Ander looked around the deck of the ship. He couldn’t tell when he looked from the 11th floor, but the deck was absolutely filthy. Rocks, boulders and a thick layer of dirt covered the entire thing. Still, they did not obscure the impeccable artwork of the ship. The railings were polished to a gleam and were undimmed by age. The floor, where it could be seen, bore faint looping designs that were intricate in the extreme. There was no detail, at least to Ander’s quick inspection, that had been neglected. Ander glanced over to the structure at the very back of the ship. That alone was several stories tall and ornately carved in a style reminiscent of gothic architecture. It was extremely gaudy, but in all the right ways. Every nook and cranny held more detail, the likes of which you never found on modern earth. Ander figured that only French palaces would truly compare, and still it would be the palaces falling short.
It took a good half an hour for Ander to be done ogling the fine work and to take a better look around. The entire place looked as if Napoleon tried to make a cruise liner. There were stairways and balconies with wide spaces that could be used for entertainment or leisure. That said, it was likely possible to field an entire army in these spaces. Ander wandered about for a time looking around before he finally decided to head inside. Instead of entering the building at the back of the ship, Ander decided he would go elsewhere. Specifically, there seemed to be a small building midship right next to several large grates in the middle of the ship’s floor. Ander figured there was a way down in there. He would save what was likely the command area for later.
His decision made, Ander marched off in the direction of the small building. It was a bit of a hike to get there through the debris that covered the deck, and on his way Ander passed by a couple masts. Part of him said to abandon this whole thing and ascend the masts now. It was by far the safer option. He had faced multiple life and death battles already, and while the deck was clear, there was nothing to say that it would be clear below decks as well. But another part of Ander said to go inside. See what he could find. Ander would fully admit that this wasn’t curiosity, or the spirit of adventure, or anything like that. It, plain and simple, was greed. It was the same impulse that made him ‘collect’ nearly useless things as a kid just to add to his cluttered horde. He had mostly curbed that impulse, but the greed had never truly went away.
The greed won out over caution, and Ander walked the rest of the way to the small building, a grin starting to cross his face. Ander liked stuff. He would take anything not nailed down if he had a way to carry it off. Hell, he would take the whole ship if it were possible. Of course, he would have to look and see. Somehow the builders had managed to move very large objects through some very small spaces and Ander would figure out how. Maybe he would walk out with a ship in a bottle. The very idea made the greed burn higher.
The building was a lot larger than what it seemed from a distance. Still, it only consisted of two rooms. One looked like a multi person office with six fully furnished desks. At the back of the room was the other, a room for some kind of manager containing a desk and a small lounge area. While this was all quite interesting, Ander was focused on the staircase leading off of the main room. It was wide and could accommodate a large number of people, which didn’t make any sense until he realized that one entire wall of the main room could move. This allowed the staircase to be open to the outside, or closed off from it as necessary. Ander couldn’t figure out the reason for this, and in the end had to shrug and move on.
Ander decided to leave all of the office stuff where it was. His greed complained, but not too much. While all of the items in the room were quite fine, there was nothing outstanding that he could make use of. Instead, Ander headed down the stairs. The first area he found seemed to be large housing areas. It seemed odd that the creators of the ship would dedicate so much of its area to passengers, unless his thought that this was supposed to be a cruise liner was actually true. He went through the rooms one by one, but most seemed unused except for what seemed to be stock furniture. He would have been proud for his apartment to look like one of these rooms, they were tastefully and simply decorated. Still they were quite plain in comparison to the other areas of the ship. He did find a few rooms that bore signs of life. Perfectly organized personal effects showed that a real neat freak must have come in here at some point to tidy up.
Except that this was the case for every seemingly occupied room he found. It was the same as the sections of the factory outside that were still in working order. Which meant that there was likely some sort of magic going on here. To test his theory, ander went to a desk in one of the rooms, found a pen and tilted it to a 45 degree angle. Nothing happened as he watched, but when he left the room and came back almost immediately, he found the pen rocking slightly back and forth. Five minutes of absence found Ander staring at a perfectly aligned pen. For good measure, Ander found some clothes perfectly folded in a chest of drawers. He pulled a couple pieces out, and flung them haphazardly on the floor. It took a half an hour this time, but the clothes were neatly folded and placed back in the drawer they came from.
“Where has this been my entire life?” Ander’s voice echoed hollowly in the abandoned halls. Ander decided that it was time to move on. He went down a level to find a cafeteria and more rooms. Not what he would expect from luxury passenger accommodations. He wanted to say it was cre space, but there was way too much. All of this was on the interior of the ship. Even with the awesome size of the vessel, these spaces should have been quite cramped if they were crew spaces.
Of course, all of that was flipped on its head when he went down to the next level. He found a room. Except it wasn’t a room. It was too big. As in, make the hangar outside look small, kind of big. Was he still inside the ship? Or had he found a cleverly disguised hatch in the bottom that led to an area below the hangar. On the floor of the room Ander could see row upon row of pallet racks covering the area of a supersized warehouse. But here, that was only a part of the large area. There was a large area that was simply open space. One section held long pieces of worked wood that were obviously replacements for the dozen or so masts up top. Other sections held large objects that Ander couldn’t identify, looking like some sort of arcane machinery. Ander could only assume that those were also replacement parts. When his gaze finally landed on the opposite end of the room, Ander grinned. There was a large vault door on the opposite wall. Wherever Ander was right now, vault doors meant only one thing.
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There was something nice behind that door. Ander made his way down the long set of switchback stairs to the bottom. He then made the long trek to the other side, starting to wonder how anyone was expected to get around here in a timely fashion. He was nearly running with the wind speeding his way and it still took him a solid 10 minutes to get to the other side. On his way he passed through the forest of pallet racks, finding that most of them were empty.the ones that were full held what seemed to be more repair supplies of different kinds. Ander eventually got to the other side, and stood before the vault door. It was another thing that was larger than it seemed from a distance. He could see that the door was nearly three stories tall. A single giant hinge sat on the right side of the door, but there was no handle or anything to open it. Ander supposed it was foolish to think he could open it by hand, but hey, he was several times stronger than a normal human by now so maybe there were individuals who could muscle this thing open.
However, Ander found it wasn’t necessary to force the door, because he could see a small control panel to the left of the door, and down where it was easily reachable. Of course, when Ander got there he found it sitting very uncomfortably just above eye level. He had to crane his neck ever so slightly to make out any of the controls. The control panel was rather simple. There was a plain black box sitting next to two buttons stacked one above the other. The top one was labeled open, and the bottom one was labeled close. Ander tried to press the open button, but found it would not depress, which was obviously what it was meant to do. He pressed harder, and then harder, but found it would not budge.
Trying to figure out what was wrong, Ander used identify on the control panel.
Vault Control Panel
Controls the main vault door located in the hold. To use, present an authorized key to the black square.
That seemed simple enough. Ander, however, had no key, which meant he had to find one. That was both intriguing and frustrating at the same time. He wanted loot damnit, not a fetch quest. Still, there was nothing for it. Ander looked through the full pallet racks, trying to find something of interest, but found nothing as expected. Instead of going back up the way he came, Ander went up a different set of stairs, which was hard, even for him with his huge strength stat. Eventually he made it to the top, only to find himself in a set of workshops with large hallways leading away. Each was marked with what seemed to be an area of the ship. Was this the maintenance area? The hallways were marked with things like engines and cooling and stuff like that. It made Ander wonder why the thing had sails if it had engines. Modern ships sometimes came equipped with sails as a last resort if the engine went out, but this ship seemed to rely on them as the primary mode of propulsion.
Ander wandered on, visiting the engines, which were suitably mechanical, though they were covered in a myriad of odd markings that Ander could not decipher. He then visited cooling, which was an unintelligible mass of pipes and other things ander did not understand. He went through a door at one point and almost got lost in a mind bending set of blank passages that he was more than glad to leave behind. Ander had walked for miles as far as he could tell by the time he finally made it somewhere interesting.
He burst out of a stairwell into a long hall with odd contraptions along one side. The looked at first to be guns, or cannons. Except for the fact that where the bore was supposed to be, instead there was a metal rod capped with crystal. The contraption pointed at a hatch in the wall that opened easily when Ander slid it upwards. Outside, he could see the lower levels of the hangar room as well as a good portion of the mariner horde. Said mariner horde did not notice him however, at least not at first. Ander stuck his head out the gap and checked to both the left and the right of his hatch. On either side, as well as above, more hatches could be found with less than an inch to spare between them. However on the inside, the hatches to either side were more than a yard away., and the one above was nowhere to be seen. With what Ander had witnessed so far, he figured it was time to draw an odd realization about the ship.
It was bigger, far bigger, on the inside. Which was completely absurd. It was an absolutely massive ship, and still it was bigger on the inside. The crew quarters he had found before were just that. They could afford the space. Ander wandered down the hall to another door which led to more home areas, though these were more spartan, styled for warriors rather than civilians Ander supposed. But it was undeniable that even this housing section was larger than the entire ship on the outside. Moreover, it connected to at least twelve levels of gun decks. This ship could likely field thousands of those magical cannons. A quick identify confirmed that they were indeed, magical cannons.
Ander kept on searching. Like before, he found that a number of rooms were full, absent only the inhabitant, but that most were empty. Ander supposed that the place had a skeleton crew before everything went haywire. Though that could simply be due to the fact that a full crew had not yet been assembled. The craft was still technically unfinished. Eventually, he found an area on one of the gun decks that widened out into a large command center. It was all quite interesting, but Ander only had eyes for a door to the back of the command area. Ander passed by everything else on his way to that door. When he arrived, the door swung open easily, and Ander stood there, a grin fit to split him in half forming on his face. He had found the jackpot.