Stuck at the Galleria

Act 3: Tagged! (part 3)

The explosion knocks the ropes out of whack for a bit, but I stay calm and keep my hands on the knot I'd grabbed as they swung. Tre, however, is frantically trying to get a good grip on the thing, but he gets it after two or three tries.

"It's super quicky rope time!" I say.

Tre stares at me blankly. "¿Que?"

"Oh, right, lemme explain it. The rest of us say 'super quicky something time' whenever we want something done fast."

He blinks twice, then says, "You guys are weeeeird."

I laugh a bit. "You didn't notice before?"

He sticks his tongue out at me. I scoff at him playfully in response before I look up at the other ropes. There was an open vent on the other side, but there were two ropes between ours and the vent and it was too far away to get there on this one, so we'd have to swing.

"Hey, Tre, you ever seen that movie Tarzan?"

"Uh, yeah..." he says nervously. "Why are you asking this now?"

"Because, we're about to live it. Key advice: don't look down."

I grab under the knot and start rocking the rope back and forth. Tre tries doing it too but slips to the bottom of the rope instead, and he yelps a bit as he descends. It wouldn't be that big a deal if he fell, though. He could survive falling 7 or 8 feet, right?

I try not to think about the physics, and instead look at the rope I was on. We were gaining a bit of momentum, enough to hopefully make the first jump. Only one way to find out if that was the case...

I let go of the rope and reach forward. My hands grip the other rope and stop me from moving any further. Phew. I look back at Tre, who's somehow managed to get himself a bit higher up as the first rope still rocks.

"Jump, man!" I yell down to him.

"I can't, it's too far out!" he replies.

"What are you, chicken?"

He gives me a low look, then swings the rope back. He comes back over as fast as he can possibly go, then jumps. He completely misses my rope, but somehow he catches the one in front of me and gets on it without skipping a beat. 

"Who's the chicken now?" he says. I smirk, then nod to acknowledge his sudden burst of bravery.

"Didn't know you had it in you," I say as I swing my rope backward. I leap off of it and catch the next one right over him.

"Great, now the hard part comes," I mutter, looking up at the vent. We'd have to climb the rope all the way up there if we wanted to get to it.

"Eugh, rope climbing. I can never do this crap in gym, it sucks."

"Well, I hope you can learn fast." I say as I start pulling myself up. I get to the top of it and into the vent in about 2 minutes, but Tre lags behind me and gets there 3 minutes later.

"What took so long?" I say as we both crawl further into the vent.

"Eh, shut up," he replies under his breath. He pauses for a sec, then in a louder and less irritated tone, he asks, "Shouldn't this vent be a lot smaller, since all it really needs to carry is, well, air?"

"Well, I never really thought about it like that, but I suppose so."

He stops crawling. "Also, how is it supporting us?"

I try to ignore the question, but a hissing noise keeps me from doing so. The both of us looked around the vent to see where it came from, but before we could find it the walls started to creak.

I give him a glare that a lion would wince at. "You had to ask tha--aw, frak!"

The vent splits itself in front of us, and the piece we were on falls downward. Tre and I both spill out of the opening, and he lets out a scream worthy of being in a horror movie.