Day 749

We as a species have explored the surface of our territories, consuming every inch and spitting out cities, wars and forgetting where we put either of them. Comparatively we've hardly touched the depths that the ground affords us, the more accessible chasms that we can't get to in our oceans.

The air underground is stale but bearable, tinged with the scent of your own sweat and something like an old potted plant in an attic. We find this air today in the basement of an old pencil manufacturing plant that shut down as we found better ways to make everything. It was left to rust and forgetfulness, nobody being sure which would remove it from the world first and nobody realising that the world wasn't nearly done with it yet.

Deep under the basement gears were turning - literally. Made from flint and held in place by the already existing structures that had been pulled down and remade in some kind of mirror image. When urban explorers came across the gaping hole in the depths of the old pencil factory they thought it a sinkhole until one of them shone their torch onto a wide set of iron stairs.

The flaking paint matched the remnants of everything on the upper floors, the ground floor was utterly devoid of the machinery that had definitely been left there to rust. Even the floor grates were gone in most places, a small patch of them stood at the far end of the factory floor and nothing else. You among the others head down, equal parts fearing the unknown and excited at the thought of finding a hidden place, perhaps a new base for the group.

The stairs weren't too steep, almost a ramp rather than a steps in all honesty but they still took the group a fair way down beneath the factory's alleged lowest point. It branched out eventually into a wide platform, the iron grid illuminated from below by small lights. The filaments looked to be the same as those they'd seen near the basement door, old halogen shining up at them and the strange machinery that surrounded them.

As a bright light suddenly filled the room you all turned at once to face a fan that must have been fifty feet across. It spun lazily, casting the entire room in a brief halogen-bright haze and showing just how deep the room was, deceptively so from the first glance. Everyone was so distracted by the unexpected sight that it took them a while to hear the faint sound of metal grating on metal.

The fan's blade blocked the light once more and their torch beams dimly showed what looked to be dirt encrusted cables dragging metal grates down the stairs and to the far edge of the platform, stretching and expanding it until it fit neatly into a large space over a gaping chasm that their torch beams couldn't see the end of.

Nobody noticed the same kind if cable snaking their way from beneath the platform, heading for the unsuspecting ankles of humans who went where the underground was creating its own world. As the cables snapped their ankles, their necks snapped soon after from she sheer force of the impact, jarred to breaking as they hit the edges of the iron floor with a loud cracking thud.

They didn't die for nothing though, just like everything else that came from the factory floor they were put to good use. Their skins were so much more useful than the rabbits and birds that the underground had found wandering about before. Their bodily fluids mingling with the water to cool down machines whose purpose was unknown even to its creator as it moved downward and forward to perfect production.