There were a number of places where they'd skipped doors in their exploration when they didn't easily open, locked from the other side. They were large doors, far larger than the others in the complex. Once the rest of the floor was explored, they forced one of them open and found exactly what both Sophia and Dav expected: a hole that they couldn't see the bottom of. There was also an opening above the doorway, but it was clear the elevator shaft didn't reach the surface; it stopped about twenty feet above the floor.

There was no sign of the elevator that must have once used the shaft, but Sophia was certain had once been one. She'd seen other ways of doing things in the past, but only the ones with platforms had self-locking doors. Maybe it was all the way at the bottom, abandoned when the magic failed?

A search outside the door didn't show any obvious way to summon the elevator, either. There were a lot of different things that could mean. Sophia grinned at Dav and made her guess. "I'm guessing it was a magical trigger of some sort. Maybe when you touched the door or the wall, but more likely you had to reach out with your aura and trigger something. A lot of the mage academies in the Empire use something like that, and their elevators look a lot like this."

She didn't bother to explain that the Empire was the largest power even somewhat close to Earth back home; she'd already told Dav that, along with the fact that they had a good relationship with Earth. Good enough for a lot of trade, anyway, and the Emperor had declared Earth off limits for conquest before Sophia was born; no one wanted to piss off the dragons that made Earth their home, after all.

"Yours just use buttons, though, don't they?" Dav shook his head with a smile. "I don't think so; this doesn't seem like an elitist place. The opposite, if anything; everything's repetitive. I'm betting this is a work area, and that's how they move stuff up and down, a freight elevator. It probably has a remote."

That seemed possible, even if Sophia thought it was an inelegant solution. Like ordinary buttons, it would work. "I guess it would make it easier to limit who could use the elevator, instead of a lock. It seems a little pointless."

Dav shrugged, but before he could say anything, Xin'ri interrupted. "You two know what this was?"

Sophia blinked. Wasn't it obvious? A moment's thought told her that she'd never actually seen an elevator in Izel; people did fly between levels, but that was on their own, using their Abilities.

"It's a way to move between levels," Dav answered while Sophia was still processing her surprise. "A platform or box that was lifted between levels to carry things or people, with doors that close when it isn't there to prevent people falling in. We're arguing about how people got it to come to them."

"Are you sure they did?" Xin'ri asked. "Why wouldn't it always be moving, maybe pausing at each floor? Or maybe you'd have to go and get it."

That seemed like a huge waste of energy compared to having a way to call for an elevator, but Sophia couldn't say for certain that Xin'ri was wrong. Either one would definitely explain why there were no buttons.

Sophia frowned at the entrance, then shook her head. Why were they spending this much time on an empty elevator shaft, anyway? "I don't think there's anything else to look at here. We can probably skip the other doors like this one, too; they're all going to be more elevators."

It was evidence in Dav's favor, or maybe Xin'ri's. There were exactly three types of rooms on the entire floor, and it covered more than a square mile: the small room, the larger room with the wall storage, and restrooms. It was hard to think of anywhere that was that repetitive; in fact, Sophia had never seen anything quite like it before.

Well, technically there were also the hard-to-open large doors that were apparently elevators and the easily opened doors that led to stairs, but Sophia wasn't counting those. They were more like hallways than more rooms, since they were ways to travel. Even so, everything was standardized to a positively insane level.

"Xin'ri?" Lan'ti spoke for the first time since the doors were opened. When Sophia turned towards him, he was staring at the opening to the elevator shaft instead of the woman he was addressing. "Are you done, too?"

Xin'ri sighed and shook her head. "Unfortunately. There's nothing here to look at; it's just a hole."

"Then can you close the door? It's probably not possible for a ruins apparition to climb the sides, but we don't want anyone to fall in." Lan'ti's explanation made sense, but the fact that he didn't take his eyes off the door made Sophia wonder if there was something more to it than just that. Was he actually worried about things coming out of the spooky hole?

Despite the fact that Lan'ti seemed to ask her, Xin'ri stepped back to make room instead of pulling on the door to try and close it. Dav and Sophia were the closest, so Sophia glanced at Dav. The elevator doors were a pain to open and they hadn't even managed to get them open all the way, so they were probably going to be a pain to close as well. She didn't even have to say anything; he nodded, so she stepped back.

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Dav grabbed the door and yanked. It resisted for a moment, then slid halfway closed with a shrill screech. When he pulled again, his feet slid on the floor without moving the door at all. Dav snorted, then seemed to glow slightly. Sophia could see his magic and aura shift, but she couldn't quite tell what he was doing beyond the fact that he was probably using a call.

Whatever it was, the next time he yanked, the door moved instead of his feet. He had to jostle it back and forth a few times and repeat whatever Call he used each time he pulled, but the door eventually slid to less than the length of his forearm away from the wall.

"This is as far as I can really get it," Dav admitted. "I might be able to close it if we use your climbing spikes so I had something to hang onto?"

Sophia shook her head. "I don't think that'll work. The door isn't thick enough. The spikes don't work well in thin rock." They were more likely to shatter it than anchor properly if the rock face was only an inch thick, and that was about how thick the door was. It might work, but Sophia doubted it.

"It's fine," Lanti informed them before they started looking for a better solution. "Ivri'ok can extend the door the same way he's building on the surface; it'll reach if he melds some more material to it. He might even be able to meld it to the wall as well."

That sounded like a useful Ability. Unfortunately, it had to be a Professional ability; nothing called "Meld" was available to her, Dav, Ci'an, or Taika. Ivri'ok was a Professional Shaper, apparently, which meant he was good at working with materials on a significant scale.

They ended up waiting for Ivri'ok to finish before they moved forward with the expedition, which wasted the rest of the day. Sophia wanted to complain, but she held her peace. There was no point, not when Lan'ti was clearly nervous about the elevator shaft. It was true enough that they'd have to leave someone behind to watch over Ivri'ok while he was in the dangerous part of the ruins, even though they hadn't seen a ruins apparition in this part of the hallway, and it was also fair that Lan'ti wanted to bring the entire group down to the next level together.

Sophia and Dav spent part of the time wandering the halls killing ruins apparitions. It was more interesting than slowly watching stone, metal, and wood blend together. That was interesting at first, but it quickly became as exciting as watching paint dry. They'd look at the result when it was done, but that was all.

The next morning, Ci'an proposed that they take a rest day instead of heading downstairs. Sophia stared at her in horror for a moment before Ci'an's expression twisted into a grin and she started laughing.

"Good one." Sophia tried to smile and found that it came easier than she thought it would. It was kind of funny, now that she knew it was only a prank. "You got me good that time."

Ci'an grinned wider. "We should have a rest day soon, but I want to look at the next level first. Maybe there's another space at the bottom of the stairs where we can set up a camp?"

Sophia nodded, then realized she'd left two areas out of her count of identical areas: the two plazas below the paired stalled escalators. They were close enough to identical that if there were any differences, she didn't know what they were. In some ways, that was even weirder than having all of the other rooms be identical; it meant that they hadn't needed to build around anything that already existed on the surface.

Well, that or whoever built the underground tore down anything that was in the way on the surface. That was possible too.

Sophia pushed that thought away, slung her pack across her back, and headed towards the nearest set of stairs. She had to stop and wait before she got too far, but getting started seemed to help. They were finally going downstairs!

The door to the stairs was identical to the doors to the two types of rooms; the only difference was the label, which Volat translated to mean "Down." They all said the same thing. They'd tried to map the area out, but so far all Sophia was certain of was that the stairs were about half as frequent as the bathrooms, which were by far the least common room other than the entrance plazas.

The stairs were wide, wider than the hallway that led to them. Sophia had to wonder if that meant they expected a lot of people to move on them at once. There was something else odd about them, but she didn't manage to put her finger on it until she was nearly at the bottom of the single flight of stairs.

There was no handrail. There weren't even holes where one might have been in the past. The stairs stretched from one wall to the other, smooth, solid, and unbroken but dull like concrete, but that was the only thing in the stairwell.Sophia had seen that on other planets, sometimes, but she'd never seen a place on Earth with a wide set of stairs and no handrail.

Of course, this wasn't Earth. It was odd how things like the lack of a handrail could rub that in when seemingly larger things were easier to get used to.

The stairs let out in front of another door. Sophia felt a little off balance at that; sure, there was no reason to expect the gigantic underground space to have more levels, but somehow she'd expected it to. It just seemed weird to carve out a square mile of space horizontally and not do more than two levels vertically.

Without even thinking about it, Sophia pushed the door open. On the other side of the door, her magelight revealed a lot of pale shapes in a large space. For a moment, she dared to hope that she was looking at equipment or something, but she had to discard that thought almost immediately when one of the large shapes turned to face her.

There was no intelligence in the look the skeleton of a ram gave her, but Sophia was still certain it saw her.

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