Night 73: Secret Stairs

[forsworn]

[from here]

The lights flickered on as Kratos entered; he quietly sheathed his sword and then walked onto the escalator after checking to make sure that Castiel and Lloyd had made it in after him.

"I realize our keys may not match," he said, mostly for Lloyd's benefit, as the escalator began its slow climb upward. "We have the radios, though, so if there are any issues, call." Both Castiel and Lloyd had easily remembered numbers; hopefully, they both recalled his.

Comments

[freewill]

With a near-perfect memory (and it would have been perfect, if it weren't for what Landel had done to him), Castiel had both of their radio frequencies and a number of others imprinted in his mind.

It was a good idea to rely on those if they were separated again, though, and so he nodded. If nothing else, he and Kratos should end up in the same spot, but the same couldn't be said for Lloyd.

They still hadn't been attacked, but as the elevator slowly worked its way up, Castiel continued to keep an eye out. It was well-lit here, but that didn't mean that something couldn't drop down on them from the ceiling.

[lighthearted]

[From here.]

This was the furthest they'd gotten, but Sora felt like they'd made it in much less time, which was a good sign. He paused at the bottom of the escalator. The room was well-lit so there really weren't any nooks or crannies where monsters could be hiding, and yet he took a moment to look over the whole room before he stepped onto the escalator and triggered it to start moving.

He spun around, turning his back to the top of the room as he glanced down at Link and Tsurugi. "I went into a storybook too, by the way! I used to visit Winnie the Pooh and all his other friends... but you really went back in time, huh? I've never done that before."

He'd done plenty of other things, and he was more than willing to brag about it if the conversation went that direction. There was nothing Sora enjoyed more than talking about the places he'd gone and the friends he'd made.

[ryuuzaki]

[From here.]

What on earth...?

The room beyond the wall wasn't very big, but it was very different from the area they were leaving behind. The surfaces were shiny in a way that most of the rest of the Institute wasn't, something that suggested a clinical, technical, advanced atmosphere. It stood at great contrast to another hidden corridor he had been in, the almost medieval one in the basement that led to the Sphinx's prison.

The small size of the area behind the hidden door meant that there was no need to clear it with the gun once he had looked inside it with the light. The area was dominated by an escalator, currently still. As he and Lana entered the room, lights came on overhead--bright lights, they hurt his eyes momentarily--and he could see that the walls were lined with speakers, which appeared to go all the way up. There didn't seem to be anyone on the escalator. He holstered the gun, intending to get it out again at the top. It had no manual safety; riding upward with it in his hand seemed like a bad idea.

As far as he could tell, the dangers here were the escalator itself, the speakers, and whatever was at the top. The escalator could be rigged to suddenly release... but that hadn't happened to anyone before, and neither had his other concern, which would be a deafening blast of sound from all those speakers.

Lana would want to press on, that much was obvious, but he still shot a brief questioning glance in her direction, in case she had something to say.

"We've been extremely lucky so far."

[rebonding]

[From here]

The same, weird, familiar moving stairs. Korra stepped up without hesitation this time, keeping her balance as the stairs began to move.

"First thing we gotta do is find one of those teleporters, I think."

[firewhichrefines]

[[from here]]

He blinked at it for a moment -- there had been plenty of weird things about the technology here, but this was new. The concept behind it didn't seem terribly difficult if he bothered to think about it, but the purpose of leaving it to constantly run upward seemed wasteful, if nothing else.

Still, there it was. It was impossible to avoid tightening his grip on his sword when they stepped on with a weird uneasy jerk of suddenly moving not at his own pace, but it seemed efficient enough.

The lights followed them as they moved, Sasuke tense for attack despite the fact that the only real noise was the rumble of the moving stairs, frown deepening as he took in the difference in the style of this passageway from the rest of the Institute.

[envy_the_sinners]

[From here]

This was as far as Scar had gotten, up until now. He squinted in the sudden light and turned off his flashlight to preserve the battery. The stairs, he noted, were already moving.

He stepped onto the escalator, still waiting for his eyes to adjust.