Heyhi! Well, there's probably only two people reading this story.
Lake Blue and Mewcat: the quote, like Mewcat said, was from Pokémon. See, Lake Blue? Pokémon is philosophical!
"Isn't this dangerous?" Gary asked, wary of the mountain of stacked items. The building blocks were basically random things Astra found around the reflection room and improvised with to reach her target: the ceiling. Gary, meanwhile, was eating a bar of dark chocolate at his only other companion's claim that dark chocolate can reduce stress, which was supported by several different websites he most likely deemed worthy because he wasn't complaining about getting a cavity.
"Of course it is," Astra replied bluntly, testing the sturdiness of her neat pile. No matter what situation Astra was in, she was always obsessed with neatness, cleaning, and organization. Her flippers were always aching to reorganize someone's bookshelf or rearrange the mess of a penguin's desk. For once, though, her OCD issue came into pretty good use.
Smack dab in the middle of the room was a pyramid of furniture, boxes, and miscellaneous objects that were scattered all over the place. The base of the pyramid was made up of the surprisingly tough and sturdy coffee table along with the heaviest, largest boxes that stored who knows what. Astra didn't care as long as it would stay stable. Leading to the top of the pyramid were the mini fridge, television, more boxes, and at the very top was a Puffle bed Astra had found in the corner with other Puffle items. Apparently, being OCD could help build a pretty solid pyramid. It had taken so much effort to build the stack high enough so they could reach the air vent located on the ceiling and they didn't have any other way to escape because the window, old and yellowing, refused to open, the lock rusted to prevent from being moved.
Gary had taken the clock down and shoved it inside of a box to weigh it down so it wouldn't topple from such a high elevation, so they didn't know what time it was. They couldn't watch Club Penguin Talk Show either to figure out how long it's been since they first built the stack since the television was face down at the middle level of the pyramid, and that was pretty much the only connection they had to the outside world.
Neither of them were magic either, so they couldn't flush themselves down a toilet Ministry of Magic style (courtesy of CC Rainbow Unicorn's earlier review) or throw Floo Powder in a fireplace, step in the flames, and yell, "EPF Headquarters!" and magically appear at the fireplace of the HQ (Harry Potter references). Besides, the room did not come with a toilet (luckily, neither of them had to use the bathroom), a fireplace, and Astra doubted Aunt Arctic had obliged to Rookie's plead to have a fireplace at the HQ so he could roast marshmallows to make s'mores. That had probably been the only time Astra ever agreed and supported Rookie's suggestion, though they both had been overruled because everyone else thought it would be a waste of money.
Gary took another bite out of his chocolate bar, a larger one as a result of his nerves. "Wouldn't we possibly injure ourselves by falling when we're climbing up?"
He looked more terrified than Astra had ever seen him. His entire body was quaking, perspiration was rolling through his feathers, he was eating chocolate, for goodness sake, and he actually listened and followed through with two of Astra's suggestions: the chocolate and the pyramid.
"Why do you think I put the Puffle beds and the mattress around the mountain?" she replied, jumping on the mattress before purposefully falling on her back to prove her point. Puffle beds were arranged to cover a four-foot radius from the stack.
Her co-worker still didn't seem convinced, based on the fact that his feathers were pale and he stopped chewing on his chocolate.
Astra sighed reluctantly. She never had a problem with heights. She used to go to sleepaway camp back in junior high during the summers, one activity including climbing rope courses held up by tree trunks suspended thirty feet to fifty feet in the air. To her, this was just another adventure. "Can you think of any other ways we can get out of here? All I can figure out is we can climb through the ventilation system to the set or wherever else we can go."
Gary opted to take an even bigger bit of his chocolate to avoid looking stupid for not having an alternate strategy to get out of their confinement.
"Can you do ropes?" Astra asked slowly, taking out a length of it from a random box. She put the coil over her body like a satchel, a.k.a. man purse. "I'll climb up first and then lower the rope. You climb up and we're good."
Several teetering minutes later of tedious climbing, shaky boxes, shrieks from Gary, and, oddly enough, laughter from Astra every time she was about to fall to her death (not the best choice if you want me to do dangerous stuff), Astra was at the top of the giant pile of reflection room items.
"Is there a broomstick in the room or something I can use to beat up the air vent?" she shouted to Gary, seeing that the shaft was locked. She wondered why the vent was all the way up here. Wouldn't it have been more convenient to be closer to the ground? Whoever designed this building clearly didn't think of every possible situation that could happen.
Gary rummaged around the room and even in the boxes before producing a screwdriver. "I'm not climbing that," the inventor said stubbornly, holding up the tool as high as he could. Irritated, the two of them got into a brief argument until Gary came up with the bright idea to just lower the rope Astra was carrying so he could tie the screwdriver to the rope's end rather than have him climb up too.
About three minutes after a string of curse words on Astra's part, more trembling of the tower, and yelps of panic courtesy of Gary, Astra finally made it inside the ventilation system. The tunnel was pretty dark, but somehow, the stainless steel was free of dust and was wide enough for a penguin to crawl through. She could sit up, but had to bend her upper body uncomfortably.
"Climb up," Astra called down after tossing one end of the rope to the scientist munching on his last bite of chocolate as he threw the wrapper carelessly into the garbage bin.
"What if you don't have enough strength to pull me up?" Gary said worriedly. "You might sprain a muscle or drop me on my head. I don't want to lose any brain cells! I won't be smart anymore and then the Director won't have any use for me anymore! I'll be fired from the EPF and have to work...to work...in the Pizza Parlor."
Astra mentally flipper-palmed. This guy was such a downer. If he was at a party, he would completely ruin the whole idea of celebrating absolutely nothing at all just to have fun. "First of all, I won't drop you. Second of all, if you have basic common sense and if I do drop you, you'll know to protect your head with your flippers when you fall. Third of all, you have some brain cells to spare and your body will regenerate some more. Finally, what's wrong with the Pizza Parlor? You'll make a good profit from all the pizzas the EPF orders for Rookie, Mewcat, and me. We do love food, after all."
Well, apparently, Gary had an alter ego because he started arguing with himself out loud. "Maybe I should trust Astra. She's the only person who can help me escape from here right now, and this is a dire situation. Even a carefree penguin like her wouldn't be messing with penguins for her own amusement when a problem like this is thrown at her face."
"No!" he suddenly shouted. Astra raised her eyebrows at that. "Are you kidding me? Why should we trust Astra? We're talking about the same penguin who dressed up as Herbert P. Bear for Halloween! If Rookie didn't reveal that it was only a costume, Club Penguin would've been on lockdown!"
"But she said she only did that because she thought that he was the scariest being she could dress up as after penguins began to take him seriously after the fear inflicted from Operation Blackout," Gary's first personality argued.
"She should've known better!" the alter ego defended himself. "She didn't take Herbert's evil ways seriously enough and decided to scare people by dressing up as him for her own pleasure!"
"Are you done yet?" Astra snapped impatiently, irked that Gary's alter ego was only listing Astra's bad qualities as if she wasn't there. She was slightly surprised that Gary tried to defend her against himself, but what annoyed her was that he was allowed to argue with himself publically yet he considered sending her to a mental institute when she fought with herself mentally. To speed up his decision-making, Astra added, "If you don't make up your mind soon, I'm going to crawl through the ventilation system with no sense of direction as to where I'm going and leave you here. You could be stuck in here for several more hours, or even days considering the fact that I don't know my way around this tunnel system."
"Lower the rope more; I can't reach it," Gary suddenly said, jumping to grab the end. Astra smirked and let another length of the coil down.
"Oh, jeez, you know you don't have to hold it so tightly, right?" Astra grunted, feeling the tension on the rope increase. Gary was gripping it so hard that if Astra pulled him up halfway and accidentally released the rope from the weight, she was pretty sure he would end up burning his flippers from the friction.
Screaming and shrieking courtesy of a certain scientist followed soon after that. Yelling and "encouraging" shouts of "Man up, Gary!" among other phrases similar to that were fired back at the blue-feathered inventor. Fortunately, the panicked noises escaping from Gary's beak weren't as terrible as earlier when he went ballistic from the shock of being locked in the reflection room. Astra labeled that event as "Several hours of my life I'm never going to get back."
"Finally," Gary chided, squeezing himself through the hole and into the tunnel. "That took much longer than expected. You must really work on your upper body strength in case this sort of situation repeats itself in the future or you are required to use more of your chest muscles and arms muscles."
Astra wanted to explode, but kept her beak shut. Instead, she left a rambling Gary behind as she crawled through the tunnel, trying to remember how she had gotten to Gary's reflection room hours ago from her own stuffy little closet. If the vents went in a similar direction, she could easily make it to the set where all the other agents were.
"Where are you going?" Gary called, scrambling after her. "Do you know how to get to the set? Which way are we going? Why are we going this way?"
"Intuition," she explained simply, not wanting to bother going into more depth than that. It would be too confusing to explain to him she was retracing her route back to her reflection room and head to the direction of the set from there via the air ducts. Whenever she tried to tell someone her purpose in something, she would always forget important details and have to go back to what was already spoken, continue from that point, and the rest of the explanation would be extremely confusing (Confused? Welcome to my world).
"That's not a valid reason!" he exclaimed in protest, stopping in his tracks. Astra sighed and halted as well, lying flat on her stomach because she was too lazy to support herself with her limbs even for a couple of seconds. "I say we go the other way."
"And why is that?" she asked, using his own words against him. "Do you have some big, scientific explanation for your decision, oh so great leader Gary?"
"Well, um, uh...you see, it's because..." Gary trailed off, silent for a moment to figure out why his idea was better than Astra's when there was really no difference. "I'll have you know that I have the highest IQ out of all the citizens of Club Penguin, so that means my hunches are much more valid than yours considering the fact that I'm smarter than you and therefore, I have much sharper deductive skills."
Astra rolled her eyes, exasperated. Obviously, he just wanted to disagree with her because she was what most penguins would classify as untrustworthy. It was heads or tails; a fifty-fifty chance. He had no better reason to go the other way than Astra did going her way except for the chance of finding the air vent to the set. "Basically, you have no real explanation. Do whatever you want, Gary, but I'm going this way unless you can come up with a valid point as to why I should go that way. If I don't find the vent to the set, then I'm wrong. Whatever."
"T-Then fine!" the addressed penguin burst out. "But don't come crying to me for help when you get lost in here!"
"Bye," she replied, continuing her path towards the set. Gary must've been pretty confident about the other route because there was shuffling and clattering from behind Astra as the pattering of his flippers got quieter and quieter, signaling that he was getting farther and farther away.
Ignoring the fact that she just rejected a genius penguin's intuition, Astra continued her trek - well, crawl - to the set so she could yell at everyone who left her in a stuffy closet.
"Is this it?" she murmured to herself, peering through the ventilation shaft. Relief flooded through her body as she realized that she was above her reflection room. A penguin had a flipper reached out and opened the door.
Bam! The two halves of a broomstick Astra had snapped earlier and hastily tossed back inside the closet fell out and hit the penguin squarely on the head. Astra winced as the second half smashed against the penguin's face, causing him to stagger back, stumbling in a circle.
"That must've hurt," Astra said aloud, continuing her path towards the set. However, unknowingly to her, the penguin had shrieked at the sound of her voice and glanced around the empty hallway.
Oddly enough, Astra started hearing some heavily auto-tuned, stereotypical popular plastic girl voice trying to rap. She made a face and figured that it was the Just Dance game music playing as Rookie and the others danced to it. Now, though, she could just follow that sound rather than relying on only her instincts and memory.
Why couldn't he have chosen a better song? Astra sulked, listening to the lame, bubblegum pop sound. Maybe she was being a little biased because she preferred Green Day and Eminem whereas Rookie was more childish, but she still couldn't believe anyone would pick, let alone like, the fake voice being blared out from the television. Actually, she couldn't believe that the song was even successful.
"Astra?" The said penguin looked up in surprise to see Gary right across from her. The music had gotten louder. In fact, it was right underneath the two.
"I need air!" Gary wheezed dramatically. He pulled and tugged at the ventilation grid, but it wouldn't budge. There were screws holding it in place.
"Do you have a laser?" Astra asked, pounding against the metal. There wasn't even a scratch on it. That was some sturdy material.
Gary stared at her in disbelief. "Why would I be carrying a laser around?"
"Why do you carry parts of a pirate slang translator in your pocket?" Astra shot back, pointing at the objects sticking out of his lab coat.
"In case Rockhopper comes back!" Gary defended himself.
"Do you know how—never mind, it's not worth arguing with you," Astra grumbled. "Do you have a screwdriver?"
"Yes, actually," Gary said proudly, pulling one out. Astra stared at him. This guy carried a screwdriver, out of all things, around with him, but forgets the keys to his home inside his igloo? That made no sense at all.
Ignoring her thoughts, Astra took the screwdriver and within seconds, the ventilation grid was lifted and put to the side.
"So now we use the rope," Astra muttered to herself, trying to figure out a way to get down. She had no idea what was below them, except that the music was somewhere near the area. For all she knew, they could be filming right now. Hopefully, they weren't, and if they were, Astra would blame Gary for dropping in like this.
Unfortunately, Gary was so excited to be connected to the outside world that he jumped down the hole immediately despite Astra's warning shout. If that wasn't enough, his flipper had gotten tangled with the rope Astra was carrying, which, in spite of her attempts to avoid the coil, wrapped itself around her foot. The weight of Gary and gravity dragged Astra down the space in the shaft.
"What the—?!" Gary hit the floor first but managed to land safely by tucking himself into a ball. Astra was surprised that he could do that in his state of panic as she did the same.
Waves of pain shot through her body, leaving her feeling paralyzed like the time she fell out of a tree and landed on her back.
Anything broken...no. Flippers still intact, head still on body, no eyeballs rolling across the floor, no blood pool around my body...perfectly fine. Astra moved her limbs slowly, trying to regain her senses. She still felt sore, but forced herself to stand up anyway.
Gary was already on his feet, probably because he didn't have any dead weight dragging him down like Astra did.
"You're here!" Rookie exclaimed excitedly. Astra turned to see the green penguin grinning cheerfully as if nothing had happened. In fact, no one was expressing too much concern over the fact that Astra and Gary had fallen from the ceiling except the medical team, who were poking at Astra's flippers to see her reaction. When she didn't show any, they went back to Gary's groans of pain and took him away.
"I was beginning to worry you were mad at us and staying at home!" Rookie said optimistically. This guy never seemed to be down.
The next words that left Rookie's beak meant Astra's doom.
"Come on, let's play Just Dance 4!"
I probably should've updated sooner...though I suffer from writer's block and developed nausea that wouldn't stop bothering me the entire week.
Midwinter break starting today! Yeah!
Also, I might put this on hiatus because I want to start from scratch with a different project I've been thinking about for a while. I was rereading the story the other day and must've slapped myself at least fifty times while going through several sections. I might do this at the same time as the other one, but I think that's too ambitious.
'Kay, bye!