Chapter 28: The Labyrinth's End
Malco remained in the center of the trail as they fought through the abandoned camp. He defended himself with the Fireball whenever necessary, but such occasions were rare given how efficiently the two soldiers had been fighting. At long last, the end of the camp was in sight. The remaining hostile Gaudi had either been killed or finally decided to retreat, and the three robots found themselves at an ancient-looking steel bridge extending across a massive body of gently-flowing water.
Behind him, he heard the others approaching while putting their weapons away.
"Final score: thirty-one," Curly boasted.
Quote made a strange metallic rasp that Malco took a moment to recognize as a laugh- such an expressive noise coming from him was unusual at best.
"Forty! Looks like I win that round."
"Really? Shoot, I need to try harder next time."
The male soldier could be heard grunting in affirmation, then stood beside Malco and looked out over the subterranean lake.
"Where are we…? Is there a way out of the Labyrinth across this bridge?"
"I can't say… I have no map of this area."
He turned to face the last decrepit building in the camp: a dome-shaped structure with small antennae protruding from the top. Malco let out an excited beep when he realized what it was after quickly perusing his memory banks. Running toward it, he cheered loudly.
"This is Team 9's mobile command post! It should include- let's see…"
Thankfully, the door wasn't too rusty to open. He entered to confirm his suspicions about what the building held. Sure enough, behind the ruins of various electronic devices and discarded weapons sat a cylindrical device big enough to fit a person. A teleporter, just as he'd hoped. The glass tube connecting both ends was extremely dusty and covered with grime, but fortunately it wasn't broken.
"Yes! It even has an emergency power reserve! I should be able to get this operating again, and then we'll have our way back to Mimiga Village!"
Quote and Curly had entered alongside him, inspecting the old teleporter.
"You really think this'll work?" the latter soldier asked hesitantly.
"Without a doubt! It will take me some time to calibrate the destination coordinates, but other than that we're in good shape."
Malco's sharp fingers went to work immediately, rattling away on the machine's keypad. The sound of it humming back to life was music to his audio receptors.
"I can take care of this. In the meantime, why don't you two search past the lake? There might be another way out across the bridge. I'll stay in contact with you in case either of us succeeds first."
With a few last words of encouragement, the soldiers exited the command post together and left him alone with the teleporter. Things really were looking up.
While Malco worked on their way out, Quote returned to the edge of the tunnel where the lake began. On the opposite bank loomed an enormous wall of pitch-black carved stone. There was a rotting wooden door in the center, which did little to distract from how strangely ominous the wall seemed. He looked down uncertainly at the equally dark water- which he couldn't see the bottom of- and at the rickety metal bridge leading across it.
"This doesn't look very stable…" he muttered.
"Aw, lighten up," Curly said. "We'll be fine."
Quote frowned.
"Maybe you will. You have that air bubble tank in case you fall in."
Her grin faded slightly.
"Good point… let's just be real careful. It's not that far of a walk."
He took the lead, lightly stepping onto the bridge and beginning the trek across. With each step he swore he could feel it creaking and groaning under his weight, and having Curly not far behind wasn't comforting in the slightest this time.
"Hey, Quote? Can I ask you something?"
The soldier took another careful step forward. It wasn't the best time to have a conversation, but he supposed there was nothing else going on anyway.
"What is it?"
"When all this is over, what are you going to do?"
Something about the tone of her voice indicated that she'd been sitting on that question for a while.
"I… haven't considered it yet. Right now, stopping the Doctor is the important part."
"Well, yeah. But after that, where will you go?"
Truthfully, Quote had no idea. He didn't say anything in response and continued to walk, hoping that would be the end of the discussion so they could focus on the present. Curly wasn't finished, however.
"If you don't have anywhere to go, you can… well, I think the Colons wouldn't mind if we had some more company…"
This time he stopped short, causing her to almost run into him from behind. He looked back at her to find that- surprisingly- her face was slightly flushed.
"Are you… asking me to live with you?"
Curly's eyes widened and she gave him a meek smile.
"I-I just thought you'd like having somewhere to stay after we're done! I have a home to go back to, but you and Malco are kind of on your own in that regard. And, well, I don't like the idea of you two being all by yourselves, y'know?"
Quote thought it over. He'd been so determined to stop the Doctor and save the Mimigas that he failed to consider that he really did have nothing waiting for him afterwards. Sue had mentioned letting him escape with her, Kazuma, and Booster, but now that he'd failed to destroy the Demon Flowers merely leaving the floating island wasn't an option. He felt obligated to see this through to the end, but Curly was right. There was nowhere for him to return to.
Nowhere, that is, except…
"I think that's a great idea. I'd be happy to stay with you and the Colons. Malco too, I assume?"
"Oh yeah, definitely! I'm sure he'd like coming with us."
He turned around to continue walking, but not without seeing the wide smile plastered on Curly's (still faintly red) face. It wasn't hard to tell how happy she was to hear his answer. And now, with the creaking of the bridge no longer bothering him, Quote shared her smile.
Curly couldn't explain why, but she was just as overjoyed as her partner thought. Her excitement to stay with Quote and Malco couldn't be put into words. It was strange, because they hadn't known each other for all that long and yet she wholeheartedly trusted the two.
Once they finally reached the end of the bridge and hopped off onto the mud, she tapped at the green receptor antenna on the right side of her head.
"Malco? Can you hear me?"
"Loud and clear, Curly. How are you two doing?"
She stepped out of the mud and onto a more stable area of rocky floor. The enormous black wall was right before their eyes, and the rotted door not far away.
"We made it across the bridge without it collapsing and sending us to a watery doom. I'd say pretty well."
"That's the furthest you've gotten? I could most likely wave to you from here if I stepped outside…"
"There's a wall in here," Quote interjected with his own antenna. "It looks out of place amidst the rest of Team 9's camp. Do you know what's behind it?"
"Unfortunately, no. You'll have to inspect it yourself. Progress on the teleporter is slow, so there's still time for you to have a look around."
Curly wasn't about to waste the chance to explore. She strolled casually up to the door and grabbed the handle, upon which the entire thing collapsed into a pile of decaying wood. Quote, moving to stand by her side, peered into the room behind the black wall with Polar Star drawn. He stepped inside and swiftly disappeared into the darkness. Not wanting to be left in the dust, she followed close behind him.
"Are we still in the Labyrinth?" she asked quietly as her eyes adjusted to the dark.
It certainly didn't appear so. Their surroundings had gone from rust-colored to a dark navy blue, and the air felt much cooler. This room had an even more industrial feel to it, as there were fewer rocky surfaces and more metal panels along the walls, floor, and ceiling. Water gently pooled around their ankles. A steel door- surprisingly not corroded- stood on the opposite end of the cramped room, but aside from that nothing of interest could be seen.
"Guess we just need to keep moving forward," Curly said after a moment of silence. She trudged through the shallow water and yanked the door open, wondering what it was concealing.
The answer to that was another hallway, one much narrower and with an even lower ceiling. Dark gray panels and grated floors lined the corridor, with very dim red lights illuminating the way forward. Curly's footsteps echoed all around her, blending in with the faint sound of flowing water and a monotonous hum emanating from somewhere up ahead. Just in front of her was some kind of blast door, tightly closed with a smooth surface to prevent it from being pulled open. To the side was a small computer terminal. Despite the area seeming abandoned, the screen flickered to life.
"This is a strange place," Quote remarked as he entered behind her.
"I'll say. Maybe it was a base during the war."
Their antennae briefly hummed as Malco connected to them again.
"Update: this teleporter is more run-down than I thought. I can still repair it, but it'll take a bit longer. How are you two faring?"
Curly gave the blast door a knock. It was apparently so thick that the sound hardly even echoed.
"We're past the wall across that bridge. This is a compound of some kind, but I don't know what it's for."
"Hm… I've found nothing in this camp that can indicate what's beyond your position. Feel free to investigate if you wish, but be careful. I'm detecting a powerful magic force resonating deeper inside…"
She jumped back in alarm when the door made a sudden clanking noise. The sound of gears grinding against one another could be heard, and the shutter began to rise into a slot in the ceiling. It didn't take long to realize what had happened; Quote was standing at the computer terminal with his finger still on a button.
"That was easy enough. Can you see anything inside?"
The corridor was significantly darker behind where the door had once been. Curly kept a hand on her machine gun as she proceeded deeper, but nothing jumped out to attack. Instead, a second blast door stood in the way.
"There's another shutter in here. Can you open it?"
A swift keystroke could be heard, and just like before a new section of the hallway opened up. It was even darker than the last, but once again she could make out the gleam of yet another steel blast door.
"I wonder what's so important that it needs this much security… it's kind of exciting, don't you think? Hit that key again!"
Quote was beginning to have mixed feelings about going any further. He did share Curly's interest in finding out just what the compound was hiding, and there could have been an exit waiting for them, but something about the structure gave him the impression that it wasn't meant to keep anyone out. Instead, he suspected it was to keep something in.
Nevertheless, he pressed the key to open the next blast door. Just waiting for Malco to finish with the teleporter didn't sit right with him if there was possibly a faster route back.
"I think it's stuck on something," he heard Curly say from further in the corridor. "Hold on, let me see if… there we go. It's open far enough for us to crawl underneath. Wow, there's a really big door here! Can you open it from that side?"
He looked over the computer terminal, but to no avail. There was no option for any further doors on the keyboard.
"Doesn't look like it," Quote shouted back.
"Hang on, there's a handle on the bottom. I think there's something stuck under the door too. Get in here, maybe we can pull it open together!"
There were no other options he could see, so he did as requested and moved to join her. He only then realized that Curly's build was much slimmer than his own, as he had a great deal more difficulty fitting under the stuck blast door than her. By the time he'd managed to squeeze himself through, she was outright giggling at his efforts.
"Geez, you took longer than I thought you would."
"Not everyone can fit under there as well as you," he protested.
"Maybe you just need to exercise more," Curly shot back with that grin of hers only widening. "Eat better, shave off some fat…"
Quote didn't give her the satisfaction of a response, and he thought he saw her sticking her tongue out at him from the corner of his eyes. The question of why robots like them even had tongues lingered in his mind for just a moment before he crouched down to grab the handle she'd mentioned. Curly did the same, and they pulled up as hard as they could on the blast door. Despite its tremendous weight, their combined strength was enough to raise it all the way up. A soft "click" indicated that it locked into place, and the corridor was clear at last.
"We make a good team," Curly said once they had finished pulling. "Up high!"
She held her hand out toward him with her fingers straight out and her palm exposed. Quote stared at it blankly, trying to process what she meant.
"Uh…"
"You don't know what this is?" she asked incredulously. "Just… never mind, let's keep moving."
The two soldiers walked through the open blast door, or at least tried to before almost tripping on what had been stuck underneath it. Quote's gaze seemed affixed to the crushed heap of wires, metal joints, and various other materials strewn across the floor before them. He could just make out a claw on the end of a rusted stick-looking appendage, and an odd lumpy shape with two broken antennae on either side of it. His eyes widened in shock when he realized he was looking at the miserable remains of a robot disturbingly like him and Curly, all alone in its demise.
No… not alone in the slightest. The scene before them was a good contender for the most unnerving sight they'd ever come across.
