Dreams in Monochrome - A New Elysium Story [ongoing - hiatus]

Triangles

Theo watched Erika carefully as she moved through the room. Her intuition was still leading her across treacherous paths sure-footedly, but she had slowed down significantly now. At one point, she stopped and looked back at him, and although half of her face was concealed by her mask, her expression still told him that she, too, sensed that something wasn't right about this level.

They circled through the room repeatedly, pacing around the door in the center like two predators on the prowl. But neither Erika's intuition nor the dust that floated in the air unveiled the right path towards their goal.

They met up again at a ledge from which they could see the door, suspended way out of their reach and slightly above them. With a deep sigh, Erika sat down on the floor with her legs dangling over the edge.

"This is it. The one level I never managed to crack," she confessed to him as he sat down next to her.

"Huh. So you actually don't know if it's really the last level?" he asked to tease her, as he leaned back and rested his weight on his palms behind his back.

She shrugged. "I suppose I don't. At first I thought I just wasn't good enough to find the way, so I kept on trying. I got a lot better at moving around in this place-"

"No shit," he remarked quietly. The way she moved around in here still had him in awe.

"...but I can never find a way to this door." She turned to look at him, which cast a ripple through her floating, golden hair. "But seeing how you figured out this place so quickly, I thought you might be able to?"

Once more, he scrutinized that door, looming mysteriously ahead of them, amidst an area that was conspicuously free of any dust. He slowly shook his head.

"Sorry. I think it might be impossible to reach," he told her. "Actually, I'm fairly certain. I guess the person who made this place just didn't finish building this level."

She crossed her arms before her chest and cocked her head to the side as she looked at him. "And you're really trying to tell me you haven't been here before?"

There was no point in keeping the truth from her any longer, but he also really didn't want to have the entirety of this discussion right here, right now. In a subconscious nervous gesture, he lifted a hand to run it through his hair, but of course, in this space, he only had a hood and a mask. He tugged on the hood instead, pulling it down further over his concealed face.

"Yeah, I've been to cyberspace before," Theo said quietly, "But not here, specifically."

"Yet you moved through the levels in a breeze. And you talk like you know this place..."

"That's just because I figured out how it works," he said.

He leaned over to her and pointed at a spot in the distance, where the haze was passing horizontally before a visible patch of black space in the distance. It was far easier to spot there than in front of the white structures that made up the walkways and stairs.

"Do you see that in the air? Right there in front of us?"

"Uh... the door?" she asked.

"No, not the door." He rolled his eyes, "It's in the air. Something like... dust. It's a stream of little particles."

She turned her head and gave him a long, hard stare, as if he was some sort of lunatic. Then she looked back in the direction he had indicated.

"I don't see it," she said flatly. "Are you shitting me?"

"No, it's really there," he insisted, "It's a constant datastream, barely visible, but there is a pattern to it. It's how I could move in the other rooms. I think it's part of this place's source code. Once I saw it, I understood the laws of this place a bit better."