[REWIND & RE-REVERSE]
causticAccolade
dead yet dreaming
- Location
- Silent Sound, Cipher Cove, Levoile.
The CLASS MACHINATION [INTERROGATION FOR IMBECILES] has been activated!
You study Ankara's face - that kind, thoughtful, impossibly sad face. She doesn't seem like she's lying, at the very least. Not even a little. Mostly she simply seems regretful.
"Kala has been hiding since things started going wrong. When Kala wants to hide, the only way to find her is for her to find you. If you see her, tell her I'm sorry. For everything." She shakes her head, balancing on her own two feet and still looking a little weak. "It is not in your best interests to approach the other children as they currently are," she murmurs, voice tinged with bitter regret.
"And as for personnel... this facility is on lockdown. I cannot tell you exactly where my colleagues are, but I can guess. The elevator at the end of the Labyrinth will take you to the main part of the facility, the east wing, specifically. That's the medical wing. I think, in the case of an emergency, Dr. Geneva would have stayed there. Whatever he tells, you, it is imperative that you do not trust him. He will adhere to his Hippocratic Oath at all costs if you are injured, but in every other respect he is not to be trusted." She looks at you all with a serious gaze to make sure you've understood before she continues.
"In the west wing, you may meet other staff members trying to escape: Klaus Helsinki, perhaps. If you see him... tell him I said he's an idiot, and that I'll meet him when I can. He'll help you. If she was anywhere, Kyoto would be there too, the bull-headed woman that she is, still trying to do her job amidst all of this chaos. Paris, that horrible assistant of hers, and your father," she gestures at Mari, "Should all be on the above-ground levels."
"The Consortium does not believe in searching for saviors we don't already have. In this place, children, we created saviors. Well. That was the intention, at any rate."
"I disagreed with Dr. Paris on certain ethical matters. I was able to quell these for... longer than I'd be able to admit without showing me in the cruel, harsh light that would reveal the sort of person I truly am. Eventually, I could bear it no longer, and took action. This... perhaps it did not work. Perhaps I have only done something foolish and terrible. But I am a selfish woman, I am afraid, and all that mattered to me was that I'd be able to say, I did something. The security system of the Labyrinth in particular is... well, a Labyrinth must have a monster, mustn't it? It's really something very fearsome, but I helped to design it. It's meant to frighten and distress, but I know how it works, and that makes it easier to deal with."
"Months. One of you" she's addressing you and Owen here, Mari clearly being a special case, "May remember more or less than the other, but the both of you should remember little of it. Stolen time. I am sorry."
Feeling a little AWKWARD, you hand Dr. Ankara back her MOBILE PHONE, WALLET, and NOTEBOOK. She smiles warmly and thanks you, with an earnestness that you've only ever felt from the sort of grown-up who takes you seriously - the sort of grown-up who knows that you're a person, who realizes that you have thoughts and feelings of your own, and cares. All of a sudden, you feel a little sad that she will soon be in danger.
When you attempt to hand her her KEYCARD, she hands it right back to you. "I can use the biometric systems. The computer systems aren't functioning well enough for Jack or Paris to have revoked my privileges, and if they could, then that card would be useless too." She pauses. "Plus, you'll get 30% off on the cafeteria food."
"Speaking of discounts..." you say, quietly. "Do you think we could borrow some money? Just a little, so that once we leave we can take a taxi, or something. I promise I'll return it! Even if it means I have to track you down across the world!"
Ankara smiles sadly, and hands you twenty dollars. That's as many as two tens, and four times as much as was stolen in your previous case, the Adventure Of The Grand Lunch Money Larceny.
As Ankara is about to open the door, you see something remarkable, and you almost feel the urge to squint to make sure you're not seeing it wrong, because Mari takes a step forwards and throws her arms around Dr. Ankara, sniffling a little. "Thank you, doctor," she mumbles. "Don't be stupid and let anything happen to you, understood? My father and I would be very unhappy." Both you and Owen share a glance that communicates 'this is slightly awkward, so we'll just avoid looking at them and each other until Mari has stopped being emotional.' What an unusually communicative glance! Dr. Ankara lightly pats Mari on the head, and after a few seconds she pulls away and gives both you and Owen both a 'what the hell are you looking at' glare.
Stepping up, you give the politest little bow you can and hold out a hand for Dr. Ankara to shake. "Goodbye, Dr. Ankara. Perhaps I will meet you again on my adventures," you say, because you feel it's the sort of DIGNIFIED and MEANINGFUL thing that Sherlock Holmes would say in this situation. Finally, Owen, feeling like something is expected of him, offers a thumbs up, his usual sheepish grin, and a hurried exclamation of:
"Good luck!"
"Be safe, children. And once more," Dr. Ankara says over her shoulder as she turns to vanish into the darkness of the Labyrinth, "I'm sorry."
With Ankara gone, you turn around to face Owen and Mari, who look nervous and irritable, respectively. You take a deep breath. "We're going to get out of here," you say, with only the confidence that a JUNIOR SLEUTH can have, "Come on."
Clutching the SATURN TILE in your hand, you lead the way, pushing your COOL SHADES up so that you can see even in the DEEP DARKNESS of the LABYRINTH. After getting everything in order and making sure that everyone has what they need, you leave through the DOOR that you didn't enter by, confident, somehow, whether it be by intuition or deduction or perhaps some deep, unfathomable part of you that can see the strings of destiny and is determined to tightrope-walk across them in the most dangerous way possible no matter how many people tell it that the tightrope doesn't mean health and safety standards. Perhaps it is this same daring, assured, purposeful part of you that knows, in what flickering, faulty light you're allowed, to follow the arrows drawn in red marker.
You feel a connection to this person, as you wander, Marinette and Owen in tow, through the dark corridors, sometimes clambering over debris, sometimes treading carefully around suspicious-looking puddles. You feel lost in this Labyrinth, drawn through it by only arrows and the occasional silver thread you find has been set up for you to follow in the dark. You think that the one who writes in the red marker feels lost, too, but lost in the world. It's an easy way to feel, lost in the world. A world where billions and billions of people have never heard your name or seen your face, a world where there are billions of people to whom your own existence doesn't matter - is a nothing. Perhaps, you reflect, everyone is lost. Perhaps people like Marinette and Dr. Ankara who seem so sure of themselves are simply better at hiding it than you are.
Perhaps-
What's that sound? You have just turned at a crossroads, and you hear a terrible creaking, a screeching sort of noise, and with a start you realize that the floor is shaking beneath you. When you look down, you realize that the floor is cracking like ice, screaming with concrete straining against metal like the sound of some unholy beast, chained up and tortured. This is a structural instability, and it only takes you one, two, three seconds to realize that if you don't run then the floor will fall out from beneath your feet, like the feeling you get when you think everything's been completely figured out and then you're suddenly proved entirely wrong except this feeling will be deadly. With the ground already giving way beneath and in front of you, you run.
The CLASS MACHINATION [ANALYSIS FOR AMATEURS] has been activated!
You run, and somehow managing to keep your eyes on everything at once - struts, grates, pipes, and all of it collapsing around you - you see calculations flash before you, working out the mathematics in your head in what must be fractions of a second. Trajectory, angles, velocity, inertia, all of these things are factored in with every step, with every tiny shift in weight or posture. You feel like you're dancing, except your partner is not another person but the forces of gravity and air resistance and whatever primal destructive thing is causing what seems like the very world to collapse around you. You have no trouble breathing, strangely enough. You are perfectly, flawlessly, efficiently calm in a way that would terrify anyone who happened to look at you to the very core.
Besides you, you are aware of (but are too focused on yourself and the world around you to acknowledge) Owen, and you can see how he dances, too, how the trajectories and vectors start to fall away around him, twisting and bending like a straw in a glass of water when they get too near him. He's not truly dancing, not taking the thought to move every moment like you are, but nonetheless he is in the right place at the right time, and if the numbers on the right place are off then they blur and bend in ways that make your head hurt if you try and consider them in any more detail than a casual glance from your peripheral vision until he's safe. It's not surprising at all, with what you see, when the ground is finally stable again, you hear Owen leaping from one last part of crumbling infrastructure to land with a painful-sounding thump by you.
[ACUMEN CHECK: SUCCEEDED]
[NIMBLENESS CHECK: SUCCEEDED]
And Mari, of course, Mari is...
[NIMBLENESS CHECK: FAILED]
Mari. Where is she? In an instant, the calm has faded and a dull panic is building up, a panic that starts out small and grows and grows until it seems to take up so much room in your head that it forces you yourself out. "Mari!" you shriek at the darkness behind you, at the yawning chasm that has opened up as if following you on a pleasant stroll. "Marinette! Mari! Mari!" you shriek, until you're red in the face and your throat hurts and you want to curl up into a ball and give up.
She can't be gone, you tell yourself, (but she is), she can't have fallen, you continue, (but she did), she can't be gone. (But is she?)
She can't.
Flashes.
- from one last part of any more detail than he's not dancing, the very core no trouble breathing primal destructive thing you feel like you're dancing fractions of a second collapsing around you you run you run this feeling will be the floor will fall structural instability sound of some unholy like ice when you look screeching sort of noise turned a crossroads -
{{ SOTERIOLOGY GAMBIT: [REWIND & RE-REVERSE] }}
The SATURN TILE burns in your hand like you're touching a hot stove and you can't let go. Owen and Mari are looking at you strangely, and eventually Owen speaks up. "So, uh. Aren't we going to. Take this turn, then. At the crossroad. Or, uh, is that, a thing which, is going to be a thing which we're not doing."
You respond with what you think is an eloquent and reasoned argument as to why that turn leads to a structurally unsafe area that could very well collapse underneath the weight of the three of you, but is actually more along the lines of an incoherent groan. The tile in your hand burns like an exploding star has been concentrated into a pinprick.
When Mari raises an eyebrow in concern, you cleverly add the conclusive point that brings your argument together by passing out on the floor.
Yay, plot developments! Of a sort, anyway. This is the end of Questionably Soteriological's Chapter 2, and a post beginning Chapter 3 will be on its way to you by the end of this weekend. In the meantime, if one of you could be ever so kind and remind me of what exactly you'd all planned to do with inventory items and the distribution of such, I would appreciate it dearly. By the by, I'm awfully sorry if my prose is too esoteric or self-indulgent. There's a point where having a signature style turns into being incomprehensible, heh.
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