Truth had an unusual problem. Well, he thought it was unusual. It hadn’t ever come up for him before, but maybe he was underestimating the challenges faced by other people. He nodded to himself, as he wedged himself up into the corner of the wall and the ceiling, relying on his inhuman strength and conditioning to hold him in place.

Yes, other people had their own struggles, their own burdens. Who was he to assume what problems they did and did not face? Perhaps this was just one of those questions everyone confronted.

Exactly how fast did lava flow?

If, hypothetically, one were to trigger an explosion in a volcano (somehow) and that was big enough to (somehow) cause the lava to surge and if, someone (somehow) left open the door to a secret base that connected to a lava tube, how fast could the lava flow through the secret base? Hypothetically.

He should have asked someone at the convenience store in town. Or an old timer smoking on a bench. An elder at home was like having a treasure, according to his period romances. They would definitely know the answer. Probably dealt with this exact problem five or six times.

He knew he was flapping. He needed something dramatic. Something that would at least draw the attention of those high levels. People who could handle mountain-melting level problems. The key to any surprise attack, any ambush, was speed. Which meant that the question wasn’t idle. How fast did lava flow? And what would it take to flood the base with it?

So. Issue number one- investigating what was on the other side of the bulkhead. He dropped to the floor behind the workers coming off shift. His feet fell on the polished concrete silently. When he moved, his feet matched the steps of the workers exactly. They hadn’t the faintest idea he was there.

They marched through the halls directly to a locker room, where they more or less collapsed.

“Good God! Every time I think I’m going to get used to it. But I don’t. That shit is freaky. When does the job get boring?” A worker moaned.

It was a multi-step process trying to get your boots off. It was designed to be both sealed against things coming up the trouser leg, and just as important, stopped things from falling down into the boot. A complex system of straps and seals were employed, each of which took a few seconds to disengage. As a result, each boot took about a minute to remove. It felt considerably longer.

“You aren’t bored?” This from a woman who looked like she had been melted by heat and sort of smooshed back into a roughly human shape. Or maybe that was just the exhaustion. “What’s so interesting about thousand degree rock bubbling and spitting pebbles of fiery death at you while you try to work?”

“Speaking personally, it’s the way you can’t really see, breath or feel anything properly through the suit, but you know that if you take off any portion of it, the best case scenario is that you are maimed. It’s that “Fear of horrific pain and/or death” combined with claustrophobia that really makes me sleepy.” This from a pudgy little man who, upon removing the shoulder length gauntlets from the protective suit, revealed tattoos of catbirds on his arms.

“One of you bastards has a cold beer in their locker. Or a cold tea, or something. Give it to me, and I promise I will mentally take back at least one of the things I thought about you.” This came from a hunched over person, struggling to shrug off their sodden undershirt. “I swear my aircon enchantment is busted.”

“If you really think so, drop it off with maintenance. Don’t be an asshole, just go do it.”

Back and forth, the workers bickered and moaned. It all sounded normal to Truth. Could it really just be Starbrite talking to himself? It couldn’t be, right? They weren’t mental clones any more than he was a mental clone. It was more like each person had their base personality nudged more in line with what Starbrite wanted.

Why did Starbrite want employees that reflected different parts of his personality? Why did he want their souls brought into line with his? Truth could feel the edges of some enormous secret here. Could this be the secret to Starbrite’s power? Somehow? But it sounded like Starbrite couldn’t move around much. He needed a new body. Didn’t sound “powerful.” And yet.

Truth eavesdropped on the moaning laborers, watched them put everything away, drop things for cleaning and repair, pull on their off-duty clothes before they shuffled off to the cafeteria. In the secret volcano lair. He had to stifle a hysterical giggle. If Sally was right, there were only three people in the building. Sally, Truth, and Starbrite.

He didn’t want to believe Sally was right. It didn’t feel entirely right. But he didn’t have a better theory.

He followed the team lead when she split off. Apparently to report in to someone. Now… why would you have to do that if everyone was a mental clone of Starbrite? But then, the System had told him he was under instructions not to contact the main System Astrologica unless utterly necessary. Like when he completed a mission, or bought something through the System Shop.

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So it wasn’t like it was one big, distributed, brain. Was it more like gardening? Sally said something like that, right? He was growing elixir ingredients. His employees, eventually the whole nation of Jeon, maybe nations around the world, would be his ingredients. To do… what, exactly?

The team leader went into a little office with lots of cheerful underwater views of bright tropical reefs. Lots and lots of colorful little fish.

“How’s it going in there?” The supervisor asked.

“Same as usual. I would have thought all the bombardment might shake something loose, but… nope.”

“It’s a giant, ancient volcano. It’ll take more than a few low yield spells going off against our wards to shake it.” The supervisor chuckled.

“Guess so. The mana conversion systems and heat miners remain within the expected parameters, failure rate is on the high end of the range but within projections-”

“I can get all that from your reports. What I want to know is how it feels.”

She blinked at him. Truth watched the byplay. The supervisor was deadly serious. He was the kind of man who can turn a paunch, a cheap tie and a comb over into badges of competence.

“How what feels?”

“How do the tunnels feel? The mining rigs? The ritual anchors? How do they feel? I know what it feels like in those suits, but… did you feel safe in the tunnels? Did you feel like someone was watching you? Like something was wrong and you just couldn’t see it? How did your shift feel?”

“Um. Well. Not fine, obviously. Nobody likes being in the tunnels.” The supervisor nodded. “But I’d say pretty normal? None of the alarms were tripped or bypassed if that is what you are getting at. None of the banishments or wards were damaged either. It all looked fine. So, as shifts went, it went… fine?”

The supervisor nodded slightly. “That’s good. You know why I ask, I assume.”

“Worried about infiltrators coming in through earth movement spells or tunneling demons or something?”

“Or something, yes.” He sighed, smiling a little. “It’s a quirk of the lava tubes. Most of the cone of the volcano is near solid basalt and volcanic rock. But there are these “little” tubes snaking around.”

“Tubes we can use.” She nodded. “And theoretically, with a very specialized spell load out, someone could use it to get to us.”

“It’s incredibly unlikely, of course. And there are guards on our side of the bulkhead. But I’m not in charge of this side of the bulkhead. So any little warning bells you hear ringing, any “vibes” that might turn into problems later- I want to know about it. Because when things go wrong inside an active volcano…”

She smiled at the frumpy looking man. “Appreciate you looking out for us, boss.”

“Nonsense. You are all valuable KPI’s. You exist to make my numbers go up. The good numbers. The bad numbers you exist to make go down.” He waved her out of his office. Truth hung out with the supervisor a bit longer.

The wax tablets and pools of mercury on the supervisor’s desk were displaying streams of information. Some showing security footage inside alarmingly red tunnels, others showing numbers going up and down. Truth recognized a few of them. They were reporting devices that tracked things like air quality, temperature, cosmic ray density, things like that. From there he was able to figure out roughly what he was looking at.

It was a power source. He had never seen anything like it. Generally, ambient cosmic rays were more than enough to power… almost anything, really. Sometimes you needed a big spell array to gather the energy, but actually generating the power was… not unheard of, exactly, but very, very weird. He didn’t understand the mechanism, but something was taking that lava and turning it into usable cosmic energy. Powering what, he didn’t know.

Nothing felt excessively energy dense. Not the lab, not the curses holding down Sally… maybe the wards? The whole volcano was covered in magical protection. That had to be drawing a ton of power. Have something set up that could shrug off the big blasts of energy, limit the spells that could hit the mountain, force people to go in on foot and then feed ‘em to the monsters outside… could be it. But the display didn’t say where the power went. Just that it was coming in, and all the systems continued to report “green.”

The lack of a giant red button labeled “Warning! Self Destruct, DO NOT PRESS!” was disappointing, if expected. But the basic notion was pretty clear- there is a machine, a magical device, that was somehow turning lava or heat into usable energy. He could work with that.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in!”

“Got a moment to talk about shift schedules?” A weedy looking man asked. Truth took that as his cue to leave.

Truth could feel bits and pieces sliding around. He didn’t think Sally was right about the System Astrologica, or at least, not all the way right. He knew that the System took over people and harvested chunks of their souls, but it was also a pretty hands-off manager. You had to directly get its attention if you wanted to talk to it, mostly. That system-fairy, for example, never just turned up on its own.

Same thing applied to him just possessing her body, or whatever he was planning. Again, if he wanted off-world, he could have done it by booking a ticket. Why kidnap a Shattervoid child? There was something he was missing, something he was missing…

Truth roamed the halls, checking the other doors as he went past. He got VERY fast at cracking the locks, which was handy since he had to stop, run away and hide from the trolls depressingly often. He came to the conclusion that as secret volcano lairs went, this one was a bit of a snooze. There were staff apartments, some barracks, a mess hall, a management mess hall, a senior management dining room, janitor’s closet, etc. All the normal things that Truth associated with army/PMC bases.

On the second floor, he found a room the size of a large lecture hall, covered in dense arrays of runes and spells waiting to be activated. All focused on a currently empty ritual space at the front of the hall. There were odd looking devices, somewhat like pipes, extending down from the ceiling. Truth smiled. He had found the ritual room. Now he could really get cooking.