Things have been going swimmingly, or sadly not. I had been trying more than a few ways to generate heat, using friction mostly, and all had either proven to be too inefficient or produced too little in the way of temperature change. I had, however, gotten a temperature gauging skill, having tried testing the temperature of my experiments with the back of my hand. In the end I had no real way to force a temperature change in any meaningful way so I was unable to draw water out of my plants. My second option, however, was actually producing some results, though I now had a third floor experimental chamber, once again built behind the ramp to keep it hidden.
For my experiment I was doing it the most old-fashioned way possible, putting a bunch of plants in a big pile and waiting for them to decompose, which would produce heat and release, hopefully, moisture. There did seem to be a distinct lack of bacteria that would enable my plant matter to break down, as nothing had happened in the days I'd been running the test. The only reason I say I'm getting results is because of a new method I was trying, juicing. I had made the room funnel shaped to begin with, thinking I might have a way to collect mulch as the plant matter degraded, but I had just made a second chamber under the funnel and poked holes in the roof. Then, with the application of a big rock, I squeezed the plants and produced a kind of slurry. It was green and didn’t seem like regular water, so I was pretty sure I just squeezed a bunch of sap out of the plants, but it seemed like a step in the right direction.
So, having concluded that the stuff I made wasn’t quite water, I decided to bring one of my slimes down to the water chamber and dump him in the pond, a couple inches deep at this point. It only confirmed my suspicion when a new resource popped up, sap. So I had it stop and had a long think about what to do next. I could try to make more than dump it somewhere, let it naturally dry out and maybe make a pseudo ecosystem, but i only had vague ideas about how rain was made, and i thought i’d need dry air to help the process along and i only had a few vague idea on how to make a ventilation system. I had also considered making electricity but I had no real idea on how that worked, something about spinning magnets around, magnets which I didn't have. So that idea was shelved too. My last idea, having the slime collect biomatter from the sap, hopefully leaving the water, didn’t work. I didn’t think it was impossible but my slimes just didn’t have that kind of control over their collection abilities.
With that new experiment failed I decided to go back up and check out the others that had failed, possibly getting some new ideas. My personal favorite, and surely worst, was the slime powered piston engine. It took a slime that would move from one side to the other, pushing the pistons which would turn a crank. It was an outlandish idea to make a lathe like item that I would just jam against something to generate friction. The concept was solid but I just didn’t have the materials I'd need to make it a reality, the step down gears simply being too brittle to stand up to any real torque. It was a disappointing, if not entertaining, temporary failure.
My problem would come down to heat and I'd just have to live with that until I could solve it. In the meantime, when I was letting my experiments run their course, I helped design the third floor, a system of large rooms, about ten meters long by ten high and ten wide, each connected together by small airlocks. With ten such rooms i was content to call this floor done and had already descended to floor four, planning to move my orb sometime soon so I could reap the benefits and see what new spawns awaited me. I only wanted to spawn in my new ramp bug spawner first, mostly for curiosity but the utility of a mobile plug wasn’t lost on me.
I had chosen the center most room, each decorated by moss and mushrooms, along with the mostly hidden oxygen farms, and was about to place it down when a window opened up in my peripheral vision, an odd thing as most new alerts were always right in my teeth.
Intruders:
Unknown beings: 1
Unknown being, class unknown, name unknown, race unknown.
An unknown being is a living organism concealed in some way as to make discerning their abilities, race, or even sentience impossible.
‘Excuse me?’ I had to be going mad, that was it. I’d been letting the stress of being alone, likely for thousands of years, take a back burner and now it had overboiled without me watching it. But, no matter what I did, I couldn't will away the screen. I had to go confirm what was going on.
My being raced through the dungeon, passing through doors and burning past confused slimes and hoppers until I was standing in front of the outer airlock door. My whole being felt on edge and I could almost feel a thundering heartbeat in my chest. What madness had brought this insanity on. I shook myself out of my shock, and steeled myself. IT’s probably some kind of bug, or some damned asteroid had impacted nearby and sent a chunk with bacteria into my entrance.
The window disappeared and my heart lurched.
‘Fuck it!’ I forced myself through the door and stumbled out into the same view as before. The stars were glittering, the planet shone above and there was nothing outside of my hatch. Nothing. I felt a sense of disappointment wash over me as I realized what this meant. I must have been desperate for something, anything, to interact with in some way, little green men or otherwise. I was as alone as I had been from the start of this mad life in another dimension. I gazed up at the planet and let loose a silent scream, pure frustration working itself out before I gave up and cursed the planet and turned to get back to work, then stopped in my tracks. There, on the ground by my hatch, was a trail of boot prints.
Fine moon dust filled the slight crater that formed my emergence point, the side of an enormous crater. I already knew I wouldn't be able to climb up and look for the boot print maker but I still had to bounce off my boundary to bring that to the forefront of my mind. Someone had stopped by, took a gander at my hatch and left. No, they did more than that and all it took was a quick check inside and I confirmed they had tried to open the door. A door which was sealed in place by pressure. Had they been defeated by a simple hatch and given up? No, what kind of person, alien or otherwise, would land somewhere to check something out and give up at the door? They’d probably gone to grab a cutter of some kind, which sent a wave of dread through me.
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I worked quickly, unwilling to just turn it for my mystery intruder. I formed a pictograph on the hatch itself, showing a hand turning the valve to the side of the hatch first, then a picture of the wheel being turned on the bottom of the hatch. It was simple, which probably meant it was good, they’d likely recognize an airlock if they were a space faring people, and i supposed the handle wasn’t terribly easy to see as the metal was similarly colored to the stone and was a short distance from the hatch itself. I then made sure to make the opposite pictograph on the other side of the hatch, just to be sure they’d at least seal the door before trying to open the second. I was grateful then that i had made a second valve for the airlock, to let the first floor air into the airlock rather than spending hours waiting for the air to fill. I quickly moved back outside, eager to see the being come back, and stopped in my tracks.
It stood, probably shoulder height to me, and was staring at the door with a gun shaped object in its hand. It was clad in a space suit, less bulky than the eta suits of astronauts. a helmet, slightly elongated to the back, had a silver visor that was T shaped, though it stopped about where a nose might be for a human. The suit was apparently armored, or likely just had hard sections, on the chest, joints, shoulders, shins and boots, the hard sections painted a bright red and the soft sections a white.
It was immobile, and I could easily guess why, staring at the hatch and its brand new pictograph. It stayed that way for a long time, just staring, before its helmet turned slightly, showing me why it hadn’ seen the valve lever. I doubted the peripheral vision was any good in that helmet. It moved, slowly, constantly glancing back towards the hatch, until it knelt and turned the valve open, an explosion of air sending up a cloud of dust as I hadn't lifted the pipe exit above the dirt level, dust getting into it from my work.
The dust settled and the being was on its knee, its gun-like object in both hands practically confirming the thing as a weapon. It took a few minutes again before apparently composing itself and stepping up to the hatch, slowly examining the interior beyond before accepting whatever risk lay beyond the hatch. It descended, making me glad to have put a pair of ladders in, even as a decoration. It wasn’t until it was on the ground that it seemed to realize there was another hatch, looking up and seeing the lever beside the first hatch it had to ascend and shut both the hatch and the valve.
After its second descent it seemed to be waiting for something, and i was beginning to think it was going to wait for the air to naturally fill from the farms, a process that would take two and a half hours, something I had decided to time after setting up the valves and doors properly. The being didn’t seem to want to wait that long, having spotted the second valve it moved to the other ladder, climbed and, much more slowly this time, opened the valve to pressurize the room.
“-Utterly ancient but robust design. I don’t know what sort of creatures may have once inhabited the planet and moon but their legacy lasts through the structures they left behind. There may be some promising discoveries should someone decide to scrap and catalog this moon base.”
The sound of another voice after so long was like water in a desert, I couldn't believe how much tension drained from my core all at once. The smooth tone seemed to be un obstructed by the suit, or more likely it was some dungeon ability. Whatever the case, her voice was easily the most beautiful thing i’d ever heard.
It, no she, waited for the hissing to stop before opening the door and peeking up past the hatch.
“Simple stone room but the air reads as breathable. More than breathable really, i’d expect these kinds of readings on the jade moon, not some hole in the ground. No signs of life but I don't see any signs of the opposite. I’ll proceed with all due caution.”
Well, that eased some worries, I wasn't just making a bomb by pumping pure oxygen into the air. It might be some natural dungeon thing, to keep the space viable for life. She pulled herself up and out of the hatch, shutting it behind her but I noticed she didn’t lock it in place. It was a little annoying to see but I had to guess she was trying to stay safe. Who knows what critters might chase her and opening a door while running isn’t easy or quick.
Her first obstacle, however, was me. I had to move quickly before she got too far into the room as I'd completely forgotten about the traps I'd built when I was freaking out about the emergence. I thought quickly, no time for pictographs, simply reaching out and shoving the fragile stone, crumbling the trap and leaving a deep hole in the ground. That got her attention and she approached it slowly.
“No, not a sign of deterioration.” She was certainly talking about the hole in the ground. “This is clearly a trap set to catch an intruder. Possibly a sign of this civilization's demise? A trap set up for a force that never attacked this base? I can't be sure and I'm not a xenoarchaeologist. I’ll keep my eyes peeled though, the silver academy would probably pay better if I can locate some texts, or computing devices so they don’t have to search for them.”
She moved past the trap and, much more carefully, tested the floor ahead of her as she continued, finding that each of my rooms were similarly trapped. It was odd that she thought I was some lost civilization, an Atlantis of the cosmos I guess, but it made a sort of sense. Who’d suspect some odd dungeon just chilling somewhere so random. She continued on through the rooms, not even remarking on any of my glow shrooms or moss, until she stopped at the hatch at the top of the first floor ramp.
“Displays of paranoia about containment breach, in line with a fairly young species, but the lack of metal so far in this structure is surprising. They put a lot of trust in stone this far up in the crust, one small impact and all this stone could crack and crumble leaving them buried.”
She opened the hatch and slipped through, still leaving them unlatched, then moved onto the next floor where she stopped in her tracks, mostly caused by my dropping one of the stalactites down so she’d be cautious of the spikes above her. Her helmet moved around the huge room, taking it in, before her gaze clearly locked onto one of the hopper teams collecting general metal and mineral along with the copper i’d mixed in. She seemed to be taking her time before she spoke again, probably taking a form of journal or something.
“Revision to my first assumption for this place. This is no abandoned base, it’s a natural born dungeon.” She then readied her weapon and took a step back. “Will need to revise my plan and report back, a specialist is required for this. I’m not nearly equipped enough to handle this kind of risk.”
And, at those words, my hoppers turned as one, stared for a moment, and launched themselves at my intruder.