Our tolerance for dwelling within this accursed powerplant was quickly expiring at this point, so we rushed to the master computer mere moments after catching our breaths from the preceding firefight.

Nuri explained that all we had to do was insert the override chip into the mounting port located somewhere on the main console. Every terminal computer had one somewhere, and Nuri showed us the one that was on the console downstairs for reference. It was quite a jarring and imposing piece of equipment, for there were no keypads or keys of any sort, unlike conventional computers. I wondered for a moment whether or not this was designed to solely be operated by those brainless slaves, as many of the switches and the random assortment of divots found on this console were tiny and housed inside little holes―just big enough for their tong-like extensions to fit into.

Fortunately, it took us little time to locate the insertion port for data cards just by the upper left corner of the console, where it was subversively hidden amongst the convoluted assortment of alien circuitries. Shephard eagerly reached over and slotted the chip's teeth into the port before snuggly clipping it into place. The giant monitor above shifted from a glowing blue to orange as the screen began filling with alien code flashing across the screen.

"Bingo. I think that looks good. Good for us, anyway," Shephard said, brushing his hands together in accomplishment.

"Indeed," I agreed, already motioning back towards the lift. "Come on, Nuri said the virus will kick in in a few minutes, just long enough for us to get back down the lift."

"Let's move it, then," Shephard prompted, ready as I was to vacate this place. We leapt over the body Shephard had beaten to a pulp as we returned to the corridor with the lift to ground level just at the end. Our excitement was dashed in an instant when we saw that the panel meant to call the lift and open the doors had been destroyed.

"Oh shit…" Shephard winced, examining the ruined panel as it sparked. "How the hell did this happen?"

I tried brainstorming possibilities. Perhaps this was caused by a stray shot from the gunfight, but I knew this had to be deliberate. I then looked back down the corridor to see the body of the soldier who almost killed me and remembered that it emerged from this direction. It seemed fairly obvious to me what happened now.

"We weren't meant to leave this place, even if we did succeed," I said, leading Shephard's attention to the body. "They trapped us up here with nowhere to go."

Shephard wasn't thrilled by this development and held his wrench tighter with determination. "Then we find another way out. Let's check that big window in the other room. If there's no fire exit, we'll make one out of it."

We quickly returned to the main control room again and trotted up to the viewing window. The extended balcony that could have been seen from the ground was the one right outside the observation window. It had a row of cables fastened to the end of it, almost like it was meant to retract upwards. My immediate assumption was that this was meant for aircraft to dock next to without necessarily landing for quick pickups or deliveries. Something told me that Airwatch would be using this extension momentarily to either retrieve or kill us―the latter being the most likely if our reception was clear enough at this point.

"Ah boy," Shephard said as we came up to the glass, withholding much praise as we looked outside at the balcony. "Doesn't look like it offers much. Can you break this glass? It looks like it's fifteen inches thick."

"Of course I can," I assured, holding my staff up as the spearhead flashed open, seeping with cold misty energy. "Stand back, please."

Shephard did as instructed while I walked up and tapped the glass with my open spearhead, and a web of intense frost began to spread across the entire wall of glass to where one couldn't see at all outside. After sensing that the ice had woven its way through the entire width of the glass, all it needed now was a good punt in the right spot. I raised the shaft end of my staff and thrust it straight into the frozen surface.

The whole window shattered into giant frozen shards as all the remains crashed onto the ground, allowing the wind from the outside to start blowing through. Aside from all the frost caking my fur, it was a rather clean shattering with no glass shards being blown at me, though I had turned away from the cascade just in case.

"Bitching!" Shephard marvelled with enthralled delight at the spectacle, bringing a wide grin to my muzzle to see him get so excited from it.

"Captivating for sure, but let us not waste time," I encouraged. "Come, let's go see if there's a―"

I was cut short when all the lights in the tower suddenly went completely black, along with all the machines and other equipment. The buildings across the street and beyond suddenly began going black in sequence, and before I knew it, all the lights of Aldana had gone out completely, leaving only the stars as the only source of light for miles around. That may not seem like much, but one may be surprised how luminous they can be―enough to cast shadows. However, our eyes had not adjusted yet, so everything really did look pitch black aside from the sky.

"Oh, man…" Shephard uttered with dread, startled and frightened by the complete darkness that engulfed the whole facility. He promptly switched on his night-vision lenses, which made a tiny pinging sound in his mask, basking his eyes in a green glow bright enough to almost act as a lantern for me. "Looks like we just did something."

"Something big, that's for certain," I added, still pressing to move outside despite the darkness. "I hoped to not be up here when the lights went out, but we must find another way down."

"Well, there's the obvious way down, but I'm not up for being a pancake right now."

"Mutually. Come on."

Tucking my toes inside my sandals, I began stepping over the icy glass before Shephard grabbed my shoulder tentatively. "Hey, watch it; you can barely see out there," he warned. A kind presumption it was, but he needn't worry.

"Don't fret; foxes are nocturnal beings. I can still see just fine."

Shephard was apprehensive at first, but he let go of my shoulder. "All right, just watch your step."

Even from our position, I was able to see well past the street that resided just below us, revealing a few large pools of water adjacent to the channelways just beyond them. While these pools were a mystery, it seemed to have inadvertently revealed perhaps where all that water came from when I and Shephard got flushed away earlier in the evening. I had one hand on the railing as I looked around the sides of the tower for a possible way down as I strode out along the extended balcony. I could not see any surface sparing an inch of leverage as the tower sloped into a crescent shape down towards the base, dampening my hopes as the wind whipped through my hair.

Amongst the disarray between scurrying Combine units occurring down on street level as a result of the blackout, I had been keenly aware of the distant chopping sounds of a hunter chopper flying around the facility. The relative calmness turned deadly again as a hunter chopper appeared around the side of the old cooling tower that stood near the other end of the complex to the left, shining a bright spotlight as it quickly flew straight towards us. My whiskers flared in a panic, and Shephard hardly received the occurrence any more tamely.

"Fallback!" Shephard hollered, jumping back inside the control room and hiding behind a wall out of view from the former window. I joined him seconds before the wind began picking up and moments before a harsh white light peered straight into the control room from outside. This must have been the Airwatch unit I had heard was dispatched to this location.

The chopper hovered right before the window for a long and tense moment, shining its light around at the vacant space inside, littered with dead soldiers and hardware pocked with divots and dents from pulse fire. Shephard and I held our breaths as we waited for the worst to happen, but much to our surprise, the chopper turned away and proceeded to fly elsewhere, as shown by the spotlight vanishing and the muffling of the chopper's loud rotary feedback.

Shephard then groaned with desperation. "Well, that thing's not gonna be gone for long," he concluded wisely, stuffing his wrench back in his pack. "We gotta get out of here fast, but I couldn't see any way down from out there. Did you?"

I thought about it for a second. We really didn't have time to meticulously find our way down to the streets. The disorientation caused by the blackout would not distract the Combine from pursuing our friends for long. They needed our help, and we were running regrettably late. I took into consideration what I saw outside just before the chopper showed up, and I realised that our exit might have been more obvious than either of us truly wanted it to be.

"Well…besides the obvious," I said, recalling the observation Shephard made a little earlier. "We jump."

Shephard raised his glowing eyebrows. "Say what?"

"Those pools out there, did you see them? We'll have a far better chance of survival landing in there than on the pavement."

Amongst the industrial landscape beyond the street below was a large pool as big as the ones used in planetary sports competitions, linearly connected to a few more identical ones. This wasn't a site that was obvious from the ground, yet we could see quite a lot up here. I wondered if a pool like this was connected to the same flooding incident that swept me and Shephard away, for the same channels our party traversed earlier this evening were very close to these mysterious pools.

Shephard was still less than persuaded to perform a cannonball into one of those pools from here. "From this height?!" he grimaced. "Krystal, that's crazy. There's no way we can―"

"I have means," I recapped, emphasising my staff. "I can cushion our landing if I know we have to. We don't have another way, nor do we have the time to look for one. I need you to trust me."

I did not blame Shephard for being unwilling. He was far from accustomed to the fluid rules of my craft and lacked the understanding to realise its reliability. However, Shephard was a daring individual, and I knew he pulled off plenty of 'crazy' stunts in the relatively recent past just to stay alive to continue his journey. Our relationship was admittedly quite rocky and uneasy, despite our understanding in that crawlspace, but he had been convinced that I wasn't a devious element, and that was enough to make him nod in compliance.

"Are you sure about this?" he asked, within the right to doublecheck the soundness of my radical idea.

"I swear on my life," I promised.

Shephard knitted his brow in a cautioned form of acceptance, which I felt was more than I thought I deserved from him after putting him through all of this. "Let's make it quick, yeah? I don't do well when I think about doing stupid things before doing them."

I nodded silently and led him out to the balcony again. We could still hear the chopper flying around close by, mostly likely during a permitter sweep. Whatever operation it was conducting we could afford to figure out; we had to jump out of sight, and the extended balcony would serve as the perfect sprint track to launch ourselves from.

I pointed the pools out to him before we stepped outside and stood before the strip that extended its length over the street. It was not long enough to completely pass over the street; we would need a running start if we wanted to close the sizable gap between the ledge of the balcony and one of the pools, which was about twenty metres in distance along with a three-hundred-foot drop. I could envision us successfully clearing the distance; the actual jump itself would be the hardest thing about this.

I could feel how nervous Shephard was. He looked at the strip of balcony like it were the tarmac of a runway. "Is this a bad time to mention that I've never been a fan of heights…?" he asked, cracking his knuckles with his thumbs anxiously.

I then slipped my hand around his and held it―both as a means to quell his fears and as a silent nudge that we needed to jump as one. "Do you know how baby CloudRunners take their very first flight out of their nests?"

Shephard looked at me suspiciously, sprinkled with a dash of weariness. I could practically feel his quickening pulse through his wrists as I held his hand. "No. How…?"

A few things pushed me to run at that moment: the crispening sound of the chopper coming back around the tower, my own nerves begging for release, and the thrill of the leap. This was not the first time I had to make a jump like this. The audaciously curious side of myself wanted to see if Shephard could handle it better than I did on my first leap all those years ago.

"They just leap!" I hollered, equal parts excitement and terror as the hunter chopper's spotlight appeared along the streets to our left, automatically triggering Adrian to run alongside me―all action and no thinking as he wished. He ran as fast as he could to keep up with me, still firmly gripping my hand. We were twelve feet away from the open ledge as the hunter chopper burst into view, nearly completing its thorough sweep of the premises around the tower.

"Oh jeez, oh jeez, oh jeez, oh jeez! Oh Jeez! Oh jeez! OH JEEZ! SHIIIIIIIIT!"

We both leapt straight off the balcony, pushing every ounce of strength we had left into the spring of our legs. We soared over the street in a graceful flight of faith, though it would have been more wonderous if Shephard hadn't been screaming a profanity that wouldn't end. As our plunge began, we cleared the chopper's line of sight as we passed, narrowly missing the blinding beams of its spotlight as we were now on our way to meet the water.

The pull of gravity began to strongly assert itself on us as we started falling towards the water at a frightening velocity, but at least that's where we were headed instead of the pavement. Shephard had suddenly lost his voice as we made our rushing descent, not letting my hand go for anything while he kicked his legs and flailed his free arm as we cleared two hundred feet in a few seconds.

By the moment we were over a hundred feet above the black water, I pulled myself towards Shephard and closed my arm around him before casting some protective magic from my staff. I knew beforehand that the spell I was meant to conjure to save our lives would most certainly endanger me, but it was necessary to save Shephard's if it couldn't save mine.

I conjured a shield, but not an all-encompassing one like I did many times before. I honed in a girthy amount of my reserved energy into creating a barrier that prioritised intense shock absorption. I produced it just in time, mere seconds before crashing into the water. As we were consumed by the water, the kinetic energy absorbed by the shield needed to be released. I would normally send it back at an enemy if I were to ever use this unstable spell, but it had nowhere to go but the water itself.

That would certainly kill Shephard given water's ability to enhance the traveling speed and the intensity of energy. The only thing that could take it was me. It was a giant risk, but I had to make sure my friend was all right. Although mitigated to a considerable degree, the shock that was sent from my staff's shaft into my body felt like I was hit with a sledgehammer on both my back and my chest simultaneously, instantly incapacitating me as I sank beneath the depths.

Only a vague darkness curated in the abyss that was my unconscious mind before I found myself stirring again.

It was not a peaceful awakening; all around my body felt broken and sore well beyond what I was able to tolerate, yet I still breathed. I slowly cracked my eyes open to see a gorgeous canvas of stars, glimmering like diamonds. I found myself getting lost in their twinkling beauty like I often did on lonely nights. They were not my stars, but they were nonetheless brimming with interstellar wonder.

It wasn't long before I began to hear a whisper of some kind in my mind. I wasn't able to hear―or at least that's what it felt like―so this sensation wrangled my full attention quite easily. The whisper didn't quite sound like a voice, but it beckoned for me. It was a laborious task to lift my head, but I nonetheless did.

A black horizon line was then presented to me, shaped with rectangular elevations, almost like I were looking at distant square-shaped mountains, but that wasn't what held my attention. I was lying on a solid shoreline with my feet and calves submerged in the water, and I spotted two ghostly entities standing above the black surface, though one was a little taller than the other. Their auras were an ethereal greyish-blue, and they appeared to be wearing long robes of some kind that draped over their whole bodies. Glowing white patterns could be seen woven in their fabrics, but the most prominent ones being the same symbol that grew in the fur of my outer thighs were burning bright like fire on the brows of their hoods.

Their eyes were glowing white as well, but their faces were primarily obscured. Had I not begun reclaiming bits of my past through the Vortessence, I wouldn't have known what to think of these apparitions. But my mind was now in sync with my heart, and there was no doubt in either of them who these entities were.

"Mother… Father…" I croaked with an intense rasp that made me feel like water was in my throat as I reached out to them with a feeble arm.

I could feel the entities falter a little at my display, almost like they wished to answer my plea and rush over to my side, but something prevented them from doing so.

"Do not bewail, our child," the untethered voice of my father coursed in my mind. "You are growing past the point many others believed you would cease. You have continuously proved them wrong."

"Take me… Please…" I begged, trying my hardest to reach my hand out to them.

"Relent yourself, Krystal," the tender voice of my mother cooed. "We are never far away. You will soon understand this, just as much as you will understand what has happened to our domain."

I remained stubbornly determined to reach out to them, even when I knew it was useless. I missed them so much, and each memory I reclaimed of them only made me be within their direct presence more. My parents pitied me, I could tell, but I could also feel their own helplessness to honour my desires despite knowing that they couldn't.

"Remain steadfast, Krystal," my father counselled. "You too are bound in shackles, but retain hope. You are not without your allies."

"Only one will help you break free of them just as you did. He is the key to preserving your future…"

Immediately after my mother said these parting words, something massive heaved out of the water in slow motion, obscuring the view I had of my parents. I looked on in awe as a dark, stern and sturdy figure with flaming green eyes was piercing through the darkness, clutching a Cerinian staff in his right hand as he rose out from the water, wading towards me. The water cascaded around him as he stepped ashore, which was when his hazy figure began to define itself more clearly.

Time began to resume a normal pace again as the hazy figure quickly trotted out of the water before kneeling right before me. That's when I realised that it was Adrian Shephard, ushering in a wave of relief throughout my addled body. "Oh…it's only you…" I croaked again, right before I began coughing up water, forcing myself to raise my back.

Shephard was quick to help me in this endeavour by propping my back up, allowing me to clear my lungs without the labour of holding myself up. My coughing soon subsided, and I leaned my head against Shephard's arm. He had been quiet while I regained consciousness, hanging his head in exhaustion. He felt reprieved, that was clear to me, but it was shaky like he wasn't quite close to accepting that I could have been all right.

"You okay?" he asked softly, a moment after I was able to steady my breathing again.

"Splendid," I groaned, but it was a relieving one, such as one might make when a massive headache suddenly alleviates. We looked at each other for a mindful moment; the glow of his night-vision lenses was so bright they were the only things I was able to see at that time. "What…happened exactly?" I wondered drowsily. "I remember being in the tower, but…"

"You made us take a three-hundred-foot plunge into a pool of industrial solvents," he informed brusquely.

I heard a distant explosion and some gunfire a few seconds after he said this, catalysing my full memory retrieval. "Oh… Oh!" I exclaimed, suddenly remembering the danger I knew we still were in. "We need to move! We have to―AH!"

My stomach wounds flared intensely like a hot iron press was resting on them when I curled myself forward to try and jump back into action. I instead curled up on the ground with my hands over my abdomen, hissing in distress while my heavy wet tail slinked in between my legs.

"Hey, hey, take it easy," Shephard consoled, putting a hand around my shoulder and on the side of my head. He let out a brief dry laugh as he considered my condition. "You just don't know when to quit, do you?"

I glanced up at him as I managed my discomfort. "I can't. I never can. I must keep going…"

Shephard regarded me momentarily, letting my words settle in his mind. I found it unusual that he would take such an interest in them, but like myself, he wasn't one to idle around in thought while danger still lurked. "Yeah, we do. But it looks like you need a little more help now to get going. I don't think anything that's being kept in that pool is doing your injuries any favours."

Shephard then slipped his arm beneath my own to get a secure hold of me, preparing to hoist me up on my feet. "Yeah… I suppose I do feel a little itchy…"

"Me too. Hope that shit isn't toxic."

I was then able to stabilise myself back on my feet thanks to Shephard's helping hand. "I don't hear your radiation measurer clicking. At least the pools don't appear to be radioactive."

"Small blessings," Shephard agreed, keeping clear as I began shaking my body to get all the mysterious solvents off of my fur. He almost stepped on my staff when he backed up, which in turn reminded him to reach down and pick it back up for me. "I imagine you wouldn't wanna lose this again, right?" he asked, offering it to me.

I smiled and graciously took it from him. "I don't. It's quite important to me. Thank you."

Shephard nodded modestly and began leading me up the ramp while I used my staff as a passive crutch as I slowly regathered my strength. I managed one last glance at the water's surface one last time, hoping to see my parents still there, but their images had vanished. I was happy to have at least seen them in some capacity, even if they were likely a hallucination. But such rational phenomena were hardly a certainty in my dominion, which was why the next apparition to make an appearance, I was confident, was not a trick of the mind.

Shephard and I were trudging our way up the ramp, miserably dripping with dirty water, where we caught the ominous sight of the G-Man standing forebodingly up on one of the suspended catwalks linking two buildings just outside the brick-laid boundaries of the pool. We both froze the instant we saw him, rendered dreadfully silent as the pale-faced spectre in the blue suit stared down at us with fierce and terrible blue eyes that glowed like the stars themselves.

We could feel his demeaning gaze as if it were directly pushing against us. Shephard and I dared not move; even my bodily temptation to shiver from my injuries and my drenched state seemed to postpone itself. We waited for the entity to do something for a long moment, but all he did was look down in judgemental silence.

Eventually, we were able to see the G-Man make a conniving smirk on the side of his face as he adjusted his tie briefly before turning to walk into the building to his left, where we were able to see the briefcase that he held in his other hand. We were even able to faintly hear his shoes treading across the grated metal walkway as he walked leisurely through the doorway into the neighbouring building, where he disappeared.

Though not directly stated to us, the purpose behind the G-Man's appearance was apparent. Not only was he keeping an eye on the both of us, but this was meant to show us that he was many steps ahead of us, and there was nothing we could do to evade him. He was still in total control of our situation; allowing us to be an autonomous presence in the world was a gift from him.

"Just like in basecamp…" Adrian muttered contemptuously after the G-Man vanished. It would appear Shephard's situation hadn't changed much since this entity began watching him back at his stationed military base before the Resonance Cascade. We began moving along again without a word, hoping to make back up with our friends again as I recalled the message my parents told me. I too was in shackles, but there was a way out of it. For both of us. And we would find a way out together somehow.