"Blueprints!" Legolas said after a minute. "Without them, we wouldn't know where the rooms are, right?"
"Right. So, let's continue."
The entries that Adam Strickland had privately written down had completely distracted them from their original task. But because they read the journal, they knew for sure that the Light of Earendil was somewhere underground. Now, they were carefully searching the office for the elusive blueprints to plan the easiest and safest way through the building.
"Any luck?" Aragorn asked after about an hour.
"No," sighed Legolas. "You?"
"Nope. But I managed to figure out why those windows were bugging me." He went over to them and stroked the drapes. "The window frame is of elvish design. Looks more like an Imladris design, doesn't it? We can thank your Uncle Elrond for that."
Legolas was barely listening. He had followed Aragorn to the window, but not to admire the window frame. When the drapes shifted, he noticed a small groove in the wall behind it that definitely looked out of place.
"What is it?" Aragorn said curiously.
Legolas pushed the drapes away and hit the wall beside the groove with his fist. A slender piece of the wall shifted away automatically and the rolls of blueprints fell to the floor.
"A secret compartment with blueprints and," he reached inside and withdrew a piece of paper, "another blueprint. But it's an ink sketch."
Aragorn gathered the blueprints and spread them out on his father's and Legolas' father's desks. For another hour or two, they pored over the blueprints to find any indication of the rooms mentioned in the journal and any kind of passageway underground.
"According to this thing, there should be a door about three meters ahead and to our right." Aragorn pointed to the gap on the blueprint. They looked and stared at the wall. "Obviously, there is no door. What're we going to do?"
"I don't know," Legolas said slowly. He glanced around the desk while he tried to think and suddenly got an idea. He furled the building's design and began tracing his fingers along the furthest edge of the desk. "Oh, where is it?"
Aragorn simply watched him as his finger stopped near the end and they heard a loud click. Legolas then dove under the desk and opened a small, black box hidden in the corner.
"Do you mind if I ask you something?" Aragorn said as he looked under the desk. "What the hell are you doing?"
Legolas didn't reply and pressed a small button after reconnecting some wires. Immediately, several small lights were blinking and there was a square, glowing piece of fiberglass on the desk. He came out from under the desk and pressed it. A thin, translucent fiberglass computer screen steadily rose up from the middle of the desk and flickered on. The sheet of fiberglass in front of him glowed and the keys of a keyboard appeared and became distinctly solid with the help of force fields.
"I love the technology our dads gave themselves," Legolas told Aragorn as he typed in his dad's password. He went through the files quickly, never forgetting where he was going.
He tried to open a locked file but failed. He entered in the bypass code and tried to get in.
"Voice authorization required," a smooth female voice said.
"No wonder our dads liked working in this office so much," chuckled Aragorn. "This voice is more than enough to keep any guy in here."
"Authorization: Grayfield," tested Legolas.
"Voice identification confirmed," the smooth voice said. "Grayfield voice trait confirmed. Access granted."
"All right," said Legolas. He tore through the file, looking for maps of any kind. "Fuck... So I was wrong."
"Wait, wait! Stop right there!" Aragorn cried out. "Go back a few applications."
Legolas did so and smirked at what Aragorn had seen while he was too concerned with finding maps.
"The Ares Room," Legolas said, amused.
"It has to be it. Both our dads loved stuff about ancient times and Ares is the Greek god of war." He waited for him to log into the room's database. "Legolas? What are you waiting for?"
He withdrew a small packet of what looked like crumbled bread from his back pant pocket. He munched on a small piece and offered it to Aragorn. "Lembas? It's in itty-bitty pieces because I sat on it, but it's still good." He put the pouch on the desk and worked on getting into the Ares Room.
Aragorn shrugged and ate a piece of lembas while he felt his appetite wane and listened to the soft tapping of the computer keys.
Click. Beep. Nothing happened on the screen.
"Legolas, what did you do?"
"I don't know. What did I do?"
The computer suddenly popped up a new window that said, "Access Granted" in bright, green letters. A second later, a sound like a room was decompressing echoed in the room. They looked up and watched a piece of the seemingly blank wall slowly depress, split and slide into the sides of the wall. The popup window closed by itself, showing an inventory of the contents of the Ares Room and what they did.
Impressed, Legolas went through the inventory list interestedly. Aragorn went over and peeked into the Ares Room.
"You want something from in here?" Aragorn called from within the room.
"If you could just look around in there for a few minutes, it'd be better," Legolas called back. "There's a lot of cool shit in there so I want to see what kind of shit we're dealing with."
"Sure thing." He stepped in and had a good look around the room.
Compared to the small entrance, the Ares Room itself was very big. Many different kinds of weapons lined the walls and various kinds of tools sat on drawers, tables and glass shelves. Armor ranging from bulletproof vests to chain mail to bracers were displayed in a far corner, connecting the themes of the wall of sword and other blades with the wall of guns. Opposite of the swords and adjacent to the guns were finely crafted metallurgic bow and arrow sets. The wall opposite the guns was what interested Aragorn the most, though. It was divided into two sections: on the left were maces, blade-tipped whips and lances; on the left were dozens of different kinds of hand-held bombs and other projectile weapons. Everything glittered and shined brightly under the halogen lights.
"Wow," breathed Aragorn. He was inspecting the quality of a tiny grenade when Legolas came in, obviously impressed as well. "Cool, isn't it?"
"Oh, hell yeah." He made a beeline for the samurai swords on the other end and used it so fluidly and gracefully that it looked as if he had been practicing for years. "I'd love to take this with me, but I have no room to carry it with me."
"Shame, isn't it?" Aragorn slid a couple of the bomb timers in a chest pocket of his holster and the explosives themselves in a small pack on his belt. "If I could, I'd take some of those swords for the Hobbits. But, I suppose Elvish design is better than any of these, hmm?"
"No, it depends on what you're comfortable with." The Elf put a few diamond-coated and poison-tipped arrows in his quiver. "If you're not comfortable with a weapon, it would do worse rather than good."
"True enough, true enough." He eyed a small earpiece on the table. He put it in his ear and pressed a small button at the back. Instantly, a cool-looking microphone shot out and stopped just centimeters from his mouth. He picked up the other one and tossed it to Legolas. "A walkie-talkie headset. It's bound to come in handy."
Legolas carefully slid it behind his pointy ear and pressed the button. "Keep an open com link for as long as possible." He grabbed a couple of the smallest med kits he could find and tucked them in his belt pouches. "Ready to go?"
"Yeah." He took one last bomb and followed Legolas out.
The door automatically shut behind them and once again became invisible against the rest of the redwood wall. The computer logged out of the Ares system immediately after the door closed. While Legolas shut down the computer, Aragorn put the blueprints back but kept the ink sketch map.
Quickly and quietly, they made their way to the other side of the building. Luckily, there was no interference from anything. They came to the end of a hallway and stared at the blank, featureless wall.
"Are you sure it's here?" Legolas asked skeptically.
"That's what the map says. There should be a door or an entrance here." He put his hand on a bomb. "Should I?"
Legolas put up his hand to make him wait for a moment and went to examine the wall more carefully. His fingers ran gently over the ridges of the drywall paint and felt a miniscule rise in the wall. He tried pushing it, but nothing happened. Only with Aragorn's help could they finally depress the lump.
With a click, a small, square piece of the wall bent forward, revealing a screen with the company logo on it. The piece of wall lay perpendicular to the screen and had an indentation lying on it.
"Authorization required," the smooth voice said again. The security camera in the corner swiveled to focus on them.
"Authorization: Grayfield."
"Insufficient data," replied the voice. A small gun dropped from the camera and shot a small burst of what looked like lasers.
Legolas yelled and stepped aside in time to see a scorch mark on the wall right where he had been a second before.
"Wait," Aragorn said, an idea appearing in his mind. He took out his dagger and carefully cut his fingertip. Bright, red blood blossomed on his fingertip and started to flow down his finger. After licking away the excess blood, he pressed his bloody finger onto the outstretched panel.
"What...?"
"Authorization confirmed," the voice announced. "Secondary authorization required."
Aragorn carefully cut Legolas' finger and prompted him to press his finger on the panel, which had already cleaned itself of all of Aragorn's residual blood. Slightly confused but confident, he did so.
"Secondary authorization confirmed."
From the security panel, silver lines extended to all ends of the wall. The panel itself closed and became as invisible against the wall again while an intricately designed door opened. The silver lines seemed to have made a design of an elegant spider web and was pulling the door open, into the wall.
"Welcome, Mr. Strickland and Mr. Grayfield. You are now entering the Oracle's Chamber."
As the doors opened, the lights within the Chamber began to light up, one by one. It was a circular room with a giant monitor on the wall directly ahead of them. At first, they could only see a single podium-like control stand in front of the giant screen. As the lights switched on, two large strips of computer modules that paralleled the room's curvature were seen. Above each module were no less than a dozen large fiberglass panels. The boys weren't quite sure how, but the panels were hovering silently in the air looking slightly askew from their proper place.
Legolas followed Aragorn inside, sucking on his cut finger. He threw him a hurt look over his finger.
"That won't work on me, Legolas."
"Damn," he hissed. He tore off a bandage from a med kit and wrapped it around his finger. "So why'd you cut me? For the hell of it?"
"Because," Aragorn said over his shoulder as he tried logging into the Oracle, "the system needed both of our DNA sequences."
"Ahh... Okay. That makes sense. We carry the Grayfield and Strickland genes - at least, half of them - so the system has no choice but to let us in."
"Biology comes in handy." He let out a frustrated growl when he was denied access again.
Legolas sighed and pushed his friend away from the console. He unwrapped his bandage and reopened the cut on his finger. He and Aragorn watched as his blood drew out and a couple drops splashed onto the console.
As the blood was absorbed into the console, more functions on it began to light up with the same technology as their fathers' personal computers. The two curved modules behind them flowed with power and the panels above them flickered on and shifted into their default positions.
"How is it that you figured out how to open the door with blood but not how to log into the Oracle System with blood?" Legolas asked him tauntingly while re-wrapping the bandage around his finger. "It's the same basic principle."
Aragorn just laughed and said, "I was good at bio but I can't figure out computers that well. Only a seventy-two in technology."
"And yet you can wire bombs," laughed Legolas. He was attempting to access the main Oracle system while he talked to him.
"That's because Gimli taught me."
Legolas had just shot him a startled look when the main screen opened a video file by itself. The file started to play and they found themselves listening to a video message recorded by a man that they knew all too well.
"Dad?" Legolas whispered.