so early?" Niel asks. It's only noon, and they normally don't get home until almost four.
"Parent-teacher's."
"What?"
Mabel steps out from the kitchen for her duly-timed explanation. "It's called Parent-Teacher Interviews. We'll be going over to their school in an hour to talk to their teachers about how they've been doing," she explains.
"Ah."
Of course, just because they're done with classes for the day doesn't mean that Niel and Illia are too, so Louise's teachings continue for a few hours more. In that time, Mabel and Gabriel leave for the school, and they don't return until after classes are over and Louise is already gone. Reed and Lydia are both upstairs in their respective rooms, so the adults ascend the stairs to discuss the results of the interviews. As for Niel, he had been lazing around in the living room and wasting time, but hearing voices upstairs sparks a curiosity in him. He abandons the couch and slithers up in Shadow Dive to investigate.
He doesn't even make it to the second floor before he catches what the commotion is about: Lydia. Her attitude in school lately has gotten her in trouble several times, and their guardians are none too pleased. He can see through his Dust that while she's on the receiving end of Gabriel's ire, she hardly shows any interest or care. Mabel is becoming upset with her now, too. Things go even further south when her parents are brought up, and Lydia's anger spikes drastically to match Gabriel's. The confrontation swiftly and decisively ends when Lydia uses a blast of ice to seal off the entrance to her room. Mabel and Gabriel are visibly angry, but without the ability to enter her room and scold her further, they're forced to leave. Gabriel goes back downstairs while Mabel enters Reed's room to talk to him.
This outburst was almost identical to the one Niel was subjected to several days ago, and it's a stark reminder of her situation. He needs to find some way to abate her anger, and his only lead is within the pages of that notebook. He needs to crack the mystery and find what lies at the end. He needs to keep going. With renewed resolve, he returns to his room to try deciphering that notebook once again.
Figuring out the secret of page 76 is first on the list. He checks both sides, if there's something hidden within the page itself, or if there are any subtle indents in the paper, but they reveal nothing. It isn't until he holds the page up to the window that he finally finds a clue. There is something here—he can tell because light doesn't shine perfectly through some sections of the paper. He caresses these sections with his thumb and finds that they feel thicker and oddly smooth, and when he scrapes it using his nail, white wax shavings fall to the floor. This is the secret! But what does the wax mean? He assumes it's more writing, but how can he read it? Scraping the wax off and replacing it with Dust sounds dangerous because if he messes up, he could lose it forever, so he leaves the thinking to his phone.
Searching up 'white wax hidden message' results in many examples of how to make a secret wax message, but more importantly, how to reveal them—and it's simple, too. So simple, in fact, that it's listed as an activity for children. Niel's slightly bruised ego aside, all it takes is colouring in the area with watercolour paints or coloured markers. Illia has a pack of markers she uses from time to time, so while she's downstairs, he commandeers one from her room and colours the white page purple. Clear as day, 'Under the birch tree' is fully legible. It's great that he figured it out finally, but this doesn't help him with directions.
Lastly are the said directions and their given locations. Niel assumes the three directions are meant to triangulate a single point of interest, but apart from the (or rather a) lookout pointing south, nothing he's seen gives him any absolutes. He supposes he'll just have to brute force it. Niel brings up the map of Soul and marks down the key locations.
Assuming the lookout refers to Lookout Hill by the park, he draws a line south from it, then connects that with a line spanning east from the library. This intersection is also north of the river, so this must be it! The location is just east of the Heartstone Market... inside a building. If this is the case, then what about the wax message? Unless there's a secret birch tree inside of this building, Niel has a hard time trusting that this is correct. He tries this again with The Lookout Glass pub, but now it's leading him to the middle of the road.
If it has something to do with trees, then perhaps the lookout in question is that hilltop lookout just outside of the city? There are plenty of trees out there. However, no combination of east and north connects to a southern line from the lookout. So, now what? Maybe... putting 'lookout' and 'south' together was a red herring. With this in mind, Niel tries all sorts of directional combinations with the five points, and while some line up, they're all arbitrary locations within the city. Except one.
East of the library, south of the river, north of the hilltop lookout. This places him in the forest—where he hopes he may find something underneath a birch tree. He'll go out exploring tomorrow.
>>>>>>
Niel is anxious now that he's on the cusp of this breakthrough. He's eager to get outside, but class demands his attention more, so he reluctantly sits inside on this beautiful summer day and tries to distract himself with the lessons in front of him. Once his time with Louise is up, he quickly makes himself scarce from the home.
Clear skies, warm temperatures, a refreshing cool breeze—the weather is nothing short of perfection. Except, not exactly. It's too perfect. Not only can he not dive with how many eyes are watching every angle around him, but the sun would leave him completely exposed even if he could. The most he can do is jog, leaving him well-winded by the time he reaches the trail to the lookout. After comparing his current location to his objective on his phone, he pushes himself forward into the tree line.
The shade from the forest mixed with the breeze feels great after jogging all this way, but Niel doesn't want to rest yet. With the lack of direct sunlight and people around, now is the prime opportunity to Shadow Dive, so he temporarily abandons the respite of the forest to become one with the shade. It takes him several surfacings to check his location, but he soon arrives in the target area.
He can see the hill above him and the lookout on top, but he should be practically invisible to anyone up there. Along with the cover provided by the trees, it's hard to find what you don't know you're looking for. All he needs to find now is that birch tree. He searches for what feels like a while, but among the darker brown trunks of other tree species, he can't find the white bark of a birch. Niel now realizes that he should have used the lookout to scout for birch trees from above before coming down here. He won't have enough time to go up and come back down again before supper, so he climbs a tree to get a better view. From this higher vantage point, he finally finds the upper branches of a lone birch peering through the canopy. Now to see what's there.
He notices two things on approach to the tree: new birch saplings standing low from the forest bed, and a large rock engraved with the letter 'B' at the base. The Brookes most certainly left this here. But, is this rock all there is? There has to be more here, right? Niel circles the tree and finds nothing out of the ordinary. He moves the rock as well, but all that's underneath is just more dirt. With straws as the last thing to grasp at, he examines the rock for any potential clues, and to his relief, there is one. It's slightly eroded and filled with dirt, but 'X marks the spot' is etched into the bottom of the stone. If Niel recalls correctly, this idiom is used to mark a place of interest, but he's also heard Reed mention it alongside buried treasure. Is whatever he's looking for buried?
With no way to find out other than to try, Niel uses his Dust to lift away the grass as a sheet and dig underneath. Niel employs caution as he digs; there's no telling what's buried here, and driving his Dust straight through it is a very real possibility. He excavates the topsoil layer by layer, both by hand with a spade and with sweeping Dust, and soon something unnatural can be seen in the dirt. After brushing it off and hauling it out, he realizes that it's a rectangular metal container nearly a metre long and about half a metre wide and deep. The dark metal is unsurprisingly dirty, but it's also starting to rust in places, especially in the brighter hinges. With no lock on it, Niel raises the lid and opens the box.
The contents within are what he can only describe as a trove of personal treasure. There's a handwritten letter resting at the top of the pile, and Niel's heart races as he skims through it.
'To Aaron and Lydia,
Love, Levi and Miriam.'