Phobia: Reign of Terror (Renegades Fanfic)

Chapter 6 - Forever Fearful

Adrian knew he should be heading home, knew he needed to sleep. Max had already gone home, along with his dads. Ruby, Oscar, and Danna had gone home an hour before that even. It was almost midnight, but something was keeping him awake. Something that was urging him not to go home tonight. He needed to talk to Nova.

His first try was her desk. It was her number one place to simply sit and work, and he often found her there. Of course, she wasn't there tonight. There was nothing at her desk, but her monitor was still on. He knew he should check to see what she had been looking at, but it was just cataloging.

His next check was in the artifacts department. Ever since she had decided to reorganize the archive, she had spent more and more time there. The entire floor was dark of course. No sign of Nova, or any of the others there either.

The cafeteria was a bust, as well as the rec room. He tried the lobby, but she wasn't there. He got the bright idea of asking Sam, who was curiously on night duty tonight, if he had seen Nova. Adrian kept sending her messages and attempting to call her on her communicator, but there was no response ever. Sam mentioned the last time he had seen her, she was heading to the training hall. That was the next place Adrian would look. Maybe she had taken it off to train. Nova, of all the Renegades, had the worst habit of randomly taking off her communicator. Adrian suspected this was rooted in her time as Nightmare, but perhaps she simply didn't like the feel of it.

He felt terrible for doing it, but he decided to use the communicator's GPS to see where she was. After only a minute of work, he had it. She was indeed at Renegade HQ, but he couldn't tell much more. Curse two dimensional maps. The training facility was the last place he could look, and it was also the largest.

Stepping into the massive space was always a little intimidating for Adrian, but this time he ignored the sizable room, the flurry of motion, even at this time of the day, and the sounds that assaulted his ears, not to mention the smell. He was too focused at this point to notice any of the usually very disconcerting facts about the room. Adrian was just busy looking for Nova. There was still no sign of her.

"Have you seen Insomnia?" Adrian asked the nearest person. This happened to be one of their newer recruits, from the same trials as Nova actually. He only grunted in response before throwing a spear almost forty yards into the exact center of a target that had a decal of Ace Anarchy's helmet for the bullseye.

Adrian slowly stepped back from the prodigy, whom he now remembered was an air manipulator, and continued his search. Of course, even the training hall seemed to turn up nothing. Adrian was almost ready to start searching for Nova at some of their favorite late night snack locations in town when he decided to try to call her one last time before her left. He held up his communicator to call her, but then he heard it. The signal that someone was receiving a call. Many of the Renegades around the room glanced at their own wrist, only to find nothing. Adrian found it as quickly as he could.

It was laid out on one of the tables in front of the shooting range, fairly close to the spear throwing prodigy that Adrian had briefly conversed with, if one could call it conversing. He quickly picked up Nova's communicator, and found at least thirty notifications that he had messaged or called her and she had missed it. He quickly cleared these notifications and checked what she had been doing before she left. It was an intuition he had that Nova must have been looking into something.

He found nothing but a map with a blinking dot and a title. It was labeled to be tracking one of the Renegades. Magpie. Adrian recognized just where that blinking dot was one the map, and he hated that Magpie had returned there. Somehow, Magpie wasn't still in Renegades custody, and she had returned to the cathedral ruins, and now Nova had followed her as well.