Dungeon; Is it Really Necessary to Keep them in your Basement?
"Your Majesty," Orange reported as he knelt in front of the throne in Lelouch's audience room in the front building of the palace, "all mission objectives have now been completed. The deserters, as well as the rebel leaders have been apprehended, and we have recaptured all of the UFN delegates who were use as bait. In addition, Princess Nunnaly Vi Britannia has been taken into our custody, and is being detained in the blue rooms on the lower level of the rear palace, as your Highness instructed.
Unfortunately, a few of the Black Knights and their supporters still elude us." Here, Orange paused for a moment and looked up at me, where I sat on an ornate chair beside Lelouch's throne. "According to our intelligence reports, your acquaintance Ryan Lance is currently their acting commander. Baroness Viletta Nu and Princess Cornelia are also among those who have evaded our net, but we are confident that they will make some attempt to release their comrades, at which time we will have them by the throats. Also, C.C. is missing. That is all."
Lelouch fingered his chin thoughtfully.
"I see," he replied. "Well done, Jeremiah. Continue your work on rounding up the remnants of the black knight leaders, but leave C.C. to her own devices. She is no longer of any concern to our current objectives. You may go."
Orange saluted and marched out of the room, leaving me alone with Lelouch and, inexplicably, Schniezel, who had a very blank expression on his face. Noticing my interest, Lelouch stood up and curtly told the tall blonde man to leave, which he immediately did after saluting as Orange had done, and with a similar look of loyal obedience.
"I thought you and your brother were enemies," I commented. "Ryan said he was launching F.L.E.I.J.A.s in that battle, right?" Lelouch winced.
"Not exactly," he murmured, and then fell silent. I waited a few minutes for him to speak, but all he did was type on the laptop computer he had pulled from its holder on the side of his throne.
"Um," I began, "if I remember my royal genealogy right, don't you and Princess Nunnaly share a mother as well as a father?"
"What of it," he snapped, "considering I obliterated both of them?" I couldn't help but gasp.
"S-seriously?" I stammered. He glared at me, bobbed his head once, and turned back to whatever he was working on. Apparently, thanks to our conversation in the hallway yesterday, he was no longer trying to hide his foul mood from me.
"What's going on?" I asked softly. "You look like a rubber band stretched to the breaking point."
"Nunnaly," he murmured, and then trailed off. "She and I used to be… very close. I don't really like having her as… as my prisoner, if you must know; as my enemy."
"You kind of had it coming though," I reminded him. "Interpersonal relationships aside, your politics and hers just don't mesh very well, at least from what I knew of her during her time as Viceroy." His gaze was stony as he met my eyes. He knew that. "I'm just saying what I see," I sighed, raising my hands in a gesture of surrender.
He turned back to his computer screen, and I stood and flounced out of the room with no particular destination in mind. Even though his mask was dropped, I still couldn't find his motivation. If he was so upset that his little sister was his enemy, why didn't he just quit being evil and make up with her? it didn't make sense, and somehow I had trouble believing that he was just the nasty sort of person who oppressed people for fun, though he did a fair impression of it.
I wandered back into the residential palace and just kept looking for stairs going down, wanting to know how many basement levels the building had. The kitchen was on the first level, the laundry on the second, and the storage facility for all of the record books that didn't fit into the library was on the third. From the quantity of dust and cobwebs all over everything, I assumed that it was the bottom level, but when I heard footsteps coming down a hallway, I ducked inside a room and peered around the door, which I left slightly ajar, to watch a pair of masked security goons march down the corridor like sentries.
As I waited for them to pass far enough away that I could safely duck out and find the stairs back up, I turned to examine the room, and was shocked to find that it was not, as I had thought, a storage space. It was entirely made of metal except for the carpeting, and there was a button panel by the door, almost like…
Like an elevator.
Bingo.
I shut the door properly and the mechanism hummed to life, sliding metal grille elevator doors out of the wall to close me off from the ordinary wood-paneled door. The panel had two sets of buttons; a vertical line of round ones that looked like they belonged to an ordinary elevator, and a keypad with a little screen above it that reminded me very strongly of the machine used to input debit card pin numbers at the supermarket.
"If I were Lelouch," I murmured aloud, "what would my password be? Let's try 'Nunnaly.'" The minute my finger came in contact with the first key I knew I had messed up big time, because if these buttons weren't fingerprint sensitive, I was a lizard. I bent my fingers toward myself, using the backs of my nails to type the word.
With a faint beeping sound, a little light by the keypad turned red. It was the wrong password. I cursed, quietly, of course, and tried 'Suzaku,' 'Kururugi Suzaku,' 'Nunnaly Vi Britannia,' and even 'Orange Boy.' None of them worked. Suddenly I remembered a news broadcast, the one that had showed Lelouch being voted into the UFN with the representatives at gunpoint. Near the very beginning, a boy had climbed up on the security gates and yelled to him, insisting that he was his best friend from when they went to school there.
What was the academy's name again? 'Ashford,' that was it. I tried that, but it failed too. What had that student called Lelouch? Larson, no, Lander, no, Lamprey, Lampru, Lamperouge?
'Nunnaly Lamperouge,' was the seventh password I tried, and to my utter amazement, the light turned green and my plummeting stomach informed me that I was being conveyed down the elevator shaft at a vary rapid pace. For a moment all I could see through the grille was the wall as it flew upwards past me, but then the wall ended abruptly, and I found myself looking down on a massive cylindrical expanse, far too huge to be called a room. It was dimly lit with pale silvery lights, and there was a catwalk with a railing that spiraled around the whole thing, from the roof to the floor.
The elevator stopped at the first level, though I saw that it could go lower. It had automatically taken me to the highest level, and I decided I'd get out and have a look around before deciding if I wanted to go lower.
My parents' house had a hallway for the upper levels that was open on one side and looked beyond a railing down into the living room. This was a little like that, but on a mega-grand-stupendously-larger scale. The walls were made entirely from what appeared to be ordinary Plexiglas, in sheets about five centimeters thick, with holes about a centimeter wide drilled through at intervals to allow for airflow. The "rooms" that they enclosed were about the size of the bedroom in my old apartment, with a toilet in each, and no other furniture, though there were restraints for neck, wrists and ankles hanging limply from the walls.
There were three or four people in each, alternating in gender with men in every other cell, and women in the cells in between. I realized that they were cells because all of the people inside were wearing those straitjacket prison outfits, and they all looked exhausted and depressed and hopeless and, well, like prisoners in a dungeon ought to look.
I made my way down a staircase I found after some hunting, not wanting to walk down the entire spiral ramp or get back into the elevator and hope the password hadn't changed, but curious to see what the place was like further down. It would descend six steps, and then make a ninety degree turn, so that it formed something like a square spiral. When I reached the bottom, I took a look at the inmates of the first cell I saw, and was surprised to see two slightly familiar faces. They were both female scientists; one, Nina, the developer of the F.L.E.I.J.A. warhead unless I missed my guess, and the other was the assistant to the guy who developed the Lancelot. There were two other women, one with long blonde hair, and the other with a hairdo very similar to mine; short brown layers, though her hair was much straighter and hung close to her face, whereas mine was stubbornly wavy and had to be kept even shorter than hers if it was to be manageable.
I stepped hesitantly closer, but my high-heeled shoes (to match my pale pink silk dress with the wide, flowing skirt) made a loud clicking sound on the smooth stone floor no matter how gently I set them down, and they looked up at me. The short-haired woman glared at me with an intensity that made up for the lifelessness of the first level.
"What do you want?" she snarled. I took a step back; feeling like a large fierce tiger had me cornered, instead of a woman in a straitjacket behind a Plexiglas wall. I told myself to calm down; her enraged aura wasn't nearly as strong as Lelouch's, and I wasn't very scared of him anymore.
"I'm just having a look 'round," I explained, taking another step back. "Wait, I saw you on TV, didn't I? You're one of the Four Holy Swords, correct?"
"What of it?" she spat venomously. I sighed. This was going nowhere.
"Nothing at all, oh revered saber-tooth tigress," I retorted, whirling in a cloud of pink skirt and flouncing off in a different direction. Walking along the bottom floor of the dungeon was much like being at the bottom of a big wastepaper basket, I mused as I clicked along the floor, peering shyly at all of the people within the cells. The general response was a fairly even divide between harsh glaring and supreme indifference.
I spotted a man I took for Kyoshiro Tohdoh, kneeling seiza with his eyes closed, like he was meditating. I saw a girl around my own age with messy pinkish hair, in a cell with a pair of girls who were far too young to be in any sort of jail. One had black hair and looked the perfect picture of a Japanese twelve-or-thirteen-year-old. The other had platinum blonde hair with an odd cut, and couldn't have been more than ten. She stared out at me with pleading eyes, and I was so caught off-guard that I blurted out in Britannian, "how old are you?"
It came out sounding a great deal harsher than I intended, and there was a sudden sharp movement from the cell directly beside the one that had caught my attention. I shifted my gaze to within to see none other than Li Xingke, on one knee with his arms up in a defensive manner, as though preparing to rush to the aid of the little girl I had just, well, kind of shouted at, heedless of the fact that there was an impenetrable wall between them. He seemed to realize this too, and settled for giving me one of those 'looks-that-kill,' disregarding once again the fact that they really can't.
I took a breath and addressed the girl again, more quietly in Japanese.
"Sumimasen," I started, "I'm sorry; I was just surprised. How old are you?"
"I'll be nine next month," the girl replied in a squeaky little voice. She must have been crying recently, and the black-haired Japanese girl put an arm around her.
"So young to carry the fate of so many," announced a very familiar over-dramatic voice from behind me. I turned around to see Lelouch striding down the stairs towards us. "She's Empress Tien Zi, of the Chinese Federation," he explained for my benefit. "She and the other UFN delegates are going to be staying here for a while."
"While you mess up their countries?" I guessed shrewdly. He laughed, and I didn't like this one nearly so much as the others. It was entirely fake, without any of the surprise or other emotions I had come to expect when this response was elicited from him.
"Xingke," he addressed the Chinese man, who now looked very much like he would throw himself at the wall until it smashed. Was he that determined to protect the little Empress? But it didn't matter, since they were in different cells. "It would seem you've become acquainted with the woman who provided the information on the imperial security systems. This is Monozuki Koneko, daughter of a certain pioneer in modern electronic guard systems."
Xingke looked suddenly alert when he heard that, and I could guess what was going through his head. In his mind, I was either a double agent who sent him information to trap him, or I was a prisoner in a prettier straitjacket.
"Yes," Lelouch continued, hamming it up, "she's well-known for being fearless, and has excellent martial arts skill along with the mental faculties required to prepare and execute strategy, but even she is not without her weaknesses. When she heard that a certain little boy was imprisoned, her defenses were useless. You are familiar, no doubt, with Jayden Lance's unfortunate incarceration? In exchange for his freedom, she forfeited her own, and agreed to remain here as my wife.
So now you see how futile it is to struggle against me! There is no one in this world I cannot conquer! Just be grateful I did not decide that a Chinese-Britannian match was more suitable." Here he leered at the Empress, who whimpered and shrunk into the chest of the Japanese girl, who glared balefully at their captor.
'Jerk,' I thought. 'You can say pervy stuff about me if you like, it doesn't really bother me that much, but she's tiny! What the heck!'
"As for you, my dear Empress," he addressed me in a voice that could have come from a snake, "you will refrain from wandering this far down in the future. I have changed the passwords for the elevator, and I do not advise attempting to break them again."
"I take it I triggered a silent alarm with my failed attempts," I groused. I had been rather expecting that when I had decided to take the stairs.
"That is correct," he affirmed, and strode back over to the stairs, gesturing for me to precede him.
"Manners," I asked, "or perhaps you don't trust me behind you?" He smirked and, not feeling like incurring that first lovers' spat just yet, I swept past him up the stairs to the first landing, where the elevator awaited.
We rode in relative silence for a while until finally I couldn't stand it any more and turned to face him with what I was sure was a pout on my face.
"What was that all about?" I demanded hotly. "That didn't sound anything like what you told me!"
"I prefer people to see me as the sort of person who would take a woman in a power-play, than know the truth. It is for the sake of royal image, you understand?" He turned to look down at me calmly, and I found myself mesmerized for a moment by his appearance. He was attractive, I realized, as I stared into his eyes, which were suddenly heavy with sorrow, though a moment later he looked away and his expression went back to normal.
When we exited the elevator, it was through a door in an upper hallway, and the secondary keypad for putting in the password slid into the wall and was covered by a sheet of steel. The elevator looked like a perfectly ordinary one, and the only people who would ever know that it was the way into the secret dungeon were those who already knew about it. I had gotten lucky apparently, by finding it while it was already prepared for a descent into the lower levels.
Lelouch was like that, I realized suddenly. I, who was predisposed to believe in the unbelievable, would be the only one besides people like Suzaku who already knew who could figure out that his public face was a mask. As he turned away, I saw a sinking of his shoulders, like he was exhausted, or depressed, or even a little regretful.
Nobody who was truly evil would look like that.
In the middle of the hallway, looking intently at his retreating figure, I swore to myself that I was going to find out what made him tick. For some reason, a perfectly nice individual was playing the role of the wicked Emperor, and I aimed to find out what that reason was.
My hobby had become an obsession.
Tsuzuku!
Next time in Of Curiosity and Cats:
I chose of my own will to embark on this path, and I won't regret it. I refuse to regret it.
But there is some merit to the idea that ignorance is bliss.
Still, if I did not know, than I wouldn't know what I could do to support him; I wouldn't know how to love him.
I do love him, don't I…
Chapter 7) Midnight; Under the Sable Velvet Sky!
