Chapter 6: Dim Detour

Working with the dark ether of Shadow Stitch was not the most pleasant way for Melia to spend the majority of her next year and a half of training. While she quickly learned how to stop splashing herself with it, having only one session each week put even more of a damper on progress than she expected, even for keeping up with her other arts.

It was relatively chilly day in February when Melia's ability to summon the shadowy ether within a minute reached consistent enough levels to move on to the second half of the art.

Reddel demonstrated the art again. "The idea is, on the final strike that deploys the ether, you imagine it spreading out in a thin circle as opposed to a concentrated blob. From there, you command it to latch onto whichever targets you see fit."

Melia looked at the row of dummies set up, with sensors at their bases set up to detect darkness, some labelled "friend" while others were "foe". She started pounding away at the floor, working the shadowy ether down to the bottom of her staff. Once she could feel it just at the tip, she gave it an extra-hard bash, imagining the drop of darkness flying outwards like a firefighter's craft dropping water on a burning house. The actual result was the drop splashing outwards at about a quarter of the desired radius, drenching her ankles.

"As with everything else, practice makes perfect." Reddel cast a powerful flashlight across the floor, alleviating most of the shadowy feeling. "The best possible result is to have the darkness travel underneath your feet without touching them, which can only be achieved through increasing the affected radius."

Melia sighed and started casting the art once more. She wasn't having a lot of fun with it, but at least it was an ether art.

18 May Sorean 3 - THE HIGH ENQUIRY - 3G

TRENSOR CONVICTED - "The right man walks free", Ders' defendant says

[Wes Valentium, Legal Correspondent]

After a full week of deliberation, Hector Trensor has been convicted of the murder of Sally Kert, leaving Gord Ders innocent and cleared of all charges. The year-old case marks the fourth time in the past decade that a unanimous decision has been handed out by a jury.

Melia disgustedly placed the newspaper back on the bench where she found it, not even bothering to read the rest of the front page. Yet another mockery of the legal system, allowing the pure-blood prejudice of the public to taint a cut-and-dry case, where the authorities had not produced one iota of evidence against the one of mixed heritage.

Standing up, she turned north and continued walking up the street. She was no longer given specific objectives during her public excursions, which were planned irregularly about once every two or three months, and she had become interested in simply walking around and building up a proper familiarity with the city.

Passing by the alleyway between a barbershop and a winery, she heard what almost sounded like crying. Glancing down the alley, she saw a boy about her age backing a much younger boy, maybe forty-odd years old, into a corner. Words couldn't be made out, but the impression was that the older boy wanted something and was going to take it by force if necessary.

Melia weighed the situation. She wasn't supposed to be getting into any confrontations, but perhaps simply her presence would cause the bully to chicken out and retreat. And none of the adults passing by seemed to care in the slightest, or even notice something was going on.

The bully snatched what looked to be some sort of card from the younger boy, who covered his hands with his face and started crying.

This cannot be allowed to continue. Melia started quietly stepping down the alley. It wasn't long before she could make out the gloating.

"...the holographic foil casing, but that's not the main event, is it? Trust me kid, this is in far better hands than yours now, it doesn't deserve to be trapped in your grubby-"

Sneaking up behind him, Melia plucked the card out of the bully's hand and gave it a quick glance, revealing it to be a trading card. She didn't follow sports, but even she could recognise Ted Biffens, the Shooting Stars' top scorer. The card's specularity and fake 3D effect implied it was quite a rare find.

The bully was a bit slow on the uptake. "Where'd...hey, who do you think you are?"

Melia deftly flipped the card back into the young boy's hands, who was now sitting with his mouth agape. "Do not linger. Return home at once!"

The teary-eyed boy made a mad dash out of the alley. "Thanks, missy!"

Face turning from confusion to anger, the bully slowly turned to Melia. "Well aren't you some goody-two-shoes."

Melia suddenly recognised the boy - he was the third of the gang she had met during her first excursion, the one who hadn't said a word at the time. That means the other two can't be far away, she realised.

On cue, the other two gang members turned into the alley, looking quite pleased with themselves.

"Well, Charles, how did it go?" asked Brent, the leader. "We saw the scrawny runt high-tailing it out of here, so we figure you got a good haul off o' him."

Charles scowled. "He's got the good stuff, but this idiot here broke it up. I got nutin'."

The other two's moods soured immediately.

"This idiot here, you say?" Dev, the oily-voiced one, stretched his arms and cracked his elbows. "Would you say that this idiot here looks quite a lot like that idiot that we've been looking for for the past couple of years?"

"This idiot here? Yeah I'll say." Brent cracked his knuckles. "The one that made us look stupid about two years ago, by leading us on a wild goose chase across the middle of nowhere. You thought we'd forget about something like that? You thought we'd forget your smarmy face?"

Melia wasn't really listening to the bullies; she was busy looking for a means of escape. There are no footholds on the walls to speak of. There is one door that leads into the winery, but it has no means of opening from this side. Now how do I look behind me without turning away from these fools?

"What was your name, Emily or something? Ah whatever, it doesn't matter."

The gang started advancing on Melia. She was forced to back away until she hit the alley's back wall. Wait, what's this? She kicked the bottom on the wall behind her, feeling a swinging grate. This must be a maintenance duct. I can hide in here until these chumps go away, and they're too large to have any hope of following.

"Not so tough when you don't have your cheap transporter tricks, eh?"

In a single motion, Melia opened up the grating and dove inside the vent, vanishing into the darkness.

"Oh look, she's gone and trapped herself in a hole in the wall." Laughter. "We don't need to follow, we can just wait out here until she decides to show herself."

Oh. Right. They're been looking for me for two years, just hiding in a vent won't dissuade them that easily. Hmm...

Melia had a basic idea of how the Alcamoth maintenance duct system was structured: in the end, every duct was connected to every other duct in some fashion, so she could simply keep going deeper into the system and eventually pop out somewhere else. It was because of this that parents tended to tell their children that the ducts were a dangerous place, full of spinning fans and biological waste, simply to ward them off from trying to play inside and ending up stuck or lost.

"You can't cower in there forever, y'know. And there's three of us. We can just keep swapping out until you're ready to play nice."

Mind made up, Melia started crawling further along the pitch-black duct. She hated tight spaces, but it really wasn't that bad; there was just enough room to sit up straight if she wanted to. Being short has its advantages I suppose.

After a few turns and inclines, she saw natural light around a corner. Based on their comments, they think I have no escape. There's no chance of them following me to this exit. She quickly made the turn.

And instantly fell down a vertical shaft that was invisible in the darkness.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" Unable to splay herself out to slow the fall, Melia tried jamming her limbs into the walls, which did nothing but hurt. Just as she lost track of how long she had fallen for, she could feel the shaft gradually start to turn sideways. Unfortunately, she was travelling at such high speed that the instant she started sliding along the steep floor, she collapsed into a ball and started rolling uncontrollably.

"-aaaAAAaaaAAAaaaAAAaaaAAAaaaAAAaaaAAAaaa..." Melia had no idea where she was going anymore; for all she knew she was trapped in a perpetually-spinning hamster wheel. Every now and then she felt a sharp corner but couldn't even tell whether it was a horizontal or vertical turn. Running out of breath to scream with, she scrunched her face up tight and wished for it to end quickly.

It didn't take long. After about two minutes of rolling, Melia felt the tunnel end as she was projected through a hatch and into an open area, colliding with a wall. Aching all over, she slowly unrolled to find she was in some sort of control room, with monitors and control panels everywhere, being watched by two people.

The larger of the two men was first to speak. "Now who are you? Where'd you come from? Haven't your parents ever told you to stay out of the ductwork?"

Leaning against the wall, Melia slowly realised that she was probably in trouble and would need to talk her way out of it. "I...apologise for the intrusion. I was...tricked into entering the ductwork by a group of bullies in the Lumian District." She paused for a moment to decide how to explain further.

The smaller of the two men interrupted. "Wait, Lumian District? Can you be more specific?"

Confused, Melia strained to remember. "It was...an alley between a winery and a barbershop."

"Port J-56?" The man looked to a complex map on the wall and traced a route. "Seriously? You got through J Shaft? Woah." He started looking over Melia more thoroughly. "Pretty flexible, half-wings, just small enough to get through all the thinnest ducts. A lot older than most of the kids we find lost in the vents. And you had to have gone through tube J-12 to get here, yet there's not a scratch or a scuff on you." He turned to the other man. "You think she could give us a hand?"

The bigger man scratched his chin. "Could be just what we need. Okay then. What's your name, now?"

"...You may call me Mel." Melia wasn't sure what was going on, but it didn't seem like she was in trouble.

"Okay, Mel. I'm Jim, and this is Rob. Here's the deal. If you give us a hand with this issue we've been having, we'll send you back where you came from with no fuss. You don't help us, we'll have to turn you in for trespassing. All right?"

Melia had never done any sort of physical labour in her life, so she didn't think she'd be able to offer anything, but she figured she might as well try. "Tell me in greater detail."

"We've been dealing with a blockage in tube F-37 for a few months now. Normally we can just blast air down the pipe and clear it out, but it's just partial enough a blockage that it's not working." Jim pointed to a thin tunnel on the map. "It's minimum gauge, so it's the hardest for us to deal with if we can't get it unstuck because we can't fit inside. What we'd like you to do is get in there and unblock it. It shouldn't take a lot of work because it's a partial blockage, so all you'll need is this." He held up a chisel about the size of Melia's lower arm. "Just poke it until it comes loose. Sound easy enough?"

Melia nodded.

"Good." Jim handed Melia the chisel and a light on a headband. "If you can roll through the system like you did when you came in here, we can save a lot of time and just propel you through the pipes. Get in the duct and we'll fire you to F-37. Once you're done, we'll be able to tell the blockage is gone, and send you back here. Any questions?"

Melia secured the light to her head. "No." She wasn't sure if she was looking forward to high-speed rolling through the tubes again - it was very scary, but quite exhilarating, and would be much less frightening when controlled.

"Okay then, good luck." Rob fiddled with a control panel, opening the hatch to the tunnel Melia had initially popped out of. She clambered inside and rolled up, carefully making sure that the chisel was safely tucked inside her grip.

A few seconds passed before the hatch closed and Melia felt air pressure build up behind her, applying gradual acceleration. After about ten seconds she was rolling along at a decent speed, slower than what she had dealt with earlier. This is much nicer than the speed caused by my freefall. Rolling along with her light on, she noticed a great number of T-junctions and forks that she had passed by earlier, each with valves opening and closing to direct her to her target.

Just when Melia was starting to get a little dizzy - being able to see was a disadvantage in that regard - she felt herself bump into something and stop as the airflow in the tunnel dropped to just enough to detect the clog. Unrolling and sitting up in the cramped space, she immediately recognised the problem: a baby stroller. With a shaft just above, it had clearly been slipped into the system by some idiot, and was jammed on some of the pipe's cross-bracing.

I suppose I won't be needing the chisel then. Melia started pushing and prodding various parts of the stroller to try and get it loose. After a few attempts, the front end came free, and it was pretty easy to get the rest of it unstuck after that. It was quite a nice stroller, patterned in a variety of pastel-coloured swirls, and seemed fully functional. Melia idly wondered why it would have been chucked into a vent when she realised she didn't know what to do with it now that it was unstuck.

Suddenly, she could feel the wind building again, ready to propel her back to the control room. Thinking quickly, she squeezed the folded-up stroller past herself before picking up the unused chisel and rolling up - hopefully her chasing the stroller down the tunnel would be enough to stop it getting stuck again.

It seemed like it was much faster to return to the control room. Popping out of the hatch, Melia intuitively banked right and just avoided crashing into the stroller as they both hit the back wall.

"A stroller?" Rob picked it up. "That's going on the list of weird things we find in the ducts."

"Looks like it just needs a cleaning and we can sell it." Jim turned to Melia. "I know it didn't seem like much, but you really helped us out here. F-37 isn't a major tube, but it being blocked meant that F-28 was getting a lot more airflow than normal, which chain-reacts down the whole system." He idly pointed to the map on the wall as he spoke. "It's a bit complex but basically every blockage hurts. Tell you what, you can have this."

Jim reached into a cabinet on the wall and extracted a box, which was full of black bracelets. He pulled one out and handed it to Melia.

"As you probably know, the average height of us High Entia has slowly been getting taller. It's been several centuries since any of us duct guys could fit through every tube in the network. But back when we could, we used these."

Melia carefully slipped the bracelet onto her left wrist and gave it a tap as she handed the headband light and chisel back to Rob. The blackness lit up into a blue display, showing a tiny map of the entire duct network and her current position in it.

"It's called a Chozo interface, named after the guy who invented it. All you have to do is think of where you want to go, and it'll patch into the system and send you there." Jim looked at the device wistfully. "Guys like us have no hope of using it, we'd have a wing ripped off or get stuck in a junction somewhere. But you can use it to get around the city in ways no one else thinks are there. Just promise to come back here every now and then to see if we could use your help with anything."

"I shall. Thank you." Both overwhelmed at the overall situation and relieved that she wouldn't be punished for anything, Melia slipped back into the ductwork. She looked at the glowing bracelet in the darkness. Take me to Lumian District, please.

The map on the bracelet zoomed into the relevant portion and circled several ports. Melia tried to remember what Rob said she originally came through, so she wouldn't come out the same one. I believe he said I started at J-56, so...J-55?

A route was traced across the map in white. Seconds later, the system kicked into life, sending Melia through the pipes at the medium-high speed necessary to get her up the long vertical shafts. Two minutes later, and she rolled to a stop just inside a closed hatch, which she pushed open to find the back alley on the other side of the barbershop she had originally started at.

Clambering out of the duct and into the sunlight, Melia stood up and stretched, finding that she was surprisingly clean for having just spent several minutes rolling around in maintenance shafts. That was certainly an adventure. I think it's time to go back to the palace. Walking towards the transport hub, she looked to find the trio of goons still huddled around the hatch she had first disappeared into. The temptation to show them up was strong. But that would just lead to another chase. Which I could easily escape again by going through the ducts, which would be endlessly entertaining, but I don't wish to attract attention. ... Though maybe I could toy with them in other ways...

Melia walked across the street into an alley between a cheese shop and a butcher shop, taking notice of some garbage bags piled within. She picked up one of the smaller bags and was immediately disgusted by the sensation of its contents. Perfect. She tossed the bag into the vent at the end of the alley and turned to the Chozo interface.

Take this cargo to J-56, maximum speed, no brakes.

She watched the map as the squishy payload travelled through the pipes. Ten seconds later, the mail was delivered. Another ten seconds later, and she could see the trio running by on the street, legs covered in disgusting waste.

Melia turned off the Chozo interface and slipped it under her glove. I should probably keep this whole thing a secret. I don't think Father would appreciate me spelunking through the duct system.

Arriving back in her chambers, Melia flopped onto her bed. It was a relief to be sitting on something soft for once, after having rolled through dozens of metal tunnels at high speed. It didn't hurt, but there was a lot of residual soreness.

After several minutes of rest, her curiosity started to bubble up. She pulled a book off the shelf titled Alcamoth: The Miracle of Engineering and flipped to chapter 18: Ventilation. The book went into a decent amount of detail about the city's ductwork, explaining how it was originally conceived as both a ventilation system and a mail delivery network before having the mail concept quickly canned after air quality concerns, how the system had over several hundred ports and four control substations, and how the system's widest tunnels developed over time to double as maintenance access for several major areas of the city and palace.

Melia had not known that the ductwork in the palace was part of the system at large; she thought the two were completely disconnected for paranoia reasons. Intrigued, she booted up the Chozo interface, which informed her that the closest port was called A-64 - and a mere few metres away. Following its pointer, she entered her closet.

As expected for a princess, Melia had quite the expansive wardrobe. On a regular basis, the imperial tailors would add more clothes to the racks while removing the oldest ones by entering through the closet's back door, which Melia presumed connected to the palace's maintenance corridors. She had spent quite some time inside in her life, sometimes childishly looking for secret passages, but she never suspected that the vent in the ceiling would be one.

Open the port. The instant the thought materialised, the vent grate swung open. I might be able to get up there with something to stand on. She looked around and spied her two suitcases in the far corner; she never really understood why she possessed suitcases, given how she expected to live in the palace for her entire life. Stacking the suitcases under the vent and standing on them, she still couldn't leap high enough to reach the freely-swinging grate.

That may be just as well, she thought as she put the suitcases back and commanded the port to close. Being able to leave the palace at any time through an unguarded exit is folly. It would be all risk and no reward; far too tempting and far too discourteous to those who fear for my safety.

Regardless of what she kept telling herself, Melia ended up spending the rest of the day fantasising about using the ducts to escape the palace on a regular basis, living a carefree life outside in public while returning inside just enough to keep suspicions low and all her royal obligations fulfilled. Before going to bed that night, she stuffed the Chozo interface deep into her sock drawer, where it would hopefully take enough time to get at to stop any impulsive decisions.

Hopefully I can keep any silly exploits locked within my dreams.

"Biggest coins only! I ain't runnin' from the cops with a bag of pennies!"

The tellers fearfully poured masses of coins into the kingpin's sacks while his two cronies waved their ether pistols around, keeping the cowering customers in check.

"That's the lot then?" The boss scowled as the cash reserves ran dry. "Eh whatever, it's good enough for us! C'mon boys, let's make a break for it!"

"You shall do no such thing!" The voice echoed through the very walls of the bank.

"Oh yeah?" The boss cocked his ether shotgun. "I ain't afraid of no voice! You gonna try and stop us, or just talk big?"

A white ball blasted out of the vent behind the teller and landed directly on one of the accomplices' heads. The ball unfurled before it hit the ground to reveal Melia, dressed in a pristine white tuxedo, bearing a silver cannon on her left arm.

"The Ventilator," spat the boss in disgust. "Fancy seeing your posh patoot stoop down to come after me."

"No crime is beneath my notice." Melia fired a pulse of air out of the cannon, blasting the second accomplice into the wall. "Though I do quite enjoy dealing with the small-time scoundrels."

"You picked the wrong guy to call "small-time"!" The boss aimed and pulled the trigger, but Melia was already gone, vanishing into the same vent she appeared from. Mere seconds later she popped out of one on the opposite wall.

"Your flitting around doesn't impress me!" The boss loaded another shot and prepared to fire.

"What about your flitting?"

"What?"

Melia pointed her cannon at a vent on the ceiling. It opened up and sucked up the criminal headfirst, leaving his fat belly stuck on the rim and his tiny legs dangling through the port.

"We shall see how long it takes for the police to extract you from that prison in order to throw you into another."

The bank customers gave off a smattering of applause as the cops filed into the building. "Three cheers for The Ventilator!"

Melia woke with a start as thunder exploded outside. The clock read one-thirty in the morning.

She took a few moments to calm herself down but then remembered the dream. That was highly entertaining. I'm not letting it go to waste. Crawling out of bed, she stepped over to her desk, turned the light on, and extracted her notebook.

The Ventilator, she began writing, is a superhero whose power is focused on the ductworks of Alcamoth. Clad in pure white and armed with a cannon that not only fires pulses of compressed air, but allows ultimate control over every vent, port, and tunnel in the city for transportation and various other utilities. Disguised with a helmet, none know the Ventilator's true identity - or even gender - except her brother.

Satisfied that this was enough of a reminder for her creative writing itch next Monday, Melia climbed back into bed and hoped to watch a sequel.