The chosen defender of the Seed Vault was in the middle of sparring with her bo staff.

T'chmakh-of-the-Favor is now on the floor, with a solid chunk of wood at his throat.

Wait that's not Sensei, Sensei would never have fallen to something like that.

What?

"What just happend?"

T'chmakh-of-the-Favor is of a generally humanoid bodyplan, with greenish-brown skin and a tall, wedge-like head. His eyes are on short stalks extending out from the center on either side, with a tall mouth in the center of his forehead above them and a sort of 'beard' of cilia or tentacles below.

He is also quite unable to respond immediately, being somewhat stunned by the blow and the threat of further harm. Violence is not something that happens within the Seed Vault.

The room Velra finds herself in is, perhaps unusually, apparently made entirely of metal. The floor, ceiling, and walls are all exposed and decorated primarily by variously-colored lights, dials, gauges, switches, and levers. There is an important-looking console of such switches and levers to her right, below a transparent pane of glass which provides a view into another room, where a strange contraption sits on a circular dais in the center.

Okay, this person is significantly less able to withstand little things like "being knocked bodily into solid surfaces" than Sensei (most people are less able to withstand things than Sensei). She can wait for him to catch his breath. Wis 16 is enough to tell her that messing with glowing contraptions she doesn't understand is a bad idea.

"W-we greet the defender," he wheezes at length. "Sent by the Revan in our time of utmost need."

Thaaat sounds important but first she's going to offer him a hand, she doesn't think she's relevantly at fault for having not yet prioritized learning to reflexively stop fighting on a tenth of a second's notice but she would be if she didn't help him up now.

Once that's done she'll ask him if the whole "utmost need" thing is, like, scale-of-minutes urgent, such that she should do something right away before getting oriented to the situation here.

That is what the book called it. When the lights make the pattern. The nature of the need is... unclear to her interlocutor. He seems rather under the impression that she would already know.

If there's nothing that urgent she'll try to get some context.

"I was not expecting that to happen, and while I'm happy to defend things that need defending, I'd prefer to be asked first. Who is this 'Revan' person."

"The Revan is the savior. The one who put us here and provided us with the Holy Seed. It is for the Revan's purpose that we worship the Seed, and when it is fulfilled, the Revan will return and gather us to glory."

"And what, exactly, is this purpose?"

"To protect and nurture-" His next words are cut off by the muffled sound of an explosion. Several lights start blinking more urgently, and red.

That's bad.

"Is there anything we should do to respond to that, and if so is there anything here we should grab first?" The optimal treatment of weird glowing-or-otherwise contraptions is different if you might never have a chance to get them again.

"This was not foretold," he says. Though perhaps new insight to the texts has revealed itself. He will consult his book, laid on the console next to the interface.

Oh no, he's a wizard. Nevermind having him make decisions, how portable does the aforementioned 'strange contraption' look.

It's probably about the size of a medium-large dog, a few feet tall and roughly egg-shaped. Doesn't seem as though there are any handles or really good spots to get a grip, the surface is smooth metal panels with several seams or overlaps in a seemingly-random arrangement.

That's too heavy to carry around. It looks like it might be some sort of weird puzzle box though. Does anything happen if she spends thirty seconds pushing random bits of it, prying seams apart, and failing that throwing it on the floor (you gotta at least try brute force before giving up)?

The moment she first touches it, an impression brushes her mind, a presence. A wordless question. Of any object she can imagine, what does she desire? It need not be a considered want, even a brief flicker of impulse will do.

She's a monk. She knows how to use weapons, that's why she was training with the staff when she got grabbed, but fundamentally, she uses her body, not tools. If it's got something that'd be more of a part of her she'll take it, but she's not going to rely on something else. That said, she likes shuriken, mostly because punching people from range is difficult, that's fine too.

The ovoid hums gently, and a moment later a pile of the most perfectly formed shuriken she's ever seen emerge from the front of the device to fall neatly into a pile in a small depression in the dais.

She'll grab them and put them in her weapon pouches. Is the ovoid, like, still there in its original condition, such that she could try asking it for more things?

It has not visibly changed at all, so yes!

In that case she'd like some handwraps, just in case something happens to the ones she's wearing, and does it, by any chance, contain a menu.

Handwraps are procured. Like the shuriken, they are of excellent quality. Fabric tightly and neatly woven, of a pleasantly soft texture yet strong and durable.

The menu is the platonic ideal of a menu- bold, readable typeface with groupings by heading and subheading laid out for ease of navigation. However, on closer inspection the text is pure gibberish, like what one might see in a dream.

Well, it could have worked. Can it make something to shrink itself, or failing that something that can carry it (not something sentient, she is not going to have a kid just for an artifact, even a really good one)?

She packs the handwraps away.

Neither of those thoughts produce a response.