Turquoise was thankful to be back in the dark, quiet Reliquary. The gala had been an entertaining diversion, sure. Fantastical beyond description, et cetera. But all the glaring lights and gaudy colors gave her a headache, especially when they were magnified through her ocular enhancers. And the music, the dances⦠it was all too strange, too garish. Too new.
She was made for older things. As a turquoise, her job was attending to legacy technology that couldn't be modernized for practical or cultural reasons. Then again, her predecessor had also been one, yet chose to leave the Reliquary when Gems were given job choice. Can you imagine? Giving up work at one of the most significant repositories of gem history? Oh well, Turquoise wouldn't have been promoted to the vacant position otherwise.
Since then, she had spent all her time exploring these vaulted ceilings, obscure alcoves, and glass containment chambers, yet still felt like a newcomer. She didn't even know the exact nature of the disturbance she was currently looking into. All she knew was that it was some sort of artifact that required frequent adjustments to its environment, often more than once per hour. She must have missed a few while she was at the gala, because when she got back, the painfully generic "Check Sector 00009-D" light was on and she had to set off to look into it.
That was one thing that made work at the Reliquary difficult. It was made of layers of technology that grew older and older toward the heart of the facility, like tiers of sediment in the ground containing more and more ancient artifacts. This meant each new addition to the complex had to interface with the deprecated codes and archaic language of the previous, resulting in some of the nuance inevitably being lost. By the time data reached her workstation in the newest area, it had undergone several iterations of this process and was incredibly vague.
When she arrived at the first boundary with an earlier age, the message on the obsolete rounded display was only slightly more specific. "Check Sector 00009-D β Urgent." She found her pace becoming slightly more brisk as she hoped to deal with this before it caused an embarrassment so early in her career. As was her habit on this type of excursion, she took time to admire the area's construction as she passed through it. From the power conduits to the display stands, everything was just a little more impractical, a little less elegant. Many devices quietly hummed and buzzed in a way some might have found annoying. Yet it brought out a warm feeling of nostalgia in her all the same. All of it from just before the fall of the Empire.
The next display she passed had a more rectangular design and blockier text. "π±πππππ πΈπ ππππππ πΆπΆπΆπΏπ³ ." That was annoying. She was going to have to clean something up and report it. Her PDA swung in her arms and her coat flapped out behind her as she powerwalked through the section, and for the first time a fleeting moment of unease passed over her. The things here were genuinely exotic. Some of them dangerous due to unshielded actuators and transformers, some of them needlessly complex, some of them using designs that simply didn't exist anymore. The artifacts, too, were more mysterious, with reasons for containment that were no longer common knowledge.
Turquoise was tense by the time she saw the warm yellow light coming off the next wall display, and more tense after she read it. "π°πππππ π΄π π»πππππππππππ πΉπππ π―ππ" It was an old Gem dialect, but of course she was fluent. It meant this wasn't a regular breach. It was something sapient. It could be actively doing more damage. This was normally her favorite era of the Reliquary, but she jogged through it too quickly too appreciate the baroque, flowing decorations illuminated by golden flickering lights. There was no time to wonder about the relics here, many of which were almost mythical in their inscrutability and power, most of them caked in dust.
The next era, the one containing 9-D, loomed in the distance like the gullet of a beast. Its perimeter display sat there dim, crude, and strangely organic in design. There was no text here. Only a single rune, pulsing a warning. It looked like a pickaxe with a long, thick shaft. Even she had to dig deep into her memory for its esoteric significance, but what she found couldn't be right. She dropped her PDA and broke into an all out sprint. The red lights thrummed. Low sounds of groaning, grinding, growling seemed to come from every direction. The artifacts - left in shadows, sometimes choked in vegetation from lack of care - were like lost memories from infancy. This had to be a nightmare.
Finally she stumbled through the worn threshold of the containment chamber she was looking for. What was once a checkerboard stone floor was now an enormous, cracked crater of rubble. She saw the reason this room had required so many adjustments: the stasis field generators, stronger than any in current use, drew an enormous amount of power with fluctuations whenever there was resistance. Now they lay toppled and broken in the corners of the room.
All Turquoise could do was sink to her knees. Helpless. Terrified. Ashamed. At first she stared up at the stars through the hole roughly torn out of the once-pristine domed ceiling. Then her head fell and she sat there, motionless. She wished the Empire still shattered gems. That would be better than living with herself, knowing what she was responsible for.