Secondary Story - Chapter 2 (Patreon)

The heavy beat of the girl’s heart is an overpowering, almost nauseating sensation that sends out wave after wave of rushing blood beneath her clammy, cold skin. The hair on her arms and neck rise, sticking up into the air as the heavy metal thuds ring out one after the other in the vague distance; like dull strikes of an old hammer they give credence to the presence of some other entity inhabiting this floor of the ruins. Each ring thunders out and echoes through the hall. Each step of the machine causes her to flinch just a little more, to squeeze the crystal just a little tighter and to cower down just a little lower behind the rubble.

The winding of its gears back into place to prepare for each consecutive step hisses out ominously, as forbearance of the potential danger lurking in the darkness. The bot wasn’t far away, however even if she couldn’t tell where exactly it was, she could tell it was close enough to be a threat. The next room, maybe a hallway down from that. It wasn’t far. She wasn’t breathing again, but now on purpose. Fear courses through her, fear of being heard. Of being seen. Could she run back to the entrance fast enough if it had heard her? Even being this close to it, she wasn’t sure if she would make it in time before it caught up if it went at full speed.

They were fast, usually.

As she sits there listening, waiting, shaking, Pen’s panicked thoughts focus solely on the idea of escape now. She had one whole shard, that was enough. Wasn’t it? She could just go. If she waited a minute she could just leave. Sure, there might be more to find but…

The ringing steps continue on together with the hiss of the coils, with the whisper of piping steam escaping some gap somewhere from some slit in the creature. All of them grow quieter together. Step after step the sound fades away until it is gone entirely again and the girl hears nothing else but the reassuring hum of the crystal as before. A gentle, tempting voice.

Slowly she lets out her breath and looks back down the way she had just come from again. Towards the exit, escape, safety. She could go back up to the town right now. Back to the life she was trying to leave.

Back to that place. Back to those people.

Pen grits her teeth and looks towards the darkness looming before her like a curtain waiting to be drawn. Wasn’t it better? She would die if she went back. Not right away, not like she would down here; but she wouldn’t live like that anymore. She couldn’t. No. This was everything she had left, this opportunity was it. Everything or nothing. She had to get those shards now or she never would. She had to fight to get out of her old life now, or she never would. Just like the rest of them. She never would. She’d become like them.

The crystal hums against her body, continuing to radiate the same reassuring warmth, keeping on with its seductive promise of more. The dull droning sensation is calming in a way, it numbs the edge of her thoughts and grounds them back into that determined state of mind, removing all fear like the nighttime lullaby of a doting mother. It grounds her thoughts back into that goal oriented existence, removing those constant touches of fear and anxiety. It was now or never. It was do or die.

She gulps and gets up tenderly from the cold stone floor and begins creeping forward in an odd mixture of shuffles and timid tip-toed steps over the sharp rocks and crumbling debris. Breathing is a sort of a painful act, the air which is thick with particulate had already formed a black crust in her nose that was making it hard to breathe through. She ignores it, her hands never leaving the crystal shard. Opting instead to inhale through her mouth she can feel the deep ache as the cold air pulls against her temperature sensitive teeth. She can taste the old, ancient particulate on her tongue, bits of dust and residue of an age forgotten scratch her throat as it goes to her lungs.

Just one or two more.

She steps forward, proceeding down the hallway towards the next room, listening with every step for the sounds of the bot she had heard before. She didn’t know what kind it was, but it sounded like it had four legs and was slow. Just a patrolling unit probably. Just an average F-class. Maybe a D since this was a deep level, but probably nothing worse than that. Yeah. Yeah. The thought made her feel just a tiny bit better, but not much better honestly. Even an F-class could kill her. She was slow. She was sickly. The medicine was expensive, but it was the only thing keeping her standing on her bruised legs and body.

She had to get more. She had to get enough so that she could leave the town, so that she could go to the city like she had always dreamed of.

Pen exhales, walking forward through the cloud of vapor that had escaped her lungs and enters the next chamber, looking around warily.

The room is… it is massive. It’s not a room, it’s a shaft. A round, vertical tunnel. Standing in the doorway she looks ahead and down at the cylindrical opening before her that makes up the hollow room she can barely see across due to its width and her own bad eyes. The stone floor turns to metal here. Into net-meshed metal bridges that dig into the stone walls that rise around the outside of the cylinder up and down in a spiral with degraded sections crisscrossing through the middle, some of which had long since fallen down into the abyss below.

Looking down Pen stares into the darkness that seems to stretch on forever from up here, scanning the bottom of the pit for signs of  something. Anything. But instead all she sees is nothing. Stone walls lined with metal cat-walks and flat faded lights that run in rings around the interior are the only thing here. Her eyes find nothing but that. Even with the many ancient lights placed around the cylindrical shaft that still burn brightly to this day, her sight can’t pierce through to the bottom. What was this place? What did the first-people do with such things she wondered as she stares down into the pit.

Why did they make so much stuff out of metal?