More Mysteries and the First Decision

The humming of machines on the other side of the shattered wall was clear to hear and the few working screens and consoles that were a dubious sign. Many of the electronics were too dilapidated or even outright rusted too, which rose even more red flags about the situation.

And the fact that she couldn’t feel any semblance of the usual radiation wavelengths, even if in negligible amounts, was the worse of all. Although this one could be answered after she took a good glance deeper into the dark reactor room...

Still, without the safe door and with one less wall between her and the workings of the plant, most things could be 'seen' already. The heat deep inside the building, and the current crossing parts of the machinery, were all signs that this place was working.

None of it made anything make more sense or be less worrying, but that was that.

Explaining what was happening wasn’t very hard at all, but the ‘why’ on the matter was a whole different matter. Even the chatty spectators were in silence as they waited for their confused host to say something, and none could blame them.

How were they supposed to react when the derelict reactor was found to be powered up and working anyway?

Anyone who could understand the situation could easily see how wrong the situation was. Not only this power plant was too old to be running for this long without maintenance, but it was also stuck away from a good deal of the city. Having it being online and functional was one of the scariest things they could find here.

“Being a little serious with you, Mr. Lawyer...” Amy spoke as she tried running more scans through the area, even managing to catch a glance at what seemed to be footprints on the dusty floor around her. “You may leave now if you want to, you know? It is getting way too weird for me to assure your safety now.”

“I’ll be honest with you, girl… I’d love to do just that, but how in the twelve hells would I explain to my boss why I ignored the freaking ghost nuclear power plant, eh? If you weren’t somehow able to keep a live feed down here at least…”

“Would you like to know how it works?!” A suddenly high-spirited girl turned to the deadpan man. “No one asked me until now and, not to flaunt myself, these are quite the impressive pieces of hardware, you know?”

“Don’t you have more important matters to pay attention to right now, girl…?”

The weirded-out answer brought Amy’s focus back to the matter at hand. Not that she had lowered her guard too much, of course, but showing off her toys was a lot less important than finding out what was happening.

“Right, right, I lost focus here for a moment…” The idol slapped her cheeks and then started to look around the beaten-down control room. “Let us assess the situation, okay? Investigating this kind of thing will throw the ratings to the sky.”

“Again, I don’t think that’s what you should be paying attention to right now...” Benjamin continued as he gave up and entered the ruined room, focusing, in special, on the screens showing mysterious data. “Can you read anything from this? It would be good if we could know if this thing is warning us that we’ll die…”

“Hmmm… I can get some. I am a little too rusty on this to understand everything, you know? But we should be safe since nothing is glowing red, no?”

“I’ll have to ask for a bonus when we go back…”

“Maybe you should, but that is for later. For now, can you all help me with these computers, faithful ones? I want to take a look behind this glass wall, but Lily will get angry if I lose too much time for no reason…”

Reading these screens wasn’t necessary for their goals and they would take more time than Amy could safely give away. She also had a weird feeling that something there was useful. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that she still needed to get some copper and power conversion, she would be focusing on these computers. Since she couldn’t do so though, the next best option was to outsource the problem and hope for the best.

There was also the fact that keeping everyone’s eyes on the computers would give her some flexibility in how to act. The fact that this whole thing was working was already a big danger flag, so getting some extra safety was good.

And of course, by being fueled both by their curiosity and by their idol’s plea, many volunteers came forward to try and work on the data being shown.

“Thank you very much, all of you. I shall now start working on how we will use this electricity, Mr. Lawyer. You wait for me here, okay?” The sapphire-eyed idol spoke with her glowing eyes glued to the lawyer trying to look over her shoulders. “It would be too dangerous to go further and this place should be enough for your bosses, right?”

“Well, this whole place is enough of a point for my report, so I think I’ll wait here… Would hate to disturb whatever you’re going to do inside there too.”

“I shall send a warning if anything dangerous gets close to you and all you need to do is shout in case you need me, okay?”

“Move on, girl. The faster we leave this place, the safer I’ll likely be.”

“Got it! I will check on the generator, and the power source, and then try and make the main transformer work as we need it. The voltage will likely go very high, so beware of any loose cables while I am out… See you later, Mr. Lawyer!”

With this last phrase, Amy jumped through the remains of the glass wall and started to skip her way around the machinery overseen by the little room. Her first goal was right ahead either way, so no need to go too seriously about it. It wasn’t as if any common reactor could take her down anyway.

Still, the pink girl was having trouble finding what exactly she should be verifying. This place didn’t fit the schematics she took from the web in the least, and that was a little troublesome, but there was enough here to go by.

For one, this huge tubular thing connected with dozens of cables and ducts that were being watched by the control room was shining, so it had to be something relevant.

The glowing something connected to the many support machines spread around the huge room wasn’t a heating source though. Or at least, it wasn’t even close to being hot enough to power any kind of generator.

But it was glowing. And it was a black glow too. Nothing that could glow and was black should be good.

Even if it had no signs of radiation or anything dangerous, it couldn’t be this safe. Again, it was a freaking black glowing tube connected to a hell lot of other machines.

But even with all these signs, the weird skipping girl was still sure that it was all fine. More even than fine, she was sure it was working as intended. A very weird reactor that could work for very long and felt very powerful. It was an ominous marvel of ancient technology even if she couldn’t say what exactly it was.

Although, this meant that Amy would have to destroy this place before they left the ruins.

A shame since she felt this could be useful and it was improbable that she would get the right schematics or find out what the power source was, but not a problem at all. This kind of thing was for big companies and evil geniuses, not for prim and proper idols.

“It is not connected to a steam generator or anything common, but I can sense the electricity flowing from some of the machines… Must be good enough for now.” She spoke to herself while conducting a low-depth analysis of what she could see. “Now, to find the distribution apparatus or something of the kind… Or maybe I should find out why this place has a chimney… Hard to decide...”

There were other details to think too, the biggest one being the footprints spread around the dirty floor of the ancient building. They didn’t seem too old and seemed to take almost the same route all the time, but the weird part was the lack of grooves or fingers in the marks.

Almost flat footwear would be very ineffective, so it was hard to guess why someone would use them in such a dangerous place.

Other than that though, there were no major clues to see. The best Amy could manage was to notice some odd-looking parts on the machines connected to the weird tube. Oddities which became more frequent as she went closer to the distribution area. The only problem was that she couldn’t say if were there before or after whatever sent this city underground.

She was speaking to herself even though her cameras were around, but that wouldn’t weird anyone out even if they were to actually see it. As is though, most of the feed coming from anything around her was being modified in real time to hide anything that would be bad if seen.

Information control was pretty much Amy’s specialty no matter how strong she was at everything else. Or that was what she liked to believe herself at least.

Keeping the facade wouldn’t work forever though, so she had to go a little fast with the check-up of the power plant. Also, she had to rapidly find a suitable place to set her temporary transformer and the ‘safety measures’ to deal with this place later on. Expecting to have the perfect devices inside an energy production facility was way too optimistic even for her. It was also too much to expect time to deal with the loose ends later, so a way to deal with it was necessary.

She was yet to find the reason why this place was working, to begin with.

“Looks like I will need to think about it later...” The idol mumbled again after reaching her second destination, the dilapidated gates on the path to the power converters. A decent number of converters and batteries were broken down or out-of-commission, but most of them seemed to still be connected to what remained of the power grid.

More than connected, the energy seemed to be going somewhere. In a relatively low current, of course, but going somewhere nonetheless. The reasons for such were easy to guess and made the situation a little easier since her bootleg transformer would need to be less powerful.

It was also a lot less dangerous if she hadn’t to deal with ultra-high voltages and currents here, but that was an afterthought.

“These go up, do they not? Should I build a makeshift one or should I change this one… Better go with the safe option and parasite this one, right? Yes, it should be better.”

With her decision taken after minimal input from her viewers who weren’t very sure of what she was trying to do, Amy started to work on her project. Materials were easy to find all around and she could even use parts of the destroyed electronics already, so it was easy to work this time. It didn’t take her more than a minute or two to deal with these, and by the end, the loss on the mysteriously-working grid wouldn’t even fall that much when everything was connected.

The five or ten percent down caused by Amy messing around shouldn’t be that noticeable too in case there was someone down here using them.

The same weird feeling of danger was still present though.

“Good. It seems we are done here, everyone, but I will leave a camera around just in case, okay? I hope you all will help me by keeping an eye out if anything weird happens. Maybe I would even put on a good prize if someone managed to point out an oddity I could not notice before, you know…?”

So, with her work done for now, Amy turned back to where she came from and started to return to the control room. Two of her three goals were done either way, so it wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

That was until she heard the noise of glass breaking and metal being bent back in the control room.