Vivify

He opened the other door. The woman and her companion looked over at it in surprise. They had not expected it to open so suddenly. He had already moved beyond it, down the hallway beyond. More symbols were on the walls here. At the hall's end lay another chamber, but this one was different from the others. It, too, lay behind a door of metal.

He opened this door as well. It hissed at first, releasing a puff of stale air left trapped behind an impermeable seal. Once the seal had broken, the door slid open silently. Lights winked on, small globes which shone yellow-white. They were set behind transparent panels in the walls, and they illuminated the chamber. The room was cramped and overflowing with containers which lined the room's walls, stacked one atop the other and secured using green straps of elastic material. Each was wrapped in an opaque white sheet, and each had symbols describing its contents. He knew they were full of objects similar to the bricks found on the traveler.

The center of one of the walls had two parallel lines of seats extending from them, black and glossy. They were study and were oriented pointing upwards. Along one wall, right near the door which had just opened and stretching between a pair of openings in the floor and the ceiling, was a ladder made of metal, coated in a white paint. It led both upwards and downwards to identical-looking chambers.

The woman led her companions down the long hallway to the second door. She peered inside first and recoiled. Her expression was confused and subtly frightened. The sterile, metal-plated rooms and hallways of this place must be alien enough to her. A room which was constructed vertically, and which contained objects the like of which she had never seen, served only to further increase her wariness and suspicion.

She was not daunted by the strange surroundings. She said a few words to her companions and handed them her weapon, then she took the rungs of the nearby ladder and began to ascend. The impact of her hands and feet caused the metal of the ladder to ring out with each rung she climbed.

The top level of the series of stacked rooms was identical to all the others. No holes were in the wall, no other doors were visible. The woman tore open one of the wrapped packages and pulled out a handful of its contents. Bricks plummeted from the gash to impact against the walls and distant floor, rendering their contents into a crumbled mess. She climbed back down and reported her findings to her companions.

They spoke among themselves. There were enough of these bricks present to feed all of their companions for a long time. There was shelter here. There was light. All that it lacked was liquid.

He found liquid for them. It bubbled from a length of tubing, drawn from a great cistern which lay below the series of connected chambers. It had been painstakingly gathered there.

They were shocked at the sudden flow of clear liquid. The woman tried it, then put her mouth on the end of the tube and sucked on it until she was sated. Her companions did the same. They spoke more.

They would bring the others here. They could always return up if needed, they reasoned.

They gathered some of the packaged bricks of material to show to the others, as proof of their discovery. They set off again, this time retracing their steps. He went with them still, to be sure.