Ursula and I share a look. She shrugs as if we didn’t just watch the elemental brutalize the heart.

“You’ve got yourself a deal. On one condition.” Ursula holds out a hand. The elemental doesn’t toss the metal just yet. Seconds go by in this strange stalemate.

“It is normal to state the conditions after stating that you have conditions.” The elemental says.

“Mmhm.” Ursula confirms. “You’re just gonna have to trust that they aren’t too bad. Or are you telling me that you can’t trust us after we’ve been trusting you this entire time?”

The elemental’s core dulls. Inner light shifts to shine on the metal, and she reluctantly slithers over to put the metal in Ursula’s hand.

“I am trusting you to uphold your part.” She states without letting go of the metal. “You will no longer refer to me with nicknames that I do not approve of.”

I grab the metal from the both of them with a roll of my eyes. “This is not the time or the place for this bullshit. And here.” I flick a coin at the elemental, who encases it in molten salt as she shies away. “Didn’t even put a spell in that one yet, but I guess that did seem a little hostile. Can you put it in the heart with enough room around it?”

“There is no reason why I could not.” The elemental reluctantly says, gently tossing the coin into the air. Salty mists whisk it away, and my awareness stretches all the way into the heart. “For this favor, please do not refer–”

“Yeah, yeah, no nicknames. Neither of us will call you anything but ‘you’ or ‘the elemental’ from now on.” I shoot Ursula a look as I push a spell into the faraway coin. “Isn’t that right, Mercenary?”

She shrugs and laces her fingers behind her helmet. “A promise is a promise. Crack that puppy open and let’s see what’s hidden inside.”

That’ll have to do, I guess. And I do have to admit that my curiosity is a little stronger than my desire to ensure Ursula’s silence. I sigh through my nose and run my thumb down the side, calling the blade from my knife to swiftly cut through the hinges that hold the thing together. They hold out far longer than the others, but that just means it takes close to a minute for me to rip it open.

And reveal a pair of small white stone rectangles about the size of playing cards. I frown and hold one of them up to the elemental’s inner light, looking for any kind of markings, but there’s absolutely none. Not even a hint of magic to be seen.

“The hell?” I mutter to myself as Ursula reaches in to grab the other rectangle. “What are we supposed to do with these?”

She studies her own, then shrugs. “Write on ‘em with the metal spear dipped in ink? Or maybe it’s a backdrop for us to write on the tickets with. Doesn’t matter anyway until we can find the vault.”

“Fleur.”

Ursula and I turn at the same time to face the elemental. She nods ever so slightly and her core burns with molten sincerity.

“I want to be called Fleur.”

“Okay… why?” Ursula asks.

The elemental shakes her head just a little while her core flickers as if laughing. “It is French for flower, and there is a method of harvesting salt that produces ‘fleur du sel’, or salt flowers. In addition, it sounds quite pretty when said in the proper manner.”

Ursula shrugs. “Works for me. Welcome to the world, Fleur.”

When she says ‘Fleur’, her voice shifts into a slightly different accent. One that flows from letter to letter in a much different–and much smoother–way than Ursula’s normal voice. Was that the system helping her pronounce a name in a different language?

“Fleur.” I whisper to myself. Mine comes out nowhere near as flowy as Ursula’s or the elemental’s. So either the system’s being a dick, or Ursula’s much better with pronunciation than her normal voice lets on. I shake my head and shove the stone into my pack along with the other symbol-things, then lean back and wait for Ursula and Fleur to stop talking.

When it becomes obvious that isn’t going to happen, I tap on my earpiece to get some info.

“Architect, any progress on finding the vault? Or any info on the client?”

“No and no. Sorry.” March replies immediately. “But there is a room off of this one that has a bunch of stuff in it. Desks and stuff. And corpses. Desks could mean info.”

“Yeah, they could–corpses?” I furrow my brow as Ursula and the elemental finally stop yapping. “Did you just try to gloss over a room with corpses? And so we’re on the exact same level here–human corpses?”

March makes a little noise of confirmation. “Human corpses. Lots of desks, too.”

I don’t know why she’s so obsessed with the desks, but if there’s a room with human corpses on this level, we definitely need to check it out. Ursula taps her helmet twice, pauses, then gestures with two fingers off to her right. Which is my left.

“You getting the maps in your helmet now?” I ask as we move. The elemental–I mean, Fleur–comes along without a single word of question.

Ursula waggles her hand in a ‘kind of’ motion. “I’ve got a direct link to Architect. Kind of like screen sharing, but it only sends a snapshot when I activate it. Good for getting my bearings and not much else.”

“Then lead the way, miss has-maps.”

----------------------------------------

Even with March’s maps, Ursula takes a few minutes to find the correct path. At first I thought it was because she was terrible at reading maps, but when we finally come face-to-face with the ‘entrance’ I decide to give her a pass.

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Like the cave entrance in the waterfall room, this one is somehow both enclosed in the floor and up on a ledge. Ursula has to lean down and brush away a thick layer of grass-like salt to reveal a thin opening, and after a tight squeeze down, we jump up a sheer wall and scramble into an opening that’s barely big enough for Ursula and all her gear to crawl through. I’ve got less stuff than her, so I’m fine, and Fleur’s body just distorts so she can fit.

And for all of that, what do we get? Why, exactly what March promised us, of course.

Hundreds of rows of desks, all in perfect shape, spreading out so far into the distance that a salty mist obscures the furthest ones. Each desk has a mummified body sitting at it, all dressed in variations of worker’s uniforms, suits, and casual clothes. An overwhelming aroma of cured meats hits me as I take a step into the strange mausoleum, lit only by salt fixtures on the ceiling that look like a combination of chandeliers and bluebells.

“Oh, damn, that’s bad.” I swallow hard and pull my shirt up over my mouth. “Lucky for you two you can’t smell right now.”

“Really?” Ursula asks with a little too much curiosity. “How bad?”

I swallow hard and mentally compare the disturbing scent to the smell of rotting ghost quarters. One’s so much worse, sure, but this smell is just… wrong. Like the smell of burning human flesh being a little too close to pork.

“Like I walked into a supermarket deli, stuck my head in the lunchmeat cooler, and took a deep whiff.” I mutter, which almost makes Pearl burst out laughing. “But it’s people.”

“Oh, so like smelling burning human.”

“Yeah. That.”

Ursula nods to herself and walks straight up to one of the desks, completely unbothered by the dead woman who seems to be… flesh-glued… to the chair. I force myself to look away and instead go for one of the desks with a full-body radiation suit sitting at it, carefully push the poor soul aside, and lean down to get a look at the documents they were sitting over.

Except… they’re not paper. They’re blackened salt etched into extremely thin sheets of salt. I gently run a finger down one of them, careful not to shatter the fragile writing material, and shudder at the dry sensation that’s exactly like paper. After quickly scanning it to see that there’s nothing useful written on it, I carefully grab the salt-paper and lift it off the desk.

It comes away in full, and even flops down like a normal piece of paper.

“Hey, Fleur! Did you–AGH!” I turn, and Fleur’s face is less than an inch from mine. “Shit, how’d you… my… did you teleport?”

“I merely rebuilt my body at your location. What did you need me for?”

Once my heart stops racing, I gesture at the paper. “Did you make this?”

“I had no hand in this.”

More apocalyptic weirdness, then. But if it's all salt, then maybe we don’t have to spend so much time pouring over all this shit. I hold out the piece of salt paper for her to take, but she just stares at it. Then at me.

“Take it. See if you can read it without actually having to read everything on it.”

Ursula perks up from a few desks over. “Hey, good idea!”

“Could be. Might not be.”

I wait for Fleur to take the page. Instead, she looks around the room as the salt mist seems to grow even thicker. Hopefully that means she decided not to bother with the one page I already read, and not that something huge is about to break down the walls.

“There are three main subjects written about in the papers, each corresponding to a place in the desks.” Fleur moves past me to another desk and pulls open its drawer, revealing another set of papers. Except these have pink salt writing. “Those on top of the desks are reports from an unknown party detailing the growth of the krarig. Those in the drawers are less numerous, and detail the work done by an additional party in exploring the krarig. Finally, those stuck to the bottom of the desks detail the efforts of a third party to recover a lost investment of class coins.”

“Three different groups, huh.” I lean down under the desk, and sure enough, there’s a piece of salt paper with yellowish salt writing stuck there. “I bet they’re our client, the preservation, and… someone else, I guess.”

The salt paper with yellow writing resists me a little when I try to pull it off. If the first sheet was printer paper, this stuff feels like the extremely thick stuff artists use. I manage to pull it free with careful nudges, but even then, a few letters are lost to whatever kept it stuck to the desk.

I brush the salt off it as I lean back against a desk and start to read. The first paragraph is pretty simple–the last bit of some kind of agreement–but the second paragraph instantly tells me who wrote this. Problem is, I don’t like what it implies.

“Mercenary.” I look over my shoulder and flap the paper at her. “Read this.”

She pops up from under the desk with half a piece of yellow paper in her hands, laughs sheepishly, and tosses it away before grabbing the one I’m offering. Her helmet tilts down as she reads the fairly short page, and her fingers slowly start to dig into the salt.

“That little bitch.” She mutters to herself as the paper crumples in her hands. “This shit’s dated eight months ago and they’re already referring to the resort and the Preservation. How long were they planning this?”

“Eight months at least.”

A paper shuriken whizzes right by my face. I raise my eyebrows at Ursula, more impressed with how quickly she folded the thing than scared with how close it came to giving me a nasty papercut.

“Smartass. Seriously, though, they had eight months to plan this shit. Which means we could’ve come here much sooner, with the exact same objective, and not had this time limit looming over our damned heads.”

“I know what it means. But you saw how it referred to us. We were their last hope, and the Preservation was their last resort.” I glance over my shoulder at the shuriken, which somehow managed to embed itself in a metal panel, and gulp. “If I’m reading between the lines right, then they sent teams in before us. Multiple, if I had to guess. So what the hell happened to them?”

Ursula crosses her arms and leans against the desk behind her. She sighs in thought, then glances over at Fleur. Who’s still just a few inches away from me, and has been listening to everything.

“How’d they all die?”

My eyes nearly bulge out of my head at Ursula’s overly direct question. But… I mean… I kind of want to know, too. What did they do that we didn’t? Did they get any closer to the vault? Hell, did any of them actually make it out of here alive?

Fleur’s cores shine blindingly bright for a split second. “The party you refer to as your client has sent thirty-one expedition groups into the krarig. Three were present when it began to shift, and another eight went in while it was in the process of shifting. I hold no memories of what happened to them.”

She pauses for a second, then moves to another desk and pulls a piece of paper from the drawer.

“From the twelfth group, I recall each and every one of their fates. Seven utterly perished in one way or another. Six partially perished. Five completely escaped after barely exploring. And two are still hiding within, sheltered by their own powers, counting a timer down until they are taken to another world in four and fifteen hours respectively.”

Fleur walks up to me and exactly mirrors how I tried to give her the piece of paper I’d found. With her strange face locked perfectly on mine, I feel pressured to accept her offer in a way she obviously didn’t feel with me. So I do. And when I read through it, I’m met with phrases and names that don’t really make sense at first.

But as I keep reading, and Fleur keeps handing me new pages, things start to fall into place. An expense sheet for a Russian mine and a complex teleporter array. Ownership rights to this very part of the ocean, save for the tiny bit exactly where the krarig sits. Reports of the salt growth, and how it has both accelerated and slowed down the krarig’s growth. And with the unexpected appearance of an elemental so powerful that the krarig project was deemed too risky to continue with lower ranking members.

Of the Preservation.