The thick stench of death wafted out of the next section the moment the door was out the way. Sera retched, but Tiriana only grimaced as she walked in.
“Did we finally find the staff?” Sera choked out, unable to check for herself just yet. She could see Tiriana staring through a window, though, so she must have found something.
“No…but if anyone died it was definitely here,” the elf responded somberly. Then she looked back at Sera where she had fallen to a knee before the door. “You can wait outside if you need to.”
“My curiosity is stronger than my disgust,” Sera asserted as she forced herself to stand, hands pushing on her knees. Although she continued to gag, she was able to at least walk slowly. She staggered forward until she caught up with Tiriana and looked at her findings, but found herself choking down another urge to vomit when she laid eyes on the room.
It was an operating room, with a tall table the height of her chin in the center. Sera wasn’t a small woman, so this spoke to the size of the beings that lived here. Tall doors and vaulted ceilings were used even by humans, but a table that size could only belong to something twice her height. That wasn’t the source of her disgust, however. In fact, the table was the most pristine surface in the entire room.
Surgical tools littered the floor, and a few were even embedded in the walls. The lights on a mount above the table were smashed. And every single surface in the room excepting the table was spattered in blood, with the floor so drenched it looked like a scarlet floor spattered with white paint. Some of it was dry, but some spots had pooled so thickly it had begun to rot instead, producing an atrocious stench.
“What the fuck…?” was all Sera could manage.
“Looks like whoever they were operating on turned the tables. Maybe if we go further we’ll figure out what happened to their bodies,” Tiriana said in a flat tone, her usual excitement for discovery muted by the macabre scene in front of them. Tearing her eyes away from the bloody mess, Sera followed after Tiriana at her best pace.
But the scene repeated itself several times over, like every patient had gone mad and slaughtered their surgeons all at the same time. The only constant sounds were their own footsteps and breathing, along with a faint dripping sound Sera couldn’t quite pinpoint. Occasionally there was a creaking sound from the vents, indicating a failure somewhere in the system.
Soon they came to an intersection, but since they couldn’t read the signs, Tiriana just picked left on a whim. The hallway took them to another abandoned guard station, but unlike the operating rooms, the station showed no signs of a struggle. Past it was a door that already lay open, taking them into a corridor lined with holding cells.
“Were they operating on prisoners, here?” Sera muttered mostly to herself. Clearly they weren’t using volunteers, or rooms they’d passed wouldn’t be covered in blood. Tiriana jogged down the row of cells and glanced into each one, but when she returned, she shook her head.
“All empty. No bodies or blood, just empty cells.”
They tried the right side this time. Here they found abandoned testing chambers- the first was a firing range with a number of weapons on a rack off to the side, and at the far end, several suits of armor. The smell weakened once they entered the room and closed the door behind them, which Sera was grateful for.
“I wonder if they were testing the weapons, or the armor,” Tiriana said as she picked up one of the guns on display. It was unloaded, but there were several magazines on the rack with it. The rifle was sized for someone much bigger than either of them, but Sera thought it was probably doable if she used the counters at the firing line to support it. Sera walked over and held her hand out for the weapon, and when Tiriana gave it to her, she loaded it and stepped up to the firing line, where several sets of headphones had been left out.
“Cover your ears with these,” she told Tiriana, watching to make sure she put one on and doing so herself. Then she aimed at fired. As little training as she had, it took her most of the magazine to do it, but she finally struck a suit of armor with a bullet, which merely flattened against it and bounced off. “…either they weren’t having much success or they were testing the armor, I’d say.”
“Since their enemies were a magic-based civilization I’d wager the latter,” Tiriana agreed. She yanked a suit towards them with magic, laying it on the floor on their side of the firing line so they could examine it more easily. “This isn’t magic engineering. Look at the mechanisms.”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
The suit had hydraulic actuators built into the limbs and camera lenses in place of eyes. The technology was in general foreign to Sera, but she thought she saw a battery pack on it, as well as something that looked like powerful servo motors partially hidden by plating. Tiriana popped the helmet off after a bit of experimenting and showed Sera the inside- strangely, although there was an apparatus for breathing, she saw no screen or visor for the wearer to see through.
“Why give the suit cameras but no way for the wearer to see?” Tiriana wondered as she looked for the release mechanisms for each limb. Judging by the mechanical components it was probably power armor, and the fact that Tiriana was able to remove an arm with a bit more effort suggested it was a modular design.
“That’s not the only oddity. I see some needles in there. Recessed, but they probably extend to jab the wearer.” Sera copied Tiriana’s movements to remove the arm on her side, and peered down inside it. After a moment of observation she saw something strange and searched for a way to remove the forearm, and showed Tiriana the interior of it. “Look at this. The hand is fully mechanized but there’s no way for the wearer to operate it.”
“Could have been a mock-up. Maybe it was only for use in endurance testing?”
“Maybe the prisoners got their hands on the finished product. Doesn’t explain where all the bodies are, though.”
Even while they were busy looking over the suit, Tiriana kept herself angled so that she could see the door. Abruptly, she shot to her feet and spun to face the door, but when Sera followed her line of sight, there was nothing there. The elf cautiously approached it, peering through the glass into the empty white hallway, but came away frustrated.
“Did you hear that?” she asked Sera, but she had heard nothing at all. At least, nothing from outside the room.
“Do you think it was the vents creaking?”
“Didn’t sound like it.” Tiriana opened the door and looked around, then stepped into the hall. “Let’s keep moving, we’re not going to learn anything else from that suit.”
Sera had to agree; neither of them knew the first thing about this technology, and Sera could do little more than make assumptions based on Earth’s technology. Finding documentation for Vivi would be more productive. Unfortunately, this wing seemed to be largely dedicated to testing. There was an obstacle course, several laboratories, and an abundance of password locked computers, but no hard copies.
No matter where they went, though, there was that dripping sound. Drip, drip, drip. Always the same volume, as if it was on the edge of hearing, never growing further away or getting closer. Every drip seemed to deplete Sera’s metaphorical sanity gauge, making her feel more and more restless, like she had to escape the source.
“You hear the dripping too, right…?” she whispered to Tiriana as they turned back to check the final hallway. Tiriana nodded several times, an indicator that it was getting to her as well.
“I think it’s coming from the vents, like the creaking,” she replied softly. “But I don’t know how non-magical ventilation works so I’m not sure how to find the source.”
The acoustics in the vents must have been amazing if they were hearing that dripping from all over the building. Sera tried to remember what she’d learned about HVAC systems in school before dropping out, but in the end, there wasn’t much point in speculating about it when the system wasn’t even built by human hands.
She looked at the vents high above as she thought, coming to a sudden realization. They would have been too small for the builders to navigate, but they were also built to accommodate enough airflow for much larger beings. A human could surely fit inside, and if the fans were offline, it might be safe to explore them.
Sure as fuck wasn’t going to be her that did it, though.
“We don’t need to find the source, the vents are small enough for us to follow them from the inside,” she pointed out. Tiriana stopped midstride to look up and determine the validity of the statement, and nodded to herself a moment later.
“True. And it’s not too high to reach, either. Wait here for a moment.” As soon as she finished speaking, Tiriana wrenched one of the vent covers out of place and made an inhumanly high jump, catching the lip of the vent at the apex of her leap. She pulled herself up and in, vanishing into the depths of the vents.
A soft, intermittent tapping joined the dripping sound as Tiriana progressed through the vents, broadcast to the entire wing of the building by the vents themselves. Sera waited nervously, hand on her hammer, for Tiriana to return. The minutes stretched on as she sat silently, hoping the building was as abandoned as it looked.
Into the silence came a loud thud, followed by rapid tapping above. Sera jerked upwards so fast she slammed the back of her head into the wall she had been sitting against, calming herself with the knowledge that it was probably just Tiriana making her way back. Sure enough, she emerged from the vents feet first and dropped to the ground, but the look on her face was not reassuring.
“I found a body, one of the scientists, I think. They must have tried to hide in the vent shafts, I think there was a bigger opening near the fan. Wasn’t…wasn’t much else I could determine. The fan mangled their body as badly as they mangled the fan,” Tiriana explained. Sera put two and two together and realized the dripping sound was blood draining from that scientist’s corpse. Even Tiriana looked shaken, and she had been far less bothered by gore up to now, so Sera preferred not to imagine what state the body must have been in.
“Whatever happened here made them risk that instead of sticking around for it,” Sera concluded. It was odd that the body had been left behind, though. Had the body snatchers not been able to squeeze into the vents?
“Let’s get the documents and get out of here,” Tiriana said, hurrying towards the final section, which Sera could only hope included records or administration for the secure area of the facility.
If it didn’t, she was happy to make it someone else’s problem.