Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 4

Chapter 4 - City Navigation

“You Ancients really weren't very good at labeling things, were you?” McKay put forward as their group of four piled into one of the city's transport chambers.

“Rodney.” Teyla scolded in an appalled tone as she turned a glare to the scientist.

“No, he’s mostly right.” Eventus admitted idly as he examined the control panel at the rear of the chamber with a frown. “My people really were horrible at labeling things in ways that normal people would find useful. For Atlantis you either needed to download the information directly into your brain, or utilize one of the augmented reality uplinks that would let you see a virtual overlay of things that only existed within the city's digital layer.”

“Digital layer?” Grodin inquired in confusion as he shot a side-eyed look at McKay.

“It’s currently offline right now due to the city being in a low power limited access state.” Eventus explained as he placed his palm on the interface border next to the screen and began running through the mental inputs needed to bring the transport network out of guest access mode. 

“What are you–” McKay began in annoyance as the top down display with its fifteen transport points vanished to be replaced with a three dimensional wireframe of the city with nearly a hundred small gray and red dots on it. “That’s… You… It can do that?”

“Okay.” Eventus muttered as he ignored McKay for the moment, very much not happy with the sheer number of grey dots denoting either an obstruction or lack of system response that were now filling the undercity portion of Atlantis. “It looks like the closest usable transport chamber to the maintenance depot is twenty-seven epsilon. But given the way most of the others are down in that portion of the undercity we’re going to have to pick up some aqua suits if we want to be able to actually make our way there.”

With that he tapped the red dot that would translocate them next to one of the oceanianic recreation bays, and with a flash they were in an identical booth nearly two kilometers away.

The door slid open, and Eventus cringed at the flickering lights and obvious ocean related staining covering various surfaces of the corridor.

“Sorry about the lights.” He offered as he began to walk. “Seawater probably sublimated into the fittings and corroded the energy transfer pathways. Extremely annoying to repair without the city…”

He trailed off upon realizing the trio wasn't following and turned back to see McKay engrossed with something on his tablet as Grodin examined the inactive interface panel inside the chamber with worry while Teyla cautiously stuck her head out of the transport chamber doorway and to look down the other passages.

Something groaned, a heavy sound of stressed metal under pressure that made Eventus turn an annoyed look to the ceiling.

“That sounded structural.” McKay muttered worriedly as he looked up from his pad only to recoil slightly in surprise as he finally noticed their location.

“Perhaps we should wait until such a time as a team can properly check this area of the city over?” Teyla added in a tone that suggested she really wanted to make that an order but was holding herself back from actually doing so.

“It's fine.” Eventus reassured her with an idle wave as he bit back a sigh at yet another thing that would need fixing. “Or well, not fine, because that was the sound of an overstressed pressurized fluid transfer pipe that could burst at any time. But that will just blow out a wall or two at most and flood the nearby area with whatever fluid it's carrying till the system redirects things around the break.”

And since the fluid was probably just seawater being automatically pumped out of areas of the undercity that were still actively taking on water, there shouldn't be any real danger from it to any of them on the off chance it actually happened during the handful of minutes they'd be in the area.

“Is this broken?” Grodin suddenly asked as he actively tried to get a response from the transfer chambers control panel to no avail.

Eventus sighed before turning around and continuing on to the oceanic recreation bay, leaving the trio to either follow or not since time was wasting and he wanted to get this at least half way done before the day was up.

The oceanic recreation bay was only about twenty meters from the transport chamber, a purposeful design choice because really, who wanted to walk a long way when you were going somewhere to relax. Not his people that's for sure.

He tapped the crystal control to open the door, moderately relieved when it opened without issue since he'd been half afraid he'd have to waste time opening the wall panel to access the manual control. 

Walking through the now open door into the bay proper, the lights immediately went to full brightness, a testament to the engineering expertise put into a location that was expected to get submerged in seawater for significant lengths of time during its normal course of operations.

“Guess Salacia finally got around to disassembling the sea-skimmers.” Eventus murmured somewhat sadly as he eyed the empty berths. 

Knowing her though she'd probably reassembled the things on the best tropical water majority planet she could locate within the Milky-Way gate network and then spent the rest of her days trying to become one with the wind.

“Sea-skimmers?” Teyla asked in interest as she walked up behind him with an annoyed McKay and relieved Grodin in tow.

“Null gravity sailing craft.” Eventus explained as he made his way over to the aqua suit storage lockers. “Horrendously complex to maneuver since you have to mentally tune the null gravity generators as you go if you want to avoid being blown into the sky or ocean.”

They could have put together a system of sensors and computer programs to handle that for them of course, but the mental challenge of the activity had been a big part of its draw.

“And here we go.” He said as he opened up the first of the lockers to reveal one of the deep black bodysuits made out of woven carbon threads. “Don't worry about size, the control unit on the wrist will auto fit the suits to your body…”

He trailed off for a moment before shooting the trio a somewhat apologetic look. “But ah, you're going to want to strip down to at least your underclothes before putting one on, since the fit will be uncomfortably bunchy otherwise.”

“You want us to strip!?” McKay squawked in alarm.

“Changing room is over there.” He told them, rolling his eyes slightly as he pointed to a door a few meters to the right of the lockers. “If you don't want to wear them, that's fine. You can just put on the breather unit instead. But the aqua suits are waterproof, temperature controlled, pressure, puncture, electricity, heat, and radiation resistant.”

“Huh.” McKay muttered as looked at the suits with a sudden spark of interest in his eyes.

Teyla looked from Eventus to the suit and back with an odd look on her face. “Clothing like that seems like it would be very useful in everyday life.”

Eventus shrugged, because he'd suggested the same on more than one occasion. “There are some material limitations involved for the exterior potion that make anything but tight fitting black bodysuits problematic. But the temperature controlled inner lining was standard on everything we wear.”

“There isn't some dangerous long term side effect of wearing these things, is there?” McKay asked in sudden suspicion.

“Of course.” Eventus returned happily as he pulled the suit out.

“Knew it.” McKay groused as he glared at him. “Let me guess, it will cause your–”

“Chafing.” Eventus finished with a quirk lipped grin as he walked over to the changing room, ignoring the glare now being shot at his back.

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Authors Notes: Have another chapter of this, work on Cerulean Stars next chapter has begun, but with Veilguard releasing Thursday the new chapter probably won’t be ready till next week. As for more of this, who knows. I’ll post it when it’s done.