Following the Flamingo

With all the chaos behind me, it couldn’t have been easier to get into the lab.

I grabbed a lab coat and a clipboard, those tend to get you most places if you walk with enough confidence, and this being a university they weren’t hard to find. The clipboard was on somebody’s desk. Before taking it I made sure to remove the notes on, uh, it looked like the grades of this year’s Political Science students. I didn’t want to cost somebody their work, just a piece of stationary.

I went to the Counterphysical Mechanics labs next. Small building on the western side of campus. It was isolated from the rest of the buildings, probably to minimise damage if it burnt down, as labs were wont to do. There was only one entrance, the front door, but it wasn’t guarded or anything, I could just wander in, pretty much.

I immediately ran into problems, of course.

The first problem was that right after entering the building I found myself in a lobby. There were signs for lab one, lab two, lab three, lab four. I had no clue which was Lucas’.

My second problem was another sign on those doors. “No entry - experimentation in progress.” in big red warning font, alongside an exclamation mark and a little scrawled depiction of a man running around in panic whilst on fire.

It wasn’t like the sign was going to stop me, but it gave me pause.

I’d gotten excited about having my big realisation earlier. I’d experienced something close to hysteria, excitement enough my head felt like it was fizzing, like I was floating. The warning sign alone was enough to bring me back down to earth a little.

It felt silly to worry about going too far after I’d broken into the Liberationist hideout, but that was different. I’d known for certain that whoever was inside were criminals, murderers. Sure, I was taking my life in my hands, but nothing worse. If I broke in here and was wrong, or hell, if I was right and couldn’t get enough hard evidence to convince anybody…

I’d be arrested, or worse. Before could have cost me my life, but only if I screwed up, got hurt, failed.

I was about to break so many laws, and was probably going to be in trouble even if I was right about what I’d find in there.

I wasn’t sure what it said that this felt heavier in my gut than risking my life had.

I put my hand on the door anyway. Picked one at random, door three. No way out but through.

I had to know.

The door held firm against my first attempt to open it. The door knob turned, the door pressed forward a fraction, but it was like there was an air pressure difference, something pushing back. It slid shut again with a click after barely opening an inch. I hissed a curse.

“Aw, come on, what’s-”

At first I thought the effect was divine, but I wasn’t feeling that telltale prickle up my arm. There was definitely that kind of energy in the air, just not directly in the door. So what?

“Ahem.”

I went stock still. Had I been caught? The voice was coming from behind me, low and haggard.

I turned slowly.

There was an idol to Anchorhold in a little inset in the wall. Like back at the prison, they built those into the architecture for exactly this reason. He was one of the chartered, god of protection and the sea. The idol was stone, a barnacle-and-seaweed encrusted anchor. The encrustation was carved in, of course, not real.

Please, please tell me he wasn’t here as security. Protection deity, he had to be, right?

“Hi!” I projected confidence as best I could and held my clipboard close. “New intern, my name’s Alex. Lucas asked me to make sure everything was okay in here and get him some stuff, there’s apparently been an incident outside?”

Gods weren’t omniscient like back when they were unshackled, I told myself. He probably didn’t know who I was. I’d only watched Sarah kick one of his idols over earlier this week. That one hadn’t been inhabited, right? And it wasn’t like we’d talked.

“You were not informed of the protocols? This is unlikely. There are rules, dear child, in this place and this land to ensure you are not harmed by what is contained within.”

He glowed with a blinding pulse every time he spoke, I had to raise a hand to shield my eyes. Apparently he wasn’t concerned with ensuring my vision wasn’t harmed, at least.

“Man, I just started this job thirty minutes ago and already a weird-ass horse thing tried to kick me to death, if there’s rules I don’t know it’s ‘cause nobody explained them. What are the protocols, then?” I pinched the bridge of my nose, holding the clipboard underarm, giving him my best put-upon look.

“I am not authorised to inform you of that. I have a list of licensed worshippers of mine, and you are not amongst them. I must request that you leave.”

“I really need to get inside and-”

“I must request that you leave.” Anchorhold said, in the exact same tone as before. Monotone, a voice like granite. Possibly literally, given I wasn’t sure what kind of stone the idol was made of..

I looked around, trying to find a way around this, nearly squirming. Anchorhold was clearly contracted to act as some kind of security here, and I’d seen security deities dealing with intruders, it was rarely pretty. I grunted and knocked on the door, door three again, yelling “Hey, anybody in there? Your stupid god’s acting up again!”

I banged on the door. It was wood, a rich mahogany, about as old as the university. That meant it rattled on its hinges pretty badly as I pounded on it, and eventually an actual human showed up. Intern, brown hair, he looked as flustered as I was and was in a matching lab coat. He had an Infinite Staircase badge pinned on his lapel, like I’d seen back in the docks, the inverted pyramid vanishing towards the star.

“What the hell is going on out here? Quiet down, I’m trying to-” He blinked, and seemed to take in what I’d said. “-uh, are you licensed to worship it?”

“I just started working here, they didn’t tell me I had to be.” I put a bit of panic into my voice. “I don’t even know which lab I’m working in, uh- Lucas’s? He said to come here but just said ‘the lab’, and-”

The intern sighed. “Lab two. And- Penum’s arse, Anchorhold I beseech thee, give her the safety blessing already?”

The idol glowed, a teal light washing over me. All the hairs on my body stood on end, and then it receded. I patted my now-spiked hair down, everything sticking up all frizzy and frazzled.

“I- thanks.” I smiled bashfully at the guy, before putting a hand on lab two. “That uh- lets the door open?” I asked.

“You have to force it a bit.” He replied with a smile. It was every bit as polite and strained as mine was.

I turned the handle and pushed, and like before the door resisted me. So I put my back into it, pushed against the door with my shoulder too. It felt like something was forcing it shut.

I finally got it open with a triumphant heave, and a gust of air like whirlwind hit me like a brick wall. I staggered back, the clipboard was blown out of my hands. I pushed forward though,

stepping through the threshold, forcing my way through headwinds that threatened to blow me away, coming from seemingly nowhere. I had to keep the door held open, only letting go of the door once I was through it, letting the winds slam it shut behind me.

The wind stopped when it closed, giving me a chance to get my first proper look at Lucas’ lab.

The entire room was in a ritual circle.

The circle was drawn in chalk around the edges of the room, with Anchorhold statuettes every few meters contained in their own little circles, powering it.

Not just one circle either, they were concentric. There was a smaller one within the larger, and that contained… I don’t know what, an ugly jagged pile of iron and scrap. It had the same kind of horns or spikes or whatever they were sticking off the top that the radio had, like an insect’s antennae. It wasn’t just Anchorhold powering that circle either, but a dozen gods, none of which I recognised.

The place was drowning in so much divine power I could hardly breathe, and the air swam and distorted like a heat haze. My chest heaved, for a second I thought I was about to faint, but then I stabilised, a little of that teal light Anchorhold had blessed me with pulsing from my skin. Something about simply standing in this room was harmful, it seemed. That blessing was needed, but I wasn’t sure why, what it was protecting me from.

Altered physical laws, maybe. The Staircase were trying to invent different laws of physics where new machines, new inventions could work. I wondered what laws were changed in here that would be so hostile to humankind as to require this kind of protection.

It was nowhere near as bad as anything I’d seen Lady Regress do to warp space, though. A bit hard to see through the haze, but otherwise things felt normal.

I moved forward. Nobody seemed to be here, the lab was abandoned for the science faire. There was another door, heading back outside by the looks. That seemed odd, given the level of protection on the other door. What if somebody blundered in here without a blessing? Was that safe? Maybe it was locked, I supposed. Worth checking in a moment.

First of all, though, I had a lab to investigate, and the scrap pile wasn’t the only thing worth looking at in here. There were shelves full of papers, reference books and scientific documents. Tables on which were placed all kinds of measuring equipment. I didn’t recognise most of them, but I knew a watt-meter when I saw one, it measures electric charge right?

I’d never seen one which could go into negatives though, that was new.

Nothing here was quite what I was after, nothing that could constitute evidence for my theory, evidence against the Staircase. Was this really the entire lab? I started pulling down some of the reference books, trying to see if any of them were in that familiar Dreaming Empire script Raspe’s notes had been in, if there was anything that might pertain to the Godbox.

There was a window, peering out into the courtyard, next to the door to the outside. About halfway through desperately flipping across the first book, I looked through it and noticed that they’d finally gotten the horse under control. It looked like nobody was injured, thank Hylyss, but that meant I had no time to spend dawdling around here.

Next to that window was the door.

It couldn’t actually lead outside, could it? There was only one entrance to this building and I’d come through it, it wasn’t this one.

I swallowed. It couldn’t be, could it?

Different physical laws. Space could work differently. Could the door lead to more laboratory?

I opened it up, eager to find out.

It opened into a dark, underground room.

The walls of that room were different. They weren’t the familiar Eccless redbrick of the rest of the lab, they were hard stone. The ceiling was lower, and propped up by regular stone pillars and arches.

It felt brutalist and efficient, nobody had cared to decorate this place. And it was cold, chillingly so, I felt the freeze just standing outside the door as the cold air rushed to meet me.

“Hello?”

I peeked my head through, looked left, then right. If I was going to get caught, I might as well do it now, when I was still close to an exit. I didn’t want to wander in here and then get cut off at the door by somebody inside.

No reply.

I hadn’t been in here long. A couple minutes, maybe. The commotion outside was quietening down, no more screaming, no more electric sparking or crashes of the horse rampaging everywhere.

A moment ago I had told myself I didn’t have long.

But I had long enough to just take a peek, right?

I stepped into the room and suddenly all the noises from outside stopped dead. It was like I’d gone into another world, all the ambient sounds from the university gone in an instant, replaced with a low electric humming of the lights, and a fluid bubbling coming from every direction.

That last one was coming from the tubes.

The walls were lined with them. From outside I’d thought they were columns supporting the roof, but up close they were clearly some kind of experimental equipment, huge glass pillars as thick as a person, going from floor to ceiling and filled with a bubbling green fluid.

There were black iron supports at the base and top, completing the pillar-like look. The ones at the base had visible control panels, alongside divoted seams at the four corners of the base where it was clearly meant to come apart. To allow the tubes as a whole to be moved, or just to replace the contents? I wasn’t sure.

They were cold. I was dressed for warm but not boiling weather, and already the little hairs on my arms were standing on end from the change in temperature. I stepped forward. Was it the tubes that were making everything so freezing? Did they need to be stored at this temperature so they wouldn’t expire, somehow? That goo looked almost biological, would it rot or moulder under higher temperatures?

I put my hand on one of the pillars, against the glass. It was cold as ice, I jerked my hand away before I gave myself frostbite, hissed in pain.

It made me wonder if this was Folkvangr technology. Glass usually meant Gnoll, but those undead had it cold down south. Maybe this was something to do with them? If I saw Einherjar Frank again I’d need to ask.

The pillars were bubbling, but it was only after I stopped hissing I heard another noise. A faint clinking. Something tapping against glass, like a fingernail. Was somebody in here after all?

The glass pillars almost acted as dividing walls, I couldn’t see past them into the wider room, but there were small gaps between them. If I put my eye up close, I could see further.

All there seemed to be was more of the pillars. This place was like a warehouse full of them. What were they even for? Something to do with different physical laws, probably. Trying to change the freezing temperature of… green goo?

There was nobody there though. Every second I spent in here, I got more paranoid about somebody finding me. Every time I verified the place was empty, I started worrying that fact had changed about ten seconds later.

The tapping was to the left. Around the corner, if you considered the rows of pillars to be walls.

I went left, rounded that corner. Found myself in a corridor of the pillars.

I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t see the end of said corridor. It just faded off into darkness after a certain point, the lights too dim to let me see further. I had absolutely no sense of how large this space was, I realised. It had a claustrophobically low ceiling, but no apparent width, no obvious length.

I started moving forward cautiously, trying to be as light footed as possible. After only a few steps I suddenly realised the clinking was coming from behind me now.

I stepped back. Now it was to my left.

One of the tubes?

The tube to my left was like all the rest. I couldn’t see any distinction between it and the other, and I certainly couldn’t tell what was causing the noise to come from it. Equipment malfunction, maybe.

But then I saw it. A little grey-brown dot inside the green. It seemed to vanish and reappear in time with the clinking. Something inside the goo, the bubbles were pushing it around, making it leave then re-contact the glass.

What was it?

I got closer. Planted both hands on the glass, grit my teeth for the cold, and jostled it. The iron holders at the base and ceiling only gave the glass tube a half-inch of leeway, but that was enough to shake it a little.

Come on, come on…

Something emerged from the goo. It impacted the glass with a thud. Solid, brown.

Dead.

Corpse.

My gorge rose. A green bile of my own threatened to spew from my throat, but I forced it down. I didn’t want to look at this a second longer than I had to. I had to take in all the pertinent details now. My vision was swimming so bad I was nearly blind, but I had to do it all right now.

Headless. Clean-cut, I could see muscle and exposed vertebra. Surgical, not violent. Something was sticking out of the neck, jammed just under the spinal column. Something segmented, I almost mistook it for the spine at first but it was too flat, too brown. The segmentation was wrong.

It had little legs coming off from the sides. A centipede.

And it wasn’t the bubbles moving that finger. I could see the muscular tension under the arm. It shifted like it was alive in there. Conscious. The head moved like it was following my movement, even.

Okay. Okay.

Now I could throw up.

I hurled all over the floor. They’d definitely know somebody was in here now. When my vision stopped swimming and I could see clearly again, I knew I wasn’t ever clearing that puddle up. My hair framed my face as I stared down at the mess, I used a hand to gather it up and pull it back, thanking whatever gods were relevant that the tips hadn’t dipped in the bile whilst I was bent double.

This wasn’t what I’d come here hoping to find. I had no clue what this was. I had no fucking idea how to fit this into the theory that had drawn me down here. I thought that Lady Regress-

I was hyperventilating. This was clearly a loss. I’d caused all that trouble, committed half a dozen felonies and whilst what was down here was messed up, probably illegal, and definitely very secret, it had nothing to do with Lady Regress or Raspe. This was something else entirely.

I should go. I should really go. Figure out who to tell about the Staircase’s… zombie… centipede project thing. Probably. If that’s even what this was. Irons? Irons. That felt like a plan. Maybe I could get a pardon if I stopped them from taking over Eccless with an undead army. Maybe. I totally wouldn’t end up going to jail forever and never finding out what happened and having Irons gloat at me about how reality punished me and…

“Squooonk!”

A noise cut through the panic. It…

I looked up. I’d been staring straight down, still hunched over the chunky mess I’d thrown up. I hadn’t been paying attention to the world around me.

Hadn’t noticed a pink flamingo sneaking up in front of me, staring at me with black, beady eyes.

It was so damned dissonant I almost burst out laughing. Stone walls, shadowy halls. Corpses and death and mad science experiments, and here was standing a bright pink bird unbothered by it all.

What was it even doing here? Escaped from the zoo?

Or summoned by…

Hadn’t Lady Regress summoned one of these?

I couldn’t think of any other way a flamingo could possibly, physically be down here. It couldn’t be a scientist’s pet, I’d’ve heard if any researcher kept one and they wouldn’t let it wander. It couldn’t be a zoo escapee, not with all the security stopping even humans from getting in here. Flamingos were not, to the best of my knowledge, native to extra-dimensional pocket laboratories, either.

Now I was hyperventilating for a whole different reason. This had to be it, right? She had to be down here somewhere. Some idol of hers I could talk to. Proof she was working with the Staircase. Proof of my theory that-

I fished a chocolate out of my pocket to calm myself down, chewed on it. It tasted of vomit, my whole mouth did, but it still did its job.

“...Hey buddy.” I tried. The flamingo tilted its head at me. “You doing okay? You uh, your mum here?”

Summoned creatures, did she count as their mum? Not the point.

The corpse inside the tube shifted. I tried not to make too horrified a noise. It turned to look at the flamingo now, or at least oriented its torso like it would be looking if it had eyes to see. It was definitely reacting to movement outside the tube. Definitely some kind of zombie.

The flamingo didn’t seem to mind. And it didn’t seem to understand my question. It just replied with a second, louder “Squonk!”

“Can you uh, can you take me to… ugh, this isn’t working. How about-”

I jumped up, spread my arms and legs out, tried to make myself look big as I gave a loud “BOO!”

It jerked back in fear and flapped its wings, turning tail and running.

Let’s see where it considered safe, hm?

It fled around one corner, then another. I followed it into an open space. It almost felt like emerging into a clearing. In the middle was a ritual circle, something huge in the center, and-

“Shit!”

A ritual circle. Deities in there, I could be seen. They’d recognise me as an intruder. The flamingo settled down once it realised I wasn’t pursuing it in there as I skidded back into the hall.

I wasn’t sure what was in that room, inside the circle. Something that required unique physics to exist. Something lizardlike. I thought I could hear it breathing.

I took a breath. My panic had been kneejerk. After a moment of consideration, I realised I was looking for a deity, to interrogate one. If It was Lady Regress maintaining the circle…

I peeked around the corner. Caught glimpses of the creature in the middle, a snout, eyes like fire.

Anchorhold.

It was Anchorhold maintaining the circle. I pulled back. Okay, chasing the flamingo was a bust then. There had to be some other way to find… anything down here, outside of these accursed tubes.

Did I have time? I’d been in here ten minutes. My distraction had already been audibly petering out when I came down here.

And as much as it wasn’t proof, as much as the connection was so, so tenuous, I knew Lady Regress was down here now. There wasn’t any other explanation for the flamingo. Was that enough?

Probably. It was probably pretty close.

I sat myself down, tried to think.

I’d come down here expecting mind-blowing revelations. To find a spare Godbox outright, maybe. And certainly all this… I didn’t know what any of this meant but it was big. I mean, city-shatteringly huge. I didn’t have a word for what I’d stumbled on. If I stared out into the darkness of the corridors I still couldn’t get a read on just how big this laboratory was, how many of these centipedes-corpse things were down here. If space wasn’t working as intended, it could be infinite.

And Anchorhold was working to maintain them. I was unsure if that meant this was church-sanctioned or Anchorhold going off the reservation, it wouldn’t be the first deity to, but if the Chartered Nine were doing so…

I just had to get out so I could figure out what to do about any of it, since my initial plan was shot. Lady Regress worked for Counterphysical Mechanics, I’d hoped to tie her to the Staircase then prove just her fleeing to the Liberationists had been part of the attempts to frame them, that her stories about Raspe tormenting her had been a lie.

Instead, I had more evidence and new information than I knew what to do with. I needed time to process.

I made my way back towards the door. It was easy enough to retrace my steps. It was impossible to tell one corridor made of identical glass pillars from another, but I’d only taken three or four turns and could do it by memory even without the, ah, markers I’d left behind. If I’d gone deeper I might have gotten lost here forever, or at least until some Staircase member found me to pull me out, but this deep, I was fine.

Past the puddle of vomit, past the clinking centipede-zombie.

Through the doorway into the lab, outside the pocket dimension, into Eccless proper, feeling the gust of air as the pressure changed.

And then smack-bang into Doctor Erwin Schreck. I nearly bowled him over I was walking so fast to try to get out.

He panicked. I panicked. He dropped the pile of books he was holding all over the floor.

And I grabbed him by the collar, hauled him back into the pocket dimension where I knew nobody else was, and slammed the door to seal us both inside.