Avalon Rodgers skidded to a stop and nearly collapsed. She shuttered as pain racked in from her ears towards her brain from the alarms first blast as it echoed up and down the barren hallway. The urge to drop the wooden crate to cover her ears overwhelmed her and instantly wished that ear plugs had been included in the gear bag. She reached in the box and rummaged around the Arrau turtle that sat inside, pulling out some of his bedding and stuffing it in her ears. It helped. Sort of.

“Are you smiling at me?” Avalon said as the turtle turned to face her. The turtle responded by stretching out his neck, still staring. “You’re never going to see that place again, so stop complaining.” He said nothing.

Hefting the wooden box in her arms again, Avalon took off down the hallway once again. The alarms continued to wail all around her, changing in tone and pitch in a way that compelled to think she was running on the wall. Concentrating on staying right side up as her senses mixed with the auditory mis-cues while running was far more taxed then anticipated. The hallway stretched out to infinity in front of her.

The lights cut out, plunging the young women into darkness. She nearly toppled again from the disorientation. The alarms stopped, leaving her with a ringing silence. “Stage two,” Avalon huffed to herself, looking back into a glowing ball of aether that hung against the black backdrop of the hallway.

She checked on the turtle again, who still looked like it was smiling at her, as though it knew she wasn’t going to make it out of here, that this whole attempt was pointless and she’d probably end up dead by that aether pretty quick. “Look, we’re doing this and that’s that. You’re just going to have to learn to live with it. It’s going to be better for you, trust me.” And she tore off down the hallway as the aether ball ricocheted off the walls chaotically towards her.

“The penalty for stealing the arrau right now is simple arrest,” A male voice boomed over the same speakers that the alarms had been blasting from. His Rathan accent so thick she barely could make out the individual words. “But if you want to keep going, we can upgrade that arrest to death. You have until the aether reaches you. Which is about 30 seconds from now,” he said conversationally. Avalon kept running, 30 seconds was enough to time make it to the arch. She had one more trick up her sleeve… or pants in this case. “Suit yourself,” the voice boomed again, still nearly unintelligible.

Jets of steam blasted out from the bottom of her legs, throwing spinning wildly through the air. She caught glimpses of the ball of aether, ceiling, exit, floor, wall in haphazard fashion. And hit the arch where extraction waited.

“Oh, the Archive is going to love you,” she said to the turtle as she laid in the ships cargo bay, out of breath as it took off into the surrounding clouds.

The Dice Roll:

Electricity	Aether
Bridge	Arch
Turtle	Aarau Turtle
Record	Archive
Block	Arrest
Speech	Accent