Exigency - a case or situation that demands prompt action or remedy; emergency

I hate dust. 

I hate it because it smells terrible, even through a filtration mask that was meant specifically to clean the air. Even after having been in it for the past four days from sunup to sundown. 

I lifted a piece of brick and moved it carefully aside, using a coarse brush to dust off the floor and reveal some of the wood beneath it. It was heavily caked in dirt no matter how much I ran a brush over it, and the deep scratches would take hours to dig out by hand. Reaching one hand back into my bag, I pulled a small can out along with a rag. 

Darius was hovering; I could feel his presence arching over me, directing the camera for the best angle. With a roll of my eyes and a flick of my mask down, I let my finger press down on the nozzle. 

There was a sizzle and a pop and I turned away, closing my eyes to the neon green colors. Turning back once it was done, I let my rag drape over the top of the bubbling mess and scrubbed. There was another minute of hissing before I moved the rag away to reveal a freshly cleaned cherry wood floor. 

Darius set to taking photos while I lifted another few bricks away to clean another area. The scratches were well defined and deep set into the wood; the edges a darker color than the rest of the wood. 

That's strange. I leaned closer to look at them, flipping the lens of my glasses to zoom in. The edges of the groves were darker, significantly so. They appeared as if they had been burnt into the wood. 

My acid cleaner wasn't going to be able to fix that.

But the grooves were bizarre. They weren't linear, as if from furniture, or plenty and shallow as if an animal had been there. The lines were precise and curved, as if they were hand drawn on the floor. Almost as if there was a pattern.

I moved more quickly now, disregarding any bricks that may have some importance. I could look over those another time; we could always bag them and bring them back to a lab. Darius handed me rag after rag, taking the ones I disposed of quickly. The putrid smell filled the air and made the dust float up through my mask even more. It smelled absolutely atrocious. Whatever these marks were had to be important and gain me a lot of points, otherwise it certainly wasn't worth it and I was going to find everything possible in the bricks. 

Almost immediately after the fizzing stopped I began to scrub, crawling on my knees to reach farther out. The cherry wood was dark, an almost red color that seemed as sinister as the house had appeared itself. The acid was effervescent and green and illuminated the walls. I could feel the change in the air filtration, see in the corner of my eye as my hair curled and uncurled and swayed in a breeze I could see but not feel. 

I yanked on the rag and swept it over the larger area, only backing away when it had gone from white to neon green to purple and began to smoke. Dropping it into the bag Darius had open,  I stood and moved away from the now exposed floor. 

Darius was next to me in the next second. I didn't pay him much attention other than taking away the remote for the camera from him to monitor it myself. The design was large and from our angle very odd. It would be best to have a large photo of it, one taken from the top. 

I let Darius take over the photos while I bagged the bricks and moved them towards the door. My task was to clear as much of the floor as possible before we had to leave, that way when I came back we didn't have to step over potentially revealing items on the floor. 

Besides, the parlor wasn't as interesting as people seemed to think. There were a few broken shelves off to the side, a fireplace, and some furniture we had already pulled out. There had also been a couple paintings but another team had extracted those and were analyzing as much as they could. 

Once Darius was finished, we set back to work. We had disclosed much of the design on the floor, but there was still a lot to go. And now that I was looking at it, the swirls seemed somewhat familiar. 

When the sun finally came from outside the clouds, it streamed through the gap in the roof to the floor. Stunning was one word to describe it. It blazed a bright red and shone as if it had been freshly polished. For a moment, I could imagine distinctly what the house must have looked like when it was in its prime: rich upper class family, maybe two hundred years ago, swirling around in lavish clothing admiring a lavish house. The colors alone would have been something to catalog - maybe I would take a look in the Recreation room when we returned. 

The sun had slanted across the room and moved away by the time we were finished. Darius stayed back a minute to finish off his photos while I loaded the new personal cars with the bricks. The hovering vehicle shuddered a moment and dropped height a little, but it quickly readjusted the thrusters and balanced out.

There were four other two-person personal cars on the road; each one was being loaded up and turned on for the ride back. We would head back as a pack, as usual, as was regulated by the Square.