Chapter 6 - UNDERGROUND

A word of caution, here: almost all the underground corridors lack lights and shadows in the currently-released unfinished version, and are featureless to the point that in places some spatial disorientation can occur. We suggest again waiting for the completed Adrael, but if you choose to go ahead, please be patient.

Enter a dark corridor that bends to the right and goes downhill, leading to a manhole and a ladder. Descend the ladder, to find yourself in a diamond-shaped room with three doors. You can open any of the doors using nearby levers, but only one at a time. As usual, you can explore in the order you want, but we suggest the following one.

Going through the left door, you find a third “nexus device”: bookmark the place, if you like, and then look for another manhole. Descend the ladder. At the ladder’s bottom, you find yourself in a culvert, with one end closed by a decorated iron panel and the other by a grating. The panel won't budge. Looking through the grating, you see the dead tree and the bridge far away, outside on the cliff ledge. Midway between the ladder and the iron panel, there is a sort of bay window protruding into the corridor. Beyond dirty glass, you can see a small room.

Go back up the ladder and return to the starting point in the diamond-shaped room. Go across and open the rightmost of the three doors. At the end of that corridor, you find a ladder descending into a big cave. Once down, look around. You see scaffolding supporting two big pipes that have glass observation portholes, more ladders, and a couple of levers. Both levers are blocked. If you look inside the portholes, you’ll see that there’s a spinning fan in the upper one, indicating water flow there, while the lower one is still.

On one side of this large room there’s another nexus device, number four. As before, you can bookmark the new link-in spot.

Time to explore the scaffolding. Climbing the ladders, you reach an upper level and a locked door. If you pay attention, you’ll find on the pipes the two symbols you’ve already seen in the Aquarium and in the Dragon Mine. On these same pipes, you should find D’ni numbers as an additional clue, but they’re not there at the moment. Is it because the age is unfinished? You bet!

These symbols and the numbers would give you the clue that the pipes once brought water to the Aquarium and the Dragon Mine. Measuring the pipes’ lengths and multiplying by the numbers on the pipes, you could even calculate the distance between the cave and the mine. For the moment, with the few clues presently available, you must take our word for it: the upper pipe goes from the cave to the Dragon Mine, while the lower goes to the Aquarium, and the water is flowing through the upper one, even though it doesn’t reach its destination.

Walking along the lower scaffolding, you find a corridor leading to a small room with a glass window. Of course, it’s the same window you’ve earlier seen from below, at the end of the left corridor. Once upon a time, this was the guardian’s office for these waterways. You can take his seat, peek into some drawers and understand that the D’ni guardian was also an amateur painter of some talent. On one of the walls you can see the worker’s masterpiece, a portrait of the dead tree. Take a good look at it. Perhaps you’ll notice a detail that will be useful later on.

Return to the starting point in the diamond-shaped room and open the door at centre. Beyond the door, you find a short corridor leading to nexus device number five, and a dead end.