"The... The trail goes that way. Shouldn't we, you know, follow it?"
"I'd prefer to get a feel for the whole chamber first. There may be more than one exit, or other interesting things concealed here. The room can't be that big."
Skivven keeps an eye on the sand for anything poking out that looks interesting, and also looks for more carvings on the walls.
What does everyone else think? Trail or aWall?
I say we stick to the trail for now
The trail takes you across the expanse of the underground desert. As you begin to reach the middle of the room, even Skivven's darkvision is having trouble keeping the edges of the room in focus. Now that you can focus on it without worrying about being killed, you notice the air has a stale smell, like from a room that has been locked too long. The landscape seems mimic some far off environment, but there is no light or wind or water to sustain it. Occasionally, you find the remains of a long dead animal, the corpses are decayed beyond identification. Following in the footsteps of the previous expedition, you reach the rocky expanse in the center and follow the path along the edge of the rock. You reach the other side of the chamber where your lead turns right along the wall of the far tunnel. Finally, you see light coming from ahead.
The path ends at stone wall. It appears to be glowing, casting light along the interior tunnel walls.
"Well, if the path leads here..."
Skivven ponders a moment, running his hands through his whiskers in thought.
"If it leads here there must be some kind of door. Right?"
Skivven examines the wall before him.
Skivven reaches a paw out and it passes through the rock as of it wasn't there at all. It appears to simply be an illusion.
Seeing that Skivven was able to pass through, Harrash slowly sticks his head through and looks around.
Harrash sees an empty chamber. Like one of the previous rooms, the walls are covered with various nozzles and tubes. Unlike the other areas where there was very little light at best, these areas are fully illuminated by bright ceiling lights. A strange humming is coming from the walls.
There is also a doorway on the other side of the room. The walls are covered in scorch marks.
"There's an empty chamber here," Harrash tells the group. "It's well-lit, and I hear a hum. Let's see what this is."
The chamber with the nozzles and hoses resembles one of the areas you had explored earlier, but that one was in much better condition. Unlike the pristine conditions there, this room is heavily damage. Hoses are torn, nozzles are broken, frayed and snapped wires poke out in many holes in the walls. The surface is covered in burn marks and soot. You can tell that the burn marks aren't caused by fire. It looks like some kind of electrical discharge did the damage. The hum is coming from the walls.
The hum increases in intensity as you examine it.
"The entire room is disheveled, and there seems to be some kind of damage caused by electricity on the walls."
Harrash examines the walls from which he hears a hum.
Aside from the emptyness of the room, Harrash doesn't notice anything else unusual.
The hummimg continies to get louder.
"I wonder what that humming is?" Skivven enters the room and pokes his nose around, giving things the once-over.
Skivven's sensitive ears also pick up the humming. Like an approaching swarm, it continues to increase in intensiy, but it's too uniform in pitch to be a group of creatures. Noticing the damaged wires and electrical burns all over the room, he comes to the conclusion that the humming is a building power surge. Anyone in the room when that happens will not be happy.
Arrenopos pokes his head bemusedly through the illusion to catch a glimpse of what is going on inside.
"What have you found? Have you checked that other door yet?"
"Do you... Do you think we can, um, stop the humming somehow. It... It would be nice if, well, if the place doesn't explode while we explore it." Trem tries to get closer to the fake wall, but with such a narrow passage and the size of the group, he remains in the back.
"Yikes! Power surge coming! I think we better get out of here before it goes! In fact, step aside, coming through..."
Skivven runs back out into the corridor, as far as he thinks is necessary to get out of the blast area.
"Let's see what happens when it goes off and then worry about how to disarm it. We might not have enough time!"
"Even if it recharges afterwards, we will have more time then to disable the circuit."
Harrash runs backwards after Skivven. "Do you think we triggered it?"
You don't think that the power surge is a result of your actions. It is most likely just caused by all of the damage to the room.
After you all clear out, you hear the sounds of a dozen bolts of lightning shooting through the chamber. Fortunately, none of them arc through the holographic wall into the tunnel.
"It appears to be random, I think we should hastily check that other door now before it builds up again."
Yes.
"The... The surge is done. Let's go, um, let's go inspect the damage." Trem walks into the room and inspects the room to see if he can stop the surges or at least make them less frequent.
Trem doesn't know how to go about stopping the power surges.
As he is observing the circuitry, the humming begins to build up again, quickly.
"It just keeps exploding, again and again," Harrash points out, trying to find out how to stop it before it blows up again.
Harrash is also unable to identify a way to stop the constant power surges.
"Is there another exit? Perhaps we can just run through the chamber quickly after the next discharge?"
"Let's time the surges and see if they are regular. If they are, we can time going through. We will need to first see if we can open the other door quickly."
After watching the discharges for a while, you realize that they are semi-regular. They shortest time frame between discharges is about 10 seconds while the longest time span is about 40 seconds. By listening to how fast the humming in the walls builds up, you can tell how long it will be between discharges. If you go one at a time, it should be long enough for you to get through the door at the far side.
"I don't like these mechanical things. Always unreliable," Harrash complains. "Let's get through quickly before it explodes for good."
Harrash dashes to the other side of the room as soon as he hears a discharge.
"I... I can't... There is too much damage, I can't make sense of it." Hearing the humming building up again, Trem hurry back out of the room. Once they start putting up a plan to get across the room, Trem looks around. "So, um, who goes first."
You cannot tell how long the discharges have been going on for.
"There might be something hostile on the other side. Whoever goes through first should be tough enough to handle themselves if they are attacked."
"That's probably not me."
Harrash and Arrenopos charge towards the far door after the electrical energy clears the room. They find that the door is locked, but it has one of those slots that would fit the brown striped cards.
Harrash shouts across the room, "Skivven, are you holding the card we found? I think we might need it."
Valeria will take the card from Skivven and wait for the other two to clear the room before heading in. Waiting until after the last burst of elecrticity goes off she pulls her pistol and dashes across the room.
Once in front of the doors she inserts the brown card into the slot by the door and waits impatiently for it to slide open. As it opens she will dive into the room and come up in a defensive crouch, pistol at the ready. Unfortunately in her eagerness to avoid being electrocuted she stumbles across the threshold and her graceful tuck and roll becomes more a a faceplant than anything else.
"Okay... here I come!"
Right after one of the discharges Skivven runs across the room as fast as his little legs can carry him.
The air in this room seems to buzz and hum with energy. Strips of glowing rectangles light the room from above, while strange flickering windows line the east and west walls. A large glasstopped circular table sits in the middle of the room. To the north sits a large metal desk covered with blinking lights, while a humming pillar of purple-and-black metal stands nearby, its sides flashing with tendrils of violet energy. A single golden panel flashes with a soft but incessant light on the side of this pillar. A thick layer of dust coats everything, diffusing the lights shining from the various surfaces, and many of the machines seem to be damaged, cracked, or otherwise ruined.
"Whoo... what happened in here? I wouldn't go near that black pillar."
Skivven looks around at the equipment in the room, trying to figure out what things do.
"Whatever happened in this room, it can't have been good. Hey!"
Skivven looks over at the strange pillar.
"This violet light... isn't that the same color as the Torch used to be? Before it went out? I wonder if this is the bottom part? Are we underneath where the Torch comes out of the ground?"
Skivven looks around the room, trying to gauge how far they have come from where they started, and where the Torch would be if it was on this level instead of above.
"That's interesting. Maybe whatever disaster happened in this room is what caused the flame to go out," Harrash proposes. "Does anyone know how to put it back together?"
The equipment seems to be technological masterpieces called computers. Thr creations are unheard of outside of Starfall, the base of operations of the Technic League. You would be approximately under the former location of Torch's torch.
Harrash does not know how to fix the computer, but Skivven notices that several of the panels can be pressed into the machine. He thinks that the big flashing golden one is safe to hit.
Okay. When I posted your entrance into this room, I had done it from memory. There is actually a hallway that takes you from the shock room to the computer room. The only way out of the computer room is back through the way you came in, but there are two other doorways out of the hallway. The map has been updated if you want to look.
"Ah! I have head of these! They are called- 'compuders.' They have them in Starfall."
"You're supposed to push these things to make it work. It looks like we're supposed to push this one..."
Skivven presses the flashing golden panel. Then he looks up and around, not sure what to expect.
Arrenopos cringes slightly as Skivven begins to just push buttons.
The machines in the room begin to whir and hum. Buzzes and clicks emit from the walls around you. The circular table in the room shines to life and a faint, transparent image of a circular desert complete with a rock formation right in the center of the terrain appears on the flat surface. The desert looks familiar and small line of disturbed sand shows that it is indeed a picture of the desert just outside. You see that there is another set of caves on the side that you had not explored.
"Hey, this looks like a map of this place," Harrash points out. "That's the desert we were just in a little while ago. But I don't remember those caves," he says, pointing to the image on the side.