The Donut Room
"Fffffh! Not so fast!" the drugged-up detective fumed through his teeth, keeping a firm grasp on his pistol even as Molli's mechanical limb attempted to disarm him.
He absolutely would not let go, and slid on his skivvies all the way to the improvised path William had created moments before. With a solid thud, his noggin caught on the threshold's jagged entrance when Molli's arm passed it and returned to her, forcing him to finally release his determined hold on the gun. Luckily for the detective, his body remained outside in the hallway when the Kaiyō's ID-SOL Marine hefted up the metal workbench with his gargantuan strength and placed it back down to block the way with a thunderous rumble that belied the ease with which William had crossed the room. Along with Sif's, the heavy table was more than enough to plug the hole.
With her arm recalled and firmly attached to her shoulder, Molli found herself whole. As had Sif upon her quick check for any wounds. No one seemed injured as far as they could tell, the team fortunate thus far to have avoided catching any lead from the police gunfire. And for a few seconds there was peace. Just enough time for Aratani and Molli to pilfer a couple of donuts, each from a separate box.
The cakes were about as bland as their "shelf stable" labels suggested. Dry and mealy despite their waxy chocolate frosting, the donuts felt to the two Star Army girls like biting into soft suede that dragged across their teeth and somehow created a thirst provoking suction within their mouths as they chewed. If either Molli or Aratani cared to notice, they'd have seen a cylindrical grey wrapper stuffed down the middle of the donuts behind that first one in each of their boxes. It'd clearly been no matter for Aratani, whose mind was rightly locked into escaping as she discarded the rest of her donuts and proceeded upward through the dark, damp crawlspace.
Soon enough the momentary calm was shattered when the armor clad cops outside, finally recovered from the setbacks foisted upon them by the Kaiyō squad, slammed into the storage room's door. Though locked, their well-trained NPF breaching drills shook the wall to its baseboards and sent a square of dust echoing off around the shut entryway's buckling latches. They didn't even bother with the hole in the wall that Sif and William had blocked up, nor yet trigger Morgana's carefully placed grenade trap.
"Come!" Aiko beckoned the others, one leg already raised and hooked over the forgotten window that allowed them to ascend. She had her eyes shut, ostensibly because of the overwhelming brightness she'd seen in the dark crawlspace, but still managed to move unimpeded thanks to her body's
skin vision. "Now!"
Fire Escape
The princess and Rio—and hopefully the others—just behind her, Aratani swung and climbed using her momentum and Nekovalkyrja agility to trailblaze as quickly as she could. It was musty and damp in this place, and the rotten steel of the ladders dripped and shuddered each time they had any force applied. At every level, when one of the Star Army team stood or hung for too long, the old gangways would screech and slip down a few inches, only sturdy again when they wedged lopsided between the Gumtree apartment block and the larger building next door.
"This is too much," Aiko said, huffing steamy breaths of the humid tunnel's tainted atmosphere as she hurried right on Aratani's tail. "The air here is too sultry, we must get out soon or we risk succumbing to the influence of its vapors."
Of course there was no such threat other than the unnatural stink of decomposing Nepleslia in all of its glory, at least not outside of Aiko's perception. But the princess seemed to have an urgent need, and her labored respiration only made the tight escapeway more stifling as excess heat sloughed off her affected form in steamy waves. It would only be a fleeting discomfort, though, as their destination lay only a few feet ahead.
Eleventh Floor
Aratani emerged into a dark concrete room though a full-sized doorway rather than a window-to-nowhere like back on level seven, opened up from the fire escape side when she pulled high a galvanized steel roll shutter that was painted in a light gray. There was a series of locked transformer boxes along the wall here painted in the same neutral tones as the retracting shutters and a strip of dim, harsh light very unlike the tungsten bulbs in the donut room. Across from where the Star Army team entered, there was another threshold, its door ajar enough to let in a sliver of radiance from beyond.
Aiko came through next, crawling on her hands and knees to clear the door before resting on her elbows to take in the cool, comparatively fresh air beneath the canopy of her dark hair. Looking very sweaty, she tugged at the high turtleneck collar on her shiny leotard to cool off.
"Scout forward, we must keep moving," the princess ordered as Rio arrived next.
Peering into the crack in the door, Aratani could see a garage on the other side. It took up most of the rest of level eleven from what she could see, with only the building's smooth concrete retaining pillars and some vehicles breaking up the empty space. She wasn't afforded a full view, but could spy a few hover cars of various makes and models plus some hoverbikes. A trio of gangers clad in acid wash jeans and studded leather sauntered past her sightline carrying SMGs and clubs, and her Nekovalkyrja ears could hear chatter from others she couldn't see.
