Angel hopped into the chair in front of the monitor. Then he paused, squinting up at the runes. There was clearly a passcode of some sort to access the terminal. “Ah… I don’t suppose you happen to know this?”

Lilian shook her head, rising to her feet and walking to stand beside him. She tapped several of the runes on the screen in quick succession. With a small ding, it flashed and revealed a plain model of a man’s head.

“Welcome back, Cowl,” the head said, turning to look straight at Cowl. Angel frowned, glancing around to see if he could spot what the face was using to locate them but failing to find it. “What information would you like me to retrieve?”

Lilian glanced at Angel. “What do you want to start with?”

“The location of the artifacts you’ve got in here,” Angel said without an ounce of hesitation. “Relics too, if you’ve got them.”

“We didn’t just have a bunch of relics sitting around,” Lilian said with a scoff. “If they were that easy to come across, we wouldn’t have been sacrificing people to power the Buried Gods. As for artifacts... Open my door, please.”

One of the seven doors clicked open at her words. The face gave Lilian a small nod. “I have unlocked your room. Is there anything else you would like?”

“Not right now. Remain on standby,” Lilian replied, gesturing for Angel to follow her and walking towards the cracked open door. Angel did as she requested, peering over her shoulder as they approached the room.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but Lilian’s room didn’t shock him in the slightest. It was plain, like a large metal box with a bed and a desk. There were no furnishings or any signs of life. It looked worse than a prison cell.

“Wow, your taste for decoration is absolutely atrocious,” Angel said, glancing around. He was wary of Lilian, but at least for the time being, he was relatively sure she would work with him. “You lived here for six hundred years and couldn’t even put a drawing on the wall or something?”

“Not all six hundred years,” Lilian said. “I spent almost all of my time in the Reawakening as a field agent – usually inside a city, manipulating a government official. This is just one of our bases. The largest one, but it’s been a while since we last stayed here. I wouldn’t have brought you here if I knew the rest of the Reawakening still frequented it.”

She walked over to her desk and reached underneath it. There was a small click as lines of light lit up behind the walls, briefly illuminating the room. The wall on the far side rumbled, lowering to reveal a thin passageway.

“Ooh, fancy,” Angel said. “Wait, let me guess. You’ve got whips and chains down there?”

Lilian scoffed, but it turned into a small laugh at the end. She headed into it with Angel close behind her. It didn’t last long, and they soon emerged into a long hallway. It was dark, but as soon as Lilian set foot within it, rows of glass tubes on the wall hummed to life with faint green light.

The floor was strewn with, at first glance, what looked to be metal scrap. There was so much of it that Angel couldn’t even see the actual floor through the layer of trash on top of it. It was everything from discarded motors to broken glass tubes to weapons.

“Better kinds of toys,” Lilian said. “Artifacts. Nothing too amazing, so don’t get too excited. Most of this is artifacts that were damaged. Soul was meant to fix them, but when he went missing, we didn’t bother moving anything.”

Angel knelt, picking up a dagger with some basic rune work on the hilt. There was a scar going clean through several lines of the runes, rendering it useless. He tossed it back to the ground and let out a slow whistle. “It could take me a year to go through all of this and catalogue all of it.”

“So can you do anything with it?”

He rubbed his hands together, excitement building as a gleeful laugh slipped out of his lips. “Do anything? This is amazing, Lilian! Wait, do you prefer Cowl or Lilian? Are you even a woman? Now that I’m no longer considering blowing your brains out, I’m kind of confused.”

Lilian’s skin rippled like a pool of water, molding and flowing as her chin grew square and her chest gained muscle. Her body morphed until she looked like a gruff warrior. “Would you prefer I look like this?”

“I don’t care what you look like,” Angel said, grimacing. “I just need to figure out what to think of you as. It’s getting all jumbled in my head.”

She chuckled, turning back to her female appearance. “This is what I looked like before I joined the Reawakening. I thought it might be apt to return to it now that I’ve left. I don’t know if I have any true claim to either gender anymore. I just… am.”

“A woman you are, then. Let me know if you change your mind,” Angel said, perching on a large plate and digging a box out of the trash around him. Tubes hung from it, disconnected and covered with dried greyish liquid. He scanned over it, making note of any runes he didn’t recognize.

Lilian watched him work for several minutes before sitting down near the entrance. She picked up the dagger he’d discarded and examined it. “So, what now? You said it yourself, looking through this could take you a year.”

“Why do you care?” Angel asked, glancing away from the cube and cocking his head to the side with a small grin. “All you want is to live, right? It shouldn’t matter what happens to everyone else in the desert. Unless you actually care about others, and your whole selfish act isn’t completely true.”

Lilian crossed her arms and let out a sharp breath. Angel laughed and returned his attention to the artifact, completely ignoring her. He managed to get nearly ten more minutes of work in before Lilian threw her hands into the air.

“Fine! I might feel the slightest bit bad about what I’ve helped the Reawakening do, and I don’t want more of it to happen. But what about your whole speech about caring for people? You should be the one rushing!”

“I am rushing,” Angel said, setting the box down and prying at it with his mechanical hand. “But I’m not going to run blind. I need every bit of magic I can get my hands on if we want to stand against the rest of the Reawakening. You said two were missing, and you just left, so that leaves them with… 4 members, right?”

Lilian nodded. Angel tore the box open with a screech of metal on metal and peered inside it, cataloging the runes.

“So you’re going to stay here until you learn enough to challenge them?”

“Of course not,” Angel said. “Do you really think I’d leave valuable information behind? I’d never forgive myself. No, I’m not leaving here without every last scrap of knowledge I can get my hands on.”

“But–”

Angel reached into his bag and pulled out the System artifact. It snapped open at his touch, scanning both him and Lilian before letting out a low hum.

“I’m Wonderful,” Angel said, rolling his eyes as the orb gave him a cheerful chirp. “You’ve got a scanner, right?”

“That is correct,” The orb said, its merry voice crackling as it rose into the air. “I am equipped with a basic analysis tool for the purposes of identifying objects and creatures charged with magical energy.”

“Wonderful,” Angel said. “Go memorize every single rune you can find in this room. Set aside any object with a rune that doesn’t show up frequently. Don’t bother with anything I’ve already looked at – I’ll make a pile behind me.”

The orb crackled, floating slightly lower than it had been. “Oh. You don’t have something important to scan?”

“I do have something important to scan,” Angel said. He pointed at the garbage on the ground surrounding him. “And it’s all over the floor. Don’t worry, we’ll get to scan big scary stuff soon enough.”

That seemed to perk the artifact up, and it floated to the far end of the hall. Blue light washed out from it, following Angel’s instructions. Compared to him, it was nearly sprinting. Even still, there was so much in the room that it wasn’t going to be a quick task.

“I’ll stay here a week,” Angel said. “That’s enough time for me to figure out everything I need to know while not losing too much time. Fair?”

Lilian nodded. “Yeah. That’s fair. Is there a way I can help?”

“Unless you know runes, not here. However, there’s probably some interesting information in the Reawakening’s database. Can you try to compile anything relevant?”

“Yeah. I can do that,” Lilian said. “Good luck. I hope you find something useful.”

“So do I,” Angel said, setting the box aside and picking up a small metal broach with miniscule wings poking out from either side. “For all of our sake, so do I.”