January 17, 6:49 pm - Hey, ok so I wouldn’t normally do this, but I decided to start a journal. I heard about some fishy stuff goin’ on up at the S.U.N. Lab. From what I got, our source of power (The Artificial Enchantment Sphere, we also refer to it as our Sun) seems to be in a somewhat unstable condition. It might have something to do with the surge of Nexus energy from a few years back. That’s what we study and experiment with after all. The Surge Unity Nexus Lab, aka the S.U.N Lab, is where we watch for signs of dimensional activity. I’m not sure but I’m tempted to call it an incident, but when that initial surge happened years ago it caused our Sun to become unstable. We were able to hold it together for years now but it’s showing signs of failing.

January 20, 12:09 pm- OK, something is very wrong. The Sun has been having fits of overloaded power. It’s supposed to have a backup for any unusable or extra power to keep it from overloading like that, but it seems like the backups are full as well. More backups have been ordered to be built, but I’m not confident they’ll be finished in time. The Sun could blow any day now.

January 21, 2:29 pm- An evacuation is currently underway. All the scientists were ordered to stay at the Lab, but they can bite my shiny metal butt if they think I’m staying here for more than a few minutes. The second that thing starts acting unstable again, I’m bookin' it out of here.

January 21, 3:01 pm - I’m back home now, I forgot the research documents in the control room of the S.U.N tower, but I just hope everyone’s out safe. I’m only here for a few belongings, then I’ll meet my wife at the evacuation center. 

This entry is covered in blood and burn marks, making it only partially understandable.

Jan~ry 2~, 3:~ Ok, I’m not doin’ so hot. The sun st~ed releasing massive burs~s of energy, firing them al~ over the pla~. I got hit by one, I’m not sure if I’ll make it. If any~e finds this, please, I b~ of you. Find my wife, it’s in the drawer, tell h~ what hap~ed to me. Pl~se, tell her I love her. PLEASE TELL HER I-

The rest of the page is destroyed, burned beyond legibility.

Thistle closes the book with a horrified expression and puts it in his back waist pouch. He turns around back to the drawer he passed before and opens it. In the drawer he finds a magic sensor, he gasps at the discovery. He holds the sensor closer to his eye, realizing it’s faded of all color, meaning all the magic inside it has either been used or drained out of it. He turns his head to the door he found the journal in front of and opens it. Through the door lies a burned, decayed body of a middle-aged man in a lab coat, there's also a lanyard around his neck with a key card inside it. The man's body is lying in a bathtub, a thick line of burnt flesh and cloth going across the man's chest. Thistle covers his mouth and walks slightly closer to the body, he looks at the lanyard, it reads Dr. Shining. Thistle leans down and takes the key card from his neck before slowly backing out of the room. 

As he’s walking away he turns around to face the body once more, before saying with a solemn tone, “Thank you.”

Thistle places the sensor in one of his belt pouches and grabs his staff before exiting the building. When he makes it outside he looks around for a moment at all the other buildings, they all have numerous holes in them, burning the metal that once kept them up. Suddenly Riona and Cass come racing out of a different building, Riona looking up at the now dark purple sky in worry.

She runs up to Thistle and says with extreme anxiousness, “Please tell me you found one!”

“Yeah, I got one.” Riona sighs with immense relief, Thistle takes the extremely dull sensor out of his pocket, “But I’m not sure if it works though.”

“Oh great, cause I kinda forgot what we were lookin for to be honest.” Cass remarks.

“What?! No!” Riona yells in a panic.

Thistle speaks calmly so as to not make her more upset, “Woah hey, my friend in the suburbs should still be able to help.”

Riona begins to calm down a bit.

Cass looks up at Riona, “What’re you so worried about anyway? We found a sensor, isn’t that good?”

“Well yea, but if it doesn’t work, that’s more time we need to spend fixing it. We spent most of the day just getting here, I don’t know, I guess I thought this would be going faster.”

“Well, then we should get go-” Thistle says before stopping in the middle of his sentence to look at a silhouette in the distance, seemingly holding a bag full of something.

He begins to walk to the silhouette as Riona questions, “Um, Thistle. You good?”

He continues walking towards it until he can see it properly, “Eldridge?!”

The silhouette gets startled and turns towards Thistle, revealing that it is, in fact, Eldridge. He’s holding a bag full of a currently unidentifiable object.

“Ugh, what are you doing here?” asked Eldridge, his face showing obvious annoyance.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Thistle responded with an angered expression.

“I don’t need to tell you anything,” Eldridge says with a smug face.

Cass runs up to Thistle's side, “Hey! That’s the guy who stole my stuff!” she says while furiously pointing at him.

Eldridge waves his hand as if to present something in Cass and Riona's direction, “Ugh, you guys are here too,” he smirks, “I guess everyone I hoped I wouldn’t see again is here. Ha, where’s dad?”

Riona looks at Eldridge with a suspicious squint, as if trying to stare a laser through his skull.

Thistle points at the sack Eldridge is carrying, “What’s in the bag?”

Eldridge responds, “Oh, not much.” he changes to a growly tone, “Just a buncha nunya.”

“Anything important?” Thistle asks.

“It’s nothing.” Eldridge puts his arm with the bag behind him and turns, attempting to walk away.

Thistle makes an annoyed face, “Cool, guess you won’t mind if I practice my aim on it then.”

Thistle holds his staff out and begins to charge a powerful blast, pointing at the bag. The aqua aura of the staff can be felt even from the distance away they’re standing.

“Go ahead.” he turns back around and holds the bag in front of him.

Right before the staff finished charging, Thistle stopped and snatched the bag out of his hand.

“Hey!” Eldridge yelled.

Thistle opens the bag to find that it’s full of magic sensors, some of which are completely charged.

Thistle, shocked, asks, “What?! Where did you find these?!”

“In that building over there,” Eldridge says while pointing to the side.

Thistle turns his head to look in the direction he pointed. The moment he turns his head Eldridge sends a flying fist, straight into the side of his face. Eldridge quickly grabs the bag away from Thistle and attempts to sprint in the opposite direction. Riona draws her sword and runs to catch up, but before she can Eldridge suddenly freezes in place as if a stasis was put over him, a blue glow emanating off of his body. Thistle stands now behind Riona, brandishing his staff once more, the orb atop the staff glows a bright aqua, the aura of which attempting to throw itself in Eldridge's direction.

“Let me go, you moron!” Eldridge yelled, still suspended by the spell.

Thistle slowly walks towards him with a face of fury, the staff still in his hands, out facing his direction.

He shouts, “What are the sensors for?!”

“Please, let me go! I can’t let you find him! I can’t let anyone get to him!” Eldridge pleaded.

“Find who?! The blight?!” Thistle shouts in his face.

“Exactly, he’s stronger than you think he is. He can’t be stopped. Everything I do is to protect people from him!” his tone changes to a more solemn one and he looks to the ground, “To protect them.” He squints his eyes, staring daggers into Thistle, “I don’t know why I’m surprised, you were never the perspicacious type.”

Thistle is taken aback by this statement before getting angered once more.

He throws Eldridge to the wall across the street, yelling. “Don’t condescend me! I don’t need your protection! Just let me have one of the working sensors, and we’ll be on our way.”

“Look at you acting all high and powerful like you have nothing to be ashamed of.” he laughs, staring him down, “Like I’d do anything for you after what you did.”

“Ugh, this again.” Thistle sighs under his breath.

Tendrils of iron begin to sprout from underneath him, engulfing him as he sits up.

Thistle gasps and lunges towards him, “Wait!

“Don’t find me,” Eldridge says before the tendrils close and speedily sinking into the ground, “You can’t balance this. No matter how hard you pretend to care.”

Thistle falls to the ground where Eldridge once was and plunged his fist into the ground in a rage, “Damn it!”

Riona and Cass run to Thistle on each side of him and assist him off the ground.

“What was up with that?” Riona questions.

“Yea, how does that jerk know you?” Cass added.

Thistle adjusts his belt, sweeping crust, and debris off his already slightly torn cloak.

He picks up his staff and answers, with an almost monotone que to his mannerism, locking his hidden fury behind a meer disgruntled expression, “He doesn’t, clearly. He doesn’t know me at all.” he stows his current feelings away, in an effort to return to a sense of mental normalcy, “Were done here.” Thistle says, looking at a side exit to the city.

As they were walking to the exit Thistle pondered to himself the contents of that journal he found. He looks up at the ruins of the self-demolished remains of the S.U.N.

He squints at the tall tower, most of the bottom still intact. The deviation getting worse nearing the peak of the old S.U.N tower, “Actually, there’s one more thing I want to grab before we leave.”

Riona and Cass follow Thistle as he walks past the side exit to the tower, he pushes past a shattered glass door that at one point would have opened automatically. Stepping over rubble, they gaze upon the ruins of an old front, dimly lit lobby. Echos of gray tones wash over the previously vibrant yellows of this once congregation room. A room once dedicated to waits and appointment-making, is now desolate, almost liminal if not for the debris. The level of broken foundation pillars makes the tower seem as though it could crumble at any second, though miraculously the building still contains some power. The energy reserved in the power backups are still surging through the facility, only slowly getting used up by the lights in the building, at least the ones that still work.

Thistle walks to an old dented platform lift door, figuring it might still be working since the building still has power. He presses a button with an arrow pointing up on the wall next to the door. When pressed he’s met with a ding. The lift door opens, but there’s no platform to be seen. Thistle walks closer to the door and pokes his head into the shaft, he looks up and sees nothing but broken wires and more equally, if not more, dented and broken lift doors. He looks down and sees the lift still emanating with an almost blinding periwinkle glow, bordering the platform itself.

“Hm,” Thistle takes his head out from the shaft and looks to the side, another broken door with a stairs symbol is there, “Guess we’re taking the stairs, not super surprised, I doubt that lift’s been used in ages.”

Cass takes a step to follow him before Riona extends her arm in front of her chest, stopping her, “Um, Thistle. This place looks like it could collapse at any moment, the fact that no one has been here is probably the whole reason it’s still standing.”

Thistle keeps his pace without turning around, “Yeah that makes sense.” 

He attempts to push the door open, only for it to fall forward to the ground and shatter.

“What are you even looking for?” Riona asks with high concern.

“Just some documents, they’re for someone.”

“Ok but it’s not safe!” she says with a more grave tone.

“That’s not important, you guys should wait outside.”

Riona looks at him as he walks to the staircase and begins to ascend it, “I-” her face changes to one of more annoyed, “Yeah, sure, we’ll do that.” she and Cass begin to walk to the exit, Cass continuously looking back in concern. They step over more rubble before Riona turns around again and shouts, “Just hurry up!”

She’s met with nothing but silence and the echoing footsteps of Thistle scaling the staircase. Riona and Cass wait outside the building. Riona led them to a safe distance away.

Cass, concerned, looks at Riona and says, “We shouldn’t have left him in there.”

“He was being stubborn,” Riona says with her eyes half closed and her arms crossed.

“Yeah but still. It’s not safe.”

Riona gets more audibly annoyed, “Well, I tried telling him that.”

Thistle, continuing to scale the staircase reaches the top. He walks past the broken doorway with the words control room above it. He walks into the room, crackles of broken glass and fragile stone echo with every step he takes.  He walks over to the control panel and looks down at it before looking up at a ginormous glass wall blocking a shattered amber Core, the source of the S.U.N’s power, the object that imbues itself with the artificial magic that’s then used to power the city. Now laying dormant and destroyed. Thistle looks at the Core in lament before looking back down at the control panel and searching the many drawers it has underneath it. The open ones are empty, while the rest are locked. Thistle fruitlessly attempts to open one of the locked drawers before eventually using all his force and breaking the drawer off its hinges. He falls back and rubs his palm in pain, the now broken drawer lying next to him. Looking to his side, inside the drawer he sees a document with the initials WJS on the front. He picks up the document with a slight smile before walking back to the staircase. 

On his way down the staircase, he notices broken steps that weren’t broken before. Though he finds it odd he doesn’t question it and skips the steps. That is until more steps begin to break off, crackling on the ground below. More and more fall until the entire staircase begins descending downwards, crumbling to the ground. Thistle, in a panic, jumps off the side railing of the stairs and uses a gust spell aiming down to break his fall. He looks up and swings his staff, cutting a chunk of rubble before it hits him, he then lunges himself at the doorway from where he arrived. He turns around while still on the ground, looking back at the now-ruined staircase with a nervous sweat before getting up. Hyperventilating at the close call Thistle walks to the exit, documents still resting between his left arm. Walking past the dimly lit lobby once more he pushes past the broken automatic double doors and is met with purple hues of the night sky and the cries of Cass.

“Thistle! Are you ok?! We heard a loud crash.”

“Yeah, I’m ok. The stairs gave out on me.” Thistle says, holding his shoulder.

“I tried to warn you.” Riona remarks without making eye contact.

“Yea yea,” Thistle replies with a slight smile, “Let’s go.”