The super computer presumptuously named The Wrath, located in New Quay City, mainland China, is the world's most powerful computer with immense computational power befitting of its unprecedented scale and cutting-edge technology.
For various reasons, the ghastly power consumption included, the government claimed it to be something fragile and refuses to use it too often, claiming that it needed "frequent repairs and meticulous maintenance" and the vicinity would be shut down nine days out of ten.
But the need for its computational power, or perhaps the lust for the ostentatious luxury of getting one's hands on such a machine clearly overcame the obedience for rules for some enthusiasts, and the computer nerd sneaked into the building and somehow managed to wreck the thing, partially. He was caught in the act and put to jail. And that was it for him and, surprisingly for The Wrath, which was later 24 hours guarded by heavily armed soldiers as if it were some military base, all requests and visits were forbidden. Such was the governments weird decision-making, you never understand why.
For the soldiers assigned to guard the colossal computation center, work was dull, it was a balmy summer night, and the soldier who was supposed to be keeping watch at the guard post by the gate, sitting lopsidedly in the security room found himself in a stupor, he nodded his head as he struggled between waking and falling asleep, the feeling of responsibility caused by high wages clashing with the overwhelming dullness of it all. The black of his drooping eyelids and the scene at the gate alternated in his blurry vision, and in one of those fragmented moments where his eyes were open, he caught a glimpse of black robes billowing in the night air and jolted awake.
After a moment's reflection, he sat up straight in his armchair and rubbed his eyes, he looked around him, behind him, then at the moniter screen, nothing happened. He shook himself resigned and gradually succumbed to sleepiness. Nobody is going to sneak into a lousy super computer lab, what for? You don't get computer nerds who'd risk a lifetime of happy jail life everyday.
It seemed to be a fairly normal, corny day, just like every other boring day, for all he knew, thought the guard, stretching and turning with his eyes closed. After a few minutes, a goofy smile curled his lips and he drooled in sleep.
Unbenownst to the slacking guards at their various posts, and invisible to cameras and security drones buzzing in patrol, whose combined effort put up a desultory appearance of guardedness, their defense had been easily breached.
There was a hooded figure in the control room where scientists run the molecular simulations, not even bothering to decode the feeble security protocal, he did something quite out of the ordinary. You could just barely see in the darkness, that his hands were clutching several wire cables thicker than an adult's arm, connected to an output slot.
His face was hidden under a mask, the kind you'd see on someone on a costume party who fancies himself a magician from the middle-ages, and he was muttering something with gleeful whispers. He would have been ominous-looking, dressed all in black, muttering in the dark, if not for the eccentric and ridiculous-seeming air he gives out spontaneously.
"Ahh! I see now, I see... and the final touch in this recursive alchemy formation, is abyssal energy! The amount needs to be precise, truncation error...tensor arithmetic runs quick...That concurs mathematically with all the hypotheses and all the physical and alchemic evidence so far."
The hooded man chuckled, and there was a gong sound in the air. A moment later, the man was gone.
"Did you hear anything?" asked one guard looking back over his shoulders, he was one of the guards on duty tonight, gazing at the monitor screen on his chair with a grumpy look on his face.
"Nothing." replied his pal beside him, they worked in pairs.
As they conversed, something slithered silently underneath their feet, pelting away, sometimes brushing against the wall, always staying within the shadows, and it murmured rapturously in an undertone. If you listen carefully, you can hear it speak in the voice of the man who infiltrated the heavily-manned, but loosely-guarded The Wrath.
In a flash, the man's position changed, he rose from the shadows and walked right through the soldiers who didn't even seemed to have noticed his approach, almost as if they were in different dimensions of space. A light haze fell on them, smoothing out their sharp silhouettes and out of nowhere there was water, water brushed away the scene before him as if it were a sandpile on the seashore crushed into smitherings by the tides.
With a loud Swoosh, the magic stopped, the scene abruptly shifted and the man was floating in water at the bottom of the sea.
You could tell it was miles under the surface for it was dark, dreadfully dark, and silent except for occasional sound of water swirls and slight currents.
The man moved in the darkness, his black outline merging with the blackness of the surroundings, you could see him only as a concentrated lump of black in this all black, murky patch of darkness.
He wasn't breathing, nor did he seemed the slightest bit uncomfortable in the crushing pressure a thousand times higher than normally bearable for humans.
"Most magicians rely on instinct and magical arithmetic, but I aligned it with science, treating them as each other's compliment, and I achieved far more than any magician or scientist." his muttering self-compliment was muffled by the water, and had no odience, but he droned on and on, as if talking to himself, making him look all the more eccentric. If anyone were to see him in this state, their first thought would be to call a phsychologist, and on second thought, they'd call the police.
Buried deep under the sea in some unknown domain, covered in solidified lava and layer upon layer of ocean sediments that agglomerated through the years, a curious ten-foot tall pyramid-like artifact painted gold, whose color refused to go off despite the many years of erosion, started to shake. The tremors sent shockwaves down the underwater gorges, and would result in earthquakes ten times the energy release of a nuclear missile somewhere where the earth is weaker and more delicate.
With no warning at all, a chunk of the seamount elevated in height, its rocky frame crushing and breaking through the seafloor substrata, dust and rock segments whirled up in the sea water, like some mine had been activated underneath.
With all obstacles removed, the pyramid-like thing exposed itself in plain sea water, and plucked itself up, swimming towards the man's out-stretched arms. As if responding to some deeply-nested call, inscription that looked like something between pure graph and hieroglyphics etched into the sleak golden surfaces of the pyramid thing started to glow deep red, with a flowing property, too, looking eerily like blood pulsing through veins.
The "pyramid" actually had a regular octahedron shape, its surfaces and vertices pounded ever so slightly, coupled with the eery red inscriptions, it looked like a real thumping octahedron organ with veins transmitting blood.
Shadows darker than even the darkness of the deep seas settled themselves around it, like condensed darkness. And they joined up and stretched, into the fuzzy outline of a girl, bathing in the sudden red illumination of the "veins". Her eyes were closed, her wavy golden hair flowed gently with the current.
She was not breathing, nor did she seemed to be even slightly uncomfortable in the mega high pressure of the deep ocean trenches. She had no tangible physical form, and was more like the shadow, or the projection of someone.
The eccentric man caressed the "octahedron heart", stroking it affectionately, and lightly touched the non-existent forehead of the ghostly girl.
His voice was velvety-soft as he said, "Not long, not long, just a little while, Helena. And we shall both be free."
And he sang, he sang in a mesmorizing voice, in a long-forgotten, unearthly language, and his voice had a carrying property, not carrying through the water, but through the fabric of space itself.
You couldn't hear it, but you could feel it, coming from somewhere, someone, or something sang back, in the same archaic forgotten tongue.