The key turned easily and the lock clicked open. I pocketed the key again and with my soldier guys help turned the stuck bar handle before pulling the hatch open. Immediately I was hit with a dusty gust of air as the stagnant air of whatever was down here blasted out from the pressure shift. It was a musky smell but otherwise not bad. Naturally I sent my soldier guy down the ladder on the side of the tunnel going down first. There was some light from small industrial grade lights imbedded in the concrete walls. -
It turned out I didn't even need to bother with the caution as nothing was down here. The bottom of the ladder led to a small room with wires and pipes running along it's walls and a large metal door at the end with a spinning handle. I turned the handle and the metal creaked as the doors mechanism was pulled inwards and the door sank into the ground with a handle sticking out to be grabbed to close it again. Behind that door was a short downward facing tunnel that ended in a massive gear shaped door I recognized immediately, a vault.-
'Oh fuck, I am WAY underprepared for something like this.' I thought and decisively backed out and shut everything back the way I found it.
To understand what a vault was you first need to understand that before the great war that brought the nukes and even during it there were companies capitalizing on the fear of total nuclear annihilation. Vault-tec was the big one though and had a business strategy of creating these massive self sustained underground bunkers called vaults. To the public these vaults were basically supposed to be safe places that they could go to maintain humanities future for the day the surface was no longer irradiated. -
And a lucky few of them actually served this purpose, these were the control vaults. The others were, well, all experimental in nature. I don't mean as in the technology making them up hadn't been tested but rather each of these vaults were literally being used to conduct experiments on people. Ethics and morals weren't a problem here since the world was basically over once the vaults needed to be filled. The idea was to test as many different ideas, no matter how fucked up or insane, as possible and hopefully collect the results once certain vaults reestablished Vault-tec on the surface.-
I'd like to say many of these got happy endings because the morality of man won out in the end, that would be a lie. Decades of inhumane experiments and rampant uncontrolled results meant opening a vault was always a gamble. If you were lucky the experiments ran out from population death or equipment failure and the whole place was a treasure trove of old technology and loot. If you were unlucky though, diseases bioengineered for maximum lethality, monsters, toxic gasses or even sub audible mind control sounds being played through the whole place were all very real and very possible things you could run into.-
I only had a single two two soldier guy on my side and a ten millimeter hand gun with only a handful of bullets, not NEARLY enough. When we got out of the underground passageway I locked the hatch again with the key and buried it under sand once more. I didn't have time to do anything else today unless I wanted to risk the gas station being targeted from the light. I had the soldier guy bring his horse into the station and left him with it in the lobby while I turned in on the cot in the garage.-
{New day begins, dispensing pack opening token.}
The systems notification woke me with a panicked start. Once I actually read it though I had to sigh. I had expected the new token to roll over around noon maybe, not the literal moment the sun started to peak over the horizon. I learned something interesting as I got up and turned on the lights, my soldier guy didn't sleep. He hadn't moved a single inch from where I left him before bed.-
'Is it because he has vigilance?' I wondered but couldn't say for sure unless I summoned another creature without it for comparison.
In the card game the ability [vigilance] meant that even when attacking the creature wouldn't tap. In that context it was useful because you could attack on your turn and on an opponents turn also block with the creature. Since everything about the card was made into a realistic comparison I could believe this ability had been turned into a lack of need for rest.-
If it was true then any [vigilance] abilitied card I got and summoned would be a twenty four seven sentry that could patrol and guard without rest. Still I'd be sure to test this first on a creature without it to tell definitively. I sent my guy and his horse to watch for threats or people approaching the station. While he went off to do that I wasted no time at all bringing up my sets and spending my swanky new token on another pack of New Phyrexia. The image of a pack getting torn open appeared and my fifteen cards showed up.-
Mindcrank-artifact, Phyrexian Metamorph-artifact creature, Beast within-instant, Whispering Specter-creature, Pristine talisman-artifact, Mountain-land, Lost Leonin-creature, Immolating Souleater-artifact creature, Shriek raptor-creature, Pestilent Souleater-artifact creature, Insatiable Souleater-artifact creature, Spined Thopter-artifact creature, Impaler Shrike-creature, Ogre menial-creature, Forest-land
I looked over each of my new cards and while I COULD play quite a bit now that I had three lands in hand I only locked onto one, Pristine talisman. This card would ease up my mana problem a little and might even give me emergency healing. It's text box read as follows "Tap, Add 1 mana to your mana pool, you gain 1 life". It might be a gamble that would cause the card to vanish after use but I was willing to bet the thing was reusable unlike lands.-
With the resolve to gamble and maybe lose I took out all three of my useable lands and tossed them. This gave me a red, a blue and a green mana for exactly the three needed to summon this artifact. I held up the card for Pristine talisman and all of my mana flowed from my chest, up my arm and into the card just like when I summoned my soldier guy before. -
The card pulled out of my hand and grew slightly larger before a silver shiny object fell out and onto my still outstretched palm. It was a curved thing flat and slightly bigger than my palm that had a constant dull white gleam to it.
'Now for the gamble. I tap Pristine talisman.' I thought firmly.