Nia finished off her lesson with a sign-off to a military that hadn’t done anything for her, then just disappeared. The smoke came back in from the firepit in the middle in the blink of an eye, as if someone had cut together two different but similar video feeds of this same room. I glanced over my shoulder again to see that the claw marks glowing on the entrance were still off-kilter, so they hadn’t changed when Nia disappeared.

What the fuck was going on? “Keep an eye on the firepit. Tap me on the shoulder if anything changes.”

“While you watch the entrance. Gotcha.” Jun agreed with a nod that I caught out of the corner of my eye. “I’m ready when you are.”

I nodded and began to fast-forward through the rest of the lesson. At first, it seemed as if nothing at all would change. Hours flew by in minutes where absolutely nothing changed at all, the smokescreen created by the fire bellowing out its green-tinged power unceasingly as more and more molten rock dripped from the claw marks around the cavern. But no matter how much molten rock fell from the marks, and no matter how large the piles that formed on the ground grew, they never once seemed to grow deeper or larger. As if they were creating the rock out of thin air.

Which was an interesting detail, but didn’t help me figure out what was happening. Nia’s lesson left a lot to be desired, which didn’t seem right for something she could’ve re-recorded a hundred times over, and we were noticing inconsistencies within the recording itself. There had to be a reason for it, but as time flew by, I couldn’t notice any of them. The entrance stayed exactly the same for thirteen hours of footage. After changing multiple times within Nia’s lesson footage.

By hour nineteen of the footage, which was only around ten minutes real-time, I was growing increasingly concerned. There was something off about wherever Nia had filed her lesson, and it was infuriating that I couldn’t find a single connecting piece of evidence for the strangeness I’d seen. I was starting to suspect that the entrance blocking rock wasn’t really an entrance at all, but something completely benign that I’d latched onto out of the need to find something of significance in the strangeness of the lesson.

But maybe I had to admit that this was just… subpar. That Nia really hadn’t known how to create the things she preached, and that she just wanted the knowledge to get out into the world. Hell, maybe it was common knowledge among the Staura already and Okeria’s armor was already made with the same principles. He needed that slyk oil for something.

Even still, I kept watch on the entrance. It wouldn’t take that long to go through the rest of the footage, and I’d kick myself if we ended up missing something important just because I couldn’t handle another few minutes of annoyance with myself. My finger perpetually hovered over the fast-forward symbol, only a slight twitch away from speeding up the process. It was tempting.

Jun tapped my arm. “Seb. Something’s happening.”

My finger shifted ever so slightly and paused the lesson. I swiveled around to see excitement etched onto Jun’s face, her arm that wasn’t tapping mine outstretched to point at whatever the hell was happening to the fire. It was frozen in a state of growth, the branches of flame that reached out to lick the edges of the cavern ten times the size they had been moments ago. It had only spread a few feet away from the fire at that point, which had taken minutes in real-time even though Jun had witnessed it in seconds.

“What the fuck is that?” I asked, unpausing the lesson to let it play out in real-time. The branches expanded like those long balloons people used to make animals out of, puffing up in a very uniform expansion that looked like something was being forced through them. “Did Nia make them do that?”

“I don’t know.” Jun murmured, watching transfixed as the skeletal network before us blossomed. She let out little ‘eep’ as more and more tendrils branched out from the existing ones, forking and multiplying over and over again until the room was as crowded as a thicket of brambles. Smoky, glowing brambles.

Somehow, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen something like this before. I had no idea where, or how that was fucking possible, but all these branching and interconnecting lines… it was as if this place was becoming its own little neural network. A tiny, primitive brain.

“But that’s impossible.” I said to myself, watching as the bloated tendrils shrunk back down to their original size as they let loose more and more of their branches. “Do Staura even have brains?”

“Rude.” Jun snorted. “Yes, we have brains. Maybe not like what a human has, whatever that is, but we do have brains. And this place does look like some of the brain scans I saw during my training…”

“What? Why would your training make you look at brain scans?” I asked, then shook my head. “No, no, that’s not important. Are we in the middle of some giant monster gaining sentience? Did Nia do this?”

“Why are you asking me? I don’t know anything.” Jun said warily, contorting so that the lines of green fire wouldn’t pierce through her. “Fast-forward through this. We still don’t know why everything seemed so off.”

I raised an eyebrow at Jun’s sudden desire to be out of this place, then did as she asked. She yelped and jumped as the green lines pierced through her chest, doing absolutely no damage as we were in a recording, then continued to spread and multiply until there was almost no room left in the cavern at all. I looked down at the time remaining in the lesson and saw that we were entering the last hour of it, then checked over my shoulder to see if the entrance had changed.

Piles of molten rock crept up from the floor to meet the green lines, and where they did, the two fused into something different altogether. The glassy substance that was created shimmered and pulsed with an inner glow that flickered like firelight, and it stretched all the way up one of the green tendrils in a heartbeat to coat almost everything. Less than ten seconds passed, and all of the molten rock was gone. All of the green tendrils were glassed over, and visible pulses of yellow-green flowed through like electrical signals.

The entrance was gone. That part of the wall had seamlessly fused together, leaving nothing but a confusing reminder of what we’d seen. And a single symbol etched onto the middle of it that I recognized immediately. I’d been looking at it less than an hour ago, after all.

“Nia’s core.” I said with utter confusion, taking in the molten flower-thing that was burned into whatever this place was. “What the fuck does all of this mean?”

Jun gripped my sleeve and pulled me back to looking at the fireplace. She was oddly intense in her silence, forcing me to stare at the circle of algae-like fire as the glass finally reached it. After a few moments, I still wasn’t sure what she wanted me to see. I narrowed my eyes and studied every inch of the stones, of the firepit, and the lazily flowing flames that seemed to be caught in an endless current.

“Not the fire.” She whispered reverently, gently placing her hand on my head and tilting it down ever so slightly. “Look at what’s under all of it.”

I glanced down ever so slightly and felt my mouth go dry. There was a perfect square of clawed stone under the fireplace. With marks that didn’t match up with the ones around it. I couldn’t put into words what my mind was trying to understand, which led to me having absolutely no clue what the fuck I was supposed to do with this new information. It didn’t add to the other discontinuities. It didn’t solve any questions we’d had about Nia’s lack of knowledge for something that was supposed to be a ‘lesson’. Most of all, it just made no fucking sense.

Everything went black.

“...Is that really it?” Jun asked. “That was a lot, but almost nothing at the same time.”

“Yeah, that’s the end of lesson two. Where we learned a trick with our interface maps, that we should be wearing underarmor, and that we could be making better armor. We–”

I reached out to hit the pause button, but stopped halfway there. The time was past what the lesson said it was supposed to be. Way, way past what it was supposed to be. In less than ten seconds, the lesson had somehow gone for another two years. Which could mean that this darkness wasn’t the darkness of a lesson being done, but a natural darkness. Whatever the hell that could be.

The sound of muffled footsteps echoed through the darkness, followed by a long, tired sigh. “Attempt number thirteen.” Nia said with obvious exhaustion. “It has been three months since Inopsy disappeared off the face of the world. I have combed every hazard we visited in the past few years, and even now that I am triple-checking the hidden parts, I have yet to find even a single trace of him.”

My world blinked into colour, and I saw Nia’s fully armored form sitting on a flat rock on the opposite side of a small fire. A small fire which was made with the same strange rocks as the one in the cavern had been.

“If anybody is seeing this, stay away from the Crushbone Desert. The hazard has become unstable along with Inopsy’s disappearance, and what was previously a treasure trove of materials has become a deathtrap.”

Nia reached out and picked us up, whirled us around, and set us facing what looked like an inverted waterfall. “Physics no longer function as they should. What was once a cavern for mining a resource I used to explain the lesson you just saw has turned into a monstrosity that roams the wasteland, destroying everything in its path. I have tried over and over again to subdue it. I have succeeded twelve times. Yet again and again it regenerates, growing a new mind somewhere else in the hazard.”

“This will be my last attempt.” Nia said, her voice growing hard and full of sadness. “If you were only here for the lesson, I apologize for its shortness and lack of detail. But if you are here from the investigative corps, and are reviewing the footage to help find Inopsy, I have provided two days worth of footage from inside one of the mind-caverns before it gained consciousness.”

“Please help me find him.”