Out of Bounds

As soon as we stepped out of bounds, I could see that things were sporadic, and purposefully designed to be hidden from us.

The floor was made of glass, which started to explain a lot of intricate details about how the tower moved. Looking at it, everything was powered by one gear... and probably thousands of bungee cords.

Loose cords that moved in tandem, stretching to their absolute limit and returning to where they belonged. We could see the tops of all other rooms in the past... including the prison where we first entered this Tower in.

They were all connected to the same gear, bouncing with each other, and receding back to a single point in the middle of the gear.

"What the hell?!" Alex said out loud, getting closer to the floor to see as much as possible.

"So, this is how the Tower operates... gears and bungee cords? It seemed a lot more complex than that. Chi-Chi, Asoh, what do you know about it?" Orion asked the two.

"Nothing in particular. When you're close to The Tower from the outside, you can hear weird noises... maybe this was them. But, if we can see all of this, then we're really high up... how can that be?" Asoh asked herself. The questions she kept to herself didn't help us learn where we were at all.

"No... think about it, we were all in that Forest, or whatever you want to call it, with that Genesis guy. We were brought there and you ended up there. I already told you, we fell into a room before that, and then fell into that waiting room where we were all tested. We kept falling and falling, and now we were in that Labyrinth. We can see all of this... we're nowhere near the top," Shike suggested.

Now that he mentioned it... he was right. We couldn't be near the top, but with the mechanisms underneath us, we could've been sent to the top with a counterweight...

"The rooms don't shift left and right. They can only go up and down," Chi-Chi snapped her fingers at her next thought. Everybody gave some attention to it, and more ideas started to fly.

"Or, they get stuck between the grooves of the gears and move accordingly. But, that idea wouldn't make sense unless the bungee cords are attached to one place on the very top of the ceiling of this damn tower..." Boo said next.

I looked deeper into the glass and the cords, but I couldn't see any other structures or rooms being carried by the gears or the cords. I was thoroughly confused...

"No... think about it, when we left the jail cell and ended up in the Forest from the staircase, those steps weren't even. Like... the entrance was put there artificially. But, when we took that elevator down, it all connected. And, since Shike and the others fell into that trap door and then into the testing room, that means that the Forest, the Testing Room, and the Labyrinth are all connected, right?" I asked everybody. They were all on board with the newest idea on the table.

We truly had a collection of very intelligent people here.

Orion stepped further into the glass, looking down at the gear.

"This is the bottom of the Tower," He pointed at the biggest gear on the very bottom of the axle it was stuck to.

"You sound confident, why's that?" Asoh asked, crossing her arms and looking down right beside him.

"You don't put the big gears in the middle of the contraption, you put them on the ends. That's how it knows to move with everything else. See how all of the other gears are connected and intertwined with bungee cords? That big one isn't. It's not being touched with anything, meaning that's the base of this Tower," He said again.

"Or that's the top and we're all upside down right now..." Alex said. We all shot a look at him, then looked back down at the floor.

I guess I was wrong about having intelligent people here...

I noticed Boo and Alex were locked into a separate conversation while the rest of us gathered around the center gear of the whole Tower.

"How does that even make sense?!" Boo shouted through the small talk of everybody else standing in the circle.

"Can we break the glass? Would we survive that fall?" I asked Orion. I primarily looked to him for advice, even though Shike and Boo were closer to me as friends.

"I could survive that fall, and maybe Boo, but if you don't have strands to heal those injuries we might be hauling the rest of you back with broken legs. Our safest bet is to find a way down... I dare even say that exploring the Labyrinth might bring us to another solution... where we don't all end up crawling back to Zealous," Shike suggested.

I'll admit, it wasn't a terrible idea, but it would take far too much time to make it where we needed to go from the Labyrinth, and then back here after we found what we were looking for. If nothing was in the center of the Labyrinth, then the trip would've been for nothing.

"What if nothing is in the Labyrinth, and we're just brought further into the Tower? Our escape is right here, right? We should find a way to take it," Boo asked next.

"Splitting up is not an option... but you've already demonstrated that you can take down a wall. Why can't we just do that from the center?" Alex asked us next, which was a really good idea actually.

"Yeah, we'll do that. Come on, let's see where the Labyrinth takes us," Orion said, leading us all over to the pathway we originally walked away from.

"Hey, Orion, you said that you thought this Tower was a test to weed out the criminals that were put in here... but why have a Labyrinth like this? Why isn't everything one big death match like the forest was?" I asked him, following right beside the dirt-ridden path on the inside of the long hallway of the Labyrinth.

"I'm sure we'll come to find out soon," He finally added.