CHAPTER 3: Exploring the Shelter
“Hold on. Do you see shimmering up there?” Audrey leaned forward, a gloved hand holding the control of the aqua-evac.
Vinny sat in the other seat, but all Milo could see was the back of his head from that angle. He scholar undid his seat belt. “Yeah, I do…”
“It looks like an air pocket.”
Audrey flipped several switches. “I’m bringing her up for a look.”
After only a few seconds, the aqua-evac lurched, breaching the surface. Water ran down the view port, distorting the image. “Say put,” the mechanic began, standing up, “I’ll go up and take a look.” Milo held up a pointer finger in protest, but received only a benign shove to the side. The king shrugged and sat back down next to his wife. He heard the creaks and squeals of the hatch being undone and waited.
There was a long silence after a “click.”
“Hey, Audrey, are you okay?”
“The only thing he heard was a faint, “No es posible…”
“Audrey?”
“Milo? No, all of you should take a look at this…”
No one hesitated, especially Milo, the first to climb up.
The aqua-evac’s search beam illuminated an extremely wide ramp, the remains of what may have been a loading or transportation area. A few vehicles were strewn about, some damaged beyond repair. The walls were decorated in designs typical of the culture’s art during the pre-cataclysmic period. A long hall faded into darkness.
The cartographer glanced around to the looks on the faces of the other five that had come along, suddenly wondering if Obbi was lonely at the blacksmith’s up above.
“Atlantis must have been the inventor of all ‘grease traps,’” Sweet commented to Milo. Kida gave him an inquisitive look.
It did not take long for them to inch the aqua-evac closer to make the ramp accessible to them. The team opened the back hatch, a large door that revealed a vehicle bay. Whether from America or Atlantis, they doubted they’d need much from there. It did allow for them to set up a communications relay station, part of which needed to be put inside the evac. Milo marveled at the new technology he held in his hand, a small, five-pound radio of sorts, he thought, that he could strap to his waist. It was undoubtedly one of Packard’s best gadgets she had been working on for Whitmore Industries. He wondered just how long she had been working on it, since he seemed to recall her gossiping about an idea on the way down to Atlantis so many years ago.
The scholar pressed a button and held it to his mouth. “Hey, can you hear me, Mrs. Packard?”
A voice sprinkled with static droned through the box. “Yeah, I hear ya, whatcha want?”
“Just testing the radio to see if it works. This is great! We can report back to the sub! It looks like there’s a lot more than just an air pocket down here. We’re going to check it out. I needed to see if I could contact you first.”
“You can also contact each other s long as relay up to the sub. Push the other button, the one on your right. That will cut communications with the sub and activate a signal between all of you.”
“Thanks, we’ll try that. Bye!”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Milo held down the other button, hearing a click through the speaker. “Anyone else getting this?” His voice came from the waists of his friends. “Hold down the right button to speak. The little green one.”
Mole came in through the other end. “I see zee communications are workeeng.”
“Very well, indeed.” Though Kida was only ten feet away, she tried it anyway as she walked.
“Ey, this thing on? Eh, I guess so.”
Sweet chuckled on the radio. He was across the chamber. “Hey, Audrey, you there?”
There was a crash in the vehicle bay. An irritated voice came over the radio. “You know, tightening this part of the frame takes a lot of attention.”
Milo was chagrinned. “Sorry about that, Audrey.”
“You better think about what you do if you want a stable chaise on a truck! Or else something else is going to come crashing down…!”
The scholar cut communications, not really wanting to think about what would come crashing down. A second later he heard a click from his box and a woman's voice.
"Hello? Milo?"
“Milo here, he answered.
“You should see these markings.”
“I’ll be right there.” He went to Kida, who stood at the entrance to the hall.
“It says, ‘shelter.’”
Milo thoughtfully put a knuckle of a finger to his lip before speaking. “I seem to remember in a scroll reading something about Atlantean shelters. They were specifically designed to hold up against hurricanes and even to resist tsunamis, not to mention enemy attack. It was a new type of engineering they had planned on putting throughout the continent… I guess it worked better than they could have hoped.”
So it is an architectural wonder after all.”
“Seems to be.” He held up his crystal to the carvings.
“Wait.” Kida held up her own crystal to an old lamp, activating it. To everyone’s amazement, it also turned on the lights down the hall, a tunnel that led perhaps one hundred feet before turning to the left. Along the ceiling, pointing at now crumbled, inaccessible doorways, were small stone sea snakes.
“Well… That was a good idea.”
“Yes.”
“Now… These markings seem to indicate…” Milo’s fingers found a small notch in the wall. He pulled at the edge until he heard a pop. A small door opened at the command of his pull, revealing a scroll and sets of gauges and dials. “My gosh. They’re… temperature and pressure gauges it says. For… Under the complex?”
Kida shrugged. “Perhaps it has something to do with how well it has lasted. We will look n the way. For now, we will gather the others and explore.”
“Sure ah lot ah loading areas… This is the third, unless you, ah, count that blocked passageway. Looked like it could ah been one.”
“Might have,” Milo replied, marking this spot on the crude map he was making.
“Once a cartographer, always a cartographer,” he heard the Lantina murmur, looking up from the scroll from the first gauge panel.
“And I have not see you take your eyes off of those blueprints, Audrey,” Kida commented, crossing her arms. “And you cannot even read them.”
“Hey, you said it yourself, you can’t either. Technical terms you don’t know, different dialect you’re not used to… Admit it, I’m still the best shot at figuring this out.”
“Just a minute,” Milo continued, finishing. “I want to make sure we don’t get turned around.” He took out a scrap piece of paper and found a set of gauges, closing the piece in the door to mark that they had been there. “Second set of valves and gauges, too.”
“Why would they need more than one large loading bay?” Sweet asked, watching Mole examining the stone of the floor.
“Well, it’s a fast entrance for people and supplies, and in an emergency, you’d want all of your options open, I guess.” He finished and they resumed their scouting.
Kida wrinkled her nose slightly.
“You smell that too?” Audrey asked.
“It is a very old smell…” she began. “Much like…”
“Sacré bleu!”
They rounded the corner, revealing a much larger hall. It was not unoccupied, and various shouts and exclamations followed Mole’s.
“Oh my gosh, these poor people!” Milo looked on, seeing long-dead bodies strewn across the floor. Ancient, half-powdered skeletons stared at the explorers with dark, empty eyes and broad smiles.
Sweet and Kida began a little prayer.
“They all died down here.. Ran out of food and water…” Audrey looked on in sad amazement.
“Not to mention their bodies loosing valuable meenerals like calcium… Eef they had enough food down here, they might have died, instead, from malnutrition.”
The mechanic sighed. “With you, everything’s minerals.”
“Thank you, eet eez who I am,” Mole said proudly, stepping forward. Audrey shoved him away.
“I wouldn’t doubt there’s more than these people here,” Milo stated gravely, stepping over rib cages with decomposed, faded clothing. “C’mon I see a side passageway up here.”
Another gauge was marked on the map as they entered the passageway. At the end of it was a familiar control panel and a canal that ran perpendicular to the passage. In the shallow canal, facing darkness, was the same swordfish vehicle Milo and Kida had seen before, scraped and pitted, but intact.
“Lemme see here…” Vinny spoke up as he began to count on his fingers. “Eh, there’s a shark, narwhal, barracuda, crab, lobster… Piranha, squid, flying fish… even that sea horse, sea dragon monerail… and now ah swordfish. No tuna?”
Milo laughed. “No, sorry, haven’t seen a tuna.” He examined the control panel enthusiastically, now that he could actually read it. The writing was almost pristine.
“Whatcha got there?” Sweet asked.
“Oh, there’s one of these in Atlantis, well, the Atlantis above us, I mean. I just couldn’t make out all the writing.”
After a few moments Audrey growled. “Will you at least read it aloud? In a language we can understand?”
“Oh! Sorry. Yes. Basically it’s a personal transport that homes in on certain crystal structures. It… has some way of avoiding obstacles like trees or buildings, though there’s no explanation here as to how hit works. You just punch in the station number, basically, and it’ll take you to it.” He pointed to the Atlantean number fifteen on the panel. “Wonder why someone didn’t try to use this to leave… It looks like it seals completely.”
“Guilt, or the doubt it would take them someplace safe? The continent did sink, you know,” Audrey suggested, pointing the obvious out to Milo.
Milo looked a little sheepish.
“I don’t know about you guys, but ‘los muertos’ outside are giving me the creeps even in here,” the mechanic thumbed. “Let’s go.”
There was a general agreement. Not even Milo hesitated, despite what was there, except to jot it down on the map and make a rushed rubbing.
The next hall was much narrower, and it also had its share of stone sea snakes mounted to the ceiling of the intricate halls. Milo found it odd to find a couple of skeletons lying in the doorway to a room, but there were massive holes in their rib cages. The bones were blackened along the edges. However, it was clear they had entered the main part of the complex. There were doorways on both sides, many of which were open. Most of the others were locked, jammed, or debris had fallen in front of it, making the stone entryways inaccessible.
“Mole, we’re done in this room.” Audrey, scroll still in hand, folded her arms.
“Wait! Surely even Milo would agree with me that exameening these soils from zee plants ees proof Atlantees spanned zee globe in ets eefluence! Zee plants were potted in their natural soils from conteenents across zee globe!”
“The dead plants. Their just pots of dirt, Mole.”
Milo sighed as the conversation went on and looked to his wife, only to see she had already gone on. He ran a hand over his head and exited while the others remained, trying to pry Mole away from the earth. It was true he wanted to know how far Atlantis spanned, but just from his studies before discovering it, he had a pretty good idea, plus the records in the Circle Doot Library confirmed it. The erudite man walked down the hall to the next accessible door.
The room was unbelievable.
Crystal circuitry and dials lined the walls, ceiling and floor, and it clearly went deep into the stone. A few pieces had fallen from the ceiling, but even there the designs glowed. The intricate patterns also revealed themselves though a large pool of water spanning half the room, and Milo doubted the water was supposed to be there.
Kida sat upon some of the rubble, her silhouette a black cat against the vivid blue light. “It is beautiful…” she said, not taking her eyes off of it.
He blinked, taking it all in. “…Yeah. …Got that right.” Milo sat down next to her, watching the slight reflections off the glowing blue water dance as if they were flame. “This must be the relay station for all the information in the complex. A main room where those gauge and dial panels connect to.”
His wife was silent a moment. “…This makes me wonder all the more how advanced our people were before the cataclysm. I have read things even so strange was people using their minds to speak to their pets and inserting something into the chest to correct a Spirit’s mistake as to how the heart should beat.”
“You’re not the only one to wonder. You’re definitely not alone in that.” He put an arm around her, and she smiled, leaning up against him. They looked on into the tranquil lights and watched how the glow from the water rippled on the ceiling. The gentle sound of the water was soothing to the couple as they sat together, finding unparalleled joy just to be together. The babble of some condensation in the room falling into the pool gossiped, the rippling of the water spreading a rumor of their embrace. Light reflecting off the ripples created waves of light that greeted and welcomed the couple to the sanctuary, and the flutter for their hearts in the midst of discovery was strong enough to beat down any obstacle, ad answer the very water. It was an amazing moment.
But it did not last long.
“You two want to be left alone?” Milo and Kida jumped as they heard a voice both from their waists and from behind them. Audrey was leaning against the doorway, grinning, communicator in hand. She had what appeared to be the ancient diagrams and blueprints open in her hands. It did not surprise Milo, but he smiled, since she could not accuse him of anything by this point.
“Oh, no, that’s’ okay. I mean, you gotta admit, it’s beautiful in here.”
Audrey shook her head and gave him a smack on the shoulder as he went out the door. “Well, we just found something you two should see.”
Based off the Disney Picture "Atlantis: the Lost Empire." The Name "Shards of Chaos" is property of Disney. The term "gorlock" is property of Disney Interactive. The characters, "MUH-suh MIH-kee" and Khohbdesheh are my property, and I acknowledge I do not own the names. Fan fiction storyline also my property. Milo Thatch, Kidagakash, Bendoh, Rourke and other characters, names, concepts, and all Atlantean in this story are property of the Walt Disney Company.
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