"Trigo?" Flicker and Ember said simultaneously.
"It's real?" Ember said, his jaw dropping in disbelief. "I thought it was just a myth."
Akuma shook his head. "It's real of course. I mean, I even founded it."
"You're joking," Flicker said, blinking rapidly. "The ancient city of the lost elements? You founded it?"
Akuma laughed, nodding his head. "Me along with a couple of my old friends. Back when we had normal names. Their names were Jake, Avery, and Jonah. We met when, ironically, Jonah was trying to kill us, and I was still going by my old name."
"Old name?" Flicker said, tilting her head to the side, her hair drooping onto her shoulder.
"Oh yeah," Ember said, remembering that Flicker didn't know Akuma. "Flicker, this is Akuma. Long story short, he's a very old guy who can manipulate life force in a liquid-energy state known as Remnant. He was injected with an entire city's worth of Remnant and that made him this."
"Good to know," Flicker said, her face draining of all color. "So then what are we doing here? I wanna see the rest of Trigo!"
Akuma cleared his throat. "I don't think you'd want to do that."
"And why not?" Ember asked, his head swimming with questions.
Akuma sighed and a door appeared on the wall. "Why don't you see for yourselves?"
Flicker stepped up and flung the door open, revealing a concrete floor surrounded by muted red and brown bricks. There was nothing but darkness ahead, as water drips could be heard to make it a cave-like experience.
"What's that?" Flicker said, her shoulders sagging in disappointment.
"That is the entrance to Trigo," Akuma said, walking through the door and down the tunnel. He turned his head and called to Ember and Flicker, "Follow me. It gets better."
Flicker immediately followed Akuma, practically jumping up and down in excitement. Ember sighed and walked after them into the darkness, before the door shut right behind him and disappeared into the wall.
"Don't worry," Akuma yelled back at Ember. "That was just one of my constructs. It only lasts as long as I need it to."
Ember shook his head in confusion and chased after them, catching up to them standing still.
"What'd I miss?" Ember jokingly asked, before he turned his head toward where the others were facing, and saw a city before him.
Both small and big buildings filled the view before him, illuminated by a large hole in a dome-like structure that surrounded the city. Billboards and signs of all kinds filling the sides of larger buildings, advertising past items of importance, hung covered in a layer of dust not unfamiliar to Ember, who had dealt with old things one too many times.
"I thought there would be more..." Flicker started, pausing before saying, "everything."
"What happened?" Ember asked, confused. "Where did all the people go?"
"They left," Akuma said forlornly. "When the last of the nations fell to our power, they thought they were safe enough to venture outside and they eventually all left, leaving just me and Avery. She didn't want to leave, but Jake had practically carried her out of here, all the while she was thrashing and kicking and screaming curses at Jake and promising to come back to me. I didn't leave though. I stood right here for several days, waiting for her to return."
"But she didn't," Flicker said, shuddering slightly.
Akuma shook his head. "She didn't. And I stayed here, occasionally opening a portal to another place to get things I needed. I kept the city safe, blocking off access points. The top hole is covered in a fake layer that, from the top, is able to be walked over and people won't fall through. I've made sure that every single place a person could possibly get in has been covered."
"Then what if Avery tried to get in but couldn't because of the blockages?" Flicker said, sounding genuinely concerned.
"She couldn't have," Akuma said, his voice audibly catching. "She, Jake, and Jonah were slaughtered by a group of anti-elemental protesters."
Flicker gasped as Ember's mouth gaped at Akuma's monotone announcement of his friends' deaths.
"At least," Akuma said, clearing his throat. "I'm 100% sure Jake and Jonah are dead. I found their bodies with nametags on from where they worked, confirming it was them. There were several women dead in the attack, and several of them looked like Avery did when I last saw her."
"But was her name tag there?" Flicker asked, cocking her head slightly to the side in curiosity.
"I didn't check," Akuma said, Ember shuddering slightly. "I just wanted to get out of there. I didn't want to search through every female body I came across to see if she survived."
"But could she have survived?" Ember blurted, louder than Akuma had been, making both Flicker and Akuma jump.
"Even if she did, I don't think she'd still be alive today," Akuma said, shaking his head. "She only received the Remnant like everyone else did. Just the crop dusting that was gonna explode us, but instead it absorbed into our food and gave us these abilities." He paused and burst out laughing. "Except for me I guess."
A shriek echoed through the chamber, making all of them jump.
"What the hell was that?" Ember said, shuddering.
"I..." Akuma started. "I don't know." He paused, his breathing abruptly stopped, before a wave of darkness enveloped him, and he disappeared into the shadows.
Flicker and Ember stood there for a moment, both staring at where Akuma had been, before he reappeared, holding a person in a dark cloak by the throat in the air.
"This was the person who scared you," Akuma growled, the person clawing at his arm still firmly gripping around their throat. The person's feet were dangling off the ground by about two inches, breathing barely audible through the person's outfit.
"Let's go back to the cabin," Akuma said, and a pair of tentacle-like shadows reached out from his back and touched Ember and Flicker on the shoulders, before Ember felt the same thing he felt when Akuma grabbed him the first time before he blacked out.
The last thing he saw before his vision clouded over was the inside of the person's hood, a black and purple eye staring back at him.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When Ember came to, the person was tied to a wooden chair with ropes of shadows, the cloak removed and their outfit visible.
The person wore a dark purple jumpsuit, dark metallic gloves covering their hands, and a helmet of a similar looking material on their head. They wore black combat boots, spikes on the sides to help with climbing. A strap that looked like leather held several sheaths of leather, silver blades glinting in small gaps, all the while it was strung across their body, the hilts of the blades wrapped in a black rope that was molded to fit in their hand. Metal shoulder-pad looking pieces of armor sat on their shoulders, with a strip of metal connecting the two.
Akuma was sitting in his chair smoking a black pipe, the smoke appearing to look like the night sky, stars and all.
Ember groaned, and as he sat up he said, "You know we could've walked back inside, right?"
Akuma shrugged and said, "I gaghered thah muckh." He paused, took out the pipe, and said, "I gathered that much. But this guy was struggling against me, so I needed to knock him out too."
Right on cue, the person woke up and inhaled deeply before swiveling his head around the room, twitching nervously against the restraints. "Where the hell am I?" he said in a gruff voice, muddled by the helmet on his face. He had a thick accent, somewhere between German and Russian, but he still spoke with no lisp or anything. Like he had the accent, but was raised speaking English.
"I'm sorry," Akuma said sarcastically. "I thought you knew you were jumping into a hidden underground city when you came in."
The man visibly scowled through his mask. As if his slanted purple eyes didn't give away his scowl, his voice when he spoke definitely did. "I didn't jump in. I fell in while I was being chased."
"Chased?" Akuma said, cocking his head to one side and raising an eyebrow in confusion.
"Those insufferable Anti-Elemental wretches came back," the man explained. "They started dropping gases all over the big cities. Some people think they were trying the same thing they had done years ago, but this time it didn't kill them. It made them more powerful."
"How?" Akuma said, furrowing his brow as he visibly puzzled it out in his head. "What do you mean they got more powerful?"
The man laughed. "Well, I happened to overhear that the thing that gives people powers in the first place, remains or something, can be accentuated by other chemicals and stuff. And the Anti-Elemental people didn't understand it, and started dropping one of the most powerful accentuators, or conductors in this sense, on all of us."
"But then what happened?" Ember asked, his throat dry.
"I think, I think," the man said, "that the accentuators unlocked something in our genetics to give us access to more types of powers."
"Ugh," Flicker groaned as she sat up, finally waking up. "What on earth do you mean more types of powers?"
The man laughed. "Well for starters, somebody standing next to me sprouted a pair of wings, and someone two floors up at a cafe fell through the glass chairs and the entire building which was made out of glass, but hit the ground."
Ember paused. "If everyone else got these insane powers, what can you do?"
The man thought for a moment, and said, "Antimatter manipulation. Antikinesis. Negative Matter Control."
"What's that?" Flicker asked, sitting up in her usual oh-I'm-suddenly-interested position.
"You know what antimatter is, right?" the man said, turning his hand over, forming a small orb of dark something that hovered about six inches above his hand. "It's explosive, but obviously not as explosive as remains."
"Remnant," Akuma corrected.
"Remnant," the man repeated. "It's similar to a nuke. But a nuke only explodes when you want it to, whereas antimatter is always trying to explode, even if you don't want it to."
There was a pause of silence before Akuma burst out laughing. When he finally calmed down, he said, "I'm sorry, I just think it is absolutely hilarious how you have given us your life story before even telling us your name."
"My name?" the man said, pausing to think. "Is Nightmare."
This, however, made Akuma, Flicker, and Ember all burst into laughter, the name so hilarious that even Ember couldn't help himself.
"Geez," Flicker wheezed through her laughter. "When you said people started getting new abilities, I didn't think that people would go full superheroes and villains yet. At least give it a couple of weeks, my guy."
Nightmare glared at her and said, "I did not get my powers from this event." He stood, passing through the restraints and making Akuma jump. "I was born from the stars, when the energy from the collision of a star and a black hole met with a cloud of dark energy. I've spent many a millenia wandering the abyss of space in search of life. And I happened to land upon this planet two days ago. I had one task: to assimilate into human society."
"Well, I think you've picked a rather unfortunate time to do that," Akuma said. "Also, how did you pass through my restraints? Those were pure shadows."
Nightmare smirked. "I draw energy from darkness and cold. Shadows are both, so I was able to draw enough energy from them to escape." He paused. "And what do you mean I picked an unfortunate time to come here?" he said, mocking Akuma.
"Well," Akuma said, standing up. "I just filled the last two rooms in my house with guests."
"Last two?" Ember asked, taking his turn to cock his head to the side in confusion.
"What," a voice said behind him. "Did you think y'all were the only ones here?"