The Seal room is one of the largest rooms in the structure, after all in the past huge amounts of creatures and material had flowed in and out of this room. The ceilings were as high as a cathedral and huge unadorned pillars were evenly spaced throughout the length of the room. On the far wall sat the opening to a huge tunnel, about thirty feet high and forty feet wide one could have easily walked an elephant through it with room to spare. Well, the elephant would not have fit through now because across the entrance of the tunnel sat a door, or more properly a seal. It appeared as two huge iron gates securely padlocked together. Of course, that is just an illusion that I put up to make the seal visible, normally to the average person the tunnel would just open onto endless darkness, but that gave me the willies so I changed it to a gate.

  In front of the gate were a swarm of the blue creatures, I generally referred to the whole race as Coptos whenever showing them to others, though I’ve heard that my enemies had less pleasant names for them. Among the blue Coptos are a few of the yellow ones, busily cleaning scorch marks off of the floor tiles, standing in front of the seal are four larger bulkier Coptos all colored a deep blood red. The Blues are all deep in their work, with one group of ten seated in a loose circle their eyes shut and looks of intense concentration on their faces, one of the circle has a large piece of paper that it is slowly tracing something on. The rest of the Blues were gathered around the group whispering back and forth in their dry dead leaf voices.

“Borer, get over here and give a report.” I call out, and one of the Blues quickly detaches himself and hurries over. The Borer looks like any other blue Copto excepting the unique gold glimmer coming from his eyes, but he is quite notable among the Blues as being one of the first ones ever made and the only one I had bothered to name so far. Of course, he had been through dozens of comprehensive upgrades since his first creation but he is still my first major success.

Stolen story; please report.

“Sir, we have been successful in piercing through a thin area of the seal, we did not find an open pore as you suspected might exist, but this works equally as well.”

“I can’t help but notice that there seems to be some new soot deposits around the seal, is there anything you wish to add to your report?” I question raising an eyebrow. Borer was the most intelligent Blue I had ever created and as such he had begun to pick up some human-like qualities, the most notable of which is attempting to hide less positive information from his reports. He would never lie but might forget to mention some pertinent details.

“Oh yes, of course, there was a small energy release from the seal during the piercing process, two of the seeker group have had their remains moved down to storage for reprocessing. No great loss and we are confident that there is a low possibility of future energy leaks.” he replied brightly.

I raise my eyebrows but do not comment on the further loss of Borer's subordinates. “Alright what has the probe found for us outside of the seal?”

“Well sir I’m afraid the probe you made is mostly suited to examining the seal itself and is not constructed with the intent of gaining information about the world outside, but not to worry I've determined it is good enough to tell the difference between light and darkness in their various grades and have set the seekers and scribes to create a black and white rendering of our surrounding environment, the first part should be finishing up soon.”

I nod and walk over to the circle of seekers in front of the Seal just as the one that had been tracing on the paper hands his work to a nearby scribe before grabbing a fresh sheet of blank paper and returning to his tracing. The scribe hands me the sheet before striding off on some errand or other. I stare at the image for a while taking in the whole scene. The whole image is drawn as though the observer is above everything and looking down. It shows a small circle of clean wooden floor beyond which the image is not rendered, probably too far for the probe, at the center is a small pedestal like you might see in a museum and sitting upon that pedestal

“God damn those rat bastards!” I growl staring at the image incredulously, “They’ve Sealed me in my own teacup!”