Tasìa looked for the exit. She was left wondering why the phase drone brought her to the subbasement room in the first place.
The place looked so out of time, but it also showed signs of recent usage. As if made for someone from another era who still lived contemporaneously like a Mesozoic era chthonic fish amongst rainbow trout.
But why did it bring her here?
Tasìa looked for an exit. There was a hall entrance behind the bar. The hall ran at length in two directions.
She paused at the corner and searched up and down the hallway. A set of stairs to her left, and several doors running down the hall length to her right.
The stairs were not very promising, however.
Two yards before the hall joined the stairway, a retractable gate blocked her exit. She tried the bars only to find them to be composed of a sturdy heavy blue metal alloy that could not be moved.
A pressurized double set of pistons kept the retractable gate immobile in its current placement.
Someone was once kept prisoner down here.
Her interior monologue let her in on a little secret concerning her own present condition given she was dumped inside the sub-basement.
- Well now, it appears you are being kept prisoner down here, yourself.
That stairway is the only way out? She needed to explore further to find out for certain.
She walked down the hall. What about the bar? Awfully social in its purpose. Was the previous prisoner allowed to have guests down here? Tasìa opened the doors along the hallway. A bath, a kitchen for a gourmand, and a living room set up like a standard apartment.
The prisoner was most likely female given the bedroom interior. Wallpaper, furniture, and tall, iron bedposts, all reflected a woman's sensibility.
When the search was completed, it did confirm that the stairs were her only way out.
She examined the hole the exploding phase drone created.
Tasìa is this going to prove to be your all too convenient means of getting out of this place?
When we crawl up there, will we find the pipe or set of pipes that control the retractable gate?
Then, to get out of here, the task becomes a simple matter of unfastening a locked gauge and releasing it.
- Oh, one can certainly hope that it turns out to be that simple.
She brought the stool over to the hole, and climbed up it. There was a merely lightly damaged cross-beam still in extent directly above her.
It at least appeared to be solid in assembly. The other side of the support beams above it gave off a charred odor, but she could not see the extent of the damage.
Only one way to find out!
She jumped and gripped it. Fortunately, she didn't put much faith in the jutting crossbeam being well secured in place.
The beam came loose. The double clamps that gave support for it had been blown to smithereens. She swung the falling two-by-four away from her with a two-handed thrust so it would not interfere with her own planned fall.
She landed on the stool with such precise ease she merely had to bend down froggy style so the stool would absorb her impact without swaying or tilting.
- Nice little trick, what else you got?
Tasìa nodded and she vocalized an answer to her internal monologue - which to Tasìa's ears, sounded drunk.
"Actually, there is something."
She grabbed the second of three stools from along the counter, turned it bottom over so its legs faced the ceiling.
She scrambled up the delicately set tower with her weight carefully offset with each maneuver she made.
When the scampering thief made it to the top, she propped her boots on the foot ring, against vertically opposing stems.
She could now poke her head into the ceiling hole comfortably up to her underarms. Except for the immediate area surrounding the hole, it was too dark to see anything.
She dug into her fanny pack for her thumb-sized flashlight.
When she felt the curved handle dig into her finger, Tasìa had another eureka moment to which one of the guests in her head gave voice.
- It was designed to be carried on a keychain, why don't you just fasten it to your keychain? Save you a little room in your fanny pack, genius.
Tasìa didn't care for the sarcastic tone her interior monologue was taking with her. It sounded like a mean drunk.
She flicked the flashlight on and searched for the retractable gate control mechanism.
The pipework was inlaid throughout in the four feet of space between the tiled ceiling and the cemented enclosure above it. That concrete ceiling above was held in place by a grid of steel rods.
The kind of reinforced structure one would see built for fallout shelters.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Two pipes exited from a round fixture built into the concrete and extended towards the kitchen, one of the pipes veered off to an adjacent washroom extension.
Two separate pairs of pipes stretched to the bathroom and shower.
She could ignore the pipes that extended outward from the mansion stories above. There had to be a localized compressor that controlled the gate.
Tasìa caught sight of another pipe. One that was much heavier and chunkier than the others. It traced back to an air compressor embedded just above the retractable gate.
Just one problem. The dense grids of cross beams made the compressor and pipe impossible to crawl towards.
Tasìa gave it some thought for a second. Then for another second. She was feeling mentally slower than usual.
Finaly,
It's not really a problem,
Tasìa concluded.
She leaned down and grabbed the Magellani .22 revolver and switched in a pair of teflonrazor moon clips.
The specialty rounds were designed more to devastate flesh than metal, but still. It would do exactly what needed to be done.
When she sized up the pipe enjoinment that curved downward beneath the wall that led to the piston buried inside the retractable gate's top cross bar, she realized the copper fixture was a less-than-ideal target.
Piercing the enjoinment would likely work but she would need to drill multiple shots into the same spot with pinpoint precision to make the pipe break.
She did not want to waste any more bullets than was necessary. Instead of the pipe fixture, she eyed a better-suited target. Between the compressor and the metal pipe, a connector ring held the two together.
It was made merely of plastic, and no wider than a strip of duct tape. Though plastic, it was sturdy enough to withstand the pressure and prevent an air leak.
Still, it was plastic with the exploitable properties inherent in plastic. No matter its overall stencil strength, on the molecular level, it banded like vertical stitch work with bare horizontal cross-stitching. This molecular arrangement caused it to be brittle with little flexibility.
Thus, more easily separable and shatterable than almost any other material used in similar fashion.
Tasìa shot a teflonrazor round into the plastic ring. It split the band just as she needed. The pipe moved a wee niggle - no more than a minute fraction of a millimeter.
That was enough to set off a chain reaction. The hissing grew and grew, until the plastic band split farther out, and shattered altogether.
The pipe and the air inside it burst explosively for several yards out from the compressor. She wasn't entirely outside of the danger zone.
Tasìa leaped down onto the floor with the stools crashing down behind her. She dove into the carpet with her face planted down, eating shag.
Bleh, yuck!
The locking mechanism on the retractable gate began to rumble, loudly. A half gallon of Mezcal shook on the bar counter.
Then came the hiss. The gate mechanism was decompressing.
Tasìa, you brilliant little bitch!
She got up off the floor and walked over to the gate.
The air hissing out did so along the top rim of the retractable mechanism where the double pistons were set in place.
Tasìa grabbed a pair of bars. She tried to force the gate to retract but, immediately, she realized her mistake.
Judas fucking priest, Tasìa! You idiot!
The same pipe pressure used to keep the gate in place was also directed to circulate from the other side to retract it. At all times, the gate was in the maw of the pressurized piston mechanism.
Now, she worked to move a set of bars that likely weighed near to two tons.
How could it be, though? There was only one pipe, after all.
That presumption was what caused her to misunderstand how the mechanism functioned.
She reexamined the pipe where it shook loose when the air pressure collapsed. There were two smaller pipes inside it.
One for inflow, one for outflow; now, she was stuck with no flow.
For a moment, her situation seemed hopeless. She even began to pout, and the thought, my bestest buddy girl is out there getting eaten by hairless tigers, and I'm going to eventually die after my diet of vodka runs out, crossed her mind.
She gave herself some much-needed solace, there's mezcal, as well. Tasìa decided to treat herself to the latter.
Just a quick double shot while I think all of this stupid shit through.
She prepared her double shot, quaffed it down, and bright specs filled her vision with pink electricity.
Whoa, that is the shit!
Tasìa shook her head to rid herself of the heebie-jeebies.
Okay, just one more double. Annebél is depending upon our condition, that we are in a ripe, right condition, in order to best quantify the means, the means to save her.
She quaffed the second double shot of Mezcal down. Her eyes were slower to clear out the pink electricity this time, but when the neon-like squigglies dissipated, something else lingered in their place.
It sat on the stool beside her. A man, a Greek man. A naked Greek man.
Tasìa chortled loudly.
"Dude! Was your father a mule? You've got a huge dick!"
He smiled through his beard and nodded firmly.
"Where have I seen you before?"
In fact, his name was mentioned less than half an hour previously.
Statues! Yes, statues. Indeed, statues.
Archimedes..? Of course..!
The vision disappeared. Tasia jumped up.
She headed for the bedroom. The mattresses sat between four large metal bed posts. She worked to get one loose. Everything about the attempt was a battle against the bed's encumbrance.
Heavy mattresses that she had to remove. Bed rails that had to be knocked loose. Even the blankets and the top quilt put up a fight.
And almost won.
Tasìa bent to catch her breath after the struggle to free herself from the sheets. She put her stiletto back. One pillow that attempted to smother her had to be dealt with in a most unseemly manner.
After catching her breath, Tasìa decided that she was good to go.
She finally kicked out one of the bed rails by hitting it from beneath with the back of her boot.
So much work! She was once a nun, now a thief. Both jobs are for lazy girls. But she had to persevere. Annebél was being eaten by tigers. But, Tasìa had also hope.
Which would see her through.
Maybe there was enough of Annebél left to save. She's getting her legs eaten off as Tasìa struggled to rescue herself from the dire dungeon, and Tasìa will have to spoon feed Annebél for the rest of the redhead's life because Raúl is not going to stick around for a girl he couldn't do the tango with.
She finally wrestled the middle post loose, while her mind grew paranoid with worry. Oxygen deprivation can cause mental retardation, she reminded herself. Maybe, she wasn't really drunk just now. Maybe, she suffered brain damage.
Tasìa shrugged as she approached the gate.
All we can do now is wait and see, and that should suffice because we have hope.
She planted the rail against the wall in the first bar. She leaned on it. It refused to bulge.
All she needed was to move the gate just a few feet so she could slip through. The bedpost buckled and bent. The gate bars must have been heavier than she estimated.
She would need a second post to help her bear the brunt of the force. Tasìa ran back to retrieve one.
She needed something that could bind the two posts together, like duct tape. Looking around she found a long extension cord tucked away in a closet. She cut it in half and tied the post together with sailor knots on both ends to secure it.
When she tried to leverage the bedposts against the gate where the end bar met the wall, the wire she had tied on the bottom of the bedpost slipped off and the entire assembly of it fell apart.
Tasìa cussed a blue fury after she threw the bedpost down.
"Can't win for shit. Motherfuck it all!"
She heard the elegant sound of a lady's boots descending the nearby stairs as they strode ever nearer.
Annebél peaked around the corner. Her red hair cascaded against her shoulder, prettily.
Upon catching sight of Tasìa, the brawler laughed uproariously. Tasìa joined in.
She caught her breath, once more, when Annebél stood in front of her.
"Hey, pretty lady, did you just kill something?"
Annebél raised her chin and right brow.
"Why do you ask?"
"Cause your nipples are poking through, rock hard."