Archive of Our Own ^beta

“It may be difficult to see without intently focusing all three of your eyes, but the anomaly is most certainly there.”

The rest of the Nomai gathered along the Observatory’s upper level followed Conoy’s gaze toward the model of the system hovering before them, and the curious reading upon it that had been his and Spire’s cause to summon them all to the facility. It was indeed easy to overlook, but located quite a distance above the system’s primary orbital plane, just beyond the range of distances from the sun most conducive to cultivating life, was a miniscule bead of projection fluid. Sporadically, it fluctuated in shape or size, but it remained ever-present, unmoving.

“How fascinating!” said Clary, stepping up onto the bench in front of her and her sister as she peered closer at the aberrant fleck. “Do you have any hypotheses as to what it might be?”

“I’m afraid not,” Conoy replied. “We have not been able to glean any additional information out of its signal (in spite of our best efforts!). All we know is that it exists and that it is only detectable (at least by the equipment here) when the locator is tuned in one of a few specific ways.”

Yarrow squinted at the bead. “Have we already discounted the possibility that this is merely an equipment error? Do we have reason to believe it to be anything more?”

“I would consider such a possibility extremely unlikely,” called Spire from the locator’s controls on the lower floor. “Not because of extensive testing that either of us has done, but because Privet (at the behest of her brother) has come in to verify the locator’s calibration many, many times during Idaea’s time building and maintaining the Sun Station. At this point, I believe it fair to state that our surety that the locator is detecting a signal from this location rivals your surety of the negative time interval phenomenon.”

Her declaration proved a sufficient response to Yarrow’s query; no one made any further additions to his branch of the discussion.

“Shall we investigate it, then?” began Pye, returning to Conoy’s reply to Clary. “I am eager at the opportunity to learn more about a new mystery in this star system!”

“I also wish to volunteer for this endeavor!” said Poke. “It would do well, I believe, to help reorient us after this recent turn of events.”

There was a moment of silence as the group glanced out at the planet’s horizon and the unfortunately very much still intact sun beyond it.

“I approve of this curiosity, of course,” mused Yarrow, turning his attention back to the gathering and putting on what Clary called his ‘director voice’, “but it would be careless of us to send a team to this anomaly without any additional information about it. I propose we send a few small probes toward this region of space (the crew at the Construction Yard should have some they can provide us) and determine our course of action based on what they report. It will be difficult to aim the probes in the proper directions (regardless of which gravity cannon we use) so we will need to calculate the desired trajectories well in advance and launch at precisely the right times. Pye, given your… preferred pastimes, can I entrust you to compute these for us?”

“I have already completed several!” Pye had long ceased monitoring the transcription of the discussion on her staff in favor of fervently computing all the paths their shuttles and probes could potentially take toward the anomaly. “All to a degree of precision that not even Poke would consider insufficient!”

Poke fixed her gaze on Pye’s work, then twisted her face into a wry smile. “Hmm… It’s decent, but I don’t think you have enough significant figures, my friend…!”

Before the two could begin bantering and making the transcript far longer than was at all necessary, Yarrow firmly knocked the base of his staff twice upon the ground. “My gratitude to you, Pye. In the interest of not risking interference with young Solanum’s return from her quantum pilgrimage, let us continue these efforts at the Sunless City’s gravity cannon. Spire, Conoy, we will be sure to update you with any additional information we learn about this newfound hidden presence in this star system!”

“Although the existence of the anomaly is already interesting by itself, the data our probes collected from the region prove even more exciting!” began Clary as the warbling clicks and tones of the recorder whirred to life once more.

“One of them disappeared as it neared this strange presence,” Poke continued, “and it ceased to be able to transmit any data to us. However, whatever interfered with this connection did not do the same to its warp core, so we were (thankfully) able to recall it. The images it recorded while cut off are likewise strange: the only celestial body visible in any of them was this system’s sun, even when there were planets and moons that should have been well within its field of vision, and the final image showed it having landed on what we believe to be a large metal panel.”

The two of them looked expectantly toward their companion. It took a remarkably long bout of quiet before Pye realized she had missed her cue and pulled her attention away from the shuttle’s front window to join the dictation.

“Another probe was launched to examine the site of this anomaly from additional angles and positions. Most of its images showed absolutely nothing in the area, but those it recorded while beyond the anomaly (relative to the system’s star) seemed to partially or entirely hide the sun (but not the light it casts on this system’s other bodies)!”

“Based on this information, our working hypothesis is that the anomaly is a large spacecraft capable of cloaking itself indefinitely and inhibiting the transmission of signals from within that cloaking field, and it is very unlikely to be of Nomai origin. As such, this endeavor may not merely be a scientific expedition, but also a diplomatic mission! This prospect of meeting another sapient species is a thrilling one – we can only imagine what they might be able to teach us!”

Clary allowed the air of exuberance to linger and be recorded in the silence after her statement, before flicking the pause switch, letting her expression fall a bit, and fixing her sister and friend with a gaze full of amiable malcontent. “Though it would have been nice to have more time to prepare for diplomacy before launching…!”

“Even with this shuttle’s improved trajectory alteration capabilities, this was the most opportune launch time for quite a while,” said Poke as she and Pye moved back toward the window and control panel. “I do not disagree that your spouse would have been our best choice for an ambassador, but you are well-equipped for the role as well, Clary.”

“I appreciate your confidence in me, Poke, but it is difficult to perform this role when I am operating at someone else’s whims. For instance, approaching this spacecraft from its dark side (as is apparently Pye’s intended trajectory) may make us appear subversive or threatening, even if we make our presence known as soon as possible.”

Pye glanced over her shoulder toward Clary. “Ah, yes, of course: Nomai, truly a most threatening and violent species…!”

“I seem to recall you being the one most in favor of exploding the sun.”

“Yes! And seeing as that danger would have come from the sun, I don’t think it matters which side of their ship we approach from!”

Clary sighed. “You know that’s not my point, but… Regardless: Please try to contain your enthusiasm until we’re sure that whoever lives there will see it as appreciative and not aggressive. …That applies to you as well, Poke.”

After murmurs of vague agreement from her companions, the rest of their journey toward the anomaly was comparatively uneventful, filled only with a plethora of conjectures about what sorts of discoveries they might find at their destination. It was only near the end, as Pye began slowing their shuttle, that anything scientifically noteworthy happened.

With remarkable instantaneity, almost as though the team had been suddenly teleported to another world entirely, every star but the system’s sun disappeared, and at the position of the anomaly, where for the entire duration of their flight there had not been even the faintest hint of any physical object, there appeared before them an utterly gargantuan ship. Approximately disc-shaped, it rested unmoving in its position above the system, rotating at remarkable speed. It seemed to be made of bronzish and silvery metals, with an assortment of spires and other fixtures along all its sides, including what appeared to be a large wheel on its sunward face and, on the opposite, several arrays of circular white lights, all slowly oscillating in brightness, and at least one open bay for (presumably) smaller ships.

“How long must it have taken them to build this?!” murmured Pye as Clary unpaused the recorder, averting all three of her eyes from the shuttle’s main controls. “Stories we were told as children mention moons smaller than this ship!”

Poke had nearly pressed the mask of her helmet entirely against the front glass. “It has to be hollow, or else it would have enough mass that our shuttle would report its gravitational strength…!”

As her companions proceeded to fill the recorder with more and more observations and deductions about the craft before them, Clary engaged the special control panel that she and Yarrow had helped design so long ago, guiding its primary control orb into one of the few slots easily available to it. A low, faint-but-audible hum began emanating from the console and, via radio waves, the shuttle itself.

“I’ve begun broadcasting our signal,” she announced. “It contains a written communication that we are non-hostile, only curious, as well as pictograms denoting the same and a collection of tones that supposedly feel naturally calming and friendly to all, regardless of species (let us hope the claims of our histories are accurate!). Assuming the inhabitants of this ship can receive and interpret radio frequencies (which we have reason to believe is a guarantee), they should notice our presence, and assuming they can understand at least one of our messages or are at least willing to respond in kind (either of which is much less of a guarantee), this could be the start of a new connection between entire civilizations!”

“Until we receive a response, I will be keeping our shuttle approximately at its current distance from the ship, so that our new friends can easily locate us and transmit any messages they may have (and also so that we do not seem to approach them without permission).” After adding her parenthetical to the dictation, Pye began to motion for Clary to go ahead and pause the recording once more, then stopped herself and quickly added, “And, if we never receive a response after waiting for a reasonable length of time, we will act accordingly.”

Clary flicked the switch. “Now, we can do little more than just… wait.”

The team took up more comfortable positions around the shuttle, all three doffing their helmets in the process, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

They waited long enough for Pye to grow bored of calculating potential bay entry trajectories on only her staff and instead commandeer an entire wall and over half the ceiling for this purpose, eventually departing entirely from the realm of reasonability, and for Poke and Clary to run out of temporally relevant conversation topics, remember a game of Division’s Folly from near the end of their youths that they never managed to finish, recall the state they’d left it in, and, after several repetitive sequences that each took longer to resolve than the last, arrive at a draw so dull and uninteresting that both nearly forgot to record it.

“Hypothesis: it is not purely incidental that adults play this specific game much less often than adolescents do,” mused Poke. “Also: second, more important hypothesis: we have waited long enough. More than long enough.”

Clary made a small snort of laughter as she planted her staff on the shuttle’s floor and pushed herself back to her feet. “I believe both of these hypotheses are already thoroughly confirmed…! Hey, Pyyyye?”

Pye whipped her head around from a calculation she had labeled ‘aesthetically obnoxious entry maneuver that wastes a ton of fuel and benefits approximately no one, iteration 35’ and stared wide-eyed at Clary, an almost manic grin quickly creeping onto her face. “Yes??? Is it time? Is it time?”

*click!* “After waiting for… much longer than protocol expects of us, we have not received a response of any kind from this curious ship. Accordingly, we will be altering our broadcast to pictograms that announce our intended approach and entry, and, concurrently, attempting to perform exactly these actions.”

Poke and Clary had to nearly jump out of Pye’s way as she hurled herself at the shuttle’s controls, glanced at her staff to find one of the several trajectories that perfectly matched the shuttle and bay’s relative positions, and with great verve and aplomb engaged the thrusters accordingly.

In a mixture of trained knowledge, muscle memory, and pure preservation instinct, the sisters took firm and fast hold of the nearest handles on the walls as the shuttle jolted into action – it was thoroughly unlikely that they’d have been flung much at all from their positions if they hadn’t done so, considering the high stability provided by the gravity panels that were the shuttle’s floor, but Clary did feel as though she might have lost her footing otherwise, and Poke had still felt her upper body lurch with the sudden acceleration.

“Pye!” shouted the latter of the two. “What are you doing?!”

“What do you mean, ‘what am I doing?’?” she retorted, eyes remaining focused entirely on the controls and window before her. “Trying to enter the bay without aligning with its rotation would only bring us a quite injurious impact with several walls.”

“We all know that! What I believe my sister was trying to point out was that protocol requires our helmets to be on while the shuttle isn’t idling, and that all non-pilot crewmembers be secured before any sudden and severe changes to velocity!”

“You lack a sense of adventure, Clary.”

“I lack a death wish! It’s not like we have any way of being brought back!”

“…I am aware that we could not make our sun go supernova, but much like Idaea, I do not need you doing so in its place.”

Clary and Poke exchanged glances. No words were said, but the meaning was clear – neither had any idea whether the pause before Pye’s response was born of frustration, a search for a joke to make, or some strange combination thereof, and her tone provided no clues to elucidate the conundrum.

The rest of the ‘adventure’ was silent, with the exception of the occasional comment from Pye noting transitions between the steps of the process. Regardless of her enthusiasm, she remained worthy of her informal designation as the clan’s preeminent expert in astrodynamics – the shuttle approached, its velocities and accelerations were aligned to the bay’s, and once it had ‘descended’ into it, it rotated and landed, upright and proper, never once making contact with any other part of the hangar.

“And that’s planetfall! Or, rather, shipfall, in this instance,” she beamed. “With none of us any worse for the—”

Pye turned around to find her teammates slowly pushing themselves up off the floor of their craft. “…What are we doing down there?”

The two of them fixed her with a pair of triplet glares. There never was any shortage of ‘evidence’ that they were sisters – the shared patterns of streaks in their irises, the identical curvatures of their buccal horns and waves in their manes, the way that their laughter always seemed to harmonize – but with the manner in which their brows now furrowed at her, Pye felt nearly as though they were somehow weaponizing this fact against her.

“As… smooth as your piloting was,” began Poke, “we are not all inoculated against the effects of acceleration, and you gave us very little time to secure ourselves.”

“Thus, in lieu of using the seats and restraints (as we’re supposed to)…” – Clary allowed the anticipation to hang in the air a moment – “…floor.”

Pye half-rolled her eyes. “Your grievances are noted… in any case, the shuttle says that there’s no breathable air in the bay below, so we should get our helmets on.”

It was only out of a desire to not poison the transcript that Poke and Clary gave no voice to the responses they wished to provide.

In short order, helmets were donned, the shuttle’s door was opened and its gravity pillar projected, and the team descended to the surface below. Despite its nearly cavernous size, the hangar felt as though it had an almost oppressive atmosphere. …Or, rather, lack of atmosphere. Its floors, walls, and large arcing ceiling were of the same dark metals as the ship’s exterior, save for the large strips and points of light embedded in patterns beneath them. Along both of the walls perpendicular to the ship’s circular faces were several raised platforms, most of which each had a tetrapod craft, shaped approximately like a flattened hemisphere of more dark metal with a proper hemisphere of glass emerging from its apex, resting upon it. A set of hooks high above them held another of these smaller ships aloft, perhaps having stopped mid-transport or -service. And the far wall had two empty doorways on either side of a dais, beneath bright white lanterns and a large glowing symbol composed of two elongated concentric rings, the outer one not fully connecting to itself along its lower side.

“What do you suppose it means or represents?” began Poke as she and Clary gazed up at the sigil, her sister working to sketch a copy of it into the transcript. “Or, perhaps it is nothing more than a design flourish passed down from previous generations (like the triangular spirals we use in our lanterns)?”

“Without any additional information (besides that there looks to be another instance of it near the bay’s mouth), I would hypothesize that it represents either this ship or this entrance to it, if it represents anything at all. If possible, we should ask its inhabitants about this as well, alongside the many other questions we hope to pose!”

“Poke, Clary, when you have a moment, please aid me in examining the floor; while I doubt your staves will show different readings than mine, I would prefer to be more certain that these measurements are correct before I start wildly updating our hypotheses.”

Suppressing expressions of incredulity, the sisters glanced over their shoulders to see Pye kneeling at a seemingly arbitrary point on the bay’s floor, looking back and forth between the metal beneath her and the panel of her staff. They shrugged at each other, then prepared their own staves for measurement and analysis and pressed the ends against the ground.

“…If your readings indicate that this metal was forged into its shape a very long time ago, then yes, our staves are finding the same,” said Clary, nearly failing to keep her tone level. “And although this fact on its own doesn’t guarantee anything…”

Poke nodded. “It does significantly increase the probability that this ship is ancient, that whether or not it has inhabitants now, its constructors are not remotely close to being our contemporaries.”

Believing it best to leave the other species’ docked ships alone for the time being, the team ascended the stairs to the dais, briefly regarded a collection of sealed crates (before electing to leave them alone as well), and passed through the open doorways. Beyond them was a much smaller metal room, well-lit by more white lanterns, with twin staircases leading up to a higher platform and a pair of open doors leading further inward. As they crested the steps, pale green markings on the bar between the doors caught their attention.

“Ah, so this species has at least one written language!” said Clary, closing upon the writing and touching the end of her staff to it to begin analysis. “It looks to be vertical (though I cannot immediately discern whether it is aligned upward, downward, or some combination thereof), made of marvelously intricate arrangements of branching lines and curves, with occasional individual dots and… wait a moment… Poke, Pye, do these markings look like tree branches to you?”

Her companions leaned closer toward the glyphs for a moment, then made gestures and sounds of affirmation.

“How curious!” said Poke. “Do you suppose they are linguistically meaningful, or are they simply a stylistic choice?”

“I could hardly begin to make an educated guess, but with any luck, my staff’s analysis will—”

Clary cut herself off as the staff’s full results appeared. She glanced over them, and could not help but let out a small huff of bemusement. “Never mind: barring a loss or corruption of data (which we all know to be quite unlikely in this scenario), this orthography is not one that any Nomai before us have ever encountered, so for now, at least, we cannot translate what this says. However, also of note (and as a point of intrigue that doesn’t come with disappointment): the substance this is written in is of a very similar chemical composition to that of our inscription fluid!”

Pye leaned to look at the output on Clary’s staff. “Specifically, the formulae that are better suited to inscriptions intended to last for a very long time. How do you suppose they create it?”

“I believe it most likely that some creature or plant (or perhaps a fungus?) that they cultivate aboard the ship produces a compound similar, or even identical, to that which we produce.”

“Alternatively, they, too, could produce the compound themselves! (Although, it would be an astounding defiance of statistical improbability for two entirely unrelated species to both evolve to the point of spaceflight and evolve to produce one of the few possible chemical bases for inscription fluid or anything similar.)”

Clary nodded resolutely. “Hence why I said ‘most likely’, though if your proposal is the case, I’ll be fascinated to learn how similar or different their method of production is to ours!”

Beyond the inscription was a cylindrical room, smaller still than the one just before it and still made of that dark metal, with a large mechanism in its center – a tall and thin pillar with a white lantern at its apex, as well as two pairs of flat, thin protrusions, each with a circle of green glass adorning its most distal end. Each set looked to be affixed to a rotatable metal ring on the column, with an additional, unadorned ring between them. Along the room’s walls were three rings of metal strips in grooves, one of which crossed in front of two conspicuously door-shaped outlines on the side opposite the three of them. Aligned across the metal strips and wall segments between them were curved patterns of a darker color that, together with the way the rings had been carved, formed long, flowing flourishes all around the perimeter of the room.

As Clary, with some aid from her sister, made more sketches of the ship’s design decorations, Pye stepped forward. “…Any objections?”

“Protocol states that we shouldn’t utilize unfamiliar technology unpermitted any more than is ‘necessary’,” said Clary. “If we want to find any answers, I believe this qualifies.”

With a nod, Pye held out her staff, activated its flashlight, and pointed it at the green circles on the branch-like structures on the pillar (it could hardly have been more obvious that they were reactive to direct bright light). As expected, the door behind them closed, and all the rings on the pillar began to rotate, moving along with them the strips in the grooves. The nodes themselves had lit up a pleasant pale green, almost as though in affirmation.

It took only a few short moments before the spinning metal aligned such that the large central piece no longer blocked the doors before them and such that the flourishes along them once again aligned with those of the wall. She angled the light away from the nodes once more, and the path deeper into the ship opened, letting loose from within a burst of air – breathable air…! – that briefly fluttered the robes of their suits.

The next room was dark, seemingly lacking in any forms of built-in lighting, but this element was not nearly as interesting to anyone on the team as was the matter of that, unlike everything leading up to it, it was made not of metal, but of wood – a pale brown, occasionally tinged with slightly redder hues, across the floor and walls, with darker hues to be found on the tall, triangularly prismal pitched ceiling.

“It seems the planks in here are about as old as the panels out there,” said Poke as all three began taking readings and measurements once again. “I am pleased that this species cares as much as we do about ensuring our creations can stand the test of time!”

“Speaking of which… now that there exists a fluid medium around us…” Clary stepped toward the room’s far wall, adjusted her suit’s airflow, took in a larger-than-usual breath, and let out a long, airy, two-tone-descending vocalization.

“You’re going to… scream at them…? No greeting, no salutation, no… any words at all???” Pye’s face was mostly hidden by her mask, but all three of her eyes, just barely visible, bore clearly to Clary her genuine bafflement at her action.

“Well, of course she is!” said Poke, her words coated in an air of amicable sardonicism. “In how many of our history stories do you recall unknown cultures being able to understand our language immediately upon first contact?”

Pye rolled her head to the side to pay Poke’s attitude back in kind, then halted as she fully took in her words. “…I admit, with how little it’s proven relevant, I have not kept myself actively apprised of all the techniques we have for establishing communication with other sapient species, and I now wish to rescind my incredulity – that was the vocal equivalent of the friendly radio tones, correct?”

“Correct!” nodded Clary. “Now we have to wait again, in the hopes that someone comes to find us, but in the meantime… I believe we ought to examine this.”

In the center of the room was another incredibly conspicuous mechanism, one that Poke and Pye had only been able to resist immediately inspecting out of an actively maintained intent to follow Clary’s lead on diplomacy – with that blockade removed, they descended upon it like particles into a black hole. Rising from a large demarcated square in the floor was a tall wooden arch with a metal ring fitted beneath its curving beams and what appeared to be an inactive light in its apex, from which a third wood formation – a sort of half-arch – descended back to the floor on the farther side of the room. Immediately beneath this structure, embedded in the floor, was a decorated octagonal platform, made of the same wood and metal as everything else, and spaced evenly around its surface, each about midway between the center and perimeter, were four posts each tipped with a green glass orb. Off to one diagonal (breaking the symmetry) was raised slanted panel with a gear emerging from its upper side, illuminated by a soft green light.

“Wait, I don’t believe this platform is physically embedded at all,” said Poke, bending down to analyze the stylish wooden pieces ringing it and stabilizing herself as the platform shuddered slightly under her weight. “It’s somewhat difficult to see past these lining pieces (and of note: they appear to have hinges that would allow them to fold upward), but as far as I can gather, the platform is being held in place by bars and tracks within the seams.”

Pye moved toward the panel, skirting the square’s perimeter. “Fascinating! I doubt it there is any way for it move laterally from here, and it does not appear that moving upward would be particularly useful, so… Hypothesis: this gear is a switch that disengages the locking mechanisms, or is in some other way related to lowering this platform.”

“Perhaps it is a mechanical lift!” mused Clary as she joined Poke on the platform, looking over the pole closest to her. “Also of note are these photovoltaic nodes; each time our lights have passed across them (thereby activating them), I have heard a faint, low, mechanical rumbling from below or within the platform – it is clearly at least attempting to do something in response to its preferred stimulus. Hypothesis: given that there are four of them spaced evenly along the longer sides, they are for directional lateral navigation. Suppose the platform lowers onto a network of tracks it can be moved along, and this is one of its stations?”

Pye nodded in agreement. “These are sound conjectures! What do you suppose is the… Poke, what are you doing?”

While Clary had been pondering the glass spheres, Poke had been moving from corner to corner of the octagon, peering quite closely into the seams and attempting to angle her flashlight to illuminate them as much as was possible. She had circled the platform several times before Pye noticed her behavior, and was midway through the next examination, having returned to the side opposite the raised panel. There was a pause before she answered, and when she finally did, her tone was far from that of one intended to thoroughly explain a conundrum to another. “I am attempting to determine whether these mechanisms are as they should be – this side is the least obstructed of the four, but the shadows still make it difficult to discern much at all, and I certainly can’t fit my staff in to perform a material analysis. Perhaps I could— no, no, I’ve already tried that, but what about…”

“Oh, perhaps one of us could take a look as well, then?” Pye fully drew her attention away from the various other curiosities of the structure and toward her friend’s dilemma. “Another set of eyes (or, rather, another third eye, in this case) might be able to shed some light on the situation!”

“That would be much appreciated…! Just be sure to walk around the—”

Pye set a foot forward onto the octagon. She lifted the other. A series of loud metallic snaps, followed by a short, horrible grinding, resounded from the seams, and the platform descended. Rapidly.

Clary and Pye managed to each grab a post as soon as their fall began, but Poke, having been leaning so close to the seams, instead shortly found herself driven face-first toward the very angular edges of the new hole in the room’s floor, dragged nearly upright as her mask both rolled over the rim and was pushed away by the hinged pieces of wood folding upward, and, reeling from the sudden movement, forced to fall backward as the platform’s plummet ended with a very wet-sounding and not at all balanced-feeling impact.

The hypotheses they had spoken aloud were far from the only ones they’d each made about the function of the platform and what they would find beneath the room, but nowhere on those lists had been that the platform was a raft for a rather rapidly running rivulet of water, as they soon registered themselves to be on.

Poke slowly turned toward Pye. “…around the platform, as I believe the supports might be damaged, and too much pressure could cause them to break.”

“I… I apologize, Poke; that was more impulsive of me than the situation warranted.” Pye knelt down and stretched out a hand toward her. “Are you injured at all? Your mask appears to be unperturbed.”

“Nothing severe – that much I am sure of.” Poke took hold of Pye’s hand and allowed her to bring her back to her feet. “Now, let us see where we… whoa.”

There was much that their years of work and overall experience living in the star system had taught them and prepared them for. Responding properly to an incident of suddenly falling was a standard element of most forms of occupational training, and handling an impact in the fall was scarcely a more advanced subject. But there was very little any of them could have undergone that might have prepared them for the sight they beheld as the raft drifted out from under the dark room and into the light beyond it.

The stream beneath them was a small segment of a massive river running the entire length of the ship’s inner circumference, surrounded not by metal or wood, but natural land formations, all dotted with patches of pallid green grass and trees with long aboveground roots, some of which descended even from the higher branches. A short distance beyond where their path, tucked away within high cliff walls, joined the main river, its flow briefly turned dangerously rapid before settling down again around what looked to be a settlement built across a few tall (relatively-speaking) islets, among which was a particularly prominent tower and the remains of a wholly incinerated building. Beyond that, along the opposite end of the craft from where they drifted, the waters turned white once more as they followed winding ravines through even taller cliffs, in the later parts of which were structures built high upon the cliffsides. Whatever followed them was hidden from the team behind a grand wooden dam just upstream from their raft, which, judging by appearance alone, was clearly designed to carefully control the flow of water through it to ensure the looping nature of the river remained steady and stable. All the space between highest points of the cliffs and trees was, indeed, hollow, a great expanse of open air illuminated by a giant light – perhaps a sort of small artificial sun – in the center of the hollow’s sunward side, which, at first glance, seemed transparent, the outer structures of the ship and the field of stars far beyond it visible from within.

“What a spectacular feat of engineering!” proclaimed Pye, gazing every which way with a giddiness she could practically feel trying to burst forth from her chest. “A… a ringworld! Not hypothetical, not theoretical, not a pure mental exercise! A real, physical, actual ringworld!”

“Can you imagine all the work and time and planning and effort and care and caution and… and everything that this must have required?! The terraforming alone is a far greater feat than anything and everything we did in the creation of the Ash Twin Project!” Poke felt her breathing become heavier and a fluttering buzzing start filling her head. To call their opportunity exciting was understatement. To call it exhilarating was an understatement! “It’s incredible! It’s nearly unbelievable! It’s—”

“Gush later, focus now!!” Clary shouted, jostling the both of them by the handles of their masks. “The river turns ahead, the raft is going to collide with that outcropping of rock directly in front of us if we do not aid it, and hypothesis: it would be much easier to do that if you two weren’t unbalancing it with all this ecstatic happy-tapping!”

Not waiting for any kind of response, Clary regarded the four light nodes for a brief moment, thought back to the comments made as they were studying them, and promptly flicked on her staff’s flashlight and aimed it at the sphere to her left. It lit up, the mechanical whirring sounded once more, and raft’s course shifted exactly in the direction she had hoped.

It took them approximately no time at all to figure out how to control the raft – activate the light node matching the direction one wished to attempt to move in, or activate two adjacent nodes at once to guide it along a diagonal (or, activate other counts and combinations if one’s goal was to put effort into a lack of productivity).

Following their stream for not too long at all led them to a small wooden structure rising out from the water and above their heads. At its top was a pair of perpendicularly intersecting wooden arches with a metal ring affixed within their curved segments and, at their joint apex, a spotlight peering down into the water. Beneath it were eight hooks attached to chains, and a wooden pathway led off it onto an outcropping on the cliff beside them.

They all exchanged glances, nodded wordlessly, and guided the raft into the spotlight. All four nodes lit up, along with an assortment of additional tiny ones, imperceptible to the primary eyes, embedded within the raft’s floor, slowing and halting it beneath the mechanism. During its deceleration, the hooked chains lowered down in a chorus of metallic clinking and clattering, taking hold of the raft within a fraction of a second of it fully stopping and drawing it upward, out of the water and into a familiar octagonal hole. The edges rose to be flush with the square of wood around them, the hinged footrails fell outward, and a few rough mechanical clunks assured the team that this station’s locking mechanisms were far less worn by time than the one upstream.

Clary stepped off the raft, followed shortly by Poke and Pye, and peered over the rail around the docking platform, finally taking in for herself the utter masterwork that was the ringworld in which they stood. “…Alright… Alright! Now you two may return to a… reasonable level of gushing.”

“You were correct – more than correct, perhaps – to shake me and Pye from our bout of unfocused overenthusiasm, Clary, but…” Poke stepped toward her sister and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Do you truly not find this – all of this! – as boundlessly energizing as we do? Has something dimmed the sparks of curiosity within you?”

There was a moment of silence, broken only by the sounds of the running and rushing water around them, before Clary leaned back from the railing, rested her staff at her feet, turned to face Poke with her entire body, and let the anticipation linger a moment longer, before clapping her hands onto either side of her sister’s face (or, rather, her helmet, but the effect was largely the same) and leaning in close enough that their masks nearly brushed. “Poke… the only reason I’m not behaving as exhilarated as I feel is because I need to keep myself collected, in order to perform my role as ambassador. If this were not expected of me, I assure you I would be as outwardly excited – or, no, nearly as outwardly excited – as you are. This ship, this ringworld, is utterly. Utterly. Astounding.”

“Despite this lack of proper physical contact, it still feels like you’re squishing my cheeks.”

“Good! That means I’ve returned the favor from a few days ago. I look forward to when you return this one in the future!” Bringing her hands back down to her sides, Clary knelt down, retrieved her staff, and began making her way toward the station’s access path and the large sign positioned on the rocks beside it. “I wonder if the reason no one responded to my call was because the sound did not carry well from the entry room. I’ll try again…”

“While that conjecture could be accurate… I fear a strong possibility is that there is no one here to hear you… Look at the state of this place…!”

Clary turned around to question Pye’s line of thought, then remained silent as she, along with Poke, came upon the same realizations their friend had. Now that they were no longer enraptured by the engineering marvel that the ringworld was, its not-so-admirable aspects became more apparent, elements of it that, much like the failed mechanism that had sent them to their current position, had undergone the tolls of time – the rails and boards of the platform were water-rotten in multiple places, the color of the trees’ bark and leaves did not look particularly healthy, and, distant though they were, many of the structures in the settlement downstream looked to have large, jagged holes in their walls and roofs.

Moreover, and perhaps more damningly, no matter where any of them looked, across all the islands, all the cliffs, all the buildings and platforms and walkways, and every length and branch and twist and turn of the river, not one of them could note even the slightest semblance of motile life.

“This wood looks to be about as old as that of the entry room,” she continued, placing her staff on one of the rotten planks and looking over its panel. “I can’t determine anything more specific with the tools we have, of course, but it certainly has not been replaced or repaired in a very long time.”

“So… did they… abandon their ve—” – Poke caught her words and promptly stifled that version of the statement – “…their ship?”

“That, or…” Pye paused for a moment, debating how to phrase what she increasingly felt was the all too likely option. “Or… Well, it’s a bit difficult to hear or respond to anything when you’re dead.”

Clary tilted her head at Pye. “What, do you propose that something wiped them all out?!”

“That’s one possibility! They could also have simply faded away, not maintaining their population. Perhaps, in time, they lost their drive to persist, their sense of perseverance. Or maybe they tried to create something similar to our magnum opus, except they failed in a way that ended up being permanently fatal, as opposed being not fatal at all!”

A length of silence ensued as Pye’s companions stared at her and the transcription of her conjectures on their staves. Poke chose to hold back anything she might have said as Clary, eventually, took the mantle of replying. “Not that I intend to start habitually agreeing with him, but I am beginning to understand why Idaea so frequently complained that you are frightfully nonchalant about the macabre…”

Despite its inability to be recorded by eye or by staff, Pye’s only response was a proud, mischievous grin.

“In any case,” Clary continued, making for the walkway once more, “I will accept the notion that there is no living person (aside from the three of us) aboard this craft as a possibility, but in the event that there are others here to find, and they are simply, say, hiding from us, or perhaps merely all asleep…!”

She turned around once again and repeated the two-tone call of amicability. A moment passed. And then a few more. And yet, in spite of her hopes, nary an iota of movement was incited by the sound.

With two sets of expectant eyes burning into her, Clary drummed her fingers together. “It is highly unlikely at this point that anyone is coming to find us. Either they are hiding, or they are gone. But whether this ship is a living population’s home, or a relic from an ancient people we cannot hope to meet, the only way we will find the answers we seek is to actively and directly pursue them. Poke, Pye… let us begin.”

Crossing over the nearby rocks, the walkway from the dock revealed itself to lead into another settlement, one that had been hidden from the team’s initial impressions by the cliffs around them. A few buildings, most of them of right-angled walls with pointed, triangular prism-esque roofs, were scattered about the islands and islets of a marshy lowland. A sizeable covered bridge connected the far sides of the area, seemingly leading almost directly to a staircase up to a raised circularly-walled building with, above its entrance, a tree branch-like sigil lit from behind by a familiar green glow. The sign on the rocks beside them bore a painting of the same bridge and outlier structure, albeit in a state they had both decayed away from over time, and beside it was more of that pale green vertical text.

As Clary began transcribing the writing and making notes about its context, Poke leaned over the railing to examine the sign more closely. “It is only one artifact, so we cannot make any conclusions about their patterns and norms, but it is notable that this rendering of the bridge and raised structure (and the environment immediately around them) seems to be mostly in imitation of reality – it uses a limited palette and does not contain much (if any) gradient blending between each pigment, but I cannot discern any notable stylization in shapes or angles, for instance.”

Pye reached out with her staff, careful to not let its analyzer make proper physical contact with the ancient paints. After a moment, it returned what few results it could from a mere proximity scan. “Indeed, the artwork appears to be about as old as everything else we’ve encountered so far. The pigments derive from both organic and mineral sources, but I cannot discern anything more specific than that, or anything at all about the paint’s medium, without a contact analysis, and (though I am sure we are all simply burning with curiosity about it) we cannot yet risk easily-avoided actions with a significant probability of bringing further harm to their work.”

With one final check that her copy of the sign’s glyphs was accurate, Clary nodded, satisfied. “Given what we know and can see, my initial conjecture is that this text” – she paused for a fraction of a second to add the writing into their transcript – “is either the name of this settlement (or a smaller part of it), a welcome message, or a combination thereof.”

“A welcome message?” Pye repeated. “Do you suppose they expected visitors?”

“It is a possibility! Alternatively, consider all that we’ve experienced so far – an ominous ship bay and airlock, a dark room from which the only exit is to drop into the water upon a raft, and then nearly all of the ringworld’s wonder comes into view as one travels down a shallow, narrow canyon, which leads directly to a dock, from which this sign must then be seen; perhaps this was their way of welcoming others of their kind to the ship for the first time!”

“What a delightful gesture!” said Poke. “If this was their intent, I offer my gratitude to them for our opportunity to partake in the experience as well! It was quite a scenic way to come to know their ringworld for what it truly is!”

“Additionally, pertaining to this topic of visibility…!” Pye walked past the sign to look not at the settlement below her, but at the dam and, more specifically, what lay just beyond it. “From this vantage point, we can see behind the dam, between it and the winding cliffs. It is not surprising, I think, that it holds a massive reservoir, but the structures around and within it are very worth noting.”

Poke hurried to join her, Clary following (at a slower pace) shortly behind. “How curious! One of the buildings on its sunward side has a dock that appears to lead directly to three chains of considerable size rising out of the water. As the support beams they descend from (relative to the reservoir) look to be sturdy and stable… what do you suppose they are suspending beneath the surface?”

“As of right now, we haven’t much we can use to guess…” Clary, alongside her companions, stared in silence at the strange structure for a short time, before she shook herself from the aimless pondering and continued down the path before them. “Perhaps we will find information about it as we explore, or, should it come to it, we can delve and inspect it ourselves.”

The walkway expanded out into a larger platform overlooking the lowland settlement, which, like its mechanism-bearing friend, had multiple signs of being timeworn, from the holes in the planks to the large portion of the railing along the side opposite that of the cliff face that was missing entirely. At the far end of it, immediately ahead of the team, was a staircase leading down toward a building and, beside it, another collection of crates.

“As we have already noted (based on their counterparts in the hangar),” began Clary, briefly pulling out the recorder to ensure it was still functioning as expected (and indeed, it was), “these crates open via an intricate seam along the upper face, which would split into two panels. Their outer hinges are rather obvious, but much less obvious is any way to have them open – it does not require the third eye to see that they are sealed.”

“Immediate hypotheses include potential hidden buttons (or other controls) in the ridges and divots, a special tool (such as those curious sticks leaning against the railing), or some combination thereof.” Alongside her sister, Poke gazed longingly at the boxes and, in a sense, whatever secrets they entombed, before forcibly tearing her attention away. “Even so, there are many other mysteries to be uncovered here, so we shall return to this particular one another time.”

“Other mysteries such as this one!” Pye lifted from the top of the highest crate and began examining a (seemingly, at least) broken lantern. It comprised a tall thin bulb of pale green glass, a metal base on its flat lower side, a metal cap and partially wooden handle on its rounded upper side, and two additional handles, also mostly of wood, binding the base and cap together. There was a large hole in a section of the glass, as though it had been shattered long ago; through it, she could see a dark rod running the bulb’s length.

The lightless light was passed around the three of them, each given a turn to visually examine it, before Poke placed her staff against the inner cylinder and ran a quick analysis. “This lantern is evidently electrical, with what appears to be an ability to continue emitting light for a very long time. The efficiency of its power cells is phenomenal!”

“It supplements its stored energy using ambient electricity in the space around it,” continued Clary, looking over the analysis’s readout, “and would likely charge rapidly if exposed to a more concentrated field. Of note: it looks to be specially designed to attempt to use only certain wavelengths and frequencies and ignore all others, likely as a safety consideration. In particular, there is significant overlap between the fields it can charge in and the fields that lifeforms like us can exist in without issue.”

Pye joined them at Poke’s other shoulder. “However, on the topic of safety, it does seem like they had to handle these lanterns very carefully – the filaments within are quite fragile (as evidenced by this one’s lack of functionality), and exposure to any more than droplets and sprays of liquid would immediately short its circuits, requiring extensive time and effort to repair.”

“We ought to keep an eye out for more lanterns like these – though this one has taught us all it can, more of them might grant us proper insights about this species’ culture and lifestyle!”

The other two nodded at Clary’s declaration, and they moved on. At the base of the stairs was a sharp right turn through an open (and notably tall) metal-framed threshold. The structure before them was among the smaller of those dotting the lowland, large enough for one or two rooms of decent size or three or four (maybe five) smaller ones. Even without trying, the three of them could see that parts of its back wall had rotted away, revealing the gray rock of the cliff behind it.

Clary stepped forward and, once again, made the two-tone call, albeit quieted appropriately. And, once again, there came no sound or movement in response. With slower steps, they crossed through the archway – the building revealed itself to be a single room, with (to their right) a table in an alcove beneath a lofted platform with a tattered rug around it and a chair behind it, and (to their left) a much smaller table, with another broken lantern on it and a frame of some kind beside it, and, past them, another threshold leading back outside and further into the settlement.

“Given the heights of these open doorways, this table, and the chair behind it, it seems probable that this species was (or is) significantly taller than Nomai are – additionally, given they have objects we immediately recognize to be chairs, it is also probable that they, like us, are (or were) upright bipeds.”

Poke moved closer toward the table and began circling around it toward the chair. “It’s mostly made of wood, with a metal ‘core’ of sorts, it has a singular, thick leg that looks to be affixed to the floor, and it is semicircular in its shape, matching the curve of the alcove it has been placed (or, perhaps, built?) in. The rug beneath it seems to have a base coloration of a pale green (and some of that paleness may be due to time), with intricate, quarterly radially symmetrical silver, brown, and blue designs upon it, which Clary has begun creating a sketch copy of for later reference. This chair is strikingly redder in coloration than the rest of the wood we’ve seen so far, and I must wonder if there is a deeper reason than pure artistic choice that the carved shapes of the top of its back greatly resemble tree branches. However, more exciting than any of this are the table’s current occupant objects!”

She clambered onto the seat and, standing, looked over the table’s contents – two metal cups (with wooden lips?) upon stems and flat tripod bases, a larger, flat metal dish, and, most interestingly, a triangular board with a small assortment of tall, metal-and-wood playing pieces atop it.

“The board has printed upon it a grid of triangular cells (all equilateral, like the board), alternating between those filled in with dark black ink and those that exist in the negative space between them, with the latter having the greater count. It is separated into three concentric tiers, each smaller one raised slightly higher than the one around it – the outermost one (the board itself) has eight negative cells to a side (or fifteen cells total), the middle tier has five negative cells (and thus nine total), and the highest has only two and three (that is, it has four total cells, only one of which is filled in). Of note: the three corner cells of the board are slightly truncated (which could be merely stylistic, or it could indicate that they aren’t cells, or that they function differently, and any of this could vary depending on the game and…!)” – Poke cut off her spiraling and took a breath – “Clary, have you sketched any of this yet?”

“I’ve already moved on to the pieces!” In the time it had taken Poke to describe the board’s appearance, Clary had skirted around the table, joined Poke in the chair, and created a copy of the grid for the transcript (it was a grid, after all, and quite a straightforward one; there were multiple functionalities within a staff that could rapidly assemble such a thing). “There appear to be eight in total, comprising four triangular ‘rings’ of metal (with the same truncated corners as the board), three unpainted triangularly prismal pieces (again, with truncation) that appear to each have two tree branches(?) emerging from them, and a single largely inked piece (notably in the central cell) with… a symbol that somewhat resembles the one we saw in the hangar, although the smaller circle is merely a line here, and there is an arc on either lateral outer side, each with a small line protruding from it. Of note: this piece, and this piece alone, has a small point emerging from one (and only one) side of its (metal) base, pointing nearly in the direction we are facing, and its truncation is far less prominent than the rest, and its connection to its base is thinner than the that of the other three, and it looks to be cylindrical, and—!”

Poke’s eyes were boring into her. With an amused huff, Clary cut herself off, and both turned back to the board. “It is possible to make all sorts of conjectures about what game this is (as this is almost certainly its purpose), but we know little else about beyond what we can see: we do not know if these are all the pieces for it, or what point in the game we are observing, or the number of players… I would start making these conjectures anyway, but for the sake of the recording…!”

Clary let out a soft chuckle. “Indeed, the recording will remain far more easily reviewable if the both of us refrain from voicing the ideas effervescing in our minds (or, to be specific, refrain from voicing any more of them!). Likewise, it is probably for the best that we do not have any additional recording devices that could be allocated for this purpose!”

The sisters resigned themselves to instead silently wildly hypothesize about the game, or games, that the ship’s inhabitants might have played upon the board, but they were unable to do so for even a minute before Pye, who all the while had been taking more readings and analyses of the old wood in the room, as well as the tattered rug, interrupted.

“Poke, Clary, you two might want to take a look at this…!”

She had ventured toward the tiny table and its frame, and had taken to staring at the latter with marked fixation. Her companions, shaking themselves back into the proper headspace for the tasks at hand, descended from the table and crossed the room to her.

“What have you found, Pye?” Poke asked as they neared. “What is… oh…!”

“Could it be…?!”

Clary knelt closer to what they now saw was a painting in the frame. It depicted the head of a lifeform, one covered in grey and greenish feathers, with only two eyes, both a solid, bright white, a ridge of scales or tougher feathers lined over each eye and meeting in the space between them, and no visible nose or mouth, unless the strange contortion in the feathers beneath the eyes was the latter, or potentially an outer layer over it. Emerging from the creature’s head was a pair of dark, twisting, branching antlers, and it seemed to have some variety of blue and brown cloth wrappings around its lower neck and shoulders.

Reaching out with her staff, Poke initiated another proximity analysis, while Clary summarized the appearance of the artwork and then provided resultant hypothesizing. “It is important to not jump to conclusions (as this, too, is still only one artifact), but it is quite possible that this is a portrait of an inhabitant of this ship! It cannot yet be said whether it is a specific one or a general likeness of them as a whole, nor whether it is of the species that built and/or operated it or some other species that one brought aboard, but the important element is that it is an artistic depiction of a (presumably) motile creature!”

“The pigments used appear to be of similar chemical makeup to those for the welcome board outside, but of significant note is that, unlike the painting of the bridge and curious round building, this one’s style involves extensive use of color blending. Look, for example, at how the figure is not made to completely stand out from the background around them (which I do not believe to be merely a result of colors fading over time, though it is a potentiality that the pigments have lost some vibrance for this reason).”

“Much like the lanterns, we should remain aware of any other paintings like this one for additional information about, or clues toward, the nature of this species or their culture. And, regarding the lanterns…!” Pye reached out toward the lantern on the table and ran the same analysis that Poke had on the one before. “…No, there is little extra information we can gather from this one: it is as broken and nonfunctional as its cousin on the crates. There might be a significance to the fact that they are both broken in a similar way (a single, large hole in the glass, with the filaments within ruined), but I do not believe any hypotheses we might make based on only these two lanterns would be worthwhile to voice.”

With nothing more to do with the wall’s items, they continued down the room and exited, where after a short walkway and following staircase they at last descended from the wooden planks onto soft dirt, moss, and grass on a ridge slightly above the water’s surface. Here, the path forward bifurcated, allowing them a choice between turning to the left and inspecting and/or crossing the bridge over the river or continuing forward and ascending a few steps into a larger building, one with multiple tiers to its roof, the higher ones closer to the cliff beside them and, by proxy, the dark side of the ship.

It took only a moment’s discussion for the team to elect the latter option, on the basis of it being more likely to provide revelations to them sooner than the former would and it having a prominent painted pattern over its (closest) entrance archway.

“Look at these markings!” Poke said as they approached. “There’s an array of white lines fanning out from approximately the position of the lamp over the entrance, framed by two longer ones, and several yellow and red lines and other, ‘blockier’ marks scattered about, particularly directly to either side of and above the entrance. The ones just above it look somewhat like a pair of eyes to me, and there is another eye-like marking (with its own array of radiating lines) in yellow and white above the lamp, framed by more red (of note: this portion greatly resembles the unique sigil we saw on the game piece earlier – could they be related?). The pattern is perfectly symmetrical (ignoring the slight locational imperfections and what we can assume to be peeling due to time). Suppose that it is more than an aesthetic flourish: what might it represent?”

“The design might be a manner of signage, denoting for the ship’s inhabitants what this structure’s purpose is. Perhaps it is an abstraction of a particular entity (physical or conceptual).” Pye took a few more steps toward the building. “Whatever the case, I would be surprised if there were no significance at all to that the white radiating lines all emerge from either the lamp or the eye-like marking above it.”

Clary finished creating an approximation of the design on her staff, and added it to the transcript. “I would be, as well. It is also possible that this design carries a ‘charm’-like effect – some of our records of other cultures (few and old though they are) indicate the existence of traditions involving placing particular objects or, indeed, visual markings such as these near thresholds in order to ward off malevolent forces, unfortunate circumstances, and other varieties of negativity. Hopefully, we will be able to learn more about this pattern (or at least gain more information we can use to make deductions about it, rather than guesses) as we continue exploring!”

Ascending a small set of steps and passing over the threshold, the team found themselves in a mid-sized covered passage – to their left, it led past a wooden support column onto a large portico overlooking the river, and to their right, there was a door with another staircase leading further forward into the building. At that end of the hall was a series of three tall wooden panels connected to each other with hinges, placed on a nearly-square green carpet (as tattered and intricately designed as its circular counterpart), and on the walls were a few additional paintings of the feathered, antlered creatures.

“Most of these are similar in composition to the one we found earlier, depicting a single lifeform’s head and shoulders against a cloud-like or water-like backdrop,” began Poke as the three looked around, approaching one positioned above another semicircular table. “They appear to have significant variation in the way their antlers extend, twist, and branch, with a marked lack of symmetry. Conversely, assuming these are accurate depictions of individuals, they do not appear to have much variation in feather color, eye color, facial markings, or head shapes (none that I am noticing, at least).”

“A few of these paintings, however, are more distinct, and more revealing!” Clary moved toward a longer piece framed on the opposite side of the entrance wall. “This one depicts two of them, one standing behind the other, gazing directly forward (‘at us’, in a sense) with rigid postures. In it, we can see that the wrappings around their shoulders and necks are large shawls, with a variety of potential hues and shades and all sharing the same pattern of darker marks. The rest of their outfits, by contrast, are rather indistinct in coloration, composition, and materials. I will begin drawing a copy of the shawl’s designs.”

Pye joined her. “Their bodies are quite tall, at least in terms of height-to-width ratios, with especially (proportionally) long limbs. Their lower extremities are hidden behind what looks to be brush, but given the shape of the legs, they are likely digitigrade, like us, or perhaps unguligrade. Looking more closely at the two figures, I can see that the smaller one has slightly different proportions (look at how much shorter the antlers are!), which remind of the young forms of many other creatures. Hypothesis: these two individuals are parent and child, guardian and ward, mentor and apprentice, or another cross-generational relation (potentially one that doesn’t exist in Nomai societies).”

“Another painting on this wall depicts a similar scene, with the two individuals standing slightly offset from each other. The taller one appears to have rested a hand over the shoulder of the shorter, and it is a fascinating hand indeed! They have five digits to a hand, all of them clawed, and both of the outermost ones look to be thumbs! I wonder what activities and purposes this arrangement of digits is apt for. Might they have technology on this ship that we (with our three digits per hand and only one thumb in each set, as well as significantly smaller hand size altogether) would struggle to use effectively?”

Clary’s observations and musings were met in kind with more from Poke and Pye, before they promptly moved on. The hallway’s right-side archway led to a small staircase embedded in the upper floor of a larger, two-tiered room, the lower one appearing to be accessible from a door leading out onto the portico they had seen just before. More red (and, as they could now discern, antlered) wooden chairs and tables of both varieties were arranged across both levels, all angled toward a large white board on the left wall. At the center of the edge of the higher level, interrupting the railing and ‘marked’, in a way, with another tattered green carpet (albeit long and rectangular, this time around), was a cylindrical device (of wood, as ever, with some sections painted red or blue) with several openings on its topside and what they could easily guess to be a lens pointing at the pale board. In the center of the lower floor was another raised panel with a large gear in its center, and on the other side of the mezzanine was another open archway, leading out to a balcony.

“This device looks to have room to insert two objects into it,” began Poke as they approached and examined the mechanism. “One of them should be tall and rather cylindrical, fitting directly into the center, and the other would be some sort of thin ring, to fit into this groove around the central structure.”

Pye leaned in to look more closely at the inner walls of the openings. “Take a look at these apertures! They align with the fore-facing lens perfectly, all aimed directly at that conspicuously pale and colorless board at the other end of the room. This is almost certainly some sort of light-based image projector. What do you suppose they used it for?”

“This could be a schoolhouse!” suggested Clary. “Our records of other clans from before the crash indicate that similar devices are often available for children to use in visual presentations when they have yet to attain a solid grasp of building holograms and manipulating projection fluid (though I don’t recall anyone in our clan ever needing them). …Still, considering there are no records of any other cultures ever creating anything close to projection fluid, this variety of projection could remain important to this species even into adulthood. This building could even be a cultural cornerstone for them! Perhaps they regularly gathered here to share stories with the aid of projected images.”

“It would be wise, I think, to attempt to use this device (this action, it must be made clear, is fully sanctioned by protocol unless we find evidence indicating that the species which would grant or deny permission to use it is, in fact, still around to make these decisions). I believe we ought to use it as was likely intended, however, in that we should place a (functional) lantern into the central opening, instead of trying to use a staff flashlight. Unless either of you are interested in taking the time to repair and recharge one of the broken lanterns we’ve found, I will see if I can locate a suitable one (perhaps in that round building across the bridge?), while you two examine the device further and, if possible, locate images to be placed into it.”

Clary and Poke made sounds of affirmation at Pye’s proposal. Swiftly, she left out the door they had entered from and made for the bridge. After another short exchange, Clary departed toward the balcony in pursuit of Pye’s second request of them, having noted what appeared to be staircase just to the right of the archway, leaving Poke alone with the device, her thoughts, and her muttering.

“The projector has some sort of pressure plate in the lantern slot, and its walls have more of those near-microscopic photovoltaic nodes, and given how they’re positioned, it seems likely there’s a special interaction that occurs when one of those lanterns is placed on the plate… meanwhile, the construction in the outer ring seems to indicate it is given to rotating in increments, not freely, which I imagine lines up with whatever… wheels of slides they made for this device. This is something worth testing… I can see hidden compartments around the lower parts of the mechanism that might contain ways to control it, but that pillar is probably the ‘main’ way it was controlled… I may have to wait until my friends return… if only I could manipulate the gear while still looking into the projector, but their controls clearly weren’t built for that, and it’s not like I have any way to—”

Out of the corner of her vision, Poke caught eye of her own staff, and promptly allowed herself a tiny sigh of self-frustration; really, what was the point of remote manipulation functionality if it was going to be left unused?

Poke raised her staff and angled it toward the gear on the panel below. Though its quarry was quite near the edge of its range of potential effect, its telekinetic field successfully caught the mechanism shortly enough, and, cautiously, she rotated it back, and forth, and several times back, and several more times forth, and so on in increasingly less controlled patterns, and indeed, the ring of wood and metal at the bottom of the groove turned along with it, each moving in synchronized increments exactly as she had predicted.

“Telekinetic field, hmm?” said Clary, interrupting Poke’s focus and causing her to whip her head toward the balcony archway, where her sister once again stood, “Couldn’t wait for one of us to return to help out?”

Poke scoffed. “Oh, I’m sure I could have, but it would not have been as efficient.”

“Are you referring to the time saved by not waiting, or the time taken to sufficiently experiment with the gear?”

In reply, Poke gave no verbal answer. However, though Clary could not see it, she knew that behind that mask was a delighted, obnoxious smile.

“Anyway, our presumption was correct: look at these!” Clary gestured to the end of her staff, which she had held aloft; draped along its length were two thin metal rings (notably of a silvery hue, much brighter than the dark metals they had primarily encountered prior), each one bearing a sequence of small, intricately colorful circles. Every single one of their physical traits corresponded perfectly to the ring-shaped slot on the projector.

As Clary returned to the mechanism once more, ensuring that the slide reels were kept relatively stable, a series of familiar footfalls sounded from the mezzanine’s other entrance, accompanied by a bright, pale green-white light. Pye emerged from the hallway carrying an apparently very functional and properly intact lantern. It was not so bright as to be difficult to look at, especially with the filters built into the glass of their masks, but it was nearer to that threshold than any of them might have expected.

“Hello, friends!” she said, a bubbly note shining in her voice. “As you can see, my endeavor was successful! I believe there is much more we might learn from that round building, as it is replete with lanterns and contains several tall colorful paintings, but in the interest of focusing on one task at a time, I returned as soon as I managed to pull my curiosity back here. …That said, while returning, I noticed that the pattern we saw around the archway outside is also on the river-ward face of this building, so our conjecture about it being specific to ‘thresholds’ may not be accurate.”

“Welcome back, friend!” said Clary. “We were successful as well! Poke knows how to operate the projector, and I found a few reels of slides for us to test it with. Regarding the pattern, this is intriguing and useful to know. Perhaps, when we have completed our work with this device, we should examine the other sides of the building for it.”

“You have my agreement! Let us waste no time, then!” Pye approached the projector and placed the lantern into its slot. As it clicked into place, the lights in the room (comprising lamps on the walls and a triplet of bulbs extending down from the ceiling, all of them that same bright white) shut off entirely, leaving only the bright circle from the projector on the white board as a source of illumination in the room, alongside the faint glow from its control panel below. …And the archways leading out of the room. And all the holes in the walls.

“…The extra light does not particularly detract from the apparent desired effect, but I imagine it would be marginally improved without it. Let’s not go shifting around their furniture to try to replicate it, though.” Clary approached the projector, beginning to remove one of the reels from her staff. “The rings I found were in a set order, and this is the first of them. Which of us will take charge of reel rotation?”

“If you’ll stay up here to place the reel and monitor the projector, Clary, Poke and I can head to the lower floor to oversee the gear.”

Hardly waiting for her confirmation, the two of them stowed their staves on their backs, scurried over and down the wall, retrieved their staves, and approached the gear pillar.

“Ready?” called Clary.

Poke opened her mouth to call ‘ready!’ in return, but was cut off by a vocalization of delight from Pye. “Poke, Clary, look at the shape of the projector!”

Clary leaned over the railing and Poke turned around to heed their friend’s suggestion. The main cylindrical body of the projection device, they could now see, extended all the way to the floor, and to either side of its upper slots, framing the now bright lens, was a small, wing-like wooden piece.

“Yes, this is almost certainly what the paint patterns on this building represent!” Poke proclaimed. “It appears that our conjecture that it is signage for purpose was accurate! (Additionally, if the symbol from which the lines radiate and the symbol on the game piece we saw earlier are indeed the same, it seems that the piece represents a projector lens, an entire projector, or potentially a concept relevant to one of these.)”

“The difference between the lack of stylization in the artwork on this settlement’s entrance sign and the heavy stylization in the projector pattern is notable,” said Clary. “We should keep aware of other instances fitting one or the other, or anything in between – what they choose to represent clearly versus abstractly may be important in developing our understanding of their culture. …Right, then: are we now ready?”

Pye and Poke dipped their heads at each other, and then at Clary. ““Ready!”” they returned in unison.

Clary held out the reel, used the lantern light to find the marked slide that she could only assume indicated it was the first, and slotted it into place.

And they all immediately stopped cold.

The slide displayed was likely a label, or some kind of equivalent thereto, considering its depiction of four small uncolored images against a blank background, arranged in a circle, with a connection between the topmost and leftmost ones absent; the first one, the one at the top, seemed to be ‘projecting’ itself into the image’s center, where it was colored in, depicting some sort of ringed planet and its moon. The lower image might have been a lantern of a different design, maybe, and the one to the left was… unclear enough from afar that none of them bothered to register it; whatever it was was (probably) significantly less important than what the image to the right depicted – a particular, familiar symbol.

A very particular and strikingly familiar symbol.

A symbol with a dark, open epicenter surrounded by a ring filled with chaotic linework from which a plethora of rays of greatly varying length spread out in all directions, as though bursting forth, chaotically and unpredictably.

A symbol they had spent their entire lives seeing, studying, venerating, pursuing.

A symbol that was, in some sense, the catalyst for everything that had happened to and within their clan since the first time any of them saw it.

A symbol that was no work of an artist’s mind, but the one and true appearance of a fateful signal that had once emitted from somewhere near the star over which the ringworld rested.

The symbol, the sigil, the signal of it. That. Their ultimate goal, the source of all their greatest questions.

The Eye of the Universe.

With a paradoxical mix of speed and caution, Pye approached the board and met its gaze. She was silent for a great many moments, before, weakly, she managed to speak. “It does seem… stylized a bit differently… the offshoots on the longer rays are curved, fitting the branch motif in their script… but there’s no mistaking it… the Eye of the Universe is part of their story, too…”

“But… how?” said Poke, her entire body rigid and unmoving. “The Eye’s signal… but if they… but if we… But—”

“Perhaps we should see what else this reel reveals?” murmured Clary, her voice pitch raising slightly and her volume lowering in turn, as though being pulled into a trance. “We will find no answers staring at a single slide.”

Immediately, Poke broke from her petrification and turned the gear forward. The next slide showed (a painting of) the system over which they stood, each of its planets arranged around the sun, with the symbol of the Eye, now colored in whites and blues, placed at a distant orbit.

“This image is most certainly not to scale,” declared Pye. “If it were that close to this star system, we’d have seen it, and all of our locators would have detected it.”

The following slides displayed the Eye broadcasting its signal, slowly blanketing its solar system, and then expanding out to reach a neighboring one, one with a redder sun. The signal passed over a green-blue moon in orbit around a large, ringed planet, both the rings and its thick atmosphere colored in shades of blue, green, and yellow.

“Did they… were they this close to the Eye, unknowingly, until it sent out its signal?” muttered Poke.

As if to confirm her pondering, the next slides showed one of the feathered, antlered creatures standing on a grassy, arboreal riverbank on the moon, next to a device that looked rather like a stationary telescope. The signal passed over the scope, igniting a pale green flame upon it, and the individual leaned in toward it. A beam passed from the closer end of the lens channel into the fire, from the fire into a secondary lens channel (so they guessed), and from that channel into the figure’s eyes.

“Of note: unlike their visages in the hanging paintings, this one’s eyes are not white,” said Pye. “Hypothesis: this species’ eyes have tapeta lucida (a retroreflective layer in some eyes that aids vision in low light conditions).”

A sequence then followed with a closeup of the individual’s face, green beams of light from the device passing across their eyes and an image of the Eye’s signal appearing above them amidst a dark, starry backdrop. After it and the light faded, the figure opened their mouth in what the three Nomai could only assume to be the same shock, surprise, and wonder that their clan’s ancestors had had when they first encountered it.

“Do you suppose that there is any abstraction or visual metaphor in this (besides the clear contraction of space, and potentially time as well)?” Clary wondered aloud. “If not, I would be interested in examining this apparent vision technology of theirs.”

“I would be, as well… later. Poke, please continue.”

At Pye’s behest, the reel proceeded, showing the individual, energized with wonder, summoning others of their kind to the device to observe their discovery for themselves. A collection of their hands reached up and out to the distant sky, grasping at the Eye’s signal and the star it orbited.

And then, the next slide was a nothing but a few charred remains around a massive, burnt hole.

“Wha—? Did they…? did someone…?” Poke continued to struggle to find her words. “I would think it extraordinarily unlikely that this was accidental. …Are all the remaining slides on the reel like this?”

She twisted the gear several times in quick succession, receiving only burnt slide after burnt slide after burnt slide. A few of the later ones had the uppermost portions intact, where they could see the ringworld being built in the sky in front of the ringed planet, but the rest were indecipherable.

“And this is even less likely to be anything but careful and deliberate,” said Pye, a slight growl entering her voice. “There is something that they (or, potentially other visitors before us) wished to hide here, without hiding when and where the ship was built.”

To her relief, Poke finally reached another slide that was fully intact. It and those following displayed the ringworld, fully constructed, deploying five massive green structures from the spokes on its sunward side, revealed those structures to be solar sails as the ringworld traversed the void between the two star systems (“Ah, so that’s what those are for, and that’s their method of travel…!”), and concluded with its arrival at the Eye of the Universe.

The next slide Poke brought them to was the first one, the labelling circle, once more.

“So…” began Pye, her tone audibly being forcibly kept level, “to start: we know that the creatures depicted in the paintings are the sapient architects and inhabitants of this ship (provided this reel depicts history and not, for instance, mythology or mere fiction). More importantly, however,” – that faint growl returned – “is that while this is quite a way to start a story, it is evidently not all of it. What did they burn away, and why?”

“I… I have a hypothesis,” ventured Clary, tentatively, “and we might be able to all but confirm it now… Poke, would you mind alternating the slides between the sequence where the signal arrives at their moon and the sequence where their ringworld departs from it?”

Poke obliged. To the arrival they went, and then back to the departure, and then the arrival again, and then the departure again, and then—

“I… I think I’m seeing what you’re seeing, Clary,” she said.

“The moon is colored lush and verdant when they receive the signal, and a rather un-lush grey when they leave to find it… This masterwork that we currently stand in came at a horrible toll, didn’t it? One that they recorded at first, and then… tried to hide?”

“…Well, they did a right shoddy job of that!” shouted Pye after a brief moment of silence, her voice echoing faintly through the room. “Because here we are, here we figured it out!”

“Perhaps… perhaps they did not expect to have their ship invaded by a species with both an entire ocular organ specially attuned for discerning small details and a brain that defaults to curiosity as a response to almost any new stimuli…”

“Even if that is so, Poke, they still evidently anticipated that individuals unaware of their history might eventually find it, and tried (and failed) to hide away the… objectionable parts… Considering our Ash Twin Project, I cannot fault them entirely for destructive terraforming in the name of a grand work in pursuit of the Eye (though there might be philosophical discussions to be had regarding extent, necessity, and emotional connection), but their choice to obscure it is… puzzling. Clary, is the other reel you found the second one in this (presumably) four-part sequence? Perhaps it will illuminate us to their thought processes…”

Clary removed the ring from its slot and began switching it out with the other one on her staff, peering at its initial slide in the dimmed light near her. “I believe it is, yes!”

Upon insertion, that same unfinished ring appeared on the board, now with the rightward icon – the Eye of the Universe – ‘projecting’ itself into the center.

With no one making any comments about the slide, Pye and Clary waited expectantly for the reel to be turned. When no such event followed, they both turned their gazes toward Poke, whose free hand rested with tension and tentativity over the gear.

“Poke…” said her sister, her voice slightly contorted in concern. “Is something the matter?”

There was another delay before, at last, Poke responded, an air of anticipation all too audibly beginning to rise in her tone. “The previous reel shows them reaching the Eye successfully… It’s unlikely they entered it, given its location in this story, but… suppose that, after all this time, all this effort, all this thought, that our clan has put into finding the Eye and discovering what it is and what it’s capable of… suppose that this just… gives us the answers?”

Clary made a slight grimace. “That would not be the most… gratifying outcome, to be sure. Though, I would still think there to be a lot more that we could learn from and about it than whatever’s recorded on this reel.”

“Alternatively, they may well have burnt all the knowledge they gained from it! Because of… reasons!”

“Let us hope that is not the case either, Pye.”

With no responses to any of theirs, Poke, grip firm and fast, flicked the gear. The first few slides depicted an inhabitant dressed in red garb approaching a window somewhere on the ringworld, where two more, one in red and one in blue, waited, gazing out at the Eye of the Universe.

“These slides must involve visual abstraction,” said Pye. “I refuse to believe that the Eye looks identical to its signal.”

The leading individual carried with them a wooden staff (one short enough that some scholars might have argued it a wand) with what looked to be a small lens and a few wing-like flares on its upper end. They held it up, and an array of triangular beams of green light emerged from it and scanned the Eye (earning another round of comments from the team about visual abstraction and technological capability).

The angle then shifted to a closeup on the scanning individual’s face. Beams from the staff, and a flame held within it, entered their eyes, delivering a scene of one of their kind standing upon a featureless glassy plane and reaching toward the Eye. The Eye turned red and shined a blinding white, and emitted a crimson wave of light across its star system, the astral bodies within turning to dust, and, shortly thereafter, the clothing and flesh of the inhabitant undergoing the same, leaving only their collapsing skeleton. The vision ended with their skull, and the dust beneath it, slowly becoming overgrown, consumed even, by verdure.

The Nomai made no sound, no action, no response at all – they could do naught but see the reel through to its end. The scanning one, mouth wide in shock and whites of the eyes painfully visible, dropped their staff and collapsed to their knees. The other two neared to assist, and all three donned expressions of fury, eyes gleaming. A large collective of them approached what seemed to have been a temple or shrine to the Eye; a few of the throng stepped forward and, with devices on their backs capable of projecting handheld gouts of flame and the rest looking on with raised hands and fists, thoroughly incinerated the structure.

The next slides, once again, had large holes burned in their centers. What remained seemed to show a few inhabitants building, overseeing, or otherwise doing something in a hangar, with one slide in particular having only the object in question burnt out, followed by something happening between the ringworld and, presumably, the Eye, until the eventual departure of the former. After a series of slides so thoroughly destroyed that not one of the Nomai could discern anything upon them aside from what were potentially a few light blue painted lines near the edges, the last few, intact, showed the ship approaching the system’s sun and engaging its cloaking field.

As the pale light from the projector and the symbols of the Eye glared at them, the team stood in pause, still and silent, for seconds, moments, perhaps even minutes on end.

And then…

“…Well!” began Pye, slowly, still struggling to keep her tone level. “This reel was… informative! It seems that, back in their time, Ash Twin might have had water (somehow), and Fragmented Ocean had not yet been sundered by that wretched plant.”

No responses. Poke stood frozen (again) at the control panel, and Clary seemed to nearly be trembling as she gazed over the railing above.

Hmm… a different approach, then. “What do you suppose they did to the Eye? I imagine it is related to why the signal our clan’s Vessel received was so brief.”

Again, neither of them replied.

“…Might this ship hold the keys we need to find the Eye? If something they did affected how it broadcasts its signal, perhaps we can do something here to reverse it!”

Nothing. Pye waited. And waited. They remained still, wreathed in silence. Horrible, clamorous silence that only raised in volume. It had soon grown loud enough that she felt as though it was ringing in her ears, dancing in her vision, spreading across her entire body, pulling at her fur and holding it nearer and nearer to a flame – a green flame, perhaps, one of the absurd number of inscrutable, vision-granting flames so wielded and honored by these… these…!

Pye threw the lock-spheres in her mask out of position and ripped her helmet off her head, letting it fall to the ground where she had likewise dropped her staff. The smells of old wood, muddy river shores, air neither fresh nor stale, and all manners of rot flooded her nostrils, but she hardly took notice of any of them as she turned to stare down her companions. In her flurry of movement, several locks of hair on her scalp had the audacity to fall into her face, as if her sight weren’t already clouded enough by her friends’ continued silence.

“I am not the only Nomai on this expedition!” she bellowed, tearing the errant white wisps back as the rest of her mane began to flare out. “I’m not the only one capable of dictation and analysis and extrapolating about what. happened. here! Someone say something!!”

It was not immediate; Pye had to look back and forth between the sisters several times, entire upper body leaning forward and arms splayed out in stress, but eventually, eventually…

“Is this… is this really what we’ve been seeking this whole time…?” Poke could barely manage to force words out of her throat. “Were the… the hushed concerns correct all along? Could the Eye truly be… malevolent?”

Clary’s free hand tightened around the railing. “What… do we do with this knowledge? Must we completely divert course? Abandon what brought our clan here in the first place? How would the others react upon learning this? It could… it could bring more ruin to us than any crash or… red haze could ever manage. How can we—”

“No.”

Poke and Clary turned their gazes, heads unmoving, toward Pye. ““What do you m—?””

“I mean, No.” She took several steps forward. “No, No, and No. Why, in the name of everything we do and everything we are, would you two just take what these antlered inhabitants have presented at face value? A few paintings depict one of them using some magical all-divining scanning machine on the Eye and seeing it somehow turn multiple planets and moons and an entire star into dust, but leave their bones intact, and you all just… accept that as an undeniable truth?! These very reels, so methodically, deliberately burned, prove they are inclined to hide the truth! To twist and warp and change and discombobulate a story to fit some… some ulterior design! And the Eye is so anomalous that its very existence challenges assumptions we thought certain! We have no reason to use these reels, the contorted reports of a species we know precious little about, for any conclusions about true, actual nature of the Eye of the Universe!!”

Pye marched toward the wall, scaled it with enough verve that Clary instinctually leapt back, and tore the slide reel from the projector. “I defy the picture that has been painted, I defy that there is nothing further to be found to the Eye’s story, and I defy you both to defy me!”

With enough force that Clary could feel the resulting displacement of air, Pye flung the metal ring across the room. It careened off the projector’s board and clattered to the ground. In any other circumstance, any other at all, this would have engendered in her multiple complaints about breaking protocol and, more importantly, valuable informative artifacts; in this one, however… well, to call her distracted was rather an understatement…

“We have seen only two of their accounts,” Pye continued, the dark red in her eyes seeming to almost alight with fury. “Suppose further ones show this all to be some… grand hypothesis, or that they learned more and changed their minds, or that all of this is a fabrication!”

Poke crossed the lower floor to retrieve the reel and Pye’s hastily castoff equipment. When next she spoke, it was with a voice significantly less weakened. “…I must remind you, friend, that it is not wise to operate under the assumption – the hope – that our best-case scenario is correct and these records are irrelevant to our ultimate mission” – she raised a hand as Pye opened her mouth to protest – “but… you do make a reasonable point: it is also unwise to immediately interpret these records under the worst possible light.”

Gradually, a slight smile crept onto Clary’s face. “It would also not be very… Nomai-like of us, to do so. …You are correct, Pye, and you have my gratitude for your guidance. We should obtain as complete an apprehension as we can of what these reels are trying to tell us (and what they are trying to not tell us) before we settle upon any conclusions. Our course forward is to press forward in search of more answers!”

Pye’s expression curled into a grin – or, rather, an attempt at one: Clary and Poke could see that while she had tensed the muscles around her eyes appropriately, her eyes themselves still maintained an incensed glint, and her mane had yet to settle. Likewise, when she spoke, the cheer in her tone remained audibly affected. “That’s better! I am certain that, if we persevere, we will be able to uncover whatever secrets of the Eye this ship’s architects mean to keep from us – from everyone. Clary, were those two reels the only ones you found?”

“Of the many slots for storing reels on the floor above, only three were occupied, and the third is located in a shelf behind another shelf, so I did not try to access it. However…” – Clary raised a digit as Pye immediately attempted to leap into action – “there was something else I noticed while up there that I believe might be worthy of inspection, before we view another reel.”

“I see! Let us make haste!”

Poke climbed back up to the mezzanine and returned Pye’s staff while Clary set the two reels (the second of which seemed to have sustained no injury from Pye’s outburst) on a table in the back of the room. Poke turned to retrieve the doffed helmet, but Pye had already rushed onto the balcony and up the staircase. Briefly exchanging glances, the sisters hurried after her.

The floor above was the building’s apparent reel storage room, each wall and much of the space between lined with shelves with clearly marked slots for metal rings. As Clary had noted, they were all empty, save for one that hung from a shelf that was indeed entirely inaccessible to them behind another. This conundrum, however, seemed even more suited to be saved for later as they sighted Pye, having already reached the end of the shelves in what most would likely assume to be a dead end, inspecting the oddity that Clary had found her first time there.

“Am I to take it that you see it?”

“Are you referring, perchance, to the secret door in this conspicuously shelf-less patch of the wall, which would absolutely be undetectable to most unaided, and that we can only see via the third eye?”

“Indeed I am, Pye.”

“More secrecy, then…” mused Poke, stepping toward the region in question and peering as closely as she could at the nearly imperceptible seams. “The flushness between the door(s) and the surrounding wall is remarkably close to perfection, and I can’t see any ways it might be opened from this side! Either they have some sort of art tradition or movement related to the hidden and the obscured, or they really did not want whatever lies beyond this door to be easily accessed or viewed.”

“And we all know which of those two hypotheses is more likely. Poke, Clary, please take a few steps back.”

“Pye, what are you—?”

“I appreciate your conjecture, Poke, but I fear that it will be opened from this side.”

Pye typed a long sequence of keystrokes on her staff, and then directed its telekinetic field toward the door.

“Pye!” Clary yelled as her sister gently pulled her away. “We’re not supposed to—”

“Clary. I understand that, in general, it is important to follow protocol. And I understand that this is not a particularly… preservation-minded approach in any case. However, our pursuit of the Eye could depend on determining the truth of the relationship between it and this ever-so-secretive species, and I must prioritize that. At no point did we let the full might of our ideals stop us from seeing the Ash Twin Project through in our search for the Eye – I will not let them halt us now.”

“But that doesn’t mean that you have to—”

Her protest was interrupted by the sound of metal ripping apart. The doors flew inward, shattering their hinges and tumbling down the lightless wooden staircase that now revealed itself behind them.

“Hah… I do hope we have no further necessity of that!” Pye brushed her hand several times across a few segments of her suit’s sleeves, though there was no dust or debris to be removed, and the forced satisfaction and delight in her voice was all too apparent. “I do not think my staff would be able to handle another overload, and I’d hate to ask either of you to do the same.”

Without waiting for even a hint of a response from either of them, she ignited her flashlight and stepped into the once-hidden hallway. Poke moved to follow, but Clary grabbed hold of her free hand.

“Poke, I’m really worried about Pye. Ever since the Sun Station failed, her behavior and demeanor, especially when around only us and also especially over the course of this investigation, have become… erratic…! Her words of encouragement downstairs were much appreciated, potentially even necessary for the two of us to hear, but even so…! Her eyes betray the true emotions that fuel her fervor, and… and without her helmet on, she could have become grievously injured in doing what she just did, never mind the fact that she shouldn’t have—”

“I have seen what you have, Clary, but… I think, for now, it is not something we need to be too concerned about, unless she does anything more reckless than… this. She evidently is focused on maintaining all scrutiny of the story this species seems to mean to present to us, something that we (momentary as it was) failed to do. For all the emotion and passion that this turn of events has brought out in her, I still trust her to remain reasonable in this expedition.”

Clary stared at her sister with a slight but firm tilt to the head. “…Are you certain that this position you have taken is not at all born from your own disappointment at the Ash Twin Project’s failure?”

This question was met first by a long, long bout of silence, the two of them firmly, ceaselessly, nearly unblinkingly maintaining each other’s gazes, before Poke turned away.

“…No, Clary. No I am not.”

And with no further words, they plunged into the tunnel in pursuit of Pye.