Freefall and Freer-Fall

It was a very monotonous and long voyage inside the elevator.

The damn thing was speeding up faster than it should for some reason, but a terminal velocity elevator wasn't that fast still.

Freefalling or not, it would still take half a minute to reach the underground, which only made it more infuriating.

“Decide if you want to lure or kill me already!” Shouted Amy as the elevator reached its terminal velocity.

Throwing an elevator in freefall was an obvious trap, but was a weird one in this case.

No reason to have the trouble of attracting her to the place if they were going to drop it anyway.

“More than that, why use a half-backed trap like this one?! This thing cannot even go that fast!”

No matter if the cables, security systems, and brakes were cut, an elevator was very limited in acceleration and speed.

Such a big thing could barely reach a speed of 100 m/s even with a few engines helping.

In fact, Amy had managed to say all this and not even a third of the descent was completed.

Going this fast and with the heavy frame around her, it was more a matter of being stuck in the wreckage than of receiving damage.

She also had more than enough time to find a multitude of countermeasures too, so again, it was just bothersome.

Either way, dealing with whatever trap and the wreckage down there would take too much, and Amy didn't have the time for it.

“This is angering me.” She said with the calculations done and while watching the doors of the falling elevator opening. “Three, two, one… Go!”

And then, as if it was no effort at all, she jumped towards the opening at the perfect match between the door and one of the floors.

“Ouch…”

Her fall was as graceless as humanly possible and the impact was enough to crack the tiles beneath her, but it was a successful escape nonetheless.

Luckily, no one was around to see the idol faceplanted on the floor.

Her pride wouldn't allow being laughed at even if she herself threw grace into the air due to anger.

“Was it just to send me there faster or was it a weak try of trapping me? I cannot understand what is happening anymore…”

A plan that relied on her surviving that attack from earlier was already weird and now it was weirder.

At this point, it was as if the whole ordeal was just to test her capabilities and nothing more.

But testing her would mean knowing some background no one should be able to know.

Before she could finish her line of thought though, an explosion echoed in the elevator tunnel and a dust cloud followed it a while later.

“Why…?” The girl covered in dust asked. “WHY?!!!”

Sabotaging the elevator after inviting her there was already nonsense, but blowing it up at the bottom was overkill.

“If you wanted to kill me so much, you could have done so before!”

She was defenseless after being shot, so there was no point in waiting longer.

And even then, an explosion in the underground that wouldn't damage the building's integrity would never be enough to defeat Amy.

“Are you stupid or something?!” Amy cried at the closest camera in sight. “A decent power armor would be enough to survive this little trick, you know? In fact, all it would do was buy a little time for you, but if you dumb dumbs wanted time, THEN WHY INVITE ME IN THE FIRST PLACE?!!! I did not even know there was a subterranean floor or that you were there, so why? WHY BUY TIME NOW?!!!“

It was angering on so many levels that Amy wasn’t able to keep a straight face by this point.

She was burning her limited time, but the whole situation was so dumb she couldn’t simply accept it.

Nothing about this made sense, but it wasn’t as if there were other options, and when this thought crossed her mind, it all clicked.

“Someone translated the ruins. It should be impossible in so little time… No, if I suppose it is not impossible, then all makes more sense.”

Until now, she was acting based on the supposition that all this was about Lily and her grandfather’s will, but it wasn't the only option.

Canceling the plan to buy time during the party with a call to attract Lily to Norco’s headquarters;

Blocking the bottom floors, but leaving the mainframe almost unguarded;

The cameras looking at her instead of every other thing happening when the brother was rescued;

Nothing happening even though she and Lily were at a numerical disadvantage;

Leaving Amy alone for enough time to her recover after blowing their cover to take her down as a way to disable her hat;

And finally, leaving a single open path that she would have to follow no matter how many traps were set to delay.

Everything made more sense if she was against someone who knew how her body worked and was targeting it instead of her detective friend.

“Am I the real target? Some things make sense if it is, but how would they notice that I was at the party? Was I leaked? And how would someone translate that chaotic data so fast? The ruins are too old for anything to be adaptable...” 

To beginners, those ruins worked in a different logic from the current world, so they were mostly impossible to recreate.

No one seemed to have noticed that yet, but Amy knew the truth.

It was in the news for so long that all she thought about it was how boring it was to see so many groups fighting for the technology they could never recreate.

All data was written in a dead language and all technology used a form of energy that was beyond the laws of physics, so they were useless.

In summary, it wasn’t exactly impossible to understand, but someone would need years of research or an army of geniuses to translate it all.

“NorCo had a head start for some reason, but a few months is too little even for Zhelya. You would need a whole team of… A team of Zhelyas... Hells… Double hells! The stupid VR machines, right?!”

The cat scientist was working double time with her VR necklace, so she could be made to work a couple of hundreds of times with the same technique.

It wouldn't work if you tried to sync it all in a single person, but manpower wasn't lacking around here.

This building had a good number of employees and customers living inside VR and, as Amy warned before, those could be used to mess up with the mind.

It would be time-consuming and very much maniacal, but someone could create an army of geniuses by using the VR device’s dangerous functions.

They would have to ignore how most of them would end up dead after a while, but it was doable still.

“Zhelya was not a target to the suggestions, but not due to her safety device. She was simply worth more with her mind intact while every other person living in fantasyland became a test subject…”

One Zhelya was enough to reverse-engineer most working devices in the area in a few months, so who knows how much an army of them could do. 

Emulating a genius in full was impossible, but the numbers should solve this problem.

Even fighting Amy back was doable with this many of them no matter how big her hardware edge was.

"So I only kept the mainframe because I got it infected, eh... It also explains why my good fans did not take this place over already."

She should have passed by the VR devices earlier since their existence meant a lot of danger, even if temporary.

It also meant that brainwashing was more than a possibility and that the hidden computer was powerful enough to rival the machine in Amy’s house.

“It is maybe the same type of computer even… I get why Lily was talking about a ghost now.”

Some details weren’t exactly clear yet and half the explanation was based on suppositions, but it didn’t matter.

As long as Amy knew what she was against, she could find a way to defeat it.

She even had a very good and very stupid one by now.

And it would involve reaching her destination much faster than any rigged elevator could.

All she needed was the right tools and an open path.

These meant a bunch of big fire extinguishers and the ruined emergency staircase.

“Four of them should be enough, right? Now, I just need to strap them around with some curtains and...”

The process of finding the extinguishers and getting them ready didn’t take more than a minute since she knew where all it stood, and now Amy was ready to bulldoze her way through any traps.

As she approached the stairs, the girl checked her data and equipment once more.

"The weak spots are there... I have enough space to reach terminal velocity... The extinguisher should each amount to a good enough thrust... And the hit should not cause more than a reasonable amount of damage."

Anger and determination were mixed in the idol’s eyes as she marched towards the remains of the emergency stairs.

Each step of hers brought another piece to its position in the whole puzzle to create a movie that was in no way perfect but was good enough to get her a target.

The idol had to calm down a little though, as this much was more of a risk than she would usually take.

“At the end of his time, researches through grime, trading salvation for his gold, looking for the ghost of old.”

She was singing an improvised tune meant for a single audience member and with simple reasoning behind it.

With the cameras watching, the idol kept on skipping to her own tune, each step closer to getting the resolution needed for her leap.

“Worker or pupil, the same fate would instill, their minds begone, for his plan to be done.”

It was a cheap rhyme made by someone who wasn’t a songwriter in the slightest, but this much was beyond the point.

“But before the finale, in the weirdest time, the ghost of old simply joined the fold.”

It was a useless loss of time for anyone who watched the scene from far away and it would probably not even work as a provocation, but it was fine.

This whole act was just to give the girl the calmness to execute her plan which was beyond stupid as she lacked anything better.

“He could not stand still, using as bait his will, toying with those he had done before his salvation was gone.”

She reached the remains of the emergency stairs.

Nothing to see above or below herself and a bunch of cylinders strapped around her body.

The idol spun on her own axis and did last theatrics towards the nearest camera as her last lines went.

“The trap was sprung, his chance was clung, only to be outsung, and the cold man ended hung.“

And then, it all got silent for a while as the idol stared at the camera with an eerie smile.

Said smile was dropped right after and the girl gave her final words without a facade to cover them.

“You have fifteen seconds to surrender, old man.”

Giving her warning in a cold tone while walking backward, the girl wearing pink frills and fire extinguishers jumped into the dark depths.

And less than fifteen seconds later, all who stood close to the building felt the impact.