Going through the lumber mill from top to bottom, the four only found spent cigarettes, empty beer bottles and cans, rubbish, abandoned chairs that were brought in from the outside, broken glass from someone shooting at the windows for fun, and several dozen graffiti of different qualities.
Vulgar to artistic, subtle to loud, people came to the lumber mill to express themselves in myriad of ways, legality notwithstanding.
"Careful!" Cappy was quick to stop Taylor from touching a bag left on the ground.
Recoiling, Taylor watched as Cappy instruct Bumble to check the bag and she did.
"Red sand," she identified sprinkles of the substance latent inside the bag.
Stunned, Taylor asked what it was doing in the bag, and as he watched Bumble look through it on their behalf, Cappy tells her that it was a local drug.
It absorbs easily in the skin, so that was why he suddenly stopped her.
Seeing red sand here, Cappy exhales as he shakes his head disapprovingly elaborating why it was dangerous for them to touch with their bare hands.
Absorb too much and they're dead as a doornail from the intensity of the drug running through their veins.
"Why would anyone want that on their skin?" Paul questioned why people came here to take the drug as Bumble tossed the bag to the side after not finding anything of note inside.
Shrugging, Cappy said with a sigh, "Chasing new highs when old ones lose their luster, I suppose. It's known to cause paranoia on a bad trip."
However, there wasn't anything on the backpack they found with the recording disc inside.
Bumble didn't see the missing man and woman in the recording disc using the substance, though she suggested they might've come into contact with it without noticing.
"Doesn't explain where they went," Paul pointed out that if the two overdosed, they'd find their bodies.
Glimpsing around, Bumble says that she doesn't see any markings of a red sand lab, fresh or old, in the lumber mill, not that it would be possible for one to be built within it.
Tilting his head, Paul asks why, and Bumble told him that the drugs required an extensive laboratory with reinforced walls, no one can make it out of what they took from a science class closet.
Even the ardent addicts wouldn't go far trying to recreate it because of how dangerous the process creating the red sand was, easier just to pay their dealers the tender.
At best, they try and break into the labs to steal the finished product, but even then, they'd be faced with armed guards.
Only people capable of producing the drugs were people neither Paul or Taylor want looking at them twice.
It's one of the things that Cappy struggled with during his time as a detective for-hire attempting to curtail, but once those labs come into fruition, it's like going into the weeds.
And.
He can't exactly afford being turned into Swiss cheese; Lizzy would never forgive him!
"You said he was a mob boss, are you certain you checked every corner of the lumber mill after the bust?" Paul's curious angel eyes move around the bare floors, marred by gashes as machinery was moved out after the lumber mill closed.
Cappy affirmed that he didn't hesitate looking behind the walls after the bust, needed to make sure he had everything to prove his case.
Granted after the bust he never came back to the lumber mill, no reason doing so, which led him to suggest what Paul was thinking, "Someone was working in the lumber mill."
However, he and Bumble never heard of anyone coming up here trying to make some sort of base of operation.
His informant didn't mention anything, either.
Going through the lumber mill one more time, Cappy decided to change his strategy and started checking areas that one would never think to look, even if it looked innocuous enough to overlook.
Remembering the burn marks outside, he went around looking for them on the hardwood flooring.
It was hard with the sawdust piled up everywhere that no one thought to collect and dispose, but he found piles with burns that he couldn't explain.
Instead of catching fire as one expected when sawdust encountered a high heat source, it was burnt into cinder.
Curious and curiouser this case of his, considering the hardwood wasn't horribly burnt, whoever came through here managed to control the heat of the propulsion device they brought with them in such fashion that it didn't risk catching the whole building on fire.
Though, that said, he didn't find any footprints, either.
Getting an idea, Paul produced his Sonic Screwdriver from his pocket and uses it to find a trail leading towards a pile of abandoned crates.
Bumble became baffled as she insisted that her scanners didn't pick up anything out of the ordinary, but Cappy informed her that her scanners worked, it's that they were tuned to look for what Paul's Sonic Screwdriver picked up on.
Looking at his Sonic Screwdriver with his angel eyes glistening from the light, Paul frowns as he glances up to Cappy.
"Have you encountered any Daleks since you have been here?" Paul asked him as he stepped beside the man as his cyan eyes followed the Sonic Screwdriver to the crates.
Hearing that word made Cappy's blood run cold as he uttered, "No. I made sure they would never come here, I went far as becoming an agent for the government just to be sure that the people here wouldn't make the same mistakes we did."
As he turned off the Sonic Screwdriver, Paul grew curious as he inquired what Cappy meant, and he learnt what led to the Time War.
The Time Lords disregarded the Daleks, seeing them nothing more than pests that scream and nothing more, easily dealt with, but of course, they proved to be more than just pests.
Once they grew in numbers, after testing the Time Lords by throwing their own at them, and advancing their weapons from stealing technology and retrofitting it to match theirs from the different aliens they subjugated, did the Time Lords come to regret not taking the Daleks seriously sooner.
Thus began the Time War that claimed thousands of lives, hundreds of families irreparably destroyed due to the Daleks besieging Gallifrey for only one desire: destroy the Time Lords.
"If not for those domes, our people would have died," Cappy exhales sharply as he remembered when the day when the war came to a head and the Daleks prepared to bomb their cities, only because of a smart child did they survive the bombing while the planet around them became an irradiated wasteland that will take centuries to decontaminate and centuries more to undo the effects of the war.
Remembering the stories from his father, Paul inquisitively asks if Cappy knew of the Time Lord that created the domes.
Frowning, Cappy responded with a sigh as he said, "I was there when they banished him. That was what led me to leave our people. Our ancestors held their heads low in shame that day for turning on their own."
Had the Time War happened centuries earlier, the boy would have been hailed a hero, adorned in gold pleats, but those days were long gone, people have changed, and they chose to demonise the only reason they stood in the court that day.
"Ancestors shall smile upon him for his bravery, for always and eternity," Cappy utters out of spite for his people's actions.
Checking the crates, the men found that they weighed far more than they expected, and with Bumble's help, they lifted the crates away from a large hole in the flooring with stakes nailed adjacent with a ladder leading down into the darkness below.
"This wasn't here, before," Cappy winces at the sight of the hole bored into the flooring.
After the bust, he was thorough, and Bumble confirmed this as he glimpsed into the darkness below.
Growing curious, Taylor opened one of the crates, finding it was filled with supplies leftover from when the lumber mill was functioning left forgotten after the last of the machinery was taken out of the building.
"These crates weighed approximately 45 kilograms each, no one could have the time to carefully put them down this arrangement, under arrangement especially," Bumble concludes as she glanced up to Cappy as his cyan eyes stared at the crates.
Too big for a singular person to lift themselves, even with help, both size and weight would make it impossible, no signs of a portable crane around here, either.
Having spent centuries here, Cappy's certain that this wasn't the work of bodybuilders.
Something else.
"Eeep!" Taylor jolted to the side when she saw the crate beside her move on its own.
Catching her, Paul pulls her close to him as he watched the crate turned in an angle that would be impossible for Taylor to do.
Alerted, Bumble raised her blackened hand as she heard the crate near her and Cappy turn on its own, too.
"Telekinesis," Cappy narrows his cyan eyes as he deduced the cause behind the heavy crates moving on their own.
Whatever bore a hole in the floor is still here and now became aware that there were people in the lumber mill.
Time Lords might not be capable of the feat themselves, but what they lacked they made up with their telepathy, which Cappy showcased what centuries of practicing and learning the ancient arts looked like.
Whatever lurked below didn't take to the forced intrusion from Cappy, the ground rattling underneath them as the lumber mill creaked and groaned.
Gripping Paul tightly, Taylor felt the hardwood rattling under her feet as something grew agitated by Cappy.
The crates started moving on their own, this time of subtly moving, it was like they took life of their own, attempting to assault the four, however Bumble effortlessly destroyed them by firing bullets from her hands, spreading the contents onto the hardwood.
Underneath their feet, the four felt something moving, and the hardwood cracking.
Like that, they fell through the opened hole underneath their feet.
