Indigo's Owl [Indigo Rewrite]

Chapter 13 - Trust

Shift was pretty sure that the uncomfortable silence his team sat through the entire way back to base could be considered a form of torture.

Kione drove, with Talia riding shotgun beside him — which was as far away from Athira as they could get her in the limited space of the rover. Raph and Zoe took the middle seats, while Shift had been relegated to the back with Athira, because as Raph had put it, with his Colour currently burned out from doing 'who knows what', the most he could contribute was a tackle if something got out of hand.

Which, from the way Talia continued side-eyeing Athira from the front, seemed entirely possible, had Athira shown interest in anything other than staring out the window while her fingers flipped the small, silver amulet that hung around her throat.

When the rover finally pulled into the base's garage without incident, Shift breathed a sigh of relief.

Before anyone opened a door, Raph spoke, his words short and tight. "Team meeting, prep room, right now."

Kione leaned down, unlocking the epicore from the rover's power slot. "We can use my Tech lab."

"Appreciated," said Raph, and stepped out of the rover.

The team headed through the foyer with Shift bringing up the rear behind Athira. They filed down the stairs to the basement and into the storage room, where Kione pressed a hand to a particular panel on the far wall.

"Athira's attuned with temporary permissions," said Kione as the shelf to his right slid aside. The wall it revealed looked solid, but as Kione passed through, it turned transparent and flickered with a faint, Orange glow.

"Sure," muttered Talia as she followed Kione inside. "Why don't we just give her the encryption codes to the base while we're at it?"

From what Shift had been told, Kione had converted the rest of the storage room into a lab that could only be described as a fortress. As each Keeper passed through the transparent section of wall to enter the Tech lab, the Orange flashed in recognition.

Had it not — well, Kione had once demonstrated the various security measures upon a curious Shift, and suffice to say, once had been more than enough.

When Athira passed through the wall, thankfully without incident, Shift walked inside and sealed the wall behind him.

Kione's Tech lab wasn't like anything else in the base. The entire room was essentially one, giant, Orange Framework, entirely crafted and coded by Kione.

The walls, while appearing to be dark, solid, stone, were actually screens that Kione could modify as he wished. The floor was tiled, which at Kione's command, rose up around the lone, comfortable chair in the centre of the room in an elaborate system of consoles. A holographic, epicore-powered keyboard expanded out from the main console as Kione took his place in his chair.

Kione hid away in his Tech lab most days, something that'd never needed explaining to the rest of them. If you saw someone with cat-like pupils, you knew they'd lived through a nightmare. The day the Indigo and Violet Colours merged to form Purple twenty-one years ago had led to chaos everywhere, but in Nomstral, the result had been catastrophic. Over eighty percent of the population on Nomstral had been wiped out in a week, either turned into a walking corpse or killed by them as their Colours became destructive.

Kione would have been six at the time, and sometimes, it seemed a wonder that he could handle going outside at all. The Nomstral survivors all shared two things — the cat-like eyes, and the trauma.

Once inside, most of Indigo settled into their usual places around the lab. Zoe and Shift went straight for the reluctantly placed couch shoved against the back wall that more often than not, Kione used for naps. Talia looked like she was considering joining them before opting to stand in the corner beside it, her glare firmly fixed on Athira, who remained standing awkwardly by the door.