Forsaken Garrison, Pt 2

As you take a few steps in you immediately sense the psionic beings that are in here move as well. Even worse, when you stop moving to get your bearings, they stop as well - all of them, all at once. When you begin moving again, so do they.

You are immediately chilled by their actions. Though they seem to be scattered all over the facility in different rooms and floors, they all somehow seem to move in unison, as though they're connected through their own Network. 

A Network which you can't sense and can't disrupt in some way. Whether their Network is more powerful than your own, or they're connected to each other through some other intrinsic way… you simply can't tell.

Regardless, you have a more immediate problem to contend with - you can barely see. Even with your night vision maximized and with your hand-cranked flashlight out, you're hardly able to pierce through the darkness.

Rather, you can see a tiny amount in a straight and narrow cone wherever you're pointing your flashlight, but everything else all around is pitch black. Your night vision only barely helps.

You figure that the only way to overcome this is with more psionic energy, though not specifically in Temperance and ESP. With those two you can see better, hear better, smell better, and so on. But with the addition of Scan and Telekinesis and even a bit of Foresight, you get a much more complete 'view' of the world around you.

As you pour in energies into your other powers, you're able to sense the edges of objects, right where their elemental natures butt up against other elemental natures. A solid desk versus the air around it, for example. You're able to feel where the psionic flows move around these inanimate things, not necessarily avoiding them, but not passing through them either.

On top of all that, you have slivers of the future tell you where things seem to be - at least before you run straight into them. 

Once you activate Telepathy - simply as a means to detect if any psionic minds are close to you - all the powers seem to meld and merge into each other. It's confusing at first having to deal with all the incoming sensations from every angle and every level.

No longer are you focused on what you can see and sense in front of you, but all around you as well.

The information overload is more than enough to make your head spin, alongside a growing spike of pain in your head. But as you maintain control of this new power's weaving, things come into greater focus and your headache dulls to some degree.

You find everything all around you for a few dozen meters clearly defined by all your powers - you sense every edge and every object within this entire room without any issue whatsoever. Of course, you gain much more detail if you turn your focus specifically on any given thing, but you otherwise can tell where things are. At least, in relation to you.

You decide to name this power Ultrasense (or did someone else name it, and you're just adopting it subconsciously?). Although this allows you to perceive everything around you with incredible accuracy, you note that it's using much more energy than its individual components combined.

And so you draw back your senses inward a bit, until you can 'see' only a dozen meters all around you. Sure, anything beyond that is practically invisible, but this allows you to maintain a balance between your energy draining, and your energy recharging. 

With practice, you could probably end up seeing further than ever before. Though this is hardly the time for that. Instead, you look at the room around you, hoping to get a better understanding of where you are.

It's a relatively spacious room, and you have to walk in a small circle to see every edge inside. Of which there are none - the room itself is semi spherical in nature. Basically the room appears to be a dome made of some kind of metal, and reinforced with thick arched beams spidering out from the very top down to the ground.

You guess that it's designed to withstand the sheer weight of the rock formation above you, which is impressive on its own. It also dawns on you that the tunnels are also reinforced similarly, and that perhaps the entire rest of the facility is going to be just like this.

There's a curved desk at the other side of the circle, opposite the main entrance. It's flanked by two security stations, though neither are booths specifically. Instead, they're open-air stations with mounted machine guns pointed downrange. They also have armored plating protecting them from the front.

The desk sitting in between is relatively plain despite the odd curve, which matches the curvature of the room itself. There's a couple of laptops and all kinds of paperwork scattered on and behind the desk, but there's otherwise nothing interesting about this.

Besides the three corpses here, of course. Like the ones outside, these are well-preserved corpses whose liquefaction stage has caused their uniforms to become thoroughly soaked. Of course, they've all long-since dried up and are very slowly decomposing down here.

Two of the corpses - the ones behind the security stations - are also well equipped and heavily armed. Both have shotguns slung across their bodies, and have numerous spare shells slung on molle bandoliers in front of their body armor.

And their armor is sturdier than the security guards stationed outside - clearly thick enough to take on heavier rounds. You can't help but wonder just what kind of scenarios these people were trained for…

Certainly not the end of the world though. They certainly didn't account for that.

There isn't much else around here beyond the desk and security stations. There are flags up front flanking the entryway, as well as a seal of some kind of military division inlaid at the center of the polished granite floor.

Thankfully there are four hallways leading out of here, each one protected by smaller, less heavily defended security stations halfway through. There are a number of dead bodies littered in each of the hallways - at least one guard manning the security stations themselves. But also one or two others, also in uniform, but not nearly as armed or armored. No doubt they were simply walking through the hallways when they died.

Signs embedded into the steel arched hallways tell you what sectors of the facility the entryway leads to - Administrative, Habitation, Medical, and Security. There are also smaller plates under the signs which potentially signify sectors beyond these four, such as IT, Maintenance, Engineering, and so on. 

Among them is Research & Development, the most likely place where you're going to find your prize, and so you head down that pathway first. It appears that you have to move through Administrative before you can get to R&D, which makes some sense to you.

The smell of rot thickens the deeper you head into the base, which seems to seep into your scarf and mask, and really all your clothes. You can't help but feel it permeate your skin, which makes you shudder at the thought.

Death has lived down here for so long that it has no compunction over taking over everything else.

You Telekinetically slide open a secure door and step through into the first sections of Administrative. Here is another dome-like room, but filled with little cubicles filling up the center. You can see corpses littered all over here, perhaps a dozen or so. Some are in the cubicles, while others are in the designated walking area around the dome's edge.

There's a kind of information desk greeting you as you come in, with what appears to be a sign-in sheet on top of it. Whoever was manning the desk is long since dead and slumped over on top, decaying ever so slowly.

You decide to enter your name on the sign-in sheet, just for laughs.

Since nothing here catches your attention, you move around to the other side and go to the next dome-like room through a short adjoining tunnel. This next room appears to house a number of shelves and filing cabinets in numerous rows and columns.

Each of the shelves are filled with numerically tagged and categorized cardboard boxes seemingly organized by date. On closer inspection, you note that all of the boxes are filled with various paperwork, though none are dated before the year that apocalypse occurred. Or at least, none of the ones you check yourself.

You move to the very center of the room, where you can see exits from all four directions. Unable to fully decide where to go, you arbitrarily choose the pathway to your left. They all look the same to you, and if it leads nowhere you could always just turn around and pick the next left to take. 

Eventually you'll run out of things to turn left on, right?

You make your way to the very end, passing all manner of shelves and filing cabinets along the way. You note that there are also a handful of standing desks here and there, though none seem as though they're manned in any way. 

Perhaps they're only temporary workstations here? Used only when someone wants to review paperwork? All you have are guesses, unfortunately. Sure, you could potentially use Astral Memory to find out, but that would be a total waste of time and energy. You're not exactly invested in knowing what the day-to-day here was like.

The only information you could want to get is the location of the exosuit that Babbage wants, and you're not likely to find it here. Well, not in any reasonable time, anyway. You could spend hours poring through all this paperwork to find the lab where they're building the suit, but that too would be a total waste of time and energy.

Best if you simply allow your powers to guide you.

You finally get to the far end and open the door, only to find a very short hallway leading into a maintenance closet. Since there's nothing beyond that, you simply turn around and head back to the center. At which point you spin left and head down that way instead.

Along the way, you make a mental note to practice your Foresight more often, so that it can actually guide you with greater accuracy…

The next door leads further through this maze-like complex, and into what appears to be more office space. Instead of cubicles grouped around the center however, these offices line the edge of the room itself, and are laid out one next to the other in groups of four. 

In between the groups are doors leading out to even more sections of the facility, while the very center appears to be an open work area. There's a large circular desk in the very middle, with all manner of papers and diagrams and books and maps littered all over it.

There are a handful of corpses around the desk, which makes you believe they were all working on something together.

You also note that one of the offices takes up the entire four-office block, and practically dominates the space around it. When you get closer to it, you realize that it's for the facility's commander, some Brigadier General something or other. You don't exactly care who this person was, and don't read the rest of the name plate embedded next to the door.

You're far more interested in what's inside the office itself - hopefully you'll be able to find some kind of map or floor plan of the facility itself. That would be the most helpful thing right now.

Just as you step through the door, you note that you sense the presence of one of the psionic creatures coming up behind you. It seems to have made its way to the facility's entryway where you just were earlier, almost as though it's following you, or tracking you. 

It's certainly the closest one to you thus far, and it just about confirms your fears about what they're doing - they're coming for you, step by step, moment by moment. Not only that, but you sense a kind of hostility within it. Clearly, it doesn't like the fact that you're here.

So you spin around, power up your energies, and head back in that direction, determined to end this first greeter as quickly as you can. Hopefully by doing so, you'll make the rest of them think twice before coming any closer.