Somewhere around the fourth time I narrowly dodged someone in a hallway, I realized that I had no idea how I was going to get myself out of here. I still hadn't found whatever the piping on the roof was, since I was still too high up into the building.

I had, however, figured out that most of the building was just storage. That fact was pretty much what kept me from getting discovered. Since most of the rooms were labyrinthine mazes of boxes, they did weird things to the sound of your footsteps. All I had to do was walk quieter and be sure to stop whenever I heard someone else enter a space and they'd miss residual noise I made as it was covered by the echoing sound of their own footsteps.

I worked my way back towards the stairwell, hoping to go down another flight of stairs. I wished there was a more permanent way to deal with these guys, since I was sure that the one I'd 'squirreled' upstairs was awake again. That said, I wasn't about to off someone when I had no idea what they were doing. Sure, my intuition was telling me one thing, but maybe it was a machine that converted orphan tears into food or something.

Granted, in this city, it'd just be some rich dude stealing the food afterwards, so I wasn't about to feel too bad if I had to percussively reboot a few people.

Descending to the next level without issue, I found that I was finally getting somewhere. The tangle of pipes was popping out of the floor here and heading over to the wall. So one more level down it was then.

I retreated to the stairwell, and then realized I could hear voices. Slinking down the stairs more like the cat than the squirrel it would be chasing, I reached the bottom of the stairwell and was greeted by the door of a room that was ajar, with light spilling out onto the floor. Bonus!

Pressing an eye to the crack, I looked inside and found the target of my investigation. The mystery machine in question looked like a collection of moles haphazardly glued together, or maybe someone's cancer that had also gotten cancer. Bulbous with a bunch of protrusions on it and the pipes jammed into it here and there, there was no rhyme or reason to the thing.

There were two people standing in front of it, looking at it. I wasn't sure what they were seeing, as when I looked at it I saw some kind of yawning void that my sight disappeared into. The person on the right was clearly higher status than the one on the left, as this second one was facing more towards the other man than the machine, while the first was mostly ignoring them to look at the… blob thing.

"Go get me another artifact to extract from. I'm not done yet." The first said. Extract from? Extract what? I kept watching. The second ran off to a huge stack of the same crates I've been seeing around everywhere and pulled out two artifacts, and then scampered back holding two round items in his hands. I caught a brief glimpse of him and had to stifle a laugh: he looked even more like a squirrel than I had felt like I did earlier, with chubby, wide cheeks and a narrow forehead with close set eyes. If I was a Secret Squirrel, he was a Stupid Squirrel.

Or maybe a chipmunk? I was never really sure what the difference was. I'd at least seen squirrels though, once a long time ago.

Stupid Squirrel handed his payload to the first guy, who held one of them out in his hands, towards the 'extractor', for lack of a better word. I then watched with no small amount of horror as the whole thing split in the center and opened like a mouth. The inside had no teeth but plenty of unpleasantly wet surfaces. He apparently was as disturbed as I was, since he dropped the artifact into it and quickly withdrew his hand.

The artifact fell into the gullet of this bit of body horror, and it snapped shut, the gap that was apparently its mouth sealing as though it had never been. Then the whole thing started 'chuffing' like a broken car engine, sounding bizarrely mechanical. Shortly thereafter, it began glowing, as though it was heating up from the inside.

The man reached out and laid a hand on it, stopping to shake a wrinkle out of the sleeve of his suit jacket midway. When his hand touched the surface of the 'extractor', the glow began to spread up his arm. The noises from inside it diminished, and I could see one of the pipes jammed into it shaking a bit.

After the warmth transferred completely into his arm, the man quickly removed it, and sat directly onto the floor. I watched the glow vanish, and concentrated. My special vision refined, and I could see the energies entering the pit of his torso, behind the belly button. He had a sphere there, even if calling it that was a bit much. It was misshapen and lumpy, a lot like the extractor's shape. It felt weak and unbalanced to me and probably was.

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After a few moments, slivers of the glow broke off and entered this core of his, one wisp at a time. The misshapen lump of a core spun faster, but just that looked painful. The grimace on the face of the man implied it was.

I felt the beginnings of a headache and let my eyes, or my brain, or whatever combination let me see all this, go back to normal.

The man extracting the energy suddenly sat down. "That'll be enough for today," he said, panting heavily. Apparently there was only so much of whatever this was he could do for one day. I noticed that the extractor was writhing a bit itself - although it seemed less diminished than the man. A spot on the back bubbled a bit and a new protuberance slowly formed there.

Yeah, that can't be a good thing.

It took quite a while for the pair to rest up enough to leave, and I retreated under the stairs when they turned and started walking in my direction. It was almost pitch black at the bottom of the stairwell save for the light coming out out of the room.

I tried not to imagine what sorts of things I might be sharing the darkness with. I was pretty successful, as what was in that room seemed a lot worse than any creepy-crawlies I might find out here. I heard their footsteps come my way and shrank back into my corner, willing myself to be as small as possible.

The door opened, and the man in front, the one who'd absorbed the artifact, looked briefly in my direction, making my heart stop a little. I was pretty sure he couldn't see anything under here in the dim light, but I wasn't sure.

Then the moment passed and his gaze moved on, evidently deciding what he had seen was unimportant. "What was that, a squirrel?" I heard him ask as he passed over me on the stairs.

Totally, 100%. I thought, Just your local neighborhood rodent here to chew power lines or blow up your totally weird extractor thingy. Nothing to see here, squeak squeak.

I stayed put for what seemed like hours, but was probably more like ten minutes or so, before I was sure they weren't coming back down. I'd heard other doors in the stairwell open and shut above me once and twice, and when the third came, I quickly moved inside the room and carefully eased the door shut behind me. I'd have locked it, but it didn't have one.

Now it was just me and the nasty blob thing. I somehow felt like it was regarding me, which was a weird experience. Originally, I was just intending to bludgeon whatever device that was in here to death, but it didn't seem right when the thing in question could actually die. Whatever this was, it clearly did not deserve what had been done to it, which left me at a bit of a loss.

I walked up to it and put a hand on it, the outer surface seeming pretty cold and clammy, which I supposed made sense, it didn't exactly have a jacket or anything. It shivered when I touched it, with what felt like a kind of fear.

Concentrating, I willed my vision to appear again, and when it did, I noticed that the blob, too, had some sort of misshapen core at it's center, only something had gone wrong with it. I put a second hand on, and this helped clear up what I could see, through some weird happenstance. Under my eyes, a hairline fracture resolved from top to bottom, and the core itself was completely hollow and empty. It appeared whatever process created this thing broke it in the process. Or maybe it was broken to start and then they did… this… to it. I couldn't be sure.

Up farther, though, I saw a dimly flickering light. It was polluted, but I could feel that this was life-force of sorts - it felt like a dim facsimile of the rich nature I'd encountered in the bird world.

Reaching into myself, I found some of the white fire in my belly and moved the smallest amount of it out and up my torso, warming it in the process. I wasn't entirely sure how I knew to do this, but it seemed almost practiced, like I done it before. The movement itself was jerky and uneven, as though my body didn't have the pathways to do this the right way and it was only the experience making it work.

I moved the Mote of inner radiance out of my torso and brought it down my right hand, then pushed a little, whereupon it gave the impression of a popping sound and then leapt from me to the extractor.

The relatively tiny mote flared into a blazing fire as it entered, quickly overwhelming the feeble light. A feeling of relief seemed to wash out of the lumpy thing, followed by what felt like gratitude.

Then it hit me: it was thanking me for destroying it.

I'm not crying, you're crying.

It slumped down as the internal fire raged, and I let go, too overwhelmed by my own emotions to maintain the connection. As I did so, I let my vision slip as well, and then realized that the bright glow was more than just metaphysical. I could clearly see it inside the extractor-blob even with normal vision, and it was growing brighter by the second. Uh oh.

I scampered towards the door as I heard the pipes above it start creaking from the heat it was generating. Slamming it shut behind me, I dove back under the stairwell, not caring at all how dirty I got. I put my head down, covered my ears, and let my mouth hang open.

Ka-Boom!

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