As far as Jin can tell, the building heavily served administrative purposes. Both of the large doors connected to the throne room lead directly to large rooms hosting service desks. In the halls beyond, offices and meeting rooms dominate the available space. That’s what the little remaining stone furniture implies, at least. Nothing in the ways of paper documents seem to remain, either due to them being taken or decayed.
As the halls twist, turn and wrap around the building, the girls find themselves in a circular room with the large central pillar in the middle of it. Except unlike outside, the pillar has obvious metallic doors in it that have small plaques to the right of them. The door closest to them has a fancier frame than the others they can see, so Jin makes her way towards that one.
She rests a hand on one and carefully channels her mana.
“I think this is an elevator.”
Sage bounces on the balls of her feet. “What’s an elevator?!”
Carefully, Jin alters the spell structure slightly to bypass the security features. Like the front doors to the building, the elevator also doesn’t prevent formula budding. But unlike it, the plaque doesn’t use inlaid enchantments; which really just means that instead of following metal inlay placed within a magically inert material, the enchantments follow ‘seared-in’ channels within a (usually less) magically active material. The latter is necessary for any enchantment made on a smaller scale. However, they are also slightly less stable—an issue rarely comes up.
Except it is an issue right now. Jin frowns while trying to keep the image of the enchantments in her mind without activating them. Some sections of it are just… broken. The channels have conflicting directives and symbols garbled into meaninglessness. It’s only a few sections, and Jin is able to bud off additional formula to solve the problem, but it’s odd. If decay takes place, it usually just erases existing formula rather than corrupting it.
“An elevator is what’s about to take us to the rest of this facility.”
She has to take several minutes to make sure everything is repaired, if temporarily. The enchantment corruption makes her uneasy, but these plaques must be obscenely old. Who knows what could have happened to them? Jin channels a significant portion of mana into the plaque and lets the enchantment take effect.
The mana cost was more than she expected. By… quite a bit, actually. That's more than a little concerning. She feels light headed from the expenditure; she better lay off the spell usage for a while. A low grinding noise can be heard from above, slowly descending downward.
Honestly, Jin is having second thoughts about taking it. She doesn’t know nearly as much about the why of things as she would like to, but…
A bell chimes and the doors in front of them slide open to reveal a small room with reflective metallic walls. Surprisingly, the inside is lit by a soft, warm light from the top. That would explain in part why the enchantments diverted her mana elsewhere, but a simple light isn’t enough for the unexpected mana expense.
Sage gasps as the doors open and quickly skips into the elevator. She stares up at the light source—a small stone circle with a soft enough glow to not hurt the eyes.
“Jin! This is like your light miracle! Kind of! And these walls are so reflective! We have a mirror at home but these whole walls are mirrors!” She spins in a circle trying to see everything in the small room at once.
Jin steps inside tentatively, cautious of Sage’s outstretched and spinning arms.
She looks at the board inside the elevator to try and figure out what any of the runes and buttons mean, but gives up prematurely and examines the spell structure instead. It’s easier to guess based on what the structures imply, anyway.
“Metal working was a strong point of the dwarves. Their talents for metallurgy were only overshadowed by their talent for enchantments.”
Only one of the buttons requires mana input, so obviously Jin starts investigating that one. Specifically, it’s the button that seems to send the elevator downwards. She takes a moment to examine the spell structure to make sure she understands what it does. It wouldn’t do to accidently set off some security feature she overlooked.
“I bet they were pretty important when they were around, huh? Our village really relies on traders for our metal. We don’t have a blacksmith, so any time we need anything made of metal we have to go out of our way to buy it. It gets expensive! Papa said he wants to recruit a blacksmith from the city one day, haha! We could definitely use one. Oh! Maybe when I’m an inquisitor I can convince someone to come to Rock Orchard for him!”
The enchantments on this button have broken sections to it as well, but fortunately they all look to be easy fixes. Jin channels mana into the button while pressing it. The elevator doors slide close with a ding, and the room begins to slowly descend with no sign of imminent death.
Sage’s eyes go wide and she spreads her arms out and the feeling of descent. “Uhh… What’s happening? My stomach feels all floaty, are we falling?!” The last statement was added with a shade of panic to it.
Jin tucks her notebook under an arm and sticks her hands into her pockets, then leans against one of the walls. “We’re going downwards.”
Sage relaxes after seeing Jin’s reaction, then seems interested in the sensation. She jumps to test the feeling. When the elevator sways in response to the movement she stops and sticks her arms out again, but still looks delighted by the results. “Cool!”
She keeps bouncing on the balls of her feet, shifting the way the elevator moves ever so slightly with each bounce. Jin has used less stable elevators like this in the past enough to not be worried and tries to keep up her casual demeanor. She’s not totally sold on Sage’s insistence that she’s not scared of heights but… The more she can avoid raising the other girl’s anxieties the better, right? The line of thought is admittedly foreign to her. Jin frowns.
The descent takes… quite a while, actually. Sage started babbling about the importance of a village blacksmith again that Jin is only able to partially tune out.
Eventually the elevator stops with a ding and the doors slide open again to a short hallway with a heavy looking stone door at the end. They exchange a glance and move towards it.
“Kinda funny that it just leads to another door, huh?”
“Probably a security feature. The buttons on the elevator that make it go up don’t require mana to be channeled into them, so long as the structure as a whole is powered up. Only the one heading down here did. There’s probably some kind of identity verification...” She says the last line as she places her hand on the plaque beside the new door.
This plaque is made of some kind of stone and has inlaid enchantments stretching out behind it. Sure enough, it looks like some kind of password is required to return a positive from some database too far away for her mana sight to see. Jin alters the structure to always return a positive and floods it with mana. The door clunks loudly and slowly grinds open.
Jin glances back at Sage with a self satisfied grin. “My guess is on a treasury, you?”
“Oooh! Yeah! Storing valuables underground with only one way in seems smart! People would have to tunnel through rock to get to it if they aren’t a super cool cleric like you.”
Jin turns away to walk inside, bringing the light spell with her. Hopefully Sage didn’t notice the heat rising in her face. Magic this easy isn’t that cool.
She shoots two of the orbs high up into the room and amplifies them like she did in the throne room. Shadows are banished in mass and a clear image of the room is revealed.
Which is to say, the relative emptiness of the room is revealed. Tall, mostly empty shelves take up much of the space, along with opened, empty chests and racks. Everywhere she turns more unused storage is in sight.
She’s not disappoint—no. Jin is disappointed. She frowns, scanning the room for anything interesting. Most items on the shelves are just cuts of stone, ingots, and otherwise shaped metals. Even if there probably wasn’t going to be any good enchanted items, she still was still hoping to find something in here.
She takes a deep breath. There’s more to the room than just what they can see right now, not all is hopeless yet.
“How good are you at finding things, Sage?”
Sage’s head is on a swivel as she’s similarly scanning the room for anything. Rather than frown, her eyes are alight with opportunity. “Very,” is all she says, and then she quickly stalks off deeper into the treasury.
Except the moment Sage passes one of the shelves, Jin hears a sharp yelp from her, followed by her saying, “Jin? There’s, um, there’s a uh…”
Jin is already walking towards her. Sage isn’t able to say what she sees before Jin can see it for herself.
Two skeletons lie in a heap in between a pair of shelves. Which is surprising, if only because she hasn’t seen any other skeletons until now. Their clothes have deteriorated to nothing, but the telltale glint of metal draws her attention to the rings on their fingers. With any luck, maybe they’re enchanted.
The skeletons look human at first glance, but some of the bones are just a little too short, and the skulls just a little too wide. Blackened stains coat the pale stone beneath them.
Jin frowns. “Are there many skeletons in the rest of the ruins down here?”
Sage shakes her head after a moment. “No, not really. There’s um, a few. But they’re all uh, in beds, and stuff. Not just, around.”
Hmm…
Jin approaches the bodies and checks the rings on them for enchantments. Sure enough, once she gets close enough to test them they light up in her mind’s eye. Except… Every ring on them is almost entirely corrupted. What the hell?
She pulls off one ring with a sigil on it and turns it over in her hands. It’s only after she’s holding it that she realizes that she had to touch the remains of what is, in all likelihood, a dwarven mage. Shouldn’t she be… Bothered by that? Or otherwise affected?
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Although she also held a human skull with hardly a second thought back in the academy. Maybe she shouldn’t be surprised.
Sage steps forwards beside her and starts muttering something under her breath. Jin picks up a couple words like ‘soul’ and ‘journey’ and decides to not bother trying to listen.
Of all of them, the ring she has in her hands is interesting, since it seems to have both inlaid and drawn enchantments. All the drawn enchantments are entirely unreadable, but the inlaid seems to work as some kind of… Unreasonably complicated transistor? Why?
Jin stands and looks around again, trying to get a better grasp of where exactly they are so she can hopefully start figuring out some answers.
The ‘treasury’ appears to be a circular room like the one they were in above, and wraps around where the pillar would be, were there not a short security hallway in between. At least from where she’s standing, she doesn’t see any other doors in the room.
Sage eventually stands up, and Jin holds the ring out to her. “This is the only enchanted item they had that isn’t entirely defunct, but I have no idea what it’s supposed to do. It looks like a transistor, which is usually just a small part of a bigger enchantment.” Sage blinks and takes the ring.
She glances towards the skeletons, but then her attention looks to shift more firmly. “Oh, ok. Um. That sounds interesting, what’s a transistor?”
How to simplify that down? “…The short of it is that it works as a connecting piece that can allow or disallow mana through. Occasionally they work to amplify the amount of mana going through at once. Not this one, though. This one is strictly a connector, I think, and not one I’m used to.”
“Huh. That’s kinda cool, I guess.”
Jin shrugs. Sage looks disappointed, but smiles and tugs at her cloak to slip the ring into a pocket. Jin hasn’t noticed until now, but Sage has a lot of pockets sewn onto the inside of her cloak.
Sage glances back towards the skeletons. Jin frowns and says, “We should keep looking around. The metals on the shelves might be valuable, but I’m still hoping we can find something better.”
Sage nods and tries to give a reassuring smile. “Okie dokie! I’ll do my best!” Her smile wavers when her eyes turn yet again towards the skeletons, but she distinctly turns away from them and further into the room.
Jin moves to look around too. There’s another door on the opposite side from where they came in. She guesses it’s another elevator since the doorframe looks mostly the same. A bit odd, having two entry ways.
They also find a few more skeletons in the room. Only one of them had any enchanted items, and it is just as garbled as the other rings. In other words, useless besides its aesthetic value. She notices Sage collecting them anyway. Guess she isn’t too concerned about looting corpses either, huh.
Eventually she finds a barrel partially filled with some kind of ingots with a shiny silver-blue hue to them, knocked over and forgotten in a corner. She’s surprised the wood survived this long, considering it must have been thousands of years since this place was abandoned.
Other surrounding barrels are full of slightly rusted iron ingots. Jin has to wonder if it would be worth it to try and bring them back, or if she should try and limit herself to higher value items.
She takes a mental stock of what all she’s seen on the store room’s shelves.
No matter how nice they look, the stones that were left behind are doubtful to be worth the haul. Some metals left on the shelves seem nicer than others, but Jin isn’t able to identify most of them. She never thought she would regret not taking the enchantment metallurgy elective. But…
Jin picks up one of the silvery-blue ingots. They soak up her magic eagerly when she tests them. If nothing else, she’s willing to bet these are at least more valuable than the iron they were stored with.
“Jin? Can you come here? Please.”
Sage’s tone is similar to what she used when she found the first skeletons. Jin goes to find her with some apprehension in her steps, and sees that Sage got the door they didn’t enter through open. Rather than go in, Sage is hovering near the entrance with a strange look on her face. At the angle Jin’s approaching, she can’t see far within the new room yet.
When Sage spots the mage, she starts an explanation, “So, um. I was looking for stuff and uh, you said it was some kind of connector ring? The one we talked about earlier. So I um, I looked around for the little symbol thingy on it and I found another one! Here at this door… I thought it was just gonna be an elevator but it had a matching symbol! So I uh, well I tried to open the door and, and uh. Umm… Just… Look.”
Jin sees inside.
The first thing her eyes land on is a tall, pulsating crystal pillar in the center of the room. The design is far bulkier than any she’s used to—stones with inlaid enchantments ring the pillar at regular intervals to keep the mana within circulating - but the telltale glow of densely circulating mana is impossible to mistake - she’s looking at a mana battery. It wasn’t visible at all from beyond the walls, despite how much mana is concentrated at the top. She breathes in sharply, realizing that she’s probably looking at one of the first mana batteries to ever exist. Is this where her mana was diverted to earlier, when she activated the elevator?
It’s only after realizing what the pillar is that she sees the skeletons.
There’s several packed into a relatively small room, and are lain far more densely than the rest of the treasury room.
“How did you activate the ring? It’s both broken and requires the user to channel magic—which… I don’t think you can do. Unless…” The inlaid enchantments? The transistor.
“I… I just touched it to that square there, in the divot, where the matching symbol is. It looked like it fit, so…”
Jin glances at the plaque beside the door. Frowning, she places her hand on it and tries to sense any enchantment within, but can’t see anything.
“Are you sure that’s all you did?”
“Yes?”
Jin frowns harder and holds out her hand, and Sage puts the ring in it before she asks anything. She double checks the enchantments within. Then she checks the plaque. Then she places the ring in the divot again, and sees the briefest flash of magic arcing towards the ring then away, and the door in front of them starts sliding close.
She blinks in surprise.
When the door shuts all the way, she presses the ring back into the divot and… Again that flash of magic reaches out for the ring and vanishes, followed by the door sliding open. And yet, it doesn’t look like anything when using her mind’s eye.
The girls exchange a look, and Jin takes the first slow steps into the room with Sage trailing right behind her.
“For once, it looks like they had a proper security measure on this door. I couldn’t sense anything within that plaque. I must be some kind of inlaid enchantment that the ring acts as the connector for. Which still doesn’t make any sense given how I can’t see anything…” Perhaps it’s a dwarven metal that has been forgotten? Most every metal will keep trace mana in it, but certainly not this one, it seems.
“Funny that the secure room is full of skeletons, huh…”
Jin agrees. She scans the room around them carefully. The glimmer of enchanted items flits across her mind’s eye. But they don’t concern her as much as the giant battery in the middle of the room. Who knows what sort of in-fighting might have killed them, they aren’t the ones with still active ancient magic systems.
Sage slowly bends down beside one skeleton, and starts speaking towards it in a low voice.
Jin makes a lap around the room to quickly catalog what all is within. Sage moves to the next body after finishing whatever she was praying, and starts again.
Towards the back of the room Jin sees what she can only think of as a console. A quick examination of its contents shows it to be where the enchantments for the door are stored. These too are inlaid enchantments, but with that same near invisibility to her mind’s eye.
So the only way to get into the mana battery room, is through a door enchantment charged by the battery? That’s just poor design. You can charge it from outside the room if her first experience with an elevator was of any indication, but what if something breaks?
She looks back at the crystaline pillar.
The mana has been circling around the top of it for the most part, but a few strands of magic are orbiting around the middle and look to be lowering. An uncomfortable feeling settles into the pit of her stomach, and she starts examining all sides of the pillar for any potential imperfections. Battery design is something with rigorous safeguards that every student is required to learn at least once before they graduate, but given the track record she’s noticed from dwarven enchantment…? Shit… she’s afraid she might know what killed the dwarves, actually. Maybe she’s wrong? Surely the dwarves wouldn’t have been that careless?
Sage is finished praying at each skeleton by the time Jin spots it.
Near the base of the crystal is a hairline fracture that spans an entire horizontal cross section of the pillar. She had to move her light around to spot the slight reflection within. Jin steps back and eyes the loop of magic that has been slowly lowering.
Inert mana is relatively safe in just about any dosage. The worst it typically does is cloud the mind, but some reports have said it can cause minor neurological issues that clear once the body is removed from the area of concentration.
However, inert mana dissipates. That topic is still a hotbed of theories, but it means if you want to keep mana around outside your body for any extended period of time, you need active mana, since active mana takes far longer to dissipate on its own.
Active mana is also far, far more destructive than inert mana.
Jin’s eyes slide down to the skeleton near her. She has a terrible feeling that she knows exactly what happened to them. Which would also explain the corrupted enchantments…
Jin then looks back at where the mana is in the crystal. One ring of rapidly looping mana has made it about half way down the pillar.
“Uhm…” She swallows, trying to find her voice. When was the last time magic posed this much of a danger to her? Sage has been hovering anxiously beside her for the past few seconds, and reacts immediately by grabbing her arm. “What? What is it?!”
How the hell can she read my reactions like that? No, not relevant. Jin finds her voice as Sage starts slowly pulling her out of the room.
“It’s not—“ She clears her voice. “It’s not urgent, but. We should leave, anyway. I doubt anything in here won’t be corrupted. At a glance, most are.”
Sage gives her a hard, concerned look, and starts pulling her harder towards the elevator door. “Ok, yeah. Yeah let’s go then. We can look somewhere else.”
Jin remembers how far it is to the surface. She grimaces. “I doubt it will reach us but… I think we should leave the ruins entirely.”
Sage shoots a nervous glance back towards the direction of the battery. “What?! Jin, what is that thing?”
Jin tries to explain before she starts opening doors to get them in the elevator. “Ah, it’s, it’s just a mana battery. They’re usually safe but this one… isn’t. The mana inside is active, but this one is very old, so it doesn’t have any of the safeguards to, ah, nevermind. Active mana typically reacts destructively to, well, life, mostly. And enchantments. Do you know what radiation is? No? Aha… it’s kind of like that. Pure energy demanding any sort of outlet. Kind of. Most active mana is still not that big of a deal, until you amplify it further and further with enchantments designed to do just that. That keeps it from dissipating as quickly. Like in batteries. When that happens, it gains a lot of potential to start breaking things. For some reason, the higher the complexity of something, the more likely active mana will try to break it up. Most theories say it’s because there’s more opportunity for something to break.”
Jin never learned the formula to shield against active mana. Never needed to, really. She feels the lack of her mother’s amulet rather acutely as the elevator doors ding open. Potentially finding the safeguard she grew so used to is rapidly rising in priority.
She just hopes she can find it before she needs it.