Delinquency

by Daemon McRae

Essay Three: A Lecture in Extradimensional Architecture

Essay Three: A Lecture in Extradimensional Architecture

The door to the stairwell was surprisingly heavy. Treble wasn’t entirely sure if that was due to the nature of the door itself, a typically sturdy metal storm door, or the fact that all the doors up to now had been… lighter, somehow, than they should. They still felt like doors, even as he took a moment to test a nearby one, but for some reason it wasn’t as hefty as he’d imagined it would be. Hospital doors are usually rather thick wood, not the cheap plywood-esque bedroom door crap he was swinging on its hinges.

Not that the stairwell door was locked. He’d been able to open it relatively easy, despite being somewhat surprised by its weight. It looked much like he’d figured a stairwell door in this place might: bulky, obstinate, and almost devoid of color. He looked to his fellow ‘marauders’, who gave rather noncommittal gestures.

“If you’re expecting me to volunteer to go first we’re going to get eaten before you get an answer,” Sunny said.

Sugarcoat nodded her agreement. “If anyone’s going first it’s the guy who seems to have some idea of what he’s getting into.”

Treble shrugged. “So much for ladies first,” he sighed, then opened the door.

“Not so sure about that,” Sunny said in a stage whisper. Sugarcoat gave a sardonic grin.

“Now that’s not nice. How are you going to feel if I get eaten?” Treble complained, leaning on the doorframe.

“Probably not much. We’ll most likely all get eaten at the same time unless we do something universally stupid and split up,” Sugarcoat pointed out.

“Fair enough,” Treble conceded, and threw open the door, taking his first real steps into the stairwell.

His immediate reaction was to turn the hell around and frog-march his way to the other side of whatever pocket dimension they’d landed in. The stairwell itself was vastly different than the sterile, bland environment they’d been traversing for the last few hours. On one side of the door was clean, shiny white walls, smooth in texture and completely nondescript besides. On the other, cold gray steel, slightly warped with age and covered in a thick layer of dust. The platform beneath their feet was cold stone rather than simple linoleum, and the banister was a set of three metal bars held in place by more metal fixtures and bent to match the curve and descent (and ascent, Treble noted) of the stairs themselves.

The metal plating on the wall was worn and rusted, though not quite the autumn red you’d see on the bars of a neglected bike. More the sickly green of rust that’d been there forever and run out of moisture to finish the job. If not for the darkened gray of heavy metals and the lack of lighting casting distorted shadows at every edge and surface, it might have been the first thing Treble noticed, for the simple reason that it was the first real color he’d seen since they’d… arrived.

He turned to the girls, as they walked through the stairwell door and greeted the sight much like he had: completely gobsmacked, with a side order of confused. Sugarcoat recovered first, turning her disapproving stare on their leader. “Do I need to point out how many of your theories just got shot to hell?”

Treble tapped his chin. “Ok, three possibilities. One, I’m completely and totally wrong and this isn’t a psychonaut, which means we’re absolutely fucked because I don’t know anything else powerful enough to create a space like this without being a Beast or some seriously long-term spellwork, neither of which I’ve seen signs for. Two, the psychonaut’s learning curve just got a whole lot fucking faster, which means we’re going to start seeing weird shit in minutes rather than hours. Also bad. Three, this is another template, taken from a different source, and the other floors are going to make the entirety of the structure look like a jigsaw puzzle taken from five different boxes. I’m really hoping it’s three.”

Sunny, not taking her eyes off the top of the stairwell, nodded. “I’d really like to think that, too. But if that’s the case, I don’t think it’s just five puzzles.”

“Oh?” Treble asked curiously. He noticed Sunny pointing straight up, and followed her gaze. His jaw dropped.

“No, more like a hundred,” Sunny said in that simple tone of voice that indicated either shell shock or emotional deflation. Either would have been appropriate. The stairwell went on forever, and from what they could see, there was another landing, potentially with another floor, evey ten or twelve feet. They looked down, out of morbid curiosity moreso than anything else, and saw much of the same. They couldn’t even see a floor or ceiling, just more rust, dust, and steel.

Treble immediately fished around in his pocket. How he wished he’d thought to wear his suit to this, but it was still being carefully reconstructed by a rather meticulous tailor uptown. Wherever uptown happened to be from here. He still found what he was looking for, a quarter from the year 1973, which in any other circumstance would have been nigh inconsequential. He held it up to the two girls. “Can you do me a favor and read the year on this for me?”

“Why, are you gonna do a magic trick?” Sunny groaned, seemingly coming to from the shock of the enormity of the stairwell.

“I really hope not.”

That took Sunny back a bit, so she played along, not having a good retort. “Uh… it’s 1973. Savvy?”

“Savvy,” Treble agreed, then bit into it as hard as he could and bent it slightly. He leaned over the side and dropped the quarter in as straight a line as he could, then held perfectly still and motioned for the girls to do the same. Everything was eerily quiet for a while. Then another while. After a full minute of not hearing the quarter hit bottom, Treble leaned back. “Welp, looks like we’re not jumping any time soon. Might as well get moving,” he said, marching confidently downstairs.

“Um, where the hell are you going?” Sugarcoat demanded, before he’d made it even a couple of steps.

“Look, we’ve pretty much scoured the floor we came from. So unless you want to walk UP hundreds of flights of stairs, I suggest we do our damnedest to find the ground floor, and maybe something… different? Useful? Hell if I know. I just know it’s easier on the legs to go down rather than up and I’d really like to stick to my moving target theory,” Treble explained.

Sunny shrugged. “I mean, it’s better than nothing. At least it ‘sounds’ like a plan. We should probably poke our head into the other floors, too. Maybe someone else got dragged in from… somewhere else? Landed on a different floor?”

Treble muddled over that thought for a second. “It’s possible, but given the sheer size of the thing, even if they did I have no idea how we’d find them, if at all. Remember, we only found the stairwell by systematically eliminating every hallway on that floor. Considering the average human is about as intelligent as the stains on their t-shirts, how likely is it anyone else trapped in here would think to do the same thing? I mean, there is always sheer dumb luck, but in this line of work it’s not always ‘good’ luck.”

Sugarcoat rolled her eyes and started following him down the stairs, closely followed by Sunny. “You don’t like people, do you?” Sugarcoat grunted.

“It’s not so much liking them as trusting them," he mused. "I mean, I can get along with pretty much anyone. Doesn’t mean they’re not either dumb as shit or some backstabbing sociopath. Given all the terrifying fuckery I’ve dealt with over the last few years, you learn pretty quick that there’s really only three kinds of people in the world in a pinch: idiots like the ones who always go into the basement in horror movies, backstabbing douchecanoes who either summoned the terrible thing in the first place or start picking up strangers and throwing them into the mouth of the beast to buy themselves more time, or the complete psychos like myself and my merry gang of monster hunters who think, ‘Hey, that thing is terrifying and defies all logic! Imma hit it with a stick!’”

“What about the halfway decent people who dive in front of the monster or try to save the children first, that kind of thing?” Sunny asked hesitantly.

“Not as common as you’d like, more common than I thought, admittedly. So I guess I should say four. But most of the people I know who are genuinely good and try to help in times of crisis are either that way all of the time or at least a little bit crazy to begin with,” he admitted.

“So what are we?” Sugar demanded.

“Still here. Which means you’re either decent people or as crazy as I am.”

Sunny grinned a little. “What, you’re not a decent person?”

“HA! FUCK no.”

------------------------------------------------

The stairwell showed no signs of ending. They’d made their way past more floors than they could count, and even given the relatively easier task of going down stairs instead of up, they were still getting exhausted. Treble, of course, didn’t want to admit how tired he was, but when he saw the two girls having to work to breathe steady, he called a break. “Alright, alright. We’re not getting anywhere. Might as well start checking floors. First, though. Five minutes.” Neither girl protested, instead slumping against each other and the stairwell door until they hit the ground. Treble himself landed on a stair and leaned back to take a deep breath. “Holy shit. If we keep this up much longer we’re gonna be in better shape than Rubble and Indigo when we get out.”

“Speaking of which,” Sunny said slowly, around gasps for air. “Where… the hell… are our friends... in all this?”

Treble rolled a hand in the air. “Oh, there’s a dozen reasons we haven’t seen them yet. Either the elevator’s broken and they think we’re trapped on it, or time doesn’t move the same here as it does at home and we’ve only been gone like 5 minutes, or they got stuck somewhere trying to find our asses and we’re all fucked. It’s really best not to think about it. I have enough of a headache as it is.”

Sugarcoat opened a single eye and rolled it at him. “You really aren’t very encouraging, are you?”

“Lady, if you wanted encouragement you should have taken one of those damn cat posters with you. God I could use a smoke right now. Holy shit,” he groaned, pulling out a lighter and a pack. He tapped out a single fag, pulled it out of the pack with his mouth, and lit it. Taking a deep breath of smoke, he sighed contentedly. “Jesus yes that’s so much better.” He tilted his head forward to see the two girls giving him scathing looks. “What?”

“Smoking? Really? What are you, sixteen?” Sunny scolded.

“What are you, my grandmother? Besides, I’m almost eighteen. And considering what I’m doing with my free time I’m more likely to be horribly disfigured and my psyche scattered across the cosmos than I am to die of fucking lung cancer. And in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve done just as much walking as you, so don’t give me that crap about ‘lung capacity’ and ‘out of shape’. I do my cardio,” he grunted.

Sugar just shook her head. “I’m more annoyed that you didn’t let us know you had a lighter on you.”

“And when would that have helped? Besides, I’ve got a lot more than that on me. Always do. Problem is it isn’t always useful,” he conceded. “I mean, I haven’t found anything I particularly feel like setting fire too, especially since I’ve seen even fewer things I could use to put it out. And it’s not like we’re cold or anything.”

“Fair point, fine. Well, break time’s over. Let’s keep moving,” Sugar said pointedly, climbing to her feet. She pulled Sunny up off the floor, and Treble followed suit. “More stairs?”

Treble shook his head, wisps of smoke curling into slightly wavy patterns as he did so. “Nah, let’s start checking floors. I doubt we’re gonna find the bottom of the stairs by brute forcing it. Something tells me this place doesn’t work on just three dimensions anymore. Although I’m really hoping I’m wrong.”

The girls gave him concerned looks, but didn’t ask him to elaborate. Instead, they moved aside as Treble opened the stairwell door. “Y’all are really set on me getting eaten first, aintcha?” he chided.

“If you keep using words like ‘y’all’ and ‘aintcha’ I’ll feed you to the thing myself,” Sugarcoat grumbled.

Treble’s shoulders shook with a chuckle as he pulled the door open, and stepped into the new floor. He made it exactly one step before he realized something was very off.

Peeking over his shoulder, Sunny noted. “Well. THAT doesn’t look like a hospital.”

Indeed, where they had been expecting sterile white walls and simplistic designs, wheelchairs and carts, they were instead met with some of the gaudiest, moodiest hotel décor they could have asked for. As long as Spooky wasn’t around. The walls were done up in a floral pattern that reached shades or red ranging from light pink to the unsavory parts of a crime scene. The floor was a dark golden-brown diamond pattern with brown accents, meeting an almost oak-brown molding at the corners. Th same molding marked the place where the wall met the ceiling, which was done up in an almost mirror-like shine of glass over some distortedly yellow paint. The ceilings themselves were somewhat high, for a hallway, to make room for small chandeliers every ten or twenty feet. The awful patterns and slightly narrow dimensions made perspective a bitch.

There were doors, of course. A seemingly rich mahogany with room numbers nailed to the doors in big brass lettering, matched by brass doorknobs. They could see an intersection from here, a corner where a tiny side table sat with a paisley white doily laid on top and a mildly tasteful flower arrangement in a light blue vase. It clashed horribly with the walls. “God, I think I preferred the hospital.”

Sugarcoat, staring in over his other shoulder, tapped her foot impatiently. “So… about these theories of yours.”

“Lady, if you want to start postulating about interdimensional monstrosities and their modus operandi I will happily let you take the lead on this one,” he barked, stomping forward and taking slightly deeper puffs from his cigarette than normal.

Sunny raised a disapproving eyebrow at Sugar. “Really? He’s kind of our best bet to, you know, not die.”

Sugarcoat returned her look, then sighed, her expression collapsing. “I know. I would just really like things to start making sense around here.” They took a few steps into the hallway, then noticed a slight rush of air. Actually, more of a change in air pressure. Sunny turned around, while Sugar just stared directly forward with the most unamused expression she could manage. “Let me guess. Stairwell’s gone?”

“Yeah-huh.”

“Big blank wall.”

“Actually no. More hallway.”

“Wonderful,” Sugarcoat sighed, watching Treble disappear around a corner. “Let’s go catch up with him before we all get split up-”

The tail end of her sentence was cut off as Treble tore around the corner, skidding into a ninety-degree turn with impressive reflexes. He almost bounced off the wall as he corrected himself and started sprinting towards the girls. “Move move move move move move move muuuuuh-WOOOOOOOOOVE!” he bellowed, tearing past them down the ‘new’ hallway behind them.

The girls exchanged terrified glances, looking back where he’d came from. They immediately took his advice and took off after him as the first claw reached around the corner and hit the wall with a loud BANG.

Comments

[Aziraphael]

Well that escalated quickly. I was wondering when things were going to go horribly wring, I just wasn't expecting a huge monster.

[Jarimor]

8887458
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[Freethinker037]

Now the fun begins for our three mismached heroes. I have to admit that at one point, they would find Spooky walking out of one door, walking out of the bathroom, and accidentally finding himself in the maze and finding Treble and the girls. Too conveniant I guess. Still....

NEXT CHAPTER PLEASE!!!

[Magnus Orion]

Oh. Huh. Alright, wow. That just happened.

[Phoenix Flight]

Ahh... ye olde giant monster. Never gets old.

[Pontiac56]

So what's the bet this is going to end with him making out with at least one of if not both girls?

[OmnipresentMicroorganism]

My bet’s on some sort of universal nexus under construction.

[FanOfMostEverything]

I kept expecting the quarter to zip past down the center of the stairwell. I suppose it either isn't looping or hadn't reached them yet.

In any case, anything as coherent as claws makes me doubt this is the script-kiddy psychonaut, but I could easily be wrong. Definitely looking forward to more.

[BradtheBrony]

8888751
What if it is more than ONE psychonaut? One who is a scientist (creates and studies) while another is a hunter (getting its fix chasing down whatever gets pulled/trapped on the various floors created by the first).

[Jarimor]

8889386
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[Alondro]

‘Hey, that thing is terrifying and defies all logic! Imma hit it with a stick!’”

Hey, I only ever did that once!

The next time I used a golf club...