I do not claim ownership over any of the characters or places in the following story and acknowledge that they belong to Cyan. Now that we've gotten that out of the way…


Excitement was brewing up inside him. The last experiment had been a success. Sure he may have blown his lab to kingdom come, but it was a success! Sirrus was climbing up the billions of stairs to get to the very top of the spire he'd grown to hate so much. Let's face it, if you were stuck in a place for twenty years having to wear the same clothes every day you'd hate it too.

As soon as he reached the top, he stopped, caught his breath and stretched his legs. He reached into the container he held in his left hand and felt empty container.

"Wha..?" he muttered as he eyed the interior to confirm what his hand had already told him. There was nothing in the container. Had he actually been so excited that he forgot to put the explosive crystal figurines into it to begin with? "NO!" he exclaimed, hearing glumly as it echoed from spire to distant spire. The next thing he knew, he was trudging down the stairs again, flight by miserable flight. He reached the place where he'd first camped out-- where he'd decided to imitate the painting, which his parents always seemed to have, with crystal statues.

He went to the hole by the pentagonal white crystal, and looked at the broken rope tied to a rock on one side of it. Bad memories were associated with that rock. He could recall it perfectly.

He had looked at the knot he had tied with very great satisfaction, "double passed… through both loops, beautiful knot." That had been what he said to himself. He was right. The knot was fine. The knot was perfect. It was the bloody rope that was the problem. Its strength left something to be desired.

He had started down the hole, having tied the other end of the rope around his waist. He was just beginning to wonder what he would do if the hole was deeper than the rope was long when the dratted rope snapped on him. His arms flailed around and his feet swarmed all over the chute beneath him, looking for hold, finding none. He slid and he fell and he slid some more. His stomach was officially dropped, and his lunch officially lost as soon as he had reached the bottom. The actual landing at the bottom in and of itself was something less than graceful. His feet had hit the ground and launched the rest of him forward, and he had landed flat on his face. Boy, that wasn't one of his favorite experiences in this tower. (He didn't trust rope again until many, many years later when he discovered the lack of solid ground beneath Spire. That was another one of his least favorite experiences, but for an entirely different reason.)

He looked down this hole twenty years later. He knew where it went; he knew it wouldn't give injuries he would seriously regret (though occasionally he'd scrape something, or land poorly). He hopped down it, stumbled upon landing and hopped down the next hole. He landed by stumbling again, and went to sit on his special chair.

He pushed the blue button, making the lid come down, and lowered himself a level. There he stayed for a minute or two, looking at his council of crystal pawns. His eyes then proceeded to wander to the sculpture of his parents. They seemed to be laughing at him for forgetting his explosives. "What are you looking at?" he grumped. He proceeded to wonder why he'd ever made them. He went down again, played the tunes the four rocks liked and continued on to his half-decimated lab.

After filling his container with about nine or ten deadly little figurines, he looked around his lab grimly. Despite his excited-ness, his obsessive compulsive nature drove him to clean it up a bit. He then saw fit to take the elevator up, to save time.

He stepped out of the elevator, his hair standing on end from all of the electrical pulses received on the way up. "What I wouldn't give to have someone here to touch right now." He snickered to himself, imagining his brother, Achenar, receiving the static shock of his life, simply by Sirrus touching him. With that amusing thought in mind, he made his way up those heaven-forsaken stairs again.

Once he had reached the top, he just stared at the linking chamber for a minute. He suddenly realized that he had forgotten what he was going to do once he got out. "Free Achenar of course," he told himself. He then came back at himself, "Since when have I liked Achenar? Why am I going to free him? He'll just ruin everything with his bigness and stupidity." "It's because he's big and stupid that I need him. I can't do everything on my own." He suddenly realized he was having a full conversation with himself and stopped. "Yes, that is definitely a habit I am going to have to break."

He stepped into the linking chamber and threw one of the figurines on the ground, only realizing a split second later that he should have thrown it from a distance. Too late! The figurine exploded with a green flash flinging Sirrus against the wall like a rag doll. A piece of wall was thrown so far that it crashed into the elevator he had just used and made it plummet all the way down to his lab.

Sirrus staggered a bit, but managed to keep himself standing. He held his head-- it hurt like crazy-- and desperately hoped this wasn't some kind of omen as to how his freedom would be. Staggering through the jagged opening he had created, he opened the container holding the linking book and put his hand on the page, getting out of that miserable spire once and for all.