His eyes were immediately assaulted with harsh white electrical lighting, forcing him to squint as his eyes adjusted. It was quite the contrast with the dimly candle lit tunnels he had just walked through.
"What on Earth... It looks like the London underground or something."
Xaivin slowly opened his eyes, and realised that they were in fact in an underground station of some kind. It seemed to have been long abandoned. Grimy, layers of dirt lined every surface. Faded posters stained with time. Warnings about what to do during an air raid, and a barely readable map of the underground half torn were still stuck to the side of the tunnel.
"Oh my god it is, we are in an abandoned underground station. Oh, this is ridiculously cool. Kit if there was ever a time to wake up now would be it."
"How did they send us here?"
Xaivin was wondering that himself. He felt a little in awe, but not for the same reasons as Tora. The work involved in creating a spell that would take them from tunnels beneath Dorset's coast line to the city of London was quite extensive. At least without proper training, or a considerable amount of mana. He wondered how they were doing it.
Tora was humming as she danced up and down the platform examining things.
"Did you hear that?" She called all of a sudden.
Xaivin listened closely, sure enough, there was the unmistakeable sound of an approaching train.
"That can't be right, this station has to have been abandoned since around the time of the war."
"I imagine this has something to do with the people we are looking for."
As the train pulled into the platform, it became obvious quickly that no one else was on the train and that it was as old and abandoned as the station itself. Definitely summoned by magic.
"This is a little excessive." Xaivin said as the train's doors slid open for them.
The interior was decorated in a different fashion from a modern day tube train. Xaivin decided to stand as the train pulled away from the station. He did not want to bend his wounded knee again. Tora meanwhile began taking photos of the
inside of the train. Had she been doing it on the plaform too? He had not noticed.
"It is unlikely that those photographs will last."
"What do you mean?" Tora asked, frozen in an awkward position mid shot.
"I mean this train is likely to be an illusion. The kind of mana needed to create an object from scratch is more than they could have spared." The train all of a sudden lurched to the side and Xaivin grabbed hold of the hand pole next to him, to stop himself falling over.
"I'm fairly certain this is an ordinary tube train, adjusted slightly to appear old. The spell will fade when we get off, and this train will go back to wherever it was taken from. Your photos will only show the real, modern day train."
"God do you have to ruin everything?" Tora said, collapsing into a seat.
Xaivin was not sure he liked the fact that Tora seemed so comfortable with him, but he supposed it was to be expected given that he was inhabiting her best friend's body.