Aureolus

Daniella stepped into the dark, torch-lit hallway. Again with the torches... how did they stay lit? She looked around the hall, and saw many different symbols painted on the walls. She had no idea what they meant, but they were somehow foreboding. She saw Poppy enter the hall, sneezing as dust rose up around his feet. It was obvious that this place had not been disturbed in a long time. She began walking forward, trying not to inhale all of the dust that was spreading in the air. She saw the hall end ahead of her, turning right. She followed Poppy around the corner.

The first thing she saw was the bodies. All around the sides of the room... human bodies, apparently mummified. She stumbled backwards, taking a deep breath of dust, and began sneezing. Poppy walked over to her, worried. She managed to control herself, and looked around the room at the end of the hall once more. For all the dead people, it didn't appear to be a tomb, like that skeleton room. It looked like some kind of... library. Bookshelves stood around the room, and notebooks were stacked haphazardly on a few small wooden tables in the center. Some were opened, some were closed, a few lay on the floor. It appeared that whoever left this room didn't care that it wasn't organized.

But... those mummies... what were they doing in here? They were all in a sitting position, each one placed on a bench, a table, or a shelf. Fearfully, Daniella stepped into the room, walking over near one of them. The corpse wasn't wrapped in anything, but it appeared dried out, and had obviously been dead for several hundred years. She reached out and touched the hard, brittle surface of the face. Why would anybody have these in a place like this?

She stepped back from it, examining the other things in the room. Now that she had time to look around, she noticed the painting. It was placed above a door opposite the hall she came in. She recognized the man in the painting... it was the man from her dream, the middle-aged man from the other painting. And standing beside him... was her. The woman with the violet hair. She got closer to the painting, looking at the woman. She looked quite a bit older than Daniella herself... but she was very beautiful, just as she had looked in the other painting. The expression on her face was somber, she didn't look like the type to smile... below the painting, nailed to the frame, there was a small gold plate. Daniella got as close as she could, looking up at the plate and reading:

AUREOLUS AND LEANA BELLI

Leana... that was in her dream, too! That was her name... but what did it all mean? Was that dream one of this woman's memories? How was that possible? She shook her head in confusion, turning her gaze again to the man. Aureolus... that was a very strange name, but she knew she'd heard it. It was as if she could almost remember this man from her own experiences... Knowing she wouldn't get anywhere by looking at the painting, she turned around, many thoughts and questions now running through her head.

Daniella saw Poppy sniffing curiously at one of the corpses around the room. She wondered if he knew that they had been real people once. She wanted to know what happened to them, who did this to them. She decided the only thing she could do now was to examine the notebooks on the tables. She walked over and looked down at one of those that were lying open. It could have been a scientist's notes... what appeared to be many different theories and formulas were scrawled on every last inch of the paper, but they were in some language unknown to her... it looked almost like Latin. She paged through the notebook, and found all sorts of strange things... drawings and schematics of odd contraptions and systems she'd never seen, diagrams of the human body, and more notes, still all in that language.

But when she looked over at the notebook to the side of that one... it was English. It was the same scrawled handwriting, but instead of notes, this one looked like a journal. She skimmed through it, not quite understanding who this person was. Apparently some sort of human scientist, he seemed to be trying to obtain more life or something. Each entry was signed Aureolus Belli, and dated... 1540. That was almost 500 years ago! But if that was true... then the torches... She looked around the room, wondering if that was the last time anybody had been in here, and suddenly not wanting to stick around any longer. She took one look back down at the desk, reminding herself that all she wanted to find was something useful to her. It was all just these old notebooks, and it would take her hours to actually read one, and that was time she didn't have to waste.

She started toward the door under the painting, and called Poppy, who was still examining the mummy in the corner. He ran up to her, and she opened the door. The next room was very small, but lit with a still-burning oil lamp on a wooden table in the center. One chair stood next to the table, and Daniella got the feeling somehow that although nobody had been in the other room for ages, somebody had been in here very recently. The room was featureless, the walls and ceiling made of black stone. Featureless, save two things... the arched doorway across from her, and a small white statue placed on a pedestal next to it. She walked around the small round table, looking at the statue.

It was a statue of a woman, and was made of what appeared to be polished marble. It was very pretty and well-crafted, and on its base was printed the word TOWER. She picked it up, studying it more intently. The base had a series of raised lines and grooves in the bottom... did it possibly work as some sort of key? She knew that it had some importance, being the only thing in this room, so she decided to take it with her. She walked out of the stone archway, Poppy close behind her, and down a short hallway. She saw steel doors at the end... and realized she was facing the elevator she'd found in the atrium hallway.

Daniella looked backwards, sighing. Had she missed something? Was this statue all that she had come up here for, all she had gathered those crests for? It had to do something important. She looked back at the elevator, which had not been working when she had found it on the floor below, and her hopes for it weren't very high now. Not that it would be a huge inconvenience, she would just have to go back down the stairs in the atrium, but she didn't want to walk back through the room with the bodies. And maybe the elevator could take her to other floors, places she hadn't been... but her explorative spirit had all but died by now. This was all she'd wanted to do, and she was tired enough to drop.

She approached the doors, doubtfully pressing the button to the side of the doors... and unexpectedly, they opened for her at once. Why it was working now, she had no idea. She looked around inside, and it appeared to be a modern, normal-looking elevator. She stepped inside and, making sure Poppy got in, looked at the buttons on the inside. They were labeled 2, the floor she was on, 1, the atrium hall... and B1. She wondered whether to press that button see where it would take her... but she needed sleep. She knew that the agent was still walking around, but she couldn't fight it much longer. She would just have to hope he didn't find her again.

Daniella pressed the button for floor 1, and the doors slid closed. She felt the elevator begin its descent, rubbing her eyes and thinking back on what a long night it had been... when suddenly, she was thrown against the wall as the elevator jerked to a stop and it went pitch black. She knew it hadn't reached the next floor yet, and wondered what had gone wrong. The power had just shut off... did it get jammed or something? Or was it something else? She moved toward the doors, her heart rate beginning to rise, and pulled on them. They opened quite easily, whatever was holding them shut now apparently having shut off, and she looked around. She saw the dark wall of the elevator shaft in front of her, looked up and down to see horizontal iron girders placed at regular intervals, and to the right a ladder attached to the wall, probably for maintenance.

She knew she had to go out there and find out what was going on. She turned around, facing the blackness inside the elevator, not sure exactly where her dog was.

"Poppy, sit," she said to him. With any luck, she'd be back soon.

She reached out for the ladder with both hands and swung her feet out onto it. The metal rungs were cold and rusty and her hands were beginning to shake, but nevertheless she began climbing, hoping to be able to find the problem. The lights in the shaft still worked... so what happened to the elevator? She climbed up past the top of the elevator, and was about to turn around and look at it... when a hand grabbed the back of her shirt, ripping her off the ladder and slamming her down on the top of the steel elevator.