Callisto's Stones: Chapter 2
#2 of Callisto's Stones
Callisto's Stones: Chapter 2
Katja awoke with a start. She had just had the most upsetting dream. She was being chased by a group of naked, heavily-endowed snake people, who were throwing urns at her, as she stole their magical chisel. Blearily she stood up. Something was off. The light seemed wrong, it was too... green? "This can't be right, I distinctly remember bringing only blue sticks with me," but the light was not coming from her, it was instead coming from down the hall. Stumbling down the corridor, with one hand on the wall to guide and, as much as she hated to admit it, keep her from falling. On some level she noticed that she was not hungry or tired anymore, filing that knowledge away for further study she knew that she simply had to reach the light and everything would be alright. The closer she got, the lighter her feet seemed to become, until she fairly bounced along the tunnel. She was almost to the light when she tripped on a mischievous little rock. Falling flat on her face, Katja knew that something was wrong. It shouldn't be so hard to breath, unless... There! On her arm! Of course! She was running low on oxygen in her tank, that's why it was so hard to breath. "Let me... just crack this open... and get one big deep breath then... then I'll go back to using my tank..." she wheezed to herself as she began to undo the clasps on her helmet. The hiss of a broken seal jolted Katja back to her senses and she began to curse as she fought to get her suit pressurized before... she... died? "If I was going to explode, I would already be dead," Katja reasoned with herself.
Tossing her helmet aside, Katja sat down against the side of the cave taking slow deep breaths, trying to give her body some much needed oxygen and her mind some time to think. "Okay," she thought to herself, "When the door closed it must have resealed the cave system. However, that means I am locked inside here with no air left in my tanks to return to my ship. Although, if there is air in here now, that means something must have refilled the caves after I opened them up. I might be able to jury-rig something up to refill my tanks and get the hell out of here." Clapping her hands at the thought of a plan she stood up and brushed the seat of her pants off. No sense in going over terrain she had already covered and the green light seemed a good a direction as any so Katja strode off in that direction, confident if not a bit woozy from the recent lack of oxygen and still present lack of food.
Several unhelpful rest stops later, Katja reached the opening to a large, roughly circular, room. A quick count revealed that there were four other openings to the room; two to her left, one to her right and the largest straight ahead. The green light was coming from one of the doorways to her left. Staggering over and pushing a decaying cloth door out of the way Katja stumbled into the room.
The room had to be some sort of laboratory, there were large glass tubes filling the room from end to end. As Katja explored the large room, she noticed that each tube was broken outwards, as if something larger than a human had burst out each one. Stopping dead near the back, Katja sat down, hard. Obscured partially by two other tubes there appeared to be one still full of some sort of green luminescent liquid. There was a shadow floating about in the liquid. Katja crawled closer as the slowly spinning shadow turned to face her. "No it couldn't be..." she whispers, "this place has to have been dead for... for... forever!" Turning away Katja tries to scramble away on all fours, when she hears a cracking noise. Turning around slowly, all she sees before darkness is a spray of glass and 2 large and iridescent orbs.