I… don’t even know where to start thinking about this. Offshore platforms like this aren’t exactly my forte, but even I know that huge, heavy machinery like this shouldn’t be here. From how utterly massive the thing is, it shouldn’t even be able to fit in a room this size. I look back to the pumps, which now look so small in comparison to the dumptruck, then back to the thing. It’s like an optical illusion, except I’m standing right in the middle of it. And it’s somehow… working.

“You got something, Gambler?” Ursula looks right at me and nods back at the dumptruck. “Got any ideas about what this hunk of metal is?”

“I’ve got more than an idea.” I shake my head and take a few steps back. The room seems to stretch massively around the dumptruck, spilling over into something unbelievably huge stuck in a wall of salt. “Architect, what’s the chance of a dumptruck being here for any believable reason? Or even that our client brought it in for some asinine reason?”

“Zero.” March says without hesitation. “...Is that what’s stuck in the wall?”

Ursula blinks in disbelief and turns back to the metal. Her gaze catches on what I now know is a wheel well that’s big enough for someone to set up a small trailer in and makes an unsettled noise deep in her throat.

“Lord, that’s weird. Beyond horrible for us if the apocalypse takes it, too.” She mutters under her breath and crosses her arms as she leans in to get a closer look. “Still can’t see jack shit through all this salt, but I guess you can. So you get to be our eyes for the next little while. Keep a watch out for any of those elementals around us getting close to this truck, yeah?”

I already started doing that the moment I recognized what it was, but I nod anyway.

“Good.” Ursula grimaces and knocks the metal with her foot. “We gotta find out if this room’s got anything important about it and get out as fast as possible. I think my lungs are starting to get encrusted.”

“Shit tons of elementals and an out-of-place dump truck. What makes you think there’s anything important about this place?” I spread my fingers and gesture at the dumptruck, then back at the pump and all the controls. “We’re just looking for the safe. It’s not here. Unless we’re going to destroy the dumptruck before the apocalypse can get at it, I’d say we’re better off going right back to home base.”

A thorn of shivers painfully embeds itself in my brain. Ursula worriedly watches me twitch, but she doesn’t say anything. Not in agreement or to the contrary. She just walks carefully up to one of the pumps, rests her hands on it for a second, then goes right to the controls. All the while wearing an expression that shifts from worry to pensive as she fiddles with long-dead machinery.

“What do you think we’d pull up if we could get these pumps working again?”

I sigh through my nose and shrug. “Way more trouble than it’s worth. If you want a serious answer… molten salt, some of that dark water, or the oil-grease the waterfall was made of. Nothing we couldn’t get somewhere else where it’s way easier to breathe.”

Ursula hums in thought and just keeps pressing random buttons. I lick my lips and instantly regret it, then walk up next to her and peer over her shoulder at the controls. There’s no touchscreen–just a regular-ass keyboard that looks like it’s been bolted under a black and green computer display.

“Whoever made this cut every corner possible.” I note sarcastically as I rap my knuckles against the untouched screen. “Give me fifteen minutes and fifty bucks and I could whip up something better than this. I know it was made a while ago, but this has to be someone’s impromptu repair job.”

“Mmhm.” Ursula leans in and twists one of the bolts. Much to both of our surprises, it starts to squeak free. “Huh. Thought this would’ve rusted together by now. …Actually, why isn’t there any salt or rust on this thing at all?”

She pats the pump it’s connected to, which is so rusted, pitted, and salt-crusted that it doesn’t look like it’d ever work again. In comparison, the jury-rigged controls are pristine. Cheap, but pristine. I glance down at the keyboard, looking for some kind of brand, and freeze the moment I find what I’m looking for.

A cross made out of four old-timey keys. One of the symbols from the client’s letter. It’s utterly pristine–just like the rest of the keyboard–and it glows ever so slightly orange. Fate is drawing me towards it, but with all the saturation of magical salt, I couldn’t even see it. Which also means I might’ve missed a whole lot more magic.

I tap my earpiece as Ursula hurriedly starts turning bolts. “Architect. Can I get a search on any brands who’ve used the key-cross as a logo in any of their products.”

“On it.”

The clang of metal on salt draws my attention to Ursula as March starts to type furiously. All of the bolts that previously held the keyboard onto the console now lie uselessly on the floor, and Ursula carefully jiggles the thing out of the space it was filling. Little by little she reveals a small space directly behind it–barely big enough to fit a few paperclips–and two small pieces of dark blue paper flutter free. Both no bigger than a ticket you’d find at an arcade, and both shimmering like they’re made of the dark waters around the rig.

She leans down to pick up one and I catch the other on my boot before it can hit the ground. The moment it hits my foot liquid cold shoots through my veins, threatening to freeze my blood in place as shards of frost dance in the corners of my vision. Slowly but surely the ticket twists, winces, and quickly turns stark white as salt crystals encroach over something that never got the chance to do whatever the hell it was supposed to.

“Shit.” Ursula hisses as her ticket crystallizes. “The keyboard must’ve been protecting them somehow. What if we needed ‘em to open the vault?”

“Then we better hope there’s a failsafe.” I say as I reach down and pluck my ticket from my boot. “Was that frost magic? Or ice magic–whatever’s the correct term for the stuff.”

“Ice magic, yeah. Pretty common on the other world, and a little less common here on Earth. But this stuff’s definitely from another human.” Ursula tries to crunch her ticket in her hand. It doesn’t. “Huh, it’s a tough bugger. Maybe it’ll still have some kind of use when we find the vault.”

March gently taps her microphone to get our attention. “Sorry. There’s nothing on the internet about a brand with this symbol, and nothing on the symbol either. Nothing new since I looked them up a few days ago.”

Nothing at all? That’s… really weird. Ursula frowns and grabs the keyboard once more, flipping it over to get a better look at the side that touched the tickets.

“No signs of frost, and no damage at all. And unless my brain’s failing me extremely hard, I can’t even sense a trace of magic on this bad boy.” She flips it over again and starts tapping on random keys. “Switches still make some nice tapping noises, too. Honestly, this thing feels like a really high quality keyboard, even though it looks like it belongs in some computer shop’s bargain bin. You want it for your collection, Architect?”

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“Yes, please.”

As Ursula not-so-carefully rips into the console to get at the plugs, I take the mask out of my inventory and try to put the ticket in its place.

This item does not belong to you.

I nod to myself. Something told me there was another layer to this, but I don’t have any idea what that layer means. The ticket almost felt like it was trying to hurt me–like some kind of failsafe for whoever managed to get this close to the vault. That could just be how ice magic does its thing, though, and I’m getting all suspicious about nothing. I flip it around in my fingers a few times, send my mask back to my inventory, and wait for Ursula to be done with the keyboard.

“Oh, uh, you might not be able to put that in your inventory. Someone else owns the tickets, so I bet they own the keyboard too.”

Ursula looks up at me, then frowns at the keyboard. “Good point. Might as well give it a shot anyway.” She reaches into a mess of wires with her fingers trailing the one that leads off the keyboard. “There’s probably something in here that’d reset all these pumps. Can you get into it from what we’ve already set up, or is it a closed system?”

“If I could get into it, I’d already be in it.” March replies. “Do you still have the USB?”

“That I do.” Ursula confirms as a wide grin spreads across her face. She pulls hard, and the keyboard’s cord disconnects. “Bingo. Now let’s–”

The keyboard disappears. I raise an eyebrow as her face knits together in confusion.

“Guess the keyboard didn’t belong to anyone.”

“I… didn’t do that.” She says slowly, then begins looking around the room. “There was a flash of molten magic, the keyboard turned to stone, and then… I… did you see any of that, either of you?”

“Nope.”

“No. But the elemental activity just went way up.”

Shit. I grab Ursula’s shoulder and ready both of our relocations for the moment they close in on us. Her body shakes under my touch, far more than I’ve ever felt, but I don’t see any fear in her eyes. Just a whole lot of confusion which doesn’t explain the jitters.

“What did you see when it disappeared?”

She swallows hard and clenches her shaking hands. “Salt. So much salt, and then it all broke apart, and then the broken pieces fell through the ground where elementals ate them up. You really didn’t see any of that? Nothing at all?”

I shake my head. “Nothing at all. You think the keyboard did it to you?”

“That’s… yeah…. Yeah. It has to be that.” She says confidently, but doesn’t stop shaking. Does she even know it’s happening? “Must be some damned failsafe, just like the cards turning pure white before they turned to salt. They felt all the magic in the air and self-destructed using me as a conduit.”

…Except Ursula doesn’t have any access to mana. And neither do I. I start moving to point it out, but the flash of a sneer on Ursula’s face and a quick glance at her Class Card tells me she just had the exact same thought. She shakes it off and summons a USB, reaches her hand once more into the wires, and fiddles around with it.

“Damn things. Don’t work at first, don’t work when you flip ‘em once, and then they work when you flip ‘em again. If I didn’t know they were a purely human thing, I’d say the apocalypse made ‘em screwy on purpose.” She mutters to herself, then sighs in relief and pulls her hand away. “Transmission should be happening right now, Architect. Tell me when you’ve got it.”

“Oh, I already have it.” March says. “It’s just the controls to the pumps in a closed circuit. Wait… there’s also a database of all the activations. Most of them are from before this place got shut down–before the apocalypse, even–but there’s two activations after that.”

Ursula holds out two fingers and makes a ‘go on motion’. “Lay it on us.”

“Okay. The first one’s from almost eight years ago, and it only lasted a hundred and eighty seconds. The second one was a year and four months ago. And… this can’t be right…” March taps her keyboard a few times. “…Apparently they’ve been on ever since then.”

They’re… on? How’s that possible? I lean in to the pump and press my ear to the crystalline salt, trying to hear anything at all through it, but there’s nothing. Not a peep. Heavy machinery like this–especially the old stuff from before all the safety regulations were in place–should be making a shit ton of noise.

Unless… it’s broken. Which is by far the better explanation than anything else I could come up with.

“It’s broken, right Architect?”

“No?”

I blink twice in surprise. “Excuse me?”

“You’re excused. It’s pumping out a little over two hundred gallons of… something every day. It’s also the only pump that’s working, even though there’s a few that aren’t completely sealed in the salt. I’ll stop the flow. Do you have any drones, Mercenary?”

“That I do.” Ursula summons two small orbs to the palm of her hand. “Hopefully they’ll still work with all this interference. Tell me when it’s clear so we can bust this sucker open.”

Bust it open? Isn’t that incredibly dangerous?

“It’s stopped. Give it thirty seconds to drain, then you’re good to go.”

Uh. I open my mouth to start asking a question, then snap it shut as Ursula reaches into her pack and pulls out a satchel charge that glitters with magic. She turns back to me and grins, flicks her fingers at me to back away, and starts counting down out loud.

“Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen…”

The call of the other side of the room suddenly takes on a siren-like quality. I take a few huge steps back and fill two ghost quarters with shields in anticipation of everything going wrong as Ursula plants the charge, taps on it a few times, and nods to herself when a bright blue light starts to blink. She turns and walks right towards me while fiddling around in her pack.

“Five, four…” She continues and pulls out a detonator with multiple unlit LEDs on it. And one that’s lit. “Three, two, one.”

She clicks the lever.

A solid blue sphere appears where the pump was. Magic roars off of it like an industrial-sized forge, but it doesn’t make a single sound. I back into the wall as my awareness gets a full-blast of the detonation–which is nowhere near as bad as the thorns–and grit my teeth as I feel everything in the walls. All the elementals staring at us; watching and waiting for an unknown signal.

Ursula twirls the detonator around her finger before shoving it back in her pack. She waits to speak until the strange explosion dies down, leaving a perfectly sheared sphere out of the pump. We both stand here for a few more seconds–as if the geyser of molten salt or grease is just delayed.

“Zero.” She chuckles and tosses the drones into the air. One of them zips up the pump, and the other down. “Good thing the magical interference in here didn’t mess with the detonation. Could’ve used a timer, but I’ve never been comfortable with them. How about we start making our way back, then–”

Metallic groaning abruptly cuts Ursula off. She frowns and looks towards where the sound’s coming from, then blanches. I screw my eyes shut and hiss a curse through tightly pressed lips–there’s only one metal thing in that direction that could be groaning.

“The elementals are moving!” March cries out. “You need to get out of there!”

“Heard loud and clear.” Ursula confirms and grabs my shoulder. “You heard the lady. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

I nod slightly and look up at the cave entrance. Positioning myself to get a better angle is easy; forcing my body to move towards the dump truck that’s in the process of becoming taken by the apocalypse is much harder. My awareness is the only thing that keeps me steady enough to get a bead on the opening and toss the coins, then sneak one last look towards the dump truck as it shudders and groans under the weight of salt and the apocalypse.

The wheel well’s already on its way to turning into some kind of joint. Metal folds in on itself to create nooks and crannies that look like scales, and on the far side of us, I swear I can see something crushing itself into the shape of a head. Not any head I’ve ever seen before, but a head nonetheless.

Ursula grabs my hand tightly. That’s enough of a sign for me.