Rule #33b: The quietest mouse always gets the cheese
It felt as if the vent went on for miles, an amusing thought in only that it reminded Toru of Alice's trip down the rabbit hole or perhaps, it was more like Coraline's journey to the Other World. Except, you know, she was following after her peers instead of the White Rabbit or the Other Mother's Sand Mice. Then again, Lord knows that any one of the villains were dramatic enough to make a convincing rendition of the Queen of Hearts or the Other Mother…Well, maybe not more dramatic than Aoyama, but no one was more dramatic than him. Not even UA's drama teacher (which he inadvertently made cry with all of his prying questions).
There was a few times that they had to pause so that a fan could be shorted out or another barricade could be removed before the train of students shimmied on through, but otherwise they were more or less okay. Although, Toru could've done without some of the snarky comments; specifically without Mineta's comments (there may be some more brainwashing needed in his future). Then again, so much had happened this past year that Toru couldn't quite recall the last time she had had to squeeze her body into such a small space…maybe during the work studies? Certainly during junior high and definitely the last time she had squeezed into a pair of skinny jeans.
Amongst the laundry list of things that Toru should've probably thought through first, there was the factor of dragging her classmate & partner-in-crime down the vents without much forethought. But the invisible girl hadn't felt right waiting out in the open like that, not when she was so used to moving in the shadows or with equally as adept/subtle partners. Plus—considering their precarious situation with the villains—Toru would've rather braved the confines of the vent than staying up there, playing pretend with both villains and heroes. Villains? She could do. Heroes? She could do. But not at the same time; baseball the other day had been exhausting enough as it was, she didn't need the added stress of playing role on top of that.
Soon enough, there appeared a light at the end of the tunnel; one which signalled the end of their journey—or at least, the part that required them to be on their hands and knees (much to Mineta's chagrin). When the end crept into view, Aoyama wasted no time in hastening towards the exit, if only to escape the musty smell of sweat which had built up with so many teenagers stuffed into such a small space. Besides, with so many of them in the vent, they had been unintentionally noisy & slow; an irritation that was made all the more worse every time Sero got his elbows caught in the dormant fans. They'd had to stop more than once to finagle the tape-jointed hero through the junction before moving on.
Once they reached the vent opening, Aoyama hopped over the space so that he could crouch on the other side whilst Toru halted the parade behind her. Annoyed grumblings arose at the sudden stop, but Toru paid them no mind as she bent to peer through the cracks in the vent cover; peeking down to see where this opening led. It looked like an office space, poorly lit, but spacious and—more importantly—desolated.
"What's going on?" Kaminari hissed from further back up the line.
"See anything, mes amis?" Aoyama added quietly.
"Nothing" Toru doublechecked what she could see, but found nothing and—almost suspiciously—no one. "Looks like this'll be our exit"
"Finally!" Came the relieved chorus from beyond her shoulder. Seems like they weren't the only ones keen on getting out of the cramped vents.
"Tch" Toru huffed at their antics as she & Aoyama started to remove the vent covering; digging his perfectly manicured and her nervously-bitten nails under the edge to get the job done.
KRSCH!
As one, a collective flinch rushed through the teens as the two at the front let the cover go prematurely and it crashed to the floor below. Though the sound echoed about the building like a gunshot, no one dared breathe let alone move as they froze in their tracks and waited for the inevitable to come to pass. But it didn't. Mercifully—stupidly—no one came to investigate and although the worrisome chittering in her ear was annoying, Toru let herself hiss out a quiet "Sorry!" to her peers.
She could still feel the burning glares on her back anyhow, as she and Aoyama poked their heads out of the open vent—one looking one way & the other looking in the opposite direction—before they came back up for air. There didn't appear to be any cameras in this office space and the great glass expanse on one side showed a rather creepy view of the underside of the lake wherein they sat. And although the room was deathly silent as the grave, neither of them wanted to push their luck—hence the whispers.
In the end, Toru went first, cautiously lowering herself out of the vent and dropping to the floor with nary a sound—a far cry from the vent covering that had clattered there only a moment ago. When the coast seemed clear she flashed a thumbs up to Aoyama, who quickly followed after with their peers on his tail. This time it was she who flinched at the sound of the twinkling boy trying to stuff his extravagant armour through the small space and scraping up against the edges on the way down. It was like nails on a chalkboard. She spared a heated glare at the blonde who must've clearly felt it because he rubbed sheepishly at the back of his neck and replied with an apologetic smile.
Oh well, if they got caught, she was blaming it on him.
And then setting the place on fire.
It was dark in the building proper with the facility seemingly on shut down, or at least, working with partial power. Either way, Toru moved about the place with relative ease thanks to her Quirk, whilst some of her counterparts stumbled about beneath handheld torches and flickering fluorescence from the hall. Thankfully, it didn't take long for Kaminari to locate a working computer, nor for the combined powers of himself & Ritsu to access its inner workings, thanks to those hacking skills they had so boasted of.
At the other end of the room, Sero sifted through the various filing cabinets that lined the rear wall whilst Mineta occupied himself with squelching through the adjoining halls & twining through the maze of desks, like some kind of B-movie horror film spirit. Not two minutes later, they were joined by the last of them—Dagger—who trudged inside after finagling the vent covering back back into place with little difficultly. The hellhound was tall & broad enough that it didn't really bother them much, but they were still a little annoyed at being left to do it alone.
"Appreciate the help" Dagger snarked as they entered the room, only to find the wannabe heroes sprawled out across the room in various states of investigation.
"You had it handled" Kaminari shrugged, barely looking up from the screen illuminating his face. "Besides, we're here to investigate.Trigger and nomus, remember?"
They clicked their tongue in annoyance, but moved to help with the search, anyhow. "Tt"
"Hello?" Mineta quietly called from where he lurked out in the dark hallways, catching the others' attention. "Who—who's there?"
He'd spotted something—or someone—he was sure of it, just standing there in the light of the elevator at the other end of the hall. Whatever it was, it made goosebumps erupt along his skin like boils because the silhouette of the humanoid creature that had stood there in the illumination of the elevator reminded him of the creatures that had plagued them since the beginning of the year. USJ was not an incident that he liked to remember.
"Grape Juice?" Toru trotted out into the hallway at the sound of his voice. "What is it?"
"Prism?" Beady eyes peered up at her from the dark.
Before she could probe further, the others joined them in the hallway. "Grape? What is it?" Sero peppered the grape-haired boy with endless questions, concern staining his tone.
"There—there was…something—someone—in the elevator" Mineta pointed towards the device, despite the fact that few of them could see so well in the dark.
"A nomu?" She suggested with a small shrug. They were in an experimental facility, afterall, there was bound to be a few just roaming the halls, right?
"God, I hope not!" Mineta swore, crossing his arms to hide his shivers.
"But—but that doesn't make any sense!" Aoyama spluttered, flailing his limbs about in frustration. "When have you ever known a nomu to not attack?"
"Nevermind that" Dagger hummed, "If there's no power here, shouldn't the elevators be on lockdown?"
"Wrong, wrong, wrong…!" Kaminari puzzled as he joined them, bringing up the blueprints for the elevator's model, for all to see.
The hellhound huffed, turning on the blonde with a snarl. "Excuse me?"
Not that Kaminari paid her much mind, instead he sauntered over to the elevator in question and quickly began to compare notes between the device and the blueprints in front of him. "I thought so!"
"Thought what?" Mineta grumbled as the blonde turned to them to see if they understood too, "C'me on, man, we're not mind readers"
"This" Kaminari gestured to the closed elevator doors as if that explained everything. "Is a high speed express elevator"
Toru shared a confused glance with her partner-in-crime, who seemed just as confused as she was. "So?"
"So…" Kaminari rolled his eyes. "It doesn't belong in a building like this—underwater or not"
"Neither did that—that…thing" Mineta retorted. "Whatever the hell it was"
Minds seemingly made up, Toru and Dagger squared their shoulders and—taking one door each—used all of their might to haul the heavy doors open. With an almighty heave, the screeching doors were pried open just enough for someone to squeeze through. By her side, Mineta clung to his classmate's pants as he peered down into the dark abyss of the long elevator shaft, as it disappeared deep into the earth. It was like the body chute from hell.
"Oh, so that's why they need a high speed express elevator" Mineta murmured.
"Sooooo" Toru drawled as she peered around the door. All she could see was the expanse of dark nothingness. It was kind of unsettling, to be honest. "How far to the bottom?"
"Prints say we're only on the third floor" Kaminari helpfully supplied.
"Yikes"
And with that, they began to climb.
Sweat was making her suit cling uncomfortably to her back by the time that the sidekicks had made any sort of progress. You would've of thought that the further down they went, the facility would've been cooler, but the air had grown uncomfortably hot & sticky, and that was without the endless climb into the abyss. The climb down the shaft, itself, was brutal—even with the aid of Quirks (and Toru was really cursing her lack of flight/floatation in that moment)—but at least it was better than the miles upon miles of venting that they had crawled through to even get into the facility. So, silver linings and all that.
"…Dum, dum, dum, da-nana. Dum, dum, dum, da-nana. Da-dadaaaa, da-dadaaaa. Dum, dum, dum—"
"—Are you seriously humming the Mission Impossible theme song?" Dagger asked of the artificial intelligence, pausing to spare her an incredulous glare.
Ritsu shrugged unapologetically. "It seemed appropriate"
"Will you two imbeciles knock it off?!" Mineta growled, the heat making him irritable.
"Excuse me?" Dagger's attention immediately swung over to the grape-haired boy where he lay twined around one of the steel cables. "What did you just call me?"
"You heard me"
"Oh, that's it—!"
"Hey, can you two, pipe down?" Toru snapped, "We're almost at the junction"
The junction in question was one of the sub-levels that Kaminari had determined they would need to exit through in order to fully investigate the facility. Afterall, they wouldn't find what they were looking for in an elevator shaft. But most of all, Toru was just looking forward to getting out of that damp, dank hole. Despite there being more elbow room than the vents, it still wasn't pleasant. This far down you could start to smell the stench of the lake and it was making her gag.
"Hey, we're here" Ritsu chirped as the sextants finally reached their destination. At her call, the teens clambered over to the nearest ledge on—what the blueprints decreed to be—sub-level twenty-six. Hugging the wall, all six teenagers eventually squeezed themselves through the gap in the door that they pried open as well; thanks, in part, to Ritsu bypassing the security system.
Now free from the confines of the shaft, the sextants lay scattered about the floor like abandoned pieces on a chess board. It was funny, this far down the hallways were less cavernous and more hospital-like and clinical. It was a good sign that they were in the right place, but it was still a weird thing to note. Toru shifted nervously on her feet, antsy now that they were out in the open and uncomfortable with the way her costume seemed to glue itself to her form with her own sweat. It was gross, but it did little to distract her; they had bigger things to deal with at the moment.
Meanwhile, Kaminari's fingers easily glided over his holographic computer as he continued to delve into the facility's security system and insured that they would be able to lose their trail, at least for a little while. He looked ever so proud too, when he'd announced that he'd hacked the motion sensors. Though, he made no mention of other security measures nor of the supposed nomus that they had presumed to be there.
"All right, let's go. Everyone's got their comms up?" Clapping softly, Sero then turned to the group at large. At the chorus of nods, the tape hero nodded his assent. "Right then, we'll split up when we see a better way to access the different levels of the facility—"
"—I call bottom!" Toru chimed, hand shooting up into the air as if she were in class.
"Call whichever way is fastest to kick the bastard's teeth in!" Dagger agreed.
"Or" Kaminari piped up, barely sparing a glance up from his holographs. "We could just follow the signs and let the doctor come find us"
"Huh?" Mineta gaped at the thought of it. "Whaddya mean?"
"I mean, its not like we can really hide this whole situation" He gestured to their brightly-coloured hero costumes.
"And knowing the good doctor" Toru added, her expression saccharine. "He would have labelled everything, so we don't need to run around like headless chickens"
"Pretty anal, is he?" Dagger hummed, curiously.
"Just a little bit" Toru nodded as she shuffled over to the big laminated sign plastered to the wall. "See? Lab's that way, stairs are that way and—I would bet my bottom dollar—that his master…suite is down in the dregs of this place"
The others stared at the strange scrawl of characters neatly printed there upon the placard as if it held one of Present Mic's English problems; some of them even going cross-eyed in the effort to do so. To Toru, it was the "secret language" that Korosensei & Itona had taught them, but to the others it just looked like a bunch of gibberish. Toru didn't actually know where they knew that language from and hadn't bothered to ask because she had been more concerned with learning their own special brand of sign language, instead.
"Oh, right…" Toru smiled sheepishly when she realised that the others couldn't actually read the characters, "Anyways, the lab'll probably contain his plans or at least what he's been doing here. Even if he's not here, himself, his underlings will be and that includes the nomus"
"Right well, me, Chargebolt and Cellophane will go down then" Dagger stated as the two chosen boys startled at their names. The hellhound just flickered their fingers in their direction, but did not explain further as she turned to Aoyama & Toru. "We'll work our way back and meet in the middle"
"We can keep an eye out for the boys ourselves, if you want to go after the doctor" Toru proffered quietly, speaking to the hellhound in near-silent tones. "Right, Yama?"
"O-oui" Aoyama nodded jerkily.
"I trust you two to keep an eye on Grape Boy" Dagger nodded over to the purple-coloured hero in question where he stood off to the side. "Besides, I think it'll be better if we split three & three"
"Hey! Are you three done scheming over there?" Kaminari called out, jolting the three anti-heroes from their conversation. "Dunno about you, but I'd rather not meet 'the good doctor' in this backend hospital hallway, so can we go now?"
"Lead the way" Dagger gestured down the halls and followed after their chosen two. But not before they spared a hissed warning to the light-based teens. "Don't mess this up!"
"Dagger!" Kaminari called again, this time from the top of the stairs.
"I'm coming, I'm coming!" Dagger huffed, "Don't get your panties in a twist!"
"…Do we really sidebar that much?" Toru asked of Aoyama in an effort to distract the blonde from the canine's menacing threat.
It was Toga who answered over the comm, her deadpanned reply sounding staticky in their ears. "Y~yes"