Chapter 2 Part 2 – First Steps Inside
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Chapter 2 Part 2 – First Steps Inside
Abigail and Ethan stepped through the portal together.
“That felt… weird,” Abigail said, keeping her voice low, as if the room might hear her. “Not bad. Just weird in a way I cannot describe.” The crossing was almost insultingly ordinary. There was no lurch, no nausea, no sense of falling or being pulled. One moment the black surface filled her vision, swallowing light and detail, and the next her boots were on worked stone. If she had blinked at the wrong time, she might have missed the transition entirely. The only thing she could honestly report was a faint pressure behind her eyes, like the afterimage left by staring at something too bright, and even that faded so quickly it felt like her brain trying to invent a reason this had mattered.
Ethan made a sound that could have been agreement or simply his way of letting out tension.
Abigail’s hand moved on instinct. She glanced down at her phone to confirm the recording was still running. The indicator was steady, the counter ticking upward.
Then she noticed the signal bars.
She stopped short, staring at the screen for a beat to make sure she was not imagining them.
“Ethan,” she said, surprise slipping into her voice despite herself, “I still have cell signal.”
He leaned just enough to see the screen. “You do?”
“It’s weak,” she said, watching it flicker, “but it’s there. I expected it to drop to nothing the second we crossed.”
Ethan nodded once, filing that away, and finally lifted his gaze past her phone.
The room asserted itself all at once.
They were standing in a vast stone chamber, so large that it took Abigail a moment to process the scale. The floor beneath them was smooth worked stone, cool gray and seamless. Soft blue lines traced a five-pointed star across the floor, far from the entrance, connecting the vertices of the room. The walls rose up and away at a shallow outward angle, meeting a ceiling carved with the same deliberate precision. There were no visible light sources, yet the entire space was evenly illuminated.
From where they stood, faint blue lines were visible far out along the floor, converging at the distant corners of the chamber.
Abigail lifted her phone and began a slow, careful pan, narrating quietly as she did so. She did not move away from the entrance.
“This is way too big,” she said. “There’s no way this fits under the ravine.”
Ethan’s eyes tracked the walls and ceiling, already estimating. “This chamber has to be well over a hundred and fifty feet across,” he said. “There is no way that much open space exists under that slope. The bottom of the ravine is only like twenty feet down to begin with.”
Abigail swallowed. “So we’re not actually underground,” she said. “We walked through a doorway and ended up somewhere else.”
“That’s the only explanation that makes physical sense,” Ethan replied.
Her camera drifted toward the center of the room without zooming. A black crystalline obelisk rose from the exact middle of the chamber, tall and faceted, its surface drinking in light. Abigail made no move toward it.
“And yet,” she said, glancing down at her phone again, “my phone is still connecting to something.”
Ethan frowned slightly. “If this is another space, then that signal getting through at all is strange.”
Abigail let out a quiet breath. “I thought dungeons were supposed to be in another space or something,” she said. “Like a pocket dimension. That part tracks. The signal part doesn’t.”
They let the confusion sit without trying to force an answer.
After a moment, Ethan refocused. “We’ve seen enough for a first look,” he said. “We go back out now. If the exit works, we come back and test things properly.”
Abigail nodded. “Agreed.”
They stepped back through the portal together.
The ravine returned in a rush of normalcy. Damp earth, filtered sunlight under the tarps, familiar sounds. Abigail checked her phone again. Outside, the signal was strong, which only highlighted how anomalous the weak connection inside had been.
They regrouped just beyond the frame.
“So we can go in and out,” Abigail said.
“Yes,” Ethan said. “Now we test communication the way you suggested.”
She thought it through out loud. “I’ll start a call while we’re both out here. Then I’ll walk in alone and see if we stay connected. I come back out in ten seconds no matter what.”
Ethan nodded after a moment. “That’s controlled enough that we learn something without committing,” he said. “Yeah, let’s do it.”
They started the call side by side in the ravine.
“Okay,” Abigail said, holding the phone so the recording captured her screen. “Call is live. You stay out here. I go in. Ten seconds.”
Ethan confirmed, “I’m staying put.”
Abigail stepped through.
The chamber reappeared around her without drama. The call timer continued to tick upward. The signal bars dipped, flickered, and held.
“Ethan,” she said into the phone.
“I can hear you,” he replied immediately.
“Good,” she said, and counted out loud to ten. She stayed near the entrance the entire time. At ten, she stepped back out into the ravine.
“It worked,” she said. “The call stayed connected.”
Ethan did not let that become confidence. “Next step is video,” he said. “Same idea, but we leave my phone outside recording the call itself. If your phone inside fails," then he grimaces, "or the worst case happens, the call record still exists.”
Abigail nodded and pulled her older phone from her bag. “I’ll keep the call in my pocket, camera looking forward and use this one inside to record the room,” she said. “That way nothing important depends on a single device.”
They set Ethan’s phone to screen-record the video call, then placed it safely off to the side under the tarps, well clear of the portal. The previously mounted camera continued recording the portal independently, unchanged from earlier. Once they confirmed the video call was stable, they looked at each other.
“We keep it shallow,” Ethan said. “No touching anything. The lines, the obelisk, the far door. Not even the walls. No interacting with anything yet.”
“Agreed,” Abigail said.
They stepped back into the dungeon together.
This time, Abigail narrated continuously in full sentences as she recorded the interior with the older phone. Ethan stayed beside her at the entrance and used the range finder to take careful measurements from the threshold, calling out distances so they would be captured on both recordings.
“The lighting is completely uniform,” Abigail said. “There’s no visible source and no falloff.”
“And the geometry is deliberate,” Ethan added after another reading. “The edges are all fifty meters and the outward tilt of the walls is consistent. This isn’t a natural space.”
“Everything is in fives, and symmetrical,” Abigail muses. “So a dodecahedron? What kind of choice is that?”
Abigail framed the obelisk and the far door only from a distance. “We’re not touching anything yet,” she said clearly for the recording.
“That’s correct,” Ethan said.
They repeated their measurements the same way they had outside, relying on the range finder rather than estimation. Every reading reinforced the same conclusion: the chamber was far too large to exist under the ravine in any conventional sense.
After several minutes, Ethan lowered the device. “We stop here,” he said. “We’ve proven entry and exit, and we’ve proven communication at the entrance.”
Abigail nodded. “I had signal up to the lines, so we will likely have signal in the whole room. But yeah, let’s take a break. It has only been a few minutes but it seems much longer.”
When they stepped back out into the ravine again, they both let out a deep breath and seemed to relax a bit. It was definitely only a few minutes but they were tense the whole time.
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glad they switched back to american measurement
nobody knows what this MEATRIC jazz is all about -
@dwarf said in Chapter 2 Part 2 – First Steps Inside:
glad they switched back to american measurement
nobody knows what this MEATRIC jazz is all aboutEverything in the dungeons will be in metric, but I intend to keep them using casual conversation numbers in standard because that is what they would do normally.
