64. Exploring deeper

With still much of the ground floor yet to be discovered, the party found themselves one level below ground, attacked by giant egg-shaped creatures. Now, with goop all over them, the party examined the cyphers the egg creatures had collected from previous unexpecting explorers. Nox took out what was left of her old portable biolab and started collecting the goo, thinking its cool numbing effect would be helpful to to Temila.
 
It was time to move on. There was a double door near the elevator in the previous room, and a set of stairs and hallway in their current one.
“Do you think your magic arm would work on those big doors in the defended room?” Nox asked Fureva-Yung about the unusually heavy wall in that part of the complex. With the idea firmly planted, Fureva-Yung looked down at her tattoo, noting that the flashing light that denoted her was on the right-hand corner of the triangle. She could also see one the three dots at the Spire was lit, showing Trask was still there. No sign of Critinous Torn on the tattoo, though Trask never showed up on the tattoo until they’d finally found him either.
 
Striding through the elevator room, Fureva-Yung pressed the tattoo against the door. It slid open without protest, revealing a large triangular chamber with a floor that stopped just before a huge volume of green liquid suspended in a column. The room was more than 20 metres deep, and the green liquid filled the space at the far end. Fureva-Yung shuddered, remembering a similar green column of liquid she’d tampered with in the Spire. It had burnt the symbiote that was Fureva and left her only Yung for many months while it healed.
“Oh yeah, it’s the same acid,” Nox confirmed, and Fureva-Yung took the opportunity to put a healthy distance between herself and the acid stores.
“What if we threw something at it?” Said Marius, not at all concerned about the acid decanting.
“You can do that, but we’ll be in the other room when you do,” Nox replied snippily. She remembered the incident all too well and how hard she and Temila had worked to bring Fureva back to full health.
 
Fureva-Yung used her new proboscis to smell the air for the scent of the acid. She was surprised not to smell anything, as the acid was well-contained. She did pick up a faint smell of ozone, though, like a machine giving off an electrical discharge.
 
Suffice it to say, no one was interested in spending more time in the acid room than necessary. They headed back into the pod room and down the corridor. It very quickly turned to the left, revealing another familiar view. Here, the passage narrowed down to a catwalk around which a black liquid rolled and boiled. Inside the black cylinder of liquid, all sound was absorbed and made into kinetic energy. Nox tested the idea by clapping her hands and watching spikes of black liquid dance up from the surface around her. Jaden and Fureva-Yung were entranced by the liquid that seemed to defy gravity and absorb sound in such a dramatic way. Marius and Nox had seen it before and knew to steer clear of its surface lest it draw them in.
 
“Let's just walk through, don’t touch it, don’t make any loud noises,” Marius instructed as he quickly made his way through the tunnel of silence.
Jaden made a high-pitched whistle out of random scrap and watched the blackness shimmer and vibrate, “I’d really love a sample,” she said, pulling a vial out of Bellyache.
“Let me try with my telekinesis,” Nox said, plucking the vial out of Jaden’s hand with her Hedge Magic and floating it across to the spinning surface. Just as it had before, as soon as the vial touched the liquid, it was sucked down into its depths.
 
The silence was literally broken by the sound of tinkling glass and grinding as the sharp pieces tore up the walls of the room. The circling liquid stopped and started sloshing down either wall, pooling under the catwalk.
“Oh no, I think I broke it,” Nox said as the black liquid bubbled menacingly. With a flit she was away to the next room, Fureva-Yung and Jaden close behind. Suddenly, the pool of black erupted into a huge geyser that rocketed through the catwalk.
“But…my sample,” Jaden lamented, before spotting a few drips falling only an arm's length away. Stretching out and tried swiping the droplets with a piece of rag. She overbalanced and stepped heavily onto the damaged catwalk. It gave way, and she found herself falling face-first into the pool of goop below. She was not sucked down into the liquid, however. Twisting around she looked down (currently up) her leg to see Fureva-Yung’s chain wrapped protectively around it.
 
As Fureva-Yung struggled to pull Jaden out of the black sonic liquid, Marius and Nox entered the room beyond. A deep swirling electronic hum and multiple ticking noises caught their attention. The ticks seemed to be from various sources as they sometimes aligned, forming one tick or synopating into interesting patterns. Still, it was hard to tell where either the drone or the ticking was coming from. The room seemed littered with machines. On the ground, an L-shaped block with a raised pattern that was only visible in profile the devices was so black. On the other side of the room, two columns curved towards each other, creating a convex shape. Their surface was mirror-like, reflecting back everything in the room in high, though distorted detail. On the walls, mushroom-shaped devices were pointed into the centre of the room.
 
“What do you think this place is for?” Marius mused, hunting for the source of the ticking as it seemed to get louder and more insistent. Nox fluttered over to the two columns attracted by their shiny surface. She was just about to scan them when a dark shadowy something appeared in the reflection and circled around behind her own startled image. Another circled around the room’s wall, striking at Marius as Nox felt herself engulfed in blackness. They were both plunged into constricting darkness, squeezed and compressed from all sides.
Help! Black shadowy things! Nox yelled through the network. In the constricting dark, the ticking was painful, and Marius forced his hand out straight in front of him and blasted a heat ray through the creature.
 
Everyone heard the screaming as the black creature wrapped around Marius became transparent. Again, the creatures squeezed Marius and Nox, constricting blood flow, and forcing air out of their lungs. Sorely battered, Nox bamfed out, almost colliding with Fureva-Yung and Jaden now running to their rescue.
“...I couldn’t…breath…Marius…still…” she gasped out.
Jaden, her face, neck and arms covered in black goop said something, though no sound came out.
I think I know what to do… she said through the telepathic network and stalked up to the creature still holding Marius.
Don’t worry about me, I’ve got this one’s number, Marius replied in vain as Jaden's sound-cancelling-covered arm dug through the creature and caught his arm. The essence of the black creature boiled away Jaden, destroying its hold on Marius.
No really, I’m…
“...fine,” He plopped out onto the ground as the creature moaned its last lament and dissipated into nothing.
Fureva-Yung swung her chain at the creature that had held Nox. The end cracked with sonic snap, rocking the creature made purely of sound. Unhappily, Marius blasted his ray beam at the creature. He’d had a far better angle of the creature from the inside, though his shot still struck true and the creature disolved into nothing. Suddenly, the noise stopped.
 
“What is this place for?” Fureva-Yung looked around the space. He noted the Ferian technology but not its purpose.
“Maybe this was a prison for nasty sound people that squash others wings, “ Nox said, trying to straighten out her own, “Or maybe its a zoo or maybe they were experimenting on the creatures for some reason.”
“I don’t know,” Fureva-Yung who remembered back to her days in the Ferian fleet, “I would have thought if the creatures were enemies they’d have just killed them.”
“They didn’t with the Malignany A.I., “ Nox countered, “They made a prison on an old ship circling a star. They didn’t try killing it at all.”
“I still wonder,” Fureva-Yung looked at the sensors around her thinking there must be more to it.
 
Nox gave up the argument and went back to scanning the equipment. In the wall near the two chrome columns she found a small storage cupboard. Inside was a cube linked to the datasphere and two cyphers. The cube was a storage device for cyphers and currently held another two cyphers. The faraway ear was quickly snatched up by Marius who swapped out one of his lesser used cyphers for the new long range sensing devices.
 
Back to the main room the group went deciding that this time they would take the elevator down to the next level instead of climbing the new stairs up to the first where they’d already been. Once mor the magic arm opened the elevator doors and they stepped in. As the elevator descended, it also turned. Where they had entered on the right-hand side of the room, they now entered the new level on the east side. It was dark down here, not lights seemed to be on and what spilled from the lift didn’t seem to touch anything in the room. Nox sent out her Hedge light, but it too, was swallowed by the gloom.
 
“We’ve seen this before,” Marius said, looking around the corner of the lift. Fureva-Yung used her sonar and felt a thicker density to the darkness in one corner. She pointed at the shadow within the shadows, and Marius blasted it with his heat ray. A slender snake-like shadow disconnected from the wall with a scream and slithered under a door opposite the elevator.
“Good thing that’s not the guy we’re looking for,” Marius commented sheepishly.
“ We hope,” Nox replied and flitted into the room. The darkness had lifted, and they could see in the light of the hedge light a console across the room.
 
Jaden and Nox logged onto the console and quickly discovered that it was a Datasphere terminal, like the ones found in the Spire. Unfortunately, it was inactive and couldn’t be restarted without power.
 
Fureva-Yung lifted her arm to the door in the south, and like the others before it, it slid open without concern.