Miles' POV
Slipping our fingers under the glass, we tried to lift the dome, however it was firmly locked so we walked around to the other side and found the opening latch bolted to the ground. I gave Cecil my hammer to smash the lock. Meanwhile, I took out a piece of rope from my bag and tied it around the nearest chimney, pulling the knot as tightly as I could. We were soon ready to break into the toy factory.

I helped Cecil push the dome away and we placed it upside down on the opposite side of us. "I'll go first. If anything goes wrong, I'll tug on the rope. That will be your signal to pull me up. If the coast is clear, I'll whistle. Got it?" He nodded, as I held onto the rope. I chucked one end down the hole of the ceiling and heard the tail scatter lightly on the floor. From up here, the room looked like a murky chasm with danger lurking in every corner.

I held my breath and jumped. Cascading down the cord, I soon reached the ground. I waited half a minute to hear for sounds, showing any signs of whether someone was here. When I was certain I was alone, I whistled the four note melody Katniss played to the mockingjays in The Hunger Games. I heard Cecil preparing to repel down the rope, his feet shuffling on the rooftop.

I slipped my bag off my back and felt through its contents, in pure darkness, searching for the torches. As I pressed one of the buttons, I heard a loud thump! behind me. My heart jumped into my throat. Swivelling as swiftly as possible, I shone the torch towards the noise, only to reveal...Cecil - once again, flat-faced on the floor. He lifted his head groggily, groaning in pain. His face was flooded with beams of illuminating light. He squinted and shielded himself with his hand. "What happened?" I hissed.

"You know... just inspecting this floor," he mumbled casually. Cecil dragged his index finger along the tiles, collecting a pile of dust at his finger tip. Then he blew the fine particles away, watching as they were scattered into thin air. "I definitely did not fall down the entire length of the rope..." he said more quietly, getting up from the ground.
"If you're going to keep falling all over the place, can you at least do it a bit more quietly?" I snapped. That sounded less harsh in my head.

Cecil's shoulders drooped and his gaze moved away from mine. I could tell I struck a nerve, with what just happened earlier. I exhaled deeply, shaking my head, and said, "I'm sorry. I'm just really stressed about Jacob. I can't imagine what he's going through right now, and if there's nobody here, it means Brooks and the kids are gone. We have no chance of finding him now." Cecil clasped my shoulder and said, "Hey, we'll get him back. I promise." I looked up at him and nodded, handing him the other torch. He explained, "We should try to look for some clues. There has to be something here that can help us."

We decided to split up to cover more ground, with me going left and Cecil going right.The dome where we came down from was located in the central atrium. Rays of brilliant moonlight were thrust into the room through the roof opening, creating a bright circle around me. After Cecil left, the only sources of light came from the rising moon and my torch.

I searched the circular room for anything useful. At the back was a receptionist's desk. Shelves of fairly empty pigeon holes and a bare rack of key holders were attached to the wall behind it. On the desk was nothing but a pile of letters dating back to a few years ago, explaining the developments of a brand-new toy. The documents had been sent back from the potential buyers, and the more recent ones were eviction letters stating that the factory would be closed down due to ' a dangerous production of horrific toys'...whatever that meant. The drawers were empty except for a mouldy piece of mint that was stuck to the bottom. The pigeon holes contained nothing useful either.

On the other end of the room was a large of set doors that were locked from the inside. Positioned along the walls - or should I say, wall (since, you know, circles only have one side) - were dozens of ripped up posters printed with faint images of all the toys the factory had produced. Apart from a few warmly coloured chairs arranged in a semi circle around the desk, there wasn't anything else to see. For a room this big, it was way too desolate.

I decided to see if my luck would change if I went to another room. The atrium branched out into two hallways. On the left, a sign labelled 'Storage Room' was suspended from the ceiling and on the right, another sign with the words 'Toy Making Room' on it. I had to duck under the sign to get to the next room as it was hanging too low. The building was ominously quiet; the only sounds I could hear were the clicking of my shoes against the hard surface and my own shallow, quaky breaths.

My prediction of what the Storage Room would look like was completely different to what it was actually like. Imagine being in a confined room with crumbling wooden chests strewn across the floor and cobwebs lining the walls like a decorative border. Imagine pulling the cord of a single bulb, dangling from a thread, and being defenceless against a wave of aged dust particles as it surges into your lungs, slowly suffocating you...

Now scrap that thought.

When I entered the room, I found a light switch on the side of the wall. Curious to see whether the electricity was still working, I flipped the switch and was instantly blinded by the room's radiance. I sibilated a curse and tried to blink the floating red spots out of my eyes.

When my eyes had adjusted to the brightness, I was taken aback by the size of the storage area. The room was twice as big as the atrium, but in a shape of a rectangle this time. Although the width of the room was quite small, the length reached out as far as my eyes could see. Maybe it just seemed to be this big because all the walls were painted in the most dazzling shade of white I'd ever seen. Throughout the room were evenly spaced aisles of cream-coloured shelves. Every shelf was filled with neatly stacked boxes which still looked relatively new, and they reached so high that they almost touched the ceiling.

Each aisle was labelled with a letter, ranging from A to Z. The only thing that came into my mind was 'check all the boxes', which I admit was kinda dumb since there were literally thousands of boxes in this room alone. Nonetheless I ran through the aisles, checking the items in the boxes every here and there. I even climbed some of the shelves to reach the higher crates.

Inside the first box in aisle A, the toy at the top of the pile was a cross-breed between a stuffed bear and giraffe. It had the round, pudgy belly and legs of a bear, and its furry skin had the same colour and pattern of a giraffe's hide. The toy's pink underbelly had the name 'Grizlee Longneck' sewed onto it. The neck was elongated around fifteen centimetres more than a normal stuffed toy's. It had the face of a giraffe and had two small semi-circles for ears. It was sort of cute, except for the fact that instead of the eyes being stitched on, there were two large, camera-like marbles that bulged out of its face. It reminded me of those fake glasses with the google eyes that were attached to springs, so it looked like the eyes were jumping out of the person's face.

All the other toys in that crate were the same too. Then I moved along a few boxes and opened another one in the same aisle. "Grizlee Longneck," I muttered to myself, staring at another box of giraffe-bear hybrids. I checked a few more boxes in aisle A. I uttered under my breath, "Grizlee Longneck again... and again... and again..." In the next aisle, I climbed up the shelves, checking the contents of most of the boxes before I moved up to the next one. "Grizlee. Grizlee. Grizlee again..." I continued to rummage through as many boxes as I could, mumbling the same thing over and over again. "Longneck, Longneck, Longneck... And another Longneck!"

You'd think that there'd be a variety of toys in this factory considering how large the place is, but nooo. Someone thought it would be a good idea to only stock up on bloody giraffe-bears! I kept searching all the shelves until I eventually reached the last aisle. And again, I only found the Grizlee Longneck stuffed animals. Something told me this wasn't just a coincidence so I grabbed one of the toys, switched off the lights and made my way to the Toy Making Room to find Cecil.