52. The Ghosts of Rockspire

“So my idea is we let the sneaky one go ahead, look for a likely place for us to hide and then bamf back and teleport us all there,” Marius laid out his latest great idea to the group hiding in the blind alcove.
“And by ‘sneaky one’ you mean me. Alone,” Nox grumbled. She did prefer to explore this base silently, but she knew she couldn’t do it with the others tagging along. It was either do as Marius suggested or fight the whole base all at once.
“I refuse, she can’t go alone!” Jaden protested.
“I’ll do it,” Nox replied at the same time. It wasn’t the first time the women had clashed over the last few weeks, but this time, Jaden relented. “Can you move some of those rocks so I can get out?”
 
A small gap, just big enough for Nox, was made high in the rockfall, and a projection cypher, which would keep the wall intact, was placed. Nox sat in the hole, already levitating, waiting for a signal from Fureva-Yung. She was listening for guard movements nearest their hiding hole. When it came, the signal was a push to Nox’s back. It sent Nox shooting across the hallway, loose rock falling in a cascade in her wake. Nox flattened herself to the cavern ceiling, melding her colour to the grey of the rock.
 
From the eastern lookout, a guard wandered down the passage, drawn by the tumble of rock. He looked around and saw nothing, which was curious. There was no hole in the rock wall where the rock could have fallen. Fureva-Yung watched the guard through the illusion and waited for him to investigate the wall. Nox hung above, holding her breath. She was torn at what to do. Create an illusion that explained the rocks, or read his thoughts and see where that got her. She settled for the latter.
Where did all this rock come from? He thought to himself as his senses picked up the smell of cooking from the kitchens.
*Hungry* Nox projected the sensation of hunger to the guard. A subtle nudge. The man’s stomach growled.
The guard kicked the rocks against the wall and returned to his post.
“Hey, what’s for dinner? I’m starving?”
“Stew, I think…”
Nox let out her breath and slowly pulled herself along the roof down the western passage.
 
At the intersection of three passages, Nox could see guards on duty at a third lookout and hear voices from the north. Upside down, she dragged herself up the northern passage, passed a door where sounds of training were happening and passed a set of stairs going down. It was then she felt her connection to the others disappear. She was truly alone. For a moment, she was frozen with indecision. Turn back and tell the others what she’d found, or continue? From the staircase, she could hear a group of soldiers talking. If they looked up as they rounded the stairs, she was done! She bolted ahead and down into a sunken room at the end of the passage.
 
This room wasn’t like the rough-hew passages she’d been exploring. The almost hexagonal room’s walls were smooth, inlaid with patterns that looked like writing. Nox wanted to stop and note what she was seeing, but the room was too open to teleport her friends. Levitating up to touch the ceiling, she pushed herself off and glided across the room to a passageway in the northern wall. As her hand touched the wall to the northeast, a wave of sadness overcame her. It was the gut-wrenching loneliness she’d experienced back in Cerelon…except it felt as if it were coming from outside her. She examined the feeling and realised it wasn’t coming from her but from slim mould living in the cracks of the walls to the north. Swallowing hard, she pushed the feeling aside and pulled herself into the northern corridor.
 
This passage didn’t look like it was travelled often, dust and litter greyed the ground here. To the right, two large doors. To the left, a chamber with a domed roof stretched down into darkness below. A bridge connecting her passage across the void to a control panel. She pulled herself to the room and levitated down into the dark. Partway down, she lit her little hedge light, but there was nothing to see but smooth carved walls. Below, light lit the shaft from a clear synth panel bolted to the side. As she glided past, she could see another well-lit passage where soldiers travelled. Hiding her light, she continued down.
 
 
The shaft was deep, but she was soon aware of the sound of trickling water and the feel of moisture in the air. The shaft suddenly ended at the top of a domed cavern, below synth panels creating a pattern tiled a flat floor. Water ran from the east, across the floor and down a waterfall into darkness to the west. The synth flooring was lower than the rest of the gound in the cavern and made a shallow pool. To the southwest of the cavern, stairs climbed up and back into the facility. She could tell there was at least another cavern to the east but dared not explore further in the dark. This was as far as she would go alone, and levitated back to the bridge.
 
Curious about what the control panel did, she allowed herself to land on the platform before it and scanned the controls. It was all in an unknown script, not even Sacristan, which she wasn’t very familiar with. From the types of controls and readings she was seeing, though, it looked like it controlled and maintained…something. She’d found a button that seemed to turn the whole thing on. Her curious fingers hovered over the button. She’d forgotten why she was here in the excitement of discovery. Right now, the button was not a good idea.
 
She bamfed back to the others.
 
Jaden had kept herself busy making paralysis bombs and had a good collection to share when Nox appeared in their midst. She carefully packed these as Nox filled in the details on Fureva-Yung’s map.
“No one seems to travel the east-west corridor. It looks different from the rest of the place.” Nox pointed to the corridor with the slime mould, “it was really sad.”
“The corridor looked sad…or it was sad?” Asked Jaden, trying to make sense of Nox’s experience. Nox shrugged.
“Okay, well forewarned and all that. No blubbing,” Marius prepared, and Nox bamfed them all…
 
…into the dark corridor. Suddenly, like the boom of unexpected thunder, Fureva-Yung started laughing. She couldn’t tell anyone what was so funny, she had no control over it. Nox froze Fureva-Yung in place with Stasis, and everyone, for a moment, was silent. Then, the running of heavy boots coming their way. As both Jaden and Marius were in uniform, Jaden mimed threatening her giant furry prisoner with a baton. Nox took a moment to pull a mushroom out of its cypher pod and licked it. Her mind opened to the multiverse, and she felt teleporting everyone around wasn’t too hard!
Get us out of here, Marius grabbed Fureva-Yung as the Stasis dropped, and again, Nox bamfed them…
 
…into the lit corridor she’d seen from the shaft. Fureva-Yung began laughing again, but Marius was ready this time and thrust his fist into her mouth, stifling the sound. Still, crystals lying darkly in alcoves in the wall suddenly started glowing with each raucous bark. The rumble of many feet from both ends of the corridor told them they’d stumbled into the barracks. They’d just stepped from the frying pan into the fire!
 
Taking a set of stairs opposite, they descended to the next level, Jaden pulling out her first bomb just in case. Fureva-Yung’s giggling fit subsided, and she was once more in control. The corridor here ended in large double doors. Beyond them, Fureva-Yung could hear the trickle of water and the roaring of some giant beast. With the rumble and mumble of the guards above, Fureva-Yung charged, nocking the lock out of the doorframe.
They’re coming! Nox cried, running up with the other and gabbing hold of Fureva-Yung before bamfing them away…
 
…into the darkness at the bottom of the shaft, knee-deep in cold water. Nox lit her Hedge light and breathed a sigh of relief. There were no sounds other than the natural one of the cavern and her friend’s protest at being wet.
To the west, Jaden and Nox looked out over the waterfall but could see nothing, even when the hedge light drifted down the face of the waterfall to see below.
“What’s under these tiles?” Marius asked, pointing into the pool Nox had landed them. When she scanned the floor, Nox was surprised to see not the natural rock as she expected by channels leading to much larger machinery. Whatever this place was before, the current occupants only used a small part.
 
As they needed to travel east, the companions walked upstream into the second chamber Nox identified. Like the first, a circular pattern of sythe tiles lined the floor of a shallow pool. Above them, another shaft cut the domed roof with a circle of blackness. Opposite them, a waterfall and sunlight trickled through an opening in the ceiling. They were under the chasm separating the two halves of Rockspine Outlook.
 
“Ah, “ Marius stopped in his explorations, his face suddenly serious. “Somethings coming!”