Corvayne was looking for an enemy, perhaps the one that had found Wick, before she pushed him to the stairs up to the second floor of his new home.

“They are coming! Get your shit and get ready! We are leaving! I'll get Hari and Grunt.” She didn't wait for him to register and instead bolted down the hallway ahead of him. As he climbed the stairs two at a time he heard her yelling. “Hari! Grunt! Mosh! Grab anything important RIGHT now!”

“Wait, another UFO?” Mosh's sleepy head popped out of a door. Corvayne didn't waste time as Wick was already pointing to her own pack and yelling at the goblin to hurry up.

Corvayne didn't delay walking into his room and grabbing all the nice new holsters he had for his gear. He was loaded up in fifteen seconds, put his boots on and laced them tight, then put his pack on.

Hari was hopping into jeans and Grunt sauntered out of his room with a bucket full of bats strapped to his back, cracking his knuckles as Corvayne watched. Mosh was clearly not fully awake so Corvayne helped him grab a backpack and stuff some water in it as well as a tool kit.

Mosh's room was actually really well organized work space, now that he looked. A shame they were moving.

“Wait, Boss where's my weapon?” Mosh said as Corvayne more or less tossed the pack at him.

“We are probably going to be dealing with guns. How good a shot are you with a pistol?”

The goblin threw his arms through the straps on the pack. “Terrible!”

Corvayne grabbed a knife sitting at the corner of the room's desk and handed it to Mosh. “Just stay alive.”

Wick yelled at them and they ran down the stairs to where she was waving at them. He felt her push his shoulder forward “Back storage room!” She shouted then sprinted ahead, boots of running letting her overtake Corvayne. Mosh huffed and kept up pretty well.

He entered the open door to the bare room they had set aside for storage. It had a wood floor unlike the rest of the ground level. Wick was pointing and shouting at a kneeling Grunt “That one! That board!”

The large man ran a crowbar along the ground then caught a gap between the boards and pryed up a square hunk of wood that had not been attached to the floor. Corvayne saw that under it was a patch of rough concrete and a square metal door. Grunt didn't need to be told to pry that open too. The smell of stagnant water filled the room. Corvayne thought he picked up the sound of a helicopter outside. He shook his head. All the more reason to hurry.

Nyx looked at Wick. “Seriously? The sewers? First off, they will expect it...”

“Shut up and get your ass in there!” Wick pointed. Nyxion rolled his eyes then hopped down, not bothering to use the ladder. Corvayne went next. He had something flash in his face as he climbed down. Arriving at the bottom, he saw Nyxion had directed lights coming from his shoulders, flashing brickwork around them. Wick came down next, with LBC, Mosh, and Hari following. Grunt was last, crowbar in mouth as he pulled the metal door down and barred the latch on the bottom with the crowbar. The thud of him slamming it into place reverberated as it was suddenly quiet.

Nyxion turned his lights out to the gray tunnels. The chalky surfaces had obvious water lines and it smelled like pond water, but the water flowing in a semi-circular ditch didn't come past the tip of his boots at it's deepest.

Wick lit her flashlight then checked everyone was there by shining her light on them. “Stay quiet, follow me, don't fall behind. If you get lost, we are going to the space port.”

Mosh looked around and whispered. “Where's Mister I?”

Wick was tilting an ear up, then shook her head and turned to Mosh, her voice surprisingly gentle. “He will be fine. I'm pretty sure this is fallout from the mine.”

Corvayne saw her starting to walk down a tunnel, south if he had his bearings still, and followed while asking “Does Grunt need to run with us then?”

Wick looked to Grunt. Corvayne had to admit his friend looked ominous when lit by a flashlight that was pointed at his belly. Grunt blinked then made finger walking motions then held up a hand and saluted while looking up. She nodded and kept going, turning east and decending when they hit a three way junction.

She spoke quietly as she walked on the dry edge of the tunnel. “Grunt's going with us until we hit the port. Dawn will take care of him. I'm using an exit plan. We are going to crew engineering on a ship headed to Balric, then get on another ship headed to a megaworld, Dion. Corvayne, Mosh, Grunt... you guys are probably going to have to be in charge of the rest of us while we keep a star ship engine going on the first leg.”

Corvayne felt a knot of sadness as she spoke. He had already felt weird with leaving the warehouse. Now it seemed they were going to try to get off Cascadia as a whole. Then again, maybe on a more remote world they'd settle in.

They made a few turns that wound them down into cooler tunnels. Wick seemed to know the way, sometimes skipping tunnels going down to walk up thirty feet, but overall their progress was down. It felt like an hour of walking through the same tunnels. Wick would shine her light on anyone making too much noise, so there was no conversation.

He was about to risk being beamed when the tunnel they were in emptied out into a large concrete chamber that looked like someone had buried an forgotten city block in it. Her light took a moment to sweep over the dusty windows and black reflective water lapping in and out of the top of an open door. She followed the side of the tunnel to a metal walkway that skirted the top part of the flooded city chamber. Corvayne wondered why someone wouldn't demolish a bunch of buildings before making a sewer or structural chamber over them... it didn't make a lick of sense to him. A set of steps took them to a lower platform that lead into a square tunnel. Wick produced a key, opened a padlock, then gestured everyone in. Once they were in and she locked the gate behind them, she let her shoulders slump and sighed.

She pointed the flashlight up so she could be seen, showing off the tunnel as another concrete passage, this one having one raised section and a flat grime covered floor both slanted downwards. “Ok, we should be safe to talk again.”

Mosh “What was that place?”

Wick didn't look back. “Parts of Cascadia sank because an earthquake messed up the foundation. Most of the islands out in the bay have old parts of the city that sunk ten to thirty feet. In a few places they turned them into underground malls but for the most part they just built stuff above and around everything. It IS odd that they just... entombed that very rustic city block in concrete.”

Hari poked Corvayne as Wick started walking. The elf looked bewildered. “Corvayne, are we going to be okay?”

He nodded back at her. “We'll be fine. Wick's been expecting this for a long time, right?”

Wick smiled over at them. “Yeah. Next time, I'm living out in a compound in the woods though.”

“Next time?” Corvayne asked.

“When we get to Dion.” Wick said quickly, prompting him to imagine himself in flannel chopping wood.

Nyxion snorted. “Any mega world you land on you are likely to be out in the middle of nowhere. I do look good chopping wood, though.”

LBC was more goal oriented. “What do you know about the people who were planning on attacking us?”

“Fits with a private contractor doing a raid. Police blotter asked for everyone to clear airspace and you have at least a few people not in the loop asking about a APC convoy. It's why I wanted quiet, if they sweep the tunnels with drones they try to find non-water sounds.”

The cloaked woman looked around. “And your sure that what you heard is all for us?”

Wick shrugged. “Not entirely. But the reason I lived in old town was there wasn't anything happening there. It's either me or Dawn. Go ahead and cross off Dawn, she's a low stakes low profile operator. No one cares if she wants to become queen of the slums. On the other hand, we set off a nuclear weapon and killed a few dozen private contractors, and one got away.”

He felt the need to correct Wick. “Nyx and LBC did most of the work, I just got one guy to kill himself.”

LBC sounded happy. “Thanks for giving us credit Corvayne.”

Wick kept them moving through a more involved pipe maze, taking turns and going down ladders next to slice gates then up ladders to other tunnels then back down ramps, generally headed what Corvayne thought was east and south.

Mosh broke the silence first. “Ok this doesn't make sense. Why build flood tunnels under the bay?”

Wick started to speak but Nyxion laughed and beat her to it. “That you can blame my grandfather for. While he was in power, he made a push to expand the Collective. He wanted Cascadia to be one of the launch points for world ships, and eventually part of the road for exotic materials to flow back from. I suspect you could find a lot of infrastructure for a mega city they funded and never fully got to use.”

“Good for us. It's why the space port is large enough to have a few people hanging around who I've bribed.” Wick muttered.

They reached a point where the path took them into older looking tunnels, made of faded grey bricks. The side tunnels and intersections in the run down section were flooded with nearly still water, throbbing a little as they sloshed past. For some reason, Corvayne found his hand resting on his fire breathing dagger. At the crest of a junction Wick held up a hand, shining her light on a huge torn apart rat corpse, then jerking it away. The smell hit Corvayne a moment later and he winced. He was pretty sure he heard Wick gagging as she moved past it.

Hari said aloud. “Monsters?”

Wick looked a little pale. “Nothing should live down here. If it does, well, it will regret meeting us.”

Even so everyone slowed down, and he could see Nyxion's gloves clenching and unclenching. Lady Blood Claw was stalking, hand on her blade. Mosh held his knife and kept looking back and ahead nervously. Hari kept a hand on her blade but didn't slow as she twitched her ears.

Grunt... well Grunt just yawned. Corvayne smiled a little.

Wick slowed, then turned around a moment, light following to look at the tunnel they had just walked out of, then forward. She pulled her phone out and tapped into something and rotated it, then frowned.

Mosh saw her doing this. “Oh lady, if you say we are lost...”

Wick turned her phone off. “No. Just this... part... wasn't marked differently the map.”

She kept going and Corvayne saw what made her stop. The pipe was missing the wall on one side. Wick shone her light out of it for a moment, then kept walking. As Corvayne looked out into the murk, he saw a huge flooded cave with buildings jutting up. He could only make out details on a few in the dark, mostly that there were windows on the nearest building that suggested it was several stories tall. Corvayne guessed the black water below must be deep, as he didn't see signs of doors above the water level, just windows. He stopped and made sure everyone passed before he kept moving, something about the gap made him suspicious. He had visions of tentacles trying to drag them out. As if they didn't have real soldiers somewhere above their heads looking for them.

He admitted to himself he felt relieved when they left the old tunnels and were back in the modern molded concrete ones, headed upwards.

They walked out from the tunnels into open chamber with huge pillars and a ceiling distantly above them. The floor was under two inches of water that sloshed as Wick stepped into it. The concrete vault clearly was another link in a system to move water around and had a few dim lights around it. There was a control room built into a nearby wall that looked out into the concrete structure but the group walked directly under it, and Corvayne could see no light coming from it. They went into another pipe, and now the trend was walking upwards with a few locks that Wick picked rather then having a key for.

Corvayne watched her jiggle a curved pin in a lock then swing the door open. “How do you do that so fast?”

“They always use the same brand of lock down here, and it's really cheap.” She waited for Grunt to bring up the rear then snapped the compromised lock back into place. There were probably ten different gates and half as many styles of pipe as they moved upwards and eventually reached a point where the abandoned flood tunnels met up with gushing storm drains. These were like white water rapids sewers with two railed walkways and a churning torrent of water between them.

Corvayne followed Wick around a corner, feeling every bit of clothing and skin was soaked from the latent humidity, when he spotted daylight now. They had climbed back up far enough that there were points where water would pour in from above, huge grates letting muted blue light into the tunnels. They crossed a few bridges, and Wick triumphantly turned them down a tunnel to see a giant red painted grate leading out of the sewers. It had a built in lock and was blocking the entrance or exit to a culvert facing a concrete flood channel. Past the concrete lip of the tunnel the gray sky was cut by the huge infrastructure of the spaceport. The shapes formed giant slopes with red pipes, burnt orange girders, and machines of all colors and shapes under hyper smoothed concrete curves that followed parabolic arcs, no doubt with an endpoint at some wormhole the ship could slip through. It was raining hard enough that, despite being day, there were outside lights that had turned on.

Grunt moved to bend the bars, but Wick slapped his arm and actually dug a key out for the grate, then with a rusty start pushed it open. He wondered if that was part of the thing she spent so much time on, just getting herself copies of keys for places they shouldn't be. She was the first to step out into the air. Wick turned to Grunt. Corvayne saw her eyes were a little red.

“Hey Grunt... It's been a damn pleasure working with you. I don't know if we'll make it back here.”

Corvayne stopped, stunned. He had heard them say Grunt was with them to the port. But now, looking at the skyscraper sized ridges that would push them into space, it struck home that his first friend wasn't coming with him. He looked at Grunt and felt regret and sadness welling up. The big man shook his head sadly, tapped his lips, then pounded his heart. Corvayne tapped his own heart. No need for words: They were always going to be bros. Grunt then nodded at Wick, then at him, and wrapped them both in a bear hug. Grunt let them go a few seconds before he suffocated someone, then looked at Wick and pointed at her, then Corvayne, and made a sort of splayed hand next to him gesture that Corvayne didn't understand, then and folded his arms.

Wick threw her hands up, fully crying. “Isn't he supposed to take care of me!? You know I'll look out for him. Tell Dawn thanks for everything.” She tossed him a plastic bag full of credits.

Mosh waved. “You know, I'll miss the big lug. And the trees he'd throw at things trying to kill me too.”

Grunt laughed and ruffled Mosh's head, and Hari hugged Grunt which actually made the big man blush a little bit.

Hari stepped back and smiled. “No tears. We meet... We will meet again.”

Grunt wiped his eyes, then turned to Nyxion and Lady Blood Claw. He gave them a look. Corvayne knew that most people didn't really understand Grunt without spending time with him, but the look was one of those times where the perception of Grunt and reality overlapped. He pointed his fingers at his own eyes, then at them: If you fuck around with my friends, I will somehow find out and I will find you and make you regret it.

Then he slipped back into the tunnels and was gone. Wick broke the sound of rain and water. “Come on, we got a ship to catch.”