Nature of the Beast

One-Shot Series: First Star I See Tonight

Part 15: Ijl'vid

*This is the final "voyage" episode before we take a pit-stop at Fringe and check in with things on Cybertron. Little more of an emphasis on the archaeological aspect of exploration for this one, kind of as an homage to the pre-history and archaeology class I'm taking. Hopefully that can help this seem far more authentic. :)


The towering buildings surrounding the grand plaza, each seeming to weep through the rain stains that dripped from their roofs and eaves – or what was left of them. In the buildings visible through the noxious smog, their metal skeletons of steel were laid bare to the wrath of the acidic rain that plagued this miserable planet. There was little in the way of greenery or organic life out in the open. What little survived in this nightmare had retreated into the cover of the buildings or below the ground, gathering their sustenance from the stone and metal alone. The strange bristling bloom on the wall to her side shone in a sickly yellow-green, as if formed from bile. Nothing moved out in the abandoned, cracked roads. Not anymore. Lights that lined those streets, beautiful, spidery, abstract things that stretched over the roads in a thin, carefully wrought canopy, were cracked, corroded, and long dark. The corroding awning above was the only thing that kept the acid rain from antagonizing her and the two mechs trapped out in the middle of a main thoroughfare. She shuddered under the ramshackle shelter as she peered through the acidic drizzle. The skeleton of what might have once been a power plant could be discerned far out in the smog and acidic mist, a great hulking thing like an old dead titan-beast, no longer belching forth its fumes.

Detecting the structures from space had been exciting. Buildings, artificial structures of any kind really, meant something had built them, signaling life. Intelligent life. But not this time. This city, this world, had been dead for centuries at the least for such degradation to have set in. The haunting remnants of their architectural genius was all that was left of that life.

A dead city, inhabited only by the dead.

And they were intruding.

Of course they weren't, the rational part of her processor protested. Trespassing implied someone was there to catch them and try them in a court of law. No one was there aside from her crew. Whatever had killed this civilization had been devastating – devastating and completely thorough. Nothing organic could survive the constant sour attack from above. The pH of the rain was between zero and one at this point in time, enough to damage and dissolve weaker organic compounds and structures like skin or textiles. And yet the Predacon portion of her processor was arguing back through a tightening of her feathers and a wash of anxiety. No one was there, but she felt she – all of them – were being watched. She had to wonder if this culture had had some form of Hyn'dfen Æfæn soum vitlrn, but no structures had looked remotely shrine or temple-like on the scans, and her optics said the same. Everything here was scientific and industrial. Part of her admired it. Another part of was revolted. They had not cared for their world – only for progress. That had been their undoing.

"You're doin' it again," Codex grunted softly as he sifted through the soil.

The hand stopped plucking at her radial plating. "Find anything yet?"

Codex finished with the sieve and gingerly plucked out a few small items using a pair of forceps. One bit he held up closer to his optics for analysis.

"Bit of skeletal structure," he said. "Hard to tell what it is from this piece."

He sifted through more until he had a small handful of pieces. A scanner swept over them.

"Hn! Well that's interesting."

Rampart ceased his digging and scrambled out of the excavation pit he'd happily been digging. "What?"

"The skeletal structure bears traces of dolomite interwoven into the mineral lattice that must've been in their skin as well. They had some natural immunity to acids, it seems."

"Wasn't enough to save them obviously," muttered Rampart.

"Obviously. But it corroborates Sirocco's findings that the atmosphere has always had some natural toxicity. Industrialization must've made it spin out of control by dredging up and producing more toxic chemicals that had formerly sunk into the soil and stone."

"But is it wildlife or one of the city's inhabitants?" she wondered.

"Impossible to tell from these segments alone," Codex confessed. "I'll need something more complete to form an idea of the body. We'll need to dig deeper; the acid rain seeping most likely destroyed anything of real value this close to the surface, and cities as a general rule are typically built atop other former structures. What could help me more is finding a library or an archive in this city. A civilization as advanced as this one was had to have kept records of their history and culture somewhere, written or pictorial, but the slagging acid rain ain't bein' any help in exploration."

"The rain isn't any more acidic than produced by Kaon's storms," she reminded him. "I can run a sweep of the city and report back. The rain won't bother me too bad."

Codex hemmed at her offer before giving in with a simple "Be quick."

Removing a pair of protective goggles from her subspace, she transformed and soared into the dreary drizzle. The droplets themselves were quite cold, but when they contacted her plating there was a sizzle that reminded her of a Terran frying pan. Her plating was more durable than a typical city-dweller, but she'd have to hop from shelter to shelter to protect her poor plating from corrosion. Lucky, then, that the towering buildings offered at least something in the way of shelter. Tucking her wings in, she dove into the shelter of one such structure. Whatever had built them had to have been at least seven feet in height, she guessed, judging by the size of the doorway, and had had longevity in mind. This city still stood surprisingly intact after all this time. It was sort of like Kaon she realized in a flash – a small-scale Kaon turned into a ghost town. With no one to reverse the damage done to the buildings, the weather was slowly toppling them drop by drop.


Some time of playing peek-a-boo with the acid rain had caused discouragement and a bubbling annoyance. Most of the buildings were too corroded to provide anything intact enough for study within them, and they all looked deceptively similar in their dilapidated states. Something through the haze caught her gaze though: a simple, circular, three-story building on the outskirts of the city. Something different.

Her cascader closed the distance quickly.

Different as the structure was in architectural design, it had fared no better than the other buildings. Rain poured through its barely present roof and onto a collection of intricately carved tiles that ate up most of the rotunda's floor. The rotunda itself housed shelves upon shelves of stone tablets and leather-backed tomes that lined the walls, each shelf carved into the building's very walls. Oddly medieval, she noted, for the advanced city they sat in. The tomes were in a sorry state, mostly dissolved by now, but the stone tablets had fared better. Something might be gleaned from them at any rate. She darted over to a shelf mostly shielded from the rain above, gingerly extracting one such tablet. No dust – acid mist had solved that issue, revealing without delay that the tablet was covered in densely packed carved writing. No images though.

But the uniquely carved tiles on the floor – tiles like that usually were an indicator for art. If they could get some of the debris cleared and the tiles partially restored...

"Dodger?"

[Aye?]

"Use these coordinates for the 'bridge and get Codex over here, please."

[One 'bridge comin' right up!]

The portal swirled open with a soft bang and a quiet tinkling roar, and her hunching Reptoid historian emerged from it. She took a perch on a weathered decorative plinth, whatever had once been on it long gone.

"That was quick," he noted through a smirk.

She couldn't help puffing her chestplates out. *Can I get a thank you?*

He snorted softly "Predacons..." and refused to give what she asked for. "Get to work clearing some of the floor debris, would you?"

*And need I remind you I outrank you, so strictly speaking I can ignore that request and put it on someone else?*

The Reptoid huffed back, "Fine. Then start scanning what's on those tablets into the ship's database. I'll get the floor cleared."

She pulled a small sphere from her sub-space and set to work. As she took each stone tablet out, the sphere emitted a scanning beam over its carved surface. She had to wonder why there were no images on any of them. Hopefully when it was put through the quantum linguistics database on the ship there would be some kind of answer after translation.

"Huh. That's a little odd."

She turned back to the Reptoid, "What?"

He gestured to the semi-cleared floor, "Look. What do you see?"

Her helm tilted to the side. There was indeed an image made out of the thousands of small, carved tiles: a hunched, heavily armored figure, in a front-facing position with thick, sturdy legs like columns, and powerful, reptilian fore limbs held a stone tablet like the ones on the shelves as if in offering to those who had once walked over the image. But there was something missing from the image. And not just missing she realized as Codex brushed aside more of the debris: removed. The head of the image was gone, the tiles wrenched from their slots and the surrounding tiles badly scratched.

"They didn't just deface the mural," she said. "They literally defaced it."

"Seems so," agreed Codex. "I wonder why...?"

"Fear?" she guessed.

Codex rose from the ground in a creaking of joints to tower over the mural, "Not sure about fear. Defacing can have political motivations, not just cultural or emotional motivation. Remember the images from the Roya Vossar tombs created during the Shifting Sands Era?"

She nodded, "Former rulers that the people didn't like had their insect wings and second set of eyes removed in images depicting them. You think the same thing happened here?"

"Maybe not the exact same thing," Codex admitted, "since every culture has unique aspects, but probably along similar lines. The main difference is that this image is in a building dedicated to knowledge, not in a tomb dedicated to a political figure."

"But destroying something in a library can have political ramifications," she argued. "Knowledge and politics are related. Alter one and you can alter the other."

Codex smiled, "Clever bird."

"You think I'm right?"

"There's no way to know for sure yet, not until we get those tablets translated, but you may be on the right track."

"Why deface just the image then?" she wondered. "None of these tablets look defaced to me."

"We don't know that. A change of words from the original can be seen as defacing."

"But these are stone tablets," she retorted. "You can't exactly do that without leaving some evidence."

"Not if they simply replaced the old ones with new ones," he pointed out dryly.

"But why go to all that trouble? What happened that they would want to erase it from history?"

Codex backed away and circled the floor mural, a thumb against a cheek and his index digit supporting his chin guard, every once in a while giving the ground a faint tap of his trod. Considering the figure was holding a tablet much like the ones in the building, he said slowly, he assumed the figure was either someone of physical importance – perhaps the creator of the building or someone of significance in its history – or they could be dealing with the defacing of a religious image. If this were a religious image, then that could indicate the culture had undergone a kind of iconoclasm in their history. Whether or not that had had any effects on the planet itself he couldn't say. The effects of an iconoclasm or any kind of political upheaval could have far-reaching consequences.

Her gaze snapped away from the tablet in her hands and over to him, "You're not hinting that the iconoclasm had an effect on the environment, are you?" she asked.

"No, no," said the Repoid dismissively as he began to wander the room. "An iconoclasm's effects are usually political or societal in nature, not envi–"

He cut off when one trod met the ground near the back of the building, beneath where the roof had once been, followed by a loud grumbling noise from beneath him. Then the ground gave way in a great roar of crumbling stone and tile. His back hunched over further. He tried to run towards stable ground ahead of him on all fours, managing to grasp one thick, clawed hand to what was left of the floor, but when he tried the other the floor gave way, forcing the hand back into open air.

She abandoned the tablet in hand and the drone near her helm and leapt for the gap.

"Hand!" she cried.

He flung the other hand up. She took hold and pulled, deploying a talon from the back of her trod deep into the tile as an anchor, but she slid forward regardless.

Codex looked down, then back up, "Let go!"

"Are you crazy?!" she shrieked. "You don't know how far down that goes!"

"My scanners were gettin' a hit for solid ground down there!" he said quickly. "Survivable distance! Let go!"

She didn't want to, but she did. Codex's hand slipped loose and he fell down into the dark.

She rushed to the edge, transformed, and flew after him. She heard him land on all fours before she caught sight of him again. He seemed unharmed as he busied himself brushing the dust and debris from his hands.

"Me an' my big mouth," he griped in surprisingly good humor.

Her beast form was dropped, "What happened?"

He looked back up towards the hole in the ground above, "See how those beams up there snapped? Acid rain must've taken a toll on that supporting metal after all this time; probably the stone too. In the past they would've been maintained, but without the upkeep my weight and tap-dancing was too much for the old things. But," he mused, "as long as we're down here we might as well have a look around. Think you could offer some light? Something tells me night vision won't be helpful here."

She made a face, "I'm your captain, aft, not your personal lumi-drone."

"I'm not asking for me," he snorted back. "You need the light as much as I do."

"Do I?"

Codex's optics rolled, "Oh for the love of –"

Giggling, her diodes lit up on command, casting a soft white glow around where she stood that slowly brightened to the right level.

"Thank you," said the mech. "Now let's get a good look around, shall we?"

She transformed and took wing, circling above her historian's helm so he could save the sights to his long-term for later storage. But something made her plating prickle. She wasn't sure what it was until the fourth or fifth loop around. It was the pillar-like walls around them – they were the same as the ones up above, but these, and the empty stone shelves grafted to them, were upside down. And if they were upside down, then the ground Codex was standing on was actually the roof. Good old Codex caught on to the design quirk, too, mere astroseconds after she did.

"Well that's interesting," he noted. "They created an inverse mirror of the structure above directly underneath it."

Carefully, the Reptoid tapped his right trod against the "ground" and waited for the echo. His optics widened. She chirped at him curiously. What had he detected?

"This is unbelievable..." he murmured.

*What? What is it?*

He motioned for her, "Come. Follow," he grunted. "Follow!"

She followed. He led her out between the columns onto untouched stone. Codex's own luminescent markings lit up, turquoise in hue, and, reaching into a compartment on his arm, he pulled out ten little lumi-drones to provide even more light for them to explore by. The darkness gave way under the glare of their combined light. The inverted library was far from alone. All around, carved out of limestone untouched by the acid rain above, was a mirror of the city they had just been in, flipped on its head, hidden away beneath the ravaged surface. And the detail – the sheer complexity of the carved buildings was superb. Artistic flourishes not visible on the surface were plain to see in the mirrored copy – reptilian heads, smooth in design, not angular, emerged from the tops of many buildings like graceful gargoyles. Up above, statues, metal lamps created from an artistic weave, and dry fonts were suspended in a bat-like manner.

If this was intended to mirror the city above, then this city had once been glorious in design. Absolutely stunning.

"Incredible..." the old historian exhaled. "The technological acumen that's needed to create something like this, on this scale –"

she perched on his helm, *What led them to do this? Why go to this amount of trouble?*

"I don't know," he admitted in surprising stupefaction. "It seems excessive to me, and dangerous. But if they devoted the time, effort, and resources to create it, it has to have significance."

*Would this be recorded in the tablets up top?*

"I wouldn't count on it too much. Libraries aren't necessarily all like the ones we have or the one back on Fringe. If this was considered a privatized project by the species, I'm unsure it would be documented as a public record. Pit, we don't even know if that building was a public institution or not."

The mech gave another light tap of his trod. A wave of his hand sent five of the lumi-drones ahead of him until, eventually, after nearly a two breems of walking, they hit a wall. But it wasn't a blank wall untouched by stonemason tools – it was expertly divided into a great grid of squares, from the very top to the very bottom and as far left and right as the wall went. It reminded her of an ancient morgue. She remembered seeing something like it on Uktena: "beds for the dreamers" the Jhnahi called them, a mix between grave-and-coffin burials and the columbarium from Earth.

"Hn," Codex grunted. "Interesting."

He knelt, calling two lights closer for a better look at one of the boxes. His hand traced a series of carvings that went around the perimeter of the stone.

She transformed and leaned in for a closer look. The carvings, though hard to discern, looked inverted from the carvings she had seen up above on the tablets. Or at least she thought they looked inverted. It was hard to tell.

"Carvings are inverted, too," Codex muttered. "How strange."

"Think it's a name?"

"Since we know nothing about the structure of their language yet, it very well could be. Or it could be a parting message. But with this here, I think I figured out what the upside down city is for."

"It's a city built for the dead," she agreed. "They took the time, effort, and resources to make a literal copy of the city above so the dead could live in it."

"But why flip it?" he wondered. "That's something I've never seen before."

"This is just a guess," she forewarned him, "but maybe they saw the afterlife as an inverse of the living plane?"

Codex's old optics brightened, "Or," he said quickly, "perhaps they thought the sight of the dead was inverted, so something upside down for the living would be right side up for the dead?"

"Why not both?"

Codex acceded to the possibility. The tablets, hopefully, would tell more.

"Any way to open one of these things and get a peek for a biological scan?"

"Zodiac, I'm surprised at you," he scolded. "I thought Predacons were against tomb desecration."

Her optics rolled, "It's one body, and we'll put it right back. We need a bio-scan for the records."

The historian leaned in closer and traced a single digit around the edge of the stone box. He detached his kit from his hip, rummaging until he found a dynamic trowel. He carefully slid the blade in between the base of the box and the surrounding stone. It took a while of levering and scraping, but a gap wide enough to fit his hand was formed in time, and then the same was done to the top of the box. Both clawed hands slit into the slots, and the claws dug into the stone. Codex tugged until the box was halfway out, then jerked his helm at her to get the other end. Scrambling to the right spot, she grabbed hold and helped him lug the thing out onto the ground in a swirl of fine dust.

"Now," he huffed, "let's see who's inside."


He gazed at the ghostly hunched figure before him, circling it in the soft light of his quarters. An impressive body build. Heavily armored like a Terran tortoise to protect against the acid rain, and thick skin offered similar shielding. Heavy limbs, powerful and well muscled, possessed thick hands that clutched at what he assumed was a ceremonial mace. The head was a strange mix of crocodile and tortoise, bearing a pronounced beak but lined with sharp teeth and a crest of dragon-like scales that ran from head to beneath the armor of the neck. Two well-sized eyes at the front of the head indicated a predator-based species, though the heavy limbs with their thick claws were better suited for a digging.

Well adapted to the planet, and yet it hadn't saved them.

He turned to the holo-display on his desk where the ship was still busy endeavoring a translation. The quantum link it had to the database on Cybertron was speeding the process along nicely, but the story they were telling was still only partial.

"Strange race, you were," he muttered.

A rapid-fire tapping came from the wall beside the sliding doors.

"Enter!" he grunted loudly.

The Avioid in charge swooped in to land on his outstretched, balled hand. Chirping, she inquired over short-band of his progress.

"The species apparently referred to themselves as the V'Quosalak," he said. "In their language, it means 'of the heavy plates.' That underground city we found is exactly what we assumed it was: a city for the dead. Ijl'vid they called it. The Reflection. And it wasn't alone. Most of the major cities we mapped from orbit have such an Ijl'vid version of them."

*And the reason they all died off?*

"Less clear," he admitted slowly. "But it seems industrialization happened very quickly because of their efforts to create mirror cities. The acid storms, it seems, were getting stronger. But even if they were aware of the affects, I'm not sure they could have reversed the damage they'd done in time to stop them. There's always a point of no return on organic worlds when it comes to changing atmospheres."

She shook herself, *And the defaced mural? Is there anything about that?*

He was silent as he read further onto a different scanned tablet. The image on the floor, according to the building commission, was one of their god of knowledge, Khr'lash, who was once a mortal but later deified for the advancements he made in engineering and mathematics. Many of their gods, according to the writings, were once mortal beings. There was a rebel group, the No'Lkar, who 'caused problems,' and who saw Khr'lash as a traitor to their race. The ones in power saw them as a cult. They had wanted a return to the old ways, where no damage was done to the environment for the sake of these dead cities, and where bodies were buried so the acid could return them to the stone "the proper way."

"Interesting," he noted.

*What?*

"Rebel group. I think they were the ones who might have defaced the mural. I'll send these up to Hearsay and Shatterveil when the database is done translating, aye? I want to make sure the translation is accurate. A ship can err. It is a program. A mech or femme with an expertise in the field cannot."

She bowed her helm in concession. Giving a final chirp, she took wing and sailed out the doors once more.

*Keep it up, Codex,* came her voice.

He smiled. He padded over to his desk and sat, letting his old back curve into the hunch it so liked. Resting his helm in his cupped, clawed hands, he watched the ship translate in silence, reading along with it.


Author's Note: I tried to remove some of the Tomb Raider/Uncharted/Indiana Jones exaggeration of archaeology here, but also keep it in some ways.