114. The Cistern

You’ve explored vast swathes of arcology tunnels, but the bulky rounded hatchway before you is entirely new. You press your hand into a faint depression in the hatch’s center, and suddenly the hatch shatters into shards that smoothly and silently retreat into the ceiling and walls of the passageway.

You step through the hatch, only to find yourself on a platform suspended at the roof of a cyclopean well. The space seems to stretch off in all directions for kilometers, interrupted only by gargantuan hexagonal stone pillars covered in strange silver machinery. And beneath that …

Far below, the remnants of a vast ocean lap at the bases of the pillars. The sea is illuminated by a diffuse glow that seems to come from the very air of the well, and with it you can see the water is crystal clear, without the slightest impurity or living thing. You’ve found yourself in a monstrous storage well in the arcology’s depths, one that clearly used to store a sterile sea. But what did the Estians need with so much purified water?