The rest of the room contained more of the same, magical experiments and cubicles with ancient personal effects littered all over the place. We decided to take any and all photograph things that we could find. Understanding the people who’d built this place would be a huge boon to figuring out a lot of other stuff about its function and purpose.
As we investigated further and further into the huge complex, we began to realise that the whole place was based around studying magic. Just as with that first experiment though, it was all some degree of strange and primitive, none of it being properly useful as magic. Just blobs of arcane energy that had been twisted into basic knots and shapes.
We also found a warehouse, with furniture, cutlery, and everything else needed to run a large population of scientists underground. There were also several of those black slate computer things, and seeing them sealed the deal. We began to schwoop the whole lot into my grove. Desks, chairs, beds… nothing was safe from our thieving hands.
At first we were dumping it all in the grass, but on our third trip we found the buns doing their part too. They were using all of their three feet in height to carry all the crap we were delivering up into the storage rooms inside the tree. I had to give all the little munchkins pats for that, they were such good buns. We were feeling pretty good about our find, right up until we found them.
We came down in the lift to yet another floor, and this one opened out into a room that was different from any we’d found so far. Wide and spacious, it appeared to be a huge common room chamber of some kind. They had even taken a little more care with the aesthetics of the place, with more very old and very dead pot plants laying around in the corners, as well as what appeared to be an abstract sculpture in the middle of the room.
“This is actually kinda nice,” Grace whispered as we spread out into the room. “I could see myself living here if it wasn’t for the whole sunless hole underground thing.”
“Yeah, same,” I agreed with a note of appreciation.
“I hate to be the one to bring the mood down, but I think we found the scientists,” Adam said sobrely.
He was right. The whole place was open plan, but areas had been clearly set aside for different things. The area Adam had found was what looked to be the communal eating area, an open expanse of floor with several square tables set out.
Sitting at those tables were almost a hundred dead ring builders, slumped down onto their tables amongst an ancient banquet. Their corpses were old and withered, but they hadn’t had much of a chance to decay in the reasonably sterile environment of their makeshift tomb. They looked almost mummified.
In the center of the dead banquet was a stuttering hologram showing the ring and the rest of the system. Running through the hologram at a system-wide scale, a strange cloud-like mass coloured in red stuttered back and forth. It was caught in an animation, the vast red cloud perpetually sweeping over the ring, then flickering back to the last moments before it did so, over and over. Above the whole hologram was a single glowing red symbol, and unlike all the others, it wasn’t hard to figure out what that symbol meant. Zero.
“Is this what I think it is?” Kit asked, his voice high with anxiety. “Did they… kill themselves? Like, mass suicide?”
“Appears so,” Troy murmured, walking towards one of the corpses. “I wish we had some plastic bags, taking samples from this lot would be invaluable for the the brains back home. Even if it is… disrespectful.”
Staring at one of them with something like loss and pity swirling in my stomach, I asked, “Why though? What is that hologram showing? I mean, it’s obvious it was something they feared more than death, and more than those steel ones that they fought a war against… so what is it?”
“That’s the million dollar question isn’t it?” Troy remarked, glancing up at the hologram. “It wasn’t a localised event either, it hit the whole damned ring. I’d be willing to bet that scenes like this played out all across this world when whatever that wave is was about hit them. Mass suicides across the ring.”
“That’s kinda terrifying,” Grace said, coming to stand closer to me. I reached out instinctively to clutch at her arm, and she gave me a grateful smile in return.
“You can say that again,” Troy nodded, and for the first time I thought I saw genuine worry on their face. “Let’s do a quick search of the room, then get out of here. This place is… let’s just move. Taking samples can be done by another team.”
“Yeah, agreed,” Adam said with a wary look around us.
We searched the floor at speed, all of us wanting to get out of there and fast. It felt like we were encroaching in places we shouldn’t now, like disturbing the dead in their rest would lead to something awful happening down the line. Superstitious, I know… but magic was real now, and that put the question to everything humanity had assumed about the supernatural.
We left everything where it was this time, it was more of the same that we’d found in the warehouse anyway, and the idea of stealing from the immediate possessions of the dead gave us all the heebie jeebies. Especially considering we found more dead scientists in their bunks and in other nooks, presumably wanting solitude when they died, rather than companionship.
We all piled back into the lift a few minutes later and headed further down into the complex, only one or two more floors left to go. We found more labs with more random experiments and desks in all but the very last floor of the place.
When we stepped out into that floor, we were met by a single, huge experiment. Sitting in a depression in the middle of the room was a massive glass tank filled with a swirling white gas that rippled with rainbow light at the edges. Pipes hung from the ceiling to connect into the top of this tank, and surrounding the tank at a distance of about five feet were four strange looking flat disks. The disks were held in metal cradles and looked almost like they were made of white ceramic.
On the raised area surrounding the tank and disks were a series of workstations and large black glass screens, some of which were cracked and damaged. It was almost like they had been smashed on purpose, and the fact of which caused yet more questions to rebound through my skull.
“Okay, this looks important,” Troy said, turning to me. “Ryn?”
I nodded and brought up my mage sight. Again, I found myself in awe of what I was looking at. This was not like their other attempts at magic, it was far more sophisticated, but nor was it the type that I was used to. The power within the containment tank seethed and boiled to my eyes, only held in place by the flat disks, which generated a field of more recognisable magic around it.
“It’s magic all right, but it’s not shitty magic,” I told the group, warily stepping forward towards it.
“Alright gang, take a look around while Ryn takes a look, but I don’t think we’ll be able to do anything with it,” Troy said, and I had to agree with him. This thing was far too complex for me to understand.
Grace was quick to follow me, but the others began to spread out and look at the busted terminals instead. The room was so bare of anything interesting besides those terminals and the big ball of volatile energy in the middle, so I shrugged and went back to staring at it.
“What does it look like to your magic eyes?” Grace asked quietly from beside me.
“It’s even more rainbowy,” I told her, shifting my balance this way and that to get a better look.
It was like someone had taken a huge number of different types of magic and shaken it all up together in a bottle. I could feel little flickers of the Nameless Garden in there, as well as other strange signatures that I didn’t recognise. Were there other magical realms besides the Garden? It sure looked like it, judging from this thing.
“Oh wow,” Grace murmured, drawing my attention away from the angry bottle of magic.
I turned my mage sight off to see her, finding that she was staring at me, her eyes fixed on mine with an inquisitive intensity that had goosebumps running up my arms.
“What?” I asked, frozen in place by her gaze.
“Your eyes go funny when you’re using your mage sight,” she told me breathlessly, stepping closer. “They go all sparkly. Do it again.”
I gulped, and switched my mage sight on again for her, but I had to take a step back in the process, because she was way too close again. I... should not have stepped back.
When I moved backwards, I felt my shield brush against something, magic washing over and around it in a discordant stream. I turned to see what it was with a frown, only to realise with slowly dawning horror what I’d done. I’d stepped in front of one of the flat disks, blocking the stream of containment magic with my shield in the process.
The effect was immediate.
The wild magic smashed through the glass with a thunderous roar akin to that of a jet engine and hit my shield square on. It bowed inward with the force of the impact, like a baseball deforming in slow motion as it was hit with a bat.
I had a split second to brace myself before I was thrown violently backwards and into the containment disk with the crack of breaking bone. Pain lanced through my shoulder and my vision swayed, but I didn’t black out, meaning I was able to see the stream of rainbow energy ricochet off to strike Grace in the center of her chest.
The moment it made contact with her body, it was pouring into her like water down a drain. It surged and bucked even as my friend fell to the ground with a scream, her body writhing with pain. Within a second or two it was over, faster than anyone could react, and Grace’s twitching body glowed with a subtle aura of rainbow light. She’d absorbed the whole lot.
Making to go to her, I gave a cry of pain when my own injuries made themselves known, stars dancing before my eyes.
I watched as Troy tried to go for Grace too, only to receive a shock when the energy around her lashed out violently, knocking him backwards. “Shit!” he swore, grimacing as he took a few breaths. “What the hell just happened?”
“I think… I think it was my fault,” I said, my voice quivering with guilt and pain. “I stepped back and accidentally blocked the containment thingies.”
“Damn,” Troy winced. “Alright, it was an accident, blame is not helpful or important. We need to leave though, and get Grace to safety.”
“How? It’s pretty obvious we can’t touch her,” Adam asked, moving over to me instead. Kneeling down, he gingerly helped me to my feet, earning a whimper from me as bone scraped against bone. “Ryn’s hurt,” he told Troy. “Broke her shoulder I think.”
It sure felt like he was right, my shoulder felt sickeningly wrong and I could feel it shifting in ways it was definitely not meant to shift. It had been so long since I’d had a broken bone that I’d forgotten how much it hurt. Which is to say, a lot.
“Keep hold of her,” Troy told him. “I’ll figure out how to get Grace out.”
Before he could go and get himself shocked again, I cut in, “I can do it.”
“How? Your arm is—“ Troy began, before understanding dawned on him and he nodded. “Right, your magic. This makes things a lot easier, thank you Ryn.”
Without replying I reached out with my mind to carefully envelop Grace with my telekinesis, then gingerly picked her up. I didn’t get shocked or anything, thankfully, and she wasn’t too heavy for me.
Seeing her floating unconscious like that sent a terrified pang through my heart, and worry gripped my mind so hard that I thought it would burst. She needed to be okay, she had to be okay. I couldn’t lose Grace. I was so damn stupid, I was so, so stupid. Why had I stepped back?
“Good, let’s get the fuck out of here,” Troy said decisively.
The rest of the room contained more of the same, magical experiments and cubicles with ancient personal effects littered all over the place. We decided to take any and all photograph things that we could find. Understanding the people who’d built this place would be a huge boon to figuring out a lot of other stuff about its function and purpose.
As we investigated further and further into the huge complex, we began to realise that the whole place was based around studying magic. Just as with that first experiment though, it was all some degree of strange and primitive, none of it being properly useful as magic. Just blobs of arcane energy that had been twisted into basic knots and shapes.
We also found a warehouse, with furniture, cutlery, and everything else needed to run a large population of scientists underground. There were also several of those black slate computer things, and seeing them sealed the deal. We began to schwoop the whole lot into my grove. Desks, chairs, beds… nothing was safe from our thieving hands.
At first we were dumping it all in the grass, but on our third trip we found the buns doing their part too. They were using all of their three feet in height to carry all the crap we were delivering up into the storage rooms inside the tree. I had to give all the little munchkins pats for that, they were such good buns. We were feeling pretty good about our find, right up until we found them.
We came down in the lift to yet another floor, and this one opened out into a room that was different from any we’d found so far. Wide and spacious, it appeared to be a huge common room chamber of some kind. They had even taken a little more care with the aesthetics of the place, with more very old and very dead pot plants laying around in the corners, as well as what appeared to be an abstract sculpture in the middle of the room.
“This is actually kinda nice,” Grace whispered as we spread out into the room. “I could see myself living here if it wasn’t for the whole sunless hole underground thing.”
“Yeah, same,” I agreed with a note of appreciation.
“I hate to be the one to bring the mood down, but I think we found the scientists,” Adam said sobrely.
He was right. The whole place was open plan, but areas had been clearly set aside for different things. The area Adam had found was what looked to be the communal eating area, an open expanse of floor with several square tables set out.
Sitting at those tables were almost a hundred dead ring builders, slumped down onto their tables amongst an ancient banquet. Their corpses were old and withered, but they hadn’t had much of a chance to decay in the reasonably sterile environment of their makeshift tomb. They looked almost mummified.
In the center of the dead banquet was a stuttering hologram showing the ring and the rest of the system. Running through the hologram at a system-wide scale, a strange cloud-like mass coloured in red stuttered back and forth. It was caught in an animation, the vast red cloud perpetually sweeping over the ring, then flickering back to the last moments before it did so, over and over. Above the whole hologram was a single glowing red symbol, and unlike all the others, it wasn’t hard to figure out what that symbol meant. Zero.
“Is this what I think it is?” Kit asked, his voice high with anxiety. “Did they… kill themselves? Like, mass suicide?”
“Appears so,” Troy murmured, walking towards one of the corpses. “I wish we had some plastic bags, taking samples from this lot would be invaluable for the the brains back home. Even if it is… disrespectful.”
Staring at one of them with something like loss and pity swirling in my stomach, I asked, “Why though? What is that hologram showing? I mean, it’s obvious it was something they feared more than death, and more than those steel ones that they fought a war against… so what is it?”
“That’s the million dollar question isn’t it?” Troy remarked, glancing up at the hologram. “It wasn’t a localised event either, it hit the whole damned ring. I’d be willing to bet that scenes like this played out all across this world when whatever that wave is was about hit them. Mass suicides across the ring.”
“That’s kinda terrifying,” Grace said, coming to stand closer to me. I reached out instinctively to clutch at her arm, and she gave me a grateful smile in return.
“You can say that again,” Troy nodded, and for the first time I thought I saw genuine worry on their face. “Let’s do a quick search of the room, then get out of here. This place is… let’s just move. Taking samples can be done by another team.”
“Yeah, agreed,” Adam said with a wary look around us.
We searched the floor at speed, all of us wanting to get out of there and fast. It felt like we were encroaching in places we shouldn’t now, like disturbing the dead in their rest would lead to something awful happening down the line. Superstitious, I know… but magic was real now, and that put the question to everything humanity had assumed about the supernatural.
We left everything where it was this time, it was more of the same that we’d found in the warehouse anyway, and the idea of stealing from the immediate possessions of the dead gave us all the heebie jeebies. Especially considering we found more dead scientists in their bunks and in other nooks, presumably wanting solitude when they died, rather than companionship.
We all piled back into the lift a few minutes later and headed further down into the complex, only one or two more floors left to go. We found more labs with more random experiments and desks in all but the very last floor of the place.
When we stepped out into that floor, we were met by a single, huge experiment. Sitting in a depression in the middle of the room was a massive glass tank filled with a swirling white gas that rippled with rainbow light at the edges. Pipes hung from the ceiling to connect into the top of this tank, and surrounding the tank at a distance of about five feet were four strange looking flat disks. The disks were held in metal cradles and looked almost like they were made of white ceramic.
On the raised area surrounding the tank and disks were a series of workstations and large black glass screens, some of which were cracked and damaged. It was almost like they had been smashed on purpose, and the fact of which caused yet more questions to rebound through my skull.
“Okay, this looks important,” Troy said, turning to me. “Ryn?”
I nodded and brought up my mage sight. Again, I found myself in awe of what I was looking at. This was not like their other attempts at magic, it was far more sophisticated, but nor was it the type that I was used to. The power within the containment tank seethed and boiled to my eyes, only held in place by the flat disks, which generated a field of more recognisable magic around it.
“It’s magic all right, but it’s not shitty magic,” I told the group, warily stepping forward towards it.
“Alright gang, take a look around while Ryn takes a look, but I don’t think we’ll be able to do anything with it,” Troy said, and I had to agree with him. This thing was far too complex for me to understand.
Grace was quick to follow me, but the others began to spread out and look at the busted terminals instead. The room was so bare of anything interesting besides those terminals and the big ball of volatile energy in the middle, so I shrugged and went back to staring at it.
“What does it look like to your magic eyes?” Grace asked quietly from beside me.
“It’s even more rainbowy,” I told her, shifting my balance this way and that to get a better look.
It was like someone had taken a huge number of different types of magic and shaken it all up together in a bottle. I could feel little flickers of the Nameless Garden in there, as well as other strange signatures that I didn’t recognise. Were there other magical realms besides the Garden? It sure looked like it, judging from this thing.
“Oh wow,” Grace murmured, drawing my attention away from the angry bottle of magic.
I turned my mage sight off to see her, finding that she was staring at me, her eyes fixed on mine with an inquisitive intensity that had goosebumps running up my arms.
“What?” I asked, frozen in place by her gaze.
“Your eyes go funny when you’re using your mage sight,” she told me breathlessly, stepping closer. “They go all sparkly. Do it again.”
I gulped, and switched my mage sight on again for her, but I had to take a step back in the process, because she was way too close again. I... should not have stepped back.
When I moved backwards, I felt my shield brush against something, magic washing over and around it in a discordant stream. I turned to see what it was with a frown, only to realise with slowly dawning horror what I’d done. I’d stepped in front of one of the flat disks, blocking the stream of containment magic with my shield in the process.
The effect was immediate.
The wild magic smashed through the glass with a thunderous roar akin to that of a jet engine and hit my shield square on. It bowed inward with the force of the impact, like a baseball deforming in slow motion as it was hit with a bat.
I had a split second to brace myself before I was thrown violently backwards and into the containment disk with the crack of breaking bone. Pain lanced through my shoulder and my vision swayed, but I didn’t black out, meaning I was able to see the stream of rainbow energy ricochet off to strike Grace in the center of her chest.
The moment it made contact with her body, it was pouring into her like water down a drain. It surged and bucked even as my friend fell to the ground with a scream, her body writhing with pain. Within a second or two it was over, faster than anyone could react, and Grace’s twitching body glowed with a subtle aura of rainbow light. She’d absorbed the whole lot.
Making to go to her, I gave a cry of pain when my own injuries made themselves known, stars dancing before my eyes.
I watched as Troy tried to go for Grace too, only to receive a shock when the energy around her lashed out violently, knocking him backwards. “Shit!” he swore, grimacing as he took a few breaths. “What the hell just happened?”
“I think… I think it was my fault,” I said, my voice quivering with guilt and pain. “I stepped back and accidentally blocked the containment thingies.”
“Damn,” Troy winced. “Alright, it was an accident, blame is not helpful or important. We need to leave though, and get Grace to safety.”
“How? It’s pretty obvious we can’t touch her,” Adam asked, moving over to me instead. Kneeling down, he gingerly helped me to my feet, earning a whimper from me as bone scraped against bone. “Ryn’s hurt,” he told Troy. “Broke her shoulder I think.”
It sure felt like he was right, my shoulder felt sickeningly wrong and I could feel it shifting in ways it was definitely not meant to shift. It had been so long since I’d had a broken bone that I’d forgotten how much it hurt. Which is to say, a lot.
“Keep hold of her,” Troy told him. “I’ll figure out how to get Grace out.”
Before he could go and get himself shocked again, I cut in, “I can do it.”
“How? Your arm is—“ Troy began, before understanding dawned on him and he nodded. “Right, your magic. This makes things a lot easier, thank you Ryn.”
Without replying I reached out with my mind to carefully envelop Grace with my telekinesis, then gingerly picked her up. I didn’t get shocked or anything, thankfully, and she wasn’t too heavy for me.
Seeing her floating unconscious like that sent a terrified pang through my heart, and worry gripped my mind so hard that I thought it would burst. She needed to be okay, she had to be okay. I couldn’t lose Grace. I was so damn stupid, I was so, so stupid. Why had I stepped back?
“Good, let’s get the fuck out of here,” Troy said decisively.
