Persephone Incarnate [Wattpad Prize 2014] | ✔️

{23} Ava

The monitors were still displaying the same maze, with its tall walls and soaring ceilings, with the exception of Alexander.

Good, that meant he’d moved on.

She went back to Ramsey, who was crouched over the laptop. “Are we still getting those activity things from him?”

He nodded. “Right, but the orange line – it’s decreasing now. Still in constant motion, but it’s going down, and it doesn’t seem to be coming up.”

“Can you figure out what it is?”

He shook his head. “See, that’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

She beckoned Aiden, who was standing awkwardly by the door, over. “Can you make any sense of this?”

“Well, if the blue line is measuring his mental activity and the green line is measuring physical, then it would make sense for the third to measure how much energy it’s all taking up.”

“What?” both of them asked simultaneously.

“Look, this is just a guess, but it’s like reading a computer usage chart. There’s going to be a part that’s saying how much free space there is, how much of the RAM is being used – that kind of thing. But then there’s also a performance level, where it goes into how much power is being used to perform those kinds of actions.”

“Okay…” she said slowly, getting the gist of it.

“Oh, oh! That makes sense!” Ramsey reacted with much more enthusiasm. He turned back to the screen. “That means he’s getting tired though…”

“But how tired?” She peered over his shoulder, while Aiden did the same on the other side.

“Well, there’s numbers on the side,” he pointed toward the x-axis, trailing gray numerals that decreased in intervals of 5.

“But they’re in percentage,” Ramsey muttered. “But – but that doesn’t make sense. He’s not a computer, so what does that mean?”

“I’m guessing that’s how much he still has left.”

“What?”

“It’s like,” he pointed toward the screen again, and landed on the number that the orange line was slowly heading toward, “he’s only functioning at sixty percent energy. That’s how much he’s got left. Except, unlike a computer, where the battery decrease doesn’t really affect performance that much – he’s human, so that means he’s going to be affected a lot.”

Ava nodded grimly as she began to truly understand the situation. “Looks like your theory about humans just being complex computers isn’t far from being true,” she muttered as she scanned the graph.

“Well, what are we going to do?” Anna approached from her left, and she looked up, blinking.

“We didn’t really provide him with any food or anything, so the most we can do for him…no, the most he can do for himself is to rest.”

“But he can’t –”

“We don’t have enough time, I know,” she cut off Ramsey’s protest. “But at this rate, he’s not going to be doing any good for either himself or Sophie.”

“But what’s causing the energy level to decrease so much?” Aiden mused. “He hasn’t been walking that far, right?”

She shook her head. “We don’t know. We don’t have any visual on him at all right now. We just have this chart.”

“Wait, wait!” Ramsey’s head practically snapped back as he looked up, clearly excited about something. He clicked around the screen a few more times, and brought up a window filled to the brim with words and numbers. “It’s like a pedometer – it counts how many steps he’s taken and the distance he’s traveled.”

All four of them immediately lunged forward to get a better look, and Ava’s hands clamped down on Ramsey’s shoulder. Her eyes were so focused on the screen that she hadn’t noticed him wince, and he’d had to remove her hand himself.

5 miles?! She stared at disbelief at the screen. Alexander had travelled 5 miles? How was that even possible? She knew Hades’ palace was huge – Athena had shown her a scale blueprint in her mind (she hadn’t understood half of it, but the goddess of war tactics had quickly broken it down for her), but she hadn’t even thought it was possible for a little stretch of hallways to have that kind of distance.

“No wonder the poor guy’s worn out – it’s taken him, what, half an hour to go through that?” Anna said.

With the exception of Ramsey, they all stepped back from the screen and off to the side.

“What can we do now though?” Ava wondered aloud. She wasn’t expecting an answer from Athena, since the goddess had been silent since they’d gotten down to the Underworld – she was most likely off preparing for the rest of the plan. The rest of plan that even she didn’t know about. The goddess had been very vague about it – she’d only told Ava the basic gist of each step, and only up to step four. Everything else was a mystery.

“Well,” Abby said, stepping out of the shadows where she’d been watching, “we need to tell him to rest. He really needs to gather his energy, since he’s pretty much useless if he keeps on going on at that rate.”

“And how do you suppose we’re going to do that?”

“Maybe it’s time we got our hands dirty,”

“Ooh, this is the good part,” Ramsey rubbed his hands together like he was a mad scientist, and his facial expression clearly matched the image of one.

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Sorry that I keep on rushing all these new chapters. Honestly, I don't like it, because there are certain cliffhangers that I would love to have you guys ponder over.

But alas, time doesn't wait for me.