Frostfire Legacy

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..."

"Urp!"

Cassy and Kali, the two beastkins, reacted violently as they approached. Aster, too, realized the fishy, rotten smell coming from the said floor, and quickly realized the source of it.

"Right, the giant snake I killed was left here!" He commented out loud while peeking through the hole he kicked open before.

The hole, right now, wasn't even enough to fit his current body, a testament to just how much he had changed since then.

Anyway, inside, he quickly found the half-rotten corpse of the giant snake. Since there were a lot of flies swarming about, and something icky squirming within the darkness, Aster decided to avert his gaze and...

"Haaak!"

... almost vomited from the disgusting smell. Even he was unable to handle the smell, much less the two beasts who had a sharper sense of smell than him!

As if curious, Helvetica also leaned in closer and peeked inside. But unlike Aster, he merely frowned before turning back to Aster and asking. "Should I clean that up first? I'll make sure not to drag in any other materials that could be a clue."

"P-Please..."

Aster was quite sure that there were no clues on this floor, anyway, so he just agreed to his suggestion. After that, Helvetica nodded his head before pulling out a dagger from his thigh pocket and starting to slash open the door.

After creating a new entrance, he then entered inside and started to "purify" everything with fire. Of course, as he just claimed, his flames didn't burn anything else apart from the snake's corpse, the flies buzzing around, and their maggots busily eating the giant corpse.

It was only half an hour later before Helvetica returned outside, his forehead covered in sweat. "I'm done. The smell should be a little less awful now."

Aster tried to peek inside and take a hesitant sniff. However, just like Helvetica said, the foul smell was no more. Instead, only the smell of burned matter dominated the space.

'Well, it's better than that inexplicable smell, at least.' He reasoned before entering inside.

With firm steps, straight and unhesitating, he went to the cryogenic capsule, where he had been for 2,500 years. The entire capsule, just as he saw it the first time, was already showing signs of the long time it had been untouched.

It was filled with faded paint, rust, and inexplicable scratches all over. It was hard to tell how it had lasted as long as it did just by looking at its outer surface.

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!