Call of the Void
Ruin #44A, Planet Venator-423c 29 Varia, CY 802
"Konnic, you're breaking - kzzt - can you hear me? I'm getting static."
Nari sighed and tapped her earpiece. "Sorta. I think I'm losing signal a bit here."
"Come back maybe?"
"Nah," she frowned. "My holo is showing loads of voidsign down this hall. I think it's worthwhile."
"Okay, I trust - kzzt - your judgement," the voice crackled over the comms. "Amaki's keeping an eye on the - kzzt - just get back safe."
"Will do," Nari replied with a quick nod. The audio on that last message had been pretty bad, but she'd done this enough times that she knew what he was saying.
With that, she stepped into the hallway. Precursor ruins were usually dark, and it didn't help things being this far underground. Some scientists thought the Precursors used echolocation to see, hence the smooth surfaces and lack of lighting. Nobody had managed to track down a body of one, though, so who knew for certain.
She glanced at her holo, the biolights on her arm emitting a faint magenta glow in the darkness. A screen materialized above her palm, showing a radar-like display; near the top, a few bright dots stood out against the darkness. She'd rarely seen void signatures this large, and seeing multiple of them was practically unheard of.
She suspected her equipment was just faulty. But there was a chance it wasn't, and she didn't want to risk missing out on that chance.
The nerian slowly crept further down the hallway, carefully scanning for any danger. Precursor ruins could fall subject to all sorts of hazards; aggressive fauna, extreme plant growth, open pits, and no end of dangerous technology. The ruin here on Venator-423c - or just Venator, as she'd taken to calling it in her head - seemed pretty safe thus far, but there could always be a faulty security system or sudden drop somewhere, and she'd always preferred the idea of not dying on the job.
After a few minutes, she came across a plain cylindrical bin in the middle of the hallway, which seemed to be the closest of the void signatures. Glancing inside, the light from her face revealed a myriad of large dark crystals, their black surfaces shimmering with flecks of all colors of the rainbow but unable to settle on just one.
Void crystals. That's what she was really here for. They were extremely important for interstellar manufacturing and commerce, with seemingly physically impossible properties that allowed for technologies that'd previously been solidly in the realm of sci-fi. Nobody since the Precursors had figured out how to actually make them, though, so it was up to Ruiners like her to salvage them from the bones of the Precursors' civilization and bring them back home.
And Vis's blue, this was a big haul of them. No wonder the signal was so strong; there were at least half a dozen crystals in here, and they were chunkier bastards than usual.
Stopping in place, Nari took off her backpack, kneeled down, and set it on the floor. One by one, she grabbed the crystals and loaded them into the backpack; they were heavy enough that they needed at least two hands for each, and she honestly didn't really want to risk using one of her thumbless wing-hands and dropping the damn things. She'd made that mistake before.
Typ liralens win again.
Eventually, she got all of the crystals loaded up. Turned out to be eight; an exceptionally good haul, all things considered. She zipped up the backpack and heaved it back up onto her back - this time, using all four arms for leverage because shit that thing was heavy - and just as she was about to get off the ground, she noticed a pale light and a faint hum in the distance, matching up with another void signature on her holo.
Huh.
Rationally, at this point she should've turned back and come here again later. She already had a full haul, and if there were more void crystals down there, surely she wouldn't have room to carry them back to the ship, much less the musculature. Hell, she had hollow bones; at this point she was already scared of snapping like a twig.
But her curiosity got the best of her. She inched toward the sound - inched toward the light. Precursors didn't have lights. What the hell was this?
Evidently her carefulness had melted away in the moment. The ground sloped downward; her foot hit open air and she began tumbling down, dropping void crystals everywhere and leaving her prone on the floor at the bottom. One of the crystals fell on her face just to insult her.
She winced. That's gonna leave a bruise.
Once she'd worked up the strength to pull herself off the floor, she glanced up at the room in front of her. Like most Precursor architecture, it was smooth and cylindrical, made of carefully carved silicates and sleek metal roofing. Unlike most Precursor architecture, the void conduit on the floor snaked up to some circular ring on a dais, and inside that ring was the image of another Precursor ruin, overgrown with crimson flora and gently lit with pale green sunbeams.
Nari didn't even realize the words had left her mouth as she spoke: "Is that a portal?"
Cautiously, she picked herself back up onto her feet, and grabbed her backpack with a busted zipper and what remained of her void crystal supply. At the very least, it was a lot lighter; once she strapped it on, she slowly approached the central object, her jaw going agape as the perspective shifted within the image, like she was actually moving toward the scene within the ring.
Tentatively, she held a hand out to the image. It went right through.
Holy shit.
Nari had promised Vakko she'd be quick, and she still intended to get back up and out of here with the good news that she'd found lots of void crystals, and the bad news that half of them had shattered onto the floor down here. Still, she knew somewhere in her heart that if she didn't at least take a quick look through the other side of this...uh, this portal, that she'd regret it forever.
Fuck it.
She glanced around at her surroundings, took a deep breath, and stepped through.
The first thing she noticed was the gravity.
Venator was a fairly small planet with somewhat light gravity. Not quite Lirune, but it was noticeably lighter than galactic standard, enough so that she was a little lighter on her feet after getting adjusted to it. After she'd stepped through the portal, Nari stumbled for a moment as her weight increased. It seemed like wherever she was was slightly above standard, and based on all the laws of physics she knew, she strongly suspected she wasn't on Venator-423c anymore.
Once she'd gathered her footing, she glanced around. This ruin was in much more of a state of disrepair than the Venator one, with vines splitting apart panels in the walls, and shrubs and grasses growing out of the substrate. She'd heard tell of Precursor ruins getting fucked up by plants before, but this was on a whole different level, to the point where cracks in the ceiling were letting beams of sunlight in.
Similar to the Venator room, the portal was in a fairly small cylindrical room, maybe three meters across. On the other side of the room from the portal, an archway opened up to some other location, though a curtain of vines had obscured that arch enough that all she could really see beyond it was the floor.
Nari hopped down from the portal dais and stepped toward the archway, a cool breeze washing over her scales. It felt like a far cry from the stuffy hallways of Venator; frankly, she was grateful to have a break like this, especially if she didn't think about the ramifications of having just discovered previously-unknown Precursor teleportation technology.
Right as she was about to reach the arch, she heard the dying whir of some technology behind her. Snapping around, she managed to just catch the image of Venator-423c within the portal's aperture fizzle out and vanish.
Huh. Is it proximity-based?
She walked back over to the portal, expecting it to reopen its gate to Venator. Nothing happened. Shit.
Frowning, she got closer to the device and inspected its surface. It was smooth, refusing to give up the secrets of its internals besides the telltale tube of a void conduit connecting from the floor to its side. So it used void in some way, but that's about all she knew about what it was doing.
She smacked it. Then smacked it again, this time with one of her wings. Again, harder this time. No dice. All she got out of it was a sore palm.
Concerned, she looked back down at her holo, then swiped to try to navigate to the communications with her team. Unfortunately, the spotty signal she'd had on Venator hadn't improved here; rather, it was completely gone. That checked out due to the whole "being on a different planet" thing.
"Hello?" she asked, turning toward the portal, expecting it to maybe somehow answer. Unsurprisingly, the metal did not return any words, even with her scowling at it.
She walked through the ring again, expecting to maybe still be transported back. The only thing on the other side of the ring was this room's wall. There was a pretty flower, but it was not in fact Venator.
She groaned. Might as well face it. She was stuck here.
The familiar pull of panic tugged at her mind. She'd gotten pretty good at silencing it over the years - she had to, otherwise she'd probably be dead by now - but it did feel reasonably justified at this moment. She was trapped on some unknown planet in the middle of fuck-knows-where, alone, with nothing but her Ruining equipment and wits to survive. This was not what she was trained for.
At least the atmosphere was breathable.
Nari could almost feel the flow of adrenaline kick in and save her from a panic attack or mental breakdown. If she wanted to survive, she'd just need to find food, water, and shelter. If she wanted to see anyone she cared about again, though, she'd need to figure out where she was and how to escape - as well as surviving, since corpses weren't very good thinkers.
And to do that, she'd need to leave this room. As far as she could tell, there was one way out of here, and she was looking at it.
She ducked underneath the curtain of velvet flora and walked through the archway.
The scene outside the archway was...
Well, Nari wasn't quite sure what it was, really. Lots of things were going through her head right now; what she saw fundamentally challenged a lot of the assumptions she had about the Precursors and Ruining in general. If she had to describe it all in one word it'd be "overwhelming."
Before her was a great chasm, thousands of meters long and hundreds deep. It appeared to be ring-shaped, with its walls curving off in the distance. The roof was latticed, and had even caved in with the outer wall in one spot, allowing willow-green sunlight to stream into the structure and illuminate it in a pale haze.
Each wall was lined with curved terraces and bridges, twisting in fractal patterns that almost made it feel more natural than its artificial origin. Many of the surfaces were lined with blood-red flora and rushing water, eventually tumbling down to a dense jungle that covered the floor far below.
Evidently, she was on one of these bridges, given the central location of her viewpoint within the chasm. It was eerily gorgeous, a garden long-abandoned by its caretakers and run wild in their absence. She'd never seen or even heard of a ruin this large, and she suspected she never would again.
She hadn't changed her mind on wanting to get back to civilization, but if she had to be stuck in a Precursor ruin, this wasn't a bad one to be in.
Still, standing around gawking at the sights wouldn't do her much good. Nari quickly worked her holo to activate an offline breadcrumb app so she wouldn't get lost, then switched back over to her voidsign radar to start looking for any void-based machinery. If she found something she was familiar with, she could check to see if it had power; she had a sneaking suspicion the facility's emergency power had crapped out and that was why the portal wasn't working.
With that, she set off toward the inner wall, following the void conduit that connected back to the portal. If this ruin had a void reactor, it'd be near the center; best to get started in that direction early so she wouldn't have to retrace her steps.
Nari had been wandering the halls of the ruin for a few hours now. No dice on anything else connected to the void conduit so far, though she'd found a few crystals and almost replenished the supply she'd lost on Venator. Well, rather, she'd done so in volume; she hadn't given herself a backache yet, so the actual mass of her crystal supply probably left something to be desired.
Curiously, she'd noticed that this ruin seemed a lot more floral and decorative than most. Sure, it was a jungle, overgrown with plants that had run up the walls and through the hallways, but she'd noticed designated planter boxes and soil here and there too. It didn't feel purely pragmatic like so many Precursor ruins; people had lived here, and enjoyed it.
In fact, the room she was in right now actually seemed like a proper garden. The hallways she'd been in had opened up into a larger chamber, filled with metallic crop boxes of wild red grass. Those planters even had a few stools around them; perhaps this room had been a place of relaxation in its past life.
She'd heard trickles of flowing water since she'd arrived in this ruin, but here, she could actually track them down. A couple of pipe systems in the walls let drizzles of water into the room, trickling through grooves in the floor and giving the air in here a humid feel. It felt tranquil, though she couldn't quite place why something felt off.
It was alright though- Bugs.
That's what it was. Nari hadn't heard a single bug or animal since she'd arrived here. It was lush with plant life, sure, but fauna appeared to be completely absent. Why?
She almost thought she heard a faint rattle in the distance, her ears shooting up and her body jolting over toward the source of the noise. But just as suddenly as she'd noticed it, she stopped hearing it, and frankly she wasn't quite sure if it was real or just her imagination.
It's too halcyon. She didn't trust this place.
Carefully, she turned to the next doorway and continued through. It opened to an even larger chamber, cold and dusty where the previous had been lush and misty; a few shrubs grew in a sandy corner of broken-apart flooring, but there wasn't much in terms of life beyond that. The room was shaped like a T, with its stem being the way she'd entered. At the head of the T, the floor sloped up slightly with a small stairway, and that raised floor then split off to the left and right.
The conduit ran up the stairs, so Nari did the same, creeping up to the top to get a glance at where it went next. The patterns on the conduit indicated the source was somewhere along the path to her right, though on her left a second stairway proceeded up the wall to a raised deck in the corner of the room. She curiously stepped to the left to get a better look at the stairway when she heard a whoosh behind her.
She jumped back and unholstered her pistol, then turned to the side, only to be blindsided with a blurry blue shape directly to the head.
In an instant, she was back there in that room, hearing the door creak open. The hushed whispers of a group in panic, the icy fear piercing her heart as she recollected the things she'd heard on the news. Turning away to not look at what was happening. Then, in a moment of stillness, the feeling of four arms grasping her side as she turned left and...
Nari's eyes blinked open again to find herself rushing upwards, wind rushing through her closed wing membranes as if she was a faulty kite. She glanced up to get a look at her assailant, but only caught a glimpse of their grappling hook before crashing into a grate suspended from the ceiling, slightly knocking the wind out of her.
She rolled onto her side, staring the attacker dead in the eyes. They didn't look too dissimilar from herself as far as body plan went; reptilian, four arms, two eyes, two legs, and a prehensile tail. The biggest notable difference was that they had no wings, with their equivalent to her wing-arms being a regular old pair of arms instead.
A liralen. Just her luck.
The liralen was masculine in appearance, and had cobalt-colored scales that glittered away to a lighter cyan near his extremities. His eyes and biolights glowed a watery teal, and he frowned as he made eye contact with her.
"Who are you and what do you want with me?" Nari hissed.
The liralen shot a glance down through the grate, then stared at her again, holding a finger up to her snout. "Quiet or we both die."
"What?"
"I said quiet," he whispered aggressively. "Shut up. It's coming."
That's when she noticed it.
It was a faint noise in the distance, the same thing she'd thought she heard earlier. Some sort of metallic rattle, like the sound it makes when you drop a box of paperclips on the floor. There was a slight electric undertone to it as well, as if the paperclips all had different electric charges and kept shocking each other.
It started out quiet, somewhere in the distance, but even since she'd just noticed it, it'd become louder. Noticeable louder. Noticeably closer.
Anxiety began building up in her skull.
Then it got louder. Louder again. Louder still, until it was almost a roar, an all-encompassing cacophony of shifting metallic objects.
And then it arrived.
It took all her restraint not to flinch as a gust of something crashed into the room. She squinted and was barely able to make out the individual forms of hundreds, no, thousands of tiny drones, forming a cloud of robotic dust as arcs of electricity crackled between them. They were so small and numerous that they almost acted more like a fluid than individual objects, and the fluid here was a flash flood, drowning the spot she'd stood just a minute prior in a river of electric carnage.
Then just as quickly as it had arrived, the swarm vanished, rushing out the side of the room she'd been looking to explore, and leaving behind an eerie stillness for a moment before the dust settled. After a few seconds, the noise subsided substantially, disappearing back to a dim rattle in the distance.
"Okay, down we go," announced the liralen, grabbing Nari again. She didn't even bother trying to fight back this time, and the two effortlessly glided down to the floor with a zing, landing upright.
Now that she was on her feet again, she could get a better view of the liralen. She already knew he was colored a bit differently from her, but the scutes on his head were also a bit spikier than hers, and the scales on his tail smoothly layered on top of each other rather than jutting up in spines like her own.
That was all standard fare for a liralen. What wasn't usual was his attire. She'd expect anyone here to be a Ruiner, with rugged clothes that might get worn down, and a plethora of equipment to navigate the labyrinthine ruins the Precursors left behind. This guy was in a standard liralen Taro jumpsuit, with black, blue, and white patterns, made out of synthetic fiber, and completely mangled and fucked up with several holes in it. He held what was evidently a grappling hook in one hand, and had a small brown satchel hung across another. He clearly hadn't worn anything else in a while.
She was instantly suspicious.
"Okay, I'll repeat my question," she said. "Who are you? And what the hell are you doing here?"
The liralen grumbled. "It's a long story," he muttered. "Call me Visken. I live here."
"Visken? As in ghost?"
"Good, you speak that language too," he nodded, slightly shrugging his upper arms. "Yeah. Ghost."
"Surely that's not your given name. 'Fess it up. I need a reason to trust you."
"It's as given a name as I've got," the liralen replied. "How come I need to still earn your trust? I just saved your life."
Nari rubbed her still-sore sides. "Yeah, gee, thanks for that."
"Better that than dead, which you would be if I left you with the swarm down there," he frowned. "If having it be a word in that other language weirds you out too much, I guess Visk works too."
"Yeah, that's fine. Quicker to say," Nari nodded. "The reason I don't trust you is that a random liralen showed up with no equipment in the middle of a completely undocumented Precursor ruin. Surely you're a Ruiner for the LLF or something?"
"No clue what you're talking about," Visk replied, which was about the most suspicious sentence Nari had ever heard, though she didn't think it worth calling him out on until she had more info. "I get if you don't trust me, but we're both in grave danger right now. I have a hideout safe from the swarms. I can take you there if you wanna discuss things further."
"That's fine, I guess," Nari grumbled. "I'm Nari, by the way. Pleased to...meet...you, I guess?"
"Same, but let's get going," Visk reiterated, already skittering off toward the left doorway. "Swarms will be back here soon, sooner if we talk. I don't want us to have any more close calls. Follow me."
With that, Nari chased after the liralen, wondering what the hell she'd just gotten herself into.