#frio zero

Decimator of Light: Book of Darkness Chapter 5: In the Darkness

             She sighed gently, looking at the pile of work on her desk. There was so much paperwork to do – she had to review articles, read her students’ progress, look at the new suggestions from the committee, as well as catch up on the newest published research to make sure she didn’t fall behind. Honestly, the last part was the only work involving papers she was genuinely looking forward to doing – seeing what sort of new discoveries have been made always gave her a tingle of excitement. One never knew what tiny piece of information would be the thing to cause all the other facts in one’s head to click together, and suddenly, a whole new hypothesis was born.

           She looked at the forms and other paperwork she wasn’t as excited to do and quietly pursed her lips for a moment in thought. She looked around the room and, seeing no one else there in her personal office, just as there shouldn’t have been, she quietly put her forearm down on the table and gently nudged all the paperwork over to the edge, one inch, then two, and finally enough so that the center of her desk was free. Then with her other hand, just as guiltily, she nudged her beautiful teapot over until it, instead, was sitting in the middle of her desk, and only then, did she sit down and pour herself a nice, hot cup, picking up the nearest research article with findings only discovered two days ago, as though the other paperwork was not there whatsoever.

            She smiled quietly to herself, almost like she thought herself so very clever for putting off her responsibilities, as she started to sip quietly on her tea as she read the abstract for the article. Something about it had instantly caught her eye, though she wasn’t sure what. It seemed like any other article, testing the capabilities of citizens. Over a thousand subjects, all testing the exact same parameters they always seemed to be. All the data fit with everything shown previously – all except for one area. Where the subjects suddenly felt ill, and so, they were unable to collect any viable data. A small footnote in their main figure.

            And there it was. The small piece that clicked together everything, and a new hypothesis began forming in her mind before she even finished her first cup...              Cin was sprawled face-down. He could hear something that may have been voices but couldn’t manage to open his eyes quite yet. The pleasant feelings from the dream were instantly gone and reality was only slowly coming into focus. Something felt wrong -- his entire body felt different; not heavier, not lighter, but still different, somehow. The air he was breathing in felt strange to him. It wasn’t a smell; it was the air itself. It was thicker, stickier, almost like inhaling water, but Cin had no trouble breathing it in, for some reason.

             He brushed his fingertips along whatever he was laying on. Cin had been placed on top of some kind of strange material; it shifted with every one of his movements like some sort of form-fitting gel, but it was the wrong texture. It felt like cloth, not like memory-foam, but it shifted beneath him like it was actually a sort of liquid, readjusting smoothly with every touch. It was surprisingly comfortable, almost like a cloud shaped just for his body.

             “So you stole it on our last mission? Pila, the laws.”

             “I didn’t think anyone would notice, since so much stuff was smashed anyway! And it turned out to be exactly what we needed. We couldn’t just rely on Frio; she doesn’t have the experience, but the Captain was letting her just go crazy. I mean, there are laws against doing what she did, too.”

             Cin’s head was swimming. He heard the words being said around him, but he couldn’t register any meaning to them. Where was he? Who were those people? He just wanted to sit up. But to do that, he had to pull his arms in, and the moment the he attempted to lift his elbow, pain shot up his arm like he’d stuffed it into an electrical socket. He gritted his teeth violently rather than making any sound. Where did that pain come from?

             Then Cin remembered. He had been attacked by five people. He had run his hardest but still gotten caught when he’d made the genius decision to head towards trees. Trees that one of those people chasing him could blow up. After taking some splinters to his arms, one of them had knocked him out with some kind of soaked rag. And now, he quickly realized, he was lying wherever it was they had taken him.

             He took in a deep breath as slowly as possible, doing his best to keep it steady so that the people in the room would think he was still asleep. Then, very carefully and very slowly, he cracked his eyes open, just enough to see what was going on.

             The room was pitch black. No electric lights, no moonlight, no faint glow of any sort anywhere. But nevertheless, Cin could see absolutely everything around him. No, he could see better than he ever had in his life. What disturbed him most, though, was that he wasn’t sure he was even looking with his eyes; it was more like he could feel everything around him, as though he sensed every little change in the in the air, making him impossibly conscious of those in the room -- their every breath, their every twitch, their every heartbeat -- and those subtle movements was creating the image he saw. It made him feel extremely uncomfortable, like he was breathing down their necks even though they were several yards away. He tried to focus on the inanimate objects to get past that feeling.

             Cin was on a strange, golden cot in a small room that reminded him of a doctor’s office. Tools were scattered across a polished counter, many of which looked foreign and very dangerous to him. There were several other cots in the room on either side of him, all with curtains that could have been pulled around the beds for privacy, but all were pulled back at the moment, including Cin’s. Strange, oval mirrors completely covered one wall to his left, none of which seemed to reflect what was actually going on in the room, and instead remained clear and semi-transparent, almost like the surface of a calm lake. Those seemed oddly familiar to him, but he could no longer ignore the people nearby.

             There were three people in the room with him, two sitting side-by-side on a nearby cot and the last leaning on the wall next to the exit. Cin recognized all three of them. The first one on the cot was the giant man with the deep voice who had run far too fast for his size. He was still just as large, bulky and intimidating as he had been earlier, but Cin could make out this man’s features more distinctly now than he ever had in Kazuko’s office. The man’s nose and chin were both broad, and he had very dark, thick eyebrows with a vertical scar running down through the right one. He had more scars speckled down his shoulder and arm on the same side, and Cin was willing to bet that they continued down his arms and across his chest as well, but his armor hid that from view. Despite this appearance, when the man smiled, which he did now, he seemed a lot less threatening.

             The girl beside this man, the one he had been speaking to, was not the Frio woman who had been chasing Cin so closely, but he did recognize her from the office. She was second-shortest on the team and had a round face and soft features, but she had full lips and carefully-shaped white-blonde eyebrows. Despite the lack of hair, she was still surprisingly attractive. She wore an odd keychain on her headband that Cin had not been able to clearly make out in Kazuko’s home; it was shaped like two electric eels twisted into a double-helix. At that moment, the woman was pouting and looking rather ashamed of herself, as though she had just been trying to justify something she had done wrong.

             “Yeah, but we had orders, Pila. You can’t just shrug them off like that, you’ll get disciplined again,” the large man, persisted. However, he couldn’t resist grinning as the woman crossed her arms over her chest and her face darkened from embarrassment.

             “Well, so what? This isn’t a normal mission, we can’t treat him like anyone else from the Gray World! Our Abilities work differently there, anyway, maybe it works different on humans all together. We don’t know enough about him, in the first place, to assume Abilities would work the same on him as humans. So, Sterk, I think I did the only responsible thing given the situation,” Pila, the woman, nodded to herself, clearly approving of her own justification.

             “You’re panicking,” The large man, Sterk, pointed out. “So, you really do think Captain Veder’s gonna punish you for stealing from humans?” The large man softened momentarily with concern, and Pila’s face tensed with shame and hurt.

             “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she admitted after a pause, her voice losing some of its fire. “He made me sit here on guard duty with you, right? What use does a Pauser have here? I couldn’t do anything but stare if anyone came in. I’m no use in a fight like you or Tishina.”

             At the second name mentioned, the man by the wall, the last person in the room, lifted his head, as though expecting something.

             This last figure Cin recognized right away. He was the man who had looked Cin directly in the eyes in the office. He looked just as small as Cin remembered him, at least a head shorter than Cin, but not nearly as weak as the teenager had first thought. The man was thin, but lean muscle clearly showed through the tightness of the shirt. Now, Cin could make out a tattoo on his bald head -- it was perfectly black against his dark skin, and looked almost like a fiery meteor crashing towards his right ear. He had a square jaw but a small nose, and wore small necklace with a silver symbol that looked somewhat like a water droplet. The necklace fascinated Cin for a moment, mostly because he was sure he’d seen that shape somewhere before.

             “No, nothing,” Pila quickly said, waving her hand at the man to dismiss the thought. “Sorry, Tishina.”

             The man smiled, and he turned so that he was leaning with his back against the doorway again. Almost instantly, his eyes bore an unreadable expression in a half-closed, almost bored state, and he was smiling at nothing in particular. He seemed to be captivated by the blank wall in front of him, like he was having a pleasant conversation with it. Cin almost wanted to turn his head and follow that gaze to find out what was so interesting, but managed to resist the urge. For just a moment, Cin could have sworn that the eyes of the man in the doorway, Tishina, had turned flicked in his direction, but he convinced himself he’d imagined it.

             “So what if you can’t fight?” Sterk asked, his attention going back to Pila. “Can you imagine those Saturated hospital workers had managed to drive after him? If he’d managed to call the police? You know they Saturated the 911 dispatchers, too. You were vital to this all working out.”

             “I’m only vital for the beginning!” Pila cried, obviously louder since she had intended, because she gasped and put a hand over her lips, quickly turning her head in Cin’s direction. Cin kept his eyes closed, refusing to move, and the girl relaxed enough to look infuriated again. But now she whispered. “Once the power is out, once the phones are unusable, what good am I? I’m restricted from using my Ability on anything organic-”

             “Because it would destroy anything organic. You know that, you’ve seen the effects. They show everyone at the Academy-”

             “So does Frio’s! But she gets to use it on ANY inorganic matter, and today, it was suddenly okay to risk-”

             Both suddenly went silent, and Cin knew why. Someone was approaching. Sterk and Pila got to their feet, but Tishina remained leaning against the wall as their Captain entered, followed by the tall woman who had almost killed him, Frio, and someone Cin did not recognize.

             Frio walked over and stood beside her two teammates. She had large, worried eyes, but a very kind face. She was very slender and tall, at least three inch taller than the Captain and second only to Sterk, and like him, had many scars on what little visible skin she had. The deepest scar was a cross-shaped mark on the left side of her forehead that looked particularly painful. Now that she wasn’t chasing him down like a turkey on Thanksgiving, she seemed a lot less unpleasant.

              Captain Veder looked exactly the same as Cin remembered him -- two piercings in his left eyebrow, a not too skinny, not too muscular physique, and a stern expression with an air of deep-seeded duty about him. His hands were firmly locked behind his back as he motioned for the man beside him to step into the room, causing all four of his soldiers to lower their bald heads down with respect.

             The man that entered was particularly pale, especially when compared to the other people in the room, but then again, he didn’t look like he did any sort of work that involved blending in with the shadows. He wore a long robe with an intricate beaded design running down his arms. A long sash wrapped several time around his mid-section and was encrusted with dark jewels and gems. Beneath the robe, some metal-encrusted boots showed themselves along with a pair of pants that had silver embroidery all along the edges. He wore a crown on his head, made out of the same silver metal as the head bands the soldiers were wearing, with just as intricate a design in the metalwork. This man’s hair was long and rich brown, even though Cin would have expected it to be pure white at his age, and his hair was neatly tied back into a braid. His matching, braided beard reached down to his sash in the front. His face was warm, wrinkled from so many years of being bent in smiles, but as his black eyes fell onto Cin, the boy felt chills run down his entire body. The smile on his face didn’t quite reach those eyes.

             “So, I see you have retrieved him, then!” the man said with an impressed chuckle. His voice was a low, calming rumble, and the approval in his tone caused four of the soldiers in the room to smile. Tishina, however, tensed his eyebrows slightly, but made sure to keep the same air-headed smile plastered on his face that he’d had on the entire time.

“Frio and Sterk did most of the work, my Sovereign,” Veder said, his voice brimming with pride as he motioned to his two tallest soldiers. “And we managed to keep him relatively unharmed with the preparations done by our Pauser, Pila.”

             Pila’s eyes widened with shock, and her face burned as the old man turned to smile at her.

             “Your Captain has told me of your ingenious idea to use a Gray chemical to subdue your target. I am very impressed. Harming him any more than necessary would likely have ended badly for his trust in us. Your ability to think ahead is truly a value to your Squadron.”

             “Th-thank you, Sovereign-!” She stuttered out before giving a deep bow. Pila’s eyes were still wide and utterly bewildered by the reaction; she clearly hadn’t been expecting this. Her other teammates beamed, glad that she had been acknowledged and not punished.

             “Now, I understand that he did still have some amount of damage done onto him, yes?” The pale man turned, this time, towards Tishina, who was suddenly standing upright with both hands respectfully behind his back. He was smiling, but his eyes were tightly closed. With the smile, it seemed like his eyes were closed in pleasure, but Cin was sure that wasn’t the case.

“Yes, our Sovereign,” Tishina answered respectfully. His voice was raspy, like he wasn’t used to speaking often. “Upon inspection, our minor attacks have left abrasions and one particularly deep laceration to his right forearm, though more damage had occurred prior to our interference. With the connection broken for a day, The Others managed to manipulate the environment and Saturate enough humans to cause a deep wound to the trapezius muscle above the left scapula, as well as many contusions upon the forearms and abdomen. No nerve damage seems to have been sustained.”

             “A Reverser has already been called, sir,” Captain Veder assured the slightly-worried Sovereign, causing the smile to return to the old man’s face. “And all balance has been restored to the Gray World; the humans will have all the needed information given to them. A Seed has already been planted into those involved in the aftermath of the Extraction, and all the humans’ Darknesses are making sure to continue planting them as long as necessary.”

“I must say, I am quite impressed!” the Sovereign laughed heartily. “But I act as though I could have expected less from my Zero Squadron. You are all nothing short of heroes, I hope you understand. And your heroic efforts will be remembered for as long as Darkness remains.”

             The Squadron smiled, puffing their chests out with pride. Tishina did this as well, though almost reluctantly, and only when the Sovereign’s head turned in his direction.

             “Now, once the Reverser’s work has been completed, I must ask one of you to bring him to speak with me right away. There is much that he must be informed of: the current state of affairs, the dire need our people have, what The Others have been doing to us,” he practically spat out the phrase ‘The Others’, like he absolutely loathed those words. But then quickly got back to his cheerful tone again, asking, “Would it not be too much of a bother for someone here to escort him?”

             “I-I will!” Frio instantly volunteered. Her eyes darted towards her Captain the moment the words left her lips, full of guilt, and Cin realized she probably needed his permission to be able to volunteer for something like that. Tishina had opened his mouth as well, but closed it with a slight frown when he realized that he had not been quick enough.

“I shall be awaiting you both, then,” the Sovereign said with a small nod of gratitude, not seeing any issues with her enthusiast. “Please, make sure that the Decimator feels welcome; I do not wish for him to think we are his enemies, especially after how we were forced to bring him. Now, Captain, I think it would be best if you took the rest of your Squadron out to celebrate. I dare say, not only do they deserve it, and the rest of the Darkness will wish to express their gratitude, as well.”

             “Of course, our Sovereign,” Veder said with a final deep bow. “I completely agree!”

              The moment he said this, the Sovereign was gone. No flash, no twist, no puff of smoke, nothing. He was simply gone before the Captain had even risen his head back up from the bow. And Cin was the only one who found this out of the ordinary.

             “You heard our Sovereign!” Veder said looking to his soldiers, his chest swelling like he could hardly contain his pride. “We will go celebrate! Frio, after you are done with your duty, I look forward to seeing you join us.”

             “Y-yes, of course,” Frio stuttered and bowed, doing so mostly to hide the small, reddish tint beginning to take over her face. She had problems looking Captain Veder in the eye, but the Captain took no notice.

The squadron left, all laughing and excitedly talking to each other about what the Sovereign had said. The last one to exit was Tishina, his eyes still closed. At the doorway, he stopped and turned back to look at Cin. His eyes opened, and he gave Cin a look brimming with pity. It was less than reassuring, and Cin began feeling fear well up in his gut once again as Tishina turned away and left the room, leaving Cin alone with Frio -- the woman who had caused most of his wounds. Somehow, he forced his breath to remain steady to keep up his sleeping act.

             What the heck was going on? So many odd terms had been used, so much weird and official-sounding language. A squadron? He had to be taken in by, what was apparently, the best squadron? Away from the “Gray World”? His world was considerably less gray than the one he was currently in, why would it be Gray? And who were “The Others”? How had they caused the waitress to trip or the truck to just miss him? And what was with that last name? “The Decimator”. Something about it made Cin’s stomach twist uncomfortably, the way that name had been uttered, with an odd sort of hungry longing behind it. If that was what Cin was being called, he didn’t like it.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and jerked violently. Cin instantly regretted that action because now Frio definitely knew that he was awake.

             “Aa-a thousand pa-pardons, Decimator!” Frio said, pulling her hand back so that it was behind her back. Her face was full of guilt and panic. “I-I know my actions have been inexcusable, but you d-did not give us an opportunity t-to explain! Had you n-not ran, we would not have resorted to what we h-had done, th-though I know that does not excuse what I had d-done, and I apologize so d-deeply for it. W-we had planned to h-have a discussion w-with you, bu-but once you l-left, the chances of you being o-overtaken by a S-saturated human rose considerably, s-so we had to retrieve you as qu-quickly as possible. But I apologize f-for my part, I tr-truly do,” She shut her eyes tightly and bowed her head deeply in apology. “But pl-please -- the Reverser is here. P-please accept the treatment, I deeply im-implore you.”

Cin stared at her like she grew a second head. He had not expected an apology, especially not such a heart-felt one. Frio was practically crying with shame.

             “I...Er...yeah, sure,” Cin suddenly stuttered out, continuing to stare at her as though she was somehow mentally unstable, but she bowed and let out a deep breath of relief. After she straightened back up, Frio hurriedly left the room before Cin could remember how to formulate questions with his mouth. Frio returned only a moment later with another person following behind her.

             As soon as Cin caught sight of this person, his stomach leaped in excitement, and he had no idea why. For a second, it was as though Cin’s mind was convinced that he knew this person very well, but as he tried to find memories of her, he realized he’d never seen her before in his life. The emotions confused him into silence, and he was stuck looking her over again and again, as though hoping for something to spark a memory that he logically knew wasn’t there.

             The person tailing behind Frio had no case filled with medical supplies, no signs of anything for sanitation, nothing that suggested that this person was any sort of physician or nurse or first responder. This person was young, somewhere around Cin’s age. She was small, almost the same size as Tishina, maybe even a little shorter, with olive skin. Her hair was dark violet, shoulder long, with some of it up in two, short, spiky ponytails on either side of her head. What she wore was nothing like a doctor’s uniform; it was a very long black dress with sleeves that reached to her wrists, a high collar, and a sash that tied once around her hips, twice up her stomach, and then swirled down her arms until it connected to black rings on the middle fingers of either hand. She had a full face, a small nose, and large eyes, giving her the appearance of someone relatively harmless, but not someone authoritative enough to be any sort of medical professional. The only things that made her seem special compared to the squadron members were the six earrings she wore in her right ear that were connected together by a chain. A small spherical shape hung down at the end, like a sort of strange ear-keychain.

             Though Cin was a little dismayed that this person was supposed to do something to his wounds, he found himself relaxing slightly when he saw that the same odd necklace that Tishina wore was also around this girl’s neck. It had that same strangely-familiar, tear-like shape.

             “Welder Frio Zero, please, may I ask for some privacy?” the girl asked the squadron member politely but firmly. It was clearly more of a command than genuine request.

             “Hm? Oh, yes, of course!” Frio said, giving a bow to the girl who must have been ten years younger than her. She then left the room to stand at the doorway, keeping vigilant watch on the empty corridor with her arms behind her back.

             Cin opened his mouth to say something, but the girl didn’t seem very interested. Her eyes danced across his forehead, his arms, obviously making a mental list of all his wounds while somehow managing to also avoid all eye contact. The way she managed to ignore him while eyeing him closely made Cin instinctively close his mouth, suddenly unsure if it was acceptable to speak with her. She made him feel like an annoying object.

             “May I request that you remove your clothing?”

             “W-what?” Cin stuttered out, shocked not only by her boldness, but the authoritative tone she took. She wasn’t wearing gloves, she wasn’t even going over to get any medical supplies. She just stared at his wounds as though asking him to strip was perfectly acceptable.

             “Please, the top layers of upper and lower apparel at the very least. Whatever is under may remain,” she elaborated, her expression unnaturally focused on his scratches.

             For a second, Cin wanted to argue. But as he felt the pain in his forehead when he tried to lower his eyebrows in disapproval, he thought maybe it was best to at least try whatever it was this ‘Reverser’ could do for his wounds. So quietly, utterly embarrassed, he removed his shorts and shirt and then sat on the cot in front of this girl he’d never met before, wearing nothing but his boxers.

             The girl calmly reached forward and began to peel the bandages off his shoulder without hesitation. It was an unpleasant feeling -- Cin had never needed so much as a Band-Aid, so this was new to him. The blood had turned dry and crusty, and it had caked over in a translucent layer of yellow-white pus and medicine that the paramedics had applied. The girl removed the bandages quickly, not caring that it tried to stick to Cin’s skin, that she had to yank to get it off, or how Cin flinched while she did so. But the way she did it very methodically and without any hesitation helped ease Cin’s worries about her experience, though only slightly.

             He felt the fresh air hit the wound on his shoulder blade, and turned his head to look at it. It didn’t look better at all, deeper than he’d imagined it. Cin pushed back the urge to touch it, with how it was already throbbing without the bandages and the salve that this Reverser used said bandages to wipe off, and instead turned away, trying to focus on what the girl would do about it.

             The Reverser reached over and formed a triangle with her fingers and thumb, holding it over the mostly-scarred flesh, as though trying to figure out at what angle to approach a painting from. Cin was about to laugh out loud, until he felt the oddest sensation he had ever felt in his life.

             He could feel everything in his shoulder suddenly turning numb, and then slowly, ever so slowly, moving. He could feel the salve the paramedics had applied slipping out of his blood stream, see them forming the original blob that they had squeezed from a tube before slipping away from his skin. As soon as the goop was outside the Reverser’s hand-triangle, the salve slipped away, plopping quietly to the ground. Next followed by the salty crumbs that had caused him so much pain, which had been on the knife when it had penetrated his skin. As they left his blood stream, and then dropped to the ground like the salve, Cin could feel his skin pinching closed. First the muscle, the inner layer near his shoulder blade, and then the layer closer to the skin, and finally, his skin itself, pinching together. His wound closed perfectly, no scar, no anything.

            Cin could only stare in shock, knowing that his wound was no longer there. He wanted to flood the girl with questions. He even opened his mouth to do so, but no words were coming out, and all he ended up doing was gaping like an idiot at his own shoulder. The Reverser ignored his expression and moved her arms down his body, using the same hand formation to force splinter after splinter out from his skin. One at a time, the small pieces of wood simply fell to the floor, forgotten, as the holes they exited from closed right up. He felt the blood in his bruises pump normally again, as though he had never thrown himself over his own car, and he felt the last of his scratches erase themselves. Within ten minutes, he was just as good as he had been two days ago, if not better.

            Cin continued to gape in disbelief, not sure what to do or what to say. His eyes moved between the vanished wounds and this girl’s face, and he closed and opened his mouth several times, but never actually managed to form words. The girl didn’t seem to even notice. As soon as she finished, the Reverser turned to leave without giving Cin so much as a second glance.

             “I am done,” the Reverser said in a monotone to Frio. “I suggest you bring him to the Sovereign, now.”

             “Yes,” Frio said turned back towards the room, bowing deeply in thanks to the girl. “Thank you, Reverser Rakastaa!”

             “It is my duty,” she responded, walking off down the hall and out of sight. Cin watched her figure vanish still with utterly no idea of what had just happened or how.

             “Decimator!” Frio said, turning back to Cin who turned merely turned weakly to stare at her instead. But something about her excited expression snapped Cin out of it, and quickly reminded him that he was still in his boxers.

             He snapped his mouth closed and instantly began pulling his shorts back on, turning to his side to try and hide as much as himself as possible. He blushed furiously, yanking his shirt over his head, all while the woman didn’t seem to notice his embarrassment nor mind him being momentarily shirtless. “I understand that this is r-rude because you were only just R-reversed, but I must request you come with me. The S-sovereign awaits!”

             “W-wait, hold up-” Before Cin could properly argue, his wrist was grabbed and he was being pulled across a long, dark corridor. Frio was surprisingly strong; all he could do was stumble awkwardly after her, trying to adjust his shirt to properly cover his stomach with his free hand.

             The walls of the corridor were bare, save for a few doors, all of which were closed and seemingly led to a different type of room every time. Or at least, Cin guessed so from the different markings on every one. The entire place looked very official: under a different, abstract image on each door, there were symbols in an unreadable language, followed by recognizable numbers. It seemed to be in some sort of office or embassy, though one with no historical facts or paintings to cover the walls.

             Cin’s mind continued to race, but gave him nothing but unanswerable questions. He was still trying to recover from watching splinters magically moving out of his skin. Frio did not hold onto his wrist very tightly, but at the same time, not loosely enough for him to be able to break away without problems. She was excited, obviously looking forward to celebrating with her team. And as much as Cin wanted to run away, he simply couldn’t bring himself to ruin her good mood, especially when he had nowhere to run to. He could feel that, despite the attacks, the woman meant him no harm. And after watching what must have been magic done to his body, Cin could use a nice, long talk with someone who could answer at least a fraction of his questions.

             After about a minute of walking, a giant, steel door came into view, signaling the end of the corridor. It had an intricate border around it, the most artistic thing Cin had seen the entire time, and only sign of anything being in any way special within the building.