“Where she stops...” with Larry if that’s okay gurgles
@brrnedoutbrrista
Larry's life wasn't a secret, the salaryman quite open with his youth of delinquency, it simply that no one tended to believe him when he told stories about the things he used to get up to. He didn't see the need for secrets, having learned the hard way that they only compliacted things in pointless ways, but there was one secret he had to keep for everyone's safety: the crater. It wasn't one he wanted to keep, there plenty of times Agni had seen the aftermath of what could happen when he went down into the forbidden area, or when things made it out of the crater that he then had to deal with. Hell, they'd seen that first hand, Larry making it just in time to keep them from falling victim to one of the anomolies that lived in Area Zero back when they'd first met, it being part of what frustrated him so much that he couldn't tell them what was going on.
The worst though was when they'd caught him in one of his coughing fits, all that crystal dust shredding his lungs and leading to a fresh stain of blood on his hand that had left them panicking for his wellbeing. He'd done his best to reassure them, that it was something he was taking care of as best he could, not that there was anything he could really do, but it still pained him that he couldn't tell them the whole truth on the matter.
That was until a group of students had managed to make their way down into the crater without anyone the wiser until it was all over, the AI of the professor having lended an unseen hand in scrambling sensors and disabling alarms that normally went off when someone ventured too close to the area, let alone down into it. He'd gotten the reprimand of a lifetime after that despite the fact there was nothing he could have done to stop it, it only that things worked out for the better that kept his job in tact. That, and he was rather indispensable, whether Geeta liked to admit it or not.
Now, he didn't exactly have permission to tell Agni anything, but that didn't stop him from taking them down into the crater the moment it had been deemed 'safe', or at least as safe as anywhere else in the world, it admittedly a pretty sight even after all the times he'd seen it. It still wasn't open to the public, but Agni was different.
"Here it is, Area Zero." Was his introduction to the wide array of crystaline space as the lift door creeked open, Larry tossing out Scout out of habit to keep an eye on them incase any dangers drew in too close. "Technically, I'm still not supposed to be showing you this place, but you deserve to know what I've been keeping from you all this time."