Dear Smiley

While this is partially in response to your previous inquiry, I am writing this to you with the understanding that you will share this immediately with the other members of your team and anyone you intend to take into the PE-00 facility with you. I will disclose what I can.

Perhaps the first and most important thing you will want to understand is that you should carefully weigh the nobility of your course of action carefully against the chance for survival. And by nobility I mean all of that money I'm sure you've been promised. I understand this is your chosen career and as such, well, "dem's da breaks, chummer", but caution is never unwarranted although sometimes it isn't enough. To survive this sixth world you must be prepared. Consider yourself warned.

The vault was constructed over the course of eight years as a top secret project for a subsidiary of our beloved Yamatetsu headed up by a very young Hideo Yoshida. The company was contracted by the city in '41 to rework the Rim's sewage lines and roads in hopes of revitalizing the community as a prosperous border community. Of course Seattle was only concerned about the security around their mighty transmitter but similar efforts in King's gate actually yielded some barrens revitalization so clearly the effort wasn't all in vain. By '43 the Rim was a functional neighborhood with running water and functional sewers. Seattle contracted Lonestar to actually turn the neighborhood into a class B community and began trying to pitch the community as a remote escape for nuveau-rich to build mountainside villas on. By '46 the program was almost working although the majority of the population was barrens folk looking for anything better than their usual Sophocles fair. Regardless by this time people (including the higher ups in Seattle) were beginning to wonder why the construction project was still ongoing. While progress on roads and additional neighborhood revitalization was ongoing the progress had slowed considerably even though massive construction equipment was still coming and going nearly 24 hours a day.

All suspicion was abated when the Hideo offered to pay heavy penalties back to the city. Eventually late in '49 they gave up the contract stating that they were unable to fulfill the contract and paid still penalties to the city of Seattle. Of course the couple million they paid in penalties were nothing compared to the billions they sunk into the earth. The rim was growing a marginal pace and indeed the cleanup work did help somewhat but Seattle soon lost interest in the Rim and in '50 pulled Lonestar's contract for the area. With the universal brotherhood's takeover of the barrens Seattle had other things to worry about and simply let it go. By '52 stories of strange things began popping up in the Rim. Of course it was lost in the reportings many other strange things all over Redmond. No one would ever know the difference and by '56 the Rim was completely abandoned. Most chalked it up to the bugs.

I was called in to assist in the creation of PE-00 in '47 when they had already completed most of the physical work. I am not sure if Hideo's geologists stumbled upon the crevice or if they were actively working to find it but regardless when I got there they had already built several access shafts and had the majority of the complex assembled. I worked with two other well known magicians on many tasks, the largest and most complex of which was astral security. Internal facing astral security. Yes, it was designed as a magical prison of sorts with all the trappings of a full Gengineering laboratory. I never saw it fully completed but you can figure out easily enough what it was all about. It wasn't until late '48 that they changed the name from "eternity" to "epsilon" to keep internal memos from leaking obvious clues.

There are magical theorists who claim that some of the brightest and strongest Magicians have traveled to the deepest metaplanes and encountered Lovecraftian 'things' of impossible power poised on the edge of destroying our world. There are yet others who claim the most terrifying horrors lie in the astral emptiness of space where beings of alternate magical energies lie in wait for humanity to approach too close. I posit that none of them have ever looked down into the deep, rumbling, churning warmth of the very earth and seen the latent magical malice that lies deeper still. If you make it there I strongly recommend you do not look down. I was left with endless questions and a decade later still no answers, only fear.

I worked on PE-00 until the middle of '50 when they terminated my contract and sent me and Stephen Kerns, the other mage, packing. That left behind the third, a para-geneticist by the name of Davis Gentry. Gentry had worked with Kerns and I on most of the designs but I didn't suspect him of being a company man until the end. It turns out they replaced Kerns and I with a full on ritual team and began their experiments from there. All tolled I didn't interact with the second magical team much but from what Kerns has told me they were imported straight from Validvostok and had spent a lot of time training in similar facilities in remote parts of northern Russia. I've run into a lot of ritual teams in my years and that didn't scare me but the next thing he told me truly did frighten me. Yoshida was working outside of the Yamatetsu corporate hierarchy on this one. There was only one superior above Yoshida who knew that this was anything more than a fancy construction project and that was Buttercup herself.

Kerns knew much more about the nature of the rituals, the nature of Buttercup's involvement, and what exactly was going to happen down there but after I walked away I never pressed and presently he's unavailable for comment since a crack shadowteam demolished his mountain fortress, killed most of his students, and buried him under a raging volcano because a crafty, self-serving free spirit told them to ...

What I do know is that whatever they were designing to do, failed somehow. The facility stopped being actively used in '52 or '53 and they tried their best to seal it up ... whatever it was that they had unleashed. It did not take long before residents began to flee and it was obvious that containment was either failing or had failed. I heard rumors that the ritual team did not survive but Gentry was somehow still kicking around. And that was the last I heard until you and yours came poking around my home this winter.

I have no ethical reason to help you, in fact considering what you have cost me and my people both in materiel and in personnel I should in fact be leading you in the wrong direction. That said I don't believe your actions against me were fueled by malice, only greed and ignorance, the two traits that all of humanity is lucky enough to share. Regardless I as a human being could not allow anyone to go down there unwarned. I've now given you all I know or care to know about the affair. Trust nothing you find down there to be as it seems.