Bibliophobia | Glowfic Constellation

"I maybe should not move from this spot. This is - dire. Amazing. Only the work of the gods lasts millions and millions of years, intact... And I am a toddler at the shuttle controls."

"...okay. What do you want me to have brought, if you need to stay right there?"

"-Water bottle, food bedroll and waste disposal if no progress in eight hours."

Kiki calls for those things. An ops runner brings them presently.

"This is good. I'm sure this is a good thing, I just want to be careful. This feels like a computer, and you know computers, Amentans I mean, I just have to be patient." She seems to be talking to herself more than Kiki or anyone else.

The Amentans look at each other nervously.

"Well, it means the old technology is working? So we can figure out how it works and make more?"

"I suppose," allows Kiki.

"-Oh, of course, it's reasonable for you to be more nervous than me. The Well. Go if you want to- Ah, perhaps a battery, I can't charge my everything myself anymore-"

The ops purple takes off and comes back with a battery.

The Amentans mostly evacuate their base camp in case the whole thing comes down around their heads.

Stoneheart is not going to do anything much until the Amentans form more confident guesses at the translations and what she should do next.

The linguists are on it!

It really does read like a computer readout, with an explanation buried in the wall of text that since the place has been abandoned it offered admin access to 'the created ones'. A whole long list of systems that are not responding, reporting fatal errors, are out of power, are missing workers and animals, and so on. Such systems include power, cleanup, water, billing, security, magic management, maintenance, medical, ...cloning?, and memory backups. It seems to be asking if the magic Amentans are workers or guests. The mysterious room has something to do with power generation, but is way too small to be any kind of conventional generator (Stoneheart draws out the spire map) if it's meant to power the whole underground facility. The 'do you want to call for help' implies a transmission of some kind.

Does there seem to be any way to access more documentation?

...Maybe - It says that full-intent-reading-integration is not available due to low confidence, please proceed to a control console. The map helpfully points those out, some of the larger rectangles of magic rock.

They translate this for Stoneheart.

The control console has a GUI and a weird keyboard where you pick an ideogram and it displays hundreds of characters containing that ideogram. There does appear to be documentation here, but it's painstaking to read it out, what's most important, what's first?

...can she let other people see it? So she won't have to?

...After finding a manual of sorts they figure out how to let the two magic Amentans interact with the control console. They can read some things but that's about it.

They can give her a break, at least, while they figure out the portion of it the magic Amentans can see. Mostly the green does the transcription.

There's a public encyclopedia that has a lot of information about the infrastructure, about the wildlife, about Dwellin, an article about the gods that reads like a video game's lore page, and purported interesting sites all across the globe that are all missing including a spaceport - though it doesn't particularly go into how the tech works. But they welcome offworld visitors who wish to see the wonders and culture of the Silver Sand Empire!

And... who would they be calling for help, if they did?

Golden Grand Design - something - Company.

The Amentans debate this quite a bit and then propose to Stonheart that it really would be pretty cool to have whoever built all this around to help them out and they seem most likely friendly, so perhaps they should do the call for help thing.