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"This is a bad idea," Lucky muttered to Sherry under his breath as he adjusted his coat for the tenth time. His old, intermediate life division coat. The one he wasn't supposed to be wearing any more, seeing as he was neither an intermediate trainee nor a life hunter.

But in his pocket he had the keyring, all thirteen strange-looking keys (thoroughly cleaned off a long time ago) that he'd never had the chance to use. He hadn't even seen the underground lab since before it had been reclaimed - it was an actual functioning building now, not a glorified bunker wired with extension cords like it used to be. Nobody had recognized him, or if they had, they didn't seem to realize he wasn't allowed here. It was about the only good thing rapidly aging was doing for him.

He shouldn't have told Sherry about the keys. It was a mistake. The illusion of that island had gotten to him, that's all. He had really believed they would never make it back. Only that hadn't been the case. Three days; that's all they'd been gone for. And Sherry hadn't forgotten any of what he'd confided. He tried to tell himself it was Sherry's idea to try the keys out where he'd found them, but the fact he had showed up at all made him just as complicit in this.

"Well," Lucky sighed, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, "Where should we start?"

For innocent fun, Lucky looked a bit agitated. Like he expected a hologram with a laser sword to come busting out of the nearest room any moment now. He followed after Sherry like a shadow into the quiet, unguarded hallway.

"Okay, first of all, I only promised to give the book back because we were stranded on an inescapable island and I didn't think I would have to, you know, actually give it back." Lucky was speaking to Sherry quietly as he fished the keys out of his pocket and sorted through them. He meticulously tried each of the different keys one at a time to see if any even fit in the lock. There were thirteen of them; this was going to take a while door by door. "I mean, I was going to give it back, but. Things happened, and there were missions, and all of a sudden a year's gone by and now it's just kind of weird to show up all of a sudden with it, you know? He's going to think I stole it or something."

He kind of had stolen the book of unstable runes, but that wasn't important. He hadn't used it, or even opened it. That counted for something, right? He'd find out sooner rather than later if Sherry had any say in it, and she wasn't someone he wanted to argue with.