Welcome to Gaia! ::

When the doors moved to let Basiluzzo inside, he winced at the sound of a piercing alarm. While he moved quickly, it wasn’t with any particular urgency for the alarm itself. He knew that noise. One of the battery backups he’d brought with him in a previous trip was out of juice.

A pity, since he’d hoped that the solar chargers it was plugged into would have enough power to charge it—

Well, he’d brought more of them, so maybe he could daisy-chain them together or something. Though Basiluzzo would hate to start a fire on his wonder. Pressing the red silence button, Basiluzzo turned the battery backup off and watched the LED die out. It was lucky that he wasn’t using it for anything important, like food or water or facilities…

Though he had hoped to be able to start using it for powering a water reclamation system… As of right now, all he had was a handful of crude clear-tarp water collectors up to collect whatever scant dew formed from whatever nonexistent humidity formed at night. Water was one of his first priorities. It was heavy to carry back and forth and absolutely needed if he was going to make this place at all livable.

There was no cloud of dust, this time, from the bed he dropped the duffle bag on. He’d used it enough by now that the dust settled in little puffs around him at most. Basiluzzo sneezed anyway, rubbing at his face as he took a look around at his handiwork.

It was… well, it was. He’d cleaned a bunch of the immediate surroundings, making the sandstone—he’d found out it was called sandstone—its proper colour again. It was hard work, scrubbing hard enough to get the untold years of dust and grime off of the structure without damaging the surface. Given the number of carvings and murals he’d found so far, he definitely didn’t want to damage any of them.

And that was to say nothing of all of the glass everywhere in every conceivable colour and even some colours that hadn’t been discovered on Earth yet. Some of it was arranged in pictures. Some of it was hanging in elaborate displays. Some of it was just sitting in windows as if it were perfectly normal to have luridly blue glass just… in a window somewhere.

Maybe in the past, it had been. There wasn’t really anyone he could ask. He’d long surmised he didn’t have one of the ancestors he’d heard mentioned living on wonders. Surely if he did, they’d’ve said something by now, right?

Right?

Right.

Basiluzzo looked up at the ceiling and squinted at the hint of a mosaic he could see on it past soot and smoke damage. He had no idea what the scene depicted, but whatever it was involved, again, a lot of very blue glass. He liked blue, but he wasn’t sure he would have liked it enough to put it in every corner of his house—

Unless this wasn’t his house, but then again he’d had that thought already. This had to be his wonder, so of course it was his house, right? That was how that worked, right? That’s why it let him in in the first place.

Just him, though. He’d found that out the hard way one time when trying to bring Luz along for some company. Luckily sound had carried past the shielding and Luz was a very obedient dog, because she hadn’t been able to follow him into his wonder. Instead, the poor thing had been left sitting, head tilted to the side and tail wagging slowly, as Basiluzzo tried to figure out why he could get through the shield and she couldn’t.

So he’d figured that Ignacio wouldn’t be able to follow him either. Not that he wanted to show Ignacio yet, much as Ignacio was nearly frothing at the mouth to see his wonder. It wasn’t ready yet. Basiluzzo didn’t want to show people until it was ready, even if the shields would have let someone else into the wonder.

His eyes fell on the shovels leaned up against the wall. Basiluzzo was almost ready to break through the pile-up to a new set of hallways that lead further into the complex. It had to be much bigger than it seemed at first, and the occasional far off whistling of wind through rocks under his feet and over his head told him his hunch was correct.

He got to his feet, grabbed the shovels, and headed for that blocked hallway.

Some time later—-he’d decided to stop trying to figure out how long it’d been—Basiluzzo was no closer to finding the source of the shrieking or any water and much closer to the worst migraine he’d ever experienced. He’d about decided to give up for now, to go back to the hallway he came in through and try a different route that didn’t involve screaming hallways. He couldn’t see, he was thirsty, he was tired, his head hurt—

So he leaned against the wall. To decide his next course of action.

And then the wall moved.

The wall moved around a central axis, spinning and dumping him quite merrily into a new room beyond the great hall. There was much cursing and sputtering as Basiluzzo got immediately back to his feet and dusted the sand and dirt off of himself and his clothes. He looked around him, surprised at the amount of light the room got considering the darkness in the hall beyond it.

He figured he’d come through a secret door of some sort. That had to be it. Like in one of his mystery novels. So Basiluzzo pushed experimentally at the wall where he could still see a seam.

Nothing.

So he pushed at the other side of the carved-out area, figuring maybe it was unidirectional.

Nothing.

It wouldn’t move.

…Now what? He was too tired to consider the implications that he was trapped forever in a brightly-lit room with no way out and no way to call for help. He would simply have to figure out how to get out of whatever he’d gotten himself into, obviously.

He pushed at other parts of the wall, at other walls in the room, but nothing. He did it again. And he did it again, until he was forced to admit he had no idea what he was doing and settle leaning against one of the walls. He’d hoped it, too, would spin and dump him somewhere else, but no such luck.

With an aggravated sigh, he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, too.

Now what? He knew he had to stay calm, otherwise he was going to end up stuck forever in what was probably a trap for thieves, or something. Why else wouldn’t it let him back out? So he forced himself to focus on his breathing, to slow it–and his heartrate—back down.

It was then that he noticed the humming noise.

He jolted upright, whirling around and staring incredulously at the small Uranus symbol he had managed to miss in his search of the room, carved into what was obviously a button recessed into the wall. Not only miss, but end up leaning against. Excitement, giddiness, made him immediately reach out to touch it and then, when nothing happened, reach out with his other hand and gently tap it with his ring.

The total and complete lack of any reaction from his surroundings evaporated the excitement pretty quickly, and Basiluzzo tapped his ring against the symbol a few more times, each with no more luck than the last.

“Now what?” Demanded he, aloud, of the signet ring on his finger. “What the hell do you want me to do? This isn’t Green Latern’s might. I wasn’t told you had a code word!”

That was, of course, assuming his ring was even the key to the little plate in the first place.

Wait, a key.

His ring had just been sitting in a little stand out in the sand when he’d first found his way to his wonder. Doors didn’t unlock by smacking them with the key repeatedly. Maybe he had to actually— Basiluzzo removed the ring from his finger and inspected both it and the button. The symbols were the same size and everything.

He put it back on and considered the orientation of the ring, then paused and took it back off, flipped it around, and put it back on. Then, carefully, with much more trepidation than he would ever admit to, Basiluzzo pressed the Uranian seal on top of the ring into the Uranian symbol on the button.

Basiluzzo looked back and forth between the ring and the other Uranian symbol, rubbing the back of his neck and disregarding the griminess on his hands. He could shower later, after he figured out what the hell was going on, here. He was tempted to remove and put back the ring over and over to see if that happened every time, but his luck would probably mean that the door swung back shut on him as his wonder retaliated against that kind of tomfoolery.

So he didn’t do that, tempting as it was.

He needed his ring, though. He couldn’t just leave it in the wall. He wasn’t even sure he’d be able to get home if he just left his ring in the wall and ******** off. He could still get out the way he came and maybe ask Ignacio if he knew anything like this on Encke. Maybe Sadie or Livie would know.

With that set in his mind, Basiluzzo reached for the ring. This time, he noticed when he grabbed it that the setting had a little bit of give, a little wiggle room. At first, he was afraid he’d broken something and ice began to close itself around his heart. But he hadn’t forced anything. He hadn’t heard any cracks or snaps or anything, and it was still rock, after all. He would have to try to break rock, wouldn’t he?

Wouldn’t he?

Experimentally, oh-so-gently, Basiluzzo wiggled the ring in the setting. He found that it wiggled more in one direction than in another, and so he tried to wiggle it more in that direction.

And then it began to turn. Like, actually turn. Actually turn for real, like it was supposed to be doing that. Even still, Basiluzzo had frozen for a moment, that ice returning before he calmed himself down. Again, no snaps, no cracks, no pops, no rice krispies. Everything was fine. He would have to be trying to damage something with actual rock, right?

Right.

Right.

Taking a deep breath, Basiluzzo grasped the ring and turned it with purpose, like it was a key. A key, he realised belatedly, was exactly what it was in that moment. There was a little bit of resistance, a little bit of sand and grit grinding in the gear in the wall, and then the ring rotated a smart ninety degrees. It even clicked into place.

Out in the hallway, out of the corner of his eye, Basiluzzo saw the sparkles of light from the mirrors overhead converge onto the Uranian symbol. It flared to life, then, the light bouncing around the translucent blue crystal until it glowed. Eyes watering at the amount of light he was being made to deal with, Basiluzzo turned his head to follow the new path that the light had taken, wondering what the hell was going on. He couldn’t see where the light ended up, not from the room he was in, and he looked back down at his signet ring.

Carefully, oh so gently, he pulled his ring out of the wall. And, much to his relief, everything stayed put exactly the way it was. The lights didn’t move, the wall didn’t move, nothing moved. He slipped the ring back onto his finger quite hastily and stepped back out into the hall before any of that could change its mind.

Noting distantly that the subtle change in tone he’d noticed earlier was more pronounced now, Basiluzzo craned his neck to see where the light was going, this time. He got his answer when—to his diminishing surprise—he saw yet another Uranian symbol high above the door he’d just walked through. Like before, the light made the symbol sparkle and dance as it reflected yet again to another Uranian symbol in the frame of the doorway next to the door he’d come in and out of.

Without the light in the hall, he hadn’t even realised there was another door right there—

When the light hit that symbol on the door, though, it bounced again and ended up high on the wall nearby, disappearing into a channel through the wall. There, nothing happened, and Basiluzzo took a moment to realize that, like before, the light hitting the symbol was scattered and diffused. He looked over his shoulder to the first hallway symbol he’d found.

….Was it a ******** puzzle? Did he have to solve a ******** puzzle?

Basiluzzo paced the hallway a bit, looking up at the sunbeam, then down the dark hallway, then back up at the sunbeam. He even tried seeing if any of the symbols he could reach were locks like the first one, but to no avail. The walls were smooth enough that he couldn’t parkour his way to the channel near the ceiling where the light disappeared.

But as he considered the channel, he found that he could see motes of dust and sand dancing on the wind, swirling in the beam of light.

…That explained why the wind was so loud. It was literally howling above his head. Was it supposed to be doing that? He supposed it was, because the channels looked very deliberate, and he couldn’t imagine what else they would be for. Besides, little propellers here and there spun silently from where they were embedded in the sides of the channel.

What were the propellers for…? It wasn’t like anything was flying, much less the structure itself. And even then, wouldn't the propellers have to be on the outside?

Weird.

But not as weird as the fact that, without a ladder, there was no way Basiluzzo was reaching that next part of the puzzle. There had to be another symbol up in the channel that he had to focus the light on, but he wasn’t going to be able to reach the symbol on the door to focus on anything.

His eyes went back to the mounds of sand and his shovels. The gears turned in his head.

Wait.

Oh come on—

But he had to admit that, if he piled up the sand, he’d be able to reach the only symbol he saw where that’d be plausible. He was tall, and so was the door, but the sand could make him taller. Tall enough to see what he could do about the symbols he couldn’t reach standing on the ground.

His shoulders and back ached in protest as he began the arduous task of using his shovel—-more meant for digging than carrying—to transport the sand from the piles to the front of the door with the symbol in its frame.. It was the only idea he had, short of dragging heavy beds from the rooms he’d found them in and trying to stack and climb those.

Somehow, that didn’t sound like a structurally sound or OSHA-approved idea.

Basiluzzo thought about going back home to see if he could find an actual ladder to bring with him, but he could only go to his wonder so often, and he didn’t want to leave until he figured this mystery out. It was a ******** puzzle, and he was going to ******** solve it.

No matter how much sand he had to carry to form the world’s saddest hill so that he could climb it like the world’s saddest child. Where was a backhoe when he needed one? A backhoe would be great, but then he supposed he could just climb on the backhoe to reach what he was after—

The good thing about being easily distracted was that Basiluzzo realised after some time that he was pretty sure he could reach at least one of the symbols with his hands and the other one probably with the shovel. Not that he was sure what the shovel would do for him, but it was a start.

“Please let this work,” as he hoisted his aching body up the pile of sand toward the symbol on the doorframe.

He turned and looked up at the figure that, earlier, had seemed so familiar to him somehow. It was hard to see all of the details, but Basiluzzo found his eyes tracing their features anyway. It was like he had seen them before. Many times. Many, many times.

In the mirror, even.

He wished he had Ignacio there to ask, because he wasn’t sure how plausible that was. But… then again, it wasn’t like he could keep relying on Ignacio forever. No matter how much Ignacio wanted Richard to stay back even as Basiluzzo, it wasn’t like he could forever.

Eventually, Basiluzzo had to be his own person, his own force in the war against Chaos trying to consume everything in its path. Encke couldn’t be coming running every time Basiluzzo got into trouble, and he couldn’t be looking for Encke every time he got into trouble. He looked down at the burn scars on his arms from the “fight” against Faustite all that time ago.

He’d needed Encke then, but… he needed to stop needing Encke to save his a**.

Basiluzzo gingerly climbed down the dirt pile with his shovel, turning to marvel at the mosaics and murals on the wall. Half tiles, half vibrant paints. Sometimes, the same work of art had both of them.

Like the one with the people in the caravan and the one with the face that looked like his that he didn’t want to think too much about. It hurt his head to think about it, and the wind noises were doing quite enough of that on their own, thank you very much.

Granted, it was much better than it had been. More of the wind seemed focused up near the ceiling, near the channels Basiluzzo could now see clearly dotted along the wall. More of the sound came across clearly, harmoniously. Basiluzzo wondered if whatever mechanism directed the wind also controlled the sound through that.

Like blowing over a glass bottle to make music, only much, much bigger.

But there was something missing, and Basiluzzo felt it had something to do with the last place the light had bounced to. He turned for that door, tugging experimentally at the handle and not surprised to find it locked tight. And it didn’t seem like it magically unlocked when the light went through its channels, either. And it had no places for a signet ring to unlock it.

Shame.

He heaved a heavy sigh, tugging at the door again and then looking back to the murals and mosaics.

“Now what do you want me to do?” This was asked, not to his signet ring, but to the wonder itself. “I’m good, but I’m not psychic, okay?” He ran a hand over his hair, making a face at the feeling of grime and grit against his skin. He was going to take a very, very hot shower when he got home.

Home.

He looked up again. This had been home once. He could still imagine those people he felt he missed, something and someone he had long since forgotten despite any efforts to the contrary.

A lump in his throat, Basiluzzo looked back to the first mural. Somehow, he knew it was the first. The founding of the wonder. It had to be. Why else would people be out in the desert with shovels and strange beasts of burden? Was this whole structure dug out of the sand and rock? Chiseled away by sheer determination?

He noticed, then, that some of the people didn’t wear browns and blues, but wore teals and greens. Neptune, he figured. Neptune. Like Pendour and Abzu. That explained the Neptune symbols in his wonder. Neptunians had helped establish the wonder. Had probably helped them find water, or something.

Had it been a wonder, back then? Or had it just been a settlement out in the middle of nowhere? Before he knew it, Basiluzzo was tracing his path alongside the murals and mosaics, again, following from one to another. The founding of the wonder. The building of it, caravans of people coming there with more strange beasts he had no hope of knowing.

The murals weren’t all in order along the wall. Some had clearly been painted or assembled later than others and the gaps filled in. That was the purpose of the murals, he realised. To fill in the gaps between the mosaics as much as possible, but there was only so much that could be done. He saw again the picture of the figure with their arms stretched out and realised that they belonged after the mosaic of breaking ground. It was an act of proclamation.

‘This here, this land, these people, are mine.’

“‘And under my protection’,” he murmured without thinking, nor thinking much of it. Of course he protected people. It was his goal, protecting people. Even Encke, much as Basiluzzo knew Encke didn’t need it. But one day he might, and Basiluzzo wanted to be there. Same with Pendour, with his father, with Nectaris. Hell, with the people that flitted in and out of their house as easy as breathing.

What kind of person would he be, otherwise?

‘What do you want from me?’ The question was mental this time, half a prayer to the building around him and the ghosts of the people that had once walked its halls. Half prayer and half offer.

What do you want from me?

Ask it of me, ask it of me, and it’s yours.

It wasn’t quite what he’d said to Ignacio on their wedding day, but it was close enough for government work. And here, he offered it to the silence, offered himself up to the silence. As his footsteps carried him down the halls, he paused before a mural of that same familiar figure with someone else. Shaking hands.

A treaty or something, probably. Everyone seemed happy enough in the picture.

‘We can work together on this.’

It was something Basiluzzo had told his father, when Luke first became Stromboli and wanted to rush in to protect his son. They could work together. They both knew that Richard would never accept being smothered and kept in a cage. Look how well that’d been going with Ignacio?

Richard’s desire to fly free on the wind, contrasted with Luke’s desire to use his budding powers as Stromboli to make sure his family was safe from anything that could threaten them, would threaten them. Basiluzzo having to deal with the knot in his stomach and in his throat as he tries desperately to keep Stromboli alive, knowing in the back of his mind it’s what he gets for the grey hairs he’s given Encke.

Like from seeing Basiluzzo basically dead on the ground, probably.

Basiluzzo’s throat tightened as he passed murals that depicted time of struggle, of battle. Of someone dead on the ground that looked an awful lot like one of the people he’d see before. Going back to that mural confirmed it was the person he’d seen the founder–for that’s who he presumed the figure was–make an agreement with.

He had a feeling in the back of his mind that he knew who that dead person was. Or, who they had been.

Basiluzzo exhaled loudly, shaking his head, then stopping up short when he came to a half-finished mosaic. One brown, one dark blue, both with glowing blue on their bodies in tiny flecks of sparkling glass. Standing together, hands clasped, but that was where it ended. Outlines of where the rest of the glass was supposed to go still lingered under the dust when Basiluzzo cleared it away with one gentle hand.

He stared at that one for a very long time.

When he tore his attention away from it, Basiluzzo saw that he’d reached a large door, another locked one. But this one…

This wasn’t his. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he knew it, knew that whatever lay past that door wasn’t his to discover, and so he turned away. But when he did, he found something that glinted in the dust at his feet. He frowned, then crouched to pick up what he found to be a key.

A key, covered in dust and grime from centuries where it lay. And ornate key, once that he didn’t recognise but knew, somehow, where it went. He turned back for the door that had been locked before, the one where the light entered and then went out of Basiluzzo’s reach. His fingers traced the metal as he shuffled back toward that door, coughing as his haste kicked up more sand and dust.

The key fit the door and turned easily. Just like he’d known it would.