Editing City Series:Volume6c Chapter2 (section)

===Part 6===

The domed room was filled with the color white.

This was the collection of knowledge below Munich’s central hospital where Rose used to sleep.

The room had a diameter of 20 yards and the floor had several bedlike holes in it. The only light source was at the very center of the ceiling and that light illuminated the intricate patterns carved into the walls that almost looked like woven art.

Various measuring equipment and sensors sat on movable stepladders and cargo carts by the walls and simple drawing boards sat on the floor. It all looked like an art exhibit at first.

The clock sitting on one stepladder said it was 2:37. And that was AM, not PM.

Only one person was seen among the machinery and drawings of the patterns.

He was a balding old man with a lab coat hanging over his skinny frame.

The surrounding silence and the early morning hour meant nothing to him as he peered through the lens of a measuring device on a stepladder and viewed a magnified version of one wall pattern in particular.

“How very strange.”

He had the devices placed on different steps based on their function, so he did not have to look to reach his hand for the side of the one he wanted. He felt across the many switches on its side and pressed the one with a rounded end.

The device produced the distinctive click of a camera.

“What did you learn here, Marsch Gant? When you developed the Sylphide, you were the first one the Karlsruhe family allowed in here. And after you died and Lady Rose awakened, this forbidden door was opened to the rest of us. But by then, you had finished telling your riddles.”

He pulled a white glove from his lab coat’s pocket and put it on.

He hesitantly reached out one finger of that hand.

He touched a part of the wall pattern. A white plate a foot long and an inch wide had been embedded in the wall there.

The color looked a lot newer than the plates with the other patterns engraved into them.

“My readings suggest this plate was installed approximately 25 years ago. It must be the most recent one. …It was placed here by Frobel Naylor. That much I know. And I know our commander knows nothing of it.”

There was something odd about the plate he had just touched.

The other plates reflected the light from the ceiling with their intricate patterns, but this one was flat.

“Unlike the other patterns, this one must have originally said something in Old German.”

But there was nothing there now. It had been scraped off.

He stopped tracing his finger across the plate and held his white-gloved hand in front of his face.

He suddenly opened his mouth, bit the glove’s fingertip, and pulled it from his hand.

He spat out the glove and reached his bare hand out toward the scars where something had been scraped off.

“I’m being silly.”

But he stopped just before touching it. With a smile on his otherwise serious face.

He looked those scars.

“What used to be here? The Sofort Leser involved in the creation of the Geheimnis Agency left a message for the future, but why was it erased? Why has it been hidden from us? What was it? What was here?”

He looked down at the measuring equipment.

The screen in the center of the device displayed a grayscale image of the marks on the plate.

He started messing with the switches next to the screen.

A change came over the grayscale image.

“It was only sloppily erased,” he said as he stopped operating the device.

The grayscale image had undergone one primary change: a few words were now visible alongside the straight lines scraped horizontally across it.

“I can make out the words ‘war’, ‘Nibelung’, ‘1943’, ‘sin’, and lastly…” He took a breath. “ ‘Take care of-’ ”

He looked down again.

The smile from before was gone, but his lips did mouth something. And then he moved.

He swung his right hand back behind him.

“Stay out.”

He was answered by a male voice at the room’s entrance behind him.

“Not the welcome I’m used to as one of the Fünf Leithammel, ‘Dachs’ Elrich.”

“The young Intelligence Division Chief?”

Some brightness entered Development Division Chief Elrich’s voice as he turned around. An old man stood in the darkness of the corridor leading to the room.

He wore a gray three piece suit and rubbed his bald head.

“After visiting some newspaper offices around the country, I flew here. I didn’t find you at the base and was told you had taken up wall polishing as a new hobby.”

“Show some respect to a man two years your elder, Witzmann. Also…” He smiled bitterly. “I will not ask who told you about the ‘sleep’. You always seem to know everything going on around the country. It’s quite a mystery. How do you do it?”

“The trick is to never sleep, Elrich. Simple, right?” Witzmann’s slit-like narrow eyes bent in amusement and he pulled a thick envelope from his pocket. “I came all the way out here because there is something I hoped to discuss with you in private, Elrich.” He kept his voice casual. “It is related to the Messiah.”