Jinx vaulted over the cubicle wall the moment Cyborg turned to make his departure. Not how she usually dealt with flimsy obstructions in her way, but it was more use to her intact.
Cyborg, being much taller than the typical office worker, was very easy to see over the edge of the cubicle walls. She followed in his general direction from a parallel path, as sounds of the ceiling being punctured rang out sporadically around her. A pair of witches—or rather, two unreasonable facsimiles, complete with stereotyped conical hats—hopped through a new hole in the ceiling in front of her, prompting Jinx to make a left turn.
As she continued down this new path, she heard that monotone "Cyborg" in a few different voices on her left. She saw Cyborg charge between cubicle dividers a short distance in front of her, shortly before he opened the door they had both entered through. She stopped running, while a trio of small skeleton costumes tried to shamble quickly between the same dividers in a futile attempt to catch their declared target.
Right after Cyborg closed the door, she raised an arm overhead, above the height of the cubicle walls, and flung a hex at the door. The effect was nearly unnoticeable on this side of the door, but distorting the hinges on the other side would buy Cyborg a few seconds if the kids tried to open it conventionally.
As it turned out, Cyborg didn't need much more than a couple seconds. She instinctively winced at the cacophony from the stairwell, the ground under her feet resonating with the noise. Whatever he'd done, the door was probably no longer an egress point.
The zombie kids appeared to agree, as after a couple seconds they began wordlessly shambling towards her.
Jinx scoffed. "What, I'm not important enough for you to use my name? Friggin' stuck-up bear bastards."
She jumped off to the side at the sound of the ceiling over her head being torn apart. She was fairly sure the twelve-year-old sized Winnie the Pooh that landed feet-first on the floor wasn't intended to be a direct rebuttal, but it hardly mattered. The new hole in the ceiling was quite a bit larger than the kid that came through it.
With a couple quick steps towards the opening and a nearly vertical leap, she left the basement entirely and landed on the first floor.
Or rather, crashed into something on the first floor.
Her instinctive attempt to roll off of whatever she'd landed on was halted by a small hand clenching down on her leg. She looked behind her to see where the offending entity was, and by the time she'd identified the costume as Piglet she'd already stretched her other leg forward and then slammed the heel of her boot into the kid's face.
The kid released his grip. As Jinxed finished rolling away and standing, she wondered if that degree of force was excessive; but the kid was already halfway off the floor by the time she was fully standing. More importantly, a quick look around revealed kids and blue-glowing eyes scattered in every direction as far as she could see across the lobby, in small clusters around whatever large object was handy.
Picking the direction that seemed safest, she sprinted ahead at full speed. Her acceleration proved too much for the kids to handle, and she got out of the wide-open space of the lobby and into a hallway at the back easily enough. She paused briefly to catch her breath, and to rub the sore spot on her leg.
She silently rolled her eyes. First the metal scratching her arm, then the first bear briefly messing up her legs, then her hair, and now her leg again? She was about to mentally protest at all the physical punishment, when she remembered that Cyborg's arm had been punctured at the elbow and torn open down to the wrist. Maybe what happened to her arm and leg wasn't so bad.
A flicker of motion in her peripheral vision down the hall turned out to be a rolling chair being hurled through the air in her general direction, drawing her attention back to the present. She shoved herself against the wall, reaching the other side of the hall in time to avoid a horribly improper sitting technique.
Her first instinct was to turn around and head back into the lobby, but she quickly stopped herself. The lobby had more than its fair share of chairs, and she preferred not be hit by those either. At the other end of the hall was a set of three zombie kids, newly chairless. Charging past them seemed questionable at best; the single kid that had grabbed her in the lobby was enough to slow her down, and she didn't have enough legs to kick all three of them in the face at once.
Which left her with a vertical approach. The ceiling was too low to try jumping over them...But that meant the ceiling was in easy reach. Rolling her eyes as the trio stumbled in her direction, she tossed a hex at the ceiling in front of her. Obediently, three lines of a rectangle on the ceiling exploded with purple light. The connected piece of ceiling remained attached on the fourth side of the shape, so when it touched the floor it was effectively a ramp up to the second floor.
Not wasting a moment, she quickly sprinted up the opening. When she felt the surface buckle after her first step, she smoothly bent her knee forward to turn the sprint into a leap. The slab's tenuous connection to the ceiling broke as she pushed herself through the air and opening. By the time the chunk of ceiling hit the first floor with a thud, she had planted her hands against the second floor to turn her momentum into a tight roll; and she resumed her sprint with no interrupting motion once her feet touched the ground.
With no kids in sight, she hurriedly changed course towards the back of the lobby. She'd been an unwelcome "guest" in this building before, and the wide staircase that connected the six floors overlooking the lobby was there. Since its primary purpose was to show off the lobby to visitors, as far as she could tell, it didn't connect to the basement and was unlikely to be closed off. More questionable was whether the pounding the building had taken on the roof would damage it.
As it turned out, the staircase was intact. At least, until Jinx hexed the set of stairs connecting to the first floor as she made her way up. The landings showed off the lobby, which meant all those kids in the lobby would see her. No sense leaving them a way to follow her up.
She thought it odd that she hadn't seen any kids around the landing on the second floor, since the staircase was intact and that fight with the pumpkin happened on the roof. The landing around the third floor was also devoid of movement. As was the fourth floor.
She was positively suspicious when the fifth floor's landing was also clear, but stopping to figure out why seemed to be inviting trouble for no advantage, so she pressed on.
A small hand grabbed her leg midstep as she stepped onto the sixth floor.
Jinx had barely enough time to halt her fast pace to stay standing, before two kids from the opposite direction shambled into her, knocking her face-first onto the ground anyway.
She winced as the hand on her leg tightened into a nearly-crushing grip and tried to pull her back...or pull itself forward, if the feel of the other small bodies climbing up her back was any indication.
She couldn't distinguish between the three kids by tactile sensation alone; but whatever they had planned, she doubted was wholesome in at least one sense of the word. So she did what any sane person would do when trapped with no way out, and made a way out.
Jinx covered her face with one arm, and hexed the floor with her other hand.
She shivered as her own power coursed so close to her own skin, and heard the entirety of the floor beneath her crackling and creaking. Right before gravity plunged her through the thoroughly weakened material.
The kids hadn't prepared for the move, and fell off her back when she crashed on the floor below. The uncarpeted floor was far from gentle, but Jinx had felt worse distress in her muscles before, from much higher velocity impacts. She wasted no time pushing herself onto her feet and running up the stairs once more, before the kids had a chance to grab her again. An idle corner of her mind wanted to see Raven pick herself up off the ground so quickly after landing flat on her chest.
Her running steps slowed to a stop. Since she'd been tackled coming off the stairs, the top of the stairs was now a cloud of dust that she'd just escaped from. She was fairly sure the floor around the gap would survive her jumping on it, but she couldn't see if there were any more kids waiting for her up there.
She shook her head and swiped her arm towards the wall to the right of the staircase, sending a large hex at it. It plunged through the material and out the other wall forming the corner. Both walls crumbled into drywall fragments and particles, leaving the corner itself intact; Jinx didn't want to test the stability of the building by removing an obvious location for a support beam, she'd had enough buildings crashing down on her head tonight to last for nine lives.
Most of the debris cloud stayed low to the ground, and Jinx started sprinting through the empty-looking path she'd just made. A Frankenstein look-alike, this kid being around her age instead of half of it like most of them, stepped through the opening at the farther wall and swung an arm back.
Jinx broke her sprint by raising her leg to plant a boot on the kid's chest, then pushing off him with all her might. The kid stumbled backwards and fell on his back, his arm swiping only at empty air, while she executed an elegant backflip to land on her feet only a couple feet behind her.
Or at least that was her intent. She almost squeaked as her boot failed to fully connect with the ground, and she tipped over backwards; her instincts took over, and she bent her knees and planted her hands to land in an ungainly sitting position instead of sprawled like her opponent. She winced from the impact, briefly closing her eyes...before feeling her eyelids close tightly and her eyes roll towards the top of her head.
With a snarl, she forced her eyes open and pushed herself off the ground and onto her feet. "I DID NOT JUST FALL ON MY BUTT BECAUSE I'M TIRED!" she declared to no one in particular, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
She charged through the hole and past her adversary, who was thankfully still on the ground. The brief tug she felt on her dress as she slipped past did remind her of how critical time was. She decided holding the kids off was a losing battle, and heading to the roof as soon as possible was now her goal.
Jinx ran down hallway after hallway, looking for a vertical exit. She briefly considered descending to the streets out one of the many exterior windows, but it was swarming with kids when she'd last seen it. Kids that had just proven capable of taking her down with force of numbers. Landing in the middle of that many of them would be suicidal. Hexing the ceiling to jump up remained an option, but the risk of destabilizing the building was pretty high, and would only increase as she ascended.
A sign indicating an elevator caught her attention, and she stopped in front of the two sliding metal doors. While the odds were good that the elevator would lead upwards, all the mayhem on the roof was likely to have mangled the shaft somewhere, assuming the elevator was even running. And the thought of shimmying up several floors of cable was threatening to bring another fatigue episode.
Then she noticed the nearby stairwell access. In all likelihood it was the same stairwell she and Cyborg had descended in, and thus the same one he was supposed to render unusable; but the odds of him having destroyed so many floors of stairs was slim. In any case, it wouldn't hurt to check...
Suspecting she just jinxed something again, Jinx sighed and tossed a hex at the door, reducing it to a pile of rubble on the floor. It wasn't like an object intended to move could be load-bearing, and it'd be harder for kids to hide behind dirty air than a solid door. After checking either side of the door for threats, she stepped into the stairwell.
Looking down over the edge, she saw Cyborg did a reasonably thorough job; if she'd tried this a couple floors below, there would have been no landing to speak of. Looking up revealed a chaotic mass of stair-shaped metal a few floors up, as though a few floors' worth of stairs had been removed from the wall and formed into a barricade. Many of the sections still had the wood covers of their steps intact, making intentional removal far more likely than general collapse.
She began walking up the remaining flights of stairs, being alert for signs of the steps giving way to gravity. The barrier being made of the stairs likely meant there were no more stairs beyond it to climb, but four floors by stair was still less effort than even a single floor by climbing a cable, even after accounting for the slight risk of the floor falling out from under her.
Other than needing to duck to get past a corner where the barricade was resting on the still-intact landing, the journey up three floors was silent and uneventful. She figured the lack of wind noises meant Cyborg had sealed the roof access as well, but other than a testament to his thoroughness it hardly mattered.
Emerging onto the tenth floor, her first course of action was to seal the door, by using a hex to distort its hinges the same way she had this door's cousin on the basement floor. If she could get up here without any fancy movement, so could any number of kids; stalling them at the door seemed prudent.
The next thing she noticed was a mess on the floor of the hallway she'd entered onto, including a shattered pot with dirt and the remains of a plant strewn off to her right. She looked down the hall to her left, where whatever propelling force must have come from...and saw a huge hole in the ceiling and floor, wider than the hallway itself.
Walking over to the edge of the hole and looking upwards, she saw...the night sky, complete with stars, past a few other examples of punctured ceilings and floors. The aftereffects of the giant pumpkin's vines plunging through the building, she imagined. In any case, she had found her way up and out.
Jumping back and forth across and through holes, ascending a floor each time, was simple enough; and in less than half a minute Jinx was standing on the roof. In time to see Cyborg fiddling with some wreckage from what used to be the crane's control cabin, affixing it to some kind of sled shape hanging from a wide triangle frame filled with a sheet of plastic...
"...A hang glider?" she asked incredulously as she approached him.
He turned around at the sound of her voice. "You made it, thank goodness!" he proclaimed. "Yeah, it's a glider."
Ignoring how that could possibly be the first time anyone ever thanked goodness for her presence, she countered, "Built out of wooden beams and tarps? This thing is supposed to get us to the Tower?"
"I'm sure it can get to the Tower from here, yeah. Pretty sure."
"Pretty sure?!"
"Hey, I didn't decide 'creepy stairs' was better for nothing. But that fell through, literally even, and here we are."
Jinx wanted to object, but she found she couldn't. They were low on options, and at least this mockery of a plan actually had the Tower as its endpoint; they'd still have had to find a way to the Tower if her basement escape plan had worked correctly. She let out a long sigh. "Is this thing even airworthy?"
"Sure is, just finished testing it across the rooftop. I was touching up the pilot harnesses when you showed up."
"OK, that's something. Wait, harnesses?" she asked, emphasizing the plural portion of the word. She looked at the sled shaped portion again, and now that she was closer she could make out that there were actually two such shapes, suspended over each other; each with a metal bar in front of it connected into the wooden frame. "You're not expecting...I've never flown a glider before, hang or otherwise!"
"Well, technically neither have I; but the physics are pretty basic, and I whipped up a sort of power steering for us. Won't take both of us to pilot it, but I want to keep our options open in case things start going right for a change."
She suspected that was supposed to reassure her. If so, it did a poor job. "What kind of options?" she asked skeptically. She was seeing mental images of crashing into the water because she couldn't pilot the thing, and the fleet of waterborne pumpkins floating by to finish whatever the impact didn't break. Whatever Cyborg had in mind, it'd have to be pretty good to justify that risk.
"Once we get close enough to the Tower, I should be able to break through the jamming effect and connect to Tower security. If it happens while we're in flight, I should be able to stack the deck in our favor...but I can't work the flight controls and the buttons on my remote comm at the same time."
That would qualify as pretty good, much to Jinx's chagrin; she was still hoping to get out of the responsibility. But before she had time to come up with a counterpoint, a rumble dancing at the edge of her hearing drew her attention. A rumble that sounded all too familiar by now.
Wordlessly, she turned to the side and ran towards the edge of the roof, in the opposite direction from the Tower. Sure enough, the tiny orange dot she saw in the distance was coming closer.
"Looks like we're gonna have a vegetable visitor in a couple minutes," she yelled over her shoulder.
"Another one?" Cyborg replied. "How many overgrown gourds do these things have?"
She shook her head and walked back to the collection of scrap that had dreams of being a hang glider one day. "All I know, is I'm glad they're so impatient. We always hear the giant ones before we see them; if they tried sneaking up on us we'd be screwed." Which was about how she felt now; there was no longer time to talk Cyborg out of anything. And if his contraption didn't work, well, she'd find out really soon.
"And letting them catch us now would really suck, so get in!" Cyborg said.
"Get in what?" she countered.
"Just climb into the top harness thing, strap in and lay down; I gotta provide the foot power to launch the thing."
Oh right, hang gliders aren't always flown from a seated position. She forcefully blinked a couple times as she complied, hoping to keep fatigue from interfering with her thought process any further, at least long enough to get to the Tower and let her adrenaline response keep her going the rest of the way.
She was fairly sure the sled shaped portion she was now laying on wasn't a typical part of a harness, but she could only be concerned about it keeping her from falling to the bay. It certainly felt sturdy enough as she fastened the straps holding her into place. She realized that if the other harness was expected to support Cyborg's weight, it'd have absolutely no problem with her wispy-by-comparison mass.
"You ready?" Cyborg asked from behind her.
"As ready as I'm going to get," she answered dismissively. "So you know, I'm going to haunt you if I die in this thing."
"Fair enough," Cyborg answered without missing a beat. "Now hold on!"
Jinx grabbed the edge of the solid shape she was laying on, just in case Cyborg wasn't being figurative, as she felt herself and the whole assembly rise a few feet into the air. The craft starting moving forward, lacking in smoothness since Cyborg's running steps reverberated through the frame, the harness and Jinx's body. She spent the next few seconds trying to come up with an escape plan in case the glider didn't make it all the way to the Tower.
"Yabba dabba doo!" Cyborg exclaimed as the glider went over the edge of the roof and starting tipping towards the ground. Jinx's alarm at the loss of altitude was briefly halted by his quoting of a television show that was at least twice as old as the two of them were.
The glider soon began pointing skywards. "You alright up there?" Cyborg yelled from below, over the low sound of air rushing by.
"Yes, Mr. Flintstone," she answered sarcastically.
He paused for a couple seconds. "OK, since you have the control bar in front of you, I'll tell you how to work it. Grab it on both sides, push up for up, down for down, and turn it for turning left or right. Don't need to worry about it yet; I still got it."
Jinx noticed the glider had tipped down and back up again while he was explaining. "Why aren't we flying level?"
"Oh, that. Well, we point down for gravity to give us speed for altitude, and then back up to get altitude for speed. The improvised construction here is...a little inefficient, but we should still reach the Tower before we run out of altitude and hit the water."
Should? "You're not filling me with a whole lot of confidence here."
"Just relax, we'll be fine."
Looking around, seeing the city shrink and the Tower slowly grow in the skyline, she found it difficult to relax. Perhaps if her "sled" didn't block her view below, and she could see the surface of the water below to tell how high they were, it'd be different. Or it might make her more anxious than not knowing. She wasn't sure.
"OK," Cyborg called out, "I think I'm close enough to get a signal to the Tower. You got the control bar?"
She took a deep breath and grabbed the wide piece of metal at both ends. "I guess," she commented, trying to hide her apprehension.
"If we start falling, just let it fall for a bit then push it back up," he added. "You'll do fine."
She wasn't entirely sure how they'd start falling, until the sound of the air rushing by her ears got softer for just a moment. Followed shortly by the glider's nose leaning towards the water.
Feeling her heart jump into her throat, she swallowed to force it back into her chest, and forced herself to wait. When it was at the same angle as she'd seen Cyborg correct at, she braced her elbows and pushed up against the control bar.
Obediently, if a little sluggishly, the glider's nose lifted. Once the glider was pointing at the sky again, she took a deep breath. OK, she told herself, you can do this.
"There ya go!" Cyborg commented. "Was that so bad?"
She wanted to yell at him for patronizing her so calmly, but decided otherwise. "Have anything useful to tell me?" she demanded instead.
"Yeah, I got the controls again, but you can hold on if you want."
She decided to. "About the Tower."
"The system in Ops was thrashed, so no telling what's in there. Nothing moving in the rest of the Tower. Managed to tweak the security system a bit, though. They'll ignore the two of us, so no one will know we're there when we go in."
She waited for him to continue. "What about the pumpkins and the obstacle course, the one you said could shoot at them?"
"For the course thing I need to directly connect to get it started. Physically-plugging-in, direct. Everything should be ready for it, though. And it looks like there's three gigantic pumpkins there. One of them's even bigger than the other giant ones we've seen; I'd say it's 'titanic' but that'd get confusing. But they're all just laying there, on the ground. Not seeing any vines or anything. With any luck—"
She doubted Cyborg could notice the glare she was giving his general direction through the harness thing, but darn it she was trying anyway.
"I just...you-ed it, didn't I?" he added meekly.
"Shut up," she growled.
Jinx heard him sigh, which was an impressive feat with a piece of wood and the rush of air in the way. "I'd love to, but we've got a problem."
"Of course we have a problem," she added with sarcastic surprise, "Why should this be any different than the rest of the night?"
"I miscalculated. We don't have enough altitude left to get us to the Tower."
Her heart tried to jump up her throat again. "WHAT?"
"I underestimated the—"
"I DON'T CARE WHY! I'm still haunting you if those green pumpkins from the sewer kill us because we had to crash!"
"...I didn't say you."
That made no...wait. Not us, not her..."And what are you going to be doing?"
"Hoping those things don't rest on the sea floor for a reason."
She was unprepared for that kind of response. "You're leaving me again, you bastard." she blurted out.
He paused for a couple seconds. "Look, I have an oxygenator installed so I won't need to breathe, I can walk along the bottom long enough to get to the bay for the T-Sub. There's a communication console in there, use it to contact me."
"How—"
"We don't have time! I'm going to make the glider dive hard. I'll need you to pull up, 'cause I'm dropping off when the thing's level. The lowered height with the same speed'll get you to the Tower. I'll tell you when to start."
When he said they didn't have time, it was because he started the dive immediately. Jinx swallowed, and blinked away the tears threatening to form in her eyes. There were far too many memories poking at her sleep-deprived composure to focus on any of them, regardless of whether or not the tears were a result of the sheer force of air flying in her eyes.
"NOW!" he called.
With a snarl, she forced the control bar up, and the horizon began to level out. Right past the level point she heard a splash a far distance behind her, and she was on her own. Again.
It was only a few seconds before she identified some of the sewer pumpkins in the water, as she drew quickly close to the Tower. But what got her attention were the two orange pumpkins, stepping out from behind the Tower and approaching the coast.
She tried to think what she could do. She couldn't fight one of those by herself, she couldn't sneak if they saw her landing...And of course Cyborg forgot to tell her how to land, even if it were an option.
The Tower was approaching fast, so she didn't have time to question the spur-of-the-moment thought that just came to her. She turned the glider gently to the right, aiming for one of the pumpkins. She then shifted her grip just long enough to hex the "sled" under her. She shuddered, still highly discomforted to be so close to the target of her own hexes, but it worked as intended: Her feet landed on Cyborg's sled, and the straps around her were disintegrated. And the ungainly standing posture did let her see the ground below.
She made a precise drop off the glider, landing behind an outcropping near the beach to keep the orange pumpkins from seeing her dismount. Hoping the green pumpkins didn't have the kind of visual acuity they'd need to spot where she landed, she darted off to the side as quietly as she could, keeping the island itself between her and the larger pumpkins.
A few seconds later, as she made her best attempt to move unnoticed across the ground towards the Tower; she heard a loud crunch, intermingled with the sound of splintering wood. She mentally dedicated a moment of silence to Cyborg's contraption. It finally achieved its dream of being a glider, only to expire minutes later.
At the harsh rock edge, Jinx shook her head and jumped up to the next relatively level spot on her way towards the Tower. The gently sloping main path for the Tower started from the opposite end of the island, back here the landscape was still in its natural state for the most part. Its natural, steep, rocky state. That did mean the horizontal distance she had to travel was much less, but it also meant she'd have to travel vertically, and every second in the air was a second she could be spotted by all the putrid plants placed out in the bay.
But there was nothing else she could do. Whether or not the water-based pumpkins could actually see far from their native water, the large orange pumpkin on the roof had proven quite capable of spotting her; and if either of its cousins here saw her she'd be in as many pieces as the glider. That the Tower hadn't been knocked over meant they needed to keep it around for something, so it should be safe. And even if that wasn't the case, the island was far too small for her to hide outside for any length of time.
Jinx took a deep breath, resolved to ignore her fear of being found, and started jumping from level spot to level spot, heading for the Tower interior as quickly as possible.
When she heard the sound of oversized vines hitting the ground, and without any way to tell if they were looking for her or charging at her...She insisted to herself that her frantic pulse was a nice change of pace from her heart trying to squeeze where it didn't belong.