“Oh fuck,” I whispered, struck by the sight of the skull. Though I had spoken as quietly as I dared, my voice still echoed through the enormous hall I’d found myself in. The expletive bounced off the walls and returned to me endlessly, making me wince from the choice.

  Fuck…

  Fuck…

  Fuck…

  I felt like I’d just defiled a tomb. Not just from the words.

  But from my mere presence.

  I took a shuddering breath to calm my nerves and inspected the inside of the…coffin, I suppose.

  The interior of it was padded with what, to my eye, looked to be cushioned plastic of some kind. More than anything else in this…thing, it had held up the best over what must have been centuries of degradation. Still, it was fraying at the seams, and underneath it, I could see what appeared to be extremely advanced circuitry. Something far more advanced than anything that would have been found on Earth. The electronics appeared to snake their way all through and underneath the rusted metal shell of whatever this was.

  Looking closer at the entire thing, and doing my best not to focus on the occupant, I could see that there was a kind of control station set to the right of each tube. Set on it was what looked to be a…flat screen panel of some kind. When I reached out and cautiously tapped it with one ungloved finger, I couldn’t tell if I was disappointed that it didn’t light up under the digit or relieved.

  Finally, I screwed up the nerve to examine the…remains. I looked up and met the empty sockets of the skull once more. Considering my previous experiences with the undead, and my luck, I had almost expected to see an eerie blue glow in those hollow recesses. Thankfully, nothing had changed.

  That…well, that certainly was a skeleton, alright. The resting place of this poor soul was tilted back far enough that the bones lay nearly flat upon the frayed cushions, maintaining an eerily familiar humanoid figure. Human male, if I had to guess, if only by the shape of the hips.

  I knew at least a little bit of anatomy.

  The bones themselves looked to be eerily stripped clean in a manner that I didn’t think occurred naturally. If this person had died and decayed in a normal manner, I would have expected at least a little bit of evidence of ligaments to have survived. Maybe even a few scraps of skin or highly leatherized muscle. But no, this skeleton was cleaned to an uncanny degree, nearly resembling a holiday prop. There were no markings on the bones to indicate that this might have been done by scavengers either. He had to have been naked at the time of his death, too, considering I saw no fragments of clothing anywhere near him.

  Attached to the skull there was one thing, however.

  What looked to be a silicone medical mask was still strapped to the skull, even if nothing else remained.

  I stood there for a few minutes, simply staring down at the ancient corpse lying in his fated coffin and pondering it all.

  It looked like I had found the first mystery of this particular bunker, beyond its eerie trap, degraded state, or torturous prison.

  What had happened here? Was it even possible to find out?

  I would just have to continue my explorations, I suppose. A thought struck me then, prompted by my core ring. I stepped away from that particular coffin and cast my gaze over at the one adjacent to it. Sure enough, there was another one inside, this time female, also stripped bare.

  And then the next contained another. And the next, and the next, and the next.

  Until I came upon a curious sight.

  In the next metallic coffin, I found a much shorter skeleton. For one dreadful moment, I thought it might be the remains of a child. But no. After a closer inspection, I was startled to realize that the structure of this skeleton was much too broad to be that of a human child. It was stout, broad, and the form of it was altogether familiar to me.

  This was the skeleton of a dwarf.

  There were more than human remains in this hall.

  …what else was in here? I picked up my pace at that question, casting gazes at the…‘pods’ as I did so.

  Human, human, dwarf, human, dwarf, dwarf, human, human.

  And then I stopped, because there was something I had never seen before. This was a skeleton that was even smaller than that of the dwarves I’d found. It was shorter, and yet more slender. Once again, I almost mistook it for that of a human child. But it couldn’t be. The limbs were shorter, the torso was longer, and the head was enormous in comparison to the rest of the body.

  This wasn’t what I had been expecting. I had thought there might have been elven corpses in here as well, if there were dwarves. There still might be, now that I thought about it. I didn’t actually know anything about elven physiology. Some of the human skeletons I had found just might belong to the ‘knife-ears’, as Azarus called them.

  But this.

  What was this?

  A short conversation I’d had with Grey last year sparked to the forefront of my memory. He had been telling me about the collective war that the peoples of Vereden had waged against the Calamity known today only as the ‘Sea Beast’. How in that time, there had been a fourth native species upon the surface of this world, who had birthed the creature into being through reckless experimentation upon Primes. How they had ultimately met an untimely fate at the claws of that beast, and been wiped from the face of Vereden.

  The people he could only refer to as ‘The Lost’.

  I gazed down at this oddly proportioned skeleton and felt a shiver run down my spine. Was this one of those people? I have to say, I had known they’d been small, but I hadn’t been expecting them to be even smaller than dwarves.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  I had to take a step back and cast my gaze around all of the capsules around me in astonished horror. I was surrounded by them on all sides, neatly arranged in wide lanes. From where I was, there had to be nearly fifty of them on each side, stretching all the way to the wall. That then extended for maybe…I don’t even know how long.

  Miles? There could be miles of these pods down the length of the hall. Maybe it was only the dark, nearly strobing crimson light in this room. But I couldn’t see the end of it, no matter how hard I tried.

  There had to be thousands of these coffins in here. No, tens, maybe hundreds of thousands.

  And all of them, each and every one…

  Contained a corpse.

  A creeping sense of dread crawled down my spine. This was…monstrous. Evil on a scale that I don’t think anyone could reasonably conceive of.

  Who would do something like this? What had these people even been here for? What was the purpose of these pods?

  I…didn’t know.

  It was as I was examining the Lost skeleton that I heard it. For a moment, I didn’t understand what I was hearing. When the realization hit me, a shiver went down my spine anew. That…that beeping sound…

  That was something nearly anyone who had grown up in a modern Earth culture would recognize. That almost sounded like the steady blip of an EKG machine.

  There was…there could be one of these pods still active, down here.

  I stood stock still for a moment, frozen in indecision. Should I…should I try and find it? Was one of these people still alive, after all this time?

  No…I had to find out. If there was still a living member of the bunker people down here, then maybe they could give me answers. Maybe they knew what was going on not only with this bunker but with Vereden.

  Maybe they knew about Precursors.

  I focused, concentrating on my hearing. The noise was faint, extremely so. I think it was only because of the absolute silence in this hall that I could hear it at all.

  But…I think I could follow it.

  Carefully, I stepped forward, following the source of the beeping further into the hall.

  Beep…beep…beep…

  Farther to the right. I adjusted my course, and wound my way through among the capsules of the dead, slowly closing in on the sound.

  Beep…beep…beep…

  Deeper and deeper I wandered in search of the origin. I must have gone nearly half a mile by now, but the sound of the beeping had grown noticeably louder. I was close, I was sure.

  BEEP…BEEP…BEEP…

  And then, all at once, I found the source.

  There was a door set into the wall of the hall. A sliding kind, constructed of the same precisely machined steel as the rest of the bunker. Only…

  The corrosion didn’t seem to have reached it. Yes, it was half destroyed, I could see that. The door was nearly shut, leaving only a sliver of width open from which the sound could escape. Exposed wiring was visibly poking through the surface of both the door, and the panel next to it.

  But none of the rust and pitting visible through the rest of the structure was there.

  Something about that…it struck me as important.

  I had stopped at the sight of it, but I shook off my sudden sense of apprehension. Cautiously, I approached the nearly wrecked door and examined it.

  I sighed. “I’ll need to force it open,” I said to myself quietly. I don’t even know why. It’s not like there was anyone around to speak to.

  Except the dead, I suppose.

  Carefully, I activated Might of the Wyrdwood at ten percent and set my hands around the doorframe. With my enhanced strength, it wasn’t hard for me to force the sliding door back into its recess. However, it caused an unholy cacophony as I did so. The tortured screech of metal on metal filled the air, echoing up and down the length of the tomb I had found myself in. I cringed at the noise, but didn’t let it stop me.

  Before long, the door was open. Now yawning before me was darkness, pure and deep. No light, crimson or otherwise, pierced through that gloom.

  But the beeping did.

  BEEP…BEEP…BEEP…

  I needed light to see what was causing that, and I suppose I had a few options. My Sprite would produce a bit of light, but it would be relatively weak and a constant drain on my Mana at that.

  Maybe I should have insisted on learning an actual General Skill for light after all.

  More than a year later, and that was still popping up.

  Damnit.

  I was going to have to produce a light Spell of my own. The ignition of a single, tiny Spell like that would only require an insignificant amount of Mana, which is why I suppose they were so popular. But it would take me a few minutes of concentration to actualize the required Mana.

  I repressed a sigh and closed my eyes, falling into the core of my Soul in only moments. After my lessons with the Elder, I was well used to this by now. Even if it was time-consuming.

  A handful of minutes later, I opened my eyes and held out one palm facing the ceiling. Carefully structuring the required thought forms, I let the Mana I had so carefully gathered fill the grooves of that structure.

  And ignited it with my Mana.

  A star of pure white light blossomed to float above my palm. I spared myself a brief moment of triumph at the successful casting and stepped forward into the darkness of the room. Instantly, I was able to tell what this place was. It could be nothing else than what my light revealed.

  A laboratory.

  A massively advanced one, at that.

  It wasn’t a large one, I could say that at least. Maybe about seven hundred square feet in total, it was roughly rectangular in shape. Both walls of the room were lined with old, decayed cabinets, their doors halfway hanging off of the recesses. Below them were table spaces upon which only dust remained, no instruments or objects to be found. I would say the room was modest, but that would betray the single most important thing I could see in here. Something just barely visible from my position near the door.

  A reflection. On the far end of the room was a single, intact pane of glass set into a tall, upright, cylindrical object.

  One of the pods.

  Undamaged.

  The beeping was coming from that direction.

  BEEP…BEEP…BEEP…

  I advanced cautiously into the room, kicking up clouds of dust as I did. I nearly tripped over something on my way towards the capsule, so focused on it as I was. Looking down, I saw what looked to be a…microscope, I think, if not a massively advanced one. The thing was nearly broken in half and held together by only a few strands of wires. Looking closer, I could see that the floor was littered with scientific equipment of all kinds, all of it clearly broken. I suppose this is where everything that had been on the shelves ended up.

  I shook my head and disregarded that, taking another step forward.

  Before long, I stood before the capsule at the end of the room. This close, the beeping was oddly loud. It rang in my ears as I gazed at the pod in a mix of curiosity and dread.

  Unlike all of the other pods, this one was visibly still intact.

  And still working, at that.

  This close to it, I could feel that it was unnaturally cold standing next to the capsule. The glass was frosted over, quite literally, and I couldn’t see into it at all. I couldn’t tell if there was an actual person inside of this apparent…cryo-pod of some sort?

  The notion that something of that manner was actually possible was a bit of a shock to me. I thought those only existed in the realm of fiction back on Earth.

  I shook that off and looked down at the intact screen to the right of the cryo-pod. It too was still intact, and to my excitement, it came alive when I touched it.

  The screen lit up, as bright white as my active Spell. The layout of the panel…something about it reminded me of the computer from back in Hollow Hill. The user experience design seemed to have been birthed from the same principles. However, it was much simpler.

  On the glowing surface of the screen, there were only two buttons. One blue, and one green. I…had no idea what either did. Snaking its way above the two buttons was the familiar sight of a single line, undulating in steady waves. The pulses lined up perfectly with the beeping noise that echoed, somewhere, somehow, from the sides of the panel.

  BEEP…BEEP…BEEP…

  Hopefully, one of these buttons wasn’t a kill switch or something. I really didn't want to murder whatever poor person was stuck in this tube. Out of options, I reached out and put a finger on the blue button.

  The reaction was immediate.

  If not what I was expecting.

  The frost on the surface of the glass immediately vanished, allowing me to see the contents of the cryo-pod. When it did, I felt my heart skip a beat in my chest.

  Someone was in this tube, all right. But not just anyone.

  There was a little girl inside.