[i]This does not belong.[/i]

Pithy frowned as sand poured from the steadily enlarging opening, strange, shifting lights dancing from within the generator room. Not a corpse, as she had initially guessed, but something even more out of place.

Soon enough, the door had been opened enough for her to squeeze through. She sent three of her hovering blades first, waiting for movement from the other side of the room, but when none came, she pushed forward, the rest of her blades floating in behind her like a gaggle of bodyguards.

Pithy blinked a few times as she looked at the contents of the room, the kaleidoscopic illumination threatening to make her vision swim. 

Sand was not something that happened to be piled at the entrance, but rather covered the entirety of the room’s floor, shifting underfoot as she walked in. She felt sure that the builders of this place had not left this mess, if only because she could not imagine workers needing to use an iron crow on the door whenever they needed to enter the room. Openings on the walls, out of place yet large enough for someone to walk into them, gave her a clue as to where the sand had come from.

Far more attention-grabbing, however, was the source of the dizzying lights. Pithy narrowed her eyes, trying to make heads or tails of what she was seeing, but she could see little beyond the beacon’s porous, outer layer from where she stood.

She took a step forward, approaching the small chasm across which the strange machinery was gathered.

Pithy almost stumbled as something gave under her weight. Stepping back, she looked at the sand at her feet and knelt. A moment of digging turned up a yellowed splinter. She turned it in her hand, finding the shape oddly familiar, yet unable to quite place its origin. She brought a hand to her mouth, biting on her glove’s finger to remove it, and held the shard on her bare hand.

[i]Bone. Worn and brittle. But it could not be because of time, could it? This space is closed and dry… and these markings…[/i]

Seeing a mound in the sand nearby, Pithy began digging, quickly finding what she had hoped. The upper half of a human skull greeted her, easily recognizable even with most of the teeth gone and the bite marks on its surface, as though a large dog had been chewing at it.

She let the skull fall on the sand with a muffled thump, barely audible above the machinery’s clatter. She shook her hand, put her glove back on, then spat some of the sand that had fallen on her mouth. 

Then again, with worn bones strewn all about, perhaps this was not sand at all. And if so, she might have been right in her initial assessment of what was blocking the door. Just not in a way she expected.

She spat on the ground again for good measure.

For the moment, the state of the room itself was a secondary concern, so she returned to her inspection of the machinery. From there, she could barely see the shape of something vaguely cube-shaped in the center of the beacon. 

Her eyes went to the cables that held the apparatus in place snaking up into the ceiling, and she found herself recalling the cables that had connected the box-like apparatuses in the Lieutenant’s office several floors above her. If she recalled correctly, all of those had been connected to the walls as well. So had been the lights, and, she now suspected, the elevators themselves. 

In her mind she saw an image of cables spreading throughout the whole Justice Hub, almost like a sewage system. Except that instead of water and waste, it carried what the machines needed to function.

She had been confused when Oren had mentioned a generator room, but as a practitioner of sorcerous arts , the concept of syphoning energy from a source to be used as fuel for a spell, or even a network of enchantments was not a foreign one. The term she was familiar with, for facilities designed to gather this energy from a magic core, was [i]extractor[/i].

In that regard, the object that was at its core seemed much like what she would expect from such an energy source, but the surrounding machinery seemed as alien to it as it seemed to her. While the core seemed completely arcane to her, the devices shackling it still felt bizarrely mundane in comparison.

[i]Was this something the builders found, or is it yet another strange device from the same people, only different in how it appears?[/i]

Pithy could not truly give an answer to that. Instead, she marked this location in her mental map as a point of interest, and turned away from it. Perhaps later she could examine the core in greater detail, perhaps even bring it with her for study, but if her hypothesis was correct and the device fueled the Justice Hub’s machinery, removing it could leave her without a way to operate the elevators. She would need to find an alternate route to the surface first.

With that in mind, she made her way to the opening in the wall. As she approached the gaping maw, the stench of rot struck her nose.

She grimaced, recalling the announcer’s words. She was to find a vault after the generator room, but ‘creepy crawlies’ had prevented the College’s staff to go any further. 

A magelight formed in her palm and she threw it forward, the will-o-wisp illuminating the tunnel where the core’s colorful light began to fade. The light paused a few feet in front of her, silently hovering in the air.

Unlike the entrance to the tunnel itself, which seemed to have been created by something forcefully tearing the wall open, the way forward was surrounded by stone walls, too shapely to have been created naturally, or even by some huge, burrowing creature. The hand of man was clearly visible here.

[i]But was it the same ‘man’ that built the Justice Hub?[/i]

She wondered at that. The generator room seemed to her like a place where the echoes of several worlds had collided at once. 

Her lips twitched.

Two of her escorts sunk into the sand in front of her, sinking in the powder until the blades touched the floor. When Pithy began to walk forward, the ice and the magelight followed her pace, the former combing the sand for traps or critters hidden beneath, the latter illuminating the path in front of her.