NOVEL NEXT 4 – The Gun
There were, indeed, more rags in one of the drawers - two of them. Better than nothing, she supposed. Wiping off the most egregious muck quickly fouled them, and seeing this, Krahe looked around in the hopes that the lab would have a source of water. It did. One of the wheeled cabinets had a small, copper sink, a particularly thick cable or perhaps hose running from it and out of the chamber… Only, no water came out. Turning the faucet only elicited an impotent wheeze from the pipes as the hose writhed on the ground. She decided to follow the hose, both to try and find a source of water and because it ran through the only exit. Krahe wrung out the rags as best she could and tied them around her leg so she wouldn’t have to carry them in hand, instinctively looking around the room for something she could use as a weapon. Surely, a laboratory had to hold something that she could use as a weapon.
That mental impulse again, a niggling bug in her brain telling her to look at that menu. She ignored it out of sheer annoyance, pulling open drawers and cabinets in the search for a weapon.
“All this technology, and no gun? Come on…” she grumbled. Someone rich enough to have all this equipment surely wouldn’t be dumb enough to not have two or three backup guns sitting around his lab. Such an assumption was more than reasonable in her own world, and she hoped that it would prove true here as well. The real-wood writing desk quickly drew her attention, as it faced the chamber’s exit. If there was a gun here, it would be in one of the drawers or hidden under the cartoonish mess of tomes and papers. On the horrifying possibility that this world somehow didn’t have firearms, she hoped for at least a dagger.
Krahe froze for a moment when she first saw the writing desk’s top, her eyes glazing over when she first beheld this world’s writing. It came across like some abominable interbreeding of katakana, nordic runes, and latin script… And it made sense. Reading a few lines of it made her head hurt and took a good bit of effort, but what mattered was that she could read it. Unfortunately, it was all nonsense - codespeak upon codespeak. Whoever worked here was obviously concerned with infosec, and Krahe had no reason to care for the books’ contents. She swept it all away, carelessly closing books and stacking them all in a precarious tower off to the side with one hand while reaching about under piles of paper. Her heart skipped a beat when she felt cold metal and cross hatched wood.
It was… A beautiful, heavy pistol; like some long-forgotten sibling to a C96 Mauser. Its form was bereft of sharp angles, with a soft downward hump in front of the trigger that swept forward in an upward curve until it met the barrel two-thirds down its length; wooden panels covered the hump’s front half.
The gun had an integral magazine, the bottom of an en-bloc clip poking out the bottom. It had a ring-eyed lever and a tiny hair trigger, the two of which overlapped such that the trigger could be tripped by the natural motion of working the lever. She worked the lever to get a feel for it, catching the empty casing that popped out when she pushed it all the way forward. Still warm, strangely. Its sights were good, albeit the most basic they could reasonably be. No holosights, thermals, no automatic target designation - just irons, non-windage-adjustable.
It was a downright relic by the standards of her time, but manually-operated guns had just always stuck around in some form. Fancy proprietary ammo didn’t like to cycle in automatics.
She set it aside for the moment, grabbing about for extra ammunition. None was to be found on the tabletop, but the topmost drawer held the treasure she sought - three small wooden boxes with a bullet printed on the top, alongside the cartridge dimensions: 10x24mm.
Tucked away next to the ammo were a black leather holster and a second wooden box which turned out to be the cleaning kit. One of the ammo boxes had already been opened, and upon closer inspection she found that it held three ammo clips with space for two more, a total of six bullets in each clip. She took the three clips and tucked them behind one of the rags she’d tied around her left thigh, affixing the holster around the right.
Since she didn’t want to attract undue attention from whoever or whatever might dwell here, she didn’t dare play at target practice, following the hose out of the chamber.
The freezing-cold ground had already made her feet go numb, their pitter patter reverberating through the dark stone halls of this place. Unlike the shrine-laboratory, these tunnels were almost organic, evoking the feeling of running through some gigantic snake’s ribcage. Barred doors lined the walls, each revealing a cramped cell with a semi-upright restraint-bed and nothing else. This had either been a prison, or a testing facility that used unwilling subjects… A long, long time ago. She could feel it in everything here, this place had not seen its intended purpose carried out in at least a century. After perhaps fifty meters, she arrived at a turn and soon emerged onto the street. There were no doors barring her path - only wide, thick doorways that belied the bulkheads hidden in the walls and ceilings.
Craning her head back, a sinking feeling came over her; a sprawling, desolate city surrounded her, and the sun shone down upon a misshapen pile in the middle of a vast cavern. Everything was silent, the air was noticeably less cold, and… Upon taking a closer look, that pile was made of corpses, which were somehow not rotting in the sun. She was underground, inside some long-abandoned great city seemingly built inside a giant open-pit mine. There was nothing - no sound, no movement, no people or even vermin. Somehow, she would’ve preferred it if the streets were littered with eldritch monstrosities.
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