Cassandra paced forth and back Aria's room, biting her nails.
"Cassandra, would you please stop that?! You're distracting me." Aria sat on the floor, cross-legged. Her face flushed with annoyance. This morning, she found out that her stabilization rate, after two days of training, was at 9.84%.
She optimistically started planning how she will train on the four weeks she has left, typing the schedule on her phone. Everything was going well until she brought the far less energy in the outside world into the equation. Ever since that problem surfaced, Aria has been stressing herself out thinking of solutions.
Cassandra stopped her pacing and sat on the nearby chair. She sighed and rubbed the sides of her forehead. "I'm worried that you'll hurt yourself. I know you were an athlete but this is different, kiddo. Your ability is not that compatible with fieldwork, too." She leaned forward and stretched out a hand to pat Aria's head. "And not just that. You haven't even begun the training yet you're very stressed already."
Aria just nodded her head, closed her eyes and resumed what she was doing. She told Cassandra that she was absorbing spiritual energy even though she was practicing activating and deactivating her ability.
She clicked her tongue when she opened her eyes and saw the clock. [11 minutes to activate and 10 to deactivate.] She sighed and her shoulders slumped. "You can do this, Aria," she told herself.
"Did you say something, kiddo?" Cassandra asked when she saw Aria mumble something.
"Oh, nothing." Aria stood from the floor and sat on a chair. She reclined a got lost in her thought.
[21 minutes. And I have less than a month to reduce it to less than 5 minutes. Can I really do this? This is so frustrating!] She groaned, stood up and stomped towards the bed, where she plopped herself face first.
"Aaaaaah!" Came a muffled scream from Aria as she kept on beating the mattress.
The sound of the door opening caught Aria's and Cassandra's attention. By the door, they saw a tall stocky clean-cut man wearing a suit.
"Misses Selman, I'm here to take you home," He announced. "I'm Gene Myers, an acquaintance of Agent Frey. He has been called in for duty so I had to fill in for him and get you home."
"Hi, Mr. Myers." Cassandra stood from her seat and picked up her handbag. "Aria, get up. We're leaving."
"Okay." She got up, picked up her backpack and trudged out the door, ignoring her sister and Gene.
"I'm sorry about my sister. She gets like that when she has a lot on her mind." Cassandra apologized as she and Gene followed Aria out to the corridor.
**********
The rain started to pour when Cassandra and Aria left the Cerberus' underground parking lot in Gene's car. After two weeks of confinement, Cassandra was eager to see where they stayed. She looked back and exclaimed in disbelief when she saw the building they just left.
"I didn't think that the Cerberus base would be in Stohl Tower! I thought the tower is Inertia's headquarters. How is this possible?!" Cassandra shook her head and pinched her arm. She kept glancing once again at the tower receding into the distance before turning to Gene and repeating her question calmly this time.
"Well, Inertia and Cerberus have the same founder," Gene answered while keeping his eyes glued on the road in front of them.
Cassandra bit her thumb "So if the famous tech company, Inertia, and Cerberus are both founded by Dio Stohl. Then, that would mean that he's also an underworlder?"
Gene simply nodded.
"Shut up! That's amazing."
She began throwing a barrage of questions at Gene, which he politely answered while keeping most his attention on the road. Aria, on the other hand, kept quiet in the backseat, mulling over her training program and academics until she slowly drifted off to sleep.
"We're here," Gene announced about an hour later as they stopped in front of a 20-floor red-and-white building.
Cassandra reached a hand from the passenger's seat and gently shook Aria.
"Yeah?" Aria yawned and rubbed the side of her face. She sluggishly pushed herself into a sitting position and reached out to open the car door.
"Let me help you with that, kiddo." Cassandra unbuckled her seat belt and pushed the door open after witnessing Aria fail several times.
"It's nice talking to you, Cassandra. See you." Gene waved at her as she got off the car and opened the rear door to let a half-awake Aria out.
"See you." She waved back then she followed Aria who was already trudging toward their building. "I have to assist my sister. She tends to get hurt when she is allowed to wander in that-" Aria tripped on her foot and fell face first on the pavement"-condition."
"Okay." Gene's face remained passive save for the slight crinkle on the corner of his eyes. Cassandra gave him a final wave then she ran and helped the now fully awake Aria up.
**********
It was late in the afternoon when Frey reached the last area he was supposed to check, the northern outskirts of Arc City. Early this morning, he was tasked to investigate the areas where three missing underworlders were last seen. This is the third time this month he had to investigate three disappearances that happened the same night. None of the areas he investigated for the previous cases held any valuable information, including the two areas he went to today. The absence of information frustrated Frey.
After going around asking the residents in the suburbs, he found no clue about the missing underworlder. The sun has already set and the rain has stopped by the time he decided to go. When he passed by an abandoned uncompleted building at the outskirts on the way back, he suddenly sensed a concentration of spiritual energy. He quickly turned his car around and drove to the lot where the building stood.
In front of the building, Frey saw an old but well-maintained black car.
"Hey, Gene?" He said.
"Yeah. What is it, man?" He heard Gene's reply through his earpiece.
"Can you check DOT's license plate database for the owner of the car with the plate AWQ 1123?"
"Wait a minute."
Frey got out of the car, took out his phone and opened its flashlight. He checked the car doors but all four of them were locked. He shone the flashlight through the tinted windows but it was impossible to see the inside.
"Frey, the car belongs to David Calderon, our missing guy. Why do you ask?"
"I am currently in front of an abandoned building by the highway. His car is parked here. I think he might be inside. I felt a concentration of spiritual energy around here. I might be able to find something here. I'll look around a bit."
"Okay, man. Be careful."
"I will."
Frey checked the area around the building and found nothing, so he decided to check inside what should have been the Sunrise Tower, according to Gene. He told Frey that the building was supposed to be a residential building. Its construction began in the late 1990s, and it was abandoned two years later when the company who owned it declared bankruptcy.
He took note of the white paint chipping off the walls on the ground floor as he walked inside the building. After two hours, he managed to check all 25-floors of the building and found nothing. He was going down the steps from the top floor when his phone chimed, indicating that it only has 7 percent left.
"Damn." He said as he dashed downstairs.
"Hey, man. What's wrong?" Gene asked him.
"Phone almost drained." He managed to say as he rushed down the stairs between the 20th and 19th floor.
"You have the worst luck, man." It was followed by a fit of laughter.
Frey's eyebrow twitched as he continued to descend the stairs. The moment Frey got out of the building, his phone died.
"I'm...out. Phone's...dead." He told Gene between breaths as he leaned back on the building wall.
"That's good to hear man, though it would have been nice to hear you struggle going down the stairs in dark," Gene teased him.
"No beer and chicken for you." Frey pushed off the wall and slowly walked toward where he remembered his car was parked.
"Come on, Jules. I was kidding."
"Okay."
The sound of a car starting made him stop in his tracks. He turned and saw the headlights quickly approaching him. In the blink of an eye, he collided with the car. Frey was rolled up the roof of the car down its trunk lid to the ground. The car sped out of the compound, leaving an unconscious Frey behind.