Goal of the day: 1397 words. Written: 1399.
...And when he had reached the fire, he turned to the other side of the wall, about where the shield ended, and so he went across.
The rotation caused by Naoki triggers a tornado. I watched it with my eyes wide open. And I even heard what I thought was Antonio whistling.
"Oh God, I need to listen to him more often!"
The fire swept around Naoki and up towards the ceiling, leaving black and brown heat and soot stains. Almost immediately, the automatons stopped firing, presumably because they saw it wasn't working.
- Get out! - Naoki shouted from the fireball.
And after a moment, I pulled Naoki close, trusting him blindly again. Naoki slipped out of the vortex of fire, which, having lost its source of rotation, dispersed in the air and disappeared in a flash into the now stinking air.
The flames almost burned my eyebrows, or maybe they did. I don't know. And with my free hand I shielded myself from the fire.
Naoki staggered backwards, so much so that her hand almost slipped backwards.
- Aooh! - I exclaimed in fright, surprise, amazement and surprise all at once. I hurt the collarbone joint of my arm when Naoki snapped it back.
But he immediately went back the other way and twisted the rope back to his arm. He was so hot from the fire that even the sleeve of his jumper not only missed the heat, but began to smoke and smell of burning rubber.
- Well done! - I heard Ruth's voice behind me. Not quite as surprised as before, but probably just a sincere compliment.
- Wow! - the woman's voice spoke again, "You've learned a lot, Gil.
"Oh God, I remember! So she was talking to me for a moment downstairs in the Arena when I pulled Naoki out of the vortex!! It's that female voice!"
- Who are you!? - I shouted to the voice.
Antonio played a few more notes on the guitar and the panel came back to life. The rain from the walls had stopped, but there was still a path to the second door.
- Let's go, let's go," Ruth said, pressing something into her stones, and we continued backwards to the door. The automatons slowly followed and kept pace.
- Not for your nose, traitor. - the voice laughed. - And anyway, mice don't survive long in cat caves, so it's worth telling them the whole story, like in a bad book.
The voice laughed again with its low squeak. I looked behind us. The door was still a dozen steps away.
"What are we going to do when we get to the door and we're met by that never-ending crowd of automatons?"
- You know, you could," said Antonio, his voice turning behind me.
"He's probably distracting himself until Ruth comes up with something. I really hope it's true!"
- Well, I could, but should I? - the woman asked in her cleverly sweetened Kim voice. Somewhere between her words, there was a dash, as if someone had run over the table with a pot. And that sound seemed to come with her voice, not here somewhere between us.
Ruth walked around Antonio and stood between him and me, walking backwards.
- When I say "Go", we'll turn around... right... door," she said in a whisper, but I didn't hear some of her words, "shake your heads... you got it.
"When they say go ahead, then we'll turn around and run for the door... I guess. Shit, I can't ask anything!"
I shook my head backwards, continuing my slow pace.
- Eeee... - for the first time I saw Antonio confused. It must have been difficult for him to think two things at the same time and somehow answer both at the same time. However, he shook his head and laughed:
- No, you shouldn't. We're just mice. But you could. Your wishes limit everything.
There was a suction from the speakers.
"My God, is she drinking coffee or tea while she's trapping us??"
- Well, wishes, wishes... - said the woman after a pause, - Unfortunately, I don't want to. But you know, I want another thing. I liked your trick, Gil, with the pebble, or whatever you have, and the fire. What would you say if there was more fire?
"Oh God! No!"
The walls creaked and more rows of holes opened up, almost all the way through the blue shimmering wall. And a moment later they went yellow.
- Yeah, that's more than I'd like," Naoki muttered.
"Oh you hell with the purple hells!"
- Let's go! - shouted Ruth.
And her scream was almost a lifesaver for me, because I had no idea what I would have done if she hadn't screamed it.
Immediately, as agreed, I turned around and headed for the door, which was now just a few steps behind us. And I was glad - I heard Ruth's words seemingly correctly first, because Antonio repeated my manoeuvre and ran alongside me, with Ruth in front of us holding up a purple elongated crystal of some kind.
As the holes in the wall continued to heat up, the crystal in Ruth's hands glowed with a dazzling light and blasted a ball of energy forward towards the door.
And when we were about ten paces from the door, it crashed forward, leaving a small gap between the doors.
- Hey! - came a surprised exclamation from a woman.
- Into the gap, faster! - Ruth shouted, running first. But she didn't need to say it, because the holes in the walls seemed to have reached the epicentre of their glow.
Ruth peeped through the gap and the door seemed to move. But I didn't have time to think, so I ran next to Antonio. At the door, I ran ahead of him and peeked through the door.
And at that moment, the holes in the walls stopped glowing... And burst with a huge wave of fire.
Antonio was the last to jump, crying out in pain. The fire seemed to catch him and his back.
And the door, creaking, finally closed. It left a small crack through which the fire came, and I could see the flames inside the corridor, but I managed to jump back.
Antonio fell to the floor on his knees, knocking himself on the shoulders and back of the head. This one smokes like hell. Ruth came over and helped him to catch his breath before I could figure out how to react to all this.
- Oh God, we are still alive! This is incredible! - exclaimed Naoki.
- Speak for yourself! - I shouted back at him, annoyed and not knowing what else to think, watching Antonio's dream coming true. Forgetting that I was the only one hearing him.
Ruth looked at me for a moment, but then, probably thinking she'd heard, nodded again to Antonio.
- My guitar! - he laughed, ignoring his smouldering neck and shoulders and dropping his guitar in front of him. It was all blackened and smelled in places and the strings were melted.
- Wow," said the woman again, from somewhere high up. I looked up to see where it sounded upstairs...
...And I stopped laughing. We were in a huge red hall, in the middle of which was something like a big cocoon, but made of a crystalline stone material. There was a staircase leading up to some kind of console, but all around the cocoon there was just a red floor of a cocoon-like material. The walls of the hall were the same. All this gave the impression that the cocoon was part of a living organism.
"Oh my God, what is this!?"
- Get out of here," said Ruth, standing up and straightening up, also looking up to where the sound was coming from.
She took a blue stone out of her pocket and crushed it in her fingers. Wherever the speaker was, it crackled and fell silent, and the woman's voice was gone.
"What did she do? And, no, where are we??"
- Antonio, are you all right? - I asked him. And then I added, pointing my thumb back at the red cocoon:
- And what's HERE?
These two replied at the same time:
- No, my guitar! - Antonio laughed, clearly not understanding my question.
- It's the Server," Ruth explained calmly, shaking the blue pieces of crystal to the ground.
"I wasn't asking about the guitar. And, oh my God, I had a very different idea of Servers! Much more boring, first of all!"
- Come on, we don't have much time," said Ruth, walking past me towards the Server panel.
But I remained standing, looking at Antonio, at the crack in the door, at Cocoon. And I couldn't decide what to do now. If my brain had a fuse, then it was knocked out again for a moment.
- Come on, quick! - "Antonio will manage on his own, and you don't want that, no matter who comes after you. We'll have to use plan B or C to escape anyway, because A is full of fire and robots.
I jumped out of my seat and ran to Ruth on her way to the Serveris.
- What will I have to do? - I asked, trying to shake my head and see the top of the Cocoon, but it was just so huge that I couldn't really see it. All I could see was the tapering red cocoon ceiling.
Cocoon itself was glowing red and flickering in between. It was attached to hundreds of different crystalline bands and perhaps ropes from the walls around it, floating in the air, not moving, but glowing.
- Here. There. Many crystals. - And I have the feeling that these are not the purest and most morally created crystals in the world... This size... And its purpose...!
"What does he mean? Immoral? Is he saying that something very immoral was used to create this crystal?"
- You will need this. - She took her backpack off her shoulders, placed it carefully on the ground, and opened it to take out a flat grey crystal pot, "You'll put it on your head. Then I'll plug you in. And then all you'll have to do is think a lot about your memory, yourself, your name, the City, YYY, weapons and so on.
"Eeee... OK..."
- And go faster. When you're connected, I'm going to try to fix the door, because they're going to start breaking it down right away. Thanks to our intrusion, it should not open so easily - but there is a gap, and as long as the door has hinges, it is possible to open it.
I put Naoki in my bag, ran my finger a few times over the dry-cleaned and neatly cracked cut on my palm, and followed her onto the console.
This one had one chair, a bunch of incomprehensible screens and a whole bunch of buttons.