"Want to go see if it's still there?  It won't take long to get to the entrance."

"I could use a break.  We're about halfway through."

Alizara sighs.  She would like the chance to stretch her legs, but Azure could turn a thirty minute break into a four hour trip.  From the time on her phone, most of the shops will already be closing for the night.  At least that meant they wouldn't be pulled away to shop.

"Let's finish up this box, so we can close it and not leave stacks of paper lying around."

"Great!"

He compares the map to the official map on his phone.  As far as the official map is concerned, the small gap between the storage rooms doesn't exist at all, the subtle angling and warping of certain hallways away from where the should be unnoticable without obsessive measurements.

Not long after, the six of them - three humans, three daemons - are walking a short distance through the main path of Topaz Hall. 

The Hall itself is a kilometer-long straight road, lined on either side by balcony levels that lead to three stories of houses and shops.  Bridges cross between the sides occasionally, draped with golden silk banners and lined with flowering plants.  The main lights that line the ceiling of this tall "outdoor" area are turned off for the evening.  Dimmer lights keep the paths navigable.  Shops selling clothing or electronics are closed, while the restaurants and small theaters are filling up.

It is merely a few doors over, down a ramp leading to the lowest floor of the Hall, then into a narrower side-hall with a janitor's closet and set of public restrooms that serves the handful of stores nearby.  Then into a storage room which was originally supposed to be for hammers and other tools according to the document, and seemed at the moment to have been abandoned.  An ammonia smell wafts through the room, part of the 'basement' between the Hall and the thick shielding of the outer hull.  A few crates of tacky mildewed rolls of wallpaper sit neglected to one side.  Other things look just as useless, and extremely heavy.

"Ugh.  This place is awful.  You'd think someone would have taken this space and turned it into a... I don't know.  A bar?  A tea room?  We're right near some of the nicest shops on the ship.  It can't be that hard to clean up whatever's making that smell."

"Assuming they got permission.  There's so much paperwork involved in doing things.  Whoever owns this place..." she starts to say, then trails off.  Considering where it is, it's entirely possible that his family owns it.

"The smell might also be coming from the safe room.  Those are usually packed full of supplies, to wait out problems.  After a century of no one replacing it, it might be full of rotten food.  Then, if no one knows it's there, they can clean the main room as much as they want and still have the smell."

"Then I suppose we'll have to open it and see.  Maybe stand partway up the ramp?  I'll have Florentho teleport me if the smell suddenly gets worse when I open it, and we can go tell someone who can come in with a hazmat suit or something."

"Salanaya is steel-type," she reminds him.

He's already searching for the nearly-invisible catch.  It takes a little while, but eventually...

A door pops out of what looked like normal wall, sliding quietly out of the doorway.  "Huh.  No.  Looks like machines?  It's safe to come back down."

Alizara and Salanaya make it down first.  Verity and Araeneve had decided that the warning should be taken even more seriously, and had gone all the way to the top of the ramp.  

"Ooh," she steps in, her twin beside her.  Azure's Florentho leads the way in, lightly hopping between the crates and machines.  The doors are narrower here than in most other places on the fleet.  Her metang switches from stepping to hovering in order to enter without scraping the doorframe.  Verity follows with Araeneve all the way in the back.  

"I have no idea what these machines do," Alizara admits, running a finger along the top of one.  It's a little dusty, but then again not everyone dusts every surface weekly.  Also, a sealed room... would those be especially dusty, if there was nothing to turn to dust in them?  She isn't sure.  

A door opens as they continue to look around.  Another of the hidden doors.  The woman and her drowzee take one look at the main room of the lab filled with powerful and unfamiliar pokemon including a legendary, emits a shriek, then tries to shut the door into the break room before they can reach her.  It slams shut and, having access to the control panel, she deactivates the external button and fumbles for her phone to call her boss.  

"Oh!  That answers the question of how long this stuff has been disused."

She goes to the door, but has no idea how to open it even if the button wasn't disabled.  Does knocking on it work?  

The doors are soundproof.  Azure tries to open it anyway, even knowing that it won't work, then goes to try one of the two other hidden doors.  That one hasn't been locked from the inside.  

Florentho leads, in a combat ready stance, and Azure follows into the doorway of a room with three makeshift jail cells with beds and cages, two occupied, and an empty desk.  

They're still being watched, in person or not. They keep acting accordingly. He tries to observe the men's daemons, when they come in, for more information.

(The kidnapper had mentioned tests. He isn't sure when those are supposed to start. Maybe there are already some running that don't need them to do anything.)

If no one seems to object, they trade off the device. Try to see if they can learn any more about the world from it. Talk silently a few more times. They have more pieces - the device. the guards have some sort of shifts. if they can figure out where the cameras are Kente might be able to block them. Not a plan yet. 

It's - weird, to have nothing to do for so long, but he's stood in a corner for hours before. This is easier in that way, if anything. He has something clear to think about that can last him that long. And he can sit.

He worries about the daemons. He worries about Kente. He tries to think of ideas. 

They look up when new people come in again.

He does some dance exercises, tries to figure something out with the alien music. (One could say that's not the most important way to spend his time here, but there's only so long he can turn the same things over in his head again. And he always thinks better when he isn't doing nothing anyway.)

She is so bored. Why is nothing happening. Why is this cage so small. 

She likes the music. She likes the way the human is moving to the music. She tries to move some to the music too.

He takes a look at the bars and the cages.  That is almost certainly not good.  Florentho goes through the desk, hoping to find keys.  

"Do you know what is happening in this place?" Azure asks the prisoners.

Meanwhile, Alizara is taking a closer look at the machines.  She's flipped the switch on her phone to activate the camera, and is snapping pictures and sending them to her mail account, just in case.  

Verity peers into the room with the cages and is hovering in the doorway, her large daemon close beside her, standing guard in case anyone shows up and tries to start a fight.  

He wants to wrap one of the sheets or blankets around himself. He doesn't do that. If they wouldn't like him doing that, or were offended by it, the consequences would be worse, and if they know he cares more he'll have given them something to use - and if they happen to object to someone keeping subs in barred cages in their nightshirts he wants them to know about it.

"We were told it was a science laboratory studying the effects of Binding, sir, and we were taken from our world as specimens." He doesn't try to lie. He doesn't know who these people are, or why they are here and asking, but they're as likely to have a lie detector, or a way of checking, as anyone. 

More daemons are here! Maybe some of them will do something more interesting than look at her or ignore her while levitating things.

Their clothing looks immediately strange for not being the color of their daemons or typing.  Azure is knowledgeable enough about fleet clothing that he can tell it didn't come from any of the fleet's tailors, but he doesn't know enough about their world's clothing to know that what they're wearing is classified as a nightshirt.   

His own outfit is a white shirt and green pants, both elaborately patterned with white-on-white and green-on-green embroidery containing tiny matching beads.  The seams of the sleeves and the legs below the knees are open, allowing the fabric to flow a bit and show hints of a tight red layer underneath.  It's the height of local fleet fashion, though possibly looks strange to alien eyes.  He holds himself very much like a dom.

"What kind of binding?" he asks, but immediately shakes his head.  "No, you can answer later.  Hey, Araeneve, do something about these bars?  I can't find the keys."

He and Florentho duck out of the room to give them space.  This place is extremely cramped and tight.  While out, he takes out his phone.  "Hey Gramps.  I was reading through the old reports we were digitizing, and read about an old panic room from the early years.  We got bored and decided to go look for it.  Someone had found it first, and filled it with machines and cages full of prisoners.  We're getting them out now.  Don't worry about us - Verity's here so we can take on just about anything."

The largest daemon, taller than a human, walks into the vacated gap between the desk and the bars.  They take one in their teeth and begin to pull, large paws pressing against the others.  Between the bars not being especially well-installed and the daemon being unusually strong, the barrier doesn't last very long.  The cages are similarly broken - they are designed to withstand attacks from inside of the cage, but are fragile enough from the outside that even a weaker-than-daemons human could probably break one open with a concentrated effort.