The latest developments in not earth but imperial hive city architecture is lots of definitely real human skulls on things, and eagle reliefs, and gold leaf. At least on this floor. The walls (and doorways, and mechanical bits that stick out, and banner hanging poles, and machinery buttons, etc) have more skulls than your average depiction of the humans religious hell. The major colour besides gold and bone is red. Red banners with cogs on them.

Everything looks VERY old, well maintained, but worn down in a way that it would take at least a century and maybe even longer for the kinds of sturdy materials this indoor road hallway seems to be built with to wear down like that.

Some of the people coming down the road have red cloaks and robot tentacle mechadendrites, like Alden. Some of those people seem to be made more of mechadendrites than human flesh. Some of the people look like malnourished regular humans, wearing much simpler clothes and never dressed in red like the ones with mechanical augments are. There’s even a few robo zombies, staring dead eyed and slack jawed as they lift or drag something too heavy for normal humans to carry.

Alden looks pretty nervous but they manage to make it a few Kilometres down this road without attracting anyones attention. Aldens focus as they approach it is on a big half cylinder thats coming out of the wall that goes to the ceiling. The elevator.

Rich people who like blood and death, got it. Maybe ex-rich people, who etc etc. She's mildly vibrating with boredom after a while but can stick to her plan for the unexpected  k i l o m e t r e s  of walking involved here. As long as no one notices her legs get fractionally longer, or the sporadic sprinkle of dust from between her clasped hands, they can reach the elevator very normally.

(Bone dust. She knows the consistency of bone, and is checking if all those skulls are real.)

Yep! All real! Even the smaller ones that had to have come from not adults. It is possible these skulls were sourced ethically with a big enough population and the apparent age of this road.

A few kilometres walk is not that far even by the standards of people who aren't winged immortals and who run on biology and can get tired. Like 20 minutes walking.

Alden nervously looks back at her as they approach a door in the cylinder tube, him getting them onto the elevator is the closest people will get to the demon, he hopes they don't notice her weird ‘not a person’ vibes she’s giving off. 

Despite Aldens worry, the guy manning the elevator controls (who seems to be permanently attached and wired into the wall beside the door) doesn’t even care when Alden walks up and motions he wants to go down. Doors open, on the elevator platform they go! Its a BIG elevator, you could fit like 4 earth battle tanks on this platform. Alden leads them off to the far side from the door, far away from anyone else who might get on.

It's possible they were ethically sourced from demonic conjuration, if you don't think about it hard enough to notice how this does not fit with any other evidence about their culture! (Guess who.)

Totally staring at wired-into-the-wall guy. She's going to be dissecting that set-up when she has free time and space... twentyish minutes might be too long to remember little comments like "don’t look anyone in the eye".

Wall guy glares at her with his bionic eyes. Staring right back, but not in an interested way but a kinda spooked and disgusted way.

Alden will grab her sleeve to pull her along when he notices this. Once they get to the far edge of the platform he whispers angrily at her. “What did I say about that! Don’t get peoples attention! We need people to not figure out you aren’t… like the rest of us.”

"He's stuck to the wall, he's not following us!" she whispers back; and giggles. "Why is he like that. What's with his eyes, is that normal here?" She tries to get a better look at summoner's eyeballs.

Summoners eyeballs are also robotic! But much better at looking human, you can only tell because the iris looks like it has tiny circuitry lines. The light catches them differently too.

”Well it’s probably easier to use a menial than to use a cogitator to run the elevator. Menials are easier to replace than cogitators when they break down anyway. His eyes are probably replaced at the same time as they got hooked up, better to do all the required augments during installation than to wait for their eyes to fail with age and have to do it later.” Alden says, as if this was completely normal. To him, it is normal.

Nod nod. Eye replacements and humans ageing totally make sense, she is familiar with both these concepts. "How good are your eyes at seeing? What's a cogitator?"

“I have better low light vision than baseline, and have a slight zoom function. Mostly they just directly display text in my field of vision without needing a physical display for it.” Wow this demon sure seems curious, it’s better than slaughtering everyone in sight he supposes. “Cogitators can be programmed to do things, like operate lifts. But the parts are hard to make and fiddly and the rites of activation are relatively long. Better to save them for more important things.” It’s not like he’s telling the demon anything they couldn’t torture out of a menial.

The elevator is descending, pretty quickly even! Sometimes it stops at a floor to let people on or off, but mostly it just heads down quickly. Whatever this structure is, it’s very tall, or deep, it is vertically impressive.

ZOOM. FUNCTION. If she pops one eye out into her hand and burns it will that be too obvious—hnnn but if she doesn't get the hook-up right she'd have to dispose of another eyeball or go around monocular until they reach The Underhive. Maybe the slight zoom isn't even better than her current set. She can wait, it'll be fine.

"Why do you need cogitators to run lifts? Aren't they just... weights?" She's never actually made a lift. Maybe that's wrong. Hmm, if the eye connection is tricky she can figure it out and write the people trying to make general brain computers, then they'll think she's cool. (They're so cool.)

“To decide when to stop it, to open the doors automatically, to decide how fast to go, when to refuse more passengers. Pretty sure these elevators are just directly geared into the shaft rather than using counterweights.” Alden tended to work on wetware, not basic hive amenities, but he’s seen the elevators get repaired enough times that he’s pretty sure it’s not using counterweights. He doesn’t even think he could come up with a counterweight system that could pull an elevator up a whole hive without using something silly like adamantium cables. Not that inventing a new elevator design wouldn’t be all kinds of heresy, but he's already done heresy today so whats a little more in the safety of his own mind.

Down down down they go. This building is either at least partly underground or is ridiculously tall, even by hell construction standards.

...probably back home people just operate their lifts directly, and humans have weird work-arounds. Even cool cyborg humans.

...man, even people with elevators don't normally have and use this much building at once. But people keep getting on or off! This is so much building. You have to actually think about stresses and forces to have this much building at once.

"...is the Underhive underground?" she whispers after a while.

“Yes… it’s… under the hive.” Yep, Alden needs to remember demons wouldn't necessarily know super obvious stuff, demonland or wherever it is they come from probably isn’t a hive. Maybe they don’t even have real buildings. He’s heard of wild worlds where there’s people living outside. 

“This elevator doesn’t actually go all the way down there. Just to the bottom of the middle hive, we’ve been underground for a while though. We have to get off soon.” He’s never actually gone below the middle hive though except for a few expeditions to find archeotech. He spent most of his life in his workshop in the middle spires. And now if he happens to not have his entrails danced on, he will be stuck in the underhive for the rest of his life, best case scenario. Never to be in the spires again.

This bums Alden out. On top of being bummed out about probably having his soul eaten by a demon, of course.

If he wants his prospective entrail-dancer to notice he's sad he'll probably have to say something, she's not super attentive to other people's emotions even when they're not drowned in tentacles, hoods, masks, etc. (On the bright side if he wants to hide that, super easy!)

Flutter of fingers. Down down down. "So all the top bit is the hive. Why's it a 'hive', do you really like bees? I didn't notice any bee décor."

Alden is not obviously emoting, except for in the slightly sad sway of his mechadendrites, and that is very subtle even to someone who could pick up on those things. Except for the panic at almost dying earlier, Alden is not the best at emoting with his face.

“All the bit meant for people to live in is the hive. You can have totally underground hives if the surface is unsafe enough. I don’t know why it’s called that, that’s just what big self contained megacities are called? Whats a bee? Never mind, I probably don’t want to know about…. things from where you come from.” It’s probably unsafe to know too much about demon things anyway, even if he’s resigned to being a heretic.

”Okay we get off here, then its a long walk to the lower hive… then I guess I look for some smugglers to bring us to underhive…” When the elevator doors open, theres another wall guy, also wired into the wall with big glowy optics. This one seems more listless, and old. The indoor road on this floor has way less skulls (but still some), no gold, no banners, less machinery, looks a lot more brutalist and worn down and dirty. The lighting is worse, some of the ceiling bulbs flicker. The cement or concrete analogue the roadway is made of has potholes.

"You don't have bees—you must have bees, I'm not translating, this is your language's word for 'bees', it's not 'bees' or 'bees' or—they're definitely more human things than demon things, we don't have nearly as many bees." She stops there less out of respect for his vague preferences than from finding 'pollinating by conjuration is easier than keeping bees alive' mildly annoying to explain.

“Well I don’t know what a bee is. We don’t have them here at least. Or at least not anywhere I’ve had access too. If it’s a gothic word then maybe someone somewhere has them.” Is it weird the demon knows low gothic? She’s even speaking it with this hives accent. Though the demons he saw on the film knew how to scream ‘FLESH!’ and ‘Tasty tasty eyes!’ and ‘WOW THIS IS FUN!’ as they slaughtered their way through the inquisitors forces. Until massed fire brought them down at least. So maybe them knowing the language is normal.

More walking, this road you have to be a little careful with too, because of it’s state of disrepair. Alden is not able to go nearly as fast having to watch where he steps.

Everyone on the indoor road on this floor is a normal human, though looking very malnourished. No red robed robot tentacle people and no robo zombies down here. Alden actually stands out in this crowd.

She makes a dead bee in the palm of one hand... tosses it casually aside. She makes a dead bee except for the stinger and scoops it into his hand.

"Behold: the bee."

Aldens first reaction. “Ew! Bug!” And drops it.

Aldens second reaction. “Where in the Emperors grace did you pull that from? Do you just have bees ready?” He didn’t see her go for a pocket either.

"The bees are created at point of sale. Would you like another one?"

(This time it's sarcasm.)

“You can make bugs?” That sorta makes sense as a daemonic power… hordes of locusts feature in some stories. He doesn’t know what a locust is but it’s supposed to be a bug. He always imagined it as a kind of rust beetle.

Okay for real he probably should not be asking about ultra forbidden knowledge about demonland. Damn his curiosity.

”At least I can get some protein on the way down I suppose…” What the worst that could happen if he ate demon bugs, get poisoned? Mutated? She was already gonna eat his soul.

Has. Has he not noticed? That's hilarious—is it funnier to point that out now or keep stringing him along, given that she might give it away by accident?

"...you're expecting it to take how long to get down there?"

“Couple of days? If we get lucky and find a decent smuggler fast. And if all the elevators work and we don’t have to avoid the inquisition. If this was a regular expedition I’d plan for at least a week. But it should be faster with just us two.”

Alden is also planning on taking some rather risky shortcuts. If they kill him? Well… not much loss there. At least it will be out of his hands.

.......................Akʰa spends a solid twenty seconds contemplating just giving up, killing him, and going home. This is not a timeframe she was expecting for "going downstairs"!! Really, really is not. "Since when do humans build this tall?"

Alden has to think about this. He never got much explicit history teaching, but even the religious lessons of the Mechanicum gave him enough information to ballpark it. 
“20 thousand years? At least? Maybe longer? There are definitely Hives from well before the dark age.” It’s not like this was secret information a demon shouldn’t have. Any random cultist could tell them hives are an old thing.

He also doesn’t understand what she means by ‘this’ tall. This wasn’t even the biggest hive on this planet.