Southeastern Frontier
Following Janti’s map and the overhead sun, you continue to make your way south. Utaru roads and paths are long since past. Even the roads of the Old Ones are barely more than intermittent lengths of loose, bleached stone.
You pass through fields of chest-deep grasses. You skirt around forests with underbrush so dense it would take hours to cut scant meters of progress. Humid jungles line rivers, lakes, and streams, teeming with more fish and insects than you’ve ever seen in one place. The hills become more pronounced, but nothing like the mountains of the Nora and Banuk, or the mesas of the Carja.
Janti had not exaggerated the sprawling mass of the ruins you come across. Even dozens of kilometers away, its crumbling buildings stretch beyond the full width of the horizon.
The Old Ones referred to these ruins as Dallas, TX, US.
From this distance, the ruins seems alive with the activity of an anthill. Every type of machine seems to be present. Behemoths lift their huge cylindrical cargo pods under their bellies. Shell-Walkers scuttle back and forth, sorting debris into containers of all sizes. Glinthawks circle the sky, dropping to alight on the taller metal structures, grinding teeth chewing away. Bellowbacks totter to the other machines, using their long snouts to pull Blaze, Chillwater, and other liquids from their full canisters. On the periphery, Rockbreakers occasionally surface to chew their way through smaller stone buildings. And on, and on.
They appear to be deconstructing the ruins. Consuming, sorting, and collecting it, leaving open holes and bare earth. One container at a time.
The transport machines, once laden with cargo, all head in a south-westerly direction. There are so many machine working the ruins, they form an almost unbroken line, farther than the eye can see. A second line, on the far side, appears to be empty machines returning to fetch another load.
The Long Walk
The machine convoy stretches for more than 400km. There are very few Ravagers and Glinthawks keeping an eye out — the machines don’t seem worried about human presence around here. By keeping at a distance, which isn’t hard given the unending line of glowing machines, you’re able to stay unobserved.
The line marches straight through the heart of a second, less dense, cluster of ruins. This area appears more weather-worn, and has fewer tall structures remaining. Jungles encroach from all sides. You get the sense that the ruins used to be larger, but have been under deconstruction for longer, and are almost depleted.
Through creative use of Free-Tails and stealth, you’re able to follow the machines through the ruins. The working machines seem focused on their tasks, and do not seem to notice you. Several times you think they might have, but the machines do not become hostile.
The Old Ones called this area Houston, TX, US.
Upon meeting up with a river at the heart of the area, the convoy curves eastward. The water widens into a system of Deeproot-sized lakes, leading south again to a bay dozens of times larger.
The machine-made structure in the bay could only be an above-ground cauldron. Sprawling production lines, alive with armatures and skittering boar-sized spider machines (see Spinners at entry 853), curl toward the water. The machines produced at the ends of the lines come alive in flashes of blue and yellow, before dropping into the water and swimming away to the southeast.
One machine is fish-like and almost the size of Nora lodge, its smooth skin and ponderous fins gliding into barely-disturbed waves. Another looks like a mushroom cap above, but with an innumerable supply of fern-like appendages below. When it hits the water only the dome floats, surrounded by a skirt of fern-arms spread out below, each giving off a soft pink glow.
A third type of machine seems to be produced as twin salmon as large as a person, linked by an unwieldy length of cylinders joined into a metallic rope. When the duo hits the water, the rope floats between them, moving of its own accord. Each pair does the same dance: spreading wide to draw the rope taut, speeding ahead, dragging the rope behind them, meeting up to loop it, and then tightening the lasso toward them, making a loud sucking sound and producing twin jets of water.
Even more types of machines are being assembled in the distance, including one which clearly looks like a turtle, but must be absolutely massive to be identifiable at this range.
As the convoy approaches, it splits into an impossibly complex weave of paths. Each machine seems to know exactly which production line requires its materials. Unloaded full containers sit on the ground for mere seconds before they are snatched up by Shell-Walkers and Spinners. Unburdened machines wait only a few seconds more before being given an empty container in return.
Using your Focus, each unit of the expansive facility is marked PI-15, plus some additional signifier which has no meaning to you.
TODO: Make it trickier to find the entrance and avoid the machines.
Avoiding the convoy of machines, you are able to find a familiar set of doors leading down into the swampy earth below the bay.