I waited for someone to volunteer to go in, but nobody did. Which was strange, since it didn’t feel like the room was too dangerous. I turned and glanced back into the darkness and pooled a ball of hydra petal-scales in my hand, which glowed gently against the dark, then threw it into the room.

The dim glow illuminated a fairly large amount of furniture and strange fixtures jutting out from what seemed to be the walls, but if that was the case, then the rest area was only a few feet wide. Which, according to the map, it definitely wasn’t. My function splattered against a half-wall and kept slowly moving, until it ground to a halt and formed into the two-headed creature I had some control over. It swiveled around and nipped at the air as if tasting it, then turned to look at me and yawned before it flopped to the ground and curled up.

“Looks pretty safe to me.” Jun noted as she walked up beside me. “And I hate to say this, but do we have time to explore this place? Scalovera could come for us at any second, and we don’t know what Endra’s doing.”

Okeria hummed in thought as he joined us. “You don’t need ta worry about that; I’ve got all the surveillance we need, and I’ll make sure we’re in the place we need ta be if the time comes. Just don’t overexert yourselves so ya can’t fight when that happens, ya hear?”

“I’m not sure how we could do that in an empty room, but it might not be an empty room.” I said as I stepped into the darkness of the rest area. A strange sensation welled up while I was in between places, but it left the second I was fully through the not-quite-teleporter. I looked over my shoulder at Jun and Okeria, then past them to Mortician. “You coming, Mortician? Or do you need some time for yourself?”

“Us? We are coming.” Mortician said quickly. They jogged to catch up as Jun and Okeria crossed the boundary, which let Okeria in without any fuss. So he didn’t need clearance as long as one of us opened the way for him.

I stood aside and let the three of them pass, then pressed my hand to the wall next to the torn metal. It creaked and groaned like a metal scaffolding in the wind, then sewed itself shut with strands of red-white power until it was one solid piece of wall. As if it hadn’t opened in the first place.

“Well, this is cozy.” Okeria noted sarcastically as he summoned a light from his inventory. It burned away the darkness, revealing what I’d only gotten a small glance of as I’d summoned my hydra. “Hm. This must be a small section of the rest area, not the entire thing. Or Acasiana really leaned into makin’ this place really tiny.”

There was no argument from me there. The entire place was a little larger than the average apartment’s floor plan, but it was filled to the brim with cluttered furniture made from strange red-white pulsing roots that emerged from the floors, walls, and ceiling. A row of armchairs with cushions made of something that looked like clear leather stuffed with stone feathers sat facing a desk on the other side of the room, and there were screens all over the place that had some kind of numbers burned into them. Tables and huge water coolers that dropped down from the ceiling like small reservoirs were positioned around the room, almost like the place was designed for people to sit, watch something, and wait until their number was called.

“It looks like a waiting room.” I muttered as I reached up and tapped on one of the thin, pure black screens. Well, maybe ‘screen’ wasn’t the right word; it was a slate of rock inscribed with many Staura symbols on the back. With no spaces to input anything. “Was this place open to the public way back then?”

Okeria snorted in amusement. “If it was, I would’ve heard somethin’ about it. Nah; this place was so private that this don’t make no sense.”

“Maybe it wasn’t open to the public. But that doesn’t mean Acasiana didn’t have visitors.” Jun theorized. She tapped her fingers against the same slate-screen I was checking out, then swiped them along to some pattern I couldn’t make out. “We’re supposed to turn on the power, right? Well, I don’t see anything like that around here.”

“Must be some other way ta get deeper.” Okeria said. “I’m bettin’ there’s a hint here, but we shouldn’t think of it like a puzzle. This was somewhere people went ta train and do… other stuff I can’t think of right now. Best I can guess is either do what ya did ta get us in here again, or see if there’s anythin’ behind the desk that opens up a door.”

“We are already ahead of you!” Mortician suddenly popped up from behind the desk. “There is nothing but files behind here, most of which have become illegible from years of decay. However, there is a roll of numbers set in a glass cylinder.”

They held up the cylinder in question for emphasis. Small white marbles clattered about inside of it, each of which was inscribed with a single red symbol. Staura numbers that my system wasn’t translating for some reason. I tapped the side of my helmet as if that would solve anything, but of course it didn’t.

Jun nodded and beckoned for Mortician to throw her the cylinder. She caught it in one hand, then shook it while she stared intently at its contents. Then she looked up and scanned the room–specifically the three slates positioned around it.

“Each of the slates has a specific number burned into it. Probably whatever was the last thing on them before the power went out.” She thought out loud, then flicked her finger against the closed cylinder. It split open just like the wall had, and she reached inside to pull out a marble with a symbol that matched one of the screens. “If it's anything like the other waiting rooms I’ve been in, this should be the next number that’s called. We just need to find out how to call it.”

She reached in and pulled out three other numbers, two of which matched the other screens’ symbols. She handed those to Okeria and Mortician, then put the one that didn’t match anything else in mine. I held it up and raised an eyebrow at her, which she didn’t see.

“Why this one?”

Jun tilted her head to the side. “The system isn’t translating the numbers for you?”

I shook my head. “Not these, for some reason. Say it out loud so it does, please.”

“Right. I have zero-zero-two, Okeria has one-hundred and nineteen, and Mortician has three-hundred and fifty-three.” She listed off, then opened her interface and twisted the map towards me. I saw that each of the facilities now had a number, from 000 on the one we were in and going up by one-hundred for each satellite. “There definitely aren’t a thousand marbles in here, so I bet the others are in the other facilities. Or I’m misrepresenting this completely. Yours is number five-hundred and twenty-one, which is just a random one I picked out.”

“Okay. Why?” I asked as I spun the marble between my fingers. “We only have access to the gardens and this place, and we need to turn the power on. Why bother with anything but the zero-something-somethings?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just making sure everyone has one.”

A good enough reason when I couldn’t think of anything truly logical. I nodded and sent my marble into my inventory, then turned to Okeria. “Can you feel any electricity in this place?”

He shook his head. “Nothin’ at all. It’s completely blacked out, which either means the power’s gone absolutely dry or it never ran on electricity in the first place. Which would be strange, but I’m not countin’ that one out just yet.”

“Guess that means we’re cutting open another wall.” I walked through the rows of furniture and standing water that I wasn’t going to risk drinking. A quick swipe opened my map, and I saw that I was standing on the very furthest corner of the rest area. “There’s something beyond that wall there. Either we break it down, or we find a way to open it. Anything else behind that desk, Mortician?”

One hand raised above the desk while the rest of their body was obscured. They raised one finger for me to wait, then pulled their hand back down and continued rummaging through whatever was behind there. I crossed my arms and leaned against one of the huge rootbound reservoirs of water, which sent a cooling calm through me that emerged from my lips as a contented sigh.

Two small boxes clattered to the top of the desk. Mortician followed shortly after with a pair of thin white metal rods with tips that looked like they’d been stained with bright red waxy ink. “We found these, whatever they are. Our assumption is that they were made to inscribe the marbles with their numbers, but that does not explain why they are marbles instead of a simple digital system-bound signature.”

They stuck one rod into the first box, then quickly pulled it free. The dried tip shone with freshness, but the red didn’t look like it had changed at all. It was more like it had begun once again after being stopped for so long. Then they stuck it in the second one, and the red paused once more.

“Whatever they are, they’re important enough to be overly complicated.” Okeria chuckled as he walked over to Mortician and picked up the unpausing box. He spun it around in his hand, hummed to himself in through, then pressed down hard on both sides.

It split open like a boxy flower. Inside was a single pad of brilliant red wax surrounded by so many symbols I didn’t recognize and a mass of thin white strands that could’ve been small roots or fungal growth. They pulsed and shivered like they were alive, and Okeria nodded to himself as if he’d expected exactly that.

He turned to Jun and held out a hand. “Gimme your marble. I’ve got a feelin’ we were lookin’ at this wrong.”