"I have no idea," Xin'ri admitted. "We've seen no signs of water down here, maybe that's enough?"

"It's not that unusual in the ruins," Lan'ti spoke up. "Nobody really knows why, but we do know that anywhere objects are more preserved than we expect, there are more likely to be apparitions. Whether the objects call the apparitions or the apparitions protect the stuff, no one knows. I don't really think most people care; it lets us see stuff we'd otherwise never see."

He paused, then shook his head with a smile. "The oddest thing I've ever seen was a dress. It was on a frame, so it almost looked like a person was wearing it, only without actual arms or a head. The skirt started way up here." Lan'ti indicated the middle of his chest, just below the breasts. "And it spread out in all directions until it was wider than I am tall. Even after we took it off the frame, the skirt stood on its own. I have no idea how anyone could walk in that."

"Maybe they didn't. Maybe they floated." Sophia could definitely believe that some people might dress that elaborately to make the point of just how little they had to work. Buying a personal flyer that was small enough to work with a huge dress seemed like conspicuous consumption, and that worked well with the idea. It wasn't exactly something she'd seen before she entered the Broken Lands, but she'd seen styles that were equally outlandish.

"Maybe," Lan'ti agreed. "Anyway, I don't see anything here, so I'll note this as a room that's likely to keep having ruin apparitions appear and we can move on."

"Wait a moment," Dav said with a headshake. He frowned at the wooden board, then tapped it in the middle, starting at the left and working his way to the right. When he finished, he started at the top and worked his way to the bottom.

Sophia tilted her head to one side. The taps didn't all sound the same; the ones that were closest to the edges seemed a little duller and shorter than the ones that were farther away, almost like there was a hole in the wall. "Do you think there's something behind it?"

"Yeah." Dav tapped one side of the panel, then the other. He then ran his hand along the right edge. When he got to the bottom, he nodded. "Here it is."

Dav's fingertips seemed to vanish a little ways into the wood, then he tugged lightly. The panel opened with the soft screech of rusty metal. "I'm glad that worked. I didn't think about breaking it until it was already moving."

It looked like a hidden safe had been built into the wall, but it was entirely possible that it wasn't originally hidden. Maybe the wooden outer door was marked and obvious to the people who originally lived or worked in the underground complex.

Hidden or not, it was open now.

Sophia ran her eyes over the contents. There were piles of folded cloth, a bunch of shiny lumps, and a number of packets that looked like they'd been wrapped in cloth then tied up as bundles. Over it all, she could feel a dissipating spell, and she was pretty sure that while the cloth and nuggets weren't magical, there was magic coming from the bundled items.

"Finally!" Xin'ri grabbed the door and pulled it open until it was flat against the wall it had once been set in. Dav took a step for balance to recover from the accidental push she gave him as she lunged for the door.

Sophia glanced at the door Xin'ri was so intent on, then stopped. "A runic inscription. It was … that was active when the door was closed, but it's not functioning now. I can see the fading magic. I bet it'll reactivate when we close the door."

The runic inscription was carved into a circular disc of wood mounted on the inside of the door. The very outer rim of inscriptions were carved into the wood, but inside that they were carved in relief, with everything except the functional inscription removed. It was a series of concentric circles, patterned in the middle with stuff that looked more like writing on the outer circles.

Back on Earth, Sophia knew it wouldn't be hard to do; there were laser engravers that could easily have carved the design. This one, however, didn't look like it was done by a machine; she could see the marks where the wood wasn't cleanly removed and a lot of things weren't cut to the same depth as other places. There were also places where it looked like the carver ran into difficulty and worried the wood apart as much as he carved it.

"It has to be a preservation disc," Xinri stated in an almost reverent tone. "I've never seen one with six outer circles before; the best I've ever seen had four." Her hand reached for the carved disc of wood but she clenched it into a fist and pulled it back to her side before she actually touched it. "It's strange, though; this almost looks empty, like it was stretched. I recognize some of the symbols, but … why are they so far apart?"

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Sophia shook her head. It absolutely looked like a runic inscription, carved language to control magic, but the symbol set wasn't one she knew. Without a guide, it was nearly impossible to translate and Sophia was only a beginner.

"The outer rim is different from the rest," Dav said with a frown. "Different symbols as well as being carved differently. Inside that, the next circle is blocky text, then a circle that's barely there, maybe more connections than anything? Everything inside that looks either pretty complex or really simple. There are a lot of flaws, too; a couple of the circles aren't cleanly joined. None of that's in any of the references - Sophia? Do you have any ideas?"

Sophia shook her head. "It looks like a flaw, but it probably isn't. A flaw that big would seriously impact the function of a runescript."

"That's an irret," Xin'ri informed them, tapping the air above the spot they were talking about. "A controlled bleed; you see how the inner one is open and the outer one is capped? It places pressure on the outer circle that comes all the way from two circles inside. It's used to make small, compact discs handle more power without having to completely redesign them."

Sophia shook her head. That wasn't anything she'd ever heard of. This was basic stuff, stuff her father taught her as a teenager. "Why can't you just upscale it? The increase in area ought to handle the additional mana with no problems. The problem is usually with getting the runes too small, not making them bigger, at least until you run into power starvation and that just means you need a better mana source."

"That's not how it works," Xin'ri answered. "You have to carefully control the mana flow and pressure each rune experiences to avoid wear and possible overload."

Lan'ti cleared his throat. "Can you talk about this tonight? We can salvage the disc for you, but I want to check out the other stuff in here."

Detaching the disc from the door turned out to be relatively easy; it was held in place by a minimal metal framework of four prongs that slipped into holes in the thick outer edge of the disc. They had to bend the prongs to get them out, but that was easy enough. Once the disc was out of the way, they could see that the four metal prongs were supported by a small metal plate screwed into the door. Xin'ri unscrewed that while Lan'ti turned to the contents of the safe.

"A lot of different lumps, most of them metals but some materials I can't identify. None of them have any magical properties I can feel," Lan'ti said out loud as he added them to a bag he'd pulled out of a pocket. "A few of these are valuable, but the rest of them I don't recognize. Four, no, six glass globes, four with stands of some sort. Again, no sign of magic, but they're perfectly spherical and much lighter than I expect glass to be." Whether or not they were glass, Lan'ti tucked them into the bag with the metallic lumps.

"Are you recording this?" Sophia couldn't think of any other reason Lan'ti would describe everything as he went.

Lan'ti shook his head. "I don't have a memory Ability. Volat does, but it's for the written word only. I picked up the habit from Prythe; he does have a verbal memory Ability. I still do it because it's useful, even without one. Talking it through means everyone knows what I've seen, and can speak up if they notice something I don't. We'll go through it all again back at the camp, but this way we all know what we've found."

Sophia nodded. A dungeon back home was the closest comparison she could make to what they were doing and she'd never really done anything like that in a dungeon, but it wasn't like the two experiences were identical. If he thought it helped, well, it probably helped him.

"The cloth seems to be slightly tacky on the outside, probably impregnated with something. I don't know what or why, but other than that it's just cloth as far as I can tell." Lan'ti added the cloth bundles to the bag, then tied the end of the bag shut. He pulled another bag out of his pocket. "Six cloth-wrapped packages tied together with twine. These do seem magical, we'll open them back at camp. The cloth feels the same, so we probably know what the cloth was used for; it was probably for these packages. This could be everything we've hoped for; I may have to call you my lucky talisman, Ci'an."

"Hah," Ci'an said from the back of the room. "You'd've found this today even if I wasn't here. Or if not today, whenever you tried to move the door."

"But we did find it today," Lan'ti countered, "And it's just after you got here."

Sophia shook her head. She didn't want to step into the middle of two siblings, but she also didn't want to listen to them argue about whether or not Amy, Ci'an, was lucky or not when it was Dav who found the opening. Maybe she could distract them. "Why is it here, anyway? Everything else seems to have been cleaned out, and this seems like something the people who worked here would have known about."

"It probably wasn't cleaned out by the people who worked here," Xin'ri answered quickly. Maybe she didn't want to listen to the earlier argument either. "They took everything that was obvious and easy to get at but weren't looking for secrets. That makes me hopeful for what we'll find next."

"That or this was left behind as a cache, for someone to use later," Lan'ti added. "I doubt it, with the cloth, but who knows? Maybe the cloth is really useful for something."

"Or it was too delicate to move," Dav added. "There has to be some reason there was a preservation enchantment on the door, and it can't be to save stuff for us, centuries in the future. They didn't leave this for us. What in there needed it?"

Sophia stared at the collection of stuff. None of it looked particularly short-lived; she wouldn't have put any of it in a box to preserve it, like food in a fridge. Sure, on the scale of centuries, cloth would get eaten by moths or disintegrate from too much moisture or something, and metal would rust or oxidize away, but that didn't happen in days or even weeks.

"The enchantments," Sophia blurted. "That's the only thing in there that might fall apart quickly. They're probably delicate, maybe not used very often? Or maybe they're supposed to be really precise and can warp or something?"

They'd find out when they got everything back to camp. For now, Liam stuffed the enchanted packages in a bag and sent a few people to carry it to the camp, along with a guard in case of a ruins apparition; they'd hurry back once the items were safely deposited.

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