Project Orpheus: A Tale of Blood and Feathers

Chapter 20: The Damage

Derek was not the least surprised that he was given a gun and seen as the strongest person here. He probably was, to be fair, and he certainly didn't mind being the hero, but it felt a bit like stereotyping. Still, Orenda's trust was something he was proud to have.

The two of them entered the generator building, which was made of solid concrete and had a few glass windows, one of which was broken. Orenda flipped a switch to turn the lights on, but nothing happened.

"That's odd." Derek said.

Orenda nodded, "Yes, it is. The generator's been being finicky lately, what with the bad weather."

Orenda reached into her utility belt and pulled out a clip on flashlight that she stuck to the edge of her jacket, turning it on so they could see their way around.

"Is it solar powered?" Derek asked.

"Yeah, with some crazy "reactor cells" technology or other invented by AXIS. Thankfully we have a back up for the important systems, so it should be fine. But we are gonna have to go and reset it."

The room they had entered was just a long, narrow hallway, lined with doors and a stairwell at the end. It was otherwise pretty spartan, with only the floor covered in tile. The plaster on the walls hadn't even been painted.

"So what's with this? Why all the doors?"

"To make sabotage more difficult. They all lead down twisting corridors to dead ends, and opening them triggers an alarm. Only two of them have anything of value in them."

Derek smirked. "Smart. But why not just lock the door?"

Orenda responded with a smirk of her own as she took out a set of keys, and went to one of the doors seemingly at random, twisting the key inside the lock and pushing it open.

"We do that too. C'mon."

They went down the hall, following a trail of red lights in the floor all the way down and around a clean white tiled hallway and blue wall, before they started seeming to head up. Eventually they made it into a room overlooking the reactor - a very, very large room indeed, with a very large reactor. A gigantic sphere suspended on silver rods built of hexagons. Each hexagon had a strange circular handle in it. Wires came out of the top and bottom of the silver rod, spreading out into the walls.

A large metallic dual claw was on a track that made its way around the room. It slid along that track, reaching to one of the hexagons and twisting the handle out with one of its claws. On the end of the handle was a long cylinder with dull yellow light. The claws then rotated so they were at opposite ends, as the track moved to a structure on the floor, connected to the ceiling where presumably it went out to the solar array. The second claw twisted out another one of the cylinders in what was presumably a charging station, because this one glowed with a bright, almost impossible to look at yellow light. The dull canister replaced the bright one in the charging station, and the claw then moved to put the charged vessel in the reactor. It twisted it in, and then went back to an idle position.

"Sometimes we have to double check it. Whenever it detects more cells being low then it has charging stations for, it sort of glitches out...but it seems to be working fine right no-"

Derek noticed a spark in the distance, and turned his eyes to it. He immediately pointed to it.

"Look."

Orenda immediately ran towards it, and Derek followed. The room was a fuse room, with a bunch of wires leading to a control terminal and fuse box.

And the flashing had come from torn wires that had been formed into a nest. Bringing a bit of torn fiberglass from the wall to line it was a deinonychus and it shrieked upon seeing them. Derek instinctively fired the weapon, but without proper time to aim at what quickly became a moving target, he missed, and escaped into a hole they had somehow chewed through the wall.