The ruined city of the gods is few days away from anything settled. The land is criss-crossed and covered in their remnants. Too many hunks of rusty metal, geometrical outcrops of broken crumbling stone, and half-intact structures to be worth farming or grazing. Most ancient places outside of the city have probably been picked clean by other priests, but they make good shelter.

A few of these even have notes and advice carved or painted on the wall. 

Avoid the bridge two miles from here - not safe to cross.

The towers and tunnels are dangerous, but low places are picked clean. I suggest you learn to climb.

Be resolute and methodical if you wish to survive. You will not find truth quickly.

Anything that looks like an obvious good idea will have been tried. Either it was, and whatever was there came back with the priest, or it wasn't after all. Vaayo looks through the city for the most obviously suicidal place to go. Maybe one of those tunnels the note mentioned.

There is one particular tower that stands tall, hollowed out, but with a more intact section at the top. Some of the glass is even still in its windows. There's a section of girders that look potentially scaleable, but it would be a very dangerous climb and it looks like the whole structure might collapse some day soon.

There are entrances to the tunnels all over - metal circles covering columns with rusting ladders. Large concrete pipes that disgusting-looking water flows slowly out of, overgrown with plants. A stairway down with an unreadable sign, elaborate and half-collapsed open spaces down below, with long tunnels heading off into the darkness.

The darkness is the real trouble of the tunnels. It makes it easy to get lost. They go this way and that, there are small branches everywhere, some barely large enough to walk through, some wide enough for half a dozen cows at once. It would be so easy to walk past the exit of the side-tunnel you were exploring down in the darkness, and then find yourself hitting dead end after dead end, unable to find the way back up, until you run out of water, trapped in the darkness forever...

Maybe if he puts some strong-smelling things by the entrance and just before every crossroads... no, that idea didn't take long to come up with, someone else has probably tried. Up he goes. If nothing else the glass windows are sort of promising.

As he climbs he can manage to find a nearly sealed-off room - possibly too small a space for other priests to have reached. Inside is some scraps of cloth and leather and rotting wood, plus a few plastic cards, and a rectangular plastic shell with buttons bearing letters, numbers, and other strange symbols on one side (though the insides of it have clearly rusted away).

The tower looked more climbable from afar.

Everything is rusty, the perches are narrow and sloped downward and slippery and falling apart. The line of girders is further apart than it looked. And it's really windy up high. If he were older, in peak condition, and had better climbing gear, maybe he'd have a chance. As it is, he can get up to the fifth or sixth floors after some effort, but ascending the most difficult stretch is probably impossible for him. Not just nearly suicidal to attempt, simply not going to happen.

At least from up here he can get a good view of the city and the surrounding area. There are a lot of buildings out there, though only a few dozen still as tall as where he is right now. The great stone columns holding up what little remains of the city's raised roads make better landmarks than any particular structure, though. It all blends together, a morass of brown and green. Probably all of it has been picked over by priests before him.

...Except for an open tunnel halfway up a steep slope, past the edge of the city. It comes out halfway up a steep hill. There's nothing special about the tunnel, just another stained concrete drain, and there aren't any buildings near it... But it twinges his intuition on some level. There's something about it that makes it seem important. Maybe the way the roads are arranged? Maybe the way it's so oddly placed halfway up a hill, not anywhere you'd want water to drain to.

It looks impossible to climb, but maybe by taking a route to the top of the hill and then carefully descending he could reach it.

Vaayo doesn't recognize the symbols on the plastic shell but he examines them for a while. Plastic cards like those are what they use for money, which is probably some kind of horrible sacrilege, for all he knows the lines of writing on them are prayers or something. He'll take those with him.

He can feel the call. The gods want him to see what's down there, huh? Maybe they left the meaning of life written on a stone tablet down there in a language Vaayo can't read.

"Are you telling me something? Are you watching me? Or did you just leave some kind of beacon there when you left?"

They probably won't answer but at least he can give them a chance.

No answer except the wind.

Yeah, he didn't expect any better.

The beacon's probably also obvious. It's still possible it's something worthwhile, maybe half the people who don't come back just find that following the beacon lets them find whatever place the gods moved to, but...

...well, is there a door or a stairway or something he can use to keep exploring this building that he found by himself instead of that magic tunnel?

There are multiple doors and stairways. It's a pretty big building. He could spend the rest of the day, maybe two days, if he wants to thoroughly check it out for more places like the room he could barely squeeze into with the cards and plastic thing.

He'll just check a few more rooms. The gods and their revelations can wait, if he's getting out of this he's getting out of it with some cool stuff. Somehow he expects "but that's not the important thing, the important thing is what I have to say about the gods" will go over a lot better if he brings home something useful. And he really does not expect the gods to be leading him somewhere useful.

Looking out for rooms in the half-collapsed building that only he could fit into leads him to a relative treasure trove of discoveries.

He finds a few more plastic cards. He finds a shiny yellow hat, hard as metal but much lighter, discarded near tough-looking set of clothes that are too big for him and a metal box full of only semi-rusty incomprehensible tools. Unfortunately the opening into that room is narrow enough it'll be hard to get it out. He finds a lightbulb. He finds a broken watch. He finds a faded but intact book, sealed and wrapped in thick plastic! The title is unreadable, of course. He finds a shiny foil packet with a picture of some kind of bread on it, covered in gods' writing declaring it "TWINKIES". It feels full.

He cuts himself on something sharp and rusty at some point, clambring through the narrow passages.

Well, that's not good for his odds of survival. The bread is probably rotten but mold can be useful. He takes that and the book and the watch and all the cards and tries to get them all safely out and back down to the ground.

...At least if he has to drop the cards they're not likely to be damaged in the fall.

The distracting pain of the cut doesn't hinder him too much on his way back down.

Great. Maybe he'll get away from the tower and die somewhere totally different and people who find his skeleton will have no idea what killed him.

He puts his finds in a neat pile at the base of the tower. He considers taking all of it back and saying he had a vision of the gods where he learned that they weren't perfect after all.

...Even if anyone would buy that it's a lie and he doesn't just want to be listened to, he wants to know. He wants to find the gods and tell them how much people have suffered without them. Or find what scared them off and get rid of it so they come back. Or just know why the supposed definition of goodness includes leaving people to die.

He heads tunnelward. Maybe it is time to give them the benefit of the doubt, just for a while.

If he knew things about medicine, he'd know to wash out the cut with clean water and wrap it with clean bandages.

The suspicious tunnel is half a day away. It's night by the time he reaches it.

Yeah, if he weren't running out of clean water. He only packed what he could carry and he doesn't trust anything here. Maybe it'll rain.

Rest is for other people! He'll just. Keep going. Forever.

Downward!

It's a cloudless night and the moon is nearly full. He can still see, at least.

He nearly loses his footing on the descent and tumbles - which would be certain death on this tall, steep hill - twice. But he makes it to the concrete platform around the tunnel eventually. The ruins of a crane lean against the steep hill, but other than that it's windswept and empty here.

The first twenty or thirty feet of the tunnel are smooth, holding only a different design of metal rail than the underground ones. But there's a... A light, deep inside the tunnel. Faint, but there. It's green. On... Off... On... Off...

Oh.

He might not end up happy with the gods but that's a pretty clear sign he's going to end up understanding them! And when he gets back and hands over the old book and talks about his vision of green light things will be okay somehow. That or he'll die on the way.

Lightward!

It's a surprisingly long walk. Totally straight, no deviation or side paths at all. The few hardy plants that colonized the first section of the tunnel die out, here, too.

Eventually the featureless tunnel has a small side chamber, where it expands for a short ways and then shrinks again. Here he can see the source of the slowly blinking green light. At the bottom of a window to nothing, glass covering black, set into the wall. There's one of those plastic boxes with buttons attached to it just below. It's hard to make out anything with so little light.

They're going to strike him dead for doubting them, aren't they.

Vaayo walks right up to the light and watches it.

The blinking light... Blinks. And blinks some more. And some more.

"...I'm where you wanted me to go but if you don't explain yourselves I'm leaving."

The blinking light has no comment. Maybe he should press the buttons? Those rectangular trays with buttons seem common enough. If he had a lantern or a torch or something he could explore a little better?

He waits for a long time. Maybe the gods are just slow.

...But then he realizes this is just another artifact. He hits it. If this pushes any buttons it's entirely by accident.

He regrets that while his hand is still on the way, it's in good condition if he could get it out of here, maybe it's good for something...

Oh well.

His hand bounces off. 

The blank window lights up after a moment, staggeringly bright when he's used to the dark. He can't bear to look directly at it yet. But the light reveals new detail about this room. There's writing, markings, and a few strange artifacts on the walls and ceiling... There's a metal structure along one side, a small platform with a square of columns around it, a vertical tunnel above it leading up into the darkness. There's a door.