There were, indeed, ms in one of the drawers - two of them. Better than nothing, she supposed. Wiping off the most egregious muck quickly fouled them, and seeing this, Krahe looked around in the hopes that the b would have a source of water. It did. One of the wheeled ets had a small, copper sink, a particurly thick cable or perhaps hose running from it and out of the chamber… Only, no water came out. Turning the faucet only elicited an impotent wheeze from the pipes as the hose writhed on the ground. She decided to follow the hose, both to try and find a source of water and because it ran through the o. Krahe wrung out the rags as best she could and tied them around her leg so she wouldn’t have to carry them in hand, instinctively looking around the room for something she could use as a on. Surely, a boratory had to hold something that she could use as a on.
That mental impulse again, a niggling bug in her brain tellio look at that menu. She ig out of sheer annoyance, pulling open drawers and ets in the search for a on.
“All this teology, and no gun? e on…” she grumbled. Someone riough to have all this equipment surely wouldn’t be dumb enough to not have two or three backup guns sitting around his b. Su assumption was more than reasonable in her own world, and she hoped that it would prove true here as well. The real-wood writing desk quickly drew her attention, as it faced the chamber’s exit. If there was a gun here, it would be in one of the drawers or hidden uhe cartoonish mess of tomes and papers. On the horrifying possibility that this world somehow didn’t have firearms, she hoped for at least a dagger.
Krahe froze for a moment when she first saw the writing desk’s top, her eyes gzing over when she first beheld this world’s writing. It came across like some abomierbreeding of katakana, nordies, and tin script… And it made sense. Reading a few lines of it made her head hurt and took a good bit of effort, but what mattered was that she could read it. Unfortunately, it was all nonsense - codespeak upon codespeak. Whoever worked here was obviously ed with infosed Krahe had no reason to care for the books’ tents. She swept it all away, carelessly closing books and stag them all in a precarious tower off to the side with one hand while reag about under piles of paper. Her heart skipped a beat when she felt etal and cross hatched wood.
It was… A beautiful, heavy pistol; like some long-fotten sibling to a C96 Mauser. Its form was bereft of sharp angles, with a soft downward hump in front of the trigger that swept forward in an upward curve until it met the barrel two-thirds down its length; wooden panels covered the hump’s front half.
The gun had an integral magazihe bottom of an en-bloc clip poking out the bottom. It had a ring-eyed lever and a tiny hair trigger, the two of which overpped such that the trigger could be tripped by the natural motion of w the lever. She worked the lever to get a feel for it, catg the empty g that popped out when she pushed it all the way forward. Still warm, strangely. Its sights were good, albeit the most basic they could reasonably be. No holosights, thermals, no automatic target designation - just irons, non-windage-adjustable.
It was a dht relic by the standards of her time, but manually-operated guns had just always stuck around in some form. Fancy proprietary ammo didn’t like to cycle in automatics.
She set it aside for the moment, grabbing about for extra ammunition. None was to be found oabletop, but the topmost drawer held the treasure she sought - three small wooden boxes with a bullet printed oop, alongside the cartridge dimensions: 10x24mm.
Tucked away o the ammo were a bck leather holster and a sed wooden box which turned out to be the ing kit. One of the ammo boxes had already been opened, and upon closer iion she found that it held three ammo clips with space for two more, a total of six bullets in each clip. She took the three clips and tucked them behind one of the rags she’d tied around her left thigh, affixing the holster around the right.
Since she didn’t want to attradue attention from whoever or whatever might dwell here, she didn’t dare py at target practice, following the hose out of the chamber.
The freezing-cold ground had already made her feet go numb, their pitter patter reverberating through the dark stone halls of this pce. Uhe shrine-boratory, these tunnels were almost anic, evoking the feeling of running through some gigantiake’s ribcage. Barred doors lihe walls, each revealing a cramped cell with a semi-upright restraint-bed and nothing else. This had either been a prison, or a testing facility that used unwilling subjects… A long, long time ago. She could feel it ihing here, this pce had not seen its intended purpose carried out in at least a tury. After perhaps fifty meters, she arrived at a turn and soon emerged onto the street. There were no doors barring her path - only wide, thick doorways that belied the bulkheads hidden in the walls and ceilings.
ing her head back, a sinking feeling came over her; a sprawling, desote city surrounded her, and the sun shone down upon a misshapen pile in the middle of a vast cavern. Everything was silent, the air was noticeably less cold, and… Upon taking a closer look, that pile was made of corpses, which were somehow not rotting in the sun. She was underground, inside some long-abandoned great city seemingly built inside a giant open-pit mihere was nothing - no sound, no movement, no people or even vermin. Somehow, she would’ve preferred it if the streets were littered with eldritch monstrosities.
Akaso
If you’d like to read ahead, sider heading oo the Patreon! Patrons gain access to up to 20 days of advance tent, with further expansion pnned for the future. So if you want to help fund my crippling addi to issioning art, sider reading a couple chaps ahead.
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For a link to the discord, check the synopsis.
