[b]Solarel[/b]

You and your extraction geist snatch the authorization geist with an outstretched hand. The heat of your passing shimmers the air as you draw past Isabelle, Crescent, and Annika. The spirit shrieks “stop” after you, and you feel the floor slope down away from your direction of movement, but you’re too hot and the changing slope melts beneath your feet, giving you a firm foothold as you race through the door and onward. 

The next rooms are a blur. You race across flat metal flooring as scattered square containers fly out of their neat stacks half-melted, unable to withstand your speed and momentum, not worth dodging around. Another door slides open, the floor and walls are natural rock in this room, moss growing up near the ceilings, wet and damp from some natural source of water. Little drops of it sizzle to steam as they touch you. It feels good, even though you can’t afford the time to wait. The room is filled with workstations of nanobot gray with tables, chairs, and small computers set into natural alcoves, haphazard around the room in their facing. Some sort of odd device is connected to wires leading up one of the walls, but there’s no time to go that way. You cut right following the cavern’s natural wall, there’s another door right there, a small connecting room of some kind, but your heat won’t let you stop to think about it. The physical lock on the other side’s door melts off as your arm slams into it and the door bursts open to some kind of laboratory or testing room. Both together, perhaps.

It is here that you are forced into a halt. You race across the open walkway of the room, but the door on the far side refuses your access geist and it is too thick to melt, especially as the heat has already begun to dissipate from its most molten. The room is large, nearly twenty meters across and almost as wide. There’s a door where you entered, and another on the far end that has stopped you. An open middle walkway that you’ve just run past. One side wall is set with multiple reinforced metal plates, most of them heavily burned and scoured, along with testing stations and monitoring devices every meter or so. Some kind of weapons testing location most likely. The other wall is covered with storage lockers (perhaps full of weapons) and the space is lined with several two tier workstations: long tables at chest height and then storage shelves at head height. They’re fully stocked with various tools, microscopes, beakers, burners of various sorts, all types of meters and readers for gathering data. 

Before you have much of a chance to scour the room, though, the ceiling above the weapons testing area, perhaps less reinforced than the walls, parts open. It was made of all nanobot materials, this is a more developed rather than natural room, but it’s still surprising to see it open that way. 

From that ceiling lowers a god. It’s not a particularly large god in Zaldarian standards, perhaps three to four times your height all told. It’s built with subtle bird-like features on the face and body shape, and metallic feathers lining its arms. It has no weapon to speak of, at least not visible, simply its feathered arms, long legs for its height, and a bulky crest atop its head that looks rather suited to headbutts. 

Perched on its shoulders in an ethereal form is the spirit from before, its eyes glowing balefully. “You are ruining my facility. Mine! The Trak’tho left it to me! I will bind you here and make you beg me to fix every burn and break you’ve caused. And if she comes back while it is in such disrepair, I will make you prostrate yourself over every inch of burned and twisted metal so that she doesn’t have to trod upon this…this desecration!” 

[The spirit is marking Guilty]

***

[b]Isabelle[/b]

First there is chaos. 

The heat of Solarel as she seizes the geist from Annika is palpable. You can feel it slam into you in the form of gathered air from her run. But then she is past, snaking her way deeper into the facility. The floor slopes, and while Solarel pushes past it melting holes into the metal, you three find yourselves sliding to the center of the room. But then Solarel is through and the odd guardian spirit disappears, leaving you at the bottom of a slope pressed against Annika’s soft black robes while Crescent sits hunched on all fours, tail flicking as she looks around trying to make sense of the predicament. 

Then there is calm.

Nobody says anything for a moment while you and Annika untangle and try to sit up. The slope isn’t all that steep to reach the door if you go at an angle, though it’s slick apart from Solarel’s melted spots. You’ll quite literally need to follow in her footsteps getting there.

Finally, Annika grins. “She hasn’t changed a bit, the crazy bitch. No wonder the Empress cut her loose.” She shakes her head but the grin doesn’t leave her face. She looks rather like an owl fluffing its feathers as she glances about. Then she starts climbing up. “Well, come on Crescent, we’re going to miss the show if we’re not quick. We’ll need to get the door open the old-fashioned way, hopefully the Traktharan spirit is too distracted to notice us tinkering with the door controls absent my entry geist. You, Terenian, I don’t suppose you’re any good at hotwiring?”