We were hungry and thirsty when we awoke, and we hadn’t managed to bring food or water on the trip with us. I delivered a heal that eliminated the immediate need for sustenance, preserving our strength in the process. I could pull off this heal several times a day, although psychologically, I felt I was delaying some physical payment that might eventually come due.
But until we had supplies, magic would have to suffice. Instead of three meals a day, we’d have three heals a day, and call it good.
Since today was a big day, we decided to make sure we were fully armed and ready for action. This would be the start of the true dungeon crawl, after all, where we put ourselves into harm’s way instead of merely sending drones to scout for us. I gave one of the Dauphine’s inexhaustible pistols to Maddy, who tucked it into her belt at the back. Then we began fishing in the Compression Artifact for goodies, trinkets, and armaments.
First things first: I found Late Night Encore, the amulet that had saved Madeleine Torch by restoring hit points upon her death. I insisted that Maddy wear it, and she insisted that I wear it, and we had an adorable little quarrel about who had more hit points, until finally we compromised: we would alternate wearing it, trading off every time we physically entered a new subbasement.
Next up: I wanted to feel the sturdy grip of Blades Per Minute back in my hand. This was an inferior copy, of course, so it was more like Blades Per Ninety Seconds, but you got the idea regardless.
For Maddy, I located the Reverberation Rifle, a heavy assault kaleidoscope from SD3. About the size of a baseball bat, and useful as a melee weapon, too, if it came down to that, the Reverberation Rifle did damage by smacking an opponent with a powerful beam attack that decayed into many smaller beam attacks until you eventually fired again.
The drone we’d sent down the elevator shaft had revealed to us that the subbasements seemed to be unevenly spaced, as though some were significantly taller than others. Upon close inspection, we saw levers at each doorway that we presumed might be used to mechanically open the doors. The bottom subbasement was as tall as the six subbasements above it, and we decided to start there and work our way up.
We teleported to the bottom of the elevator shaft. We were standing on a pile of rubble that made us wonder if there were in fact more subbasements below this one; hard to say from here. The lever we thought might open the doors had no effect.
“We could,” Maddy said, “just teleport to the other side of the doors and see what’s there.”
“Nice try,” I said. “That’s how you set off traps, Maddy.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Maddy said. “If you need to protect something with traps, you don’t put it right outside the doors to an elevator.”
“Are you attempting to use logic on a dungeon crawl?” I protested. “Spikes don’t need a rational reason to fall from the ceiling!” But yes, I saw her point.
We teleported to the other side of the door, arriving in pitch- blackness. I cast a rope light spell which illuminated a pathway in front of us, or rather, a railway of sorts. A small golf cart or trolley car sat at the end of a track which led off into the darkness. We let loose a couple of drones to scan the environment, and observed the images they captured via one of the remaining drones.
Immense machinery filled the floor. I felt like I was staring into a nineteenth-century steam factory, filled with ducts and gears and wheels. Or perhaps this had been a series of enormous power generators. But it was difficult to say, because chunks of ceiling had collapsed onto the machinery; the overall destruction had extended even this far below the surface.
Huge basins collected debris on far sides of the floor, below enormous chutes in the ceiling above. Walkways surrounded the perimeter, about halfway up the walls, in case we wanted to get a better view ourselves.
“This is not working for me,” Maddy said. “Do you have any spells like Detect Interesting Shit?”
Hmm. I had Detect Illegal Warehouse Rave, sure.
“No,” I said. “Let’s walk around a little.”
We walked the path of the trolley tracks, figuring this was designed to be a relatively safe passage through the environment. My rope lights continued magically unfolding in front of us, giving everything in their immediate vicinity a nice white glow, although for fun I could toggle them into a color-cycling rainbow mode which Maddy noted was gaudy. Hmph.
The tracks ended at the opposite side of the floor from where we started, terminating just as abruptly as they’d started. The ground-level tour was not super enlightening, we decided, so we teleported to the walkway directly above our current position. From here, rope lights were not sufficient, and the drones could only really provide pin spots in specific directions. I cast Blinding Light of Dawn, normally a combat spell for clearing dance floors but in this case just the thing for giving us perspective on the entire basement.
What we’d missed, slowly making our way through the darkness, was the large hangar-style door on one wall. I suppose it made sense to have a doorway that large if you needed to move machinery in and out of this basement. Maybe it was an enormous freight elevator and you moved parts up and down that way? Maybe it was just another wing of the subbasement that someone had thoughtfully put a giant door in front of for inexplicable reasons?
The light made something else clear, though.
The door was covered with hieroglyphic writing, sigils that gave off a sharp red glow in the radiance of my spell. I couldn’t read them obviously, but they emanated a very clear “Do Not Enter Without Safety Goggles” vibe.
“Well, well, well,” Maddy said. “Shall we?”
But when she tried to teleport to the other side of that door, she lit up like a firework and collapsed backward against the wall, slumping to the deck of the walkway moments later.
“Apparently not,” she said.
I helped her stand. She was shaken, said the experience was incredibly painful but only briefly, like she’d stuck her finger in a light socket and gotten a jolt of electricity but was otherwise unharmed.
Just to be scientific about it, I borrowed the Reverberation Rifle from her and fired repeatedly at the door. The blasts seemed to be absorbed, either by the metal of the door, or by the energy of the sigils, or by something else we couldn’t detect. In any event, the door seemed unscathed.
“Take it easy,” Maddy said. “We can bookmark this location and continue exploring. I’m not eager to keep swinging here.”
“Let me at least send a drone out there to get video of the writing,” I said. “I want to be able to study it.”
But the video imagery from the drone I sent was unusable; the glyphs on the door read as overpowering brightness to the drone’s camera, making them illegible.
“Curses,” I said, as an idea slowly formed. “Literal curses, that’s what I think these glyphs are. So powerful that we don’t even have to understand the language they’re written in to understand the meaning, the intent. And maybe they’re not written in a real language in the first place.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean … maybe they’re power morphemes, Maddy. Or I mean—a written version of power morphemes. Except in this case, the meaning is so dense, so concentrated into single characters or pictograms, that—that the meaning is transmitted by … by warping perception, or by altering the literal world of the perceiver.”
I was babbling, I admit, but I was also fucking onto something.
“Maddy,” I said. “Now can I communicate directly with the punctuation marks? We have something very specific to discuss with them.”
“It can wait,” she said firmly.
We systematically toured the other floors over the next two days, keeping our minds occupied, cracking jokes as best we could. I took to having drones follow us with music playing constantly, which Maddy endured with good humor. Cameron had even hooked up the drones with a functionally unnecessary mirrorball mode that enabled them to light up and create impromptu disco parties in the ruins when we started to get run-down.
But after three days, we started to panic, and after a full week of being there, we had passed through denial and anger and bargaining, and were immersed quite deeply in depression. Acceptance wasn’t quite in view, not after a week.
But after a month, we’d begun to accept the likelihood that we were never leaving this place. The arkship hadn’t come, which might mean that Earth had been destroyed, or that they’d saved it without us. Certainly time might be passing so differently back home that someone might still come to rescue us.
The situation on the ground, though, was clearly that no one was coming to rescue us.
During that month, we trained each other on spells and sequences. I wanted Maddy to learn as much of my healing arsenal as possible, for starters. We amused ourselves working our way through training with nearly every magic item stored inside the Compression Artifact.
We hopped further and further down the length of the ruined tower, teleporting across its surface to the next point in sight, looking for technology or artifacts or books or anything that might inform us. We couldn’t understand how a culture—a civilization—could have lived inside this tower without leaving a trace of its knowledge or its literature.
We carefully skirted our way around “pocket dimensions” that we spotted. They leaked alternate realities into the air like toxins.
Each night, we made our way back to the scout ship, exhausted and dissatisfied.
After a month or so, Maddy finally said to me, “I think you’d better contact the punctuation marks now. I think we may as well get on with the business of extinguishing our last hope, don’t you think?”
I understood perfectly what she meant. She wanted to burst the bubble of some potential deus ex machina lurking in the linguistic wings.
“I have an idea,” I said. “Before I do this, I want to give the punctuation marks a little more to work with.”
“What do you mean?”
“We have two concrete examples of alien language in this place. The holographic beings projected by the pillars can talk; the curses on the wall are written. I want to internalize as much of that material as I can. Really saturate my brain with all of it. That way I’m not wasting any time when I finally do get a chance to ask the punctuation marks direct questions.”
I established a new routine. Every morning I spent focused on one of the two talking holographic entities we’d encountered, each of which operated according to unique scripts. My goal was to treat these things like the recalcitrant NPCs they truly were, and convince them to reveal their secrets.
First thing first: memorize everything you can get them to tell you, recite everything back at them as though you understand what the hell you’re saying, until eventually you trick them into adding some new sentences to the fray, memorize those, lather rinse repeat. When you get tired of that, talk at them in English, just sheer wall of monologue crap, to see if these things are smart enough to deduce your language, lather rinse repeat. No, I did not convince one of them to start speaking conversational English at me. Nor did I ever remotely understand anything they said.
I’d take a break in the midday to goof off with Maddy, who spent her days attempting to scavenge working technology from the ruins in the parking lot. Somewhere, she reasoned, there must be something that still worked, maybe the further out she got from the ground zero of the lobby. Middays were for goofy stuff. We could play video games inside the scout ship, or with the drones. I tried teaching her the difference between tech house and future house and bass house but she just did not catch on.
Afternoons, I descended down to the twenty-third subbasement, sat on the floor in front of the cursed door, and I forced myself to memorize those glyphs. I had to build up a tolerance, of course, like swallowing a small amount of iocane powder every day to gain resistance. I had to overcome the towering dread that rose up in me as I allowed each sigil to brand itself in my mind. Sometimes I felt like they were speaking directly to me, like there was something personal about each glyph, some aspect of each glyph that was encoded with me as the intended audience.
And it was probably my imagination, but I heard these glyphs speaking themselves at me in the spoken language of the holographic projections at the pillars. I mean, your mind will invent correlations and patterns for no good reason whatsoever, and the mishmash in my mind might never amount to meaning that I could understand.
But I had alien punctuation marks in my mind who were better linguists than me. Hopefully they were getting more mileage out of these exercises than I was.
I mean, sure we were hoping for a deus ex machina, but the thing is, it never hurts to work for it.
At night, we’d meet back at the scout ship after our respective labors and try to relax.
“Night” was a relative concept, since the sky never wavered from its hazy shade of orange, never dimmed or displayed stars. We could judge by relative exhaustion when the work day was over, and then we’d climb inside the scout ship and fire up the giant viewscreen. Cameron had loaded a massive amount of media onto the arkship in preparation for a long voyage, and a sizable subset of that media wound up cloned onto the scout ship. But it was painful to watch narrative movies or TV. That world was lost.
Instead, we found environmental loops that were peaceful enough—tours under the ocean, or space telescope footage, or snow falling outside a rustic cabin window, stuff that was a step up in creativity and production value from the classic fireplace video of legend. Without a story interfering with these loops, it was easy enough to imagine that any of this scenery might still be accessible somewhere in the multiverse. Not accessible to us, obviously, but not obliterated outright either. This made the interior of the scout ship feel at least minimally pleasant, as part of a general effort to keep the hopelessness at bay as long as possible.
With the atmosphere established, Maddy would often say, “Oh, is it date night?” It wasn’t a joke, really. With nothing else to distract us, clinging to each other for love and sanity was a core activity.
That’s how it was. During the day, we committed to our respective projects out in the ruins because we were trying to save each other.
And when we got back to the scout ship at night, we were still trying to save each other.