Luigi's Mansion 2: Dark Moon
Chapter Eighteen: Lower Levels
"Should we all just jump her, boss?" The purple phantom asked as it and the yellow one started to approach. "Come on, we'll grab her before she tries to use the vacuum again."
"Hold on, boys, now what fun would that be?" Boo-dacious asked, forcing Daisy to back away as he floated toward her. "It ain't like this is Luigi here, or even that weird old guy… its just a cute little Princess who thinks she's tough enough to play with the boys… so, let's see how good she really is."
Again dragging his long red tongue up the entire side of Daisy's face, and startling her so much that she tripped and fell on her rear while the other two ghosts laughed, the boo floated away, this time moving over to the large clock that was used to access the maintenance elevator. Grabbing onto the metal hands with his, uh… whatever the boo's arms and hands were supposed to be called, Boo-dacious ripped them right off of the rotor with a rusty squeak, before nearly being knocked to the floor by their weight. Now floating over to his ghostly subordinates, he passed the hour hand to the yellow one and the minute hand to the purple, each of them struggling even more under the weight of just one while their boss laughed before returning to the Princess.
"All right, beautiful, here's what we're gonna do." The boo explained, pointing over at the others. "My boys are each gonna take their clock hand somewhere down into the lower levels of this place, and it's your job to track them down. From what I heard, Luigi would already have these two mooks locked up, so you're not off to a very good start… so either you capture them or they capture you… either way, see you up on the clock tower, babe."
Again with that tongue, dragging across her face just as Daisy was starting to get up, and causing her to fall back down just as the three laughing ghosts took off in their separate ways. Boo-daious passed through the bars and up the elevator shaft, while the others floated through a door at the other end of the elevator hallway. The Poltergust seemed to have cooled down from using its strobulb feature, so the Princess turned on the flashlight as she got up from the floor, and started to quietly follow the yellow and purple ghosts, stopping at the end of the hallway to carefully push open the old wooden door. Moving the light beam around, it looked like this was some kind of assembly room, again looking like it was all abandoned right in the middle of a normal work day.
"Daisy!" The Professor's voice crackled through, making her gasp louder than desired. "Daisy, can you hear me?! Are you all right?!"
"Yes, yes, I'm fine… just a little sore." She replied, all of the impact points of her body seeming to throb a bit more as she thought of them. "I don't get it, I saw Luigi take on more ghosts than this at one time, and get tossed around the room like a rag doll… but he just bounced back from it."
As the Princess looked more around the assembly room, she saw dusty conveyer belts with metal pieces lined up, an old rusted forklift, and some broken windows that allowed the wind and rain to come in but no ghosts. At the same time, the old man was reminding her that Luigi did this kind of thing all the time, and had to clear out his whole mansion on his own while there were dozens of ghosts inside, with each of them putting up a fierce resistance to being trapped in the old Poltergust 3000… which wasn't nearly as good of a tool as the one Daisy was wearing, by the way. It didn't even have a strobulb feature, or even half the storage capacity of this one.
"Daisy, you should just come back." The Professor suggested as she searched the rest of the assembly room. "You don't have the training to take on two ghosts and a boo."
"They separated, and I almost got the yellow one." The Princess replied, moving the flashlight again. "Hey, do me a favor and see if you can find how I get into the lower levels; that's where they took the clock hands."
The old man grumbled about it, but from the bunker there was really nothing that he could do to stop her, so after a minute or two the Professor found a way down. The lower levels of the Old Clockworks had never been open to the public when Daisy visited there as a child, and it took a bit of searching before she was able to find the trap door over by the far wall. Wooden and split into two sections like a double door, the hidden entrance to the lower levels was too heavy to be lifted with bare hands… so maybe that was why there was a rope connected to one of the trap door's large metal rings, traveling up toward the ceiling and over top of a rusty metal wheel before heading to a platform… oh, so it was opened with a crank.
Up on the second floor of the assembly room, there was a wooden platform that was built where one would expect to find a foreman's office in a factory like this, and the platform's only feature was a wheel that when turned looked like it would pull on the rope and raise the trap door. Great, but how was she supposed to get up there? Another quick search around the assembly room revealed, not a staircase, but a ladder of sorts, as in a set of curved metal rods that had been driven into the wall in place of a ladder. Pulling hard down on each one that she could reach before climbing onto it, surprisingly each one held her weight, even though one moved just enough under the Princess's foot to startle her during the ascent.
"Daisy, there aren't any cameras down there." The Professor's voice warned as she turned the wheel on top of the platform. "And the stone underneath the factory blocks radio signals, so I won't be able to monitor you at all."
"Well, there's nothing that can be done about it." She replied, locking the wheel so that trap door would stay open. "You'll just have to tell me what's down there, and I'll have to handle it as I go, and besides… what would a brave ghost hunter like Luigi think of me if I wimped out now? It's just the kind of opening all the other girls who want him would use to move in… like that Paula, or whatever her name is from Brooklyn, or worse, that Rosalina tramp."
Back down the ladder, and onto the assembly room floor, the old man explained that directly below her was the mine where the Old Clockworks sourced all of the jewels and metal needed for everything they made there, but below that was some kind of ruins that had only been discovered a short time before Evershade Valley was abandoned. There wasn't much known about it, aside that there were hieroglyphics similar to those found in the Birabuto Province of Sarasaland, not like there had been much chance for anyone to explore it since the ghosts showed up, and honestly most people forgot it was even there once the Dark Moon turned the whole valley into a tourist attraction.
"I'll have to have it researched more after the Dark Moon is back in place." Daisy said, shining her flashlight down into the darkness below the trap door. "All right, I'm heading down, wish me luck."
It sounded like the Professor was starting to say just that over the radio, when the Princess dropped down into the trap door, and the signal was reduced into a staticky, crackling noise that couldn't be understood. Beginning only a few feet below the trap door, a gradual sloping tunnel had been carved right into the stone, curving a bit as it moved away from the factory, and now there weren't even any old candles lit, leaving the Poltergust's flashlight as the only source of illumination. There were lightbulbs bolted to the rock ceiling, connected with a wire that traveled along to each one, but just like up in the Old Clockworks, none of the power seemed to be working.
Soon the slope came to an end, and now the Princess was in a wide open chamber that was filled with several sets of old mine cart tracks leading into the darkness in different directions, while the chamber itself was supported by columns of stone that looked like they had been left in place when this area was first mined out. Some of the tracks had an old cart sitting on them, and others didn't, but other than that all of the tracks looked pretty identical, so which way was she supposed to go? Maybe there was an old map of the mines somewhere around there, but before she could really look around for one, her eyes were drawn toward the sudden appearance of a yellow light over toward the left.
Well, it wasn't really a light, more of a glow as the yellow ghost from before slowly appeared, setting down its clock hand against the rock wall of one of the tunnels before entering this junction chamber. The phantom's glow was enough to illuminate the whole room, but just barely, more like being able to see the outlined shapes of the place but nothing else. Now its glowing eyes were locked onto Daisy as it floated into the center of the chamber, the Princess pressing the switch to charge the strobulb before it even got anywhere close. For a couple seconds there was silence, the yellow ghost just hovering there and… not really doing much of anything.
"I just have to ask." The Princess said, breaking the silence. "Why do you drop gold coins all over the place?"
"I… don't know." The phantom replied, surprising her. "Maybe I was a greedy person before becoming a ghost, now punished by having other greedy people like you constantly trying to take my treasure… who knows?"
Well, Daisy certainly didn't need any of it. As the Princess of Sarasaland, the only person in the world who was actually richer than her was Luigi, and she wasn't planning on letting go of the green plumber any time soon. All right, well, it was time to catch this ghost and recover that clock hand, but with it just kind of floating there, how was she supposed to get it with the strobulb by surprise? She tried walking around toward the left, and then the right, but the yellow phantom just kept turning to keep her in front of itself, but then it suddenly vanished, laughing as darkness returned to the junction chamber, and now it was Daisy who was turning around with the flashlight, trying to keep it from sneaking up on her.