The vents were a little more promising. They were each a little over two feet square. If she could get the cover off of one of them, she might be able to squeeze through, but without knowing what lay beyond, that could turn into a nightmare of its own. Still, she thought, worth checking out. Not like there are many options.
At barely five feet and two inches tall, Lanie usually considered her petite frame an asset, allowing her to slip through tight spaces easily. In this case, she would have been glad for a few more inches of height. The vents were more than six inches out of her reach at a full stretch. The slats were widely spaced, though, wide enough to maybe get her fingers into.
She backed up several paces for a little momentum. Sprinting forward, she threw her arms upward as she jumped, intending to catch the vent to pull herself upward. She jumped a bit higher than she expected. It wasn’t exactly a superhuman feat, but, in her surprise, she missed grabbing the grate and instead slammed into the wall slightly above her target.
“Oof.” She hit the floor on her butt, but, aside from a bruised tail-bone, bruised chin from hitting the wall, and slightly bruised pride, she’d gained no new injuries. She stared at the vent for a couple of seconds, confused about what had just happened. Then she remembered the message she’d gotten when she’d spent points to unlock a Chakra.
She wondered how to open her character sheet back up. Almost as soon as she thought about it, text appeared in the air before her:
Lanie Manovich
Rank: Seeker
Body: Mortal (F) 15%
Mind: Mortal (F) 13%
Soul: Mortal (F) 10%
Past incarnations - 157 (viewed - 0)
Dharma: Way of the Thief
Sakti: 1
Attributes:
Strength - 15
Dexterity - 17
Endurance - 14
Vitality - 15
Perception - 17
Willpower - 10
Intelligence - 14
Wisdom - 8
Charisma - 10
Health: 112/150
Stamina: 78/140
Prana: 140/140
This time, she paid a little more attention to her stats. All of her stats had been right around 10 when she’d seen her sheet the first time, she was pretty sure. If 10 was average, then she was now well above average. Assuming the numbers meant anything. But she had jumped a lot higher than she had expected to, and she’d felt… something when she’d awakened the Chakra.
Her Body, Mind, and Soul percentages had increased as well. She wondered what that meant. Did improving her stats improve her… what had that menu been named? Foundations? Yeah, that was it. Her Foundations. What did that even mean, though? Did the fact that they were all labeled ‘Mortal’ mean that she could potentially become something other than mortal? She had so many questions.
As she pondered her stats, her Stamina ticked up to 79/140. She started counting seconds. When she got to “2 Mississippi”, it ticked up again to 80/140. A second after that, her health ticked up to 113/150.
“I’m healing. Holy crap. That’s awesome.” She wanted to wait for it to tick over again so she could time it, but she didn’t have the time to spare. “Priorities, chica. Escape now, math later.” She dismissed her status screen, but resolved to give it a thorough looking-over later.
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As she got back to her feet, she paid attention to her abdominal muscles. After the beating she’d taken, they should have hurt a whole lot more than they did. They were sore, badly bruised, but not as sore as they should have been. The swelling around her eye had gone down some as well. Way, way faster than it should have. “Ok, so it’s not exactly Wolverine-style x-factor healing, but I’ll take it.”
This time, she didn’t bother with the run-up. From a standing jump, she was easily able to grab the vent and pull herself up. “This is kind of awesome,” she whispered to herself in a sing-song voice. “Ok, head in the game.” She shook her head and focused on the vent cover. She held herself in place with one hand, freeing up the other. The thin metal of the vent slats was painful on her fingers, especially with all her weight on one hand, but with her new strength and endurance, and her feet braced on the wall to take some of her weight, it was doable.
The covers were held on by hex bolts. She couldn’t turn the ones on the vent she was hanging from. Even if they were loose, her weight against the cover was making them bind. But the ones on the other grate, with her new strength, weren’t too hard to unscrew with her fingers. It took longer than she liked, though, and she was constantly worried that her captors would come back before she had it done. Every sound, even imagined ones, made her freeze with a knot of fear in her belly. Her fingers were bleeding by the time she got the last bolt out, but the vent cover eventually came free.
Holding the cover in one hand, she dropped to the ground and leaned it against the wall, afraid that dropping it would make too much noise. With another leap, she caught the lip of the open vent and pulled herself up, only to groan in disappointment. The opening went back about four feet, and ended in a blower fan. She pulled herself farther into the vent to get a better look at it and realized something. With her upper body blocking the light from the room, the inside of the shaft should have been pitch black, but it wasn’t. She could see the fan and its housing clearly. She really could see in the dark.
She could also see that there was no way she would be able to get the fan out of its housing with only her fingers. “Damn. Ok, new plan,” she whispered as she backed out of the shaft and lowered herself back to the floor. She picked up the vent cover. It was too light to use as a weapon. She started to put it back against the wall, but then, she had another idea. Checking the pipes running along the ceiling near the door, she smiled to herself. It might just work.
The vent cover gave her just enough reach when she held it over her head to jump up and smash the edge of it into the fluorescent tubes that lit the room, plunging the space into total darkness. Darkness for anyone else, that is. Lanie could see just fine. She put the vent cover back against the wall under the open vent. The vents were directly opposite the door, so when her captors opened the door, the light from outside would show the open vent, but the rest of the room would be in shadow. She hoped it would be enough.
The pipes nearest the door were thick and looked sturdy. They weren’t directly over the door; that would have been ideal, but they were close enough. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ Lanie reminded herself as she considered the distance. It would have to do.
This time, she did need the run-up before her leap. She kicked off the wall for a little extra height, silently blessing Jorge for the parkour training as she did every time those moves helped her out. She grabbed the nearest pipe and used her momentum to swing her legs up to wrap around it. She held her breath, waiting for the sound of bending, rending metal, but the pipe held. Now, she just had to hope that her captors came back before her arms and legs got too tired from holding up her weight, and that they fell for the bait and came far enough into the room, and that she would be fast enough to get past them.
It was an awful plan. It depended too much on the other guys doing what she hoped they would do. It was exactly the sort of plan Jorge had always warned her about.
She could hear him chiding her, calling her “chica,” and tapping the center of her forehead the way he did when she wasn’t thinking things through. The memory made her smile, despite her predicament. “Yeah, I know, old man, but it’s not like I’m spoiled for choices here,” she whispered. He was only five years older, but when she was ten, and he was fifteen, it had seemed like a huge age gap. The dig had stuck, though she used it with affection these days.
Lanie marveled at how easy it had been to make the jump. She’d always been agile and had taken to Jorge’s training like a monkey to tree swinging, but this was another level. It took longer than expected for the muscles in her arms to feel the strain of holding up half her body weight. After counting off five minutes, her arms should have been starting to cramp or shake, but she was only just starting to feel it. This wasn’t the first time she’d had to hold herself up like this, and she knew her limits. Her old limits.
There was a very strong temptation to open her new stat page again and poke through it some more; her curiosity was burning in her gut like a bonfire. The whole situation was just surreal. It was a mystery that needed solving. There were so many “hows” and “whats” and “whys” swirling through her mind that she almost missed the sound when someone threw the bolt on her cell door.
Lanie tensed as a shot of adrenaline sent an icy wave down her spine to sit in her stomach, then forced herself to relax and be ready to move. The door opened, sending a line of light into the dark room, and two men stepped in. Gray T-shirt let out a hoarse curse and bolted across the room to the vent. Dark Suit followed at a slower pace, his head turning as he tried to examine the rest of the room through the darkness. Neither of them looked up. There was no sign of Cycle Leathers, but Lanie couldn’t wait. As soon as she was sure the third man wasn’t coming through the door, she unwrapped her legs from the pipe and let herself drop to the ground, bending her knees as she landed to absorb the impact.
Gray Shirt jumped up to grab the edge of the vent and was pulling himself up to look into the open shaft as Lanie slipped out the door. She pulled the door shut behind her. The men inside cried out in alarm as the light vanished. She smiled with satisfaction as she shot the bolt, locking two-thirds of her captors in their own cell. The smile vanished a second later as she heard a voice behind her.
“Going somewhere, love?”
Lanie cursed silently as she turned, knowing who she’d see. Cycle Leathers had just a hint of an accent, but, like Dark Suit, he’d obviously worked to get rid of it. She couldn’t tell if it was Australian, Kiwi, or South African. Accents were something she was usually pretty good at pinpointing, and her inability to figure these guys out was just one more thing about these assholes that pissed her off.