System Programmer - 26 The Laboratory

Of course, no matter how excited he was, Joshua was currently not in a safe location. He, therefore, launched a scan of the area. The whole laboratory appeared on his map, but he frowned upon realizing Luna couldn’t scan past the walls. He had seen such a thing before in the Crow’s hideout so the phenomenon wasn’t unknown to him. There were most likely runes in the walls preventing the scan to work properly. As for whoever was running the place, he or she wasn’t present in the lab, so Joshua had no idea on their location.

His link with Catherine was still operational though, so he wasn’t worried. He informed her of the situation. She had tried to scan the building as well and could only see the outskirts of it. Using the map Luna had created, they could see the surface, the outskirts of the building and the single room Joshua was in, somewhat ten meters below ground.

“Do you want me to come in and join you?” she asked.

“Hmm, the fact that we can’t scan the whole area sort of changes the situation. I’m willing to bet some sort of alarm will go off as soon as you try to pass the front door. I’m gonna take a look around first. I’ll scream if I need help.” he answered her.

“I’m having a weird deja vu feeling… Be careful.”

“I will, I’m done being manipulated like a puppet.”

The lab was a fairly large room, Luna measured it around 50 meters in length and 10 meters in width. The ceiling was several meters up, allowing the vats to contain large creatures. Joshua remained in physical form for now, if he wanted to interact with the environment, he didn’t have much of a choice. He had considered the possibility he was being spied on, but Luna didn’t detect anything. Of course, this place might have ways to fool Luna so he took the report with a grain of salt.

Two options lied before him, he could either leave this room and try to find whoever was running the place or he could stay here and try to figure out what was going on. He opted to inspect the lab in detail for starters, although he had to force himself not to giggle like a schoolgirl at everything around him. He could geek all he wanted later, for now, he had to be serious.

The first thing he observed with care was, of course, the creatures inside the vats. He recognized a couple of dinosaurs species, like a T-Rex similar to the ones they had met, as well as a triceratops. Those made him rejoice. However, a lot of the present specimens were beasts he had never heard of. He saw the cadaver of a beast that looked like a giant crab but also had a human-like torso. Another one looked like a giant buglike humanoid, Joshua thought it looked like a crossbreed of a human and a mosquito, which gave him shivers.

There was a small isolated space in a corner, separated from the rest by a glass window. A single door allowed access to the office. The glass wasn’t ordinary and while it wasn’t like the Plexiglass he had created in his own lab, it appeared much more solid than regular glass. The door was locked, which made him frown. He saw several large bookcases on the other side and desperately wanted to take a look at them. Not giving up, he dismissed his body and passed through the window. Being a ghost was handy for those occasions.

Once on the other side, he created his body anew and looked around. A few sheets of paper were lying on the desk. He picked one up, the writing appeared to be fairly recent but he immediately ran into an obstacle: they were written in a language he was unfamiliar with. The only thing he could tell was that the handwriting was beautiful, which suggested a woman wrote it. Clicking his tongue, he opened a random book from the shelf but it gave the same result, the tongue it was written in was unknown.

Joshua was fluent in several languages from Earth including English and French but quite obviously, those hadn’t been of any use ever since he came to this world. He hadn’t put much thought about it initially, but when he had been invoked, he had immediately spoken to Catherine in Cestorian. He had assumed that part of the summoning had directly granted him the knowledge of the language, which Catherine confirmed to him. Furthermore, he had scanned Catherine’s memories to build a knowledge database, the fact Luna couldn’t understand this language indicated that even Catherine was unfamiliar with it.

At the very least the language was using the same alphabet as Cestorian, which could mean they were related in some way. Unlike the papers on the desk, most of the books looked ancient. This suggested the language might be the one that was used in old Easa. If that was the case, it could be a case similar to Latin. While Latin was no longer used on Earth, it was the ancestor language of several modern ones like French, Italian, Spanish, and others… which is why if you spoke French for example, you would probably recognize a few words from a Latin text, even if you had no knowledge of the language itself. Therefore, by comparing the texts in front of him and searching words that looked like Cestorian, he might be able to get something out of them… vaguely. Of course, decoding a language like this would be complicated, even with Luna’s help. It would be best if he found either someone who spoke the language or some kind of dictionary.

Joshua dropped the case for now and looked for other things in the office, hoping to maybe find a map or even keys but his search was interrupted when he heard the sound of a door opening. He looked up, someone had opened the double doors and was apparently heading straight for the office he was in.

Making sure he had put everything back in its original position, he immediately dropped his form. Back to being a ghost, he tried to hide inside a wall but got blocked off. He recognized the feeling, the walls were most likely warded against spirits intruding, like the coffin he had just exited. He still had his key and was about to use it when he heard a voice talking to him.

“I know you’re in there, there is no use to hide. Come out, I don’t mean you any harm.”

The voice was talking to him directly into his mind. It was a female voice and sounded beautiful. Joshua looked at the figure who was near the office now. It vaguely looked like a human woman, except it had blue skin and green hair. Despite her strange appearance, her sight would probably cause most men to skip a beat, the words that came to Joshua’s mind upon seeing her were ‘exotic beauty’. She was wearing a pale white dress, accentuating her generous forms. As Joshua looked at her through the window, she winked at him. Somehow, Joshua wasn’t feeling the urge to run away from her anymore…

Catherine was receiving regular updates from Joshua. He told her about the various vats he saw full of creatures, about the office he had located, the books he couldn’t understand. His last message indicated someone was coming. Upon hearing this, she was prepared to move in on his signal.

“Luna, deploy the custom weapons!” she ordered.

[Affirmative]

A few seconds later, Boris and the twins had armed themselves with Joshua’s inventions. After Joshua had finished building them, he had registered them into Luna’s database so they could be replicated on demand, either by Catherine or him. Considering the weapons existed thanks to Joshua’s power, their mere presence indicated he was fine. However, Joshua had gone completely silent.

“Joshua? Do you hear me?” she said, trying to contact him.

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“…”

Seeing there was no response, she was about to go in when they all suddenly heard a strange chant emanating from the building. It sounded like the melody Joshua had picked up but it was clearly much more powerful.