He was starting to think that every time he thought he had a grasp of his wonder, and it’s layout, and rules, it threw a wrench into the works, simply to keep him on his toes. Granted… he had… on a certain level, known that the place had a labyrinth. He was reasonably sure there was one in the training grounds he hadn’t yet located, one that had once held bull dances, challenges, extensive, exhaustive training for people proud to count themselves, at least, and potentially in their own minds, some of the best warriors on a planet known for being excellent warriors.
He had not, apparently, realized that much of the city itself, possibly not including the herd lands, or for all he knew, those as well… was a handsome facade of lovely tiled roofs and gardens over top of an entirely different layer of city.

It was a fantastic, fascinating discovery, and one he was sure Lena was going to absolutely devour…

And looking at it, flat on his stomach in a rough, cobbled road, or what passed for it, and grimacing at skinned palms that were going to make the next few days hell at work, he wished like hell he hadn’t found it by finding a weak spot in what he had to assume had been some sort of skylight once, covered in blown dust to the point it had been invisible.

Fortunately there was a certain resilience in a powered form that didn’t come hand in hand with not being powered, and he attributed that to the fact that most of the harm, save for missing skin and a few shallow cuts, was to his ego.

“...Well… at least she’s not here.” She had enough to chuckle about when he failed at things that were patiently mundane...including that incident with the pizza dough getting stuck to the kitchen ceiling.

The second round had turned out better, but he had to work on making a better sauce than the bottled stuff. It tasted like tomato seasoned plastic. Or something that was supposed to be tomato. He wasn’t even sure where he’d latched on to the cooking thing. He didn’t think that was a thing that had appealed to Falco Marks. Take that as universal proof that, regardless of hand me down memories, he wasn’t exactly Falco Marks, any more than he was Xanthus of a thousand years or so gone, however appealing those memories might be. You could fall into them like an comfortable bed, roll yourself up in the dusty past and pretend it was relevant when it wasn’t.

Or you could if you didn’t have other things grounding you. Quinn and his apparent total lack of understanding of how it worked to struggle with money, Mercy who you kind of wanted to aggressively protect from all threats. Hell… Lena. Lena who’d fallen into his life much like he’d just fallen into a new part of his own wonder and made it so much less tempting to fall back on this place, in ways you didn’t realize you had been to cover up the sting of others drifting silently away after you’d been half killed together. Not, he guessed, the bonding experience fiction touted it as.

But then maybe in this version of time it was never going to work out anyway. He was never going to fit into her philosophy neatly.

“Annnnd we’re moving on.” He grumbled, pushing himself up with a wince. “******** that train of thought.”

People he knew now didn’t deserve him pouting over people who had cleanly, calmly, gotten up and walked out of his life, and for all he knew, hadn’t given him a second thought since. One was forced to assume not, and that particular pain had, after all, been a path to Lena and the others.

Sometimes you hurt in the process of healing. He was healing. Kairatos itself was healing, in slow steps.

Like this place, which was less dusty than some places, but there were things that were whatever passed for cobwebs on Mars, though he didn’t dare assume they so much as resembled an earth spider, since for all he knew it was pure coincidence that the Bulls and Cows were analogous.

There were murals down here too, but not the bulls he’d seen on the upper levels. No… there were… hints here of colors he knew from other worlds, but down here it was so damaged that that was all they were. Colors. Hints of flowing fabrics, metallic touches here and there. He wondered who they’d been once, or if they’d been anyone specific, or simply a vague honoring other worlds, other senshi.

That was… odd. It stood out. As open as they were to visitors, he didn’t recall much focus on actually… celebrating them. Then again he had only a handful of memories to go with his impressions, and that wasn’t a lot to go on.

Then again, he was getting good at tightroping along on ‘not much to go on’. The whole theory he was chasing was ‘not much to go on’. It was… how the hell would Lena have put it? Something about the appearance of correspondence probably, and that not necessarily meaning -actual- correspondence.

He wanted it to be true, for whatever the hell that was worth. He’d wanted it in his gut since that lone wolf of a royal Iris had purified him and passed out, but not until Caedus had he had something to chase.

He dusted himself off a bit as he walked, though that was more habit to an increasing amount of time doing down time in regular clothes, rather than any trait of his uniform, other than the cape, that tended toward dirt, and picked his way down the corridor, squinting in the dim light that managed to make its way through the filthy hints of skylight. There was… other light, it seemed like. Feeble hints that there might once have been other sources of illumination, but what remained of those was barely adequate as well, and he found himself tracing a path along with one hand, debating back tracking. He could come back in a week… with a flashlight. Though it wasn’t granted he’d turn up in the same place. He at least knew to watch for the skylights though. Get a damn broom, dust those off, at least until the next wind came along.

He wasn’t sure how long the tunnel continued. There were… branches, doorways leading off into other dark places, but he carefully felt past them and continued straight, hoping to find some kind of dead end, since the random placement of those dark echoing tunnels made him think ‘maze’, and if had once known his way through it, he didn’t have confidence that he could find it now. He hadn’t even started at the start, just, partway down whatever passage way this was.

It was not, however, a dead end he found, as he was considering toying with his ring to get a message out to Lena to make sure she knew he was fine, and not dead in a ditch somewhere or lost.

That was when the light changed. He thought it was his eyes adjusting at first, or his mind playing tricks on him, the way he couldn’t entirely be sure he was following a straight tunnel instead of one with a very subtle curve. But no, there it was. More light. Dusty, red tinted from the iron, and weak, but it was brighter. And there were…

God damn for a heartbeat or two he thought it was actual people. Or maybe what was left of them, like the ash remains at Pompeii (the one on earth anyway…), but it was a statue, well… several of them. A towering thing in the middle of an round open room, with yet more damn tunnels branching away.

Too tall for the passage he was in, at a full three tiers tall, the fountain, fountain, not a statue, was accessed by crumbled steps down that he approached, cautiously, in case they crumbled to yet lower layers, but they felt solid under foot. Memorable thing anyway, and he tried to memorize the details, for Phact and Lena, and his own curiosity.

The bottom ring looked… well… normal enough. Dusty and dry, the outer edge was covered in animal heads, many of which he couldn’t identify, and didn’t try, as his gaze wandered higher. The second ring, above where people might have dipped up water or thrown coins for luck, who knew. It gave him no such help or memory to go by. The second ring… the one that drew your eyes up, that was … he’d never seen anything like this fountain.

He couldn’t tell gender, he could barely guess that they had been a mixture of senshi and knights both, but not only was it difficult to guess if they’d been meant to be men or women, they had no symbols that he could find, walking slowly around them, and their faces were… if they’d ever been there, time had removed them. They stood with their hands reached up for forward toward the third, tallest part of the fountain, as though supporting the figures in the middle, or reaching for them, hard to tell, when some were missing fingers or arms to go with those missing faces. But the third tier, it was a strange mix of uncomfortable nightmare and… something else. One of the two figures was crouched, black stone fading to white or vice versa. Like the others, it was impossible to identify as a particular subject, but here that felt particularly the point. The one standing above it… with a flowing garment that might or might not have included wings…

In one hand it had a crystal, glassy, dirty… white once, he thought… and the other, it’s draped hand and sleeve obscured the hilt of a sword, the glassy blade broken off so that it was more the suggestion of an unidentified weapon. Senshi and Knight. Senshi and knights around too. And what he could only guess was a purification. Past that… who the hell knew.

There was a word carved into it, but all he could do was make a note of it, because he didn’t damn well know that either. “Consociatim,” or something like that.

“...Sure.” He snorted at it, warily, walking slowly around the base, not sure what he’d found exactly, but it was… well it was sure as hell something. “Consowhatever…”

Time to go back, he thought, make a note, and tell people what he’d seen. Maybe it would be a good lead, maybe nothing.