“So maintenance, storage, or control center are our options, huh? I think we should start with the control center,” Kain stated. Neither of the other two had complaints, so they walked up to the furthest right room. The door was not any of the standard doors they had seen, but was a heavily reinforced blast door with thick sounding plating when tapped and no apparent marks. On the side of the door frame was a small device, almost identical to the boxy device in the hardware store that Kain and Luna looted. Before any of them could touch the screen of the box, a message appeared accompanied by the door opening.

[PROJECT ATZI Recognized: Welcome, scavenger]

The hidden locks built into the door snapped open and the blast door retreated into the walls beside it. The room that appeared was more similar to a meeting room in a major company’s office building than a hub of military intelligence. All four walls were screens, coming to life as their last viewers in a year appeared. The middle of the room was dominated by a black and blue table, stripes of each color arcing across the table, and surrounding it were similarly colored chairs. Atop it all was a layer of caked on dust an inch deep that covered every surface and even stuck to the screen walls. As they were looking, something began to glow in the center of the table. It shined through the dust, trying to reach the open air, but couldn’t.

Luna’s sharp, disfigured tongue swept across the table, removing most of the dust and sending the rest into the air. As soon as the dust was swept off of the table, a blue hologram shined into the air and hung in the center of the room. The hologram depicted the entire floating city of Dubai. It was a sprawling metropolis with perhaps thousands of buildings and covered over half of the land on the island. The rest of the land was made up of a barren desert with only a few shrubs dotting the land, separated by a series of chain link fences and watchtowers..

As Kain and Ythane were absorbing the details of the map Luna was off to the side retching. She had thought the creature she copied her tongue from had a poor sense of taste, as the blood from the grunt tasted like nothing but an aftertaste. In spite of her assumptions, her tongue stung with the disgusting flavor of dirt and age. Spitting on the ground, she wretched again. “Ugh… That was disgusting,” she muttered.

“I don’t know what you were expecting,” Kain said, turning to her, “I would have stopped you, but you seemed dead set on using your tongue. So much so that you swept the table before I could even fire off any Ether to blow it away.”

With his sentence, realization dawned on her and crashed into her. She put her head in her hands. “I didn’t think about that,” she groaned. “Why does it taste so bad, anyway? When I was a rabbit, dirt wasn’t that bad all things considered. Why now?” she whined.

Kain rubbed her head, making her annoyed grumbling stop for a moment. “Well, different tongues have different tastes. It can happen between humans, so it can happen between species. Your tongue from… whatever that thing was probably had different tastes,” he explained, with Luna nodding with understanding. “That, and dust is also-”

“Don’t tell her, it’ll only make her feel more sick,” Ythane interrupted. She spoke from above the table, her foot of length and crystal floating above it. She was staring at the holographic map that floated above the table, looking closely at the section of the map that was the lowest in the city. Before trying to look at the part of the map himself, Kain made a gesture that was similar to zooming in on a touch device into the air as a test. The map became larger, with the edges of the map falling away to make room for the newly zoomed in area. In the center of the zoom was a massive tower with a doubly massive basement, the whole structure showing the name ‘Nexus’. The hologram shows the branching labyrinths that spill from the main chamber, making them look like the roots of a tree. The paths start normally, branching off from the Nexus, but soon dissolve into confusing twists, turns, drops, and intersections. They find multiple routes that lead in circles, many that are dead ends that have nothing but a room at the end of the hallway, and many other maze-like designs. Zooming out, they saw that 7 of the paths lead into large rooms housing the same pyramid structures that Kain and Luna found under the plaza. Accompanying all of the tunnels, various rooms hung off of them like grapes on a vine. They were much more centralized around the Nexus and around the large chambers on the outskirts, but were still dotted around the spaghetti-like corridors that extended around the entire city. “Hmm… an interesting design choice…” Ythane mused.

“Which part? I think that there are plenty of interesting design choices,” Kain replied.

“Well, I have to begin by explaining the central thought process behind Duvalad defenses. Despite wisdom pertaining to Ethersteel in storehouses, the central philosophy behind our defenses is that we should keep all essentials close together so that nothing can reach anything essential. That is the thought process behind the outposts: keep the Duvalad, the most powerful warrior present, in the same place as the essential equipment and food. Even if the lower levels are breached and the military quarters destroyed, we will have the necessary materials to rebuild,” she explained.

Luna raised her hand and Ythane nodded to her. “What happens if someone just destroys the bottom layer? Wouldn’t everything be destroyed then?”

Ythane gave a sigh. “Indeed, that would be the case. In spite of that, we believe that anyone with the capabilities to annihilate enough of an Ethersteel tower to cause it to topple is an enemy better to fight as a group. While all of the delicate supplies in such an event would undoubtedly be destroyed, the Duvalad and Duvalid are made of sterner stuff, to quote an accomplished Duvalid drill sergeant. Ethersteel, you must understand, is a very delicate material to shape, but incredibly difficult to break. It takes time and focus to shape Ethersteel, time and focus that are both in short supply on the battlefield or when being pelted by bullets.”

A small, mundane realization dawned on Kain. “So that is why you use such an easily warped material then?”

Ythane gave a quizzical look. “Easily warped? In what way? It takes a great deal of time and effort to make even basic shapes with it. How is it easy to use?” she asked. The two stared at each other for a moment. Kain handed her a bar of Ethersteel from his amulet and she tried to shape it. Instead of following along with her Ether, the metal resisted a bit, but caved after a minute or two. Slowly, the material shaped itself into a cube over the course of half an hour. Once completed, Ythane stared at the cube, stunned. “How is this… It should have taken me an hour to do this…” she muttered.

“An hour? It took me a few minutes to cover this in it though,” he said, pulling out Luna’s floating deer skull. Luna, who had been staring off into space during Ythane’s work, snapped her head at the skull.

“Ah! The skull! Can I have it?” she asked. Kain absently nodded and handed her the skull.

“How did you…” Ythane muttered. “Wait… I think I know what is going on here.”

“Please, go on,” Kain urged.

“It may be a material that acts uniquely with people with a great deal of Ether… I have heard of those types of things, but to think that Ethersteel was one of them…” she mused.

“Is that so? How many rules regarding Ether and physical materials are there?” Kain asked.

“Too many,” she replied, “It becomes aggravating at points when one specific type of wood has a much higher Ether capacity than normal wood or one type of material becomes attuned much earlier than it should or whatever else you can think of.” Kain nodded in understanding. “Either way, we have gotten sidetracked. Where was I?”

“About the part where this place makes no sense and something about towers falling,” an muffled voice came from behind them. They turned to see Luna wearing the skull like a mask, tilting her head at their confusion.

Ythane nodded. “Right, that was it. Anyway, this place has too many places to defend and they are all too far apart. From what we can assume from the terminal, each of those massive rooms are the homes of massive banks of soul cubes. Hundreds of lives would be lost were an enemy to breach just one of those. And while it is true that there is a maze of corridors between one room and another, it just means that any fighting forces will either lead the enemy to the next rally point, defeating the purpose of the maze in the first place, or will be lost,” she said, going on a minor tirade.

Kain cleared his thought, which was not as clear a request for attention as he thought it would be, so he sheepishly raised his hand like Luna did. Ythane raised a scaly brow at his gesture, but nodded nonetheless. “Well, think about it. They are able to basically print soldiers in their Biomachine labs. I suspect that the only reason it took Luna as long as it did was that she needed time to learn about her new abilities. A being that simply runs off of instinct and reward chemicals would probably take half an hour, at most, to make combat ready. Also, if you look at most of the rooms in the corridors, you can see that they are basically just pods to keep the biomachines ready for combat. So what you have is a maze that is layered with ambushes, dead ends, and other weird designs and your destinations guarded by hordes of monsters with no regard for their lives.If that were not bad enough, I suspect that the storage room next door is supposed to be the home of their main defense force,” Kain explained.

Before Ythane could ask for his reasons, he continued, “The room next door is a massive room with at least a hundred times more space than any other storage closet. Suffice it to say that a room labeled ‘Mass Biomachine Storage’ would have its walls filled with the things.”

Ythane disgusted the insight, looking at the map as she did so. In the lull of silence, Luna piped up. “That just leaves one question.”

They waited for her to continue, but she simply looked at the map with a serious expression. Finally, Kain sought the answer, “And what wou-”

“Why did they design this place so stupidly!?” she asked, striking a dramatic pose. Kain stared at her grinning mug, which was either gloating about her prank or gloating about her intelligence.