There is a door here.
That's not unusual. What's unusual is that when she opens the door, the room it leads to doesn't belong in this building. She can tell because there's a hefty chunk missing from the wall a few feet over. Through that gap, she sees the blank concrete floor. Through the door, she sees something straight out of the old records.
"9S?" Maybe her partner will know what to make of it.
Beverages, devoid of fish oil, appear. 9S's has a little orange umbrella.
The door opens again and a distracted, severe-looking older man in old-fashioned clothes passes through. A few steps in, he looks up and seems to scrutinize the room.
He mutters out loud, "No elseworking... but immense amounts of Gin anyway? What on the globe is this?"
He doesn't seem to have seen anyone else present.
"Oh. Hello. Would you happen to know what this is? It's either extremely cunningly-disguised elseworking or something I've never heard of."
"Fascinating. We knew there was "else", but I did not believe there were pockets of humanity beyond ours."
He collects himself and continues, "To answer your question: elseworking is the manipulation of the pentad of otherworldly forces to affect the world. It destroyed nearly all of civilization and at least one continent, on my planet, about a millennium ago."
"In our world, aliens invaded and killed almost all the humans. The survivors had to flee to the moon."
"The moon? Now there's a thought. If we could get there...," he trails off. "I was born in one of the few long-term stable locations left. Which reminds me: Duke Kolai Berenfeld, Ruler and Peacekeeper of the Valley. Pleased to meet you, I hope."
"Ah. Yours is an ongoing concern, then? We have sporadic intrusions from the elselands, but it's not my primary concern. Most weeks."
"Yeah, the machines control about ninety percent of the surface. We were on a recon mission when we found this place."
"Humans occupy less than that on ours. The Known World is perhaps 1% of the surface? Information on the pre-collapse world is hard to come by, and we don't have the means to travel to the moon. How do you do that, by the way?"
"I'm not familiar with the principles. Might you have engineering manuals I could supply to the Valley's researchers? This place is fascinating, but I am responsible to my people first."
"That concept doesn't quite translate. Records built from numbers? I think I may be missing more background than I thought."
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