Fourth Wall

Nineteen: The Balance

Wrong.

Very, very wrong.

Chloe's luck had run out. She wasn't sure if it had something to do with the universe being unbalanced, but she had gotten away with too much, too easily thus far. 

And so it was that she came to be running as fast her little kitty paws could take her through Moonrise Towers with two Absolutists hot on her (literal) tail.

So much for stealth.

She turned a sharp corner and ran down a long hallway, looking desperately for a place to hide. Her heart was hammering in her chest, and not just from the running.

Halsin was right! They were infecting people with mindflayer tadpoles here! Chloe had seen it herself, crouching behind the wooden bannister of a staircase where she had a clear view of the - by all appearances human - man dressed in a bloodied apron as he removed a tadpole from a large jar squirming with them. Even from far away, Chloe's feline eyes could see his tweezers gripping the wriggling thing shook ever so slightly.

She'd wanted to turn away when he brought it to the face of an unconscious dwarf strapped to a gurney. But she didn't. She watched as the parasite wriggled with excitement the nearer it got to the dwarf's flesh. She watched as it wiggled beneath his eyelid and disappeared. The same must have happened to herself, to all of them aboard the Nautilus.

But she couldn't dwell on that, not now. Not while there were two very angry drow men chasing her through the dark halls of a tower.

She ran past a chest and doubled back, slithering under it as the armored drow guards ran right past her and down the corridor.

It would seem the Absolutists were suspicious even of foreign animals. Chloe took a moment, flattened beneath the chest, to catch her breath. She intended to return to her party and report what she'd found, but she was so busy running for her life that she'd gotten entirely lost inside the walls of the Tower.

Chloe poked her head out and saw the coast was clear. She crawled from her hiding place and shook herself. Her black fur had become full of dust. She began trotting back the way she came, sniffing for any signs of the way she'd come. It worked for a bit, until an area with more foot traffic, and therefore more smells. And all the corridors looked the same.

She slinked behind fixtures and torches, remaining undetected on her silent paws as she pattered across the room in the first direction she thought might lead back to the makeshift exit. But instead, she found a guard asleep at a table, his keys rattling loosely on a hook on his belt, right at cat-height.

"Well there's no fucking way that's not gonna be useful in a minute," Chloe thought to herself, bracing herself to silently retrieve the key loop from the guard's belt.

 In the end she hadn't needed to try all that hard, the guy was absolutely zonked. So, stepping carefully so as not to jingle the keys on the ring in her mouth, she pressed on.

Halsin's words echoed in her head. In and out. She'd already fucked that part up, she reasoned. Why not cause a little mischief while I'm here?

She stepped past a few empty cells, a few with snarling goblins who tried to entice her to their cell doors. She looked about at each cell and decided that without the use of her voice, she'd never be able to decide who was truly worthy of freeing and who would kill her the second they escaped. 

No, she thought. The keys were best used in the hands of the party. She turned around and trotted back to the hub of corridors to try a different direction, and finally found the rocky crevice which she'd crawled through to get inside.