It felt so surreal, but I immediately felt so comforted. It was a building. It looked like it was carved into the side of the cave. It looked like the front of an office building. There was a small open area of the cave before the building. It was completely illuminated by the sun coming from straight over head. There was a lot of moss and grass growing in the center of the room under the sunlight. It was a very beautiful scene, like art of a post modern time. The building looked dilapidated, and completely dark on the inside.
"Well I can't really pass up an opportunity to go urban exploring, but it will have to wait until I have more time on my hands." I decided. As intriguing as the building was, I have to set up a camp before nightfall. I still have no fire or anything so daylight is an important commodity.
'I'll return to the cave from before and setup shop, then maybe tomorrow I'll have time to search through this abandoned place.'
After a few hours the sun had gotten closer to the horizon, and the camp was finished. A large assortment of branches and pieces of wood covered the mouth of the divot, and lots of grass and moss was laid on the ground to make a bed. For a door I just used a piece of larger wood on the side that I can remove to shimmy out of the hole. It wasn't great, or even good, but it would have to suffice. I tried to return to the hidden building but it was just too dim in the cave, there was no way I could explore the place if I couldn't find my way in or out. After a quick 20 minute trip to the pond, a not so great meal, and a 20 minute trip back, there was nothing left to be done for this day. I slithered back into my little hidey-hole and slept for the night.
Once morning came, I felt refreshed and ready to explore the abandoned structure. After a breakfast downstream, I returned when the sun started to get higher into the sky. I walked into the cave and once again saw the serene cave clearing. The scent of water and moss was abundant in the air. A slight draft came in from the cave entrance behind me. The sunlight from above was inching down into the cave as the sun moved across the sky. In front of me stood an abandoned facility, weathered by time. Just over half of the front face of the structure was visible, while the rest was covered by fangs of stone. It was like the earth was trying to consume the building whole. The facility was carved into the wall of this cave. While the majority of the building was gray, some faded yellow and blue paint that wrote out what looked like numbers or symbols. It was all so chipped that it was impossible to read them. The building had no other details on it except for one door in the center.
I walk past the mouth of the tunnel and into the opening cave. I can now see the clearing is somewhat circular, and has no other branching paths. I can now see that clovers and small flowers grow in the center of the room. I continued walking, and as I approach the doors I notice that there is no handle. As I walked up to examine the door, I heard mechanical systems whir to life in the door. The door then pushed out from the wall and slid to the side. It filled me with an eerie sense of wonder.
'how can something so worn down be so up to date?' I pondered, but the door continued opening.
Any other thought was washed away as a breeze of cold and stale air rushed out from the opening door. The dust flowing out was visible, flowing out in a gaseous state. Past the dust, there was only a wall of darkness. I slowly approach and stick my head through the doorway to find any visible light switches. As I passed over the threshold of the building, mechanical clicks rung out. At that moment, the world lit up.
A square room full of what looked like futuristic lockers appeared in front of me. Nothing was moving in the room, so I deemed it to be safe enough to enter. The room smelled of paint, but it was very faint. The lockers stretched across all for walls of the room, the only gaps in the lockers being the doorway I was in and another doorway on the other side of the room. The lockers were very bland, sharing the same dull gray as the exterior of the building. They had no outstanding features other than a dimmed screen on their surface. I walked to the closest locker and attempted to open it but it lead to nothing. No power was reaching these lockers. I decided to continue moving into the next room.
As I walked into the doorway, The lights simultaneously switch on to show a hallway with 3 different paths. The lights made a delicate hum as their pure white hue struck the completely black floor of the hallway. I walked forward towards the door directly ahead of me, passing by the two side paths. I gave a quick glace to both sides but I can see nothing through the curtain of darkness beyond the doorways at the end of the two hallways. The black doorway ahead of me grew closer, and then I passed the boundary.
Once again the lights flashed on but this time it illuminated a large circular research lab. at the center were terminals with keyboards, buttons, switches, and dozens of screens. surrounding the terminals was a circle of clear glass cabinets. All of them were broken, with glass covering the floors. Against the walls were numerous tables and bookshelves, filled with different experimental equipment and log books. The walls themselves were completely gray much like the rest of the building. The ceiling came up into a dome style roof with projectors coming down, all pointing at the center of the room. all the screens in the room were dim, the only light coming from fixtures on the walls, and some lights on the sides of the desks to illuminate the floor. It made the room feel eerie and dim.
I walked towards the center consoles of the room and examined the terminals, my footsteps echoing through the room. The terminals were extremely dusty, making it impossible to read any thing on the desk. I reached down towards a set of knobs and wiped away the area around them to see if they were labeled. I pulled my hand back, which now has a think layer of grime on it, only to see that I didn't recognize the words written around the knobs.
It was all written in a language I've never seen before. The most shocking part was that I felt the meaning of the words. I knew that one of these knobs meant to control voltage, another was meant to adjust pulse. It was bizarre to understand a language that I have no recollection of. My feeling of loss from before increased ten fold. There was no way to explain something like this to myself. Before I thought I may be lost in the wilderness somewhere relatively close my home city. Now not only must I be far from home, but I have no way to explain what this sensation of understanding comes from.
I begin to frantically look around and wipe away more and more labels, they all flowed into my head and filled me with the same strange sense of understanding. My entire experience leading up until this point felt all the more surreal. Where before I could leave the messy details up to my lack of world experience, I felt like maybe it was not my lack of experience but that I am in a place that I couldn't have known. A place that denied common sense. As similar as it may be, my sense of belonging is only becoming more and more estranged. Although I may not know some of the words meanings, I could read it aloud if I wanted to only from a glance.
"Where on earth… actually no, where the hell have I gone?" I joked
After a long moment of thought, I decided to move onto looking into the other rooms in this place. If there are dangers lurking in the shadowy corridors, I want to unveil them before I move on to investigating more about this room. After some time of examining the other rooms in this facility I found a barracks/mess hall, an exercise area, and an archive. The entire place was left in pretty good condition. The archives were connected to the lab room by another door at the opposite side of where I first entered it. the barracks and exercise room were on the ends of the branching hallways. No danger stood out to me, so I checked the time of the sun outside. It was midday at this point, and I decided to go back to the lab to find more information on this place. I first looked at the terminals and attempted to boot up the systems. This led to nothing, It seems like this place only has enough power to keep the lights on and the doors functioning. There is some circulating air but it felt uncomfortable, the thick smoke of dust making the air feel suffocating.
Around the room, dozens of shattered glass capsules left shards across the floor. Sprinkled among the shards were black lumps of debris.
'maybe this is what was in the containers?'
I bent over to pick up one of the pieces of dark rock to examine it, but as I got closer to a piece, it began to vibrate. I looked around to see if anything else was vibrating, but from the corner of my eye a flash of black flew up into my hand. A bizarre sensation filled me in that moment. It was like my body became new, but heavier. It felt as though a hole I never knew I had was filled. The feelings faded as fast as they came, and soon I was sitting down in a field of broken glass stupefied by the sensations. The rock that was on the ground before was gone now.
I looked to another clump nearby and began to reach for it, but it didn't vibrate like before. It remained motionless until I picked it up. I inspected it in my hand, moving it around to see every edge of it. It left dust wherever it touched on my hand.
'It reminds me of coal' I thought.
Maybe everything that happened before was a hallucination. It wouldn't be unreasonable. There is a lot of dust in here. In hindsight it probably wasn't very safe to be inhaling it like I was. I slipped the piece of coal into my pocket and rushed from the lab. After returning to the divot I called home, the sun was starting to wane into an afternoon glow. I decided to head downstream with my trusty mallet in hand to get food once again. Despite the grumbling of my stomach, I was brimming with energy. I rolled up the legs of my pants and sunk my feet in the riverbed. The water brushed across my calves, giving some cool relief after the walk over here.
After my ecstasy ended, I noticed a fish close by. I raised my mallet and prepared to strike. I felt the strength flowing through my whole body. As I swung I felt every part of the movement. I could feel the flow from my heart to my shoulders, to my arms, and to my hands. It all came together beautifully. As my mallet hit the water I felt the strength in my hands flow to the mallet, up the handle, and to the mallet head. At that very moment, the mallet exploded.
An explosion of water appeared, shooting with it splinters from my mallet. Mixed among the chaos was the remains of the fish, or what was once a fish. I shed a single tear in silence for the poor fish who was killed so brutally (and would no longer serve as sustenance for my stomach).
"What the hell was that?!"