“Just like I said…stuck in the ground.”
“so it actually breached the ground?”
You nod, and it sends him up onto his feet again. He starts manically searching through the materials on the floor.
“I assumed…that this hard ground… was impenetrable” he says in between breaths as he finds a metal bar. “Those scrolls I wrote were in a metal cylinder” he raises the bar above his head, and swings down hitting the ground with a thud. He does so, 2, 3, 4 more times, and then steps back as you leap forward to inspect the ground. You do indeed see a small crack. You exchange a glance, and then scramble to you feet to find a second metal bar.
“No, no” he stops you “There’s a better way to do this” He looks around thinking “I believe I saw some motors around here somewhere…”
You both start scavenging together looking for different pieces of metal and electronic parts. He apparently has had experience with circuits before, and instructs you as you go; both of you building a large mechanism together, creating robotic arms. He’s a better instructor than you initially thought based off of your first interactions. He know that more brains working on solving the same problem, and bouncing ideas off of each other, is better one.
It takes quite some time, but your new hope makes time pass quickly. The robot you make has 3 large arms, shaped like pickaxes that, once switched on, all hit the same point in the solid white ground. And you both wait with bated breath.
You see that that small crack, once barely visible, becomes wider and wider, until it starts chip and break apart, crumbling. It takes longer than you thought it would, and you both sit and watch in silence. Your mind start to wander, thinking about how hungry and tired you actually feel.
Pulling you out of your thoughts is your mechanism as it suddenly topples over. You both spring into action, your first worry being how much time it would take to repair, as the arms are quite bent, but then you look back to the hole that it was hitting, and tap the man on his shoulder.
The fact is, the mechanism fell over because it started hitting against nothing. Where there was ground before, there was now a hole, showing that the ground had only been a couple feet thick, leading into the newly revealed black abyss underneath it. You both look at each other, feeling unsure if this was a mistake, if a worse fate actually awaits you in the dark abyss, but the hole is large enough for someone to squeeze through, and there’s a chance it could take you home.
“I’ll go first” he says.
And then he gets on his knees and crawls down into the hole. You wait for a couple minutes. He doesn’t return.