“Hello? Anyone here?” Eksi tapped on the rear entrance of the Dessaron ship. He didn’t expect it to open or anything, but Litvir had insisted that Eksi have a feel around anyway, despite the ship being seemingly abandoned. And by feeling around, Eksi was doing just that, using his telepathy to feel through the ship and see if anyone or anything was inside.
“Anything?” The sudden appearance of Teekay made Eksi jump slightly, as he had been concentrating on the ship and not his surroundings.
“Nope. Nothing.”
“Any traces or convos?”
“Nope. Nothing at all. It’s all too old.”
“Thought as much…” Teekay grunted, fidgeting slightly, then pressing his hand against the wall of the ship. “I was hoping this would be kinda simple. I really hoped we’d find them asleep in their ship.”
“It’s not that bad!” Eksi chirped. “We just need to explore this nice villa with an evil castle on top of it!”
“It’s an evil castle. It’s not going to go down well. Since when did any evil castle have a good track record?”
“Eh, true, but let’s be optimistic!”
Teekay grunted again. “True, true. There’s no traces here anyway. We should head to the villa.”
Eksi skipped a little, then followed Teekay over to the main structure. While the evil castle above was rocky, dark and menacing, the villa was in excellent condition, with white walls and plenty of windows and glass panels.
Inside, Litvir and Relkir were both discussing something via telepathy, when Teekay and Eksi entered their telepathic bubble.
“Anything?” Teekay asked.
“Plenty of traces in here…” Relkir growled. “Some hints of a conversation, the team splitting up to explore further, then some sort of teleportation event.”
“How can you tell?” Eksi blinked.
“Feel for yourself.”
Eksi concentrated on the centre of the room for a moment. With a blink of his eyes, he could suddenly sense the presence of both Elksi and Retvik having a conversation, then an even more sudden and complete disappearance of their telepathic traces. They had been discussing something before something else zapped them away.
“That’s not good…”
“Not at all,” Litvir frowned, knowing that they needed to search deeper. “I can only approximate where they went, and that direction is up.”
“Into the castle?” Teekay exclaimed.
“Yes, into the castle.”
“Oh great.”
Relkir glanced at Litvir, then to Teekay and Eksi. “There are telepathic traces above us as well, but they disappear the same time that Retvik and Elksi’s traces vanish. The only difference is that the extra traces are quite high up, and have left the elevator stuck in place several storeys up.”
“That elevator is bound to draw attention to us,” Litvir added. “While we can shield ourselves from protection, we will need to work together to lower the elevator to the gr-”
Before Litvir could finish his sentence, a loud creaking sound echoed across the villa, immediately followed by the elevator crashing into the ground, sending glass flying everywhere. While the team were fast enough to create protective bubbles to save themselves, they all felt twisted, menacing vibes coming from the lift.
“I think whoever is behind this already knows that we are here…” Litvir whispered. “We had better be careful…”