Butterfly Museum in BREACH | World Anvil

Butterfly Museum

I'm assuming the sapient ones died naturally, and the worst crime here is the same grave-robbing Baseline archeologists do. Heck, maybe they volunteered their bodies to science and were happy to be here.
— Dirk Ablestein, BREACH dendrientemologist
While there is an entire world spreading out from the breach point, only the area for a few miles around it has been given even cursory examination. The portal opens on a neatly-trimmed lawn, with a gravel path winding its way to a large building about half a mile distant. Tiny robots keep the lawn neat and return stray rocks to the path. The entire area is a few miles across, then the lawn abruptly turns into dense forest, with a variety of trees similar, but genetically unrelated, to those found in Baseline temperate regions.

The world is not an alternate Earth, or, it's so alternate it might as well not be. The sun is visibly larger and redder. There are two moons. The stars form no known patterns. It's probable there's other worlds orbiting this sun (named Chou Hoshi by one of the First-In team), but no one comes here to make astronomical observations. They come for the museum.

There's seven accessible floors, spread out as sweeping arms from a cylindrical central core, like an octopus or a spiral galaxy seen from above. The core is topped with a geodesic dome glinting in dozens of colors as the light plays over the unknown material it's made of. The building as a whole is three miles across, and there are no elevators or other automated transport systems. A dominant speculation is the multitude of open areas marked with various-colored rings set into the stone are, or were "micro breach" portals. Access to upper floors was managed by setting up grappling hooks and rope ladders in the central atrium, which is clear up to the dome.

The rest of the space is full of butterflies. (Including larva and coccoons, and some other forms not known to Baseline science.) Tens of thousands of species, ranging from almost microscopic to a "baby mothra" suspended in the atrium, with a 40 foot wingspan. The ordering and grouping of the displays has not yet been fully deciphered, in large part because there's no visible writing anywhere. Presumably, they had some other means of transmitting knowledge to visitors. (If there were visitors; one hypothesis is that this is simply a random Precursor's private collection, as it seems they likely had the resources to do things like that. See also the Hedgemaze .

In two of the wings... or arms... there are large displays with several cases arranged as group, each such cluster focusing on larger (one three feet or so, one five feet) specimens who have well-articulated forelimbs and enlarged heads. In case there was doubt, these samples - which are, to be clear, preserved corpses, not mannequins -- are accompanied by tools and artifacts clearly manufactured by and for them.

The building lacks power, but is kept clean and maintained by robots similar to those on the lawn. Where they get power from is unknown. Interfering with them results in, at first, mild electric shocks, then the transformation of the "harmless" maintenance units into a swarming mob full of claws, blades, and lasers.

The museum is one of the most complete Precursor buildings found, somehow either immune to the destruction that raced through other worlds, or hidden from it, but doing more than simply looking at the exhibits, such as trying to get samples of building material, provokes a violent response.

World Type
Non-Terrestrial
Divergence
NA
Current Year
NA
TL
10^, but powered down

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