15 - The Surface (And Still Not a Soul in Sight) [Cherno]

Not being the type of person to just jam a random object into her own head for no reason, she stored away the trinkets in her Kenoma Pocket and gave the corpse another once-over. In his back pocket, she found three large brass coins and a string with several copper rings.

As far as she could tell the dead man had nothing more on him; she made her way to the lift, testing it and looking it over as if it could crash down at any moment before she committed to entering its cabin. She didn’t want to spend another moment in this dismal place.

Closing the gate behind herself, she pressed the upward-pointing button. With that strange churning from the generators, the cabin rattled and began to rise.

Minutes passed as the cabin slowly rose.

With the machine’s herculean effort, Krahe was lifted out from the earth’s stygian depths, emerging onto a manmade platform that went out to the pit’s edge. Squinting and blinking, half-blinded by the light, she stepped out into the sun.

Her eyes adjusted quickly.

A several-hundred meter wide band of desolation surrounded the pit, but green sprawled out in every-which direction beyond it. A bright-blue sky, bordering on sea-green in colour, stretched out overhead, dappled by a smattering of white clouds. Down the way, well-within the ring of dead earth, she could see a town, but not a living soul in it. Its buildings were scorched on the side facing the pit. A road led towards and through it, tracks in the dirt suggesting motorized vehicles.

Warm breeze washed over her skin and through her hair as she made her way towards the town, scents which she hadn’t felt in decades filling her nostrils alongside those she had only tasted in a synthetic form. There was the smoke of a wood fire, but also the fragrance of grasses and flowers. Flowers; she realized those were the tiny specks of colour off in the distance.

Krahe wept at the sight; in all her life, never had she witnessed such unspoiled natural beauty. Even her home, before it was rendered into radioactive glass, was but a small, engineered oasis supported by advanced technology.

Then, she noticed it.

A structure so vast it had evaded her notice until she gazed up at the sky. A… Gigantic, golden tower off in the distance, its base far beyond the horizon.

From where she stood, she couldn’t even conceive of its full scale, but she was certain it stretched far into space. For a moment she thought it to perhaps be a space elevator, but nay; she quickly realized it to be the spoke of an artificial planetary ring. From the angle at which she saw it, its base couldn’t be far, at least on the planetary scale. For all she knew, this world could be far larger than Earth.

Slavishly taking in her surroundings as she went, Krahe reached the town to find that it was just as deserted as the subterranean campsite, but even more thoroughly picked-clean. Krahe’s mind instantly jumped to any of a myriad calamities and depopulation tactics. Perhaps whatever had caused the evacuation had also stripped the land around the pit of life.

There, in the deserted town, she scrounged for a short while and rested, finding that its inhabitants had been very thorough. Going from boxy building to boxy building, she found some bottles, most empty, some with strong grain spirits sloshing about within. She also found some sort of meat jerky, a more familiar food item; unlike that which she was familiar with, however, this wasn’t reconstituted and dyed protein-mush with insane amounts of salt and spice to mask the horrid aftertaste. This was real meat. It took substantial willpower to set it aside for later, as she wasn’t hungry yet.

In the same place as the food, she also found, of all things, cigarettes, four of them hand-rolled on the table right next to a small two-compartment box; one had papers, and the other a mass of stringy, dry plant matter. The fragrance was unlike tobacco or any other commonly-smoked plant of her home, being light and sweet, with notes of sandalwood and cinnamon, both of which she had smuggled in the past. She hadn’t smoked since the accursed day of her home’s destruction.

Nonetheless, she took both the cigarette and the box.

“Guess my wish came true,” she uttered under her breath.

The last object of substantial interest in the entire town was a pair of worn boots, seemingly forgotten by their owner in a back alley. There were spiderwebs inside them, but once she shook them out, they made serviceable foot protection, though oversized.

Krahe spent a short time in one of the homes to rest for a short while and examine the things she’d gotten off the elevator corpse. That weird brass nail kept tugging at her attention, but she instead took a closer look at the glasses, putting them on only to find that they highlighted everything she thought was magical with a simple outline. A mind-impulse sufficed to make that cease.

When she wondered whether they could tell her more about an object besides its being magical, the glasses responded by demanding a smattering of Thauma. When thusly supplied they gave a readout on one of the gems, at which she had been looking at that moment. It showed itself in her field of view, rather than upon the glasses themselves.

[DD BATTERY]

[Status:]

Good

[DD Charge:]

Full

Besides curiosity as to what exactly “DD” meant, Krahe also wondered if the glasses could tell her their own properties. The glasses’ response was the flash of a detailed listing in her mind’s eye.

[PROSPECTOR’S EYES]

[Tags:]

Second-order

Artifact

Eyewear

Active

[Details:]

This Artifact possesses the following functionality:

Highlight Magic Object

Appraise Object D- (At-Will)

Detect Tur’ith Baneworm E+

Detect Life D-

“So our man was a prospector, was he?” she muttered as she turned her gaze to the weird cartridge-based holoprojector. Though more compact than even their sleekest Megacity Gamma counterpart, the Prospector’s Eyes were functionally just smart glasses.

They pointed out a faded symbol on the item’s chassis; it almost looked like an Eye of Horus.

[“OCULON” EYEBOX MOD. 5226]

[Status:]

Good (Heavily Used)

[DD Charge:]

Empty