"You find yourself at the end of the tunnel, where two doors are visible in the ray of your torch."
INSPECT DOORS"The door on your left is sturdy, and made of metal. Looking further, you come to the same conclusion about the right door. However, the door on your left bears a small keyhole beneath the handle, where the right one is without."
USE KEY"Which KEY do you use?"
"1. Bronze KEY"
"2. Ornate KEY"
"3. Car KEY"
"Fitting the small bronze key into the lock, you turn it and hear an audible clicking noise as the door unlocks and creaks open slowly, of its own accord. The corridor before you is musty and dank, cobwebs and mildew stains making evident the door's seldom use. Walking down the path, you can hear the clanking of the dam's machinery above you, drowning out your footsteps.
After a few minutes of travel, the hall suddenly curves to the right, but even in the semi-darkness you can see a small grate leaning next to an open ventilation shaft. The scuff marks on the wall indicate it was removed very recently, almost-"
A small flash, a puff of smoke, and the computer monitor blanked, the dark screen mirroring its user. Short blonde hair framed Peridot's thin, pale face, her mouth etched into a scowl. It had been a while since she saved her game, but she didn't necessarily care about that. She reaffixed her green wire glasses higher on her nose and pushed back her office chair, feeling the rusted wheels creak and whine against the ancient stone floor of her basement bedroom. Leaning down, she poked her head under the desk and immediately smelt the acrid fumes of scorching dust.
"Alright Sal, what's wrong now?" Peridot asked the sputtering computer as she attempted to pull it out of the darkness. She recoiled upon feeling the hotness of the case, and finished extracting it with her hands inside her dark green hoodie sleeves. The computer was a bulky monstrosity, nearly the size of a mini-fridge and the same common shade of eggshell white. On one side of the unit was a plate cut from machined steel with "SAL 9K" embossed on it in large, blocky letters. She hit the power switch in the back, counted to ten, and turned Sal back on again. The monitor fluttered for a second before coming back on, and a short power-up jingle could be heard, to the tune of 'Daisy Bell'. Sitting back up in her chair, Peridot watched the computer begin its boot sequence in scrolling green text.
[SAL - SERIES 9000]
[BOOTSYS SEQUENCE INITIATED]
TIME 00:00:00
BOOTSYS V1.2
EXECSYS V3.0.1
465221 BYTES ALLOCATED
59067 BYTES FREE
[BOOT COMPLETE]
Peridot sighed in relief. The primary boot sequence passed without a hitch, so nothing was seriously wrong with the motherboard.
[HARDWARE BOOT INITIATED - SYSTEM CHECK]
INT. TEMP: 53°C
RAM ALLOCATED: 1024 MB
COREPROCESS: OK
FLOP DRIVE 1: OK
FLOP DRIVE 2: OK
CDROM DRIVE: OK
MONIT PORT: OK
CUSPORT 1 (USB): OK
CUSPORT 2 (SD): OK
MODEM: OK
[CHECK COMPLETE]
Another sigh of relief. The problem was overheating; 53 degrees Celsius was around 127 degrees Fahrenheit, and above 125 the computer tended to crap out. Something was most likely wrong with the cooling fan in the back. Again using her sleeves to protect her hands, Peridot got on her knees and removed Sal's back panel. It popped out easily, revealing the computer's glorious guts to her owner. The fan was spinning, but at an inconsistent speed, speeding up and slowing down gradually over seconds. Peridot growled. This was the third fan in half as many months to break down. She would be having a talk with her parts dealer about this.
She powered Sal back down, removed the fan, and pulled out a box which contained numerous other broken or failing parts she'd removed from her computer over the years. It was very possible Sal was a completely different machine since the day it was bought: each original component had busted and been replaced; save for the motherboard. Peridot nearly dropped the fan in before she paused, and decided instead to bring it to the shop for troubleshooting purposes. She opened a new fan and installed it, and after a moment's contemplation she downloaded Sal's crash log onto her personal USB drive. Peridot had just reopened the game she was playing when her phone rang. Caller ID: her mother.
"God help me," she sighed before raising the phone to her ear. " H-hey Mom…"
"Per… Peri… Pe… I need-" There was a banging noise over the phone, and her mother groaned. "Honey, I can't find my gun. Where is my gun?"
"Mom, calm down." Peridot pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration as she said this.
"Don't tell me to calm down! Where is my gun? Did you take it, does your father have it?" More banging, followed by shouting.
"Where are you? What's that noise?"
"The terrorists, honey! They found me, and I need to send them back to hell. My gun-" Peridot cut her off.
"Mom, listen to me. There are no terrorists, you don't have your gun, remember? We gave it to Aunt Vi last year, so she could take care of it."
"Vidalia is one of them!" She screamed over the banging. This time, the shouting could be heard clearly. "Open the door, Shelby! Open it or we will have to break it down," yelled a high male voice. Peridot was the one groaning now.
"Mom, you need to open the door for Dr. Stromberg. He wants to help you, just-" She heard a loud crash, and her mother shrieked. The phone was dropped and Peridot heard a struggle on the other end before the call was ended abruptly. With tear-stung eyes, she let the phone clatter onto the floor as she hugged her legs into her body, less sobbing than she was simply leaking from her eyes. Her life sucked enough without having an insane mother as her only living relative. She hung over Peridot like a ghost, haunting her forever.
"Hey, Peridot! Welcome back to the land of the living!" Aunt Vidalia greeted her when Peridot climbed the stairs from the basement. She ignored her aunt standing at the counter and slid into a chair at the table across from Sour Cream, a lanky guy with platinum blonde hair made up into a pointed spike. He acknowledged her with a peace sign as he continued to rave to the music in his ears. Vidalia placed a sandwich in front of them both, but Peridot pushed it aside and buried her face into her arms.
"You okay, kiddo?" Vidalia asked the sullen girl.
"M'fine," she muttered, voice muffled by fabric. "Just not hungry, Aunt Vidalia."
She took up the plate again with a concerned frown. "If you say so, kid."
Vidalia wasn't actually her aunt, and what Peridot said about her mother being her only living relative wasn't really true. Vidalia was Peridot's adoptive mother, Sour Cream her adoptive brother. After her father died and her mother was deemed mentally unstable and institutionalized, Peridot nearly landed into a group home before Vidalia, a friend of her mother's, stepped in and adopted her. Peridot was 14. She moved into their basement, and although she was antisocial and reclusive, learned to love her new parents and siblings like, well, family. Vidalia was married to a fisherman named Yellowtail, and had a second son with him whom she named Onion. Yellowtail was often at sea, providing for the family, but when he was home him and Peridot always got along very well. But her father he would never be.
Harry Olivine was the kindest man Peridot ever knew. He was a mechanic by trade but had a passion for computers that he passed onto his daughter from a very early age. He wasn't a people person, but if you asked him he could tell you the difference between a dyke and a dam, list the five platonic solids, and even count up to ten thousand by sevens without a break. On her seventh birthday, he gave Peridot her first computer that she named Sal. A relic from a time long past, Peridot loved her all the same and considered her her most prized possession. When her father was alive, Peridot was another person. Happy and extroverted, always cracking jokes and playing games. Even then she was extremely intelligent, and not only passed every class she took with flying colors, but was in soccer, track, Mathletes, and Robotics club.
She had friends, too. Amy, whom they called Amethyst, came from a very large family of all sisters, and was always getting into trouble in some way. Pearl was her polar opposite, an only child like Peridot who was very graceful and well-behaved. Steven, a cousin of Amy's, was younger and the most pure and wholesome child Peridot thought had ever or would ever exist. He tagged along with all of their adventures, always the voice of reason, and frequently brought along his friend Connie, whom Peridot was fond of, and his dog Lion, a gigantic fluffy Aleutian Mastiff who had a habit of getting things stuck in his fur. Peridot had several other friends, but Amy, Pearl, and Steven made up the core of the group. There was another girl, older than them by a few years, who also came along often but no-one really addressed by name. Nobody knew her well, she just… showed up. Peridot couldn't remember her name.
But then came the twenty-fifth of September, when Peridot was 13. A tropical storm had blown into Delmarva and tossed over a few trees, maybe carried off some roof tiles, a house with minor damage here and there. Beach City reported no major destruction, just a power outage and a collapsed drink stand at Funland. But halfway through the winds Peridot's father ran out to save a deck chair that was being dragged off by Mother Nature, and when the ambulance came twenty minutes later they had a hell of a time removing a stray fence post that had buried itself through his chest. Peridot couldn't hear anything through her mother's screams, and her own.
The funeral was hell for Peridot. She stood by her mother the entire time, never uttering a word as they lowered her father into the cold earth. The priest who presided over the event drawled on and on tonelessly about God and Heaven and forgiveness and memory, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Peridot wanted to scream at him. 'Shut up!' She imagined herself saying. 'Who gives a shit about Jesus or any of that? He was the nicest man in the world, my father, and you're reciting lines from a book! Say something, anything, about him and his life. Talk about how honest and kind he was, how he loved me and my mom, not stupid prayers!' But she stood silently, watching that damned wooded box sink into the dirt.
It took less than a week for her to become a shadow of herself. She never left her room, never talked to any of her friends, never showed up to a single one of her after school activities. Nobody said anything to her about it, accepting she was in grieving, but the grief never let up. Peridot found comfort solely in Sal, playing text-based games, practicing programming, or even just holding her. All the while her mother slowly succumbed to her battle with schizophrenia, now nearly helpless after her husband's death. An ambulance came after an incident where she went outside and started screaming at the moon, and she earned herself a place at the Beach County Mental Hospital. Half a month later she was sleeping on an air mattress in Vidalia's basement, escaping into her dreams. Five years later, and she could count the number of times on one hand she left the house.
She had one more problem, but she tried not to think about it, nor had the time to. The doorbell rang. Vidalia walked out and answered it, and shouted into the kitchen moments later.
"Peri, your student is here!"
She had forgotten about her tutoring. After the whole ordeal had occured and she became part of the Shallot family, Vidalia opted to finish Peridot's education at home after a particularly nasty incident where Peridot had a massive panic attack just hours after she returned to school. Her impressive intelligence remained intact, and managed to finish home-highschool a year early. Vidalia offered she take up tutoring, an exercise that helped Peridot relearn how to be social. She was capable of going into the community, she just… couldn't find a reason to.
She got up from her chair. Her last student left after Peridot finished helping them with their 'math anxiety', and Vidalia said she would find her a new kid to help. Peridot walked from the kitchen to greet the stranger in her house, only to find she wasn't a stranger. Peridot suddenly remembered her friend's name.
It was Lapis. Lapis Lazuli.