INSIDE OF THE BUNKER was clean.

  Like, very clean. Way cleaner and in a much better condition than Zan expected to find it.

  Like every Order building he had been inside of, namely, the Command Center and the bunker 'hub' where they met MAC, the material was a smooth black stone. The coloration of this stone, however, refused absolutism. The black was not pitch. Therefore, one did not feel as though they were being pulled into the stone's hues like a ship to a whirlpool.

  The first room they encountered was small, featureless. No windows. Just a door leading further inside. He made sure to take careful note of the room's utter lack.

  "Onto the next room, I guess," he said.

  The next room was no different than the first. Blank. Smooth. Small red lights rowed the bottom of the walls evenly spread out. He guessed they were safety lights? Emergency lights of some kind? Maybe?

  And the third room was the same. Fourth room? Of course, it was yet more of the same.

  Only in the fifth room did anything change. The door leading to room six was red.

  "That's different," Whiskey whistled. "Pretty little door, ain't it not?"

  "I don't think we've ever encountered a red door before. Not in these Order structures, anyway. I wonder if 'red' means something to the Order? Screen Master? You hear me? Input?" he said, diverting his words to the Warden at the last moment.

  Screen Master Simulacrum responded promptly, as ever: "Information on strategic use of color Not Found. The information you are seeking is either not in the Order's database or is still at least partially damaged and therefore unrecoverable. If the information is not inside the database, that would be because the information was considered too trivial to include. Or was perhaps deleted after-the-fact. Much data remains in the process of salvaging. Our essential systems are fine. As are our secondary systems. Beyond that, however, when we consider the information systems, Sigma-Prime and I still have much salvage work left to perform."

  About to relay the information to his teammates, he forgot -- he didn't have to!

  Whiskey now had an earpiece of her own. She heard every word.

  "It could mean anything," she said. "I say we keep on going."

  Not able to agree with her any more than he already did, he cocked his tongue, making a weird, but stimulating noise, and walked ahead, the red door opening for him just the same as all the rest. They entered, then, a large space. He glanced up and found very little space between his head and the ceiling. "Not enough to swing a sword over my head," he thought. "But just enough to make fighting difficult. What is the point?"

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  Moving into the room declared by the red door, the only source of light was tiny red flickers spread over at intervals along the floor's breadth. Just as existed in the five rooms once they entered the bunker. Had it not been for these lights, they would have been cast adrift in the darkness.

  Until they lit flames using their magic, that is...

  "Wait, what?" I can't use magic..." he said.

  Jiehong and Whiskey then attempted to use magic themselves. But to no avail.

  "What is going on?" he asked. No one, not even the Screen Master, could answer.

  They walked ahead toward the middle of the room, where they saw a large cabinet-looking oddity. As they approached, they saw how the cabinet-like device had a keyboard which jutted out at its midsection. This keyboard looked much the same as existed in the Command Center's war room or at the bunker hub where they met MAC, the second-ever Screen Master they encountered.

  "It's a machine, I guess," Zan said, trying to remember what, if anything, he knew about this machine. He gave it all a good look. Nothing came up on his HUD. I guess I know nothing about it. He pressed buttons. Nothing.

  "What's that?" Whiskey asked of a small crystalline device just underneath the surface of the keyboard.

  "I don't know," he said, bringing his hand above it. "Let's find out."

  He channeled magic. Only for the briefest of moments, but enough to see if it was magically reactive. If something was magically reactive, one did not remain ignorant of it for long. Magically reactive materials, if Colonel Winters's training class back in Hope-Ridge had been anything to go on, made themselves known post-haste! It was like how someone knew a raging inferno was hot. Self-evident.

  As he (and his friends) considered, each in their own realm of thought, the crystal within the fixture turned bright.

  The cabinet-looking device activated. Soon, the whole fixture lit up. Even the keyboard rumbled with life, its keys clanging against each other like shivering birds warming themselves in their nest on a cold winter's day.

  Soon, the entire room turned on as the cabinet did. No more where the red lights on the floor all they had to go by. Pure, white light. He could see perfectly in the no-longer-dark-space. Like a clear fall day on a dry watch tower.

  To his left and right, he saw two doors, one to each side, respectively. Each door had red markings upon them, just like the door they had entered through. This time, however, his HUD generated something for him. [CONNECTING...]

  Confusion! What does this mean? He asked his sweet ignorance.

  [CONNECTED TO LOCAL NETWORK]

  "Local... network? What does that mean?" he again asked his ignorance.

  "Something the matter? Headset stuff or Other?" Jiehong asked, likely curious why his brother was eyeing the doors weirdly.

  "Yeah. Weird stuff. Something about a local network...? Wait. Something's happening," he replied.

  A whimsical but low-tonal sound came from his headpiece, a sound only he could hear. Then, generated through the peculiarities of the headset, an image of a well-tied knot encasing an iron-lock appeared over the doors. He knew that this meant the doors were locked.

  "Okay. Those two doors are locked. So, we are going to have to find a way to open them from here," he told his team.

  "Try infusing the crystal with more magic," Whiskey said.

  With nothing else to go on, he did just that and channeled a slightly larger sum of magical energy into the crystal. It reacted violently. The whole cabinet shone like a holy star blazing within the void. Lights overheard shone at full force before settling into a gentle glow.

  "What is that?!" Jiehong gasped.

  He looked but found nothing. "What do you mean?!" he said, wondering what his brother saw.

  "Looks! It's a face!"