“Gah;” I couldn’t help but curse, annoyed at my consistent failure to figure out just what the hel was going on in Belgrade. I refused to believe that the town just happened to be abandoned without some very good reason, especially given that large parts of it had decayed at a normal, maybe even reduced, rate, meaning that those parts were as intact as houses could be after being abandoned for a little over a year. Lots of dust, some mildew, tons of insects but structurally, those places were perfectly fine, easily able to shelter people if those people were willing to put in some work to restore them. It made no sense that nobody had taken those parts over unless there was some good reason for that.
“Mom, have you considered that there might be nothing here for you to find?” Luna asked me, the question one I had asked myself repeatedly over the last few days as we had investigated the area, especially the cellars and sewers. Underground areas were always worthy of investigation, as a lot of beasties and monsters avoided the daylight, just like Lia and I did.
“Considered, of course,” I grumbled, “But this place makes no sense; there has to be a reason why nobody is living here. Even if everyone in the area had died during the change or soon after, somebody would have stumbled across it in the meantime. At least I think somebody would have,” the last part, I had to admit in a somewhat quieter voice, as I actually was fairly uncertain if anyone had come across the town since the change, simply because so very few people were willing to travel.
Most of the people we had come across so far had settled near their homes or even stayed in the same place as they had been living in before the change, only moving if there was a good reason. And if they did, they only moved as far as necessity dedicated, not further and certainly not across the country like we did. The sole exception were the people at New Dawn but they had received divine guidance, prodding a few Legacies into moving and leading them, something I doubted was a regular occurrence. Plus, even they hadn’t moved all that far, just a day or two of marching from their respective homes, mostly to get to a somewhat central, readily fortified and highly fertile place with a great deal of natural resources to use in easy reach. Otherwise, they likely would have stayed where they were simply because it was a great deal easier.
“Does everything have to make sense at all times?” Luna asked me with a grin on her face, “Wouldn’t it be a lot more likely that somebody was here, but something came along and forced them away before that ‘something’ followed the people it had forced away? Some sort of predator, following after its prey or something like that?” Luna suggested, making me nod in acceptance as it was a plausible idea. Sadly, it was not one I could easily disprove, as I didn’t have enough information, meaning it might be something to investigate further.
“Possible, yes,” I admitted. With that admission, we both started to look for any indication of such an event, though given that we had already looked through most of the town quite carefully, I wasn’t sure just how much we would find.
As it turned out, we didn’t find a whole lot. While we did manage to confirm that some of the buildings had been lived in after the utilities were cut off, indicating that somebody had been here after the change, that was about it. Nothing to tell us why they had left, where they had gone or anything truly useful. Just somebody had been here, which we already knew because some of the stores had been looted. Well, now we knew that they hadn’t just passed through or something like that but had lived in town for at least some time. How long and just when did that happen? We had no idea, but our current assumption was that it happened shortly after the change.
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“Got something!” Luna’s voice made me drop what I was looking at, causing the small glass figurine to shatter on the floor while I rapidly made my way over to my daughter. She had been investigating a small cellar, but there seemed to be more to it.
“Show me,” I told her when I couldn’t immediately spot what she had found. Luna, with a wide grin splitting her face, crouched down and moved a bit of carpet aside, uncovering a fairly large steel grate, about a metre on each side.
“Why on earth is there something like that down here?” I asked myself, looking around the cellar. It was just a pair of rooms, neither looking like anything beyond storage space, though one was built out to serve as a washing area, as the washing machine and the tumble drier indicated. But why anyone would have such a large hole in their cellar floor and cover it with a grate like some sort of storm drain was completely inexplicable to me.
“Maybe they were worried their cellar would flood,” Luna suggested, “I mean, we are on Dry Creek Road,” she reminded me, making me shrug in unconvinced acceptance. It was an explanation as good as any, though I remained doubtful.
“Let’s see what’s down there,” I decided and started to help Luna get rid of the remaining carpet.
Once it was gone, we could see a little more, though even with our night vision, there wasn’t a whole lot to see. Just a shaft going some one-and-a-half, maybe two metres down before it opened up into a larger space. What that larger space was, I couldn’t tell, just that there were some treads in the stone, making it possible to climb down with some effort.
“I’ll take a look first,” I told Luna, well aware that I could use my cloak to escape if something down there was more trouble than it was worth, though I wasn’t about to take that risk. Not if I didn’t have to.
With a quick exertion of my will and magic, a raven took shape and was unceremoniously dropped down the hole, the scrying construct taking my senses along for the ride. Once it was past the shaft, its wings flared open, and with the help of some Wind Magic, its flight immediately stabilised, allowing me to see what was down there.
Sadly, again, there wasn’t a whole lot to see, just a musty, old tunnel leading off somewhere into the darkness. But, given that this was, for some strange reason, built underneath a house, I was quite curious now because this tunnel was many things, but normal was not one of them.
Picking a direction by chance, I let my raven move along the tunnel, curious where it would take me and if there were more openings as it went. I noticed a few smaller shafts opening into the tunnel and a few pipes sticking out of the wall but the tunnel itself was just one long hall until it finally ended in yet another grate, this one just above the water in some creek, making me wonder if it was supposed to carry away rain or something. Mainly, I was confused and dismissed the construct before forming another one to check out the other direction. Maybe there was more to this than a strangely large storm drain.
The flight in the other direction was quite similar to the one towards the creek; there were lots of pipes and a few larger openings, but no splits in the tunnel, and nothing to indicate anything special was down there. Until the tunnel ended at what appeared to be a fairly solid metal door, giving the impression it would be a lot more at home on a military base or in some bunker than in some strange tunnel in the middle of a relatively small town. Sure, the place had an airport, but that was about it in terms of special features.
Regardless, my curiosity was now raring to go and find out just why the tunnel ended at that door and what was beyond it. Sadly, my constructs couldn’t move through solid objects like that, nor could they open doors, so the rest of the investigation had to be done in person, meaning Luna and I, as I had no real interest in leaving Luna behind or moving around without her to cover my back, had to go down into the musty, moldy old tunnel and go knock on that door. If there was one thing I didn’t enjoy about adventures in the real world, or in Road to Purgatory for that matter, when compared to playing games on my computer, it was the smell. And the actual killing, but, somehow, the scent was a lot worse for me personally.
