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Nicodemus enters the umbra with his entourage, whoever they happen to be, and after some final discussions, he settles in near the node, so as to better enhance the magick he can work, and begins his extended ritual to peer into the secrets of the hospital's past--from a couple blocks away from where he's actually going to be looking. There's no light show or flare or fanfare or magickal sparkles. Just Nick, who's stripped off his shoes and socks and rolled up his pant legs, so he can stand in the cool waters of the fountain, eyes closed as if meditating.
What Nick sees before he begins to look back is a scene of absence and devastation; what little is left of Hilliard in the umbra is a quickly disintegrating metal skeleton that has been burned black by the memory of fire and explosions. The area around it is a spiritual wasteland; no active spirits can be perceived anywhere within at least a block of the former hospital site.
As he begins to peel back the passage of time, he sees this husk slowly build itself up again. Floors and walls return in splinters with the ghosts of spiritual flame flickering among them, glass slowly pieces itself together. And banes, oh, the banes. The area has only recently been emptied, because within only a few months the area is crawling with nasty spirits of all types, still feeding off the misery of Hilliard Memorial even when it's Realm counterpart has gone. In the realm, however, the vision is different. Nick feels a cold tug somewhere beyond his stomach, but what he sees never changes; it's only the empty lot, always the empty lot, despite all the activity around it. Even when the Umbral reflection is alive and vibrant (if still horribly infested with banes) the Realm remains empty.
Nicodemus was around and experienced the hospital when it was fugly and functional, and he witnessed the fallout from the fire that destroyed it and the bane-splosion that resulted, and he's seen the abandoned husk. Nick pushes further back into time, angling for the many, many decades ago when--or even before--the hospital had been built, so as to get a better baseline for the before-and-after picture for what the hospital's role seems to be. Cold in the realm? Don't look at it. Be aware of it, but don't poke at it--especially with magick.
The Realm remains empty, though he sees the grass in the empty lot continually grow and be cut back, browning in the winter only to green in the spring. No one seems to do anything else with it. No one plays there. No one goes on walks or picnics. Not even students from the medical research buildings take their lunch there. All the world seems to ignore that particular space beyond the most basic of maintenance.
In the umbra, Hilliard continues to degress back in time. It becomes newer looking, cleaner, with less and less banes, until enough decades have been rolled back that it starts to fade, becoming less prominent as what should be its realm counterpart de-ages.
Nicodemus pauses in his scrying as the incongruity of the past, the umbral reflection of the older hospital, and the utter non-existence of any hospital in the realm presents a peculiar paradox. The material past erased, yet the spiritual past is not. Yet. Almost as if there were two alternate timelines for two different, yet parallel(ish), realities. He pauses. Back in real time, in the fountain, Nick bends down, selects a spirit-coin from the fountain. "Heads: Further into the past to find what I seek. Tails: Further into the future." He flips it, using just one eye to track what the result is. Allowing Entropy to decide his next course of action.
The coin spins, briefly catches a gleam of moonlight, and lands. Tails.
Nicodemus closes his one open eye, no longer splitting his attention between past and present and two different locations; it gets a little confusing as they overlap. His senses move forward (or backwards less?) in Time, searching for some kind of event. Or perhaps a very distinctive non-event.
The metal skeleton remains vanish rapidly before his senses, while in the Realm construction begins in earnest on the new Hilliard. The future is always less clear than the past, and this is no exception; Nick cannot make out fine details, only impressions of life; people moving back and forth in the realm, only a general gist of how much time may or may not be passing...but at some point, and he is certain it is not a point that is comfortably far into the future, the metal skeleton stops disintegrating and simply vanishes. The ground cracks--on both sides of the Gauntlet, then depresses downward, Umbra and Realm moving in absolute tandem, until a massive sinkhole opens up like a hungry mouth, swallowing ground and people and construction equipment, and suddenly Nick realizes that it's not just physical things or spiritual reflections of those things...the Gauntlet shreds and tears apart, as if pulled into the hole as well. The edges of the hole continue to crumble outward, swallowing cars, telephone poles, the parking garage, and then the medical research buildings. He can't see the bottom, where all these things go. Only empty black.
Oops. Too far. Taking care to not even look intentionally at the black hole of doom, Nick rolls the clock back on what he's looking at. Before the Event happens. And he looks specifically at the realm-side construction, attempting to capture a mental blueprint of what the hospital will be once finished. And where, perhaps, the hole seems to initiate from.
Something strange happens. Nick tries to look back from the event, and the attempt seems, at least at first, to fail. The hole remains, as does the shredded Gauntlet, both spirit and Realm united in that spot in utter destruction. There doesn't seem to be any change whatsoever despite rolling back the proverbial clock...but no, when he widens his senses a little, the world around the hole goes back as it should. People walk the streets, cars drive by, the sun rises and sets; all seem oblivious to the devouring hole in their midst, the hole that shouldn't be present and wasn't present when Nick went forward in time.
Nicodemus observes the scene for a time, trying to figure out what in the world he's looking at and what is happening. After a few moments, he extends his perceptions further back in time to where--really, really, really--there should be no hole present.
The hole remains. Back, and back Nick looks, and the hole never goes away, like a light shadow burned onto the eye. He knows it shouldn't be there, can't possibly be there, and yet it stays.
Nicodemus ceases looking about in Time eventually. Puzzling over what he's seeing for a while longer, he experiments with looking about in space. But this time, not on the surface. Not higher up into the air, where the hole does not seem to exist. Instead, he peers through the ground itself. How deep does this go? Or is it merely on the surface?
When he looks again, now in the present, with no Time effect active, the hole isn't there. The hospital site looks as it did; disintegrating metal frame in the Umbra, empty lot with the beginnings of construction in the Realm. The Gauntlet is solid, whole...on the surface. As soon as he starts looking down, it becomes fragmented, and then vanishes. The effect is more subtle than it should be, but can't be hidden from his senses. As Nick looks down, first through the remains of the hospital's basement rooms, then lower, he finds...what looks like the parking garage. It certainly leads back to the parking garage entrance, but looking at it like this, diving straight down as he did, it seems distorted and stretched, and certainly not where it should be, as it stretches under the hospital rather than only a few levels across the street. It continues to go down and down, where it becomes black with thick, glistening tendrils. Nearer the surface, these seem unmoving, but the further down he goes, the more often he sees...something. Most of the time it's just wriggling bits of ooze, but now and then he catches a glimpse of something large and lupine, eyeless, or distorted figures that only look human from a very far distance. The walls of the 'parking garage' are cracked and ruined the further he goes down, and still it appears to keep going. There's something down there. Cold. Empty. It tugs at him, as if trying to pull his attention, to get him to look further.
Nope. Nope nope nope-ity nope. Nick backs his probing off, back to the surface, and swings wide around where the hospital used to be located. In fact, he brings his senses back a few blocks over to where the park is. Where he is in real time. And extends his sense down into the ground there--in both the spirit and real--to determine if the blackness is spread to beneath the glade itself--and to try and find how wide and deep it may have spread.
Below the park itself he finds only the sewers and clean earth. But around it--a respectable distance around it, he finds thin black tendrils reaching from below and continuing past the park itself. They go north. Toward the commercial district. For the most part he finds only a few, mostly pencil thin or thinner, but now and then there's some sort of organic spasm, and a bit of the tendrils become fatter.
Nick's perceiving in the present now, instead of the past or future where he can't actually influence anything. Identifying one of the slender tendrils, he begins gathering gravitational forces and..... quits, dropping the effect before following through. He drops all his scrying, in fact. A single word escapes his lips. "Cancer."
The park seems much brighter, more comforting, and yet somehow less safe than it did before he began his ritual. There's no sign on the surface that anything is wrong beyond the usual tension at the edge of the park's borders, still easily held by the park's spirit guardians.
Nicodemus loiters in the park for a time, as there are guardians present. He then uses some Mind-related magick to directly share what he saw with Val and Slug.
