User blog:Lazarus Grimm/Elder Effect: The Gift

Elder Effect

The Gift

The whole next month had been dedicated to excavate the remainder of the ship and then find out just how they were supposed to get into it. It had proved to be easier than she had anticipated. As soon as they had dug down deep enough to uncover the suspected cargo hold of the vessel, a hatch had seemingly lowered down on its own, as if it had been waiting all those years for someone to just happen upon it. The signal was undeniably emitting from within.

Miriam tasked Bihani with clearing a path and securing the opening of the ship. She didn’t want to give fate any reason to all of a sudden bring a cave-in upon them, right when they were in the middle of investigating the vessel. She had seen enough horror films on the CHIM Network to know that it seldom ended well for those who couldn’t sate their curiosity. So far there had been little to no incidents, apart from the occasional fainting diggers as they suffered from lack of oxygen down in the shafts. She couldn’t fault them for that, as her headache got worse and worse with each passing minute she spent deep beneath the ground.

She had set up her own little tent just outside the cargo hold doors, to remain as close to the site of interest as possible, but it turned out to be a really stupid idea as the workers had been so kind to tell her. Due to the minimum amounts of oxygen underground, she was most likely to choke to death in her sleep than getting any excavation done and proper.

Hence why the workers returned to their barracks above ground as soon as the bells rang for lunch or rest once their shift was over. She, however, remained stubborn, as she really didn’t want to leave the find of the ages. She tried to stick around the dig site for as long as her migraine and lungs would allow. Here they had a highly advanced alien spacecraft from before the time of creation. That was enough reason for her to jeopardize her health and everything. She could almost already see the headlines of the Black Horse Courier: ''Brilliant Scientist And Team Uncover Primordial Vessel. ''Just a little while longer now…

“Professor Auxelia?” a voice asked from outside her tent. The harrowed Dunmer scientist Drole Lathandras entered. “We are ready for you.”

“Just a moment”, Miriam replied, taking a deep breath from one of the portable oxygen tanks. It didn’t help her headache, but at least it would keep her stable for just a little while longer before she had to return to surface level.

The vessel stood waiting; its cargo hold wide and open like a gigantic maw, pitch black and all-consuming. For a brief moment Miriam had second thoughts about entering, but the investigation team stood ready and assembled. She couldn’t call it off now. Her damned curiosity certainly wouldn’t let her.

Dust had settled everywhere in the ship’s interior. Turned out that not even the strange black and shiny material it was made from was spared from the ravages of age. The walls were constructed from some equally black metal alloy of unprecedented integrity, and ornamented with some strange inscriptions, not all too different from the runes made by the Dwemer, but then again all too alien. It was impossible to ascertain whether they were merely there for aesthetics or served some unknown functional purpose. All they could do was to guess, after all, they were dealing with a race unknown to everyone and everything. A race so ancient and advanced that they even somehow had made ships surpassing modern technology before the universe even came into existence.

She simply couldn’t understand it, and almost wished for it to be false. That Thorrin Brown-Beard’s calculations had been wrong. It would have made everything so much easier.

The further into the ship they went, the stranger it became. The geometry of its interior defied all rational sense and logic. Staircases with diagonal steps along the side of the walls, doorways in the ceiling in the shape of parallelograms; it was all a mess. It was almost as if the ship had been designed by a child, either that or it had somehow collapsed on itself. She had a theory that maybe the ship was constructed in a way that would allow it to fold itself in order to travel through all matter of dimensions and angles, but the way the exterior was constructed told her otherwise. But then again, they had just discovered the advanced craft of a spacefaring alien race long before micro-organisms were even a thing. Who knew just what the true potential of this ship was?

The ship opened up further ahead to reveal a way she could only guess would take them directly to the cockpit. The air was dense as expected. She could barely breathe inside. Neither of them could. Though there had been a slight shift in temperature through successful terraforming on the surface, as well as some acclimatization of the natural environment, making the air somewhat more breathable, Caecilly still had a long way to go before it could properly be called hospitable. Maybe in a decade or two. Still, the terraforming had been going well, considering the short amount of time the processing plants had been installed.

Bihani shuddered by her side. His fur seemed to be standing on its end.

“What’s wrong?” Miriam asked.

“This one doesn’t know”, the Khajiit replied anxiously. “It just felt like someone walked over Bihani’s grave, or however you Imperials say it.”

Miriam found Bihani’s statement to be amusing, but nevertheless it was a sentiment which she shared. This place truly felt otherworldly and bizarre. The very shadows their flashlights cast seemed to observe them from a distance, discreetly whispering in their ears that this place was not meant for them to find. And if they did indeed possess the ability to speak, they would have been right. Every distorted nook here seemed to hiss at her that she did not belong here and that she should go back the way she came. Forget this forlorn tomb of a primordial past, so ancient that even time itself had seemingly wanted to keep it hidden like some unintentional jest.

Finally they reached what appeared to be the cockpit. It was a tall dark room with pilot seats the size of Grytewake batteries. The mere sight of them was enough to make Miriam tremble with anticipation and fear of what was seated in them. She could already make out the blotted out silhouettes of the pilots, still seated there as if they had been awaiting their arrival for an eternity. She hesitated to shine her lamp on their gigantic fossilized cadavers, afraid of what she would see, but curiosity seized her already frightened mind, bombarded by impressions, and made her direct her light straight at them.

She gave out a short startled scream, before mustering her courage and composure. They were dead, she had to tell herself over and over.

The height of the two pilots, seated next to each other, rivaled that of the Giants on Skyrim. The bones of their twisted body structure was humanoid; two arms, two legs, with five gnarly digits on each. Their fingers were elongated, almost claw-like in appearance, and their limbs were thin and sleek: somehow she got the impression of a pair gigantic spiders lurking in the shadows. The ribs of their chests were bent upwards, horizontally, and it was not the result of some damage stemming from the impact of the crash. The biological implications fascinated her, as much as they made her feel completely dumbfounded. And then of course there was their heads.

She had no appropriate words to describe them. They felt so human, but then again not. They were more akin to the cranial form of that of a vicious predator, like the dreaded cave bears on Cyrodiil. Sharp rows of teeth in their massive jaws and two pairs of long canines spoke lengths of their carnivorous diet. The four empty sockets in their skulls seemed to observe her as she warily approached, as if there was some kind of conscience left in these massive husks of fossils, judging her for every step she took towards them. From where she stood, they might as well have been a pair of enormous statues. If they had ever worn some kind of suits, the material hadn’t withstood the test of time as well as their ship and their bodies had.

“This one is scared”, whimpered the Khajiit foreman.

Miriam swallowed hard and nodded shortly. “So am I, but look at it this way. This is the find of world history. We are going to be famous. You are going to be famous. You are going to be remembered as the Khajiit who helped to uncover the greatest archeological find since the partial translation of the Dwemer language.”

Bihani straightened his back in a moment of subtle pride. “Y-yeah. Damn right.”

She smiled at him and then turned to face the fossilized corpses of the pilots again, her smile immediately fading as their grinning skulls stared straight back at her from the ominous darkness.

If only the dead could speak, what kind of secrets would they reveal to me?

The following two days investigating the ship was a sound success. Though the pilots would not budge from their seats, almost as if they had fused together somehow, and as such as had to be examined on the spot, the other holds of the ship had made themselves accessible to the researchers. It was strange for sure. Despite the hostile sensation she had gotten from the ship, it was almost like it was made aware of their presence and had “voluntarily” allowed them access to its other compartments.

The remaining holds of the ship were more of the same however. Unconventional interior design and strange inscriptions on every wall. And then there was the strange cylindrical objects they had discovered in one of the cargo holds. They looked like glass vessels with a bottom and top made out of a similar material to the ship’s hull, but seemingly different as they could put dents in it. Their contents were a complete mystery. Though the glass was transparent and allowed the viewer to look inside, the content appeared to be a strange conglomeration of bright yellow-glowing spheres, subtly moving around and giving away their own radiant illumination, effectively serving as a night lamp for the researchers. They had been advised to refrain from opening the cylinders however, as there was no telling what exactly the content was. The artefacts were to be transferred to the Archeologists’ Guild as soon as they had all been accounted for. They needed to be quarantined before opened. Though Miriam was a bit distraught that she wouldn’t get to experience the sight of their contents revealed firsthand, she reckoned that safety had to come first. What if it was some kind of pre-historical nuclear doomsday device and it went off the moment she opened the lid? That would have made some tragic headlines and an even more tragic end to her otherwise promising career.

Drole Lathandras had been eager to get on radio contact to spread the message to his higher-ups. It mattered little to her as long as none of them came to Caecilly to steal her credit and glory. This was her dig and her project. It had been entrusted to her and she wouldn’t let anyone else get their hands on all the effort and hard research she had been putting into it. She would not become the footnote of some page in someone else’s history book.

Though the dig had been going well and the climate was slowly improving, she felt something of an itch in the back of her mind. Something that gnawed at the very roots of her brain. The alien distress signal sent by the ship had mysteriously ceased the moment they had entered. And though normally that would have been the case with any other ship; that the alarm went off the moment another entity boarded or opened the vessel, as it would have served its purpose in attracting help from the outside, she had the creeping unsettling feeling that such wasn’t the case with their ancient spacecraft. And the impression she had gotten from the pilots…

She couldn’t begin to describe it. Maybe she was just paranoid, somehow it felt as if it hadn’t been a distress call at all, but rather a lure. Something to attract foreign entities with. It was almost as if the ship and its pilots had wanted to be found, and not for the purpose of a rescue. There was nothing indicating that the pilots had died in the crash, if there even had been one, so why were they still there? Fused together with the pilot seats as if they had waited, and waited – and waited…