Regina stood still staring at a faceless black door, and she didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh or to cry.

She’d been so full of fervor, eager to do something, planning to revisit the place where everything had started for her and try to find some answers. Still, she hadn’t actually known what to do about the door blocking her way. She’d thought she would just look around, try some things and figure it out. Now that she was here, though, Regina was less confident in how to proceed.

Her small but high-leveled party had made good time through the forest and found their way easily. They’d stopped at the hive’s first base, where she had first tried to build up a village and fought Delvers and Nerlians. It was still pretty small, but had changed a lot over the months since then. Now the place was guarded by tall walls and fortifications dotted with watchtowers, and the dwellings inside had been mostly refurbished and new ones added, building with the Production Drones’ materials and some clay tiles instead of just wood and scraps foraged from the forest. Only a few sapient drones currently lived there, but it had a lot of Swarm Drones and was something of a training camp now.

From there, Regina and the others had continued mostly on foot, since that made it easier to find their way. It hadn’t taken her long to reach the river she had first seen and follow it to the area where her hive had gotten started. Sooner than she might have thought, perhaps, all of it was her territory again. She could have come here earlier.

"What now?” Max asked, stepping up beside her.

She sighed and gave him a sideways glance. She was pretty sure he could guess where her thoughts had been going just now. “I suppose we look around and see if we can find anything. If we can’t get it to open that easily, we may have to try more forceful methods.”

Max nodded, as did Ira and Tia. Both of them had decided to accompany her, despite having a lot of work to do, in Tia’s case. But her curiosity wouldn’t be suppressed, and Regina didn’t mind. It was probably good to have someone with a Class like hers along, anyway. If they had to resort to demolitions … She shook her head and focused on the surrounding area again.

There weren’t many monsters around, which Regina supposed might be due to her group’s presence. This was a pretty low-level area, anyway, so she didn’t think any nearby monsters would be any threats to them. The drones had also been hunting in this general region of the forest, which probably reduced their numbers, too. Other than that, it looked roughly like she’d expected. There might be a few small differences due to the passing of the seasons, although, actually, it was roughly the same season it had been when she hatched. Funny to think that about a year has passed since I was last here, Regina thought, shaking her head to herself.

The entrance to the room where she’d hatched certainly hadn’t changed. It looked exactly as she remembered. Regina stepped forward and carefully swept her hands across it, feeling for any uneven parts in the material. There were none. The door was also set very tightly into the surrounding rock, so that was no help.

This wasn’t working, so she took a step back and examined the surroundings of the door closely. There might have been a hidden camera or something similar, although how it would still work after the Cataclysm, not to mention the passing of a thousand years, she didn’t know. Maybe there was just some kind of analog mechanism, with levers or the like, which had closed the door.

Unfortunately, more fruitless minutes of searching didn’t achieve anything, either. Regina sighed and beckoned to Tia. “What do you think?”

“I doubt we’re going to get anywhere like this, my Queen,” she answered, shaking her head. “This is obviously built so it can’t be opened from the outside. At least not easily. We’ll have to take more forceful measures.” She frowns at the door. “I’d recommend going through the surrounding rock.”

Regina nodded. “Alright. Do your best. Should I call some more Workers here?”

“Probably for the best, this might take a while.”

She nodded again and mentally sent out a call. There were two Workers in the nearby base, although one of them had Evolved to Drone Craftsperson. No Drone Burrowers were nearby, unfortunately. Still, they would all be able to use Ground Evacuation, since it was a basic Worker Skill. Regina decided not to mess around with explosives here, and it was probably better to let them work with the Skill rather than pickaxes, either.

Tia got to work, and was soon joined by the other two drones. Regina watched them for a second, before she wandered off, climbing the nearby hill and looking around the forest. It looked exactly as she had expected. Like it did before. Although there was less noise from monsters in the area than last year. She sat down and decided to work on her magic a little. She could talk to others or watch things through the psychic link, but this excursion was actually a nice little break from running the hive, and she didn’t really want to do that kind of work right now.

Tia called her back over the psychic link sooner than she’d expected. As Regina joined them, she saw that Tia had dug a hole through the rock surrounding the door about where you’d expect a lock to be, and at what was presumably the thinnest part.

“We may be able to get it open like this,” Tia said.

Regina nodded. “Go ahead.”

The drone frowned in apparent concentration, then stuck her Work-limb into and through the hole. Regina couldn’t see what she was doing, but she was presumably poking around inside. There was some clanging, like striking against metal.

Finally, Tia actually managed to get the door open. Regina felt a bit surprised, then chided herself for the feeling. She stepped inside, her eyes piercing the dim light effortlessly. The corridor leading out from the door was empty. The rough stone appeared to be hewn into a rectangular shape, somewhere between a tunnel and a man-made corridor. Although, now that she saw it again, it seemed kind of familiar.

“Yeah, I think there were levers here,” Tia said. When Regina turned around, she saw Tia examining the door and the side of the doorway.

“Really? And it still worked?”

“I guess?” Tia looked up and shrugged. “Best guess, they had some kind of pressure plate or other motion sensors. I’m not sure it worked exactly as expected, considering the door only closed as you had already walked through it, right? Or maybe someone tinkered with it.”

“Hm.” Regina frowned. Considering the door was open when I hatched … that seems likely.

She didn’t have to think for long about who had probably arranged for this, either.

Although she did wonder why she had been hatched only now. A question she’d definitely have to ask. There might be a specific reason connected to events in the outside world, or maybe whatever the Hivekind used to keep her egg in stasis had finally started giving up the ghost.

Regina shook her head and turned again. She ran her hand against the stone walls, then headed deeper in. The corridor stretched into the darkness, so she made a small magical light to see better. It didn’t take long to reach the vault-like room she’d come from, the corridor was shorter than it had seemed that day. Regina paused at the entrance, looking around, before she carefully made her way inside.

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The structure was definitely not natural, although it might have been a natural cave that someone had expanded. It was too smooth and regular. The room was about the same size as her bedroom, and appeared to only have one entrance. It was empty, or almost. The remains of her shell littered the back of the room.

Now that Regina was here, she could tell it must have stood in a slight depression, just enough to keep the egg from tipping over. Anything else it might have contained was gone, leaving only the splinters. She picked one up and turned it in her hands. It was pretty sharp, and thicker than normal eggshells, apparently made from the same material as her own chitinous shell or that of her drones. She didn’t remember shattering it for the first time, but she must have used her claws.

Tia and the others hesitantly entered behind her.

“So, this is where you hatched, huh?” Max mused quietly. He crossed to stand at her side, folding his arms and looking around. “It’s pretty empty.”

Regina hummed in agreement. “Doesn’t look like much.”

“And there’s no hint of any technology that would have kept your egg in stasis,” Tia added. “It seems more like someone must have transferred it here at some point.”

“Yeah,” Regina said. “But it might still not be too far from wherever that was. Let’s check and see if there are any hidden entrances or any place else to go.”

While the others spread out to search the room and knock on the walls and floor, Regina closed her eyes and focused on her more mystical senses. She could feel the minds of her drones near her, but there were no other lifeforms close by, at least as far as she could tell. Magic was … a bit harder to say, actually. There was definitely mana around, and as she focused on it, she felt like she could sense some slight deviations in its formless background, some small patterns or uneven parts.

She stepped forward, barely acknowledging Tia as she got out of her way, towards the back wall close to the right corner. Then Regina laid her hand on the wall.

Or rather, she tried to. Before she actually touched it, there was a slight hum, and the wall seemed to shiver. Regina took a step back, swallowing. Now a faint line that traced the outline of a door became more visible as this piece of the wall - the door - recessed half a centimeter into the surrounding wall. Then it started rising, drawing back into a just-revealed slot in the ceiling.

“How the hell is this still active after all this time?” Max asked. “Did they somehow manage to shield it from the effect of the mana surges?”

“I think it’s magical, not an electrical mechanism,” Ira said. Regine could sense the curiosity and apprehension she felt, although she kept her tone flat.

“I think so too,” Regina agreed, absently tugging on a mandible.

Now that it was more apparent, the mana did feel twisted slightly. Like she’d felt before, underground, although not quite the same way. This part was also set up a little differently, using the minimum amount of mana needed and sort of twisted into itself, in a rigid structure that presumably helped to preserve it even against what happened.

Max stepped in front of her, and Regina almost told him to stay behind her. But she clenched her jaw and allowed him to lead the way, instead walking behind him into the darkness. Tia pulled out a jar of inflammable Production Drone secretion and lit it, allowing Regina to stop her spell. They didn’t talk as they started exploring the structure behind the vault room.

It quickly became apparent that it was bigger than the open part, but that didn’t mean much. The corridor was still stone, but a bit more regular. A few rooms and another small corridor were branching off it, but careful exploration showed that they were all empty. A few small holes or divots in the walls, ceilings and floors revealed where there might have been furniture or other trappings, but they’d all been taken. The rooms were all arranged with connecting doorways between them, and varied in size wildly. Most of them had slightly rounded corners. All in all, the architectural style was both odd and yet faintly familiar.

The group continued on. As they moved deeper, Regina focused less on the side chambers and instead headed in a given direction, deeper into the structure. From what she could tell based on her magic senses and the others’ explorations, her goal was at the back of the complex. She wasn’t sure what she felt, but the mana was different there, bound up in another structure, one far more complex than anything she’d seen before.

The rooms’ layout changed slightly, although they still lacked all appliances. Then she turned left and passed through another doorway, entering another chamber. To one side, a counter was built into the stone, its top seemingly a natural protrusion of the walls. The other half of the room was sunk deeper into the rock somewhat, and a large apparatus filled the back of it. It looked like something from a sci-fi movie, a gleaming pod of some dark metals and unfamiliar substances. Like a cryostasis pod from a VR game. Or maybe I just think that because of what I know.

It was obvious that the pod wasn’t functional. For one thing, its lid was torn open, exposing a smooth interior clad in what looked like black plastic. She could tell it had been using magic to operate, possibly some kind of mix of magic and technology, but while some of it seemed to linger, most of it had to be gone.

Regina couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Either the technology itself or what she could sense of its remaining magic.

“Is this … where they stored your egg?” Tia asked, quietly entering the room behind her. She sounded awed, and also a bit uncertain.

“I think so,” Regina answered. “Not that I can tell what the magic did.”

"Someone must have opened it recently.”

Regina nodded and stepped forward, trailing her fingers along the side of the pod. “Was that your doing, Alianais?” She glanced up, although there was only the rocky ceiling to see. “Why now? Did the stasis systems fail? Or maybe it was something else. What changed?”

“A combination of factors.”

Regina whirled around, startled, but the feeling quickly passed in favor of dim satisfaction. “Leian.”

“I was wondering when you’d show your face here, kid. It took you longer than I thought.” The minor goddess, who had just appeared in the corner of the room, smiled. “Did you forget about it?”

Tia stepped in front of Regina, her work-limb raised like a weapon. Regina tapped her on the shoulder and stepped around her, facing Leainaleine. It wasn’t like her drones’ protectiveness would change anything here.

“I didn’t forget, I just had other things to worry about.”

“And you don’t now?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Let’s just say I couldn’t contain my curiosity any longer.” Regina glanced around. “Why are you here now, Leian? Not that I’m not happy to see you. Actually, are you carrying another message from Alianais?”

“Sort of.” The goddess shrugged, leaning against the counter. She started fiddling with a set of drawers built into it. “Let’s just say it’s easier to talk to you in places where Deirianon has trouble watching, like now.”

Regina glanced at the pod again. Did it have something to do with the Hivekind’s magic, or just because they were underground? That didn’t make much sense, however.

“I think you’ll want to take a look at this, though.”

Leian took something out of the upper drawer. A folder with a sheet of paper inside, Regina realized as she took it out and handed the folder to her.

When she saw what was written on it, Regina’s breath caught in her throat.

It was clearly a printed page. The formatting looked a little odd, but nothing she could put her finger on. The corner had a page number (1), indicating it was only the first page of several. Looking at it, it was clearly a short bio, with several sections blotted out, redacted.

Regina stared at the paper and felt her heart climb into her throat as the room seemed to sway around her.

Name: [______________________] (Designation 01)

Gender: Cis female

Mana Aptitude: Excellent (s. full evaluation, attached)

Born: [__]/[__]/20[__] (specific place unknown — a village in the state of Bohemia)

Current Occupation: medical student, University of Anberg

Background:

Des. 01 is an Imperial citizen with a British immigrant mother and Bohemian father, no siblings. She spent most of her childhood and adolescence in large cities of the HRE (primarily Prague, Berlin, Vienna). Her parents appear to have had exhaustive standards and high expectations, and her grades have been excellent throughout her formal education. Most recently, she has studied medicine and was on the cusp of passing her last exam and earning her doctor’s approbation.

Note: [________________________]

Medical status: diagnosis of MDD and unspecified anxiety disorder

Evaluation: tentatively positive (s. full analysis)