With Aster's lead, they started to walk toward his parent's laboratory.
Of course, it would have been hard to backtrack his path a few weeks ago, but thankfully, he had quite a good memory. He remembered a few eye-catching details that acted as landmarks, pointing them in the right direction.
Whenever they passed by a pile of rubble, Aster would renew the mental map he had based on what the building was in the past, long forgotten. With that, the accuracy of their heading was getting higher the further they went.
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"It's here!"
In less than three hours, the distance that he needed nine hours to walk before was covered.
'I really improved a lot,' Aster thought a little, praising himself for a job well done.
"The entrance is here; follow me."
Without wasting more time, he led them to the emergency staircase. However, as expected, it was so rusty that it would probably drop them straight to the bottom if all five of them walked on it at the same time.
Mistelle stepped forward as she spoke confidently. "So we need to descend here? Leave it to me!"
With a wave of her hand, completely leaving out chanting altogether, she created a net of vines covering the entire staircase from the top to the bottom.
"I reinforced the stairs with vines. It should be safe to traverse now." She explained.
Aster, curious, tried to carefully step on the vines, and to his surprise, it was sturdier than cement! Despite his increased weight, it didn't even budge, much less release a creak!
Trusting her spell completely, Aster decided to walk down, scaling the emergency staircase at a normal walking pace. In less than five minutes, they had already reached the bottom, the 9th floor, where he initially was.
He looked at the destroyed emergency exit and saw that the ice covering it had long melted away, not leaving anything behind.
"Ugh, this smell..."
Aster moved closer, touching the cushion inside the pod, before sitting on it again and looking around just in case for clues.
"... It's clean."
Of course, since it's been sealed for as long as he was inside it, there's no way for any clues to be placed inside, anyway. Next, he moved to the back of the pod and checked the control panel, but as expected, it was no longer working.
"... Right, out of power, was it?"
He remembered the noisy error that woke him up in the first place and looked down at the floor he was standing on. Below him should be the core room, where the Nuclear Fission reactor powering the entire laboratory was located.
'If there's any clue left behind by mother and father, then most likely...'
Anyway, before they moved to the 10th underground floor, Aster and everyone else swept over the entire 9th floor first. They checked out every nook and cranny, trying to find clues, but found absolutely nothing.
"Hmm... Any sort of document has already turned into a pile of dirt from how long it has been." Kali muttered with a disappointed sigh.
Cassy put down the random trinket she found and also gave her opinion. "If there's anything to look for, then I guess it's in a digital format since that would be more preservable."
"Right," Aster himself agreed.
"But the electricity in this facility died the moment I woke up. We should check the reactor room first and restart it if possible to see if any of the computers still have data in them."
Officer Helvetica nodded to his words, approving.
"Sounds like a plan. Where's that core room, then?"
"Below us," Aster explained. "Ah, and I'm not sure if there's any leaking radiation, so we should be careful."
"..."
Hearing his warning, all four others stiffened in shock. They weren't prepared to fight against radiation, at all!