Ezo didn't reply immediately. He was silent for a few seconds, as if he had to reach into the deep recesses of his mind for the answer. Contrary to Nakia, he kept his eyes forward, rarely switching his focus to the strange new environment. When he finally decided to answer, his voice came out low and soft, so as not to disturb the eerie silence of the tunnel. "If I had to take a guess, I'd say maybe a couple of hundred years. My great-great grandfather claimed to have actually seen a blue sky once......but then again, it might have been the mad ramblings of an old man.." As he spoke of his ancestor, Ezo's mouth twisted as if he'd just gotten a horrible taste in his mouth. He spoke quickly and with a neutral tone, as if he was stating a simple fact.

Nakia nodded and forced a smile at Ezo as she tried to relax, but something about being underground and surrounded by metal just had her skin twitching. Her eyes danced around taking in the community and trying to memorize the way they were going. To Ezo, she asked in a whisper, "How old are these tunnels? How long have humans hidden in the earth?"

"Right. Makes sense I guess...." Giving Lia's fur a gentle rub, he tucked her into the neck of his shirt. "That might help a little." Ezo tried to ignore the fumes, driving deeper into the tunnels, he noticed that at some point the rock walls were supported with metal siding. He slowed down, scanning the unfamiliar surroundings.

In answer to his question, Lia tilted her head like a normal cat and meowed, making her eyes look stupid and thoughtless. Nakia hissed at her, but pulled a clock from one of the pouches in her armor, to hide her scales. Looking at Ezo, she snarled, "We won't be staying there. The smell is choking me from here and Lia's head is pounding." Lia, completely in role of a cat now in case anyone passed by on chance, shook her head and purred confidently. Careful not to catch Ezo with her claws, she crawled up his shirt and nestled against his neck.

"I'm not cold Lia. I've been living in these tunnels for so long, the temperature rarely bothers me anymore. Don't worry about it Nakia, she's asleep." The next few minutes Ezo continued in silence. Soon he aught a whiff of something so foul it made his eyes water. Keeping his blurry gaze straight ahead, He peered down the tunnel as far as he could see, straining to catch a glimpse of something. Ezo reached down to touch Lia's fur. "I smell BG gas. There's a settlement nearby, but I'm not sure how they'll react to you and Nakia. Any ideas on what to do?"

When they past the bodies again, she murmured again, more to herself, "Humans are weird." Her mind spun in the circles that her kind always got stuck in. They killed, but didn't eat from the corpses for nutrition or strength, and they didn't fight for power or for fun, but they still fought. Her ears flicked and she stood up, walking up to Ezo, so that she didn't wake the sleeping girl. Curling against him, she asked, "Are you cold? Nakia doesn't understand that humans feel the elements more than we do...If you want, I could go into another form to keep you warm." She meant the offer to be received not as an insult to his strength, but as a peace offering for her calling him weird earlier, though she was never sure how Ezo would take anything.
Suddenly Nakia was running beside the swoop. She asked in a quiet hiss, "Is Kammie asleep? If not, keep her eyes covered. The carnage ahead is bad and I had to add to it when the rats attacked me."

Ezo's face clouded over at Lia's statement. He turned away from her, his voice betraying a suddenly pensive mood. "Yeah........I guess you're right......we humans can be pretty strange huh?" He accelerated once again, navigating the swoop through a series of tunnels and subsections, slowly descending deeper into the earth. After awhile, Ezo rode alongside a huge metal wall. This was only a small part of the entire pipeline, which was such a massive structure that it alone was the central support of over four thousand of the other tunnel systems. Ezo felt Kammie's motionless arm around his waist and deducted that she had fallen asleep. Turning the swoop down a narrow path, he saw that the pipeline was partially open here for maintenance. Giant filtration cylinders sucked in gallons of the incoming water, and purified it. Looking more closely, he saw something else floating in the water. "Bodies....." There were about thirty or so corpses floating down the pipe, each of them in various stages of decomposition. The thing that sickened Ezo the most though, was that of all the corpses, not one had a natural cause of death. Some had bullet wounds, others were mutilated beyond recognition. And some had knives or other various sharp implements protruding from their carcass. Ezo turned away, disgusted as the charred bodies of a mother and child floated past him, locked in an cold embrace.

"You aren't that lucky," Nakia said with a laugh and the sound of her scales clicking together chimed like bells in the tunnel, but then it dimmed as she headed in the direction that Ezo had said. Lia went over to the swoop and crawled in, shifting into her small form and curling him Kammie's lap, hoping that the girl either wouldn't notice her trembling or wouldn't comment on it. Not in a million years would she admit that she had been so scared. Looking at Ezo, she purred, "You went from hating Nakia and me to joking with us. Humans are so weird."

"Awww geez, now I won't be able to get that new bike." Ezo smiled at her remark, Nodding in the direction he'd heard her voice. "Nice to hear your voice again. Was almost afraid we'd seen the last of you." He laughed at the thought until Kammie pinched his side. "Nakia can take care of herself you blockhead!" "I know that dimwit, it was a joke!" The two obviously had gotten over their previous fight and were now acting normally. "Anyway ladies, there should be a maintenance tunnel about 200 meters below us. If we can get to that, we should be able to follow the pipeline to a semi-inhabitable location."

"Got it!" Lia roared back, before spinning on heel and running away, heading down the tunnel like he told her to. At the three way split, she paced in front of them, knowing she had to head left, but wanting to go right for some reason. The scents in the tunnel confused her, all musky and wet and cold. Her nose wrinkled in displeasure of it all, but it wasn't horrid, just new and complex; standing on her hindlegs, she shifted again, into her more humanoid form and was down at the other end, looking at all the different branches, her ears pricked for the sound of the swoop.

~O~

Nakia was in the tunnels in her animal form, her tongue flicked out to gather scents as she looked for her sister's trail and when she found it, she pursued it easily. The empty air of the gap warned her and she managed to leap over it and actually reached Lia before Kammie and Ezo. She tackled her sister and the two rolled around in mock fight, though Nakia was grateful for the darkness. The fear that shown in her eyes when she had scented the gap...for a horrible instant she had thought her sister dead. When Ezo showed up, she looked at him, careful to stay out of the light where she'd be hardest to see, she called, "You're a bad babysitter. I'm not paying you."

Ezo breathed a sigh of relief at the sound of Lia's voice. Cupping his hands around his mouth he called out to her. "Don't worry about going over the hole. There's a small subtunnel that branches off from here. Kammie and I will use it to get around this. I think the main tunnel continues in your direction anyway. You'll probably come to a three way split somewhere down the line. Just take the left path and you'll meet up with me and Kammie. Or rather with your speed, We'll meet up with you. You got all that?

She could see Ezo just a few feet from the edge on the far side and her tail flicked. Her sides were still heaving and she felt like she'd never be able to walk again, since she was so terrified, but eventually, she managed to gather enough breath to roar, wordlessly the first time, and the second time she called, "Are we going this way or do I have to go over the hole again?" Shakily, she rose to her paws and started pacing to get feeling back in her limbs.