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It was a very good thing Alcyone didn't have a panic attack and pass out, otherwise Atlas would have never been able to forgive himself. As the situation actually was, he still however managed to feel a bit of guilt as he felt her tremble into his chest. Ignoring his own discomfort and lightheadedness, he did what he could to help her calm down -- reassuringly rubbing her back, his fingers threading momentarily through her hair. He noticed that he was just the right height to be able to comfortably rest his chin on her head.

"Yeah, we're, uh. Pretty high up," he responded, kind of sheepishly. That was pretty much the understatement of the epoch. But it seemed like a pretty bad time to casually mention that they were walking along the bottom of the stratosphere and the only thing keeping them from plummeting to their deaths was some kind of ancient magic or technology worked into the very walkway they were standing on, so he settled for taking a look around and refamiliarizing himself with his surroundings until Alcyone was okay to move around.

Atlas let out a small sigh of relief of his own as he finally felt her nerves begin to unwind, her grip around his waist relaxing as she slowly but surely got used to the air. The calm she had begun to exude was terribly contagious as well, and eventually he'd allowed his eyelids to droop while his fingers idly stroked away at her shoulderblades -- only for her to abruptly disappear from his arms, and for him to realize that he had almost completely forgotten they were standing on the remains of an ancient civilization circling a distant star because his thoughts had gotten busy dwelling on the discovery that Alcyone's hair smelled enticingly of honey and coconut.

Being yanked back down to reality felt like a crude slap to the face, and now his cheeks were burning. He could only thank his lucky stars that Alcyone had her back turned to him while she took a look around, lest she see the look on his face for herself... and besides that, he could only imagine what she thought of him now. Friendships had their boundaries, and he had just pushed theirs a little too far.

Hopefully it could be overlooked... Atlas chewed at his lip a bit, at a loss for what to say.

"Did you want to look around inside?" he finally asked, his tone every bit as smooth and collected as a demolished building. The walkway leading into the tower was much like it was outside: namely, riddled with large, rusted handcarts. Atlas was looking out in the opposite direction, at the path he'd taken to get here and the collection of trees nearby, their bunches of colorless leaves swaying in a way that seemed almost welcoming. Far above them -- or, more correctly to say, far below -- the rocky ridges of an unfriendly landscape met his trailing eyes, proving they were still as upside-down as he had been the first go-around.

It was not just the selectiveness of the breeze that made the trees unusual. As Alcyone examined them, she would notice that they were also growing in a way that was... implacably odd, when compared to her mental image of similar flora on Earth. Something about the way the branches were arranged was just a little bit off, almost like it should have been physically impossible to bend the way they were.

Atlas was surprised to see Alcyone making eye contact with him again after such a short period of time. It made a small electric jolt jump down his spine to even be looking at her face again, and to have her talking to him with such sincerity with her gaze locked on his. He knew he should have been grateful that she was still talking to him. Instead, he felt a foreign tinge of grief at the newfound emptiness of his hands.

"This is pretty much everything I saw the first time I came out here," he said, looking away and out at the endless expanse of clouds that made for the Atlasian skyscape. "But in order for it to make any sense, I had to look up..."

If Alcyone did so herself, she'd realize that the trees were simply obeying gravity. And she, by some mysterious feat of magic, was not.

"I have no idea," he admitted, his gaze turning downward -- or, at least relatively downward -- towards the ground. "It could be some kind of magic, but I'm not sure. If you go down the walkway you'll see these big circular intersection-looking things once in a while, and they all have this symbol carved into them that..." and then he raised a hand and traced a finger over his circlet, until he touched upon the sigil in the middle. "...looks just like this. It might have something to do with it, but I guess it might also just be some sort of decoration."

Atlas knew he was kidding himself with the second option before he was even finished saying it. Those nodes were no decoration. If he were to trust his instinct further, he'd go on to say it were a... source of pride. Instead, however, he said, "Come on. Let's head inside."

The walkway, wide as a city street, continued well inside, paving the way to an interior that looked almost like some sort of indoor metropolis. Even more handcarts littered the roads, some piled haphazardly on top of each other in some places. There was a higher density of the disc-shaped nodes he had mentioned a few moments before, except they held a couple of key differences from the ones he had seen outside. For starters, they were a great deal larger -- each one big enough to accommodate a few dozen handcarts and the workers pushing them. Along with that they were surrounded by enormous, circular railings, that gyroscopically connected them to identically-placed nodes in the distant ceiling.

No... the floor.

"I wonder if any of these still work," Atlas said, absentmindedly.

In spite of his strange musings on that one detail, however, it was definitely not the most remarkable characteristic of the tower's interior. What demanded attention the most by far was the structure that lay in the very center. Almost like a tower within a tower, it boasted large windows that allowed light to fill the entire chamber, aided by billboard-sized arrangements of mirrors that had been worked into the walls. And those did more than merely reflect the light: whoever had put them there had meticulously arranged them so that they were like larger-than-life rhinestone decorations, some in elaborate artful patterns and others that could only be assumed to be depicting characters and telling stories across the stone.

Some even used the blank walls as negative space to make the illusion of highlights and shadows and silhouettes. Others were... on one end of the chamber... broken. There was part of the wall that looked like it had sustained an explosion of some kind, just about -- and bits of the walkway had been taken with it, one node's gyroscopic railings with a chunk torn away from it and the large panels left suspended in midair along them.

Alcyone might have been mildly curious about the ruined portion of the wall. Atlas, on the other hand, looked momentarily like he had just witnessed a car wreck because of it. Seeing such damage just struck him with traumatizing levels of wrong, and not only because it had happened. He was already putting two and two together with what he'd seen during his last visit and concluded that whatever had caused the panic among the workers in the orchard... had managed to make its way inside... the thought of which sickened enough that he was almost able to forget the conflicting thoughts he'd been having over his companion earlier.

Almost.

It was with a numb hand that he gestured to the battered sphere of railings, focusing a particular eye on the suspended panels and the machinery that kept them attached. Where all the rest of the structures that looked like this had their nodes firmly grounded across from each other on the floor and ceiling, this one had the panels up and angled away, apparently having climbed part of the way around the railing before it had been damaged.

"See that?" he started, though a small part of him was a bit surprised at Alba's question -- to him it was sort of obvious they had a function. "They're elevators, sorta... if elevators flipped you around. That one was just stopped." As he spoke, he was already making a slow beeline towards one of the ones that was still fully intact.

The elevator got more imposing the closer they got to it. While their size was something that could be casually observed about them from a distance, the moment they were actually standing on the panel it became all the more apparent that it was really huge. It could easily fit over fifty people on it while still providing plenty of room for personal space, the railing that connected it to its twin in the ceiling wide enough for Atlas and Alcyone to lean up against (albeit possibly with a bit of uncomfortable closeness).

They were standing on an alien elevator-disc that could probably fit a very small house on it. Which was all fine and dandy, except knowing all that didn't tell them how it worked.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how much someone would be looking forward to giving some ancient, potentially dangerous alien technology a spin), Atlas was still moving with some sort of absentmindedly autonomous direction -- not in a robotic sense, but as if this were something he'd already done a thousand times. After taking a cursory look around he moved to one edge of the platform and towards where it met the railing, his foot raising to step on a wide, thin panel wrapped around it that looked like it must have been a release latch of some kind.

It took a bit of a struggle, the long-unused machinery stubborn to stay put, but soon it change position with a heavy clack that resonated through the floor and across the chamber. And then... a lot of nothing happened.

Looking over his shoulder towards Alcyone, Atlas asked, "Could you try and get the one on the other side?"

There was another loud clack, and what followed was thankfully not a sudden, sickening rush of motion like Alcyone feared. As a matter of fact, it was almost like they weren't even moving it all -- ignoring the noise of hidden gears that allowed the mechanism to move, and how the chamber slowly turned around them as they moved up and angled away. It really felt as if they weren't the ones that were moving, and it was the rest of the world around them adjusting itself, the illusion solidified by the identical platform far above them serving as a ceiling.

At the rate they were moving, it was going to take a few minutes before they were on the other side. A few tremendously awkward minutes.

Atlas wandered back over to the center of the platform and, after a moment of watching the meticulously-paced topsy-turviness taking place around them, turned his gaze upward. The large triangular sigil carved into the platform above them stared emotionlessly back at him, completely blank. Completely empty. Completely devoid of people. And the more Atlas stared, the more aware he was that this was very wrong. There was a great span of nothing where there should have been something: people, cargo, perhaps another pair of eyes gazing back down at his own. A faint sensation of defeat overtook his thoughts, and his eyes fell closed as he allowed himself to become lost in it.

He wasn't quite sure why he was allowing his mind to wander to such a way, or even what he was looking for in doing so. But then -- it was with a faintness that he could have dismissed it as something he was imagining, were it not for the pulling familiarity that came with it... but he could swear he had heard something.