Even though they'd been at the watch tower a few times, they'd mainly stuck to the main rooms together. Yes, that's right. Roy, Dick, Wally, and Scarlet were once again in the watch tower...
"Okay, so what should we do?" Roy asked. He was personally wanting to just take a nap. He'd been up late all last night doing homework, he hadn't seen his surrogate brothers and sister in two weeks since the McDonald's incident, and he had felt a little guilty...
"Can we go exploring?" Scarlet asked, cocking her head like a curious animal.
"You know what... sure..." Roy sighed, standing wearily. For once, he wasn't sure if he could take their antics...
Wally had started humming a shockingly hated tune. "If you start singing anything from Dora I will punch you out." Roy threatened, and Wally promptly shut up.
"Where do we explore?" Dick asked.
"Let's just run around..." Scarlet said, before taking off around the corner.
"Wait up, guys..." Roy grumbled.
"It's not our fault you're a geezer!" Dick yelled, knowing it would enrage Roy. He was right, of course, and Roy's rage fueled him enough to have him stay a steady twenty feet behind the sprinting children...
"Geezer geezer geezer!" Scarlet yelled, racing around another twist and turn in the labyrinth that was the watch tower, her younger two brothers giggling uncontrollably as they raced along beside her.
"Roy, you're so old! If you had a lawn you'd be yelling at us to get off it!" Wally yelled, and they broke out once again in giggles. All this t,e they were still running, getting stitches in their sides from laughter and running...
"I'm gonna kill you guys!" Roy roared, still running after them, his exhaustion now forgotten, replaced by anger.
He finally managed to corner them, but realized he'd taken it a little too far when he saw the look of fear on their faces.
He sighed. "Fine. I might not kill you guys. But I am NOT a geezer."
"Deal." Wally agreed, smiling. And the tension was broken.
"Hey Roy, it's dinner time. We should get to the dining hall, or Batman will be worried..." Dick said.
"First let's try and figure out where we are..." Roy said. He sighed in frustration, realizing he had no idea where they were, and were surrounded by four corridors possibly directions the could go in...
Roy sighed. "Okay, so we're officially lost. Anyone have any ideas?"
"Call for help?" Wally suggested.
"No! Then they'll think we're irresponsible! We are responsible!" Dick said firmly, shaking Wally.
"Says the boy who thought it was a good idea to make me angry and almost get them killed." Roy said dryly.
"Roy, this isn't funny! We're really lost!" Wally said frantically.
"Wally, calm down..." Roy tried, but the red head's eyes grew even wider.
"Calm down? Calm down!? I could starve! I'm a speedster, if we're lost for like, two hours and I don't have food, I pass out! I'm going to die! Help me Dick, help me, I'm spiraling!" the ten year old pleaded, grabbing Dick by the shoulders and shaking him as fat tears rolled down his cheeks...
"Get a grip!" Dick yelled, slapping his friend across the face. Wally slumped to the floor and stopped hyper-ventilating. "Thanks, I needed that..."
"Look, no one is going to die, guys. We can get back to the main hall... somehow..."
"I have an idea." Scarlet piped up, pointing down a corridor. "Why don't we go that way? If we keep going in one direction long enough, we'll get somewhere..."
Roy nodded. "Makes sense. Okay, let's go..." And so they struck out forward, until they reached a dead end in another twenty minutes.
"Alright. Let's go left this time." Dick suggested, and so they kept going, turning left at every intersection of the hallways for another half hour, until they realized they'd been walking in a huge square...
"This is hopeless!" Roy yelled, punching the wall out of frustration. "We're never going to find our way back! Look, I don't care how irresponsible the league thinks we are after this, I just want to get somewhere!" Roy announced, livid.
"I want Dad, Dick..." Scarlet whispered, voice laced with dispair and eyes disappointed.
"Okay, okay, I'll call them..." Dick punched in the sequence into his communicator and gaped. "The batteries are dead." he said, eyes growing wide.
"Let me try... Dang it, I left my communicator in my other pants!" Roy said.
"Wally?" Scarlet asked hopefully.
"Scarlet, I'm the least responsible one here. You really think my communicator works if there's doesn't? Besides, I kinda sat on it..."
"Scarlet, please tell me your battery isn't dead..." Roy pleaded with her.
"No... it's not... In fact, it's sitting on the charger."
"Really!? Where?" Roy asked, getting hopeful.
"At home." Scarlet said.
"Nooo!" everyone said in unison.
Wally sniffed a little- he was taking it pretty hard. He was a speedster, meaning he was pretty hungry. And right now, their situation seemed hopeless.
"Suck it up, Wally."Roy snapped. He was hungry and tired too, and his patience was wearing thin...
At the look of fear Wally gave him, he instantly relented. "Sorry, Wally, I just... look, we're all tired, hungry, and lost, alright? But we'll be okay... because... we're together." he said, giving the group a weak smile, which they returned.
"Okay, now we need a plan of action. We're totally lost in a huge satellite orbiting Earth and we haven't seen anyone in two hours. What should we do? We need to find a landmark, something we recognize..."
They all looked around to find nothing.
"Hey, what if we found a window? We could look at the stars and try and figure out where we are by the constellations..." Dick suggested, and Roy perked up.
"Sounds like a plan. Okay, a window, a window..." They spent the next twenty minutes searching in vain, and Roy sighed. "no windows... okay..."
"Hey Roy, why is there a mailbox here?" Scarlet asked, pointing to a small chute in the wall...
"That's not a mail box, that's a just a laundry chute..." Roy said, before he gaped.
"A laundry chute! To the laundry room! At least we'll know where we, are, then..." Wally beamed, looking excited.
"But none of us know how to get back to the main room from the laundry room, Roy." Dick said, looking a bit skeptical.
"Dick, I don't even care. I want to get somewhere, and this..." he said, motioning to the laundry chute. "Is somewhere. Now, are we going, or what?"
"I'll go!" Scarlet chirped happily, and before anyone could stop her, she had scrambled into the chute and was gone.
Her joyful screams echoed out to them, until there was a loud bang and silence...
"Oh my gosh! It ate Scarlet!" Wally yelled. "And we thought it was a laundry chute... I'm coming, Scarlet!" he jumped in as well, sliding after her, anxious...
Roy and Dick anxiously followed, Roy glad he could at least fit into the chute... The next three minutes were, possibly, the worst in his life. He was slammed into the sides of the chute, since there was a complex system of twists and turns the chute had to take to get to the laundry room. They'd been told there were chutes all over the tower, and Roy had never been so relieved to plunge out of the metal death trap and into a huge bin of dirty clothing...
"That was awesome!" Wally yelled, grinning. "I can't believe we did that!"
"Wally, where's Scarlet?" Dick asked, eyes nervously scanning the surface of all the spandex costumes...
Wally paled. "I... THE LAUNDRY ATE HER!"
"Scarlet!" Roy yelled, realizing what had happened and feeling horror well up within him. The clothes seemed to be like quick sand, you fell into the gaps between then, and Scarlet had probably slid under the slippery mass of spandex. All the horror stories he'd seen on the internet about toddlers and young children suffocating under blankets and table clothes came to the forefront of his mind with a vengeance.
"I'm coming, kid!" Roy yelled, digging frantically through the costumes. Wally and Dick quickly joined him, until Roy caught sight of something that seemed to be plucked straight from a horror movie... A small hand appeared ti reach up from the surface of clothing, and it was wiggling frantically...
"There!" he seized the wrist and pulled, Wally and Dick helping, until they'd managed to free the littlest bird from a mound of costumes...
Scarlet gasped for air, sprawling on the clothes.
Wally started tearing up. "It's okay, Scarlet- it's going to be okay..." he said, hugging her as though she'd come back from the dead. Roy realized the exhaustion and hunger was making them all slightly crazy as he jumped down from the huge, industrial sized bin, helping each of his siblings down after him.
"Okay, we're in the laundry room..." Roy said. At the moment, his three friends were gaping at all the water swishing in the thirty washers going...
"Can I get in one? Just for the spin cycle?" Scarlet asked hopefully.
"No." Roy said firmly. "Now, we're in the laundry room... we just have to figure out how to get back to the main room..." Roy sighed, realizing he had absolutely no idea how to do that. It was going to be a long night...