26. Down into the past

Link to Tilted Spire Timetable
 
The passage from the elevator shaft was dark. Marius went ahead, breaking through the darkness with his enhanced eyesight. Next, Jaden and Nox, Jaden with her ever-present light spear and Nox flicking on her hedge magic will-o-wisp. Fureva-Yung marched.
 
The passage went for ten metres before forking off to the right. Marius stood in indecision, looking down one hallway then the other. They wanted to go east. That was certain. Which way would get them there fastest? He imagined himself back on the surface where the steps began. There, he could clearly see the sun rising in front of him as he faced the steps. Visualising the trip down the stair, Marius physically turned on the spot, always keeping one arm pointing in the direction of east. For the others, it looks like some sort of stiff-limbed dance that a servitor might do. Eventually, he visualised their place in the passage. Though his arm pointed at a stone wall, the passage to the right was the closest to that direction.
 
They turned right, and the new passage opened up into a room filled with fifteen crates of various sizes. All of the crates were labelled in two languages that no one could understand. There was a group with the circles and lines of the Ferrian Compact, the group Fureva-Yung identified as her own. The other crates had the sharp star shape of the Sacristans. The other faction. Fureva-Yung stared at the Sarcritan symbol with a mixture of anger and fear.
 
Marius, on the other hand, after checking for obvious dangers, opened the nearest box blithely, ignoring the symbols. Inside, the walls were padded with a thick cushioning material with a shaped cavity in the centre. Whatever the box had stored had been well protected. They opened all the boxes, finding that some had small holes for many small components while some, like the first, held one. Only one box held anything at all, a large matt black device. On top, a raised panel gave way to waves of black sloping away. On either side, shiny metal ports told Jaden that the device connected to a larger machine. To Nox, the device looked like a much larger version of something they’d seen in the teleportation room. That part was responsible for routing power so cross-dimensional or interstellar travel could be achieved.
 
“Does it look like we have all the parts for one machine here?” Marius asked, looking at all the boxes. Jaden cast her eye over the shapes the padding made in each box. There were repetitions of some shapes, that gave her the impression that these were more like spare parts rather than an entire machine.
“Look here, these spaces have connections for the Ferrian Compact boxes, but on the other side of the same device is a connection related to the Sacristan boxes,” Jaden pointed out, “Whatever their feud elsewhere, here they were working together to make a machine.”
 
“Can we take it with us?” Asked Nox.
“Even Bellyache can’t eat something that big,” Jaden replied, thinking the same thing herself.
“We could break it up for components,” Marius suggested gleefully, looking forward to the beautiful shinies it would provide.
“I could carry it,” Fureva-Yung added.
“I’m sure you could, but you shouldn’t have to. No, let’s just make a note of where it is and leave it safe in its box.”
 
They left the boxes and the device behind and took another fork to the right. After fifteen metres, the passage opened up again into another space filled with crates. These had been busted open, and their contents spilled across the floor. Marius was about to open one until he realised Nox could scan them much quicker. Nox was studying the two distinct written languages on the crates. They would say or describe similar things. With a bit of work, she wondered if she could decipher the two scripts. She was scribbling down the symbols when Marius asked her to scan through the boxes.
 
She didn’t see much of interest until her scans fell on a collection of parts hiding behind a pile of crates. The collection moved and unfolded into a six-legged creature that crawled out from its resting place. It was a higgledy-piggledy mess of different parts and different ages. A small round head surmounted with two eyes on stalks poked out from under a carapace of many different old and new material layers. Its six legs, all different, all ended in a blade or sharp point.
Jaden stepped back, looking at the different parts the creature was made of and determining that it might not be hard to make one independent component work against the others. Nox also stepped back and telepathically projected peace and goodwill.
What? What do you have? Interesting things, gimmie! It leapt for Nox, who dodged the creature’s attack, rolling away.
“Uh, it has a mind of sorts. It likes shinies,” She told the others, not taking her eyes off the creature now stalking her.
“Hey, fella,” Marius waved to get the thing's attention, “It would be much easier to trade shinies than us killing you. Let us talk.”
The creature looked up at Marius. The large carapace crouched low over its six long legs, ready to pounce.
Fureva-Yung wasn’t letting any clockwork creature hurt her friends. She made herself look bigger than even her formidable size and moved between Nox and the beast. Jaden’s left hand carefully pulled out a few iotum she always kept in her pocket, and her right hand held steady her spear.
 
This one would trade with you, Nox pointed to Marius, And this one has shinies, She gestured to Jaden’s open hand.
Nox could sense confusion from the creature over the nature of trade. Its eyestalks swivelled from Marius to Jaden to Nox, settling somewhere between Jaden and Marius.
“Tell it I will give it the shinies if it tells us about this place,” Jaden said, throwing a small iotum at the creature. It snapped it out of the air and ground it into metal dusty happily.
[I]
 
This place smells nice. Smells of things to find and bind. Look for things to incorporate.
As Nox translated the creature’s thought, Marius looked over its weaponisation. The carapace was strong, making it hard to hurt, but the six legs were wicked sharp, and it had already shown its willingness to pounce. Though small, the size of a dog, it was not a beast Marius was interested in tangling with. It was, however, made of components that could be very useful. He let the others know about the dangers of the beast via the group telepathic network.
"So if we pull off its legs, it will be ‘armless," Fueva-Yung replied.
The creature continued with its thoughts as Jaden threw another small part to it, Some things are tasty, some things sting, but that’s okay, I incorporate them too.
This time the creature took the scrap and after carefully making space under its carapace, fitted the part into place.
“Ah look,” Marius joked, “A creature after my own heart.”
“Yeah, your final form,” Jaden added with a smirk.
As the creature ate and added parts, Nox scanned it again. She was interested in what the original beast had been like before it started modifying itself. Deep under the carapace, about the size of a loaf of bread, an ancient drone, cleaner or scavenger robot. At its heart was the simple idea of finding interesting things. The living being before them was a long way from that mindless machine. It had survived the millennia by living on its wits and modifying itself with whatever it could find.
“Hey, what about all this?” Marius gestures to the scraps and components lying around.
Nice, The creature almost purred, and Nox asked it Marius’ question, Deciding.
“Can I look?” Marius bent down to sort through the mess.
Mine! The creature leapt at him in a fake charge before skittering back to its snack.
 
“Well, should we disable this little critter or kill it outright?” Marius said to the group. Nox thought it better not to translate that conversation.
“It’s just a robot. There’s no life in there, “ Jaden judged, “You might as well break it apart for iotum.”
“I’m also worried it may find that large component. If anyone’s going to break it up, it's going to be me.”
 
As the others talked about the creature’s demise, Nox kept it busy with scraps. On a whim, she pulled out one of her crystals and pushed it towards the beast. The creature stopped what it was doing, examined the new thing, unsure what to make of it and then brought it forward into its vice-like pincers.
 
A burst of white light and energy spilled over the entire group. When their vision cleared they were somewhere else, looking back at Nox and the creature.
‘Oops! I forgot, “ Nox apologised, realising that once more they’d been sent somewhere else by the crystals.
 
They were all standing in an open spherical chamber thirty metres wide and just as high. Six apertures circled the equator of the space, evenly spaced. From them, passages lead off at different angles. Some hinted at, some completely blocked from view. In the centre of the space hung a wedge of rock and earth, the tip pointing down. It reminded Nox of the pieces of floating rock around the pyramid, though this one had a plume of flame projecting from its base. She scanned the wedge and found nothing there but light. It was a hologram.
 
What the…where’s the shinies? Said the bug, looking around the space.
“What the…” Said Jaden at the same time, giving the bug a side-eyed look.
Fureva-Yung seemed transfixed by the hologram of rock. She could almost remember…something. Pointing at the point where the bright flames projected she said, “Propulsion.”
“Odd thing for you to say, Furry,” Marius commented, “What do you mean?”
Fureva-Yung searched her memory until she gave herself a headache. Sitting down heavily, she shook her head. She had no idea what she meant by the word, only that was what it was. But how did she know that?
“Maybe we can find out,” Nox pointed to the nearest aperture above their heads, “While we’re here, we can look around.”
“But how to get up there.” The aperture was seven metres above their heads and far too high to jump.
“You could throw me there,” Nox replied with a smile, “I bet I could just float in if you give me a good push.”
“Hey yeah,” And with that, Marius picked up the laughing Nox and started walking up the wall to get closer to the aperture. Though the wall was steep, almost vertical, and gravity in this place was certainly pulling Marius back down, he could feel his feet grip the spherical surface as if he were on flat ground. He put Nox down and with Jaden, and the head sore Fureva-Yung they walked up the wall and through the passage. Below, the bug sniffed and lamented the lack of shinies before scuttling off through another aperture across the sphere.
 
“Oh, I get it! We’re in the datasphere…or a datasphere! Normal rules don’t apply here,” Nox exclaimed joyously. She’d made it to the datasphere, with her friends, intact. It could be done.
“Well, it is a sphere,” Marius agreed tentatively, unsure if this could be part of the fabled database of information.
 
They followed the passage, twisting around at some impossible angle, before opening out into a blizzard. If it was a room they could not see the walls, ceiling or floor for the thick snow being whipped around them. Marius automatically shivered at the sight of all the cold.
“Don’t worry, I can get us out of here without getting hurt,” He said, sure he knew the way out. Behind him was a wall of swirling white. The doorway they’d walk through had vanished.
“But I’m not being hurt,” Nox said, brushing white snow off her bare arms. No goose flesh neither was her skin pale from the cold.
Marius stopped and realised he could feel the cold, but his shivering was only an automatic response as the cold didn’t affect him. As they mulled over this new sensation, the scene around them changed. They were pulled above the snow clouds, high above an icy tundra of a world. As they watched, their view plummeted into a hole in the ground, following a tunnel built into the permafrost and rock into warmer spaces. Here insectoid people that looked very much like ants walked, worked and chatted with each other.
 
Nox looked at Fureva-Yung transfixed by the sights around them. Nox had seen a member of this race sitting beside Fureva-Yung in ampitheatre of Fureva memory. She also realised that they had all seen these people in the images shown on the wall during their visit to the pyramid. They were one of many races that made up the Ferrian Compact.
“Ti’Churas,” Said Fureva-Yung, almost under her breath, “They are the Ti’Churas.”
 
The image travelled deep through the tunnels until it reached a lake of warm water. Steam rose from the water heating not just the cavern but also the tunnels around it. Time passed for the Ti’churas in the projection, and now the caverns were filled with geothermal-related industry. Their civilisation grew, thanks to the free energy and warmth provided by the geothermal vents. More advanced technology filled the cavern and tunnels, and the society grew. Smells wafted through the room, a scent-over describing the scene, adding content for those who could interpret it. The images faded, and the group found themselves in an empty room. They travelled back to the sphere and entered another passage leading to a dark space.
 
Tiny white dots faded in and out as the projection focused on a sphere covered in snow and ice. The same blizzard ravaged planet from space. Suddenly the view shifted as the projection dove towards the planet, the surface rushing up until the same civilisation was around them. At its peak, the caverns were clean and bright, warm and comfortable.
 
“Is this real? Are we here?” Fureva-Yung asked. When no one could give her a definitive answer, she pinched her forearm, pulling out a patch of hair. A bare patch of skin turning red from irritation, was visible.
“Clever,” Nox whispered before being drawn into the drama around them.
 
The projection showed earthquakes, passages collapsing and whole caverns disappearing under earth and rock. The image pulls away as the icebound land collapsed in on itself. Chunks of rock fell away from the planet to drift away into space.
 
“Hey! Do you think this is the same planet we saw when Fureva-Yung smashed together the crystals?”
“Certainly looks like it. Not a natural disaster or war but just delving too greedily and too deep.” Jaden replied, unable to take her eyes off the scene. More smells wafted through, unexplained or interpreted. Spots appear on the planet where hundreds of thousands of geothermally driven cities grew. These cities converted into spacefaring lumps of rock.
 
Fureva-Yung knew she knew this, but not what she knew or how. She closed her eyes and thought harder, which only hurt her head. She fought through the blinding pain, and finally, like a light switch turning on, she remembered. She had never experienced this, she had learnt in a class. This is why Fureva-Yung could not make sense of her knowing, she’d never experienced it herself, even though she knew it all to be true. She knew that the Ti’churas flew through space, meeting intelligent life, and eventually joining the Ferrian Compact. Real, but other real and a very, very long time ago.
 
They watched as the planet broke apart, the pieces turning into ships of many different sizes and shapes but with a similar structure to the hologram in the first room. Wedges of a destroyed planet moved through space, looking for a new home.
 
The ships head off together into the darkness of space, and the projection fades out. They found themselves in the box room once more, East of the Spire and possibly a hundred metres underground. Fureva-Yung looks at her arm and saw the patch of bare skin, red pockmarked from where she’d pulled out hairs.
 
Marius looks around. The bug was missing. The cyphers and iotum on the ground remain. With a merry clap of his hands, he sets to work sorting through the scrap, looking for valuable parts. Nox was quietly pleased the beast was gone. Though it was a machine, she felt it was also a living thing, and she would have felt bad pulling it apart just for cyphers.
 
Marius handed the cyphers to Nox for identification. One grabbed her attention immediately, a small drone of four tiny legs. She set it running and soon had it scampering rings around the party, telepathically controlling it.
“And I can see through its visual sensor, “ She said, sending the tiny robot up a passage heading southwest.
“Most people call them eyes,” Jaden grumbled as she fell in with the group heading in that direction.
 
They completed a square of passage, returning them to the elevator shaft, before heading northwest. At the door, Fureva-Yung used her magic hand. The door shuddered and ground open before getting stuck a hand-width apart. Marius looked through. The passage widen ahead before something like the ripple of water in the far, inky darkness beyond. Fureva-Yung placed her hands in the gap and pulled the two doors apart. In front of them, a staircase led down into the clear but ever-darkening depths of a pool of water. Without a word, Fureva-Yung waded out into the water. At the end of the stairs, the water was two metres deep and above even her head. Jaden handed down her light spear, and Fureva-Yung swam out.
The room was quiet except for the splash of Fureva-Yung’s’ passage as she swam deeper into the room. Ahead, something shiny glinted. Fureva-Yung dove and swam towards it. She found a transparent panel with holes above a control panel of heavy machinery. Looking out through the cracked and broken window, she could just make out a giant white domed shape in the large room beyond. A white dome, just like the one above the transport in the first pit weeks ago in the forest of Endoval. It looked intact, but from her location, there was no clear way through, certainly none that didn’t require swimming.
 
Fureva-Yung swam to the surface and looked for other passages to either side but could see nothing. Under the dome was where they needed to go. She hoped there was still a passage further down that was dry and airtight, leading to the space under the dome. With that thought in mind, she swam back to the others.
 
“Urgh! You smell like a wet wookie!” Marius complained as Fureva-Yung walked up the steps towards them.
“What’s a wookie?” Fureva-Yung asked.
“I don’t know, but I assume you smelled like one.”
“I will assume that is a good thing.” Fureva-Yung gestured behind her into the water. She told them what she’d discovered, including the dome in a large room beyond the broken window.
“We don’t want to go this way, though. We need to find a lower path.”
“Why?” Jaden, who was looking at the large room filled with water as a challenge, “ Couldn’t we drain it?”
“No, far too much water in this one and the next. And then we still need to get under the dome.”
 
Another lower, preferably watertight passage it was then.
“Right, let's start looking now. I believe there was another southeast passage ahead.”
Marius rallied the group and got them moving once more.
 
The southeastern passage led to a large octagonal room with a recessed floor. Above their heads, two heavy metal beams crossed the room. They met at a large ball-shaped device that, from the outside, had no apparent function. Nox spied a control panel not far from the passageway and soon had up pages and pages of files, all in the Sacristan language. Fortunately, the controls for the space were also easy to find, and Nox had the sphere moving along the two beams anywhere in the room.
 
“It looks like a gantry and crane for heavy equipment,” Jaden surmised from the device's movements and what Nox had uncovered. “I’d say items were delivered here,” She pointed to the recessed flooring, which seemed a different material to the rest of the floor, “And the crane was used to lift them from the floor to waiting transport.” She pointed at the entrance to the passageway where Fureva-Yung stood. Fureva-Yung looked down and saw a wear path for wheeled machines on the floor. She followed the path to the centre of the room.
“I wonder if that middle section is a lift that goes down to lower levels,” Mused Jaden, and she turned back to the control panel, hoping to find more clues. So intend was Fureva-Yung on following the wear path, she’d failed to see where the floor stepped down. Sudden a thud that made the floor ring had them all turning to look at Fureva-Yung, face first spread out along the ground.
“Fureva-Yung, what are you doing?” Jaden asked
“I am checking the ground,” Fureva-Yung’s hurt dignity making it sound like the most obvious thing in the world.
 
Fureva-Yung rose into the air to float a metre off the ground. With a giggle from the control panel, Nox moved the crane above Fureva-Yung and turned it on. Now it was Jaden’s turn to bark a mischievous laugh and pull out a pressure spray she’d been keeping for a moment just like this. With a few extra pumps for luck, she started spraying all exposed fur on Fureva-Yung a bright pink.
“Jaden, what are you doing?” Fureva-Yung asked, calm but more than a little concerned. She couldn’t move out of the tractor field the device had her in. She was helpless.
“I’m making you waterproof,” Jaden replied. The concoction may well be water repellant, but it seemed to Fureva-Yung it was doing a better job of making her look ridiculous.
“I do not want to be waterproof, Jaden,” This second ‘Jaden’ was said more like a warning.
“Now, you don’t want to be half pink, do you? You’d look ridiculous!” Jaden smirked, unknowingly on the same thought at Fureva-Yung.
 
Fureva-Yung hung silently, her large mind ticking over while Jaden continued spraying pink everywhere.
Finally, when she spoke, it was as a warning, “Jaden, please stop.”
“Well, since you’ve asked so nicely. But it would be a shame to leave you all patchy looking….” Jaden never finished her sentence as Fureva-Yung focused a shout onto the glass body of the bottle. The bottle hummed and vibrated in Jaden’s hand as she tried to complete the job.
 
The bottle shattered. Glass and pink dye flew in all directions by the force of the pressure inside the vessel. A piece cut of glass cut Jaden's hand, mixing with the pink stain. Jaden’s hands, face, and upper body were covered in pink splatter. Some of the splatter hit Fureva-Yung, adding to the rest made her almost 80% patchy pink.
“Hmm, you are right, “ Fureva-Yung looked over at Jaden, gasping in shock through the pink goo, “It looks better complete.”
Jaden laughed out loud, a sound that had been missing from the group for a few days.
“Next time, you’ll let me finish the job!”
 
Nox moved the crane to the edge of the recessed flooring and let Fureva-Yung down.
“Had your fun now, let’s see what’s through here,” Marius gestured to another passage and one by one, they followed. Jaden checked her hand and, once finding the small cut under the pink, wrapped it with a clean cloth.
“I’m sorry you were hurt,” Fureva-Yung said, looking deeply regretful.
“All part of the fun, Furry. All part of the fun.”
 
The passage ran northwest again, moving away from their destination but hopefully closer to a solution. Marius spotted a hole about the size of a mediums sized dog chewed through the wall. It had come from outside and had broken through metal wall panelling.
“Our little buggy friend's entrance,” Marius’ pointed out as they walked by. It was clear the little creature had dug hundreds of metres through earth, rock and metal. As each walked by, they were all pleased they’d gone without fighting the bladed robot.
 
The passage opened up into a large round chamber fifty metres in diameter. On a central raised platform, a collection of machinery connected to the platform.
“Some of these parts came out of those boxes we found.” Jaden recognised several just from their shape alone. She found the interfaces she’d theorised about firmly in place between components of Ferrian and Sacristan.
“Nice to know I can be right, sometimes.”