2 A.L.: IRENE

It took Irene three days to find the ruined green space. She decided she must have gone too far, so she turned around, climbed several floors and headed north. She arrived high on the south wall. She couldn’t figure out how she missed it in the first place. She was glad she decided to head back to the entrance early. If her luck continued like this she would need the extra days.

She finally found the green when the hallway she was in dead ended at an unbroken glass wall looking out over the trees. Not far after leaving The Heights Irene entered dark space, where none of the light panels were working. When she cast light on the first light panel she cursed herself for not telling Sharl and Greg how to do it. She didn’t know why she kept forgetting that she knew that spell.

Every time dark space came up in conversations she got the impression that they feared it. She found it almost too easy. During the day she saw only single rats. Even the night time swarms were no bigger than four or five. The animals didn’t like light. Using light to illuminate an area worked almost as well as fear.

There was no way out into the green from this level. Just looking through the glass to the clouded sky above lifted her spirits. She remembered a time right after the landing when she thought all that open sky was a bit threatening. Now she wanted to be out there so badly she wondered if there was a way to just crawl straight up the glass wall.

Wanting to enjoy the view a little longer, she worked her way down the cross corridor that ran parallel to the green until she found a room she could secure for the night. The room she chose happened to have a prize altar in it. She pinned all the vents and let the door close behind her. The hard part now would be getting back out in the morning.

She fed all the debris into the altar converting a large portion of it into scrap. A rather odd looking piece of iron and wood came up as an item. There was no language in the altar interface. It showed an icon version of the same odd shaped item which didn’t tell her anything about it. Irene decided not to put it into her inventory and instead slipped it into her backpack to study later.

She fell asleep watching stars peek through the clouds in the sky high above. It made her happy. She was eating dried fruit she purchased back in Chicago for breakfast, studying the oddly shaped tool, when a rather dumb thought occurred to her. She knew if she was traveling with anyone they would have told her not to do it. As it was there was no one there to stop her.

She found only one rat waiting for her in the hallway. She killed it with her staff, while trying to imbue the weapon with fire. She wasn’t successful. With rats being so rare in the dark area, she thought it might be a while before she learned it. She gutted the rat and set the cleaned carcass back into the room with the prize altar for dinner. She pulled her bronze vent pins out of the vent covers. Since she decided to stay here several days she didn’t want the vents to fail. She would leave them open during the day and pin them again tonight with her iron pins.

Back in the hallway she approached the next door down. She used her off hand to work the latch and pushed it open with her foot. She stepped just inside the room, using her body to hold the door open and braced herself for attack. Nothing moved in the room. The room was very similar to the one she spent the night in although it lacked a prize altar. Irene started hauling everything she could back to the first room, where she tried to put it into her inventory. That done she went on to the next.

She discovered a variety of items mixed in with the debris. There were different types of scrap; iron, wood, copper and glass. The copper scrap might actually be bronze, it was hard to tell from the icon. The glass came from a room where a large crack ran down the wall facing the green. Water ran down through the crack and dampened a dirt pile that supported a small garden. Irene picked herself a nice salad to go with her rat.

In the pieces of debris that wouldn’t go into her inventory, she found many of the bits and pieces the suburb used to build their settlement. She used some of them to construct a grill for her lunch. She cooked the rat in the hallway outside her temporary home over a fire fueled with wood scrap.

By evening her pile of unconvertable items was growing rather large. She tossed them to the side in the hallway. As she ate cold rat and fresh greens, she observed the pile. A lot of the sections of iron or steel seemed like they would fit together. It was almost like they were a part of a building set, although most of them showed a rough break for one end. She thought the pile looked like a good way for a rat to stage an ambush on her. She should have stored it in one of the rooms.

On the second day she found another prize altar in a securable room farther to the east. She went back for her wedges and found items before transferring her base to the new altar. Her number of found items slowly grew. She stuffed her gathering bag with them and still found more. There were a lot of duplicates, yet at the same time she didn’t find any of the cloth making tools she saw in the rooms near Londontown.

That evening when she looked over her pile of tools she decided most of them were for working with wood and leather. She didn’t find any larger items. There was one small hammer, which was identical to the one Mary used for repairing the pins, so that might be considered a metalworking tool. Although it could be used to drive connectors into wood or punching leather. Irene did not find any nails. Close inspection of some of the wood scrap showed traces of having been held together with something similar to wooden dowels. She put all her duplicate tools into her inventory even though she was warned that caused them to wear. She kept one of each type out thinking that maybe she could figure out how to use them.

The third day she didn’t find any new type of tool. They were all copies of ones already in her collection. More importantly she finally imbued her staff with fire. She thought about stopping that night, but decided to continue until she could imbue reliably. She moved to a new altar farther east three times over the days. The altars were much rarer in the dark zone.

She woke one morning and could not imagine hauling any more debris around. She pulled out her map and counted up the punches. Forty nine days. Irene decided it was time to head back.

She was still carrying most of the dried food she purchased in Chicago. Looking at the display of found tools she admitted to herself that there was little chance she would figure any of them out on the way back. She put them all into her inventory. She pulled the vent pins and door wedge, and with one last look at the map, headed out.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

She kept an accurate count of the floor she was on, but she wasn’t very good at judging distances. She only found about half the landmarks the map indicated. She wasn’t certain on the ones she did find.

She remembered the debris pile with some detail that was at the bottom of the grand staircase described on the map. When she found a fancy staircase it seemed the same, but the debris was completely different.

It still looked like an abstract statue. A ribbon of dark iron ran through the main section, with six lines of symbols stamped into the length of it. Wires of oxidized bronze tied the different pieces together. All of this was similar to the stature Irene saw on the way in, but the symbols on the ribbon were different. The wires of bronze ran in a different pattern. There was still a tall central section, but instead of a single section that sloughed off there were three chunks farther away that gave the impression of fleeing.

Irene shook her head. She’d been looking for this room for far too long. Deciding that it at least gave access to the floor above, she climbed the stairs and started looking for the next landmark.

She was getting close. The breakdown of the structure was getting severe. There were sudden holes in the floor opening up to darkness below. Streams of water seeped through cracks in the ceiling. There was little light. Some of the light panels refused to turn on even when hit with the light spell multiple times.

Irene thought her group reached the grand staircase on their first full day of travel. Four days passed since she climbed those stairs. She walked back and forth across the region, crossing over the same area, only moving to the next hall over after she failed to find the exit. It didn’t help that her memory of those first few steps inside were fuzzy. She discovered that this area was filled with inscriptions. They were all simple inscriptions of only two or three symbols. At first Irene took the time at each inscription to film it. Now she barely glanced at them.

She ran out of food the night before. All the water sources she found were the dark type with mushrooms. She still didn’t know if any of them were edible. If she could find a prize altar she could pull some meat from her inventory, but although she checked a lot of rooms she couldn’t find one. She was getting a little desperate.

She tucked the notebook with her copied version of the map into her belt. Every time she felt the brush of panic, she would pull the book out and study the map in an effort to calm herself. She found it easier to slip the book into her belt than the plastic of the original map. As the days passed she started adding sketches of the halls and notes on where she was.

Irene reached a dead end. It was artistically crafted to look like a collapse. Irene could feel a touch of claustrophobia, which was ridiculous. She didn’t have a problem with tight spaces. She would crawl through access shafts on the Speedwell that were only eighteen inches in diameter. That was tight. A ten foot tall hallway ending in mass of steel, concrete and stone that was obviously well secured, was not threatening.

The observation made her reassess her fear. She was tired and hungry, but she was feeling nervous, on the edge of panic really, for days. She suspected this feeling might be part of the reason why no one came back out. She knew that infrasound could make people feel nervous. She wondered if something like that was going on here. She was not going to let it stop her.

She leaned her staff against the wall and jerked the notebook from her belt. She flipped it open. She did those actions many times in the last days, although she usually showed more care. This time something more happened. She froze as she analyzed what she was looking at.

Most of her field of view was replaced by a diagram. Large sections of the diagram were dark including most of the left side. It was in this dark section that she realized she could still faintly see the beams of the collapse. The image was just slightly transparent.

The center of the image was a long white rectangular section. Just past the center of the image to the left it ended in a rough edge. To the right it continued on to before disappearing at the edge of the view area. On its way to the edge it crossed another section that ran from top to bottom. This top to bottom rectangle faded to black before reaching the top of the view area.

It was a map. That broken edge to the left was the collapse in front of her. The vertical rectangle was the cross passage she was following south, before she turned on this corridor to check it. It was confusing because she was used to the top edge of all human maps being north. This outline of the local area obviously rotated to put south at the top.

She very carefully considered how she was holding her hands. The book was in her right hand. Her palm was facing her with her fingers parallel to her body. Her thumb, although latched over the back cover of the notebook, was very nearly tucked tight against her fingers.

She grabbed the front cover with her left hand with a similar grip on the cover with her thumb. Only her fingers pointing away from her body. She flipped the cover open by rolling her hand over so her palm faced her. She was now holding the book with both her palms facing her and her fingers all together. Her left hand at a ninety degree angle from her right.

She let go of the cover, freeing her left hand. A blinking symbol appeared above where her hand was. It looked like an X with a L wrapped around it. She realized the L wasn’t actually an L, since the two lines didn’t touch in the corner. She raised her hand over this symbol and the blinking stopped. A bit of experimentation later and she realized the line controlled her view of the map. The bottom line scrolled east-west, the top line north-south. The lines of the X zoomed in and out and up and down the levels. South being the top of the map hopelessly confused her. She became lost in the scrolling. She zoomed way out trying to find her way back to her present location. Frustrated, she allowed the arm holding the notebook to drop. The virtual map vanished.

She slipped the notebook back into her belt and shook out her hands and arms as she considered. She paced around in a small circle. Her stomach rumbled. She pulled the water flask from her belt and took a long drink. Did anyone mention a virtual map? Irene asked herself. She didn’t think so. She saw enough of it to realize it only showed the areas she traveled or seen, leaving everything else dark. It wouldn’t be much use for exploration, but if it showed her everywhere she went before the revealed sections should lead her to the way out.

She looked around the area and didn’t see anything too threatening. She sat down facing south. This was an attempt on her part to remember the orientation on the map. She reached for the notebook in her belt but didn’t actually touch it. She mimed pulling the book out and reaching out with her other hand to open it. Four tries later and the virtual map sprang to life in her vision.

She moved her left hand to cover the map controls. She zoomed out. She kept zooming out until she could see the entire white spider web of where she traveled on this level. Where she was standing now was the farthest east and south the revealed section reached. She could feel the fear at the back of her mind. She used the vertical of the L to push the opened area of the map up, so that the white area was more centered in her view. She planned to zoom in along the east edge looking for some passage she missed. When she centered the revealed area, another revealed area showed at the very bottom edge of the map. It seemed completely unconnected to the area she was in.

She was too far south. She scrolled over to this second area. It described a single path from a courtyard area in the east to a u-shaped stairwell in a large room to the north west. The grand staircase she climbed was the wrong one. It looked like if she headed northeast from there, she would have found the exit. Instead she headed southeast, thinking she was at the more northern staircase.

She dismissed the map. She stored the notebook in her backpack and swung it up onto her shoulders. Grasping her staff she backtracked to the last intersection and turned north. She walked forward at a fast clip. She kept a watch out for holes she could fall in, but she moved with intention. She was getting out of here.