cascade | kotlc

14. An Exile Excursion

 They were infiltrating Exile.

June popped down her motorcycle and let it expand into Streamliner. She hopped on it and gunned the engine.

"Go ahead, June," Blur told her. "Your job is to stir up as much noise and chaos as you can. We'll follow suit and maximize that chaos to attract the dwarves."

She grinned. "Oh, I'm much better than Keefe at that."

Pushing the handlebars forward, the engine revved and she charged forward, drifting and tilting to pass corners as she swerved around the hallways, letting the engine's deafening roar echo down the chambers. She could hear prisoners groaning angrily, awakening at the noise.

She snapped her fingers, focusing the air around her engine and letting it magnify into a colossal soundwave, and an earsplitting vroom shot down the halls as June plugged her ears. She passed through a corridor and curved into an intersection. She looked around, searching for who looked the most unruly, and decided on the left, as she darted down the hallway and pulled out her gun.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

The deafening bangs reverbrated everywhere, so loud they seemed like cracks of thunder as June closed her eyes and focused on the air, stirring it into a hurricane. The air around her swirled, cycling faster and faster, before a column of wind shot up from the gorund and rotated toward the previous intersection, the whooshing air streaking across the darkness as she slammed the break and changed course, turning backwards.

All the prisoners were awake now, groaning at the noise, and June hadn't seen any guards yet. Some had started to bang on their cells, the rattling of the metal screechy and hard. June focused on the clatter and quickened it, augmenting it to the sound of pelting hail, like consecutive gunshots, almost.

Suddenly the alarm started to blare. She grinned. Finally the guards realized their existence.

Yells came from behind her and she gunned Streamliner, sending them charging forward and into a T-intersection.

"Let's give you a bit more chaos," she muttered, setting down an elemental crystal and whispering at it.

It was as if a curtain of air dropped across the hallway, distorting the light and twisting perspective, as it ballooned into an invisible sheet, now projecting the image of a dead end. The intersection had been blurred by the thick, almost solid blanket of air.

Screams, she wasn't sure if they were from her friends, the guards, or the prisoner, but they were screams none-the-less. She let the sound intensify, and a chorus of shrieks blasted at her eardrums. She quickly stuffed the other two elemental crystals to her ear, blocking out the noise.

She turned a corner and unleashed her melder, the paralyzing shots fizzing against the wall, like crackling fire as she passed another corner, then another. Left, left, and another left.

Wait... what?
She gasped as she turned back to her elemental crystal, having completed a loop. The dwarves had forced her into a dead end.

She growled and picked it up, shoving the crystals into her pocket as she pulled out Glistensteel. She would probably have to fight.

Sensing for disturbances in the air ahead, she rode Streamliner back into the hallways she had passed before, almost crashing into the walls in her urgency. Where was her sister? Where was Fitz, and Keefe?

Another turn. This time she kept track of her path, swerving right as she was faced with the Room Where Chances are lost. And even worse -- there was the Council in its entirety -- noticeably without bodyguards -- standing loomingly right in front of her.