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posting this early as a treat 🙃 not proofread so please call me out in the comments
-july 6th, 2024
"Jay?" Nya called out into the empty arcade room. She turned back to the other ninja. "Where is he?"
"Well, he has to be here somewhere," Cole said.
None of them believed it. The whole building consisted of two rooms: the one they'd just left, and the one all six of them were standing in now. Jay had had nowhere to go.
"Unless he left?" Lloyd suggested, but he didn't think that was plausible either.
Nya frowned. "By himself? Without telling us?"
"There's always a reasonable explanation," Zane said calmly.
Nya wandered to the corner full of arcade cabinets: the last place anyone had seen Jay. "Oops," she said as her elbow hit a button on the Prime Empire machine.
The pixelated screen flashed to life, revealing red text on a black background. "Would you like to enter Prime Empire?"
Nya stepped back in surprised. "Wait. Jay got the game working?"
She pushed the cabinet away from the wall to check if it was still plugged in. In her search, she found a loose panel on the machine that flipped open to reveal a small compartment.
"What's the 'reasonable explanation' for an arcade cabinet having a secret chamber?" Kai quipped, glancing over at Zane.
Cole shrugged. Suddenly, he gasped and pointed toward the ceiling. "A security camera! That'll have the answers."
Y/n's eyes landed on a computer sitting on a cramped table below. She tapped the space bar on its keyboard, watching it light up in response. "I think it's connected to this computer," she shared with the group, who crowded around her.
The device was locked with a password.
"The cliff of an infinite climb or the line of an endless fall," Lloyd read the hint aloud.
"Vertical asymptote."
"Bless you," Kai said, staring at the peach ninja as though she'd grown a second head.
"No, I believe it's the password," Zane explained.
Y/n first typed it in as one word with only the first letter capitalized. Incorrect. She tried all lowercase. Incorrect. Was the Mechanic an all-caps kind of guy? She tested it.
Correct.
She pulled up the camera footage for the night, rewinding to when they first entered the arcade. On the screen, Lloyd screamed soundlessly as a robot arm fell on his shoulder. He flew backward into Y/n.
Y/n of the present winced as she watched the scene play out.
"Um, you can fast-forward that part," Lloyd said, his face flushed. "In fact, we should erase this after we're done."
