18. Unearth

“I have to admit, I’m surprised you insisted on coming with us, Thea,” Melpomene hums, her words only slightly difficult to make out over the rush of wind. “It’s nice to have you with us out of the castle.”

Thea shrugs, focusing forward as she directs the translucent flying disc the four of us are riding through the liminal space. She sits cross-legged in the center of it, her tome open in her lap.

“It’s certainly a convenient method of travel,” Nanaya agrees. “We should be coming up on our destination quite a bit earlier than anticipated.”

“What exactly was the intended method of travel if Thea didn’t join us?” I ask. “Was Mel just gonna carry my heavy ass the whole way?”

“Luna,” Melpomene chides. “There could still be Earth Guardians around. It would be dangerous if any of them hear you speak.”

“There are Earth Guardians around,” I say, pointing ahead. “Two of them. They’re way too far away to see or hear us yet, though.”

“Why are you just mentioning this now?” Melpomene growls, causing a twinge of discomfort to crawl through my mind.

“I wasn’t sure until just now,” I insist. “You try interpreting magical energy fluctuation data without an instruction manual. Half the stuff I’m picking up on at any given time is complete nonsense.”

“How far away are they?” Nanaya asks.

“I don’t know, a few miles?” I guess.

“That’s about our target destination,” Nanaya hums. “Are they waiting for us?”

“It’s a portal to the Dark World,” Thea points out. “Of course the Earth Guardians are going to be monitoring it.”

“There shouldn’t be any monsters there, not anymore,” Melpomene considers. “The Preservers should know that… but I suppose it might be odd if they didn’t send the local Guardians anyway. Someone might start asking questions about how they know which convergences will have monsters in advance.”

“What’s the deal with that, anyway?” I ask. “Is someone actually going to explain the conspiracy I’ve just joined?”

“We’re still looking for all the answers,” Thea says. “We don’t actually know a lot, we’re all just lucky enough to have had enough disagreements with the way the Preservers do things to put together how worryingly suspicious it all is.”

“Wait, so we’re actually just conspiracy theorists? I thought I was joking,” I say.

“Don’t be daft,” Nanaya snaps. “It’s not as though we think the Earth is flat because airlines have layovers.”

“We’re more like investigative journalists on the run from the law,” Thea says. “We had good reason to believe something was up, so we started poking around, and so the powers that be started getting really, really mad at us. Eventually our choices were to hang up the transformation stone for good or run away and live in the Dark World, and all of a sudden it felt like there was a pressing need to not give up the stone.”

“Okay,” I allow. “So what are all these worryingly suspicious things, then?”

“The refusal to allow us to so much as try to investigate the Antipathy and their artifacts is the big one for me,” Thea shrugs. “I get that a lot of the artifacts are dangerous weapons, but most of them aren’t. You literally can’t have a society that is mostly weapons. You still need technology to grow and distribute food, to create potable water, to transport things, to communicate over long distances, to write with, to make art with. Even a hypothetical military-only society would be at least as much logistics as it would be weaponry. Most artifacts are completely safe.”

“There is definitely something they are hiding about the Antipathy,” Melpomene insists. “The fact that we know the Preservers and Antipathy were at war—a war that the Preservers obviously won—means we are at best learning what their propaganda believed about Antipathy society. And we know nothing about why the war started or who started it. We only know whatever the Preservers claim to be true, but they actively try to prevent Earth Guardians from investigating Antipathy ruins to look for answers. There’s only one reason to do that.”

“They control the supply of all magical warriors on Earth,” Nanaya says. “And they are the sole deciders of where and when those magical warriors deploy, and against what. To be an Earth Guardian is to defend the Earth against monsters… but only monsters by the Preservers’ definition. That means beasts from the Dark World, that means us, and that means anything else they decide our planet would be better off without. We aren’t allowed to make those decisions. The citizens of Earth aren’t allowed to decide what Earth Guardians guard.”

“Yeah, okay, I can see it,” I nod. I have a lot more thoughts than that, but it’s probably best I keep them to myself. I’ll admit, the Dark Rebellion has some pretty solid reasons to think that there’s foul play going on here, but it sounds like that’s all they have. No actual evidence of that foul play, just the trails it leaves behind. And they’ve apparently been looking for years now.

“I know it’s not a lot,” Thea says, seeming to pick up on my thoughts. “A lot of the early years were just us learning to survive. Nanaya tried to hide out on Earth after she stopped listening to the Preservers, but they went after her pretty relentlessly for it. I remember how they directed us to go after Melpomene and try to bring her in. It wasn’t… I didn’t like it. It was wrong. She wasn’t even doing anything bad, but they…”

She trails off, Melpomene herself frowning at the memory.

“They were right about one thing, at least,” Thea continues, staring at the webbed fingers on her mutated hand. “The Dark World really messed us up when we tried living there. I managed to rig together a system to keep its influence out of the castle, but it still eats away at us. Of course, now it’s way too late to go back. Even if I wanted to turn in my stone, we can’t exactly return to a normal life on Earth.”

“It’s not all bad,” Melpomene insists. “I’ve rather grown to like my new body.”

Thea’s tail whips around a little behind her.

“Well, it could definitely be worse,” she allows. “But it could definitely be better.”

“We should cut the chatter,” Nanaya says. “We’re almost to the target location, and apparently the enemy is waiting for us.”

“Going silent, boss,” I say, popping a salute. I’m reluctant to, but orders are orders. I sure hope these conspiracy theorists see a little bit of irony in the fact that they are preventing me from interacting with other sources of information, but I’ll keep my hopes realistic.

“It’s just two of them, right?” Melpomene asks. “We’ll blow through them before they can blink.”

“No need to waste time,” Nanaya says. “I’ll handle them both myself. The two of you just get the artifact to the target area.”

“If you’re sure,” Melpomene shrugs. “I wouldn’t mind a bit of a workout, but I suppose these two probably wouldn’t make me sweat.”

“Mmm.”

The black mist wall is plenty visible now, so Thea directs us right towards it as Nanaya summons her viola. She walks to the edge of our little transport disc, toes curling over the sides as she prepares to jump. When the magical girls shout in alarm, she starts falling off the side, coiling the muscles in her alien legs before launching herself directly at the ground. A single note of excruciating pain (thankfully blocked by my armor plates) is the last thing I hear before we plunge into the darkness of another world.

Almost immediately, the mist clears, revealing a vast valley of thorny, twisted plants growing over what appear to be shattered ruins of Antipathy architecture. Rumblings of lightning in the upper atmosphere provide brief flashes of illumination, but a few areas of the broken city still emit a dull glow in the eternal night. It’s a dead metropolis, a mass grave for a culture, laid out before us like an epitaph. Rows upon rows upon rows of shattered stone, overgrown streets, and broken buildings stretch out ahead, all surrounding a singular large building in the center.

“I was right,” Melpomene breathes. “I’ve finally found it again.”

“Woah,” Thea whispers, similarly enraptured. “This is incredible. This is enormous!”

“It is so, so difficult to track the movement of Dark World fragments,” Melpomene says. “I’ve been trying to find this one for years. And now, we have a fully functional Antipathy translator by our side. Now, we get answers.”

I stay silent, the three of us still close enough to the fog wall for a magical girl to pop in unexpectedly, yet I can’t help but silently agree with their awe. We’re explorers discovering an ancient lost city, unearthing Atlantis from the depths. Looking at it all, I feel a churning of new sadness blooming in my chest, a feeling of loss at what this civilization once was. Did they really destroy themselves? And if so, why?

“I feel like a little girl again,” Melomene says, her eyes roving around the city. “Take us down there, Thea.”

She points at one of the lightly glowing areas. Funnily enough, while this area certainly has more magical energy density than the liminal space or Earth, it’s the least magically dense section of the Dark World I’ve been in so far, and I don’t feel a higher-than-average amount of energy emitting from the direction of the light. It’s probably not magically powered, which is notable because all the artifacts I’ve seen so far—myself of course included—have been.

Thea obligingly drops us in a street near the center of the glowing patch, small shattered archways creating a mound of debris every twenty yards or so—

The pathway arches are spaced exactly thirty-six tolyu apart to assist with natural navigation and provide comfort. Traditionally, individual works of art are carved into the underside of each, but as Antipathy society grew it became infeasible to keep up with demand without mass production. This, too, makes me a little sad.

—which I now realize are more than just broken decorations. My eyes flash over the visible chunks of debris between four different arches, confirming that the undersides of each likely would have held the same pattern rather than being individualized. Maybe there will be different art on different streets, at least.

“Luna?” Thea asks.

“Sorry, kind of taking in a lot at once here,” I say. “I guess my databanks have some random bits of Antipathy cultural trivia in them. I wish I knew how to dump the knowledge all at once so I could just read it, but I guess for now it’s a fun facts popup.”

“Well, don’t keep us in the dark!” Melomene says, looking surprisingly excited. Thea, meanwhile, groans at the pun. “What did you learn?”

“Just that these broken arches are important to their culture somehow,” I answer. “We’ll probably find them on every street. There was art on the underside before they all… you know.”

Also, thirty-six is an oddly specific number to space things apart by. Unless, of course, it’s meaningfully arbitrary. For some reason, I just get the feeling it’s a natural number to default to, like ten or one hundred or… oh, do they use base six? Huh. Neat.

“Well, if you learn anything else like that, please let us know,” Melpomene says. “I’ve been trying to form a concrete idea of Antipathy culture for so long now. It’s difficult being the leading expert on something merely by default. There’s nothing to learn from beyond whatever I figure out.”

“I feel that,” Thea agrees, hopping over some of the rubble. “Come on, I wanna check out that light.”

We follow her, and it turns out the glow is actually caused by one of the arches, fully intact despite years without maintenance and an entire apocalypse happening around it. I walk below it, staring up at the underside, and watching the glow of the lines in the artwork project one of the only sources of light in this entire fragment. It’s pretty bright directly under it, but the glow was far dimmer from the air, the structure of the arch designed so that the artwork lies within a hooded section visible only from directly below. A measure to prevent light pollution, maybe?

“Okay, this is super cool,” Thea says, rising up into the air and manifesting a pair of tinted goggles over her eyes. “What is this? Some kind of liquid tubing? I’ve never seen this in artifacts before.”

“Well, no taking it apart,” Melpomene insists. “We’re not here to disturb the ruins, we’re here to learn from them.”

“I’m a mechanic, not an archeologist,” Thea grumbles. “Taking stuff apart is how I learn from it.”

“I know dear, but please humor me on this. Perhaps if we find enough other intact arches, we can try to disassemble one.”

“Alright, alright,” Thea allows. “It just seems like very different technology than what I’m used to from the Antipathy. I’m curious.”

“The pathway arches are as much art and tradition as they are practical streetlights,” I say. “They’re probably built using an older style on purpose.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Thea nods.

“That is very fascinating,” Melpomene grins. “A peek at their older cultures! Maybe a hint as to what they were like before the war! The history of a whole society is laid out before us! Come, let us look for some writing. I want to make use of our new translator.”

That’s me, the walking translator. And since I’m also an intelligent weapon of mass destruction, I’m almost as dangerous as the Duolingo owl!

“Well, if we’re looking for intact stuff, the huge building in the middle of all this seems like the obvious choice,” I say. “If a building that big survived, some of the stuff inside of it probably did too.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Thea says. “The building looks a little newer than everything else here, too. Hopefully it’ll have some good tech in it.”

Newer? I suppose it’s made more of metal than stone, but I’m not sure that’s indicative of age.

“It’s in the center of the city, right?” I ask. “Wouldn’t it make sense for the city to have been built around it?”

“You don’t build cities around skyscrapers, you build skyscrapers in cities,” Melpomene says.

“But that’s not a skyscraper,” I counter. “Skyscrapers are skinny and tall because they have limited acreage to work with but relatively unlimited verticality. They don’t need to worry about what’s above them, but they absolutely have to contend with all the other buildings around for space. But that building is huge. If you were to build it in the middle of a city, you’d have to remove a ton of other stuff first. It’s wide enough to cover multiple blocks.”

“Hmm,” Melpomene considers. “That’s a point. A number of different things could clear that much space, though. Especially if this building was built during the war.”

“Well we aren’t going to find out standing around talking about it,” Thea says, rising up into the air. “All aboard the translucent disc express!”

We hop on and Thea quickly takes us to the building, doing a wide pass around the exterior before deciding on an entry point. The building is mainly a hemispherical dome, with four thick, square pillars marking the corners of what would be a larger square if you were to enclose the hemisphere inside one. At the top of each of the pillars, there’s a small pit that looks like they once held something inside, cables similar to the ones inside my own body yet dramatically thicker are exposed to the air in their absence.

“There,” I say, pointing to the ground. “I see something that looks like it could be writing. Take us in for a lower angle.”

“Can do,” Thea agrees, dropping us off in front of a wide series of doors into the building, the kind you might see at a movie theater or some other building expecting to have large numbers of people enter or exit at the same time.

“Most of these symbols are numbers,” I hum. “Incremented on each set of doors. Probably just to help people navigate, or as some kind of address system. There’s a spot that looks like it had the name of this place, but it’s… you know, that.”

I point at an area above the doors that has been thoroughly smashed, what looks like fragments of letters occasionally visible underneath broken and crumpled metal, gouges dug inside of it to form different words in its place.

“The vandalized bit just says ‘take it all.'”

Thea and Melpomene share a concerned look.

“Well, we aren’t going to figure out what that means out here,” Melpomene says. “Come on, let’s investigate the inside.”

Melpomene heads for the doors and I have no choice but to follow (though I don’t really have anything else to do in this situation anyway). The doors are locked, but they’re mostly just reinforced glass and I can punch a hole in them fairly effortlessly. Melpomene looks almost physically pained when I do, but we don’t really have another way inside so she doesn’t admonish me.

The interior of the building is even darker than the exterior, which is pretty impressive for a place called the Dark World. The glass on the doors is the only way for light to get inside, and there don’t appear to be any functioning internal lights, but Thea simply summons a glowing ball out of her tome and illuminates everything that way. I almost wonder why she didn’t bother doing that before, but I guess all of us can see in relative darkness extremely well. Me because I’m a robot, and them because… well, I guess it’s just what they are now. Whatever that is.

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The room immediately inside the doors is a sterile white, with a setup that reminds me somewhat of an entry hall to a corporate office. But looking up reveals a beautifully painted display on the ceiling, a mix of the twisting, maze-like styles in the castle with more realistic landscapes of flowing, golden grass underneath what appears to be an aurora borealis, albeit with the colors much sharper and brighter than I understand them to be on Earth.

“Always with the ceiling art,” I buzz.

“If the monsters are anything to judge by, there were a lot of large aerial predators in the pre-apocalyptic Dark World,” Melpomene explains. “And the Antipathy had large eyes on top of their heads. They looked up a lot more than they looked down.”

“I guess that would do it,” I admit. “It looks like the pre-apocalyptic Dark World probably wasn’t all that dark, either.”

“No,” Melpomene agrees. “I imagine it was quite a beautiful place.”

Huh. She seems genuinely wistful. Honestly, her whole mood has been surprisingly positive since we started this trip. Even her tail is flicking around excitedly as we wander through the halls.

“You’re passionate about this stuff, huh?” I ask her. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this upbeat.”

“Oh yeah, Mel’s a huge nerd,” Thea grins. “Honestly, that’s what got us into this whole mess.”

“Like you’re one to talk,” Melpomene pouts.

“Hey, I was a perfectly obedient little magical girl until you started rubbing off on me,” Thea insists, elbowing her in the side. “The Dark Rebellion never would have got started if Mel here hadn’t been such a geek about all the Antipathy ruins we would come across on the occasional Dark World run. The Preservers were super mad that she kept going over mission time limits even before the transformations started happening. What grew in first? The tail?”

“…The horns,” Melpomene grumbles. “Though they were just little patches of crystal at the time. I kept them hidden under my hair so nobody noticed. The tail is just what got me caught.”

“Riiiight,” Thea nods, tapping her cheek. “I remember you dragging me along on unsanctioned Dark World investigations alone. You wouldn’t even tell your team where you were going. Gosh, I remember being scared out of my wits at first. The first time I went along just because I was too terrified of you to say no!”

“I-I didn’t mean to frighten you!” Melpomene insists.

“Oh yeah, I know that in retrospect. You were so busy babbling about your theories on Antipathy culture that I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. There’s no way you noticed I was about to pee myself.”

“I thought you would be interested! You were always trying to get permission to investigate artifacts, I thought you’d enjoy just cutting out the middleman!”

“Well, I did,” Thea admits. “But I never would have even considered disobeying Uma’tama if you hadn’t dragged me along. I mean, they were basically my mom.”

“Why not?” I ask. “I disobey my mom all the time. Honestly, it’s one of the best ways I know I’m doing something right.”

“Well, I was like ten years old when this all started,” Thea says. “I had to grow into my delinquency a little.”