The computer tablet Miles had taken from the first room was a pinched rectangle of metal and plastic, wider at the top than the bottom, with an interface that shrank as it went down to accommodate the narrowing display area.
Documents were displayed as lines of geometric characters, apparently written in a language called Standard-5, reading from top to bottom with the text size decreasing as it went down the screen.
Miles had been drawn to the text documents first. He'd absorbed as much as he could, skimming through what had turned out to be very dry reports and academic essays on the nature of Ialis, before turning to the videos on the device.
He tapped on the most recent video and a color image sprang up to occupy the screen, pinched at the bottom where the device narrowed in a way that created an extreme perspective effect.
It looked like some kind of video log.
One of the three-limbed sapients they’d fought in the first room was speaking to the camera in a language heavy in consonants.
"We have come to the Unnatural Depths to commune with its guiding principle. The process of its remaking can be controlled, we are sure of it. Progost Ovren perfects her alignment calibrations as I speak. Our target environment is an arboreal habitat. A home away from home."
From what Miles had gathered from the documents, the sapients had been a team of independent scientists working on a private project related to the ever-shifting nature of the Ialis dungeon.
The videos on the device were all dated and titled with names like Objective Indigo Field Study Day 1 and Report to Founders on Initial Conditions.
The sapient speaking in the video sounded confident, speaking to the camera like they were recording a press statement or team speech.
They didn’t give any hint that they thought they were in danger, or that their precautions might fail. From the state of the previous room, they’d either misjudged the risks, or they’d had some other kind of disaster.
"Already our defenses are established. Our bodies are protected by forcefields. Our minds are protected by engram vetting implants. Our environment is shielded from radiation and our atmosphere is maintained by regulatory devices. Preparation is the guarantor of our success. Whatever dangers bring ruin to the denizens of the Depths, they do not concern us. When the shifting is upon us, vindication will follow."
The individual on the screen looked very different to the mindless creatures they’d fought in the first room. During the fight, the rows of solid black eyes that flanked their head had been dull and insect-like. In the video, they were expressive. The black beads of their eyes individually stretched and narrowed as they spoke, creating complex facial expressions. Their wide, flat mouth was flexible and mobile, twisting into shapes that could have been smiles or sneers, projecting emotions that Miles could follow, if not identify.
The one he was watching now was probably the one that he’d grappled with, the one who’d been clawing at their neck. There was something distinctive about their skin pattern.
The video looked like it had been recorded in a regular dungeon area; paneled metal walls and desks, maybe an attempt by the dungeon at a workshop space, completely different from the wood-floored room he'd found them in.
On the screen, the sapient moved the tablet, changing the angle of the shot. Now it showed a corner of a room stacked with spiral tech equipment. Boxy units with interface panels, narrow pillars that lit up like strip lights, toroid rings that radiated antennas. Miles recognized a few pieces from the stash in the room they’d just raided, but not all of them.
Another of the three-limbed sapients was working on one of the devices. They wore a piece of interface tech over their head, a metal plate that hugged the top of their skull and held two translucent rectangular screens over their eyes, one screen on each side. As they came into shot, the owner of the tablet spoke.
“Progost Ovren gives us a brief statement for the benefit of our sponsors.”
The sapient working on the device, Progost Ovren, heard the words and looked up. Ovren’s mouth had been hanging open while they worked, and now it snapped shut.
They put down a hand tool and loped up to the camera. When they spoke it was with more confidence than Miles would have bad if he’d been called up on the spot.
“This represents the most serious exploration of the Depths’ reformatting to date. The potential for material extraction is enormous. Even our ambition for permanent habitation is not unrealistic. It is all thanks to you, our glorious sponsors, that we can realize our research in groundbreaking experimentation. The names U-sannis, Roarsh, and Bell will echo in our achievements.”
“They were trying to manipulate the dungeon,” Miles told the others as he watched. “They thought they could survive being down here during the shuffle, and control what it shuffled into.”
“I see. They must have wanted hairy wall room very bad,” Trin said.
The four of them were sitting around on the ground in the third room, resting before they attempted the final side door.
Trin's scan had shown that two out of four rooms branching off the passageway had sources of sound behind the doors, low noise that could have been active machinery or could have been breathing. The first had involved a battle, the second was still ahead of them.
This room, the second unoccupied room, was full of fountains. The floor was dotted with them. Hip-high bowls that could have been white wood or ivory, filled with clear liquid and fitted with some kind of pump that spat the fluid in a constant upward stream.
The room had smooth wooden walls stained gold and white, with dye that only modified the original silvery gray of the wood. The floor was more of the same wooden material they'd seen throughout, with colorful cushions scattered around the outside edge.
Miles thought it might be some kind of rest room, with the fountains to help with relaxation.
The liquid wasn't water, Trin had said, but it didn't have the chemical smell that Miles associated with non-C-type biochemistries. It was completely odorless, which was preferable in the moment, but was often the mark of a truly alien chemical regime. When a molecule got different enough to the chemistry of Earth’s native universe, it stopped interacting with human biochemistry at all.
The sound of the fluid splashing was relaxing, and it was a nice enough place to rest.
“They said they were trying for an ‘arboreal’ habitat," Miles said. "Does that make sense?”
Miles thought the wooden floors and natural-looking construction seemed to fit with that.
Torg clicked in agreement. 'Wood.'
"Yeah. And the fiber on the walls, and the furniture,” Miles said. “The only thing that doesn't fit is the floor in the corridor."
“Can you stop talking in a language I can’t understand?” Drani said, suddenly. “It feels like I’m being cut out.”
“Sorry,” Miles said. The word had been reflexive. He didn't really feel it. “Maybe you can get an upgrade to your translator?”
He knew the question wouldn’t reach Drani, but he’d asked it anyway, inspired by a thread of resentment that he was trying to suppress.
“I will translate for Miles,” Trin said. “He says that they try to make a hairy room to live in, but they went crazy.”
“I didn’t say that they’d gone crazy.”
“He says they went crazy like everyone who stays in dungeon. He says they are dumb, dumb, three leg guys.”
“Yeah, it’s got that right,” Drani muttered. “No one stays down here.”
Miles wanted to say more to that, but he felt a pressure weighing on him to keep quiet. In the end, it didn’t feel worth it.
Everyone was spending their break on their own tasks. Trin was going through the recordings taken by his scanner, discarding data that was irrelevant, compressing everything he wanted to keep. Torg was sitting on his lower four limbs, his upper arms clasped together in a pose that could have been culturally or biologically significant, meditating, sleeping, or praying. Drani was playing with his ring-form index, though he couldn’t possibly have been connected to the index network, blocked as they were by the surface of the dungeon several layers above them.
Miles’ thoughts turned to his own index. He wasn’t just a Harmonizer any more. He wasn’t even just a Harmonizer and a Sky Seeker. Ever since that night back on Earth, his index had had listed one more tradition whenever he looked at it. Tower Child.
The tradition gave him one spell. There was no indication of what it did. If it did anything. It might have just been index corruption. He had no way of knowing for sure except to try it, though the smarter path was probably to take it to a teller at the Morning Star corporation office and have it expunged.
The end of the break was called a few minutes later by a pre-programmed timer going off on Trin's scanner unit.
They weren't planning an ambitious hours-long dive, but they still had a schedule to keep. If they wanted to explore the nearby areas and still stay in range of entrance, they could only afford a short time to recuperate.
They got up without any further conversation. There’d been a brief debate about whether to take their haul and leave, but Trin had said they should keep going until they were too loaded down to carry any more. It’d apparently been their strategy on all their solo dives, and even if Miles disagreed, he wasn’t going to try and make it an argument.
Miles pulled his shield off the ground and flicked its levitation unit back on, then the four of them made their way back out into the corridor, where they headed further down in the direction of the fourth side room, the second one that Trin had detected sound behind.
As they walked, the texture of the floor gradually changed.
At the entrance, the ground in the corridor had been a soft, stretchy black skin, rubbery and hard to walk on, but a few dozen meters past the first room it started to take on the same wooden texture as the floor in there.
The wood seemed to grow out in patches, like warts on the black skin; smooth, rigid, with the same distinctive grain. The combination of textures gave the impression that the space was unfinished, like they were walking through a construction site.
After about five minutes, they reached the entrance to the final side room. They closed around it, checking themselves and their equipment.
It had the same design as the others, a circular disk of textured wood, marked in spirals as if it were a wooden vine that had grown around itself over and over. It was operated by a simple mechanical latch, with the circular lever unsecured.
Miles felt sure they were about to enter another frantic, messy battle.
This time, Trin spent a minute longer trying to scan through the door. He pressed the bubble of his scanner's antenna directly against the wood and ran through several scanning modes. He read the space with directed beams of radiation, by measuring the attenuation of energy fields, by passively listening for heat, light, sound, and other vibrations.
Nothing he tried was able to give him a clear picture. The material of the door scattered any energy beam of a type that would have picked up biological signals inside, and it did the same to heat and sound.
The harder signal beams could pick up the locations of metal and ceramic components in the room, but everything was still, and they didn't have enough resolution to get images of what the items could be. All they had were the imagined guesses of the decoding software, according to which the metal objects could be anything from foil-packed meals to assault weapons.
Eventually, they decided that given the state of the last room, it would be safe to storm it, provided they went in with a plan.
"Torg first, and this time stay in door," Trin said, slipping into the role of tactical leader, the same role he must have had to fill alone for the last couple of weeks. "If something strong comes, Torg goes low and we shoot over head."
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
"Maybe your friend should go first," Drani suggested, glancing at Miles. "He's got that big hunk of metal he's been dragging around. Might make him a better person at the front than Torg."
"No. Torg is lancer. His job to go first. Miles is very little compared to Torg."
"I could lend him my shield," Miles suggested, looking between Trin and Torg.
Trin seemed to consider it. As Miles was waiting for Trin’s decision, he realized that he was deferring to Trin as well. In his mind, Trin's slightly higher total time in the dungeon had made him seem like the authority on the subject.
He tried to push the memory of Trin announcing he’d forgotten to pay rent and what it might say about the scout’s decision making abilities to the back of his mind.
“No,” Trin said after a minute’s thought. “Miles has to be safe too. If healer gets hurt, he can’t help others who are hurt.”
“I’m not gonna get hurt, little guy,” Drani said.
Miles accepted Trin’s decision. At least this one made sense to him as well.
They got into position, Torg at the front, Trin to one side. Miles and Drani at the back, waiting side by side. Miles put a hand to the back of Torg’s shell and cast a Temporary Enhancement, focusing on their lancer’s Durability. His magical core spun and electric heat flashed out through his palm into the shell of their lancer.
This time when he cast the spell, Miles felt a twinge in his Authority, a feeling like he’d stumbled during a race, or said something embarrassing while he was the center of attention.
He was hit by a moment of dizziness, like he’d stood up too fast. It was the first sign that he was starting to draw too heavily on his magic, that the world was getting tired of him imposing the Harmonizer’s worldview on it.
Torg wrapped a pincer around the handle and twisted it.
With the latch free, the door rolled away to the side, revealing four more of the former divers.
Torg had caught them in the middle of a meal.
Black-green ichor stained their muzzles, turning their needle-sharp teeth into glistening iron spikes.
Their meal, a fifth member of their own team, lay on a laboratory bench in front of them. Their skin had been torn away and the body was barely recognizable as a member of their species. The features of their head were missing, and in places the flesh had been peeled back from ichor-stained bone. The cavity of their chest had been turned into an empty bowl by their former teammates.
As the door opened, four heads turned as one, twisting on sinuous necks to face the gatecrashers.
This time, the assault on the room was more methodical.
Torg, deciding he couldn’t keep all four of them occupied at once, ducked low, going down onto his limbs like a giant beetle. With the space above him cleared, Trin raised his tall-barreled pistol and fired off five shots before the former divers had even started moving.
The first three shots each found the body of a different former diver, sinking into flesh like embers falling into water, before piercing something essential. Halfway through their first loping step, they each fell, tumbling bonelessly to the wooden floor.
The last two shots hit the fourth former diver and bounced off. The firefly projectiles ricocheted away in corkscrew paths, chaotic and indiscriminate. Both projectiles lodged themselves in the husk wall on either side of the door.
“He’s using barrier,” Trin said quickly.
Miles drew his own pistol and tried his luck. He aimed at the former diver’s chest and fired. The flash of energy transformed the former sapient’s brown skin into a tortoiseshell of oil-slick circles, the former diver’s forcefield taking the brunt of the energy. The force from the energy weapon made them stumble, but they didn’t even fall.
With only one of the former sapients left, Torg got up off the ground and threw himself at them, grabbing their wrists and the joint of their central leg simultaneously. His pincers closed on more of the plates of force, oil-black circles springing up like scales at the points where he should have made contact.
The forcefield increased the effective size of the former diver, making them awkward for Torg to hold, but as they struggled it became clear that the forcefield was anchored at the device around their neck, and the barrier projector bore the brunt of any pressure exerted on the field. It was a big flaw in the device, Miles thought.
When Torg lifted them off the ground, all the former diver’s weight was pressed against their throat, and after less than a minute of fruitless twisting they went still, choked by their own defensive tech.
Torg lowered them gently to the ground and stepped back.
Miles let Eyes of the Emigre fall away and slipped into Eyes of the Altruist.
Glowing shapes sprung up over the downed body. They were still alive, though there were some angry dark red patches around their throat.
Torg didn’t give any indication he knew they were still alive, turning his back on them and stepping away.
Miles glanced at Drani before he decided not to clarify the situation for everyone. He’d just keep an eye out for any sign of them stirring himself.
Like the first room they’d checked, this one was full of equipment and supplies. Boxes and crates littered the sides of the room, some made of modern plastics, others of wood and even woven reeds. In that difference, Miles thought he could see the distinction between boxes that the team had brought in with them, and containers that the dungeon had created.
The information on the tablet computer contextualized a lot of what they found. When Trin pointed out a stasis field projector, it was easy to assume it was meant to be a fallback defensive option against the effects of the dungeon shift. A set of spring-loaded tents were probably meant to be used as emergency shelters if they couldn’t manipulate the dungeon into creating a suitable habitat. There were even a couple of personal transport devices, each a hollow metallic cone supported by a soft cog-shaped wheel. The cone must have worked as a seat for someone with a Floreen body plan, kept upright by balancing functions of the wheel. They apparently weren’t worth enough for Trin to even give them a second glance. They did find a hand trailer of a similar one-wheeled design, which Torg dropped their haul from the first room into.
Miles tried to avoid looking at the corpses as he moved around, picking things and dropping them into the trailer as Trin identified them as worth carting back.
He avoided looking at the partially eaten body on the bench. He was glad it had no smell, though his stomach was twisting in on itself anyway, clenching regularly, as if it was picking up a smell he couldn’t.
Trin was getting to the end of his sensor inventory when he stopped at an undisturbed crate sitting at the back of the room.
"This one has noise,” he said. “And it's warm. And moving. Something alive inside."
Miles’ stomach did an extra flip at that. Another one of the mindless divers? Maybe they’d put one away for later. Some of the crates had contained food, and he couldn’t help but imagine this one as a kind of larder.
It was easy for him to imagine being trapped in a crate like that, himself. They’d had a metal crate back at the Frazer settlement, kept outside in the rain, used as a kind of punishment for anyone who tried to escape. Miles had never been put in it, but fingers stretching out through metal slats had been a common sight every day he’d been there.
“Is it one of the divers?” Miles asked.
Trin stared at his scanner’s screen for a minute. “Is right mass, but they are being quieter than the others.”
Torg stepped up and lifted one of the clips at the side, pointing out that the latches were hanging open. Whatever was inside could have burst out at any moment.
Miles dreaded finding out what was in the crate, but he felt like if they left without knowing the possibilities would haunt him.
"We should open it," Miles said.
Torg immediately clicked his support of the idea. 'Agree.'
“Miles and Torg want to open unknown alive thing box,” Trin said, translating for Drani.
The Eppan mage seemed to approve of the idea. “Yeah. Sounds good to me. Open it.”
Drani backed away from the crate, raising his hand. Miles could already feel magic coming from the other mage, his core waking up as he prepared to cast a spell.
Trin took a few seconds to prepare too. He checked the display of his pistol then took a step back, aiming the weapon at the crate.
Miles didn't cast any spells to prepare, he didn't want to put any more strain on his authority. He just dialed down the power of his pistol, worried about stray shots, and took up a position behind Torg.
After checking everyone was ready, Torg gripped the lid in two powerful forelimbs and lifted.
The cover slid back. One of the Floreen divers sat inside, curled around themselves.
They were alive, wearing the scraps of a silver skirt. The synth fabric band of a broken wrist-mounted computer hung off their arm, the screen missing. The forcefield generator around their neck looked damaged, and there were gouges along the top of their head, close to where the skull angled down just above their eyes.
They were completely still, eyes narrowed to dull black lines. For a second, Miles wondered whether Trin had been wrong when he’d said they were alive, but when he dipped into Eyes of the Altruist the glowing shapes of a living organism bloomed into existence over their body.
He put his shield down upright on the ground and stepped forward to peer over the edge of the crate, trusting Torg to catch them if they reacted. He looked for an injury, or signs of any other reason the former diver wasn’t behaving like the rest.
The diagnostic magic didn’t show anything obvious. It usually highlighted damage, contamination, infection, giving them their own texture and colors that instinctively made sense to him. Miles didn’t know anything about Floreen internal anatomy, but nothing looked off.
Gazing up at them, the Floreen diver made their first movement, not an obvious movement, but a change in the shape of their eyes. The black beads furthest back along their head widened, followed by the next one along, then the next, in a rippling motion like eyes opening. They froze for a second, then their eyes changed again, flexing into a new pattern, the black beads alive and mobile. A clear expression.
Miles grabbed the edge of the crate with his free hand and tried speaking to them.
“Hey, can you understand me?”
The Floreen figure’s eyes rippled again. The ones furthest back along their head narrowed, the eyes closest to the front widened. Their mouth fell open, and they hesitated as if they were trying to remember how to speak.
To the side, Miles caught movement. Drani was reaching out and grasping the air. The Eppan mage’s magic was spinning up, already halfway through casting Strike the Disharmonious. He was going to preemptively rip the Authority from the huddled diver.
Miles reached out and pushed Drani’s casting hand down.
Drani was strong and could have resisted, but the motion had been so sudden that even Miles was a little surprised that he’d done it.
Drani turned to stare at him as the spell fizzed out of existence, his head flaps half raised, tense, his round eyes wide, glaring with an unidentifiable emotion.
Miles was almost as shocked at what he’d done as Drani. He started trying to put together an explanation, but before he could get the first word of it out, the Floreen diver in the crate started speaking.
“I am Subrost Elynn of the Indigo Investigation Group. My mind and my thoughts are my own and I will not attack you.”
They spoke quickly, seeming to understand the tension in the situation. Maybe they’d already noticed the bodies of the other Floreen divers scattered around the room.
The sudden announcement brought everyone’s attention off Miles and onto the diver. Miles couldn’t help but feel relieved when Drani switched to staring at them as well, whatever angry outburst or accusation he’d been building up to dropped.
Subrost Elynn’s gaze moved from the group to the rest of the room.
If they hadn’t seen the bodies of the other divers yet, they saw them then. Their eyes flexed until they were circular beads, a universally recognizable attempt to collect as much light as possible in a moment of stress and fear.
“All dead!” they said. The scrabbled at the edge of the crate, pulling themself out and onto the floor. They rushed to one of the Floreen figures that Trin had shot, crouching down on all three limbs, holding their face close to them. With one hand, they cupped the triangular head of the fallen diver. “Arran.”
“They all went crazy in dungeon shift,” Trin said. “How did you not go crazy?”
Elynn didn’t reply. All their attention was for the one they’d called Arran.
Miles stepped up and crouched beside them.
“The one over there is still alive,” Miles said quietly, indicating the one Torg had knocked unconscious.
Elynn got up and left Arran to go to their side. Miles followed.
“Subrost Orilan,” Arran said. They flicked a finger at the unconscious diver’s eyes, but got no reaction.
“I think they’re just unconscious, but it’s like Trin said, they’re not themself anymore,” Miles said.
Elynn lifted their wrist to use the computer strapped to it, only to stop when they saw the screen had been torn away.
“I need a computer. I have to check her implants.”
Miles hesitated for a second before pulling out the trapezoid computer he’d taken from the other room.
Elynn only glanced at it before waving him away. “It must be an engineering computer.”
Elynn left Orilan’s side, stepping away from the unconscious figure to throw themself into one of the cluttered boxes at the edge of the room. They ignored the mutilated body on the bench, focusing directly in front of themselves at all times as they searched through boxes.
The Eppan members of their group didn’t seem to know what to do. Drani was in conference with Trin, speaking quietly to him. Miles couldn’t hear what he was saying, but Trin looked skeptical of whatever it was.
Torg spent a few seconds watching Elynn search before coming to help. Torg must have known what Elynn was looking for, because he found one in the stack of supplies they’d salvaged from the other room and handed it over.
Elynn returned to Orilan with the computer in their hand. They pulled an electrode out of one corner of the device that extended on a long wire and pressed the end against the top of unconscious body’s head.
The engineering computer came to life. Elynn spent a few minutes operating a software interface while Drani whispered with Trin and Torg stood silently next to Miles.
When Elynn’s movements started getting exaggerated, Miles moved quietly over to them.
“Do you think you can help her?” Miles asked.
“Her vetting implants are damaged,” Elynn said. “We have them to protect against damaging thoughtforms, outside influences, but Orilan’s are degraded.”
“Are yours okay?” Miles asked.
Elynn stilled as if they’d only just thought to worry about that.
“I remember dreams. Dreams of living walls, of closing tombs. I remember being buried in the ground. There is a sense of meaning that I can almost grasp.”
They pulled the probe from Orilan’s skull and attached it to their own head in the same position. After another minute on the computer, they had an answer.
“My vetting implants are also degraded. They are not as badly damaged. But whatever affected hers has affected mine to a lesser extent.”
They pulled the wire with the probe off their head and activated a function on the computer that drew it back in.
“Did you leave any others alive?” Elynn asked after a few moments of silence.
“We shot them all,” Trin said, finally stepping away from Drani.
“How many of us have you seen?” Elynn asked. “Our party counts eleven members, including myself.”
Miles waited for a second then stepped in when nobody answered. “Eight, including you. They were all Floreen divers.”
“Then four are unaccounted for,” Elynn said. Their triangular head turned, looking at Miles and then at Drani and Trin, maybe trying to work out who was in charge. “They should be close by.”
“Probably all crazy,” Trin said.
Elynn’s eyes rippled, ending in a configuration where the eyes closest to the front were narrower than those behind.
“How likely are they to still be themselves?” Miles asked.
“With available data, and with no knowledge of how I remain intact, one in eight. There is a good chance at least one of the others is coherent.”
“We have one and half hours until reset,” Trin said. “We can look for half hour, then we go home.”
Miles got the impression that Trin was more interested in finding more loot than finding more survivors, but for Miles the question of how the Floreen divers could survive being inside the dungeon during a reset was more important than money.
It seemed like the Objective Indigo team must have had a deeper understanding of the dungeon than was commonly available, or else they’d hit on a theory that had worked for them by coincidence. Elynn was proof that the common wisdom that Fran had reeled off to them was wrong, or incomplete. It was possible for a sapient to stay in the dungeon during a reset and come out sapient on the other side.
There was only one place along the corridor that they hadn’t checked, that if they wanted to continue exploring they’d have to go. They’d checked each side room, the only way left was through the door at the end of the passageway, deeper into the dungeon.