Strange Reaction
"So, we're looking for a...void reactor, was it?"
Visk stared at Nari, an eyebrow raised as the duo walked through the stony halls of the facility. He'd taken up the rear; unlike the usual, she seemed to know where they were going better than he did.
"Yep," she replied a moment later.
"What is it exactly?"
After a few seconds of silence, Nari stopped and turned around to face him. She reached into her bag and pulled out a black crystal. As Visk looked at it, he noticed small flecks of color glittering within its surface. Strangely, every time he tried to focus his eyes on those flecks, they disappeared and new ones took their place, almost as if the crystal itself couldn't decide what color it was.
"This is a void crystal," she explained. "It's the most common way the Precursors stored a material called 'void', which has a lot of strange properties that allow lots of important tech to work, like slip drives and gravity plating. The Precursors used it extensively in their technology, and I'm pretty sure it's used in the portal that I traveled here in."
The nerian then stashed the crystal back in her bag and crouched down on the floor, pointing to a dark indentation running down the center of the hallway. "This is a 'void conduit', which is what Precursor ruins use to distribute void throughout their facilities. They're like cables for void; one side connects up to the source of it, and the other connects to what's consuming it."
"The source is a void reactor, which melts down the void, uses it to power the facility's electricity, then ships off all the extra void around the place."
She stood back up and turned to face the darkness of the hallway, sighing. "Obviously, this ruin is powered off, just like most of them. But if we find the reactor, we should be able to power it on, and get the portal working again. Hopefully."
Visk silently nodded, tailing her as she continued onward through the hallway.
At this point, they'd been walking a while, and had left the territory Visk was familiar with. Nari assured him she knew the way back - something involving that 'holo' thing she had. Hopefully her plan here would work and they wouldn't need to return to Visk's den in the first place.
According to her, void reactors were usually at the center of facilities. Consequently, she'd navigated them somewhere underneath the central garden he'd crashed in. It was a bit of a maze down here, with hallways twisting around and intersecting in a spiderweb of passages, and rooms full of various machinery and masoned furniture branching off from the sides occasionally.
Visk wasn't quite sure if they were where they needed to be. Despite her words, even Nari seemed a bit lost.
Down here, the facility was more intact and less overgrown with flora. Even still, red vines and brambles occasionally broke through the walls, and some of the hallways they'd passed were even fully blocked off by plants, a natural roadblock forcing them in different directions.
It was dark, though; they'd left any natural light behind a while back, and the hallways were illuminated by nothing but Nari's flashlight and the subtle glow of both their biolights.
After the earlier ordeal, Visk was a bit paranoid about the swarms; he kept his eyes and ears peeled, jumping back slightly every time an unexpected mechanical creak echoed through the halls. Nari wasn't quite as skittish, but he occasionally caught a glimpse of her eyes, darting back and forth as they stepped into each new hallway.
Who-knows-how-much walking later, and Visk finally broke the silence. "Hey."
Instantly, Nari stopped in her tracks, almost falling over from the inertia. She glared at him like she was about to maul his face in, then let out a deep sigh and softened her expression. "Shit, okay, it's just you. What's up?"
"You've mentioned the Precursors a lot. Who are they?"
Nari awkwardly tried to conceal a laugh, letting out a brief exhale of breath as she smirked slightly. "Sorry, I keep forgetting you don't know anything," she chuckled. "It's a reasonable question, just something you don't expect to hear because everyone knows about the Precursors."
She steeled herself and continued walking through the hall. "It's not a 'who are they' so much as a 'who were they.' They're a species that colonized the galaxy a long time ago, with advanced technology the rest of civlization has yet to match. About 25,000 years ago, they vanished. Nobody knows why; there's theories, but nobody has come up with any substantial proof or evidence."
"The important bit, though, is the technology they left behind," she continued. "Probably most importantly, they made robots called Caretakers which guided everyone to space at around the same time, and the Slipways, gates between star systems that form the core of interstellar travel."
"Huh," mused Visk. "So everyone is just...living on their bones, in a way?"
"Yeah, sort of," nodded Nari. "Everyone under Vis has tried to reverse-engineer Precursor tech and figure out how it works. Nobody's succeeded."
The duo came to a junction in the hallway. Nari kneeled down and took a close look at the void conduit in the center, then stood back up and took the right branch. Visk followed.
"Frankly," Nari added as she walked, "the fact that nobody's figured it out is pretty good for me. I'm a Ruiner, which basically means I explore Precursor ruins, grab the good stuff, and bring it back to civilization. That's usually void crystals, since they're used a ton in industrial manufacturing and travel."
"So you're a professional grave robber?" Visk asked.
Nari scowled at him half-jokingly. "I'd go with 'archaeologist-for-hire', personally. But yeah, I guess you're-"
She cut herself off and stopped in her tracks as they rounded another bend in the halls. Before them was an entrance to a tall hexagonal room, filled with desks and switches. The void conduit continued through the room and slipped underneath the wall, disappearing behind it with no obvious path.
She looked it over briefly, not even bothering to look back at Visk. "Well, I think we've found our void reactor."
"What the fuck? This doesn't make any sense."
For the last five minutes or so, Visk had been patiently waiting in the corner as Nari fiddled with the reactor controls, swearing vigourously as she tried to get it started. He couldn't say he had any experience with this kind of thing himself, and he'd taken a look at the controls and been unable to comprehend them, so he reckoned he hadn't worked with them in his past life either.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
Nari grumbled as she opened a panel and then half-slammed it shut again. "Everything! This doesn't match the standard model control board for these things at all!"
"Anything in particular?"
"Let me show you," she said, gesturing to Visk. He navigated his way around the desks to the central location she was at, and glanced at the control panel, a confusing array of switches with elaborately smithed metallic sculptures above each button.
"Okay, so what am I looking at?"
"Well, the first problem is that there's no fuel chamber," Nari explained. "I told you these things melt down void. They need somewhere to put in the crystals, though. That's usually in the control room, but the conduit just goes under the wall over there."
She held out a wing-arm and pointed to the wall opposite to the door. Visk had seen it on the way in, but he took another glance and sure enough, the conduit went through the wall with no obvious input.
"Usually the conduit goes underneath the input chamber. I've seen one or two ruins that have it elsewhere in the control room. I've never seen one where the input chamber isn't in the control room at all. So that was immediately strange."
"My next thought was to get some sort of view of the reactor mechanism itself so I could see where the input chute led out to. Problem is, the Precursors didn't really use lights; theory is that they were blind and saw via echolocation. Doesn't help us seeing types much."
She sighed. "So, I was thinking I'd boot up the reactor, see if it can heat up some of its mechanisms even without any void supply. If I'm lucky, maybe some of it will be hot enough to glow and illuminate where the chute is."
"Your biolights and flashlight won't be enough?"
"Absolutely not on the biolights," she huffed. "Flashlight might be enough, but these chambers are big sometimes and it can be difficult to get the light focused enough."
Nari turned to look at a panel placed on another desk next to her. Her brow furrowed as she looked the whole thing over, then she turned back to Visk with a frown.
"The other problem is that whoever put together this control panel did it all wrong. There's a consistent scheme in which these things are layed out, and this does not follow it. It's like they dumped all the switches on the ground and picked them back up randomly."
"What're you looking for?"
"Switch to open the main door to the reactor chamber," she explained. "No windows here, so it's just air or wall. Should have a...rectangular symbol on it, sorta? It's hard to describe."
Visk did a quick look at the array of switches before him and one caught his eye. Its label was sculpted roughly in the shape of a square cut into quadrants, radially symmetric with each quadrant spiraling toward the back of the desk. "Is it this one?"
Nari glanced over and nodded. "Yep. Flick it."
He did.
Immediately, the whir of a motor kicked in, and the sound of metal groaning shook the room as the far wall began to retract into the ceiling. Nari pointed her flashlight into it, illuminating a large chamber of indeterminate size and shape beyond, filled to the brim with odd machinery Visk could only make out in the form of silhouettes.
"Big one," Nari remarked. "Okay, let me try booting this thing up."
She looked back at a desk next to her and pulled a lever. Immediately, an otherworldly phwoosh resonated through the room, which quickly dissipated into a deep hum that Visk could feel throbbing through his bones. Simultaneously, the room was suddenly illuminated by a fierce white light; Visk blinked for a moment, his eyes adjusting to the brightness, then glanced into the main reactor chamber.
The chamber was easily ten times the size of the control room, a many-sided polygon extruded into an approximation of a cylinder. Though there were no lights in the traditional sense inside it, the center of the floor seemed to dissolve into a sheer, blinding white surface, shedding an eerie pale glow across the machinery above.
Some sort of icosahedral lattice was suspended in the center, hanging from the ceiling via a metallic spire. Additional beams of otherworldly machinery closed in on the center like claws, slowly coming to life as the reactor booted.
"What are those things?" Visk asked, pointing to the glowing floor and the icosahedron with his right hands.
"I don't know," Nari responded in a hushed tone. "I have no clue whatseover."
Visk frowned as the icosahedron began to spin, slowly at first, quickly speeding up to a ludicrous speed. The edges of it seemed to get fuzzy after a while, colors bleeding out in a spectrum of rainbow. As it hit speed, another set of machinery lining the floor activated, and the circumference of the white light on the floor blossomed out into a glittery black like an eye, eerily similar to the color of void crystals.
"What the fuck?" Nari muttered, her gaze similarly transfixed on the view.
Then, the circles appeared.
They hurt to look at, and hurt more to think about. Perfectly round clumps of something, something not quite describable in words. They were like circles of nothingness, in a sense; not darkness, it was like some parts of space had just ceased to exist and your brain just had to fill in the details. The spheres seemed to bubble up from the edge of the light toward the icosahedral core, then get torn up as they hit its rotating surface.
Nari winced and looked away. She had a feeling she knew what the spheres were doing, a suspicion that was confirmed when she looked down toward the void conduit and saw the dark rush of void flowing through it.
But that can't be...that's not possible, right?
Is it?
Concerned, she motioned toward Visk to usher him out, violently fighting the urge to look back into the reactor chamber. She reached out a hand to grab him, only for that hand to meet nothing but air.
"Visk?" she asked, glancing over towards where he'd been standing to her side. At first, it looked like he wasn't there, then she looked down and noticed him sprawled on the floor. He was unconscious, though his eyes moved rapidly as if having a dream.
"Visk!"
Her thoughts started racing. She hadn't seen him like this before.
Did the reactor do that to him? She wasn't sure. It hurt to look at for her, someone who had some experience with the Precursors' reality-bending antics. Someone who'd seen the Slipways before. Was it possible that an untrained mind could black out in the presence of the paranormal?
She couldn't fully discount the idea. This was a weird reactor, and the only explanation she could come up with was that she'd somehow stumbled upon how the Precursors created void, an invaluable discovery worth trillions of units that she was fairly confident she wouldn't see a penny of.
Carefully, she held a finger to his wrist and felt a pulse. He was still alive, at least.
She took off her satchel, holding it in her arms, and grabbed two of his hands with her wings. Then, she pulled his prone body forward, resisting the urge to sneak a glance at the reactor, and gradually dragged him out of the control room and into the hallway.
Unsurprisingly, no lights were on throughout the facility, so she twitched her ears as she tried to pay attention to her surroundings. Everything she'd seen today had corroborated those theories that the Precursors were blind. That tragically meant that deep in their ruins, she was effectively blind too. The last thing she wanted was for something to sneak up on them because she couldn't hear it.
No swarms at the moment, though. The only noises she could notice were her and Visk breathing, and the gentle hum of the reactor in the distance. It was a faint comfort, though her experiences over the past day had reassured her that this whole place was dangerous and swarms could strike swiftly at any time.
As she pondered that, Visk's eyes shot open and he gasped for air.
Nari almost jumped back at the sudden noise, then collected herself and leaned towards him. "Visk, you okay?"
The liralen mumbled for a moment as he tried to find his wording. "Yeah, I...um, it's...it's nothing. Just, we're in danger. It's bad. Far worse than I ever could have guessed."
"What do you mean?"
He scrambled upright, then faced down the hallway and looked over his shoulder at Nari, his eyes steeled with resolve. "If you want to live, we need to get off this planet, NOW."