The cold spot wasn't a monster.
It was a memory.
Jinx, ever the pragmatist, was the first one to investigate, a heavy-duty flashlight in one hand and a look of profound annoyance on her face.
She swept the beam across the crumbling brick of the far corner, her light cutting through decades of dust and shadow.
Behind a pile of rusted, forgotten machinery that looked like a robot's graveyard, she found it.
A faint, shimmering distortion in the air.
It wasn't a Gate.
It was a scar.
A pale, ghostly wound in reality, left behind by a Gate that had closed long, long ago.
"Well, that's anti-climactic," she announced, her voice echoing in the cavernous space.
She kicked at a loose piece of rebar on the floor.
"It's dead," she declared with a cynical finality.
"Just a residual energy signature."
She sniffed the air, her nose wrinkling.
"Smells like a ghost's fart."
The tension that had gripped the room broke with a collective sigh of relief.
