LSRO: Chapter 70 - Pillars (Patreon)

Yep... so... I love this chapter, you'll see why at the end!

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Chapter 70

Pillars

Quinn blinked at the words in front of her. "Lynx?"

"What?" He said as he finished tying off the skiff.

"What does this mean? It's trying to link with me." Quinn pushed down on the confusion. Since she was already linked with the Library, she assumed it was with everything inside of it... or a part of it.

"Well, of course, it's trying, it's part of the Library. You should..." He glanced and reassessed as he realized what was in front of her. "That explains everything. Infected replacement urgent." He sighed. "Okay, well, I mean, do you want to save the Pillar or not?"

"Of course I do." Quinn indicated that yes, she wanted to synchronize, activating the process. She was not, however, prepared for the sheer amount of information that spread throughout her head. Some of it felt as if she was watching the pillar corrode from the amount of miasma and chaotic energy that began to stockpile in the cavern. The time in the vision sped up, showing her the not-so-gradual decay of the filtration system. At the end of the visions, another pop-up appeared.

Do you wish to hook into the harness system?

Yes or no?

She glanced over at Lynx again. "So the harness system is a part of the pillar and you're not just going to hoist me up, climbing wall style?"

"Of course it's a part of the system. It's an entire machinery mechanism integrated into the pillars themselves." he scoffed.

"Why didn't you tell me that?" She asked.

"You didn't ask? I assumed that you would assume the harness was attached."

Quinn took a deep breath, mental fortitude for the win. She left the prompt and minimized that section of her vision. She glanced up at the top of the pillar. Up close, it was even more daunting than it had been as they were approaching it. Then she focused on the massive filters right in front of her. They were shoved in in sections four wide, with about a foot between them. Each filter was about three inches high and maybe half a foot wide. "Okay, so these filters are massive."

Lynx's brows furrowed and he looked slightly confused. "Did you expect them to be small, given the size of the pillars?"

"Not really," Quinn said, "but looking at them from a distance, they seemed smaller than this. How am I supposed to balance with these?"

"If we had enough of the components that we need, we'd make filtration golems, and after activating them, you could just go back to your duties as librarian. Right now, we do not currently have the correct supplies to create said golems." Lynx shook his head. "This needs to be done the old fashioned way. And you're not just going up in a harness, you'll be on a platform. It's not as dangerous as you're picturing."old-fashioned

Quinn let out a sigh. "So there'll be a trio of us up there then. Malakai and Eric I take it."

Lynx nodded "Malakai has the ability to kill the pests flying up there, and Eric has a weight reduction satchel that is lined with its own chaos-destroying system so he can dispose of the contaminated ones in midair with you."

"Good to know," Quinn said, as she turned that idea over in her mind. "Okay, I guess I do want to use the harness system." She indicated yes on her interface and immediately heard a whirring and some clicks and bangs as something shifted into place. She didn't look up.

Instead, she noticed that her HUD flashed more information across.

Current filters available: 1782.

Current replacements required: 1291

"That sounds like a lot of work," Quinn muttered under her breath.

Malakai nudged her. "Of course, it's going to be a lot of work. What hasn't been a lot of work since you got here?"

Quinn laughed. "You make a fine point, my elven friend."

"Stop calling me that." he said with a long-suffering groan.

She winked at him.

Just then, what looked oddly like one of those window-cleaning devices from high-rises in cities like New York and Chicago reached the bottom level. It appeared to be anchored into the pillar directly on tracks that ran between the different filtration sections.

"This is it," Quinn said. It was about four feet wide and about ten feet long. "It's a good thing you've got wings," she said to Eric.

She opened the little gate and stepped into it. There were harnesses and belts. She put one of the latter around her waist, tightening it, and then clipped what looked like harness wires into place in two of the heavy duty fasteners. She couldn't quite reach the third one at the back.

Malakai stepped in and relieved her of the hook, clipping it firmly into place. "There you go."

She grimaced. "Thanks for that. I don't want to plummet to my death."

He flashed her a smile. "Well, how do you want to do this? You want us to start down here and work our way up, or start up high and work our way down?"

Quinn gazed back up at the top again and felt queasy at even the thought of being there. "I think I'll feel more comfortable if we start up higher and work toward the ground. Like it's a reward to be back on solid footing."

"Sounds like a plan," Malakai said, as he too snapped himself into a harness. He didn't appear to need any help fastening his clips though.

The next thing she knew, Lynx was also in the movable platform with them, but he perched in the middle and, of course, added no weight to it, so he didn't even make it budge. The upside of being incorporeal on command.

"Okay, then," he said. "Up we go, Quinn."

She tapped on the edge a couple of times. It was there in her mind, just like the skiff had been. She thought directly at it, asking it to move up to the top so they could begin replacements in an efficient manner. The movable platform jolted ever so slightly once before moving quite smoothly and far too fast for Quinn's liking up to the highest filters.

The journey up, while speedy, was also somewhat soothing. It felt like an amusement park ride. She just hoped it didn't suddenly plummet and lose its brakes on the way down. Aradie swooped over, tossing a couple of visions at Quinn.

"Oh," Quinn said, as one of them flashed through her mind. The creatures up here that Aradie was chasing looked oddly like massive flies, except they had about eight multifaceted eyes and as many wings. From what she could tell, they buzzed around each of them like a swarm of angry bees. She shuddered, hoping that the bird and Malakai could keep them away from her.

The movable platform came to rest about five stories up and Quinn refused to look down. Instead, she focused on what was directly in front of her.

Begin replacing filters in section 39b. Yes or no?

"Yes," Quinn said.

There was a clicking and the sounds of what to her resembled a hydraulic system releasing itself. Four of the filters jutted out ever so slightly and Quinn picked the first one out, her gloved hands not making contact with what looked to be extremely dirty filters. Goop dripped down what was left of the internal material. Eric held a massive bag out to her. So big, that it dwarfed his actual size. She inserted the waste filter and it disappeared.

"Don't these have to be replaced all the time?" She asked as she began to pull out a new one from her own satchel.

Lynx shrugged. "Not really. The pillars are usually self-cleaning. Full replacement doesn't usually need to happen for hundreds of years on each pillar even if they're all being utilized at the same time."

The answer made Quinn thoughtful, even as she eyed the massive flies starting to move closer to their pillar.

Malakai cut one of the flies in half and it fell over the moving platform past Quinn's face. A sliver of blood landed on the platform itself. Quinn waited a moment, realized that the blood at least wasn't acidic, and felt slightly safer. She finally placed the filter she'd been holding into its relevant slot. It clicked in but it was obvious the filters wouldn't be moved back into place by the mechanism until all four were done.

Three more later and as she pushed the third one in, clicking it into place, the hydraulic sealed itself again.

"Interesting," she said.

There appeared to be about 20 filters on each side that needed replacing in each row and there were maybe 20, 23 rows or so. Several sections had control panels inserted in them instead of filter slots. It was going to take a lot to replace all of these. Still, Quinn went on to the next and the next section. Then they were moved around to the next side with the movable platform. She got into a rhythm, pulling filters out, disposing of them, replacing, pulling out, disposing, replacing...

It got into a monotonous if satisfying rhythm.

Quinn sighed as her shoulders began to ache ever so slightly from the different actions than she was used to. At least she had a solution for it.

Taliar's Regeneration: Activated

That should help with the soreness at least.

The one other thing that she did notice in the back of her mind was the chaos flies. They seemed to constantly inch closer to where they were working on the pillar. She needed to concentrate only on the filters and the system and getting it back up and running. But their constant presence unnerved her.

It felt like she had tens of thousands of eyes focused on just her, like they knew she was the one who was making this possible. "So tell me, Lynx, what's it with these blow flies?"

"Well they're actually miasma drones."

Quinn raised an eyebrow.

"Miasma bots. That's what we call them." He sounded slightly defensive.

She scanned the creatures with the Library.

Miasma drones

Levels: 85*

*level denotes age in creatures such as the drones.

"These things don't die in like a week or something?" Quinn said disbelieving.

"No, they tend to hang around and just get bigger and bigger and bigger the more they feed off the miasma. So let's get those filters changed," Lynx said, his fake enthusiasm really hitting a nerve with Quinn.

The whole process began to get sort of obnoxious. She'd lost count of how many filters she'd actually replaced. On the bright side, however, they had moved about nine levels down.

"We're getting through this," she said.

"Yes, but you're starting to look pale," Malakai said, and pulled out a bag of food from his own storage ring. Here, Cook made us lunch, dinner, and breakfast."

"Oh great," It was only upon seeing the food that she realized just how famished she was. Her stomach even punctuated the sensation with an audible growl. "I guess we're going to be here a while."

She bit into the delicious sandwich after taking a moment to cleanse her hands and munched away happily. This wasn't really so bad. A short break gave her a welcome new perspective. It was monotonous and annoying, but they were  making visible progress.

She popped the last of her food into her mouth and glared at the flies she could see. Their buzzing never stopped crescendoing.

"Come on, we better just keep going," she said. The sooner they got done with this, the faster she'd get away from those damned drones.

Quinn set about getting back into the rhythm of ripping out and replacing the old filters. Some of the ones she was coming across now were so black that any filtration particles from within the actual filter had dissolved into a black, goopy mess. She managed to spread out a plastic sheet Malakai handed her from his inventory to catch most of it, filtering it into the bag that Eric was holding. This last section was particularly nasty, and she had a feeling that going forward, much of what lay beneath them would be the same. The miasma had really screwed up this particular pillar.

She was lucky she didn't really have a queasy stomach or this would have been a lot more difficult to navigate.

Quinn was so focused on her current rhythm of ripping out the used filters and replacing them with new ones that she lost track of her surroundings. The dedicated pattern with which she removed, destroyed, and replaced the filters held all of her focus.

"Quinn?" Malakai's voice held a quiver in it.

"What?" she said, still almost robotically ripping out the next bad filter and replacing it with a new one. She refused to let anything interrupt her rhythm.

"You might want to..." He was speaking very softly, extremely calmly, and oddly slowly for Malakai.

"Spit it out," she said just as softly, because some part of her brain recognized the fact that maybe there was currently a necessity to speak that way. An image flashed through her mind courtesy of Aradie, and Quinn's hand stopped mid-insertion.

"Oh..." she breathed out.

There were a lot of things that Quinn was never fond of as a human on earth. One of those things was summertime with flies that hung around everywhere. One of her foster homes in her early teens had been on a farm, and flies were everywhere that summer. It was one of her least favorite memories. So the image Aradie showed her reignited portions of a past she'd prefer to forget about.

For just a split second, her mind panicked, and that was when training took over. Yes, she could understand that from the memory she had, being panicked was a definite option to choose, but that was just it. She didn't have to choose that option. She knew what flies were like, and Mental Fortitude and Time Dilation had taught her one very specific thing: she could think so much faster and so much longer than outward appearances would allow her to.

She'd been sucked through into another world and thrown into a magical library that defied her definition of what she would have thought a library would be in a magical world. It had so many problems, worse than computer programming, worse than glitching systems, and yet it somehow became home. She'd be damned if she was going to let a bunch of overgrown horseflies interfere with that.

Calculating their distance in what seemed like an eternity but in reality was only a couple of seconds, Quinn dug deep into the knowledge she had gained over the last few weeks. There was so much of it, but she dismissed all relevant information inside of a split second.

Not All Just Hot Air: That Which Doesn't Float Sinks had been a magnificent book. She hadn't given it nearly enough credit for being what it was.

Coming back into herself, she looked over her right shoulder beyond Eric. "Move," she said, barely waiting for him to comply before she flung out her right arm. She faced her palm toward the incoming swarm of drones.

Gravitas

She spoke the one word and it echoed through her skull, no, through the entire filtration chamber like the deep intonation of a bell clang. The sound resonated around her, channeling out toward the drones that numbered perhaps a hundred.

Then a surge of wind hit every single one of those incoming miasma drones.

For a couple of seconds, they seemed to hover in the air right next to Quinn, only about 10 feet away from her, and then almost as one, they plummeted, gathering speed as they covered more air into the miasmic sludge below. A loud, sucking sound floated back up to where they were on the platform, and then there was actual silence.

Quinn breathed out, blissful in the absence of buzzing. The rest of the drones appeared to have taken the hint. She brushed her hands against each other and pushed the filter she'd been replacing back into the pillar, thus activating the hydraulics again.

Nobody moved, nobody spoke. Finally, she looked over at Malakai. "What?"

"That was so cool," he said.

"Yeah." She had to agree with him. "It was, wasn't it?"

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WEEEEEEEE Now magic has clicked with her... WILL THERE BE NO STOPPING HER... after she's replaced the filters anyhu...

Much love

KT