Walking down the alleyway, its stark emptiness compared to the previous day slightly surprised Flo.
But he didn’t question it as he passed by random crates and a pool of a sun-coloured liquid.
After a few more steps, he arrived in front of the plain wall.
He touched the wall, tried to rub the wall but only brick dust was the reward.
He then hit the wall and attempted to coax the wall with some strange sayings.
But alas it was unsurprisingly just a wall—so how and where did the boy vanish to?
This very question seemed to repeat itself constantly in Flo’s mind; it kept him on a hook that he wasn’t trying to escape anytime soon.
Stepping back from the wall, he leaned against his home.
His head shifted left and right.
Then he went further down the alley where it opened up into a cross-section between the buildings.
His steps quickly reversed as he saw a rather rich looking man, with a large mustache and brown hair passionately kissing a much more ragged woman—who didn’t seem one bit interested in the strange sucking act but obeyed anyway.
Now back in front, with a bit more effort Flo kicked the wall, a little shake from only a doorway of bricks—a shake enough to give Flo encouragement.
Another kick and then another and another and finally another.
Each kick made the same exact bricks all shiver; but a shiver was all it was.
Swinging his arm, his rifle entered his hands, he steadily pointed the gun straight at the wall.
Backed up against his home, the barrel of the rifle was only a few centimetres away from the wall.
His essence surged into the barrel of the gun, sloshing around and compacting into an e-bullet.
Bang!
The bullet exploded onto the wall, the blood absorbing the bricks.
The wall caved in.
Dust flooded the air as a downward staircase was revealed to Flo.
It was a small crooked tunnel, only lit up by hanging lanterns.
It smelled of rotting corpses and dried vomit.
Flo moved swiftly as the bang caused a large sound, one that wouldn’t go unnoticed for too long.
Bending down through the freshly created doorway, coughing as he walked through, Flo found his way onto the wooden flooring.
Creak
As he stepped down the stairs, the creaking became more obvious.
Old cobwebs covered the inert tunnel.
Making it to the bottom step, to the right of Flo was a small door, a bit smaller than him.
The hinges were crooked and the door itself was slanted, the top of the room behind the door revealed by the broken entrance.
Pushing the door open, it fully collapsed.
Inside the room was very little: a table, a few shelves, the walls of the room lined with their own hip-level desks and a few faint lanterns still somehow lit.
A very plain old room.
Of course Flo didn’t want to believe that and so he darted around the room: picking up every ball, sheets of paper, whatever books were lying around, all of the strange mechanical items until the room was stripped bare.
Now all the items were huddled into a large lump carried by Flo.
Dashing out the room and up the stairs, he left into free air.
About to go round the corner, he stopped as he heard a multitude of shouts getting closer and closer.
Changing his mind, he headed into the cross-section where by the same corner the rich man and poor girl were kissing was a small see-through bag containing only a few millimetres of foreign substance.
Heading leftwards down a different alley, he popped out onto the street and turning another left he was in front of his home—the antique shop.
By the side were the origins of the shouts.
A small crowd of people with a few creeping into the alleyway.
Hoping he’s in the clear, Flo entered the antique shop and waved another “hello” and “goodbye” to Bil as he headed up the stairs.
Chucking all the items onto the floor, he jumped onto his bed.
Letting out a few breaths of relief and exhaustion, he bent over his bed to look out the window.
Multiple men and women wearing navy blue overcoats surrounded the broken wall.
A silver star—plastered onto the left sleeve—designed by a fog changing colours going from a light grey to a dark black by the top of the star.
One of the overcoats pulled out a small lantern, hanging by his hip with it lit up before walking into the uncanny hole in the wall.
Two more followed behind him.
After 30 minutes they came out again, obviously finding nothing.
Another man parted the crowd at the entrance to the alleyway, a man with perfectly combed over blue hair that rolled like a wave in the sea.
It was the same man who talked with Jack Barnum on the city walls of Birnam.
Two of the police often just called coats began to talk as they spotted the blue-haired man, the woman coat began in a whisper:
“Hey, who’s he?”
“Why would I know, he’s probably just someone from the Union or capital,” replied a male coat.
The blue-haired man now stepped onto the scene with his perfect eyes, his pupils a brilliant mix of sea blue and the white foam that comforts the top of the ocean.
His head shifted left and right, not finding anything of interest before he walked down the stairs.
Inside the small room at the bottom, the man only looked at a few things before leaving again.
“Is there a tracker in this city?” He asks all the coats around him.
A man replies:
“No sir.”
“Of course there’s not, anyway, tell your chief or whoever that this is a Sun Cult base and restrict the alleyway from the public,” he turned to leave. New chapters come out on g.com first.
At the very end of the alleyway, he looked back at the gaping hole in the wall:
“But why blow it up, why blow it up, why did they blow it up?” His hands rested on his hips as he stared at the wall in bafflement.
Back to the actual criminal who wasn’t able to hear any of the slight chatter and could only stare out the window until the ocean man left, is now looking at the pile of ‘stuff’ he brought home.
Books, random pieces of paper, strange balls, maybe life cores and various types of machinery filled the pile in the center of the room.
Picking it apart, he sorted all the books into one pile, all the papers into another, all the balls into another and whatever’s left into the last pile.
There were 5 balls in total and whether they were life cores, Flo didn’t know as he had never seen the specific colours of these cores before.
Some were a murky brown, some were a dirty orange and one was colourless.
Not wanting to find out if they were life cores, he set them aside.
The pile of whatever was left was filled with interesting contraptions.
One such contraption was a rotating wheel attached to a lengthy blue wire.
There were three similar machines but with different colours: red, green and yellow.
Not knowing the use of any of the things he shifted to hopefully two much more reasonable piles.
There were only three books, one was a child’s horror story titled ‘the bladed nightmare’, another book seemed to be a diary and the last one was the second part of the same diary.
And finally, in the piles of paper, the majority of them recorded coordinates of something or someone.
Others recorded initials and times like ‘HH – 8 minutes’.
There were 20 pages with similar phrases, at least 50 of the initials and times per page.
Beside some of the initials were little notes like ‘little resistance’ or ‘poisoned too quickly’ and by only one of the initials ‘GS – 2 minutes’ was a large tick at the very bottom of one page.
Shuffling through the rest of the pages there was nothing of interest to Flo, so he directed his gaze back to the books.
Ignoring the kids horror story, he picked up the first part of the diary titled ‘Brimnar City – West Wing’ and flipped the cover open.
‘Day – 8th moonrise of winter year – 9863
Brimnar City – Day 1:
This city is dead.
Dead like a floppy fish out of water.
Dead like me.
Nothing to do, nothing to see, no history and just this small room to accompany me.
This boring boring and even more boring empty shell of a room in a city where even I can get bored.
Honestly, I’ve only been here a few hours but looking at these machines, I just can’t be asked.
Like why am I supposed to put this fish food inside a bloody egg shaped capsule and then write down how long till the liquid changes colour.’
The writing was messy and rushed, one word covering multiple lines, a few sentences a page with Flo trying to decode what any of this means.
He carried on reading this person’s personal frustrations.