Light filters through the crappy windows to signal the dawn of another new day. I wince and cover my eyes a little with my hand, shifting my body so that only the back of my head is hit by the unforgiving sun. Sleep came disturbingly easy last night–and I’ve been up for almost two hours with newfound energy and a thirst for knowledge.
I gently swipe aside a chunk of the sunflower, then lean back with a sigh. Haven’t learned shit about how it works, which isn’t really a surprise, but it’s starting to get annoying. There should be something in here I can use.
“There isn’t.” I mutter to myself. “The sunflowers are just salt storage things. Everything else that happens comes from somewhere else, and we didn’t find shit about it.”
A coffee mug taps my shoulder, and I look up to see Ursula with sleep still in her eyes. “Yeah, well, maybe if you didn’t obliterate the vendigator, then we’d have something else to work with.” She yawns as I take the mug, then takes a seat next to me. “Are you confident in saying it’s useless?”
“Useless? No; definitely not useless. Just… pointless for us specifically.” I gesture at one of the split cannonballs as I take a sip of piping hot black coffee. “There’s no difference between the sunflower’s structure and the seed. Compared to the other plant you took, which has visibly different crystalline lattices and formations between each part of it, and the sunflower just seems more and more…”
“Expendable?”
I snap my fingers and nod vigorously in agreement. “That’s the word I was looking for. I’m looking at it like a gun; the sunflower should be the gun itself, and the seeds should be the bullets. But it’s all just one big hunk of same-y crystal.”
Ursula takes a much longer drink, then sighs in contentment and sets an empty mug down on the table. She opens up her Class Card and takes everything I’d been studying back into her inventory.
“I’ll get a sample to Architect later today, then we’ll get her professional opinion on it. For right now, we need to decide how we’re going to go about exploring this place.”
Her Class Card shines bright, and a pair of simple pistols appear before us. She takes both of them and sets them in holsters under her arms. “It’s pretty damn obvious the krarig has screwed this place up beyond understanding. Architect did a scan of the rest of the buildings around here–none of ‘em are touched by the apocalypse like the main one, and a few of them are slightly overrun with salt elementals. We’re gonna have to do something about ‘em eventually.”
“Are we really?” I ask as I look out the window. “None of the elementals out here are aggressive. We could easily leave them alone and focus completely on the one main building. Architect, can you tell if the coins we’re looking for are in the main building or any of the others?”
Complete silence answers me. Ursula chuckles and looks up at the clock, then down at her Class Card.
“Yup, she’s definitely still asleep. And probably will be for another hour. I agree with you on the whole ‘abandon the other buildings’ thing, but Architect seems to think there’s important stuff in at least one of ‘em. So I was thinking we could set something up so we don’t waste too much time.”
She reaches down under the table and pulls out a simple whiteboard and two coloured markers. Blue, which she keeps for herself, and black, which she gives to me. I look down at the dry-erase thing that’s been gifted to me and raise an eyebrow in question.
“Shifts.” Ursula taps the whiteboard with her marker. “One of us goes down into the main building for three hours while the other looks around up here for anything important. Then we reconvene for a meal and a short rest, trade places, and go again. After that, we both go down into the main building for eight hours to get some real work in. Oh, and when we’re down there alone, we only explore rooms we’ve already gone in. No risking dangerous progress without backup.”
I cock my head to the side and uncap my marker. “You think we’re strong enough to be apart right now? With my inexperience and your lack of mana?”
“Don’t you worry about that. You’re pretty much an on demand rescue call, so I’m not worried in the slightest. Well, as long as you’ve got a little Worth to spend.” Ursula chuckles and uncaps her own marker. “I’m gonna draw a map of this place. Mark off each building when you’ve fully explored it, and make a note of anything weird you found. I’ll have Architect yell at you if I’m in extreme danger, and you just relocate outta there if you need to.”
Over the next few minutes Ursula doodles a pretty damn good map of the place while I munch away on a breakfast of energy bars and frozen fruit. She consults another map we’ve got–one pre-apocalypse–for the base, and uses March’s analysys to fill in the newfound blanks. About seventy percent of the rig’s outside is the same, but a good twenty percent has changed immensely. And ten percent just doesn’t seem to be here anymore.
“Alright.” Ursula grunts and leans back from the whiteboard. “So… I’m going to take the building that’s a hundred feet in the air and pierced through with multiple thorn-tendrils. Any arguments?”
I shake my head.
“Cool. You want to take the first shift in the deep or up here?”
A coin appears between my fingers. “I’ll go down first. Since I’d have to go down anyway to get you there.” I split the coin in two, then flip both of them at once and hand them to Ursula. “Relocation’s already in there. Leave one of them here so you can get back, and I’ll take the other down with me.”
She accepts both coins, places one on the table, and hands the other back to me. I nod and slot the coin into my holster, then flex my fingers and stand up with a groan of effort.
“Remember–bite the bullet if things go severely wrong.” Ursula reminds me. “And if you find out anything about the extra hidden effects of the purification, send me a message through your Class Card. Even if we’re going to see each other in a few minutes, send it anyway. Could mean the difference between life and death.”
“Doubt it, but sure.” I split another coin in two, then push a relocation for me into both of them. One of them joins Ursula’s, and the other stays with me. “Should I take any guns down with me?”
Ursula hands me a pistol that looks like it’ll have enough recoil to break my arm and a belt with a holster and a bunch of magazines. I give it a look of suspicion for a few seconds, then take the belt and strap it around my waist. It feels much heavier than it looked, and when I finally take the gun, it’s as heavy as a block of lead. I heft it a few times in disbelief as Ursula grins to herself.
“That’s a modification of a desert eagle I made with magic. Based on the first gun I took out of uncertainty and blew away a weird spider-goblin that wanted to liquify my insides.” Ursula pulls out one of her underarm-holstered guns for me to see that it’s the exact same as the one she just gave me. “Most powerful pistol I can make that’s magazine loaded. There’s recoil compensation in the grip and the bullets are all way more powerful than anything you can make without magic. That doesn’t mean it won’t break your arm if you use it wrong, so be careful–and make sure you really want whatever you point it at to die.”
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I raise an eyebrow as I stuff it into the holster and snap it closed. “Why didn’t you use it yesterday, then?”
“Caution. Which I’ve since thrown to the wind.” Ursula chuckles. “If we get to day five without any progress, I’ll pull out the even bigger guns. Oh, and everything we’re using from now on has a risk of alerting someone else, so use it sparingly. Or don’t–I’m not your mom. Ready to move?”
I flip a coin between my fingers and shoot Ursula a confident smile. “See you in three hours.”
She nods right back. “Hopefully with some good news. Good luck, Gambler.”
Relocation takes hold on my awareness, and the salty air of the room trades places with the cool, humid saltiness of the rig’s depths. I drop a coin at my feet the moment I feel the crunch of salt underfoot, then drop to a crouch and snap my neck around to survey the room for any new developments. Nothing jumps out at me right away, but the molten magical light from yesterday’s still burning bright.
Meaning something’s still supplying it.
“Honestly, kind of glad it’s still so bright.” I say to myself, but equally to Pearl. Might as well use these few minutes of March’s absence to get some conversation in. “You think whatever’s supplying this place is deep underwater or way up at the top of this thing?”
Pearl slowly blinks, her head resting on her elbow, then sits up straight and grins excitedly. She gestures to her mouth a few times while opening and closing it, and I give her a nod of permission.
“Just until you hear Architect getting up.” I remind her before she can get too excited. “Mercenary can’t talk without her connecting us, so this is the only free time we’ll get. Gotcha?”
“Gotcha!” Pearl squeals happily. “Ooh, it feels so good to say words again! You killed the heck out of that vendigator yesterday! And that debuff? If you can somehow get that on demand, you could completely negate anyone that tries to mess with us!”
Her happiness is so contagious I find myself smiling along with her as I make a few more ghost quarters and put shield into one of them to get me down to the ground. I put my hands in my pockets and step onto it just before it starts moving, watching the sunflower pods dangle uselessly in the air like abandoned shower heads.
“I’ll have to rip off a jawbone next time I fight a vendigator. Hopefully the salt’s effects keep working after the elemental inside is dead.”
“I think it will. Besides, if it doesn’t, we can just try to repurpose one of them into another spell!” Pearl rubs her hands together eagerly. “Just because the dragonjet didn’t turn into a spell, it doesn’t mean the vendigator won’t.”
Huh. I hadn’t even thought about that. The apocalypse must screw with ownership–or else I wouldn't have been able to repurpose the dragonjet. So maybe there is a chance I get a spell out of this. Even a few salt-crusted teeth I can strap to my knife will be a huge boon.
“Well, then let’s get looking.” I flip Ursula’s coin, then flick it towards the middle of the room. “Maybe we can trigger another vendigator to come get us.”
----------------------------------------
I could not, in fact, trigger another vendigator to come after us. Actually, I couldn’t get anything new at all to happen–even though the room is brighter than ever, it seems completely dead now. Not a single cannonball fired, no monsters, and not even a shift in the molten magic that runs through the walls and floor. When I eventually hit up Ursula to regroup, we have so little to talk about that we cut the hour of rest down to ten minutes.
Oh, and March comes back right when I send Ursula down into the depths. With sleep in her voice and the dulled reactions I’d expect from someone who just got out of bed. By the time she gets caffeine into her I’m already halfway to the first building, and she focuses way more on Ursula than me.
Exploring the upper parts of the rig yields even less. All of the buildings I check have literally nothing interesting in them; just old things people used to run this place. Boots, broken down old machines, a lot of paperwork; that kind of thing. Some of it’s apocalypse touched, sure, but all the elementals on the surface don’t even give me the time of day. They just float lazily in the air, encased in a strangely simple diamond-shaped crystal formation, their cores pulsating with molten magic that’s such a one-to-one perfect match for the light in the deep that it can’t be a coincidence.
Maybe if we can break one of them open and study the core, then we could get some new info. But something about them… that pulse of alien magic that I know can turn malicious in an instant… it stops that thought dead in its tracks. Especially when I’m alone. If it comes to it I’ll get Ursula and we’ll break one open, but for now, that’s a last resort.
“And… that’s about it. I beat down a few apocalypse-touched machines that had the misfortune of being made from decades old rusted pieces of junk, got a good look at a bunch of elementals, and browsed decade-old reports on companies that don’t exist anymore. All in all, a complete waste of time that I’ve got a whole nine Worth to show for.”
I shrug and lean back in my chair. “Not a great second day so far, but at least I haven’t died yet.”
Ursula stares angrily at me with a protean bar in one hand and her other arm in a sling. Something tells me her second day was a little less great than mine.
“You made a big hole.” She states flatly. “And the clover grew over it. I found it.”
I wince in sympathy. “Arm-first?”
She nods. “Arm first.”
“Shit, sorry, probably should’ve marked it somehow. Did Architect not see it?”
“Nope. Not enough of an elevation difference to show on her map–and one other, much more important thing.” Ursula tosses away her wrapper and slaps her hand on the table. She peels her fingers away one by one, revealing a small cylinder of glass filled with salt. “The entire floor is salt. Down dozens and dozens of feet until who the hell knows how far, and even further than that. Check out that sample I pulled up from nearly a hundred feet below.”
Shimmering magic flashes through the salt like thousands and thousands of tiny threads each individually going up in flame. I raise an eyebrow and take the thing between my fingers, raise it up in the air, and try to latch my awareness onto it. Blinding light flows through it in a wave so sudden and destructive that I don’t have time to react, leaving me stunned in more ways than one as I blink away the spots.
“Holy hell.” I whisper. “That’s powerful shit.”
Ursula nods vigorous agreement. “I know, right? And it’s not perpetually bright like the room it came from, so we can rule out the light as the only source of real magic. There’s something else in the crystals that we can’t detect with anything we’ve got–that won’t change while we’re here, but if we can pinpoint it eventually, we might be able to use it.”
“Use it how?” I ask as I set the cylinder back down. It vibrates slightly when it hits the table, then goes unnaturally still. Almost like the magic is stabilizing it somehow.
“No idea.” Ursula admits. She rolls her good shoulder and summons a health potion, takes a big swig, and shudders as it works its way down her arm. “Hoo, I hate that feeling so much. Like peeling an annoying hangnail knowing you have to put on hand sanitizer in a few minutes. Where was I? Right, the salt. Depending on what parts of it are in the salt and which are in the elemental, we might be able to isolate the part that controls apocalyptic monsters.”
That doesn’t really sound like ‘no idea’, but whatever. I flick a coin at Ursula, which she catches easily, accepting the relocation inside and tossing it right back to me. With a snap of my fingers I’m back in the depths, and a second snap brings Ursula right there with me.
She cracks her knuckles and nods down towards the hole. “When we’re done, I’ll get a bunch of explosives and blow this floor wide open. You… did remember to put recall coins at basecamp, right?”
“Did it the moment I got back.” I confirm as I drop two more coins at our feet, then turn to the darkness that leads to the next room. “You won’t pass out when the blowback from that health potion rears up, right?”
“As long as history stays consistent, I’ll be fine.” Ursula assures me with one hand on an underarm-holstered gun. “I’ll go in first. Architect, your eyes and ears at maximum?”
“Yes they are.” March confirms.
Ursula turns and nods at me. “Perfect. Let’s see what else this place has in store for us.”