Book 6. Chapter 9: Journey down deeper
Took half a day to hoof it to the terminal. Quath’s psychopathically detailed map was just about as accurate as could be where his guesses were involved.
Man had clearly traveled a lot underground and had some intuitive understanding of what mites like to tinker on. Only reason he got caught in this amount of machines running around was due to Capra’Nor going belly up and he had no way to predict that. Not a usual occurrence to have an entire city get wiped off the map.
The terminal room itself was rather plain for such an important location in the city. Squat square building with empty windows, a few steps leading into it, and no door on the doorway. The rest of the buildings around it looked a lot fancier, spiral staircases, half-built statues, and lights in all the wrong places.
But Abraxas’s handwork was obvious. There was a scribbled boat like sigil, etched right into the concrete. Like he’d used his index claw to scratch it out.
Inside the mite building - very different story. Concrete turned into black metallic scales, veins of teal pale light spreading thin across the room and growing more complex the closer to the center it got.
The actual terminal had a few dozen old human era computer monitors, and some half-eaten actual computers, all sticking out of this almost liquid-looking black pillar. Monitors all had the domed screen style instead of the more modern LCD screens. Keyboards were in a few different places, but the one to use felt more obvious. It had a mechanical arm that let the keyboard be moved around without issue, and the screen closest to it was lit up, with a flashing green bar, waiting for instructions.
The Winterscar knights filtered into the room first, weapons drawn up and aimed. All purely out of reflex, the soul sight they all had let them see through walls and far beyond visual range in this concrete box, so we could all tell there wasn’t a soul or anything near us. Not even insects.
No dirt for plants to grow in, thus no food for anything else, and so no life at all to these cities.
I pulled the keyboard my way, and got to typing out commands on the prompt. To my disappointment, the mites did not include any quick shortcuts to communications, no inbox or messages I could find, just a half-working text based OS that seemed like it was running on Windows one second, then some version of linux the next second. Picking randomly between each on whatever it felt like, just to absolutely piss off whoever was unlucky enough to deal with it.