Jun’s theory held as much water as anything else I could’ve thought of. The only problem was that we hadn’t found anywhere for the seed to go. Mortician turned the manual around to face themselves and began flipping through it on their own. Something about the book fascinated them beyond what I could understand, and I wasn’t about to stop them from finding something out that we might’ve missed.

I swept a little debris from something or another off my arm and scoured the room yet again. There had to be something else we were missing. Whoever had spoken to us through the system was nowhere to be found. If this was the true control room, there would’ve been more evidence of someone using this place. And the mountain looked fucking huge from the wasteland, not this small-ish room we were trapped in.

Maybe we could blast through this room like we did the other. I tapped my chest and poured oil into my armor, then summoned my weapon as a hammer and coated it in petal-scales. Jun tilted her head to the side in a silent question as she stepped out of the way, and gestured for me to do whatever it was I was going to do.

“If the hazard tries to attack us for this, be ready to pull us out of here.” I warned her.

She nodded and waved me off. “If all the hazard can manage here is the same kind of stuff the spheres summoned, then I’m not really worried. And if you need some more firepower, let me know.”

I nodded and shifted my hammer over my shoulder. Needing her firepower wasn’t an ‘if’; it was a ‘when’. The petal-scales coalesced over the head of my hammer as I walked over to the nearest wall coated in old-looking strangeness, and I brought it down with as much force as I could muster.

The wall exploded in plastic and stone. Shards and dust rained down around me as I stood there in utter disbelief, completely unprepared for how easily I’d just demolished the thing that stood between us and whatever the next room was. An awkward cough escaped my lips as I leaned forward to look into the massive hole I’d just made, and what stared back at me was just as strange as the old-tech room itself.

A massive entrance hall, with tall columns and tattered banners run ragged with dust unfurled itself before me. All of it was made of the same stone as every non-plastic thing in this hazard had been, and the banners flickered and changed like breathing flames instead of cloth. A hole led outside of the mountain off to my right, and from that hole, a trail of barely different stone made a walkway to what might’ve been a giant throne at some point. Now, though, it was a pile of rubble with scraps of flame-like cloth wrapped around it like a funeral shawl.

Completely different than the room we currently stood in. And something about it gave me the wrong feeling. Not a horrible feeling, or a sense of looming dread, but the feeling that it didn’t matter in the slightest for this hazard. It felt like a final boss room, but the hazard itself seemed like it could go on forever. So… more like a hidden out-of-bounds room that nobody was ever supposed to find.

Jun leaned over my shoulder and took a look around. “Well, it looks impressive. But I really doubt we’re going to find wherever the symbiotic seed’s supposed to go in there.”

“Agreed.” I nodded and stepped back to let her take a better look. “I bet there’s some kind of treasure in there, but there could also be this hazard’s interpretation of one of your gods. And call me a pessimist, but I don’t think we’re anywhere close to strong enough to kill a god.”

“Maybe one of the weaker ones.” Jun said cheekily. She raised her gun and fired at the throne rubble. The shot echoed weakly against the stone in a spray of sparks, then completely disappeared. “Well, it’s not triggered by violence, whatever it is. So what are we doing? Do we keep looking around the room, or do we say we move on?”

I crossed my arms and leaned back against a table. There was no way we’d exhausted everything this room had to offer, but I wasn’t sure that we had the right tools to get everything out of it. Maybe one of the future combats would give us an empty tablet that we could put the symbiotic seed into. Or one of the spheres was actually missing something important, but because we hadn’t actually fought the big version of the monster it was supposed to summon, we didn’t know what was missing.

Well, there was no point in theorizing. The plastic room was a control room, but it didn’t seem like ‘the’ control room. That room had to be where the voice of the hazard was coming from, and I had a feeling that was where the symbiotic seed was supposed to be used. I opened my interface and zoomed out ever so slightly from my current position.

Only three rooms appeared in the mountain’s massive outline. The safe room, the summoning room, and the hall. The hall connected to the outside and ran about a quarter of the mountain’s length. Our room was a pittance in comparison. One that couldn’t even compare to the hall, and that definitely couldn’t be responsible for summoning everything we’d fought out in the blasted wasteland.

“Sebastian, what do you make of the woman in these pictures?” Mortician asked from off to my right. I turned to see them gesturing at the aging pictures of the employee, then back down at the manual.

“You’ll have to be a little more specific.” I said as I joined them in looking at the wall of pictures. “She looks like a Staura that worked here for a long time. But that’s not what you’re getting at, is it?”

Mortician shook their head slowly. “No; what we are confused about is that there were absolutely no Staura in what was our home. The hazard took inspiration from Staura culture, history, and myths, but it did not have any Staura inside of it. No photos, no bodies, no records.”

I nodded along to what Mortician was saying. “Yes, that’s true. But we’ve only been in three hazards. One that probably shouldn’t have existed, one that was as much Celaura as it was Staura, and this one. Maybe the inspiration’s different because it’s based on something that’s supposed to happen in the future, not something that happened in the past.”

“We do not know.” Mortician sighed in frustration. They flipped between two pages of the book, and their gaze was split equally between the book and the wall. “There is something about the fact that this appears to be a completely normal Staura that does not sit well with us. Like an extremely vivid memory within the chaotic miasma of a nightmare.”

They reached out and gently tapped on the bottom of one of the pictures. I leaned in close to see what they’d just tried to point out to me, but all I could see was a slightly ornate border right next to the picture frame. An ornate border that reminded me of the non-translated instances of the Staura language I’d seen.

“For Matria Acasiana Rambola, who has been my closest friend for all of these long decades.” I read slowly. “I thank you for staying where all the others left, for loving where hate flourished, and for innovating in a time of great stagnation. B1, C4, H6.”

I blinked in surprise and leaned back. “Grid coordinates? Why are there grid coordinates hidden in someone’s portrait?”

It hit me almost immediately. I turned and took in the room for what felt like the first time; all of the spheres were stuck to the tables. As long as a table had a sphere stuck to it, it couldn’t be moved. And they were in perfect rows with each other. Maybe we weren’t just supposed to put all of the tablets in; we were supposed to put the right tablets in.

Or we were supposed to put all the tablets in, and we were only supposed to spin the right ones. That actually made a little more sense. “Jun, can you come here?”

Her footsteps approached, and she leaned against me when she arrived. “Did you and Mortician find something else?”

I nodded and gestured at the portraits. “This person. Do you recognize her or her last name from anywhere?”

Jun leaned in to read the small print. After a moment, she tilted her head to the side and hummed in thought. “I think I remember her from somewhere. But if she’s been here for decades, it’d have to be from recordings, or old books, or maybe my history lessons…”

She reached out and gently brushed the bottom of the portrait, as if to make the perfectly clear glass clearer. “No, not there. I definitely recognize the name, though; Rambola isn’t super common back home, but it’s the name of one of the super military families. Almost all of their kids get sent to the all-world at one point or another, and a few of them came back. Is… is that where I recognize her from? Did she give a speech to my class?”

“How could she have given a speech to your class?” Mortician asked curiously. “She appears to have been trapped inside of this hazard for an elongated period of time. And if we make the assumption that she is the one who was speaking to us through the system–which leaves the other presence she spoke to as the hazard itself–she seems to hold far more power over this place than any normal person would.”

“I know. It just feels… right.” Jun sighed in frustration. She crossed her arms and shifted her weight to her heels, then moved on to the second portrait in the series. “This one says the exact same thing, but it has different numbers. A6, B3, and D2. Should we try spinning the spheres in that order?”

“We should make sure the pictures are in proper order before we attempt that.” Mortician flipped their manual over to another page and pressed their finger to it. I leaned over to see what they were pointing out and saw a string of eight rectangles placed vertically down the side of the page. “If the manual is to be trusted, it would seem that only eight of the portraits are to be used. Which is far, far less than we see before us.”

A quick count gave me an exact number of twenty-four portraits. Exactly three times more than Mortician thought we needed to use. I took a step back and surveyed as many of the portraits as I could; they were all different–some slightly, and some far more so–but they all displayed the same woman. Just as it was before, some of them looked far older than the others. And some of the younger ones looked to be around Jun’s age.

“What if they’re in the wrong order, too?” I wondered aloud. “How are we supposed to find the right order and which ones are fakes? Are we missing some parameters we’re supposed to be following?”

Mortician nodded. “Almost certainly. The manual appears to have far more information than we thought, though it is all in strange pictographs and splotches of colour and texture. If we find anything we think could be of help, or that we truly cannot make sense of, we will tell you.”

With that, Mortician backed up a few steps and jumped up on a plastic table right next to a sphere. It didn’t even shudder under the weight of their armor, confirming my thought that the ones with spheres stuck to them were infinitely sturdier than their fellows. It also lit a thought in my mind.

The rows and rows of spheres weren’t exactly uniform. They all only existed in perfect rows and columns with each other, but not every single space was filled. If I took the upper left corner of the room as ‘A1’, and the letters continued in a column downward while the numbers continued to the right in a row, then the first anomaly was almost instant.

A1, B1, and D1 were all sphere-d. But C1 had nothing. And though A2, B2, and C2 all had spheres, D2 was empty. And D2 was one of the coordinates on the second portrait.