Thank you for all your work! In addition to your reporting, I always love what you contribute to the podcasts you guest on. Keep it up!

Then stillness—a stillness no truly dormant place could ever know.

All the while, five young souls now find themselves free from their restraints, yet fiercely caught by the much crueler captor of choice.

Another exhalation of air escapes the old building carrying curious clouds of long-dormant dust as they pass through the layers of broken windows and doorways within. Hollow echoes of popping and creaking metal groan like the joints of an aging predator resuming the hunt.

…The unassailable glint of a frantically desperate ambition clung to by a man with fire dancing in his wide eyes, convinced that fate itself fights to ensure his first success remains his last.

…A grizzled village elder whose tired bones know well the old strength of an oak, filled with the sweet cocktail of a grieving and furious bafflement just as it curdles into denial.

A husky breeze with a cloying ozone tang sighs out of the heavily barricaded entryway set beneath the eroded engraving of True Sight Labs. The earth below and its winding concrete guts within rumble a long brooding thrum, too slow for the snappy sparks of awareness on the surface above to register.

Behind them, looming silently within a cloak of unaccounted time, an irregularly regular building observes, patient as the earth, its eyes upon the chaos at its doorstep.

5 companions, forgotten by their would-be prosecutors, struggle to release each other’s bonds amidst the flame-orange light of yet another volley of arching fireballs.