Cyrus Solaris
"She messed with your emotions, too?" I asked, stepping towards Nerena and Sora.
Nerena gave me a small nod, as Sora peered over her shoulder to glance at me.
"So it's a problem when I do it, and fine when you do it?" I said, crossing my arms.
"I made the choice that was going to benefit all of us."
180 seconds. 179 seconds.
"I don't know why you expected her to do something different. The great families aren't the best at compromise." Mira said, snatching the keys from Sora's astral hands.
She jogged down the dull grey hallway of the prison and tried the keys on a couple of the doors.
None of the keys worked for the right and middle doors.
"Looks like we only have one way to go, it seems," Mira said, hurrying over to the door in the left hallway.
I glanced at the timer above us.
120 seconds. 119 seconds. 118 seconds.
It didn't take long for Mira to try all the keys until she found one that unlocked the doors.
"Thank the Pantheon," Voen said, letting a faint whistle leave his lips.
When we opened the door, 90 seconds were left on the timer.
Inside this second zone, there was a large prison hall.
The hall was chaotic.
Pipes swinging from the ceilings, sliding walls shifting back and forth at high speeds,
alarm bells littered all across the walls. Getting to the otherside was going to be difficult.
"This reminds me of one of the old video games I used to play," Jace said, leaning on Sora's shoulder.
"Yeah, I think I know the one, Raiders of the Lost Tomb, right?" Nerena replied.
Jace's eyes widened.
I knew the game as well. Gramps got it for my eighth birthday, despite my mother's wishes.
"It's not the time to talk about video games," Sora said, as the next five items appeared before us: a mattress, rope, a pocket mirror, duct tape, and work gloves.
Scanning the items, they all looked useless in this situation; everyone in my cluster had the same disgruntled look.
"There has to be a way to shut this down, right?" Mira asked, walking closer to the sliding walls.
"That's why I wanted to grab the book; it could have been an instruction manual, or even held a diagram of the prison," Nerena said, her voice a little louder than usual.
Sora stood in front of the items, "We can't think about the past right now, we gotta keep moving forward. What item should we take?"
There was a lull in the group.
60 seconds, 59 seconds, 58 seconds.
"Duct tape, lets got with duct tape."
My nose crinkled at the thought.
"Nah, let's go with the mattress," Voen said.
"Vo, that might be worse than your last idea."
Voen turned towards Jace, "It's actually better if you use your brain. If we reinforce it with cosmic energy…"
"Cyrus, what do you think?" Nerena asked, cutting off Voen and Jace's conversation.
I was still having trouble with my decision and reasoning. So I just picked the first one that came to mind.
"The rope we should use the rope."
Voen was the first to give me a weird look.
"Jace, now you can't say I had the worst idea." Everyone agreed with Voen's comment, except Nerena, she looked deep in thought.
30 seconds. 29 seconds, 28 seconds.
"I think we should go with the pocket mirror, they might have trip lasers later in the prison."
'That doesn't help us now, getting over to the other side." I snapped back, as I looked at the timer quickly counting down.
"Calm down, everyone. I think I know how we should get out of this, and I agree with Voen," Nerena said.
My jaw hung open.
"Wait, really?" Voen said, his silver astral body seeming to shine brighter than before.
"Yes, I think we can combine Cyrus's idea and Voen's to help get across."
"But we can only pick one item," Sora said.
20 seconds, 19 seconds, 18 seconds.
"Correct, but there's no time to explain," Nerena said, selecting the mattress.
Nerena looked to me, "I need you to make the mattress float."
I didn't like being bose around, but we didn't have much time left. I activated Gravity Well Minor.
The mattress started to float. Nerena grabbed everyone and jumped on the mattress. "Lift us as high as you can, Cyrus."
"What about the swing pipes?" Mira asked.
"I got them covered," Nerena responded, conjuring her astral tentacles. Two tentacles wrapped around the base of the mattress, while the other two reached for the swinging pipes in the ceiling and began swinging forward.
10 seconds. 9 seconds.
When Nerena got hold of one of the swinging pipes, it felt like we got slingshot across the large room. The momentum was carrying us so fast that it felt inevitable that we were going to crash into the wall on the other side.
I tried using my third node to slowly push against our momentum to slow us down. My astral body went into a frenzy from the strain, flickering all over the place.
I could barely do it against a stationary object in my Nexus; this was well out of my realm of capabilities at the moment. But I needed to try.
I couldn't make the slight dent in the indentation of space our flying mattress created, so I had to settle for what I knew best.
"Brass for impact," I yelled out, as we plummeted to the ground.
5 seconds, 4 seconds, 3 seconds.
"You have cleared zone 2," the proctor's voice said.
"Yo, that was just like Raiders of the Lost Tomb, now that I think about it," Jace said to Nerena, grabbing her shoulder with excitement.
"Sor, I told you, you should have played that game with me," Jace said, crossing his arms.
Sora ignored her brother's comment.
She let a faint smile slip away, but quickly resumed her concentrated look.
A sigh of relief left my body, reading myself for the next zone.
Then Mira walked up to me with a small look of concern,
"Screwhead, your astral body is flickering."