Volume 1, Issue 3, Post 2

Aaron and Emily sat in a side booth at the Bread Shop, a bakery and wifi place often attended by students and professionals of all ilk.  As Emily worked on her laptop, Aaron tapped away on a computer tablet and ate absently from a scone.  

"Hey," the brownheaded, athleticly built young man prompted to get Emily's attention.

Emily pushed her thick black hair behind her year and smiled at Aaron, the roundness of her face almost cherub-like.  

"Yes."


"We still on for tomorrow night?" he asked tentatively.  


"Yes," she answered, looking down at her laptop but smiling broader as she did so.


"Great," Aaron said, and went back to his tablet, trying not to appear as eager as he felt.  He'd wanted to date Emily almost as soon as they met, despite a rough introduction.  They'd fought side by side, known each other longer than any of the others.  It only made sense that they'd get along.  And besides, she looked fabulous, very modest wardrobe notwithstanding.  Aaron hoped that would change tonight, as Emily accompanied him to the first dance at Langley Hall this semester.  

Aaron and Emily had been out like this a few times.  Nothing serious, a movie here, lunch there.  They'd all started to relax when, after a week and a half, the only video that had shown up on the internet from the "wall incident", as Emily had called it, had been a fuzzy shot just a second or two before White Diamond light-flashed the entire room and they'd escaped.  Of course, the group was still discussing meeting places.  The top of Schuster Hall worked okay as long as the weather held, but it wasn't optimal.

Meanwhile, Caz(monster) and Tim(Wrecking Ball) were out scouting for a new HQ at that moment.  The team had taken turns, day after day, spending a couple hours researching a new HQ.  In the original university plans, Caz had seen a reference to what appeared to be a train tunnel which was supposed to be dug at one point.  Excavation was definitely started, but there was no evidence that it was ever completed.  A couple years later the trains were rerouted around Stevenson to the East and South.  After lunch, when Caz' class was over and Tim, well, he just skipped his, the two young men found their way to a secluded manhole near the location of the old proposed underground depot, which just happened to be near Langley Hall.

Climbing into the darkness with a flashlight and waders, Caz and Tim sloshed into the sewer tunnel.  Fortunately, there had been a drought for the last two months, so the water was pretty shallow.  Unfortunately, that made the stench much worse.

After a short trek, they found what they were looking for.  Toward the bottom of the tunnel was a difference in brickword; it looked like someone had started a tunnel at a different level several years earlier, and then abandonned it, bricked it over, and built the sewer.

"Caz, check this out.  I think we have our unfinished tunnel," Tim said.  Once Caz had looked at it and nodded, the two backed up, and Tim opened a bag he had brought with him.  A titanium ball, the signature of Wrecking Ball, levitated out and hovered near Tim.  He backed up a bit further before telekinetically sending the ball as far from the bricked up old tunnel as possible.  Two seconds later, he smashed the ball forward at the highest rate he could, smashing a ball-sized hole in the bricks.  A second smash made the hold big enough to fit through.  

The sewage splashed onto the old bricks some 10 feel below the tunnel, and continued to do so until Caz and Tim made a makeshift dam with other nearby fallen bricks.  As soon as the area around the old tunnel was mostly dry, Tim climbed over the dam and squeezed his head through.  Shining the light below, he used his cell phone to record what he saw below.

"This might work," Tim said.  Flipping around so his feet were oriented toward the hole, he dropped in.

"O'Malley, how you gonna get out of there, you madman?" Caz asked.

"Just wait up there and help me out when I get back.  I'm gonna film the rest, and we can call the others tonight and go over it."  

The area of the old depot was fairly wide, and was largely open space.  It was unfinished, definitely, with the wall being merely local bedrock in many areas.  Which was good, because it could be further excavated, Tim thought.  There was a water-main that ducked down from above; also good.  Tim moved into an area that was slightly more constricted; it looked like it was probably a natural recess.  Then, to his surprise, he saw a shaft leading up.  It was relatively narrow, but it  was definitely man-made.  Tim held his phone under the shaft, set it to record video, and raised it upward into the shaft with his telepathy. 

Holding his flashlight up the shaft, Tim watched until he thought it was at the top, and then lowered it again.  He was half-way through reviewing the video when Caz called.  "Dude, you coming or what?"

"Just a second.  You're so not going to believe this," said Tim with a triumphant grin on his face.