Isolation (Penumbra Fanfiction)

Chapter 2

A/N: Okay. So decided to make the chapters of this story go from different PoVs, like this:

Chapter 1: Christina

Chapter 2: Philip

Chapter 3: Christina.. and so on...

It makes the whole thing a bit easier to understand c: So this chapter isn't amazing, because I was finding it difficult to write. There just wasn't much to write about, but oh well. Already started the next chapter which'll be more interesting, so yeah (:

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The last thing he could remember hearing was the constant bleep noises, notifying him that the message had been sent. This was the last thing he heard before one of them found him, and struck him down.

Now he woke up, by an alarm, a warning alarm. A voice came on above him. “Warning: New arrival detected. Warning.”

The voice was robotic, feminine. Was he the new arrival? That wouldn't make sense. He'd been in the Archaic for months now. Although, opening his eyes, he couldn't even recognise where he was.

“Welcome, new arrival.” The voice came on again. There was something disturbing and eerie about it. “You are the fourth new arrival detected in the past 10 hours.” Fourth? Who else was there? “1 further arrival recorded 32 hours ago.” So he wasn't the only one here? Where ever that was. Was this still the Archaic?

Standing up, Philip couldn't recognise anything about where he was. This place was built by rocks, sand coloured rocks. It was huge down here, hard to believe a place like this even existed. There were huge lamps in each room. Philip decided this had to be a place even further down than the Archaic and the mine had been. Was that even possible? This place proved it to be.

He wasn't sure what he was meant to do. There were only three rooms, three large rooms. In those rooms were just giant, square rocks and giant pads that sank down when pressed on. Philip couldn't think of what those could've been used for.

There was a large door in the room he woke up in that he didn't remember seeing when he did wake up, but shrugging that off as him simply being tired and groggy from waking up. The door was metal with strange symbols on it, and upon examining it, Philip saw no visible locks. Could the pressure pads be some sort of lock? He supposed that the large square rocks had to be moved onto the pads... Maybe then the door would open...

Philip stopped dead when he entered a room which had two of the pads in it. Lying in the middle of room were two parts of the same broken ladder.

Broken ladder.

It was red with one yellow stripe across each part.

The same ladder he had used long ago... Back in the mine... It was exactly the same.

How had it gotten here?

Philip had no explanation and was disturbed by it's presence. Now that he recognised the ladder, he realised the large fluorescent lamps were exactly the same as the ones that were in the cave the ladder was in... But he wasn't in the cave! How could they be here? Trying best to ignore it, he simply pushed the heavy rocks to each pressure pad.

“Exit open. Exit open.” The robotic voice informed him overhead when he finally managed to move the last one. Assuming it was the large door, Philip went back to find it open. He walked towards it, his vision blurring increasingly as he got closer to it. He couldn't see anything inside the tiny room it led to. Whether his vision was too blurry, or there was nothing there.

Finally, his vision went back to normal. In front of him was a large circular machine-looking thing. It was glowing orange. He couldn't even understand what it was. He told himself, stay away from it, it could be dangerous. But no, as usual, curiosity got the better of Philip as he moved towards the center of it.