Chapter 14: Curiosity Killed The Cat

Nathan woke from a contemplative sleep, most of it being spent thinking and not actually sleeping.

However this was one of the best ways he had found to deal with issues, ever since he was younger. Truth be told, it was more likely that he simply would be unable to sleep until some kind of resolution on the thoughts keeping him awake were made. Which is why when he awoke, he immediately headed back to the bridge room.

His objective today, was both information gathering and supply gathering. He needed to know more about the situation, and he could start by finishing his investigation into if this whole thing was a localized issue or a national, or even global one.

His objective was to create the bridge roughly around the point at which he had encountered the soldiers. However as usual, it was difficult to get pin-point accuracy, and so Nathan settled for an area a little ways away but still near the edge of the city he was gunning for.

Once on the other side Nathan was relieved to note his tendrils where not reacting, implying there was no one in the area. However, given how the woman had managed to hide her presence earlier he still erred on the side of caution.

It was night now, probably around 3 am Nathan thought. He was hopeful that this meant he could reach the edge of the city without much issue or encounter, but he didn't work with that as a guaranteed truth.

As it turned out, it was a quite night much like the first and Nathan soon found himself closing on where he knew one of the main roads out of the city lay. Unfortunately, as he made progress closer to the edge the haze in the air grew thicker, and thicker and soon Nathan found it hard to even move let alone see a few feet in front of him.

It felt like he was in a vat of jelly, that was somehow holding a small gale inside it as the wind constantly battered him like he was on a cliff at the edge of the sea. What made it worse was the thickness of the air here, making the wind pack a solid punch that occasionally threatened to bowl Nathan over.

Nathan continued to push forward, even with the difficulty and near inability entirely to see anything due to the haze becoming thicker and the wind increasing in intensity. Eventually it began to clear, which invigorated Nathans drive and he picked up the pace.

Eventually, he managed to reach an area of relative calm again and took stock of his surroundings. He was looking directly back at where he had come from. Somehow, he had been turned around.

Nathan attempted to press through a few more times. Each time ending right back where he had started.

For his final attempt, he found a small chunk of loose concrete from one of the damaged buildings nearby and would throw it ahead of him before crawling on all fours to find it. However, to his surprise and deepening curiosity he still ended up exiting facing where he had come from, despite confirming he was heading in a straight line away from the spot.

Nathan's mind began to churn over the new information, or at least the implied facts from his light experimentation with the haze. Firstly it implied that everything on the inside was locked here, and could not leave.

A question that came to Nathan's mind with this, was if things from the outside get in -or did they too experience the non-Euclidian behavior of the space.

However, Nathan was drawn from his pondering when his tendrils snapped to attention and began their signature angry quivering.

Reflexively Nathan leaped back and mid air glanced in the direction, He could a group of five humans adorning a fearful expression looking directly at him. By the time his feet had touched the floor again, the group were fleeing in terror away from him down the road, and Nathan had to suppress a primal urge to give chase.

Nathan decided to let them be, and instead turned his attention to the growing lethargy he was feeling in his body. Sighing, he decided to see if he could find any source of sugar in the local area before continuing his information gathering mission.

His source of sustenance was found in the form of raiding an offices communal sugar pot. Found through the power of his tendrils, who seemed to sniff the stuff out much like they did with living things. However, unlike with bodies the tendrils did not present themselves in a angry or hostile manner to the sugar, instead it was more like they were simply pointing it out in a rather relaxed and off-handed, uncaring fashion.

Nathan thought it would be a lot harder to down a pot of sugar on its own, and the only reason he even thought of doing it was the fact that he had managed to down an unholy quantity of energy drinks without so much as feeling a slight palpitation as an after-effect.

As it turned out, the hardest bit about it was pouring the sugar into his mouth without spilling any. But soon, he had managed to empty out the pot with only a small amount ending on him and the floor and with that the aching and lethargic sensation that had taken up residence in his body, faded.

After finishing his meal, Nathan spotted one of the spires that littered the area of the city and impaled it's buildings like a lance through a beast's heart. It was small, but unlike one's of similar dimension Nathan had gone past, this one bore no signs of having snapped or shattered - which now Nathan thought about it he wonder how on earth they did manage to snap or shatter, given explosives seemed to have little to no effect on them.

Curious, Nathan pressed on towards the spire that ruptured out of the ground floor, street facing wall of the building opposite him. He nimbly hopped down and out of the partially collapsed office building he was inside, with preternatural grace and speed using his tendrils and human appendages in fluid synchronicity.

Landing with little more than a light tap of the foot on the tarmac of the road, he seamlessly strode over to the spire that was at most a foot or so longer than him. It protruded from the building at a 45 degree angle from the ground, almost looking like the spike in a barricade leveled an on comer's necks or heads.

The first thing Nathan noticed was that the spire was actually somewhat translucent. From a distance they looked completely opaque, like towering shards of glossy obsidian but now Nathan was looking at it close up he could see the darkness was originating from something inside a transparent crystal.

Of course, he was unsure if this was the case with all of the spires for he had only been within inches of this one in particular and if that was the case his mind began to wonder for what purpose did the spires serve.

Reaching out and placing a hand on the crystal, he noticed that it was vibrating ever so slightly and was actually cold to the touch. However, the cold was strange as it wasn't so much that the surface itself was cold, but more like the sense that his hand was loosing its heat.

Pulling his hand away from the crystal, he saw that where he hand had been the darkness in side the crystal had snaked out to mimic it from the inside. In a panic he glanced to his hand, a part of him expecting to see it missing, or having been altered like so much of his body had been already.

However, this was not the case and Nathan let out an audible sigh of relief at the confirmation of normalcy. After his moment of panic passed, he glanced back up to the spire with a weary stare and found that the darkness had retreated but where it -and his hand had been, there was now a distinct crack on the outer shell of it, looking like someone had thrown a hard ball at the windshield of a car.

Eying the shard suspiciously, Nathan gave into curiosity and instructed his right tendril to coil up and strike at the shatter point.

The tendril lashed out with the eagerness of a waiting predator finding its prey. The boney spike of the tendril hit the glassy material with a resounding crack, like the sound of an ice pick puncturing a glacier and then somehow causing the glacier to collapse with a thundering crash.

Nathan managed only to get so far as to think, "Bad move" and to say "Fu..." before a series of events erupted around and to him.