Buried (Part 4)
The door in the cave (location 15,14) is open. Search and carry out what left.
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~ start a1f2793e…
The generator holds its note behind you. Three doorways off the corridor, and nothing in any of them has been touched since the ceiling came down.
initYou go back up the rope with your hands empty.
fimThe door gives on the second shove and you're standing in a corridor with poured walls and a strip light coming up dim overhead.
Sixty feet of it. Three doorways off one side. No dust in the air - the seal held.
This wasn't dug out and abandoned. Somebody lived down here.
There's a boot tray by the door with one pair in it. A cup on a shelf with a ring dried in the bottom. A calendar on the wall, and the calendar is wrong by seventy-odd years.
Whatever the man who did this was working on, he did it here, alone, for a long time - and then he brought the ceiling down over the only way out and stayed.
Wren needs what's in these rooms. All of it.
quest: accepted
You start at the near door and work down.
initquest: declined
You pull the door to behind you. It doesn't latch. Nothing down here latches anymore.
fim~ init
set puzzle_a = "unsearched"set puzzle_b = "unsearched"set puzzle_c = "unsearched"~ rooms
The corridor. Three doors, and the light holding steady as long as the fuel does.
room_workroomroom_quartersroom_tapefinishYou leave it where it is. It waited this long.
fim~ room_workroom
set puzzle_a = "searched"A long bench, two chairs, and every foot of wall given over to work.
Charts pinned three deep. Curves drawn, redrawn, and drawn again over the top in a different colour. Corrections in the margins, and corrections to the corrections.
Most of it is crossed out. Not scribbled over - ruled through, once, neatly, the way a man crosses out something he has finished being wrong about.
The dates run ten years. The handwriting gets worse the whole way.
The notebooks are stacked at the end of the bench, squared off, waiting. Eleven of them.
The last one is open to a page with four lines on it and the rest blank.
rooms~ room_quarters
set puzzle_b = "searched"A cot, a hotplate, a shelf of tinned food with the labels gone. Somebody's whole life in eighty square feet, kept tidy the way people keep things when tidiness is the only thing they still control.
There are tally marks scratched into the plaster beside the pillow, at the height of a man lying down.
They run the length of the wall in blocks of five. Then they stop, in the middle of a block, and never start again.
A photograph propped against the lamp. Instant film, the white border gone the colour of tea. Six people outside a concrete building, squinting into the sun.
Second from the left, an old man. Grey, thin, standing like his back hurts. One eye gone, the lid sunk in over it. Nobody gets old out here without losing something.
His face is rubbed pale. Somebody held this photograph in the same place, with the same thumb, for years.
rooms~ room_tape
set puzzle_c = "searched"Instrument bay. Racks bolted to the floor, cable runs overhead, dials pointing wherever they were pointing when the power went.
None of it is pre-war salvage. Somebody built this here, from parts, by hand.
A reel-to-reel sits at the end of the bench with tape still threaded through the heads, wound most of the way onto the take-up spool.
Whatever's on it, he recorded it last and never rewound it.
There's no player down here you can trust with it, and no time to find out.
Wayne has the machines for this. Wren has the reason.
rooms~ finish
There's a box under the workroom bench, half full of blank paper he never got to. You tip it out and fill it instead - notebooks, charts, the reel, the photograph off the lamp.
It comes to less than you expected. A decade of a man's life, and the box goes under one arm.
conclui a missãoAt the door you look back down the corridor with the light still holding.
He sealed himself in here with his work and kept the place tidy for ten years. Then the tally marks stop mid-block, and there's no body in any of these three rooms.
You received an item Box with Documents
Wren is going to want to see this. You're less sure she's going to want to read it.