>>5877563From the moment the doors open, warm and soft lights flood the elevator's pale white interior. A dry, stuffy air rushes in. Stepping outside gives you quite a view; a vast room of hard brown stone and metal. The atmosphere is downright depressing, save for the lobby's primary fixture.
Along the ceiling, across a warped pane of glass, there's a depiction of the auroras in quite a different fashion than you're used to. On one end of the hologrpahic projection, you can see the Earth in front of the auroras. Silhouettes of birds pass behind the earth, departing with white wispy flame on their backs. They sail across the aurora, the stars, the milky way, and arrive at a glacial spire rising out of a cold icy sea. The birds continue past the spire, leaving behind their cargo, before traveling off the side of the glass pane.
Your modest study of Finnish folklore does inform you of what this is. <span class="mu-g">It's a depiction of the Finnish process of proceeding to the afterlife; Seilulintu carry the souls of the dead along the Bird's Path, and toward Tuonela, where they rest undisturbed, frozen in ice until the end of time. Unlike Norse myth, where the rainbow road of the Bifrost leads Asgard where mortals may live in debauchery with their Gods, the end of the road for the Finns is an abyssal darkness that cuts all too close to the godless afterlife the Athiests of old believed awaited all of humanity.</span>
The air might be stale, but it is not so congestingly sterile as the HQ's main building. This place is far more ancient.
The wide-hatted man leads you through without offering comment, patiently waiting as you examine the fixture of the Bird's Path and guides you to a guarded flight of stairs off to the side of a hall which reached deeper into the facility. As you reach the top, he has a wordless exchange with another secretary, who presses some button on her desk. You walk past.
With time, he opens an ornate door, and you enter an office.
A black haired woman is sitting at a desk on an old-fashioned phone, staring out a window at the back of her office. It is the best place in the entire facility to view the Bird's Path fixture. Adorning the walls are numerous items very distinctly <span class="mu-i">not</span> of Finnish origin. They're too far away and far too detailed for you to make any sense of them without a thorough examination.
She dismisses whoever was on the phone, and sets it down off the hook.
