Chase had no clue where he was going. He had never been down this branch of the academy before, which made him curse Luke for making him go out of his way for a detention.
It was about the end of the day, and he was currently missing out on a much needed aetherball scrimmage.
He glanced around the poorly lit hallway he was walking down, realizing that he had seen very few students down this way.
Then he seen Luke standing next to a big stone door, at the end of the hall.
Next to the professor, stood the one person that he really didn't want to see right now.
Poppy was leaning against the wall with a distant expression on her face, her eyes were tinted with more red than they usually were.
In fact as he got closer, he noticed the dark bags under her eyes. Which was quite rare for the girl who never ceased to have perfect skin.
She looked as if she had been crying the entire day, and that didn't help Chase's already guilty conscious.
Their eyes locked for a moment, and she immediately turned her head the other way.
Luke was lighting one of his forbidden cigarettes, as he ignored his presence entirely.
"When can we get this over with?"
Chase asked.
Luke raised an eyebrow, and nodded toward the end of the hall.
"Waiting for one more."
After an awkward fifteen minutes of waiting, a boy with bright blue hair was taking his time strolling down the dark hall.
Neo was whistling like the idiot, that Chase had recently learned he was.
Granted, he was one of, if not the strongest of the first years; however, he had also somehow already failed every single one of his classes before the halfway mark of the year.
"There's are regular!"
Luke exclaimed, almost sounding grateful for Neo's presence.
Neo responded with a large grin.
"You know it Teach, what task we doing today?"
Luke nodded slowly, blowing out a puff of smoke.
"Come on, I'll show you."
The four of them walked into the room, after the large stone door took an eternity to open.
At the exact same time, Chase and Poppy started to gag.
"What the hell is that?"
He demanded.
"It's not that bad, just mimic corpses."
Luke said, shrugging his shoulders lazily.
Then he pulled a dimly lit torch off of the wall, and handed it to Chase.
In front of them, was a dark expanse with chains littered across the stone floors.
"I hope you brought cleaning supplies, because this dump hasn't been touched in nearly a decade."
Neo raised an eyebrow.
"Are there mimics?"
Luke shook his head.
"They all died out a while ago, Leander wanted to use this room as a new weapon stash after it was cleaned."
He paused.
"Don't worry though, it should only take about two hours."
Once again both Poppy and Chase groaned in annoyance, causing them both to stop and keep their mouths shut.
Luke began to walk away, leaving the three of them standing in a room that was too dark to even see how big it really was.
Silence overcame them for a moment, until Chase offered Neo the torch without saying anything.
"Nah, I don't need it."
Neo said, as his eyes began to glow a faint blue.
"Night vision?"
Chase asked, feeling a sense of awe.
Neo nodded.
"Yeah, but how come you don't want the torch?"
Chase held out his other hand, and summoned a ball of flames that lit up slightly brighter than the torch.
Without warning, Poppy reached over and snatched the torch from Chase, and began walking away with a bucket of cleaning supplies in her other hand.
"What are we supposed to use?"
He yelled.
"Figure it out."
That left both Chase and the blue haired boy alone inside of the eerie room, surrounded only by the faint light of his fire ball.
They watched as Poppy's torch light disappeared into the darkness.
"That's not creepy."
Neo said with a chuckle.
"Anyway, I suppose it will go by faster if we split up."
Chase nodded.
Once he was alone, in one of the small chambers of the vast shadowy expanse: He studied what he could of his surroundings.
"Welp, couldn't possibly be worse than the Hollow's den."
Then he ripped off a piece of white T-shirt, and pulled out his makeshift canteen.
After pouring a little bit of the water onto his craft rag, he crouched down and began to scrub the stone floors of the chamber.