A yawning void of jagged metal and molten salt looms menacingly before us. Chunks of not-quite-liquid salt hang against the metal like the remnants of a crystalline meal, gaining more mass from the salty winds than drips down from their long pointed thorns. Ursula and I share a reluctant look as we stand before the entrance to the rig proper, wind howling through the space and echoing deep into a paradoxically large chamber.
“Hey, uh, Architect? How’s that updated map coming?” Ursula says as she slowly traces the entryway with her eyes. “Because I’m pretty sure the regular one’s going to be about as much help as a towel in a monsoon.”
March laughs quietly as her keyboard clacks away. “I like that image. The updated one is about eighty percent complete, but I should be able to run it while you guys go in. Be super careful. There’s a lot of magic in there.”
“That’s an understatement.” I whistle as the glow of a few salt elemental cores cross through in the darkness ahead. “So, uh, what should we expect in here? Salt elementals and turned equipment?”
“Pretty much, yeah. Probably don’t have to say this, but don’t let the molten salt touch you. It’ll burn like crazy and leave some wicked scars.” Ursula says as she reaches out and pulls a salt thorn from the entrance. “Hey, Architect, is this something we could use back at the resort? Or should we even bother collecting it?”
“I don’t know.” March replies instantly. “I’ve never worked with salt like this before. Maybe try bringing back a few elemental cores; they could change regular salt into this special stuff.”
Ursula sends the salt spear into her inventory. “How much of the regular salt do you want?”
“As much as you can fit in your inventory.”
“Gotcha. Gambler; you’re in charge of making sure I don’t die when I’m harvesting the salt. You seem to have a good eye for danger, so don’t let something sneak up and brain me.” Ursula jumps up and snaps another salt thorn from the door.
Molten salt bursts free from the stump, dripping lazily over her hand like a coating of wax. She grunts in discomfort, then flings it free with an errant wave. It doesn’t even leave a mark on her skin–nevermind horribly burning her. That’s got to be her Body stat in action. Or a skill that gives her… whatever resistance to molten salt is. Burning, I guess?
“Yeesh, that’s hot.” She notes nonchalantly and sends the salt thorn away. “You really need to get that inventory teleporter prototype you’ve been working on up and running. It’d save me a bunch of inventory space while also making sure we’re not wasting our time here.”
“It’s not that easy to crack something that doesn’t want to work.” March replies. “You could’ve just taken a few teleporters with you, you know. Fly out to the end of the disturbance, teleport a bunch of things to me, and go back.”
“If you saw how rough the run-up was, you wouldn’t be suggesting that.” Ursula chuckles as she harvests the rest of the thorns. “This storm is the kind of freaky that makes the bermuda triangle look like… a… bermuda circle?”
I snort out a laugh and shake my head. “Wow. That was… wow.”
“Hey, my mouth started a sentence my brain didn’t know how to finish. You feel anything weird going on? How ‘bout you, Architect?”
“Nope.” March and I say in unison.
“Good. Probably means it hasn’t gotten to the boiling point just yet.” Ursula takes a step into the apocalypse-touched space as she dusts off her hands. “Stay on your toes, both of you. I know this isn’t your first day out, Architect, but unless I’m wrong, this is your first real monstrosity on Earth.”
“Yeah.” March confirms. “Well, unless you count that massive shipping ship where we actually got the tech working for about thirty minutes at the end.”
Ursula shakes her head as she takes a look around the place. “Nope, we don’t count that. Hey, Gambler, what do you make of this place? ‘Cause it doesn’t look like any mudroom I’ve ever seen.”
A quick scan confirms that, no, this definitely isn’t a mudroom. Most mudrooms don’t have a crap ton of tables, TVs, vending machines, kitchen appliances, and an entire kitchen off to one side. If anything, it reminds me of a cafeteria slash break room mixed into one. Except everything’s at least partially encased in salt crystals that glow with an inner magical light. There’s a few distinct spaces in the wall of vending machines, most of which are stocked with expired snacks and half-coated in massive salt crystals, and a trail of scratches on the floor tells the story of how they went missing.
“You think the apocalypse scrambled which rooms are where?”
“I don’t know what I think.” Ursula sighs and summons a revolver that looks like it was carved from marble into her left hand. She spins open the barrel, presses her fingertip to each cylinder, then snaps it shut. “But we should be ready for a few vending machines, an industrial sized stove, and a bunch of salt elementals. Plus whatever else I haven’t noticed is missing.”
I summon my knife into my right hand and a single Worth into my left. It splits into two with a skill, and two flips gets me right back to where it was value-wise. One of them gets a shield that goes into my knife, and the other stays in my left palm as a failsafe. Ursula glances over at me when my knife gets a prismatic edge, but doesn’t say anything. Instead she just gestures towards the darkness ahead, illuminated only by the soft glow of salt, and places her finger on the trigger.
My knife suddenly feels a lot heavier in my hand. I flip it nervously between my fingers and clench the coin in my left hand, mentally attaching a command to put a shield into it for easy access.
“Before we go deeper, should we stay quiet?” I ask with a glance into the kitchen with my awareness. There’s way more empty spaces than Ursula thought. “Are we being stealthy?”
She shakes her head and starts moving. “The elementals will feel us in the salty air, and the apocalypse-touched stuff is a weird mess of dangerous and annoying. Have you ever fought a vending machine?”
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“No, but I’ve destroyed a toaster before.”
“That’s… more than a little different. But not necessarily less dangerous.” Ursula chuckles as she lets me take the lead. Damn me for having better awareness than her. “These things won’t be like the dragonjet; they’ll have magic based on what they could do as a regular old appliance, but amplified more than a little so that they’re actually threatening.”
I tilt my head to the side while we walk. My footsteps echo against the metal floor, softened slightly by all the salt crystals, but the sheer amount of magic in the air makes it reverberate through my head like distant gunshots. Somehow the damn crystals work like amplifiers and dampeners at the same time.
“How’s that different than the dragonjet?” I ask a little louder than necessary. Ursula seems taken aback by my volume, and I can hear March wince from her side. “Wait, is it not super loud in here for you? Am I the only one that can hear this?”
Pearl shakes her head and points to herself, but that's not very helpful. She’s hearing exactly what I’m hearing, after all. Ursula sticks out the hand she was using to steady her gun and waggles it side to side.
“Just a little too loud. If anything, it’s way too quiet in here for me. Almost like we’re walking into some ancient tomb. Brr.” She shudders. “You got some weird skills in your first two weeks, sister. Just remember that we don’t have ‘em.”
“What she said.” March echoes. “But doubly so for me, since I hear everything twice over.”
“You can mute one of us for now since we’re still so close together.” Ursula suggests. “That way you won’t have to deal with overlapping audio.”
“Nope. I might miss something important. I’ll endure this.”
From the tone of March’s voice, it seems like it’ll actually be a struggle to endure listening in on us. Which makes me wonder why she’s the one doing this instead of Noland–he’d probably be a lot better on the comms. Maybe it has to do with their skills, but there’s no reason Noland couldn’t use a building March built. He’s definitely got the Worth for it. But that’s not important–we’ve got the team we’ve got, and I need to focus on making sure none of us get taken out pointlessly.
I shift my posture slightly to more readily react to whatever my awareness tells me and make my way towards the dark. The cafeteria seems to be completely empty of anything living for the moment, but that doesn’t mean that it’ll be empty when we’re coming back up. I turn my head and try to make a mental map of the place–memorizing where each and every appliance stands and how much salt is everywhere–but it’s a fool’s errand. For me.
For Pearl? She glares incessantly forward with rapt attention, tracing her fingers through the air as she mouths words that I can’t quite make out. But it feels like she’s doing the exact same thing I just tried to do. So I can go into the darkness without worrying about anything from behind us coming to life to surprise us.
A near complete wall of silken darkness stands between us and the salty reaches beyond. I raise my knife hand for Ursula to stop, then reach out with my coin hand to gently brush my fingers against the darkness. They’re met with the smallest amount of resistance, but there’s definitely resistance there. Extremely humid, yet somehow freezing cold, resistance.
“That’s definitely not good.” I mutter to myself as I shake my fingers off and look back at Ursula. “You’ll be fine in there with your Body stat, but I’m definitely going to freeze to death if I go in there.”
“Easy fix.” She says confidently and places a hand on my shoulder. A sheen of magic spreads from her touch over my body in an instant, and suddenly, I feel like I’m standing in a sauna. “Don’t have a cold resistance spell, but I’ve got one that makes everything a little too hot. Helped me out in Antarctica, so it should be more than fine for right now.”
The urge to pant and huff in the sudden onslaught of heat is strong. The magic sticks to every inch of my body like uncomfortably sweaty clothes after an intense workout, but a hand across my forehead comes up clean. No sweat to be found.
“What about the equipment? That’s all water and temperature proof?”
Ursula taps her earpiece with confidence. “Graded to work in any pressure, temperature, or climactic saturation. Without losing a single percentage of functionality, if I say so myself. The only thing that messes with these puppies is extremely strong magic, but what we did back at the building attuned them to this place. Don’t worry about them messing up.”
Reassuring. I take a deep breath and gently push my hand through the barrier of darkness, feeling the cold humidity cling to the magic around me like condensation on plastic wrap. It doesn’t feel anywhere near as horrible as I expected. Don’t get me wrong–it’s not a pleasant feeling at all–just not as ‘freeze to death’ as I expected.
I push through with one massive shiver. No more light meets my eyes as the strangeness of the krarig overtakes me–just the glow of salt casting long shadows over the nearby area. Ursula follows closely behind with a shiver of her own, and we carefully make our way into the darkness.
“Good lord, this is unpleasant.” She says, her voice muffled ever so slightly by the darkness. “It’s like we’re underwater, but without any of the upsides of being underwater. Hell, it feels heavier now than it did a second ago. That ain’t just me, right?”
No, it’s definitely not just her. It feels like gravity’s intensified by a little–maybe only twenty percent or so–but it’s more than enough to throw off my senses. I nod in agreement and take a few questing steps onto the metallic floor, my feet slipping more than a little with every single motion. Just like Ursula said–all the negatives of being underwater with none of the benefits. Including an extremely slippery floor without the whole ‘floating’ thing.
“This is pretty damn horrible.” I mutter as a railing comes into view. “So how the hell does light work here? If it’s completely dark we shouldn’t be able to see anything at all. But that just came into view from absolutely nothing, even though there’s salt lights all around us.”
Ursula shrugs with one shoulder. “Magic. Bullshit. Call it whatever you want, but it’s what’s going on right now.”
“Bullshit is right.” I chuckle and hold out an arm to stop Ursula from walking any further. “Careful. There’s a long-ass drop on the other side of this railing. And… huh. There’s something a little further up. After the seemingly endless drop.”
“Endless, huh?” Ursula leans over the railing and hums deep in her throat. “Wonder where it ends up. If we’ve got time at the end of this, think you can spare a coin for relocation?”
I shoot her a look of disbelief as I walk around the massive hole. “You want to go down there? When it could possibly lead to… I don’t know… a vat of raw magic that can dissolve you down to a human-based slurry?”
“See, that’s the three key words right there. ‘I don’t know’.” Ursula jogs to catch up with me and gently nudges me with her elbow. “Nobody knows what’s down there, and it could be amazing. Or it could kill a weak person instantly. Luckily for both of us, I’m not weak. And you’ve got one of the most absurd scouting spells I’ve ever seen. We’re going to find out what’s down there, and it’s not going to kill me.”
“It better not.” March cuts in. “I like being around you.”
“Aw, love you too.” Ursula says with a grin. “Do your best to map this place out. Oh, should we be waiting around in each room so you can get the location data?”
“Oh, yes, that’d be really helpful. Ten minutes per room should give me enough time to make a real model of this place. Thanks.”
“No prob.” Ursula says as we get closer and closer to the thing I can feel with my awareness. There’s something… really familiar about it. So familiar that I could swear I’ve seen it almost every day of my life. Maybe even every single day of my life. And there’s a smear of something coating the ground around it, leading to one of the walls, where another thing… sits.
Lifelessly. With enough salt thorns sticking out of it to make a pincushion jealous.