Prompt: During a winter camping trip, a hiker discovers an abandoned research station with still-warm coffee cups and running equipment, but no people.
"Stupid damn fortune cookies. Camping in the middle of winter. What madness." Ren mutters as he keeps hiking up the mountain. Taking care to move slowly for the sake of his ankles, the frost has made the trail quite precarious.
Overly cautious and rather irritated with himself for following "predictions" from a fortune cookie , Ren resigns himself to his lot and moves forward trying not to even think a single word.
"Seriously, this better be good. I would really like to be done with this ridiculous parade. Who in their right mind would have done half the crazy shit I have ; because a cookie said it would happen." Snorting at the thought, Ren focuses on spacing out for a bit and keeps moving.
The mountain trail is not any more steep than driving up the levels of a parking lot, but this trail is being reclaimed by nature. Over the 2 day journey making it up the mountain slowly but steady, Ren has wondered about this a few times.
Finally, Ren reaches the peak and as described there is an unhinged metal door. Oddly specific, he knows but that is just how the cookie crumbles.
He enters slowly and is surprised to find a light shining at the end of a descending passage. Not pocketing the flash just yet , Ren heads down towards the light.
Entering the main building, he notes that all the doors that seemingly need a security card are unlocked. Walking down a fully lit passage lined with about a dozen offices he gets to what seems like a communal area.
As he heads towards the opposite exit Ren notices the cups standing by the coffee maker has actual coffee in. The third cups coffee is seemingly still swirling as though the spoon next to has been placed down mere seconds ago. He feels the cups and all three are still perfectly hot.
"That is odd." Ren thinks absent mindedly.
"Isn't it just," he hears his mind echo.
"Isn't it a bit soon in the story for you?" Ren asks back with a thought, as he looks around to be sure there is not actually someone else.
"Not at all, or you prefer to drag this out?" His mind responds.
Ren pauses for a moment and starts walking to the open double that look like they would open to a hospital ward. "Nah, let's get this done." He responds smirking.
Even knowing the answer, Ren yells down the hall: "Anyone here?"
"Not in particular," the voice he can now discern as different than his own replies in his mind.
Down the hall a shadow flickers past the lights just as he was scanning the open space. It is safe to assume he is pretty damn spooked, but the cookie has not led him to harm yet. That gives Ren an odd sense of safety, and he will take what he can get right now.
"Ok I will bite, what are you?" He stops in the middle of one of the many circles engraved into cement and adorned with what his modern mind can only assume are demonic glyphs of sorts.
"It isn't witchcraft, it is just arabic." The voice speaks up curtly, this time it seemed to fill the room.
"Are you a person?" Ren asks as he walks past a few more down the line, a quick count of the rows and columns of the circles reveals there are 48 in total. Each about as wide as a middle aged man trying to do the splits. The writing seems to be different for each of the ones he has seen close up by now. As he heads up in the rows, he spots three of the circles with what he can only assume is a puddle of blood in them.
The voice has not responded yet but Ren continued his exploration and headed for one of the desks on the outskirts of the grid. One of the monitors draw his attention as it keeps flashing the words "Execution Paused" in bright red on black.
"Are you a spirit?" Ren asks the room, and turns to watch the area he just came from. A shadow crosses the light, more precisely it is as though a shadow comes into the room and dims all the lights for a moment, not like a surge of power but the innate way we just know something passed over something else.
A response comes but this time as though many are speaking at the same time, putting Ren more on edge than anything that has happened thus far. "Dude, just press the damn enter key," their voices seem to reverberate through the room making Ren question whether he actually heard them rather than feel their answer.
In a jiffy he presses the enter key and the monitor responds with Running. Turning back to the room of arabic demon circles, Ren watches as the pools of blood in the three he noted earlier rise up and multiply before taking the shape of what he can only assume are two dudes and an unnervingly hot blob of ectoplasm.
Once the process has completed, and Ren realised he might have been standing very still for a very long time, he blinks and asks: "Explain!"
Sitting with the three seemingly newly formed humans in the communal area, Ren sips his stronger than normal coffee while listening intently.
"Ok, so let me get this straight. You paused time in the building, but it requires to become more akin to energy particles and since you did it outside of orders as a last ditch effort the day after the project has been shutdown, no one has been able to undo what you have done for 10 years?" Ren says annunciating each word with care.
"Pretty much." The undercover hottie in a lab coat responds, then sighs, "They were here after the project closed of course but it took us almost 6 months to figure out how to use the environment to communicate and even then it was rudimentary at best."
"Thank you, for not running like others before." One of the men adds , "and those are not demonic texts, they have nothing to do with the process beyond labelling instructions specific to the subject of each circle." Then he slams palm to the table and continues "So I would implore you stop calling it demonic arabic , as it is I who wrote them. I am nothing if not a scientist. Do you understand?"
Taken slightly aback Ren wants to retort but instead just nods agreement. "Hold on though, how did you know I thought that again? " He quickly asks recovering from the reprimand.
"We may have kept some traits from being in an altogether different state for 10 years." The more nerdy looking fellow out of the three responds.
