Chapter Text
Toa Raya’s head swam. Raising a hand to it, she felt for injuries. Nothing that she could find. As she sat up, she felt a throbbing pain at her neck for the briefest of moments before fading. She wracked her memory, trying to remember what had happened to her… Nothing. Last she remembered, she had been on her normal patrol route. Something was strange about it, she was sure, but her memory was still cloudy. She shook her head and stood.
The room Raya found herself in was strange. It wasn’t like anywhere she’d seen before. It was cold, metallic… and yet it felt somehow alive. She felt the wall, and was comforted for a moment to feel Protodermis before she realised that was impossible and recoiled. Nowhere new could have been constructed from Protodermis, surely – there just wasn’t enough of it for buildings to take priority over weapons or armour when they could be made so easily from stone or wood. That meant, of course, that she must be somewhere old, and most likely very far away.
Annoyingly, the room was almost completely empty. In fact, save for Raya herself and a few empty shelves, it was empty. Perhaps whatever this place had been used to store was out of commission, possibly looted. Regardless, it wouldn’t help her figure out where she was. The Toa approached the room’s door cautiously, assuming from the lack of handles that all she would need to do was push. The door opened on its own as she approached, sliding upwards. After deciding that realistically that was no stranger than waking up in a room she had no memory of, made out of a material it shouldn’t be, she poked her head out into a corridor.
She listened closely, putting to work the acute hearing Toa Krakua had been training her to use. Without being a Toa of Sound herself, her hearing would never be quite as good as his, but she knew footsteps when she heard them. Four sets, approaching quickly. Something in her felt the urge to hide, and she pulled her head back, hiding behind the wall and praying none of them chose to properly look inside the room. She didn’t get a look at them as they ran past, but she heard them. They were chattering to each other, fast enough that she couldn’t discern the words but just clearly enough for them to feel eerily familiar. As she ducked out of the room and began to sneak in the other direction from where they had gone, Raya remembered something Turaga Matau once told her about robotic enforcers called “Vahki” that communicated to each other in the language of the Matoran, just sped up to the point where only other Vahki could understand. If there really were Vahki here, that was yet another impossibility.
Raya followed the winding corridor without much choice in the matter. The twists and turns gave it a labyrinthine impression, but she was yet to encounter another door or even a fork. Mercifully, she was also yet to encounter any more of those beings. A few minutes into her exploration, it had occurred to her that if she had been able to hear the footsteps of others, then perhaps any others could hear her footsteps. Since then, she had been using her Kanohi Matatu, her Mask of Telekinesis, to carry herself through the air silently rather than risk detection through something so simple. Now, in the near total silence, she found herself able to listen to the ambient hums of electrical conductivity, and occasionally the sounds of machinery of some kind. When she felt safe enough to do so, she would stop and listen to the sounds to try to work out what the machines might be. She couldn’t tell exactly what was happening, but they were far too regular to be anything other than automated. One didn’t spend as much time with Toa Nuparu as she did without learning what manual use of tools sounds like.
Eventually, just when Raya had begun to wonder if this entire place was just one big spiral with an abandoned storage closet, she came to a door in the side of the corridor. Like the one she encountered before, it opened automatically as she got close. Grateful to finally have an option other than one bland corridor, she went through it. Very little could have prepared her for what she found. As soon as Raya stepped through the door, it was the middle of the night in the middle of a jungle. Stunned in surprise, she turned around to see that not only had the door closed behind her, but it had almost immediately been covered by plantlife. She reached towards it, and the mossy covering vanished instantly as the door opened. She leaned away – the door closed, and the plants she could now tell were illusory returned to place. Glancing around, Raya quickly committed this part of the room to memory. It was visibly by a wall – still Protodermis, strangely, or perhaps Protosteel (she didn’t have the expertise to distinguish them at a glance) – but the door was sufficiently concealed for her to at least worry she might lose it. Once confident she would remember it, Raya went further into the chamber.
Jungles were no issue for her, of course. If anything, it was comforting to just grab onto a vine and throw a blast of air behind her to boost her swing upwards. With each of her daggers as pitons, she was able to climb and leap up to the canopy with ease. Perched on the top of the tallest tree she could find, she looked around at this chamber. It was enormous – at least a kio from wall to wall, maybe even a kio and a half. It seemed to be a consistent biome in its entirety, and Raya could see a few large fans interspersed around the wall that looked like they might simulate weather for the things living in here. Raya was certain this biome was inhabited by design; she could hear things moving around just like in the jungles and forests back home, which was a relief. That reminded her – now might be an opportunity to finally find out where she was. Whoever had built this place had given it a transparent dome for its ceiling, presumably to allow sunlight through during the day. It was reinforced with metal bars between its sections, most likely also Protodermis or Protosteel. Through it, Raya saw a cloudless night sky, filled with stars. Perhaps if she could find the Red Star she might be able to work out where she was.
A few minutes later, Raya was even more confused than she already had been. She had changed her vantage point three times. She had scoured every inch of the sky. Still, no matter where she looked, she could not see the Red Star. This unsettled her more than anything else, because that could only mean one thing. Unless Raya had been taken to some far-off corner of the universe where everything she had ever known was a pinprick of light in the sky, there was only one place where the Red Star’s light did not reach. Somehow, Toa Raya had been returned to the interior of the Great Spirit Robot and, despite everything, somewhere inside it was alive.