The elevator shuddered to a stop at the bottom with a cacophony of noises that sounded like a box full of angry badgers fighting a chalkboard. It was definitely unhappy about something, and that was going down. I didn't want to know what we were in for going up.

Viktor and I maintained our vigilance, and the BeetleMech behind us made slight movements as our destination came into view. The elevator was less 'elevator' and more 'platform that was trying its best, guys', and it had no doors. This meant that if there was anyone below, they got a good look at our toes before we were able to see them at all.

Good thing there wasn't anyone there, then. We were greeted by a room significantly less finished than the one we had left. It was rough to the point that calling it a room seemed to be stretching the term a bit, like a cat might stretch upon waking. Let's just say it was luxuriously elongated.

So this new not-a-room had tubes everywhere, disappearing into the rough hewn ceiling. They stemmed from further within, trailing across the ceiling in a way that gave me déjà vu back to the tangled mess that came out of the back of the extractor building.

"Is the Umbral Veil allergic to proper planning or something?" I asked, indicating more or less all of the ceiling.

István, who had exited his sentry, was looking up at the pipes himself. "It does seem that way, does it not?" he said, still examining the warp and weft of the tangled mess. "One could postulate that when they built this space, they just kept adding new pipes as they needed them. I am sure what we're seeing now is the result of sticking some poor soul picking up all the slack of actually installing them."

I looked at the clean, precise seam where the pipe disappeared into the surface, "So you're telling me that they have the technology and know-how to run them right through solid rock but can't figure out plumbing?"

"Basically, yes." István said. "It seems strange until you consider that organizations with self-centered goals rarely attract the best and brightest. Usually you get a selection of grifters and scum with a few intelligent but flawed characters holding the whole thing together with sheer motivation to see the world burn, as well as a few good people who are clueless as to the whole enterprise."

"So Viktor and you were in that latter category, I assume?" I asked him.

He laughed, "Well, Viktor only wants to see small selections of the world burn, and only on his terms."

The man in question was wandering around the perimeter of the space, testing the durability of the objects scattered around, or something like that. He had a crowbar in his hands, and was flexing it like a wooden dowel. "You say something?"

"Nothing at all, just hypothesizing," István replied with a smile.

"Oh, I'll leave that to you then," Viktor replied, going right back to what he had been doing, just as the crowbar broke into two pieces. He tossed it aside and moved on to his next inorganic victim.

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The three of us followed the pipes and proceeded into the next space through a rather craggy looking gap in the back of the wall that Viktor had to contort himself to fit through, practically crawling sideways at one point.

Once we had him through, we examined where we'd arrived, as was now the custom. In this case, all the pipes were joined up in the center to an oblong spheroid-shaped vessel that reminded me quite a lot of Gran's pressure cooker, which made me hungry for some of her canned foods. She'd make quite the mean assortment of snacks in that old grey thing.

There was no lid on this one though, and probably far fewer tasty goodies in it. Not that I wasn't temped to crack it open and find out. Viktor had already wandered in a different direction, and István was exactly where you'd expect him to be, being a pest to the machinery gubbins.

"This looks familiar," he said, something I hadn't expected to come out of his mouth.

That proclamation got even Viktor's attention, maybe because he was curious if he'd given it a 'massage'. He'd honestly probably make a pretty good masseur… if you were an ox.

"Oh yeah," the big man said, "We had one of these running our base back when."

István nodded, "That crucible was smaller though, the output on this unit is higher."

"Crucible?" I asked.

"Yes, it was a vessel we put what I had once thought was sand into it, in order to make that energy you've been seeing around this place. Turns out they are the remains of some unidentified sort. The same incident that saw us leaving the Veil is when I discovered it was not merely some kind of special ground stone we were using but something worse. Still unsure of what it actually is though.

I walked up to it and put my hand on the cold metal surface. It was odd, because for some reason I'd expected it to be warm, if not hot, considering the name and function. Instead it felt as though it was trying to suck the heat out of my body, and not merely from conduction.

I leaned my perception into it and eventually was able to pass my mind's eye into the interior, where I noticed that there were some sort of weak Motes floating around rather listlessly. They barely had any luminance, and I suspected they weren't long for this world.

There was a few dozen here. As I watched, sure enough one winked out; the small burst of energy getting immediately siphoned off to parts unknown - well, parts lower, anyway.

I followed the trace of power down, and saw it getting run through what was clearly another damaged Core of some kind, whereupon it hit me that the sand in the top was either crushed Cores or some sort of ground up Artifacts, maybe both. It was being corrupted and then exited the vessel in a slow and steady stream into the manifold above it, before being split off into one of the many pipes.

Those flows went into mess o' pipes on the ceiling, and from the rest we were already familiar with. Well, I assumed we were, anyway. Nothing to say that there couldn't be some other space we hadn't accessed.

"I still find it suspicious that we have not encountered anyone," István said, voicing a thought I'd been having for a while. "Where could they have gone?"

"Probably needed an emergency bathroom break or something," I said, a smile on my face.

Viktor's deep voice echoed out behind me, "They were worried something big and nasty was about to break containment." I didn't need to see him to know he was grinning, I could hear the mirth in his voice.

After what must have been a herculean effort to resist rolling his eyes at Viktor, István said, "That still doesn't help us figure out what to do about all of this. Do not forget, we have an issue from the room before with whatever sort of biological abomination that was."

I turned back and stared at the crucible, as if willing it to tell me how to destroy it.

Looking at it, I was reminded about Gran's pressure cooker again. She'd let me help her with it once after giving me a litany of warnings about how close to watch the little gauge embedded in the top. Supposedly, Gramps had once not headed her admonitions and blown a lid-shaped hole right through the ceiling into the roof. Amazing how much energy you could get out of a little water, a little heat, and a sealed container.

"I might have another bad idea," I said.

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