"Do you suppose we could build a village here?" asked Virid as they explored. "With fields outside, I mean."

Ruyo said, "Without restoring the old plumbing and electricity, it's little more than a big cave. And I don't know how to do that, let alone get all the old machinery working."

"Speaking of," said Elly, peering into a window in a door. She whistled. "I'd say it's a crypt, but I doubt those are coffins."

The door slid open with a little pushing, and Nusina scouted. "Nothing obviously hostile. I see what must be medical equipment."

So they went in. The room had twelve cubicles or sub-rooms lining three walls, with a semicircle desk and control station in the middle surrounded by inexplicably living potted ferns. Each cubby area had a sarcophagus hooked up to glass screens like the reading tablet they'd found upstairs.

Tamur pulled open the nearest machine, and found a body. Ruyo startled and Elly gasped. There was more than a skeleton here, like a dried and shriveled corpse, and it wasn't human. Its thin arms had a set of huge finger-bones and leathery flaps below the hands, the feet were bent and clawed, and the skull was stretched out and had the remains of tall ears.

Elly had gone pale. She rummaged through her backpack and took out one of the pamphlets. "Oh."

"What?" asked Ruyo.

She showed off the illustrations. They didn't explain much by themselves, but they were about medical procedures, and one odd drawing showed an outstretched arm with the same sort of bones. "I think they were turning people into creatures like that."

"Monsters?" asked Lisette.

"No!" Elly waved around the room. "This was no torture chamber. I even noticed a spilled cup in that broken upstairs room. You could sit around comfortably, and read about procedures that would give you wings."

Ruyo looked at the corpse more carefully. If there'd been intact flesh and presumably feathers, maybe this creature could have flown like a bird. "Could this have been a willing human?"

"I saw Miras, your man in Sor's Hill. He got changed by a spirit taking over his body, and that was some crazy chance event. What if you could control a change like that? In fact we know you can do that, at least for yourself."

Ruyo looked at her hands. "Is that possible, Nusina? Could that be why this place exists?"

Nusina floated around the room. "Let's open these other ones. How many people were trapped here when the end came?"

Five, by their count. Ruyo opened some for herself, rather than making her friends do the grisly job. Whatever bastards had caused the disaster that shut off the power or otherwise disabled the room, had done it while people were being operated on. When she got to one of the corner machines she paused. Magelights drifted closer to show her the device. This one had been left open, and had some of the same powdery residue as the ones with corpses in them. "I think this one wasn't just idle. Somebody was in it, and got out."

They were quiet as they looked around. There almost certainly wasn't anyone hiding in here. The bodies varied. Two human men and a woman (though decayed enough to be uncertain), the winged one, and finally, a man with bristling hair, hooved feet, and tusks.

"On purpose," Elly said.

Lisette's hand trembled on the hilt of her sheathed sword. "They were making monsters. What if the gods struck them down for it?"

Most of the group looked at Ruyo.

"Why are you looking at me? I didn't do any of this!"

Hastro shrugged. "It's not my business what weird things they did, back then. What do you make of it now?"

Some fragment of her precursor was in her, but it was hard to separate whatever insight it retained from her own feelings. Or from the wishes of the people counting on her. She felt swept up in Mythos, her opinions mystically decided two-thirds by the dead and the hopeful.

She clenched her fists at her sides. No. My choices are my own.

She said, "I don't want to dictate exactly what my followers should do. A power to change people like this seems like just a different way to improve yourself. If the last water goddess had a problem with it, well, I'm not her."

Elly looked relieved. "Then how did all this work?"

Ruyo looked to Nusina. "Before we even try solving that one, here's another question. Why haven't we seen anything devoted to caring for spirits?"

Nusina's eyes spun in the equivalent of a confused blink. "We don't get sick."

"But were your entire kind just following humans around? You have ambitions of your own. Where are the workshops for spirits? The tools you used, the gathering places you had."

"I wish I had answers, milady. Maybe there were very few of us, and mostly like Pir, too simple to care about our place in the world."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Khulis said, "What if spirits were the masters? They can possess people."

Nusina startled. "What? There's no way we'd want to be in charge."

Tamur folded his arms. "Can you speak for all spirits?"

"No, no, we're not responsible for all this devastation!"

Ruyo tried to hold her, though she wasn't tangible. "Look. Someone obviously made a terrible mistake, or everyone did at once. But whoever's guilty paid the price long ago."

Virid looked scared, but nodded. "So, let's learn everything we can here."

They studied the room, though Ruyo felt like a rat trying to understand a ship in more than the simplest terms. All her knowledge was a tiny stock of cobbled-together facts and theories.

Nusina said silently, "Let the others handle the translation. Study the magic."

Ruyo nodded. "I hope you're not upset."

Nusina gave a mental sigh. "I can't say for certain that we spirits are innocent. I only know I'm the guardian and maintainer of the Wellspring. I think your precursor made sure I'd survive and guard that fragment of her, so we could do exactly what we've been doing."

Ruyo hugged her. "Then whatever evil things people in the past did, we're honoring the good parts. Let's focus on that."

"Yeah. So. You've learned to use mana to power a simple machine. Don't try that here, but sense the magic built into the equipment."

Back to business. She put her hand on the nearest coffin and instead of continuing to study the various cables and buttons, felt the subtle enchantment. "The frame of it has some kind of pushing effect. Making someone float in the middle, maybe? And I can tell both mana and electricity flowed in. How much do you understand of this?"

"Not much. I do know enough theotech to recognize this bit here, though..." She pointed out a few of the parts and what they likely did. "Given what we know, an elemental likely had to be consumed. Probably not an intelligent spirit. Where the animal-like features come from, though, puzzles me. I doubt a god was at hand to mentally impose the shape every time."

"A mold!" said Ruyo, thinking of her smithing lessons. "There would have been molds, built into the machine."

With that insight, she had something to look for. "Everyone, how are you doing?"

They had been using the central desk for note-taking. Virid said, "Elly has been going through the pamphlets with Pir. Visitors were being told they could select one of several major changes, and the machines could also make smaller adjustments like height. In just hours!"

Hastro said, "And here's a dropped ID card." This one showed a friendly but inhuman face covered in red scales.

Ruyo stared at it, then said, "I'm looking for molds that control the shape."

Hastro's eyes lit up. "These!"

A black slab the size of a writing slate lay on the desk, like stone in a sturdy glasslike shell. The black rocky stuff within glittered. Ruyo sensed magic to it, but no details.

Hastro said, "This one was in the machine with the winged guy."

Tamur said, "Bat. I had heard they were blood-drinking monsters, but was not impressed when I fought one."

Virid muttered, "How is he our naturalist?"

Ruyo carefully lifted one; it weighed several pounds. "Are they labeled?"

"See that Air symbol? And this other one means Man. The one by the boar-man has an Earth symbol and Man, and more writing we're not sure of."

"And there were stones in the pods with plain humans in them, with no elemental symbols?"

"Right."

"There we go. That leads to another question though: if you're just curing a disease with these, probably what the plain humans were here for, then what element do you use for that? None?"

Nusina suggested, "Studying the differences between the molds is going to be a key to learning how to use them."

"And learning how to do this," Ruyo said, touching the altered skin of her webbed fingers. She silently willed the changes to spread for study's sake, but nothing obvious happened. "I doubt we can make the machines work anytime soon. But if we can get some real professional artificers and medics down here, they could learn a lot! So then, there must be more of these molds to find."

Khulis grinned. "Cabinet's right here."

Under the desk was a rack with dozens of the things, each labeled cryptically.

Though he was happy to show it off, Khulis said, "It kind of makes me angry, you know? All this stuff's been laying here for centuries, and locked away because there's one door that only opens for somebody special."

Ruyo said, "If somebody had really wanted to, they probably could have broken in from above by magic. It just would have taken more effort. So the door keeps out lazy treasure hunters who'd take the silverware and smash the rest for fun."

#

They'd learned all they could, for the moment. They'd copied down the writing and taken some of the slabs for detailed study. Virid said, "Hey, a thought. We can't use the machines because there's no electricity here, right? Can we turn it on from the upstairs power box? There was a spirit-related room in the listings."

Hastro said, "My guess is that you can't control a room like this completely from there. An idiot could turn off everything in the middle of an operation."

"Then what if we had a device for converting mana to electricity, so Ruyo could turn things on?"

Elly said, "That smashed robot upstairs?"

"Yes!"

"The one that got shot with a crossbow and then flattened with a mace?"

"I didn't say it was a perfect plan."

Nusina said, "I could ride the pipes again and see if anything like that is intact." Pir looked at her like she was crazy.

"All right. It's about time to head back, though."

Nusina vanished into the kitchen's plumbing with a faint "Whee!" The others loaded up most of the loot they'd gathered in the cafeteria, then continued exploring.

There was a lot of destruction in this area, leaving little to find. But there was a room with a couple of shelves once used for beds, and two machines that had once contained packaged food and drinks. Both had long since been ruined by the scorpions or the air elemental or something. They rescued only a very dubious package of ancient cookies and several examples of old writing.

Beyond that, there was a cylindrical tunnel. Smashed to rubble, but Virid marveled at what little was intact. "Big enough for the largest wagon!" He began trying to shift the stones to expose more.

"Careful!" said Elly. Ruyo rushed forward to try pulling him back.

Virid was smart enough not to start a landslide, but he did expose a metal rail along the tunnel floor. He waved the others off and had his earth-elemental companion do a more dangerous bit of lifting. "What could be down these tunnels?"

His work exposed a spindly metal arm, then a tube. By the time Ruyo recognized the war robot, it was moving, aiming first at Virid and then at the cluster of people standing beside him. It buzzed.

And then, Ruyo felt a faint rumble far behind her. "Nusina? Come back. Now." She called out to the others, "Time to go!"

With any luck, the machines wouldn't target her. She rushed back into the hallway, fell forward, and started gliding on a ghostly wave that splashed constantly below her. The others would have to deal with the robot behind them, because she needed to clear the way past the horde of them ahead.

The Lost World wasn't going to give up all its secrets without a fight.