The room around us took on a slightly more sinister tone now that we knew exactly where we were. Though not enough to dissuade us from exploring–and quite possibly looting–it. I rubbed my hands together in anticipation while Mortician continued to spin one of the plastic spheres with curiosity plainly written in their posture. Something about this place had them stumped, and I had no idea what it was.

Luckily, I had words for that. “What’s got you thinking, Mortician? Something here caught your eyes?”

A murmured hum was my answer. They spun the sphere one last time, fixated on the unmoving things in the middle, and stopped it with their hand. The pieces instantly fell to the plastic. No… ‘fall’ wasn’t the right word for what happened. The pieces stopped existing in the center and suddenly existed on the bottom. Somewhere specific one moment, and a slightly different place in the next.

They gestured at it with mild aggression. “Someone put an absurd amount of work into these mechanisms. Yet we cannot even begin to understand how they function. There is no battery to expend, no mechanical parts to generate a function, and nothing with which to send their commands to.”

“They could be wireless.” Jun suggested with a little tap on my interface to show she was done looking at it. “And most of the ‘technology’ I’ve seen since I got to the all-world was powered by something that’s only one step away from magic. Why couldn’t there be a central battery somewhere in the mountain that powers all these things? And a central database that collects all the signals they give out and gives commands of its own?”

“We cannot explain how we know what we feel. But we know it is the truth.” Mortician said frustratedly. But not towards Jun; towards their own lack of understanding. They spun a sphere once again, and the trinkets inside jumped to the center at the slightest movement. “There is something else here controlling these stations. Yet it does so without the need to connect them to any batteries or a central database, as you suggested.”

Mortician smacked the VCR-like tablet reader with the side of their hand for emphasis. “Which leads us to theorize two options. One; the power lies not in these stations, but in the being that operates them. Or two; the stations draw the power for their usage from anyone who touches them, and we simply are not aware on how to operate them.”

They sighed and shook their head. “It is option two that is the source of our frustration.”

In the silence that followed, the soft creak of the room and a quiet hum of something mechanical working took over. I scratched my neck and took in the stations with Mortician’s options on my mind, trying to think like whoever had created this room to find its actual function. It couldn’t just be a museum for all these little trinkets; it had to be something more. On my first scan of the room, I didn’t notice anything. The plastic all looked mostly the same, there wasn’t a singular hint of dust anywhere, and all of the stations had exactly one sphere and one tablet reader.

For my second scan, I tried to look for the differences. Anything that could’ve told me that someone else had been in here as recently as two hours ago. Someone would’ve had to have left something behind, even if it was just a footstep or a single tablet out of place. Mortician had found a tablet that had the pitcher plant on it. I had one with vines, which I assumed coincided with the creatures that produced the sapmarrow. We’d fought one of them recently, but the pitcher-plant things had sort of fallen away in our most recent combats.

So where had Mortician found it? The room wasn’t that large, all things considered. If we wanted to tear it apart searching for something, we’d only have to dedicate an hour or so to the task. Then no secrets would be left to uncover. I set the vines-slate down next to a random sphere and started walking around to get a better sense of the room. Footsteps trailing after me told me Jun had the same idea.

I stepped to the side to make room for her, and she filled it without hesitation. “It’s too bad I don’t have a search function. That would be amazing with my core.” She sighed wistfully. “Do you know where we could get one?”

I shrugged. “Hazards?”

She elbowed me in the side as a laugh escaped my lips. “Very funny. Seriously, though. If people can make trinkets or armor pieces that do things, then could we find some specific materials and get Okeria to make me… I don’t know… some kind of function that locates important things around me? Like a more advanced version of the trick Nia taught us?”

“I honestly don’t know.” I admitted and I scooped up another slate. This one showed an image I couldn’t connect to anything we’d fought; a blade like a scythe connected to a many-twigged tree branch. It was discarded as quickly as I’d picked it up. “We never got to the point that we could figure out what materials made what kinds of armor pieces and trinkets in my old life. At least my group never did; it was always better to just go clear a hazard and see what dropped.”

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A slight discoloration in plastic caught my eye. No; not a discoloration. The lack of discoloration. This slate wasn’t quite pristine, but the plastic simply seemed used rather than ancient. As if someone had religiously cleaned it, or it had been created much more recently.

I held it up and flipped it over. The back was in even better shape than the front. “Does this look newer than all the others to you?”

Jun turned her head to the side and hummed. “It looks a lot less yellow. Does that mean it’s newer?”

“I think it does.” I said excitedly. “That means this place is changing. If these things are actually connected to the trinkets in the spheres, and the spheres summon the monsters we fight, then that means all of the monsters weren’t here when the hazard first came into being. Maybe… maybe they only came into existence when a group got far enough that the hazard needed something new to throw at them.”

“That would explain why it looks newer on the bottom, too. Since the things that only get used later on are probably used a lot less.” She added with a nod. “Or, you know, we could be on the completely wrong track. Maybe time doesn’t work the same here, and all the things that look older are actually newer. You said so yourself that hazards have weird rules sometimes.”

That I did, that I did. But this plastic junk just reminded me so much of an abandoned office building I’d snuck into with my brother when we were kids. All the old chunky technology sitting out on abandoned desks with calendars more than a decade out of date, and the weird colour it turned thanks to everyone smoking all the time…

Wait. That was exactly what this reminded me of. So why the hell was it in a Staura hazard?

“Jun… does this stuff look familiar to you at all? Like, anything about it?” I asked worriedly. If this place had taken some of my memories to make itself, then… well… I didn’t know what to expect. But it had to be bad, right? Pretty much nothing good had come from me being a human since my second life started.

She tilted her head to the side in a silent question. “No... Nope, I don’t recognize anything. Our technology doesn’t look like this at all back on Sotrien. Mortician, does this stuff look anything like Celaura tech?”

“Not at all!” Mortician called out over the rows of long tables. They’d managed to stray far away in the minute since I’d left them. “Though what we will say is that it is slightly reminiscent of ancient Celaura technology. The sort that our far more primitive ancestors used.”

“Now that you mention it…” Jun trailed off and ran a finger over the slate in my hands. “I think I saw something like this in a museum once. But it was an ancient relic from way, way before I was born.”

Alright, that was just more confusing. How did two–no, three–separate species end up making the same sort of chunky tech before they got really good at making electronics? Was it like that thing where a lot of species evolved into crabs, but in reverse? Was the common ancestor of all modern technology chunky plastic machines, no matter what species they came from?

I couldn’t hold in a laugh of disbelief. It was just too absurd to be true.

When I noticed Jun staring, I composed myself with an awkward cough. “Well, looks like it isn’t as weird as I thought. But it's still really, really, really weird. Maybe there’s some sort of rulebook for these things. Or an… instruction manual. This kind of old tech always had instruction manuals that could’ve doubled as doorstops.”

“Doorstops?” Jun half-asked, half stated. “Who would use an instruction manual as a–”

“We found one!” Mortician called eagerly as they popped up from behind a table. They held a huge bundle of yellowed paper, bound on three plastic rings that let the pages rustle freely. “It says ‘instruction manual’ on the cover, too! And a name we do not understand; what is a ‘summon sphere’? Actually, we have inferred what it means from reading it out loud!”

They ran over and slammed the manual down on the table next to me. Jun snorted in amusement and shook her head, then gestured over her shoulder at the spheres. “I’m going to try and match up all the spheres with their respective tablets.”

I nodded as I stared down at the simple five-hundred page book that held the answers to all of my questions. “Don’t turn them all on without us.”

“Just in case something gets summoned into the room.” She finished for me. “Don’t worry; I won’t get us killed. Endra and Scalovera are already doing that just fine enough.”

She waved over her shoulder as she looked down at the sphere next to me, then continued on to the one next to it. Collecting tablets as she went, and setting them down whenever she got one that matched up to the thing in the sphere.

Leaving me and Mortician with the brick. “Well?” They asked. “Did the system translate it into your language, or do you need us to read it to you?”

“It looks like English as far as I can tell.” I said as I gently rubbed my fingers against the dust free laminated cover page. After carefully opening it to the first page, I was greeted with a bunch of symbols and warnings that hadn’t translated over to English. It was strange not seeing things like the ‘no’ symbol, or stick-figures missing body parts, or lightning bolts coming off of electrical sockets.

“Are you certain you do not need us to read it to you?” Mortician reiterated.

I nodded and turned one more page. “I’m sure, Mortician. Thanks for the offer, though.”

The table of contents stared me in the face. From set-up to operations to troubleshooting, everything was right there. So easily accessible. All the mysteries of the hazard seconds away from being revealed to me.

In a book that looked like it came from a hospital’s basement.