Chapter Two: The Chase

"Sleeveless?" Luigi thought out loud, "what could that mean?"

"Maybe it's a clue about what the combination is."

Luigi pressed the side of his face onto the door of the digital, very high- tech safe.

"I hear movement," Luigi said.

"Someone's back there!"

"You think, Mario!" Luigi sarcastically replied.

The brothers were completely stumped. They sat on the cold, hard floor, trying their best to come up with ideas.

"Hey, Luigi, I think I've got it!" exclaimed Mario. "You know on those puzzles where the letter a is one, b is two, c is three..."

"Yeah!"

"Maybe the combination uses those numbers!" Mario explained.

"Maybe..."

"All right there are four e's, three s's...uh...two l's and a v, right!"

"I think so," said Luigi, sounding very unsure.

"Let's figure out their numbers and add them all together!"

Numbers whizzed through Mario's head. He mumbled his thoughts out loud. "S...19...5...e...v.multiply by 4... I got it!"

"What's the code?"

"I took all the numbers of the letters and added them all together...the answer is one, two, three."

Luigi punched in the code.

"Access denied," explained a computerized voice.

"Aw man..." whined Luigi.

"We've got a lot of thinking to do, Luie," said Mario.

Silence. Silence. And more silence.

"Hey, Mario! I think I'm onto something, have you heard of a pyramid word?"

Luigi's older brother shook his head.

"I read somewhere that sleeveless is English's largest pyramid word. A pyramid has letters in increasing amount."

"Huh?"

"You know! It has one v, two l's, three s's and four e's. The combination must have four, three, two and one in it."

"I guess we were pretty close," observed Mario.

"Yeah, but pretty close won't lead us to the murderer."

Luigi's fingers danced along the keypad. Four...three...two...one.

"Access granted," rang the voice.

"Yes!"

The door opened slowly into a dark room.

A gasp rang out from the darkness. The brothers noticed a silhouette of a person, cloaked in black hurriedly stand up and begin to flee.

"There he is, Mario!"

"Let's go."

The criminal ran through the darkness and reached a wall, the Mario brothers close behind. The cloaked person grunted as he jumped up into the ceiling. The brothers reached the dead end and looked up. They could see the criminal using the wall to climb up though the series of air ducts.

"Let's go!" shouted Mario, jumping up into the ducts before Luigi.

Mario saw the culprit reach the top of the duct and exit. Mario got the top soon after, annoyed that he'd failed to get a glimpse of the criminal's face.

Mario hit his head on the top of the duct.

"Mario," Luigi called from underneath him, "ya gotta crawl!"

Mario got down on his hands and knees and began to crawl, but the criminal was nowhere in sight. Luigi lifted himself up through the vertical duct.

"Oh no, there are three routes!" Mario exclaimed.

"You go through the middle!" shouted Luigi, "I'll go right!"

The brothers split up and began crawling through the ducts.

A-ha, thought Mario. He could see the culprit not too far ahead of him. He was going the right way.

"Stop!" he shouted. The criminal began to get farther and farther ahead of Mario.

All of a sudden, Mario felt a blast, stronger than almost anything he had ever felt. Oh no, it was the air conditioning.

The power of the blast sent him backwards. He struggled to get up, noticing that the culprit wasn't having nearly as difficult of a time maneuvering through the ducts.

Mario's dry eyes could barely see a thing. Then suddenly, before he could react, he felt the metal beneath him giving way.

"Aaahh!!!" Mario fell to the castle floor with a thud.

Mario stood up and angrily kicked the wall, resisting the tempting urge to swear.

"I can't believe I let him get away!"

Luigi came walking through the hallway.

"I went the wrong way and ended up here in the hallway," explained Luigi, "what happened to you?"

Mario, busy rubbing the sore spot on his butt, pointed up at the hole in the ceiling that revealed the broken air duct.

It was then the brothers noticed that a support beam was missing from under the air duct.
A/N:

Thanks for reading this chapter; I hope you enjoyed it. It had quite a few clues in it that will help you figure out who the murderer is! Please review and give me some ideas about who you think the criminal is as the story unfurls. Please continue to play along and actually use the clues in the story to figure out who-done-it! Again, don't forget to review, and also check out my other stories by clicking my pen name! Thank you!

mr-mcd2k3