The young man's eyes snapped open. He swore he just heard someone cry in distress. He listened intently. Again, he heard it. It was coming from his head...Some kind of strange connection.
He had to suppress the urge to groan. This was happening with increasing frequency. He was really getting tired of it.
"No use trying to get more sleep now," he grumbled to himself, "best to just get back to work."
That being said, he arose from the decaying mattress he'd been resting on and started going through the motions of getting ready for the day. Get dressed, brush hair, have breakfast, brush teeth. The last two were a bit difficult; Ravenloss didn't have running water and he was running out of food rations. He'd have to go above ground for more.
The abandoned house he'd been staying in was thankfully close to the Gate, so he didn't have far to walk. Pretty soon it came into view.
The Equilibrium Gate. A glorious structure meant to take one into another part of the city, one he had learned to hold a very powerful artifact.
He scoped out the area upon arriving at the Gate. Ravenloss was not a friendly place by far and he didn't want to get attacked while he was working.
Nothing.
Good.
He got the notes he had brought with him from his jacket pocket. The Gate was covered in photic characters. He didn't exactly know what to call them. From what he had decoded, they weren't simply letters, and they were much to abstract to be any sort of pictograph. Hmm. Graphemes sounded good.
Hidden in these graphemes was the locations to the keys he needed to open the Gate. So far he'd been able to figure that the first key he'd need was in a certain alleyway in the city. He hadn't yet figured out which one; it was rather hard to translate these things.
Even with his notes, precise as they could be, it was hard to make out even the simplest word. He could have guessed some of them, he knew quite a few of these graphemes by now, but the Gate was rather cryptic in its directions. If he didn't translate a sentence in toto he might end up in the wrong place. Everything was done to his exact specifications.
Still, important as his work was, it was rather monotonous. As the hours passed in silence, his scratching pen grew more and more noticeable, more like a quiet metronome lulling him to sleep. He stifled a yawn. Maybe it was time to take a break.
He stuffed his notes into his jacket pocket and began to walk back to his "house". His eyes wandered to his surroundings. Alleyways on both sides.
"Maybe one of them has that key." he mumbled.
Ravenloss had its own strange aesthetics, he'd noted. Completely underground, the city got its light from glowing mushrooms and purple mana torches. Maybe it could have been called beautiful once but in its current state the city was anything but. Everything was either rotting, rotten, abandoned, or broken. Sometimes all at once. Sad really.
From what little he'd been told before he came here, the city had been cursed. The people were turned into monsters and their society fell into ruin. Judging by the decrepit state of the city, it and its people were in sync. What did Aspar call that sort of thing? A Fisher Kingdom?
He frowned at the thought of his friend. It was Aspar's voice he had heard this morning. Every time he had that particular dream he wound up confused. His friend sounded as if he were in pain, but he had seen Aspar just a few days ago. He was fine.
As the ramshackle building came into view, he wondered why he was having these dreams. Aspar had been acting a bit strange lately, but there could be any number of reasons for that. Maybe he'd ask his friend the next time he saw him.
For now though, it was time for lunch. And a nap. Lunch and a nap, sounded like a plan.
It wasn't like those keys were going anywhere.