Larson and Cassie quickly made their way to the NASA building. Within mere minutes of leaving Jax, the pair stood outside and watched as a few workers left for the day.

“Okay, there should only be a few janitors left inside,” Larson explained, “one of them always comes out before their shift starts and smokes for five minutes. When he shows up, we bolt inside so we don’t have to touch anything.”

“Wow, you got this all thought out don’t you?”

Larson said nothing to Cassie and kept looking at the door and after ten minutes went by, they saw the door open. They waited for the man to come out and once he was out of the way, they went inside right behind him and found themselves pressed behind a column as they waited to be sure they weren’t heard.

Once they didn’t hear anything, they decided to go out and see where they needed to go.

“Alright, now from here I’m not sure what we should do.” Larson admitted.

“Well we can always just wing it.”

“Sounds like a long shot for you.”

“Come on, let’s just start looking around.” Cassie walked off and found an escalator that wasn't moving, they went up it and found a map of the building on the next floor. “So, if we’re looking for the research center… where do you think that would be?”

Larson stared at the map for a while. He looked it over several times before he mentally marked off a few places assuming them to be tourist areas.

“I’m not sure, but let’s try near the launch pad down here.” He faced her, “we should split up and take the two data rooms on the third floor near there. Before that, let’s check that room that isn't labeled on the map.”

“Okay!” Cassie jogged off.

Larson crossed his arms and made no effort to move as he watched Cassie run in a complete circle on the second floor. She turned right back to where he and the map were, and looked at Larson.

“Are you lost?” He said. She gave him a guilty smile. He rolled his eyes and took her wrist dragging her in the right direction. “Hopefully you can find the data room better than this one.”

“Maps confuse me! I was gonna tell you, but I didn’t wanna ruin the mood.”

Cassie was dragged over to the far side of the building where a staircase was locked behind a door. Larson let her wrist go once they got there.

“Yeah, because turning one hallway was so hard to do.” Larson scoffed at her. Cassie mocked him before looking at the door as he did. It was locked and the only way through was with a key of some kind. “We don’t have a key, so we’ll just have to break in.”

“Oh, what are you gonna do?” She sounded expectant.

Larson crouched down and touched the back of his hand to the lower part of the device, Cassie watched as small electrical shocks being emitted from his hand touched the metal. The machine malfunctioned and the door released itself. “Woah…” Cassie said as Larson got up. “What’d you do?”

“I told you we can manipulate waves and as Jax said, electrical waves are one of them. We are still human so we have small electrical pulses in our brain. I just move them to my hand, or where I want them, and they come out if it’s strong enough.”

“That’s so cool! I wanna try that!” Cassie thrusted her hand out.

However, before she could do anything, Larson forced her hand back down.

“Do that shit some other time, and stop talking so loudly!” He scolded.

Cassie puffed her cheeks in an upset pout and crossed her arms as they went inside and found a large room with six rows of computers. There was a big monitor at the front of the room, but it was shut off like all the other computers.

“Hm, is this the data center? Or at least one of them, I guess they must be identical.” He stated and looked back to Cassie, “looks like you being an idiot paid off.”

“Or maybe that was my plan all along.”

Larson ignored her and went into the room. Cassie groaned slightly and caught up to him.

They went to the first row of computers and turned one on. Once they were closer, they realized the desktop had a physical key lock on it as well.

“The power in the building is still on, so it should turn on at least, but I bet it’ll have a password blocking us. I mean, it should have one.” Cassie said while the desktop booted on.

Larson seemed to agree. They waited and when the desktop came to life, they indeed did see a password lock.

“Then we’ll split the job. You try to look for anything that could resemble a password and I’ll look around for the key.”

“Alright!” Cassie took off without another word.

Despite Larson’s initial worry of her getting caught, he figured Cassie would be able to stay hidden at the very least and left to do his part.

Cassie arrived back at the map and checked it several times before finding some of the office rooms. The doors were still unlocked, which Cassie paid no mind to, and she went inside hoping this may have been an office of someone important. She opened the drawers with a pen and dug through all of it, but tried to be sure she didn’t leave it too disturbed.

After checking all of them she wound up sighing as she couldn’t find anything. Besides, my eyes hurt reading all this small text. Cassie suddenly stopped when she heard the door opening, the knob stopped moving and the door opened to an empty room.

The janitor was humming something as she went through and mopped the floor. Cassie thought to get out before she was spotted, but she opted to stay and just remain as quiet as she could. Cassie watched as the janitor cleaned around her, leading herself back to the door. The woman walked right back to Cassie’s side and she could hear what the janitor was listening to.

Crazy… on emotion? She heard the lyrics to be.

Eventually the woman got to the door and put the mop back into the bucket leaving Cassie in the room alone once more. Cassie slowly got out and returned to the desk.

“I did see something, but I didn’t think to read it fully.” Cassie said to herself while she found the papers again and scanned them over.

None of it made sense, but she figured that meant it must have been a password. Cassie smiled and approached the door trying to hear if the woman was still out there. When she didn’t hear her she went out and tried to find the computer room again.

Larson looked everywhere on the other side of the building and besides some dioramas and diagrams, he found nothing that was a key. The room he was currently in belonged to the senior director of the floor, yet had nothing useful inside. The desk had a few electronic keypads on it and if something was inside, Larson wasn’t going to see it. He didn’t want to break too many locks to rouse any suspicion. Larson was also bothered with the desk’s mouse pad, designed with a universe drawn onto it, it was much too large for the desk and flopped over the side. He was beginning to get annoyed and figured to just destroy the lock, he sighed knowing that wasn’t smart.

So he slowed down, “where would I hide a key if I knew how important it was… and I was a human?” Larson then turned to face the door and beside it was a clear case. Inside was a model of the universe, nearly identical to the design on the mouse pad. “Of course.” He went back into the desk and lifted up the large mouse pad. Under it, he found a small piece of paper with some numbers written on it. Is this the password for the desk?

He shrugged and took a chance. He crouched down to the keypad and inputted the numbers—it unlocked.

Larson wasted no time and checked the contents of the compartment. He found a few files, all of which just had data written on them. In the very back, he found a key chain with several keys attached to it.

“Not what I was hoping for, but it’ll have to do.” Larson returned the files exactly how he found them and left the room back for the data center.

Inside, he found Cassie sitting in one of the chairs spinning around aimlessly. When she noticed Larson, she stopped.

“Hey, I think I found the password!” She held up the papers.

Larson looked at them and made a face, “let me see that.” He read the contents of the papers and Cassie was proudly boasting.

“What’d you find?” The tease in her voice was hard to miss.

“You do realize you didn’t find anything right?”

“Huh? No, there’s a bunch of numbers on here.”

“Yeah, because this is a data sheet recording the last launch they did.”

Cassie snatched the papers back, “what? No way!” She tried her hardest to find anything of use in the files.

While she was doing that, Larson noticed a sticky note on the back of the papers. He removed it while Cassie struggled to read the data. The note read that there was a change in the password recently, that they should refer to the senior manager for the change.

“Hey,” He tried to get her attention, “Cassie, stop looking at that!” She looked up with a deep scowl. “The password's in the room I was just in, apparently.”

“How do you know?”

“Some idiot wrote it down here and didn’t throw this away.” He explained.

“What? You just got this lucky break?”

“I’m not even gonna bother with whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

Larson left to return to the previous room, Cassie was in tow, and once back inside. Larson looked for, yet, something else in the room.

Cassie was grumbling to herself while Larson looked for anything of use. While in her irritated state. Cassie just looked through any and everything she could. Cassie went over to a box tucked away in the corner and sat on the floor while looking through it.

“What are you doing?” Larson eventually said to her.

“Shut up.”

Larson tried not to say anything to that. He continued his search of the desk.

In the box, Cassie found a notepad. She flipped through the pages and realized something. She let out a small gasp and went over to Larson.

“Lars look!” She practically hung over the desk while showing him, “I think they change the password every so often, that guy writes it down here!”

Larson looked at the notepad, “none of them are timestamped, so it’ll be hard to tell how old this is.”

“Doesn’t matter, we’re still gonna try it until it fails!” Cassie held the notepad with an iron grip.

His eyes narrowed, “you’re seriously upset because you didn’t find anything useful?”

Cassie said nothing and sprinted out of the room. Larson scoffed at the thought and joined Cassie.

With possibly everything they needed, the screen once again read that they needed a password.

“Let’s try this one.” Larson typed the last password on the page, “Incorrect?”

“Ha, move aside,” Cassie stepped in front of him, “let me use my deduction skills and try this password!” Cassie went over the keyboard and typed, only for it to say it was incorrect. “Maybe I’m just typing too fast and put it in wrong.” Cassie continued to type the incorrect password.

Larson was curious as to what the key lock was for, so he started to try keys to open the lock. After a few attempts, he found the right one. It was a small opening that had a label.

With a series of months written on it, there were also numbers ranging from one to twelve in a descending order.

“Let me see that notepad.” Larson took it from her, as Cassie was more focused on typing the same password over and over. “Oh, I get it. Cassie, stop typing.” She sighed and looked at him, “they change the password monthly, and they use this sheet to know what they’re on for the year… I guess.”

Cassie looked at the label and read through it.

“Oh, so they opposite the months and that’s what password they’re on?”

“Exactly.”

“Okay… so that means, it’s three… so they’re on the tenth password.” Cassie typed it in, and sure enough it worked, “yay! It worked!” She exclaimed, “I’m still taking credit for that.”

Larson frowned at her, “this isn’t a competition!” He pushed her out of the way and went to their files.

He searched for anything related to dimensional beings and came up short. Knowing they wouldn’t be so obvious, he opted to search up Barmen. They looked at the screen and took in the information they were seeing.

“So… does this mean they have seen things like us?”

Larson smiled, “Seems so.”

The screen showed pictures of unidentifiable figures as well as records that told when they were taken and the relevant researcher in question.

“This means that the research of Jax’s grandfather is creditable.”

“What do you mean?” Cassie asked.

Larson stood normally, “in one chapter, he talks about how we’ve been spotted way before his time, but obviously we will be after his time as well. One thing in particular was that fifty years before we were born, someone like us was spotted by some kind of organization. He cited that he couldn’t name the corporation or even the being in question, but he could talk about what they saw. The date on this picture is from fifty years ago.”

“So that means we gotta get Jax’s stuff.” Cassie added.

“Damn right. We’ll be that much closer to understanding what we are.”

Cassie giggled and moved to go up the stairs, “I’d say this was a mission gone good!”

“I would like to explore those data centers more, but we’ll get locked in here if we don’t leave soon. We took too long trying to get in here,” he glared at Cassie, “but it was still good either way.”

“So me being here is a good idea?”

“Shut up,” Cassie pouted to him, “what’s up with that pouting?” He pinched her face hard.

“Ow, ow, ow!”

He let go, “you keep looking for some kind of approval from me. Accept the fact that you didn’t screw us and move on.”

She rubbed her face. “Fine.”

“Okay, let’s get out of here. We only have twenty minutes before they close up the whole building, so check that you didn’t leave anything and be sure things don’t look too disturbed.”

Cassie followed his orders and checked herself mostly while Larson went to return the keys from the senior manager’s room. Soon, they were heading back out into the hallway and just as Larson planned, the last janitor was about to leave and lock the door.

Larson went and knocked something over.

“What the hell was that?” The janitor took out his flashlight and went over to check the noise out. Larson and Cassie got out of the building and returned to Larson’s place.

…

It was just nearing nine at night when they got back to Larson’s neighborhood. They calmly walked down the street to his place.

“Alright, so now we’ll just be waiting for Jax!” Cassie suddenly said. Larson said nothing, “oh, what planet was that picture taken on?”

“It actually said Pluto.” He answered.

“Yes!” Larson narrowed his eyes at her, “don’t look at me like that. I liked the planet Pluto as a kid. So I’m excited to get to go on it.”

“But first we gotta see if we’re even able to do so.” they stopped walking, “let’s just go home for now. We’ll talk at school tomorrow.”

Cassie was alright with that and was about to turn around to head home. Before she did, the very same dog that was barking at Larson returned and was now barking loudly at them.

Cassie smiled fondly at it.

“Who’s dog is that?”

“Don’t know and don’t care. The thing pisses me off. It keeps barking whenever I come home.”

“Oh, I think it’s because dogs are really in tune with the spiritual world and stuff, so maybe he thinks we're like invaders or something.”

“Whatever it thinks, it needs to do so elsewhere.”

“Maybe we should take it in.” Cassie offered.

“Why?”

“It’s cute, so why not?”

Larson crossed his arms, “I’m not taking care of it and we all know your parents won’t take that thing, so no.” Cassie pressed her lips together before quickly scooping up the dog and bringing it into Larson’s place. “You motherfucker! Get that thing out of my house!” He chased after her and found Cassie sitting with the dog in her lap.

“See, he-” Cassie lifted it up and checked between its legs, “Yeah, he likes you!” The dog looked around for a bit before looking at Cassie and biting her arm. “Oh, he must be pretty young. I think he’ll be easier to take care of!”

“I don’t care, get rid of it.”

“I’m not going to. Since I’m gonna be over here a lot, I want him here.”

Larson sighed loudly. “you seriously can’t be anymore annoying,”

Cassie brought the dog to cover her face and spoke in a mocking voice. “You seriously can’t be any more annoying.”

Larson growled at her, the dog began to whine. Cassie brought it into her lap and she rubbed his back. “I’m sorry, he’s kind of scary, but you’ll get used to him soon enough.”

“Yeah, once I kill it and tell you it ran away.”

Cassie covered the dog’s ears before speaking to Larson.

“I do have a reason why we should have him.”

“To piss me off most likely.”

She laughed, “that’s a bonus.” Larson sat down, “No, he was barking at this place and us, but the other day he wasn’t barking when I saw him further away from us, so that must mean he can tell beings like us as well as rifts. We should keep him so we can know where rifts are easier.”

“We still have to take care of it.” Larson stated the obvious.

“It’s a stray. It was pretty much taking care of itself. All we have to do is feed him and be sure he’s clean and that’ll be that!”

Larson stared at Cassie and the dog as she played with his paws.

“Fine, we’ll keep the damn dog.” Cassie smiled, “but only if you take care of it. That way I’ll be able to get you over here easier.”

“I’m fine with that!” Cassie nuzzled the dog, “I think his name should be Roman.”

“I don’t really care. He has fleas and shit so I’ll go out and get some dog soap and you’re cleaning that thing tonight.”

“See, he really cares about you. He just doesn’t know how to show it.” Cassie said to the stray.

“Fuck you.”

“Don’t repeat that, it’s a bad word!”

The dog barked at Cassie and resumed biting her arm.

Larson went up his stairs and thought while trying to ignore the noise of Cassie coddling the dog.

“So I guess our next plan is to find some way to test our limits…it’ll only go from here.”