I mean, holy horse puck, folks, if you want to be a powerful baddy you have to have fans, right? Why not spend the time and effort building a mall where you can draw in the rich and gormless and sell them t-shirts and belt buckles and other really necessary stuff instead of squirreling away the product of the finest mechanical and architectural minds of your generation in some dark and damp and hard to find corner pocket of the world and then walking away to another dimension or another timeline...

In truth, the only 'secrets' of the ancient world, or even last week, exist in the minds of the ignorant. The creators of fantasy fiction and ultimately movies are obsessed with the trappings of fairy tales and drunken dreams.

And the fanbase for RPGs, Computer games, pulpy novels, comix mangazines and even pulpier movies seem to lap such crud up, seeing in each reincarnation (from Contented Cowls!) a secret decoder ring that shows that the creators of such stuff to be truly 'in' with the rabid FANBOY.

If I were to pull a Philip Jose Farmer and pull all the architctural and security wonders of the films and computer games of the last twenty years and pile them into the same mythos, the whole planet would be riddled with underground secret toyholes filled with devices whose only point is to protect the ULTIMATE THREAT TO LIFE AS WE KNOW IT from the odd self-righteous hero type who might eventually get around to want to destroy it after they get done invading and destroying all the other ULTIMATE THREATS TO LIFE AS WE KNOW IT that have been lurking in all the other abandoned ancient and evil sights that don't appear in any guide books that weren't printed in virgin's blood on handstretched priest's skin... Such books are often hidden in the Vatican's local branch library, aren't they?

The ultimate silliness is that the writers, directors, producers and publishers of all these games and stories and movies that have such deeply secret and dangerous places in them make more money and have more power to shape the modern mind than the baddies in the scripts who supposedly built them and then walked away.