Archimedes
Archimedes and Nguyen made their way through the large hamster tube and finally reached the Theater of Pop. The moment they entered a section of tubing above the theater seating, Archimedes heard a click behind them as the door through which they had just come fully closed behind them.
Archimedes sighed. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
There, about fifteen feet in front of them stood a large green disk with sunglasses and weirdly thin limbs terminating in massive gloves and sneakers. It was tall enough to stand upright in the tube and blocked their way forward.
“Oh, it’s that cute mascot for that lemon soda, Chill Dot,” Nguyen said, clearly recognizing the thing. “I even played the shitty video games it was featured in.”
Archimedes tried to figure out what to do, frozen on his hands and knees as he stared at the large dot in front of them. He was unsure if it was just another obstacle they could get past by pressing a button.
Then the Chill Dot moved. Its puffy white left glove waved at them as it tilted its face. Then the other hand came from behind it wielding a large butcher knife, and the anthropomorphized disk started to run toward them, silent except for the soft whir of motors and gears.
Nguyen, who was ahead of Archimedes, yelled “Shit! Not cute! Not cute!” as she turned around and started to crawl back the way they’d come, Archimedes following behind her.
“That’s it! Keep going forward!” Danielle shouted.
“There is a hole in the floor just in front of you!” Emma added loudly from below.
After a moment, he saw Nguyen disappear into the hole in front of them before he followed after her, the large green sunglass-wearing disk close enough behind him that even though it hadn’t touched him, he could almost feel the swooshing of the giant knife on his ass as he entered the tube.
“Right! Go right!” he heard Danielle shout, only for Lucy to contradict her in the same breath.
“No, LEFT! GO LEFT!” Lucy screamed.
“What the hell is that 3D Pacman rip-off?! Just go either way, bro! Or— Left!” Chedderfield yelled.
When Archimedes saw Nguyen take the left tube, he followed after her. From that point, he could see the tubes around them. There were dozens, some going up and down at an angle, just straight ninety-degree crawl holes like the first one they had gone down, most of them going lengthwise across the Theater of Pop.
“There’s another spiked wall blocking us this way,” Nguyen said. “Damnit! We should have gone right.”
“Right is blocked too,” Danielle called up. “I just—”
“Where the fucking hell are the buttons? Fuck! YES! FOUND ONE!” Lucy shouted enthusiastically. But Lucy’s voice was followed by a scream below.
“It’s open,” Nguyen said, moving forward. Archimedes, concerned about the scream as he couldn’t even identify whose it was, did his best to try and focus on going forward instead of thinking about it.
In less than thirty seconds, they hit another junction with one route leading down, one leading left, and one leading right.
“Which way do we go now?” Nguyen called down to the group.
“I can’t tell. It’s . . . I think the left one loops back around, and the right one . . . I can’t tell. The bottom one is blocked,” Danielle answered. “There is a spike trap at the bottom of that tube. If you go into it you’re going to get stabbed.”
“Don’t run away kids! I’m coming for you!” the green dot behind Archimedes said in the most 90s-mascot voice possible.
“What do you want to do?” Archimedes asked Nguyen as she crawled in front of him.
She looked back at him and then shrugged. “Ummm . . . I don’t . . . I need more information to make a decision. I’m not sure.”
“Hello, kids! Do you want something cool and refreshing?” another voice just like the green dot’s chirped merrily, but this one came from their right, not from behind them.
“Arcade game tactics, Nguyen. We’re going left,” Archimedes decided, reaching his hand out and pushing Nguyen’s butt as hard as he could toward the left pathway without playing dong chim.
“But the left just loops around,” Nguyen complained. “We don’t even know if it’ll be blocked or not or how—”
“We need those murderous mechanized mascots to follow us down the loop while the other two figure out how to open that spike trap for the route down,” Archimedes said, glancing below to spot where the other group was as he hurried through the hamster tunnel. After taking a left, there had been another slowly curving upward route, and the angle meant he was finally able to see clearly down into the theater.
There, on the theater floor, he could see Lucy frantically dodging punches from weird robots wearing only blue-and-white-striped shirts like they were Hanna Barbera cartoon characters drawn on a budget too tight to afford pants.
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“God damn these cartoon caveman wannabes,” he could hear Lucy cursing. “Why the hell couldn’t they give them pants even!?”
“Why does a robot need pants? Even a ken doll would have more down there than they do!” Danielle snapped as she shot one of the robots trying to punch Lucy.
“Didn’t you read Mechanical Crafter? Robots need pants too!” Chedderfield shot back as he used whip strikes in rapid succession to trip up the enemies trying to surround them.
“I said I’d get to it!” Danielle replied, “Do you want me to spend all the bedroom time reading?!”
“You find the button yet, kid?” Chedderfield asked Emma as he dodged Danielle’s potentially lethal question.
“Mwahaha. You’re probably used to hearing that a lot, Queso,” Lucy snickered.
Emma popped her head out from behind a row of seats. “Not sure it’s the right one, but I found a button under seat 2F. I’m just worried if we press it—”
“We have to press it! They’re going to die up there if we wait till they reach the wall and the button activates a different trap,” Lucy shot back.
“Lucy, just give me a damn minute before you hit another one of those buttons, okay? I haven’t cleared this wave yet,” Chedderfield said as he tripped yet another robot, the damage from continuously being knocked over snapping its red reindeer horns and causing its neck to bend awkwardly from the metal starting to fold.
“How— about— a nice— tropical— p-pu—” the damaged robot’s crackling, static-filled voice warbled as it stood back up only to fall again.
“You can stop with the crowd-control crap. Just kill them. It doesn’t matter if you take a hit. I did. They don’t hurt that bad,” Lucy spat out. “They’re terrible at fisting!”
“That’s seriously inappropriate to say in front of the kid,” Nguyen shouted down at them from where the two were still in the hamster tubes crawling forward for their lives.
“You can take a fist. She can't,” Chedderfield said as he motioned toward Danielle with his head.
“Then Danielle needs to get out of here because we have to hit that button,” Lucy said as she used her curved short sword to gouge the electric chips out of one of the terrifying mascots before turning to Emma and shouting, “Hit the button!”
Emma looked at Lucy and then at Chedderfield. “But—”
“Don’t hit— Damn!” Chedderfield tried to override the order but was interrupted as he switched from the whip to the macuahuitl and chopped down with the large sharp weapon, nearly bisecting the mechanical mascot he was fighting.
“HIT THE BUTTON!” Lucy shrieked, and Emma, shrinking back from the shout, slammed the button.
“See! It wasn’t the right one. Emma, we need that next—” Chedderfield’s voice was drowned out by a boom as one of the animatronic creatures he’d destroyed exploded and caught on fire.
“There’s just too many of them,” Danielle yelled as she fired her laser rifle at two tropical punch machines running toward her from the other side of the theater.
Archimedes could finally see the exit ahead of them, but the route was completely blocked. As best as he could see around Nguyen, there was at least one of the dots blocking the exit. He thought about turning around for a minute, trying to loop the enemies the same way that they had when they had first reached the top, but just as that thought had entered his head, he heard something below them that sounded just like a bone breaking. Terrified of what might be happening to his friends, he grabbed Nguyen’s foot and yanked her toward him, awkwardly climbing over her in the already tight tunnel. He equipped his spear into his right hand.
“What are you— It’s too strong! I can see its stats, it’s going to kill us if we can’t get the leverage to move and fight properly!” Nguyen tried to plead with Archimedes as he shifted, his weight pinning her in place beneath him as he continued to climb over her. Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to get in front of her. The creature was already right there, inches away from being in range of stabbing them.
“I don’t care how strong it is,” Archimedes replied as he took his spear and thrust as hard as he could at the big green dot.
“Ouch, be careful!” Nguyen pleaded beneath him.
“I’m sorry. This’ll be over quickly,” Archimedes said as his spear struck the creepy green disk right in the sunglasses. Nguyen’s earlier observation was correct. It was strong. Even after being stabbed with as much force as Archimedes could muster, the only thing that had broken was the large pair of sunglasses.
“You are way too heavy,” Nguyen grumbled as Archimedes saw a gun barrel appear beneath him. “And this is going to burn a little.”
Right! Burn! Archimedes remembered that he had a ranged skill. He had been hesitant to use it because they were in such a tight space, and he feared that it would backfire, but as the dot of doom stabbed out, he realized he didn’t have a choice.
Nguyen fired her laser, the beam striking the exposed eyes behind the sunglasses, and Archimedes followed up with Fire Breath, burning down and melting the mechanical mascot’s exterior only to leave the exposed metal frame it was made of still visible, but the still-working machine crept even closer.
“There! That’s it! That’s the spot! That chip looks like the motherboard!” Nguyen pointed out a spot that was covered with three fans and what looked like a liquid cooling system.
“Right,” Archimedes said, thrusting one more time with his spear as he hit the spot perfectly and destroyed the circuit board, causing the robot to break down right there.
“Now can you . . . can you let me pass? Or do you want to be in front?” Nguyen asked.
“Yeah. Sorry, I need to go ahead in case we run into another one of those,” Archimedes said.
The two of them went forward, the defeat of the green dot giving the group below enough breathing room to finish off their own issues, as Archimedes and Nguyen waited at the wall. After a few minutes, Emma finally found the right button, and as she hit it, the spikes in the wall retracted, and the wall itself fell forward through the tubing, transforming into an open-air slide connected to another translucent tube below. Archimedes saw the opportunity for what it was and dove down the slide. But instead of letting himself fall into another maze of translucent tubing, he grabbed the side of the slide with his hands, halting his fall.
“Shit, here I come,” Nguyen warned before Archimedes felt her booted feet hit his shoulders.
Archimedes couldn’t help but grunt from the weight, but quickly ordered, “Climb over and grab onto me. We’re getting out of here.”
Nguyen shimmied down his body until he was face to face with her. She asked, “What next?”
Instead of answering, he grabbed the edge of the open-air slide, leapt over the side, and activated Leap Rush to soften his landing—only to realize that he had never swapped it back in after he replaced it with I’m Not Dead Yet—and the two of them fell through the air.