The central chamber unfolded before them like the interior of a mechanical heart, dormant, yet not quite dead. Vaulted ceilings stretched upward into the darkness, while concentric circles of weathered tile formed the floor, each ring etched with symbols that shimmered with faint luminescence when caught by the lantern light. Dominating the center? A massive console—a semicircular array of panels, screens, and input devices that defied conventional understanding, its metal surface dulled by millennia, yet somehow untouched by the decay that had afflicted the rest of the ruins.

  Alor whistled, astounded at the vastness, and giggled like a child when the sound echoed off far distant walls.

  “By the Dwarf-father’s bulging pecs, I’ve never seen anything so well preserved from the pre-System era,” Alor murmured in a more subdued tone to his companions, his pink hair tossed about crazily as he shook his head in wonder.

  The chamber breathed around them, ancient currents of air stirring dust motes that danced through shafts of pale blue light emanating from recessed fixtures in the walls. Unlike the corridor's erratic illumination, these lights pulsed with a slow, deliberate rhythm, like the heartbeat of something vast and patient.

  “Do not touch anything,” Maija instructed. Her eyes betrayed the same fascination the rest of them felt, but Maija managed to bring her curiosity to heel. “Not until we’ve assessed potential traps, at least.” She begged.

  Cyrus wasn’t sure if she was begging him, or Alor, but he did have to admit she looked lovely the way the blue lights caught her platinum hair, making the enchantress seem to be enveloped in an ethereal glow.

  Matti circled the perimeter, moving with surprising grace for such a large man. His fingers brushed against a pillar, and for a brief moment his skin took on the metallic sheen of the structure before returning to normal.

  “Not unexpected, but the material doesn’t match anything in the System’s current classifications I have unlocked.” Matti shrugged, leaving it up to interpretation if the System or his own unlocks were the culprit in the failure to identify the metal.

  Cassandra stood apart, her crimson-white robes stark against the chamber’s muted pallete and blue lighting. Her eyes narrowed as she surveyed the space with tactical precision.

  “This wasn’t a manufactory; this is a worship hall. Look at the arrangement. This is very similar to other ritualistic spaces we’ve observed before. Supplicants would stand in different strata depending on their rank and purpose of the gathering.” Cassandra gestured at the delineated spaces created by the tiles on the floor with her left hand—her right hand never left the hilt of Galatine.

  Cyrus felt a peculiar pull toward the console, an invisible thread that latched onto something deep within him and pulled. The sensation was neither comfortable nor unpleasant—it felt like gravity, an inevitable force asserting its fundamental law. He circled the console slowly, aware that the others had all shifted their eyes to watch his progress. They all had varying degrees of curiosity and concern.

  The console stood silent before him. The curved surface was a canvas of darkened screens, recessed panels, and input mechanisms that resembled neither keyboards nor buttons but something more intuitive—perhaps designed to respond to thought rather than touch. Weathered inscriptions ran along its base in a script that seemed to shift when viewed directly but almost became legible out of the corner of his eye.

  “Can you read it?” Alor asked, noticing Cyrus’s glare at the script.

  “Not exactly,” Cyrus admitted with a slight head shake. Then he tilted his head in another direction, attempting to stabilize the symbols again but failed. “But it felt familiar. Like maybe I once knew it.”

  Cyrus extended his hand toward the console, fingers hovering above its surface. The air between his palm and the ancient technology seemed to thicken, charged with so much potential energy that the fine hairs on his arm stood on end.

  “Careful,” Maija cautioned, but she was too late.

  Cyrus’s fingertips made contact with the weathered control panel, and the chamber transformed. The console awakened with a deep, resonant hum that vibrated through the floor and into their bones. Lights ignited across its surface—not in random sequence, but in a complex pattern that suggested language or code. Each screen flickered to life, displaying symbols and diagrams that scrolled by too quickly for comprehension.

  “Shit, my camera went offline,” Alor groaned in horror as the ancient system booted up.

  The lights pulsed in perfect synchronization with Cyrus’s heartbeat, creating an awful feedback loop of thunderous thumping in his head. Then information flooded his mind—not coherent thoughts, but impressions, emotions, and fragments of purpose too scattered to have any substantial meaning.

  “It was reacting to you,” Matti said to fill the silence and took a single step closer to Cyrus and Alor. Matti’s step increased the tempo of the machine's illumination; clearly, the machine could sense presences beyond just Cyrus’s. New symbols flashed across screens with heightened urgency, finally settling into a stable configuration that glowed evenly.

  Cassandra stepped forward, her movements measured and precise. The lights remained stable, and Cassandra walked all the way up to the console, and ran a finger along one of the etched inscriptions that had glowed with the console’s initial activation. Her severe features softened momentarily with wonder, then hardened again into analytical focus.

  “It recognized you,” Cassandra said, her green eyes searching his face for confirmation of a theory she had never voiced, her voice barely audible over the hum of the console.

  Cyrus could only nod. Words were beyond his reach, as sensations and images flowed through his brain, short-circuiting his nervous system. The console felt like an extension of himself—or perhaps, he felt like an extension of it, a component reconnected after a long separation.

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  Alor circled the console, cataloging every detail he could with glowing eyes. “The power source must have been incredible. To function after so long without maintenance… impossible, it should be impossible.”

  Alor’s eyes flicked to Cyrus, and even with the sensations of the console flooding him, Cyrus felt the disappointment from Alor. Disappointment that no one had said ‘improbable, not impossible’. What a strange dwarf.

  Maija pulled a small tool from her belt—a slender device capable of analyzing energy signatures without a direct interface. She approached the console cautiously, and the harsh blue lights around it changed her ethereal visage to something slightly filled with electricity and terror.

  “Uhmm,” Maija groaned in frustration. “No known match. It's not quite electricity and not radiation. Something somewhere in the middle, maybe. Or it broke my tool.” Maija glared at the console before delicately tapping the device against a section designed for external connection. The contact produced a series of mechanical clicks from deep within the structure, as if ancient gears and relays were moving after eons of stillness.

  The response far exceeded even Maija’s lofty expectations. A cascade of holographic blueprints erupted from the console’s central section, spreading across the chamber in three dimensions. Spectral schematics hovered in the air like luminous ghosts—layered diagrams of structures both recognizable and utterly alien.

  “It is beautiful,” Alor whispered. He gingerly reached a hand out to the floating image, only to have his fingers pass through it.

  The blueprints shifted and reorganized in response to their movements, zooming in on sections when gazed upon for too long and rotating to provide optimal viewing angles when they tilted their heads. The ancient technology demonstrated an intuitive understanding of human perception that only System technology could match.

  Matti walked through a section of the display, momentarily shrouded himself in glowing lines that mapped themselves to his body before they blinked and returned to their original configuration.

  “Not just structural plans,” Matti pointed at one of the schematics near Cassandra.

  Humanoid forms were overlaid with technological augmentations. They did not suggest horrific abominations precisely, but they did indicate that whoever built this place had lived with a perspective where the boundary between organic creatures and machines was viewed as arbitrary and meaningless.

  “Look at this one,” Cassandra said, pointing to the central blueprint that dominated the others. “This is the structure we are standing in, but… complete. Undamaged.”

  The holographic model revealed the ruins as they once were—a vast complex extending far beyond their current explorable area. What they had taken for a self-contained structure appeared to be a piece of a far greater whole.

  “This,” she continued, pointing at a section near what would have been the foundation, “appeared to be some chamber. A sealed chamber. A prison? A vault? Perhaps it is still intact.”

  Cyrus studied the indicated section, the blueprint responded by expanding that portion, providing much greater detail. The chamber Cassandra indicated contained a central platform surrounded by equipment whose purpose remained obscure. Something about its configuration triggered a flash of recognition in him—not memory, but instinctual certainty.

  “It was a containment unit,” he said. The words emerged before he thought about it, and a dull shock rolled through his mind. He hadn’t thought he could talk or control his body while connected to the console. “Or… preservation. Something valuable was kept there.”

  Unsurprisingly, the others turned to him, their expressions curious, but Maija’s and Alor’s bore a touch of suspicion, too.

  “How do you know that?” Maija asked, unafraid to unveil her skepticism but also… willing to believe, given his connection to the terminal.

  “I just… know. Sorry. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but it's how it is. I know, the same way I know that this console is more than just an information terminal. It’s a key.”

  The chamber vibrated with each processed signal, the ancient systems working harder than they had in thousands of years. The concentric circles on the floor glowed in sequence, from outermost to innermost, creating a visual pulse that drew the eye inexorably toward the center where they stood.

  “A key to what?” Matti asked, his voice hushed with anticipation.

  The holographic display shifted again before Cyrus could respond. The blueprints receded, replaced by a single image that hovered before them with ominous clarity: a humanoid figure, neither fully organic nor fully mechanical, its form suggesting the midpoint of a transformation. Its features were indistinct, save for that its eyes glowed with unmistakable awareness.

  The image rotated slowly, revealing an inscription along its spine—the same script that adorned the console’s base. As the figure completed its rotation, the script briefly stabilized into legibility: “PROTOTYPE.”

  “That did not look like a historical record,” Cassandra observed, her hand instinctively baring an inch of Galatine’s blade from the sheath. “That looked like instructions.”

  The team exchanged glances, silently gauging the implications and the risks that materialized before them. The comfortable boundary between academic exploration and genuine danger had ceased to exist when topics broached the potential history of one of the Verses most genocidal factions.

  Alor groaned. “The Machina. Could this be their origin point?”

  Maija nodded grimly as if they had all been sentenced to death. “Or their destination? Is this the goal they endlessly seek through anomalies?”

  The hologram flickered, then stabilized into a new configuration—a map of sorts, with pulsing nodes connected by glowing pathways. One node burned brighter than the others, its position corresponding to the group's current location.

  “Its showing us something,” Matti said, one of his large fingers poking at a glowing spot. “Locations? Power sources?”

  “Or others like this,” Cyrus mused, but the words sounded too much like an undeniable truth, so much so that it shocked him. “Other facilities. A network.”

  The console beneath his hand grew warmer, almost fevered in its operation. The connection between his consciousness and the ancient system strengthened, allowing impressions to coalesce into a more coherent understanding. It wasn’t complete knowledge by any means, but it was enough to sense the magnitude of what they had stumbled upon.

  “I think—” Cyrus began, but the words were cut short by a series of harsh clanging sounds that echoed from a narrow passageway near the back of the chamber. The racket was mechanical, discordant, and unmistakenly in a rush.

  The holographic display flickered violently before it collapsed entirely, plunging the chamber into relative darkness that was relieved only by the console’s pulsing lights and Alor’s lantern. The timing felt deliberate rather than coincidental—as if security protocols had been enacted to protect its secrets from unwelcome observers.

  Galatine hummed with energy when the legendary blade sprang from its sheath, and Cassandra assumed a defensive stance.

  “We have company,” she stated with calm certainty, her green eyes fixed on the darkened passageway.

  The console beneath Cyrus’s hand emitted a final surge of warmth before rapidly cooling. Its lights dimmed to a muted glow that suggested dormancy rather than deactivation. Whatever connection he had established receded like a tide, leaving him with the frustrating sense of crucial information slipping forever from his reach.

  The clanging sounds grew louder and more rhythmic—the unmistakable cadence of coordinated movement approaching with mechanical precision. Their exploration had not gone unnoticed, and whatever watched over these ruins had decided to respond.