The sun's rays penetrating the various openings in the skull reveal that the floor, much harder than the grass outside, is composed of a dark red semi-transparent material. This strange mineral extends to the walls and eventually covers entirely a black structure embedded in the middle of the accumulation of those same dark cables I saw before entering. The warm sunlight streaming through the giant orbits is heating my face, yet I feel that the temperature inside here is significantly lower than outside.
I decided to approach the black structure in the middle of the cables, and after some rummaging, I found a small door, large enough for me to crawl into a claustrophobic room where I was hit by a wave of glacial cold.
Despite my lack of organic skin, I still felt a series of shivers all over my body.
There, I saw her. In front of me was a girl about a meter tall, crystallized in that same red substance, clinging to a pile of vaguely humanoid scrap metal.
The girl was extremely thin, with violet skin. Her enormous ears extended horizontally, making her small figure appear slightly larger. Her eyes, even though closed, were rather large, and her pained expression, on the verge of tears, gave me a vague sense of sadness toward her.
Behind her were a series of very small screens, still active, showing contorted images in their monochromatic light that I couldn't decipher. Some writings occasionally appeared in a flash; I remember a few, but only because I stared at the screens for about ten minutes, so they were imprinted on my optical sensors.
The meaning of these symbols is unknown to me; I have an idea that they refer to some control system that is no longer here.
I then put my backpack on the ground, and the electronic fairy came out to stretch her wings and take a good look around.
"See? I told you there was something interesting here!"
"Great! A crystal with a fossilized dwarf and a series of indecipherable screens! And on top of that, it's freezing cold, my tail will fall off if we stay here too long!"
"You have the nerve to complain even in front of such important information! And I'm supposed to be the shameful one?"
"Olivia, I remind you that we're here to look for a LIVING intelligent species, not fossilized corpses."
"Understanding the past is fundamental to comprehending the present and speculating about the future!"
"..."
Having said this, I pulled out a blue tube from my thigh that ended with a sharp point. I extended the tube to a useful length to insert it near the brain of the purple creature, and once I made this measurement, I sat on the ground cross-legged, facing the red crystal.
"Aurora, insert the tip as close as you can to the big-eared one's brain."
"Big-eared one? How do you talk? Anyway, I think this will end up like that time you tried to read a brain in an advanced state of decomposition"
"If we don't experiment, how can we know if what we're doing is right or wrong?"
"Whatever, you're the one who ends up paying for it anyway."
Aurora, with a bored grimace, forcefully inserted the tip into the crystal, which was pierced as if it were made of a much softer substance than it appeared from the outside. A smaller tube came out of the tip and automatically began to dig towards the little creature's head. Once reached, delicately penetrating the skull, it inserted itself into its brain.
At that moment, I received a shock and could no longer see anything.