Chapter 2: The Artefact
Wherever I found myself in, it assuredly provided much food for thought. I couldn't help but reminisce about the faint memories encompassing my father. The more I ponder about them, the more I realize how amusing they were.
My father talked mostly about his, considerably archaic, past. I have established that already both in the creases of my brain and the inked pages of this notebook, yet I never spared the time to fully grasp their contents. Essentially, not only did a group of kids and teens fight off a tremendously intelligent, mad scientist, but they were all so abnormal, even this word feels like a major understatement. A blue hedgehog who can race with a jet plane, and win without breaking a sweat. A crimson echidna who bears the responsibility of a guardian of the most sought after relic. A black hedgehog whose life my father described as a "story stretching through multiple tomes". A bat who people describe as alluring. Even those individuals at the detective agency were somehow involved. Compared to all of them, I can't help but feel sort of an outlier, even if they are the ones who are different from the rest. Indeed, I did inherit some of my father prowess, and I do absorb knowledge like a sponge, but that is a mere speck of dust compared to my father's. My brown eyes and the lack of a beneficial genetic mutation like my father's don't exactly separate me from the folk who play the role of a damsel in distress.
If anything about me is exclusive, it would be the fact I apparently survived that fall. As I observed my surroundings, I found myself stunned and wondered if I did, in fact, die upon impact. There was no doubt this was a mine, I was surrounded with layers of stone, supported by the unsurprisingly present wooden beams. Yet, what mingled my attention were the props. Heavy wooden barrels and piles of ammo crates stacked on top of each other. Without a doubt, these were all present in here not years, but decades before my father was born. This find left me unsure about its relevance to the interest of my lineage. Perhaps my father stumbled across their history and discovered something that concerns the present day. Then again, I might have just gone on the wrong bus. Either way, the blizzard outside is out of my reach.
The blinding darkness prompted me to turn on my flashlight. In front of me I observed two doors, one facing left and the other right in my direction. I went for the latter. It was unlocked, however the door stayed shut, presumably blocked by something heavy, perhaps a barrel. Logically, I checked the other door, and unlike the first one, I could go through into the next room. I found more ammo crates, barrels, and even some metal shelves. The room appeared to be a dead end, but nevertheless, it would be a waste not to scour it. On one of the shelves laid a dusty old hammer. I picked it up and placed it carefully into my bag. Any tool I could find would come in handy in this underground wreckage.
I sensed a dissonance in this room. In the corner of my eye, I observed one of the rusty metal shelves. They were dirty, corroded, most likely didn't bear any resemblance to their fresh-out-of-the-factory counterpart. However, once I came close to it, I immediately realized its nuance. There was a hole in the wall behind. I exerted quite some force to move it, and revealed a hole in the wall barred up with some rotten wooden planks. However rotten they were, my bare hands weren't up for their removal. I let out a sigh and a chuckle as I took out the hammer from my bag, amused by its immediate payoff. Through this act, the planks were no more, and I crawled through the narrow passage. After finding the exit, I found myself in another similar room, only this time its focal point laid upon a closed metal hatch. There was something near it couldn't quite identify, but assumed to be connected to the hatch. Yet, I couldn't distinguish anything that would open the hatch. I did see a hole in this thing, a metal box shaped object on top of a pole. To my right, there was a door behind a barrel. It clicked for me that I was in the room I couldn't previously access, so I took the liberty to move the barrel and open the door to the room from which I came from. Then something else clicked for me, once I saw a metal rod on the ground near the doorway. I inserted said pole into the previously mentioned hole and was met with satisfying results. I tried turning the rod around the object, and as I did so gradually, so did the lid from the hatch disappear into the stone. With nowhere else to go, and nothing else to find, I went down the hatch.
My mind then grasped the discomforting facts of this situation. Looking back, wherever I was going, it was deemed so unwelcoming that not only was it a hundred feet below the wide open surface, it was encapsulated with two metal hatches. I found it to be a metaphor of our society, a network of safety nets backed up with many independent fail-safes, striving to keep us from any harm at all, leaving us with only mundane emotions. Having bypassed it all, cold vibrations spread through my body. I recall having this feeling before, when I was younger. It felt just like when a group of older children came to deliver me my share of abuse, with no parents, teachers or friends coming to aid, either because they were scared or too far away.
As I stepped out into another stone maze, a rubble startled me as it came crashing down from behind. If there was ever a chance I could stack objects to use as stairs and reach the surface, it diminished as soon as the pile of nothing but stone obstructed the entrance. I felt trapped, and a sense of desperation made my throat swell up. Either that or the ever ancient dust made my breathing less fluid than before. Trying to cast my attention away from the debris, I pointed my flashlight in front of me, illuminating a wooden sign. Upon advancing a bit further, I realized it was a map of this section. There were several tunnels, going mostly in circles, however some of them apparently lead to several different rooms labeled on the map.
On my left, if I go around the left wall by making a 180 degree turn and then go further ahead, is a room labeled "Office". If I go to the rightmost section of the map, I will find a "Storage room". Straight ahead of me, behind a few walls, is an area labeled "Workshop". The area is divided on the map by a straight line, so I presume there is a door or a gate separating them.
Curiosity is what lead me here, and I wasn't about to rush through without being acquainted, so I followed the tunnels to the office. I took the liberty to truly capture my surroundings as I walked. Aside from more barrels, boxes and wooden beams, I could see a few lanterns hanging from the ceiling. All of them were paraffin lamps, each of them a symbol of the epoch in which my current whereabouts were made. Not only were they a marvelous find, they still held practical use, as I could see they were not devoid of fuel. Unfortunately for me, I left my lighter at home, never considering to take it with me. I held my fingers crossed in case there was chance I can obtain a lighter here.
I set foot into the office. I found a plethora of papers scattered around the floor, some stacked into large piles, however all faded and unintelligible from exposure to the moisture this placed reeked of. A wooden beam stood in the center of the room. Behind it and on the right were several wooden shelves, with papers and binders scarcely arranged on them. It was a separate section of the room, surrounded by one stone wall and two walls made out of these shelves. Laid back on the stone wall was a chest, similar to the footlocker in that boat. On the opposite side was a desk and a typewriter. The typewriter threw me off guard, it was almost a century old, more than my age and my father's age combined. On the left side of the room was a metal drawer that fell sideways on the floor, and a wooden desk.
These were all things I began to notice only after a while. The contents laid on the wooden desk on the left side of the room caught my immediate attention. On the desk stood an ancient, otherworldly artefact. I can't find the words to describe it, and the way it entranced me wasn't just because it stood out more than anything, rather the artefact itself was enthralling, any thought that didn't concern the artefact vanished from my head. It was cylindrical, with a half-spherical top. On the top and its sides were crimson and orange gems, glowing divinely. I couldn't help but touch it. And as soon as my fingers felt its smooth surface, my vision turned a bright white and it felt like it gravitated towards the artefact. I could hear the faint, soothing whispers coming from seemingly every direction. In my vision I saw a silhouette of a fox. As soon I saw the two tails, I knew exactly whose form I was seeing. Everything flashed and in an instant, my vision returned to normal. I felt disorientated and a bit incomplete, as if I forgot to bring something with me. I shook my head and started rummaging through the room. Besides the artefact, there was a bottle filled with a chemical I couldn't identify, however the label said it was some sort of an adhesive. I brought it along. In one of the desk drawers I found a small key. I wondered what it was for, and not long after my answer lead me to the chest. I unlocked it, and found a book titled "Big book of explosives". Perfect, this might just help me deal with the collapsed passageways this mine alludes to have.
Perhaps luck is on my side after all, yet there is a sensation in my chest telling me that this serenity might not last for much longer.