My mech suit's shields regenerate as we descend deep into the facility. The buttons are beled, but unreadable: The mold got them… so we simply stop at the first floor. I let everyone know there's a bunch of creatures on the other side of the door, and so we take up combat arrays, Charlene putting a visible summon at point, The rest of us waiting around looking invisible (because Charlene has the spell, and I can refuel her) when we open the door… to a terrarium.

  I don't know what else to call it. There's a bunch of lights in the ceiling behind what looks like a wet pane of textured gss, the floor is a metal grate through which some pnt much like grass grows, and there's several dozen of some six-legged knee-high animal grazing on the grass that grows tall enough to get through the grating.

  “It's an effectively automated ranch,” Alice speaks up first, “as long as the lights st, the grass grows, the animals eat it, and any defection acts as fertilizer. The grating prevents the animals from eating the roots, and moisture lost ends up in the air, to rain down from the ceiling… banced. As long as the locals return any material they remove, it's unlimited food, even if all the tech goes away.”

  “Why not just grow edible pnts directly?” Charlene seems confused.

  “Efficiency,” Brenna broadcasts, “at least for humans, it's actually more nd-efficient to graze cattle than it is to grow crops.”

  “But… it takes like ten pounds of food to make a pound of flesh on a cow…” Charlene seems confused.

  “This is true,” Brenna silently chuckles, “...but it's misleading. Cows can consume the basic bdes and stems of grass and many other pnts which grow basically constantly. People on the other hand only eat the fruit, grain, and sometimes roots, which are only a small portion of the pnt and often only grow during limited times of the year. So yes, that's a true statement, but what counts as food for a human is harder to grow than what counts for a cow. There was a VERY detailed study made based on New York state about it a while back.”

  “That's not how cattle are raised…” Charlene furrows her brow, “they're fed on grain, mostly, not grazed.”

  “Yes,” Brenna easily agrees, “because corporations are worried about monetary efficiency rather than nd efficiency, and the savings on shipping and bor mean it's cheaper to buy grain and ship it to small facilities near cities to raise cattle in crowded conditions than it is to manage roaming herds and shipping the cattle to where people will eat them… but in a space like this, shipping is a non-issue, the herds don't need anyone watching them the vast majority of the time, and money isn't the biggest priority.”

  I notice that they're all very lean, “These cattle haven't been harvested in a long time…” I look around, “I think their biggest risk is starvation due to the herd’s popution exceeding their food supply.”

  “And yet the system is still in equilibrium,” Alice rolls the idea around on her tongue, “probably because poputions don't breed as successfully when food is low. How are the lights powered…”

  Charlene gnces at them and checks a geiger counter from her engineering kit, “Radioactive decay energizing a stabilized mix of various phosphorus molecules to get suitable light… they used unconscionable amounts of Uranium 238, but it's all sealed behind leaded gss. This room will continue functioning for a VERY long time, independently of main power. It will eventually be unsafe for living creatures when the leaded gss becomes sufficiently radioactive… but for now, the radiation in here is less than you get standing outside at night. There's no risk unless someone shoots the ceiling or something, and even then, we're immune to everything but the falling gss.” She pauses, “the Engineering skill rocks, by the way.”

  “Nothing for us to grab, though?” I don't see anything, but….

  “Not unless you want to butcher dinner,” Charlene confirms.

  Shake my head, close the door, and have the elevator take us down another floor.

  The next three floors are variations of the same: Different animals and different ground cover to feed them, but all some small herbivores in a situation where they can feed and breed in limited space. The fifth level is all pnts, no animals, and has grown wildly out of control. All of the pnts are all highly aromatic: Spices, we suppose. The sixth floor down has hooks in the ceiling, lots of knives, a pen, drains on the floor, some metal tables, sharpening stones… I'm guessing the sughterhouse. It's really, really moldy and disgusting. That doesn't take up the entire floor, not by a long shot… the rest is a kitchen-like space, some rge ovens, vats, tables for working, knives, clippers, hammers, stamps, some looms and tools for working with yarn… Alice calls it: “Processing for leather, jerky, and wool.” The seventh floor is the living quarters… an actual kitchen, a half-dozen bedrooms with desks and chairs, a workout room, an entertainment center, and a few other living spaces; all tidy but dusty, save for the contents of the refrigerator (everything in there is spoiled, big time). We collect some tablet computers (they're called data pads in Starfinder, but… yeah, they're tablets) and some data storage units to go through ter… we don't find anything else of much interest.

  The seventh has a security droid attached to building power… which had long since worn itself out. It pathetically tries to shoot at us, but can't actually lift the gun anymore, and the attached firearm is out of ammo anyway, just clicking when the beast shoots the floor. It's mindless, and we kill it the rest of the way to avoid the annoying clicking sounds as we check the floor. It's engineering: Triple redundant power cores with an automatic failover setup (all three of which are still running fine), a mess of tools and raw materials (mostly normal metals and cys of limited value, plus the tools for working with them… what are we going to do with several tons of copper and iron?), a kiln, pumps for air and water, and several other things not really worth taking.

  Alice smiles, “Hey, as long as we're here… how about we shut down the power?”

  I pause at that, “Ah… why?”

  Brenna picks up on it, “To disable any existing security,” she broadcasts telepathically, “no power generally means nothing is active.”

  “Has there been any security worth the name?” I raise an eyebrow, “All we've run across is passive security… locks, really… and a dumb dead bot. We made it through everything pretty trivially.”

  “The next one might be in better shape,” Charlene chuckles, “better safe than sorry,” she answers as she runs the three reactors through safe shutdown sequences, “and it's not like we need the lights,” which go out as she finishes.

  “All right,” I shrug. We continue down to the next level, keeping up the paranoia door breech protocol.

  When we open the door, we see rows of monitors (now off) in front of a chair with no cushioning, racks of weapons (six long arms, six small arms, and six bdes) with a stack of batteries and loaded magazines, six suits of light armor, two Large suits of powered armor, six vehicles of varying styles that look just barely small enough to fit in the elevator, plus a series of tools that look specific to working on them.

  What bothers me, though, is the force-field prisoner cells… and the moldy skeletons rising up from the now-open cells to attack the visible decoy summon. I of course switch to Telepathy with the party, “No minds, just like in the elevator. How about we stay invisible and kill them with summons? I can take recharge duty.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Brenna sends to us all, overpping Charlene and Alice's reply… but I think those were yeses anyway? Doesn't matter….

  I know exactly where Charlene is located both thanks to Blindsense(Thought) from a feat and because we pnned the array out, so it's no trouble at all to get adjacent to her and start spamming my spell-like ability to recharge her spell slots as she spams summons. The undead beasts attack the visible summons, leaving us alone… and the summons are completely disposable. So while the summons are dead in about two rounds at first… that's enough, and once we get one properly dead, the summons st three rounds before they're sughtered. Then four, which is the limit anyway due to Charlene's caster level.

  They don't give us any real trouble, and even seem to ignore us when the invisibility finally runs out… although that might just be because there's always a summon or three blocking the door, and these things are apparently too stupid to so much as pick up the weapons from the racks.

  After the fight, I look at the vehicles, “It's a pity we can't load these up in the ship.”

  “We can probably sell them locally if they work,” Brenna thinks at me, “drive them to the spaceport, sell them there, buy whatever.” She looks thoughtful.

  “That's a big if,” Charlene considers, “How long do you think they've been sitting here?”

  I shrug, “There's an easy way to find out if they work,” then possess my minion properly, climb into one of them, and try to start it up.

  It doesn't.

  I take some time to drop a Technomancy sphere Sprite into the machine and see what I can find out… the vehicle apparently requires charges, so I add a few, and try again… this time it works. I shut it back down. “Uncharged, but apparently built to st. Looks like we can make this work.”

  “Sweet! Vehicles are pricey, so even the ten percent on sold goods will be a decent amount.” Alice grins ear to ear.

  “That's if they fit into standard pricing, which...” Charlene begins.

  Alice doesn't let her finish, “...doesn't matter, because if it doesn't fit into standard paradigms, then they're relics, which sell better thanks to not being something anyone can currently make, and thus desirable for the big corporations to figure out how they work, collectors who want things others don't have, historians, archeologists, and so on.”

  “There's that,” Charlene smiles… she certainly seems to be warming to the idea.

  “We have a pn for these, then,” I nod, “Great. Let's see if we can figure out what's causing the no-fly zone, eh? I mean, it's reasonable it would be controlled from here, right?”

  Brenna stops short, “I am really interested in how that's done, now that you mention it…” she voices telepathically, “...especially if it's all selective enforcement that can do a friend or foe list. I would love to always have air superiority.”

  “I'll look for hardware,” Charlene nods, “You can try and find magical components that might do it. David, please see what you can dig out of the computers. Alice, are you up for taking watch?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Alice assents. We all get to work.

  The pce is pretty big, and there's a lot of hardware… but I figure anything causing an effect over such a wide range is going to be very immobile: Built into the facility. So I start with looking at the computer systems that are tied to the building, charging them up as needed to power them and checking their capabilities. Brenna and Charlene appear to have simir thoughts, as they rgely ignore the mobile equipment and focus on the infrastructure.

  I'm looking for a while when Alice ughs, “Hey dies, I got it figured out.”

  I stop what I'm doing and walk over to where Alice is reading the backs of a few spare control cards and comparing them to a book in her hand.

  “Okay, I'll bite,” Brenna beats me to it, “What did you find?”

  “The manual,” she shakes her head, “specifically how to register a new vehicle for whitelisting for flight. We're looking in the wrong pce: The mechanism is buried in the entry building topside. Here…” she hands Charlene the book she's holding, “...bad news, we can't steal it, the grounding mechanism requires rods running from the surface down to six hundred feet underground. Good news, all we need to do is have one of these in each of the vehicles and we can fly anywhere within the borders of the country this pce used to serve.”

  “Well… good enough,” I shrug, “Let's all grab two, eh?”

  We do, as well as the weapons and armors, and move on further down….