This is one of my favorite episodes, so I guess I'll sit here and kill the next twenty minutes.
Grace quickly realized how much more fun Dimension Five was to watch with Jasper next to her. She'd already been enjoying it, but the jokes were ten times funnier when Jasper was laughing at them, too. And she frequently caught Jasper mouthing quotes as the characters said them with an impressive degree of accuracy.
Rather than sticking around for one episode, Jasper made it halfway through season two before falling asleep. Grace jolted in surprise when she glanced over and realized Jasper was out. It had only been a few minutes since she last made a snarky comment about the show's villain.
Jax and Holly had already retreated to their beds, but Thea still sat on the floor nearby, hunched over her laptop.
Grace crept over. "How's it coming?" she asked quietly. "Uh, unless you're in the zone and don't want to talk—"
"The Y-path protocols are working perfectly," Thea said. "But I can't seem to get them to respond to the input. The commands are being processed by the pathway, so I don't understand why—" Her face lit up. "Oh, I'm dumb! I forgot to assign the secondary application. Thanks, Grace."
"Uh, happy to help," Grace replied. "You going to bed any time soon?"
Thea's fingers flew across the keyboard as she typed a long string of numbers. "Mm, in an hour or so."
"Oh. Cool." After a moment, Grace said, "Jasper fell asleep on the couch."
"Oh, she does that at the apartment all the time watching movies."
"Really?"
"Yeah." Thea's hand jumped to the backspace key and tapped it aggressively a few times. "Though I guess she's been too busy the past month to watch any."
"I was just trying to figure out if I should wake her up or just...leave her there," Grace said.
Thea shrugged. "She probably won't care either way."
"Oh. Okay."
Grace made her decision and crossed the room to the closet. Inside, as she'd hoped, she found a stack of blankets. Most were scratchy and covered in weird stains, but there was one in decent condition.
She carried it over to the couch and, after a moment's hesitation, draped it over Jasper. Jasper didn't even stir. She was really out cold.
Grace threw one last glance at Thea before slipping into the next room and climbing into the bed she'd claimed. The empty bed on the other side of the room—the one they'd put Jasper in when she came back injured the night before—was the last thing she saw before her eyes drifted shut.
The other bed was still empty when Grace woke up. Gray light, filtered by the never-ending clouds in the sky, illuminated the crumpled sheets. The unpleasant smell of what must have been breakfast mixed with the room's ambient musty odor. Grace rolled onto her back and stared at a crack on the ceiling, suddenly wishing she was back at the apartment on Kronos. She'd had low expectations last time they ran around the star system for the races, but the atmosphere here on Netu was starting to convince her she'd never see the sun again.
She forced herself to climb out of bed and walk into the kitchen. Jax was the one preparing food. Thea and Holly were nowhere to be seen. Jasper was still passed out on the couch.
"Is she okay?" Grace paused in the middle of the room and glanced at Jasper. Her position hadn't changed at all from how Grace had left her last night.
"I checked when I came out," Jax replied as he poured half a bottle of solnut oil into a bowl. "She's fine. Just asleep."
Grace took a seat and idly scrolled through the news while Jax made food. Holly and Thea both joined them within the next few minutes, and before long, they were all poking at their plates of...well, Grace wasn't sure there was a name for what Jax had made, but it was probably the best they could have hoped for.
After another half an hour passed, Grace walked over to the couch and sat down on the opposite end from Jasper, debating whether or not to throw on another Dimension Five episode.
Before she made up her mind, Jasper shot upright, wide-eyed. "Don't stab me!"
"What?" Grace yelped.
Jasper stared at her. "Oh. You're not the Toasted Tots Tiger."
"You were having a nightmare about a cereal mascot trying to stab you?"
"It wasn't a nightmare. I'm fine." Jasper hopped off the couch and brushed off her coat. "Let's eat and get going. We have a lot to do."
"We all finished eating already," Holly informed her.
"Yeah, we're ready whenever you are," Jax added. He pushed the final plate he'd made toward Jasper.
Thea, who'd moved to the floor to fiddle with Poppy's android body, raised her hand to give a thumbs-up. "Yep. Ready whenever."
Jasper picked up the plate. "We'll take an hour or so to check out the Star Conquerors set again. If we still can't find anything, we'll move on to searching the rest of the town," she said. "But I want to look for anything that might give us a clue about Sarena's new stalker. We'll focus on the backstage area. Security will be tougher, but it's nothing we can't handle."
"Security?" Grace asked. Holly had mentioned shapeshifting into a security guard yesterday, but... "I didn't see any guards when I snuck back there to change."
"You must not have gone back far enough," Jasper replied. "They had some empty rooms for anyone who needed to do a quick costume change, but there's another curtain leading to the actors' private rooms."
"'Rooms' in the loosest sense of the word," Holly said. "They sectioned off parts of the cavern with giant panels." A small smirk touched her lips as she added, "I'm sure those rich actors aren't used to such a rough setup."
While Jasper began shoveling her food into her mouth, Thea rose to her feet and held up a smartsphere. "I have good news."
"Really?" Jasper said through a mouthful of food. She swallowed and lifted an eyebrow. "That's not something I hear every day."
Thea set the sphere on the table and turned on the holoscreen. "The Superangel story spread like wildfire last night. People are still talking about it this morning." She grinned. "Not even Starr himself can stop it."
Grace's face flushed. "Seriously?" What did people think of her? Did she even want to know?
"Some people are skeptical she's going to stick around for long," Thea said. "No hero has in the Janus System. And others are saying that saving a TV show prop isn't that big of a deal, but the fact that she stood up to Van Terra is promising."
Jasper choked down the rest of her breakfast and set the plate down. "It's a start," she said. "If the issue is that she did something small, then we can change that."
Grace nodded. It wasn't surprising that people didn't expect her to last long. For all of Starr's speeches about the Janus System's wealth and resources and technological advances, everyone knew the supervillains practically had free reign in lower class areas. She had no idea when the last time they'd seen a hero was. None of her history tutors had talked about it.
Jasper changed into simple black clothes so that she could disguise herself as an assistant like the rest of them, and the five headed out. Other assistants and members of the tech crew arrived on set at the same time as them, making it easy for them to slip in. The team split when they stepped out of the elevator.
"Don't all head backstage at once," Jasper said over comms as they moved in different directions. "But get back as soon as you can. That area also connects to the maintenance rooms and alternate passages to the surface. They're meant to be hard to find, but this stalker could be skilled enough to use them."
"I'm disguising myself as one of the security guards," Holly said. "When you head back, walk up to the woman with antlers. I'll let you through."
Holly could give herself antlers? That was impressive.
Grace hovered by a table of refreshments and pointlessly moved plates around while keeping an eye on the entrance to the small cave holding the backstage setup. Thea was the first to head back, followed by Jax a few minutes later.
Grace gave herself another five minutes before stepping away from the table and setting out across the main cavern. On her way to the backstage entrance, she passed Feeg and Rod, who were in the middle of another argument.
"Someone on the Starcon forums figured out the twist at the end of episode twelve. We need to rewrite it."
"We can't change it, it's an integral story beat!"
Grace slipped through the curtain. Sure enough, when she took the corner at the other end of the changing rooms, she found herself facing a second curtain. She took a deep breath and pulled it open.
Three security guards. Two chatting quietly next to a small snack table. The third stood halfway between them and the curtain, eyes on Grace as she entered. She was a tall, pale-furred woman with a set of small white antlers extending from her head.
"Uh..." Grace wasn't sure what to say as Holly approached her in her disguised form.
"You're here to clean?" Holly said, loud enough for the other guards to hear. "Yeah, go ahead and head back." Quieter, she added, "Thea is searching Sarena's room. Jax went through the red maintenance door."
Grace nodded. She cast the other guards an apprehensive glance as she walked by, but they didn't look her way.
Lights had been strung up overhead to illuminate the cavern. Curtains in varying colors hid the actors' rooms, while small signs fastened to each one identified the owners. More security guards stood around, and Grace forced herself to nod at them as she passed.
Finally, she spotted the red maintenance door Holly had mentioned.
"Jax," Grace whispered into her comm. "Is there a lot back there?"
"Not really," Jax replied. "Just storage rooms. I thought there might be a path up, but I'm not seeing anything. And the only vent opening is too small for any person to fit through."
"No point in me coming back there, then?" Grace asked.
"I don't think so. I'm going to check out this last closet and come back out."
There had to be something else worth investigating.
Grace moved on to a dark corner of the cavern. Stacks of boxes had been thrown onto the ground haphazardly. When she lifted the top of one, she found costume pieces inside.
She was about to turn around when something behind the boxes caught her eye. Something shiny. She pushed the tallest stack to the side, revealing a vent. A vent large enough to fit a person.
As Grace knelt down to inspect the grate, Jasper's voice came over the comms.
"Holly, what are you doing?" Jasper asked.
"What are you doing?" Holly's reply was indignant. "You're just standing there stuffing your face with cookies."
"I'm investigating the refreshments table!"
Grace grabbed the edge of the grate and pulled. To her surprise, it was already loose. Screws fell away and clattered against stone. The grate fell, too, and Grace barely caught it before it could make a much louder noise.
"Why did you leave the back area?" Jasper asked.
"I'm going to make sure no one important tries heading back," Holly said. "It'll be easier to distract them out here than back there."
"Whatever. Angel? Where you at?"
Grace crawled forward into the vent shaft. "I might have figured out how Sarena's visitor got in." She winced as the edge of the grate scraped her arm. It was a tight fit, but manageable. The worst part was how quickly the light behind her faded.
After some awkward fumbling, Grace was able to get her mini tablet out of her pocket and turn on the flashlight. Her heart skipped a beat when she noticed the clear lines through the dust in front of her. Someone else had been here recently.
The shaft branched off in a few places, but the tracks in the dust continued straight. Grace followed them until she hit another grate. It popped out of the wall as easily as the first had, allowing Grace to pull herself out into...
...another storage room.
Grace brushed the dust off her clothes, gave the room a quick look around, and headed out the door.
The lights in the hallway flickered on automatically, which Grace found more unnerving than the darkness. She returned the tablet to her pocket and debated over which direction to go. The scene looked the same in both directions: concrete walls, rusty pipes, and a fork at the end.
Grace closed her eyes and listened. After a moment of straining her ears, she picked up a faint humming coming from the right. She followed the sound.
"Angel?" Jasper asked. "Any updates?"
"I crawled through a vent and found some hallways," Grace replied quietly. "I'll let you know if I come across anything interesting."
She took a left at the fork. The hall took another turn up ahead. Between her and the end, two open doorways led into empty closets. After them came an actual door. Grace paused in front of it. The humming sound seemed to be coming from the other side. Electronics, maybe. Holding her breath, she gently pushed open the door. When she was greeted with silence, she dared to peer around the corner.
Once again, lights came on automatically. The room was small, and the presence of pipes and massive cylinders suggested it was a water storage or maintenance room. Grace's gaze lowered to the footprints cutting through the dusty floor. They crisscrossed from wall to wall and overlapped each other, making it impossible to pick out any specific path.
The electronic humming still pierced the air, but there were no computers in sight. Grace wandered the room until she finally pinpointed the source: a tiny box fixed to the back wall.
"Thea," Grace said. "I found some kind of electronic box."
"Take a picture and send it to me," Thea replied.
Grace snapped a picture with her tablet and sent it. While she waited for Thea's response, she threw a nervous glance back at the door.
"Could be a lot of things," Thea said. "But I'm betting it's a signal amplifier. They could be trying to access the net from down here. If they are, they must have their monitor nearby."
"I don't see anything like that," Grace told her. "Couldn't they be using a tablet or a smartsphere?"
"Possibly, but they'd want to keep it in range of the amplifier. Reconfiguring after you lose signal is a huge pain in the ass."
"I'll take another look around."
Grace's search led her to a narrow gap in the wall between two cylindrical tanks. She reached in, and her hand found something solid. She pulled it out.
"I found a tablet," Grace said. She pressed the power button, and the screen lit up. "It's locked. Should I bring it to you?"
"No, I think I can get you in remotely," Thea replied. "Hold your device next to it."
A moment later, the device unlocked, taking Grace to a blank home screen. She sent another picture to Thea.
"Interesting," Thea said. "Looks like they've got this thing stripped bare. Could you open the browser icon in the taskbar?"
Grace tapped the icon. A dozen or so tabs popped up. She frowned. "They were looking at a bunch of news articles on Sarena Trench."
Jasper chimed in. "What kind of articles?"
"Uh, one on that scam website she was promoting on her netblog, one on the fight she got in with a co-star, a Nova Cora commercial targeted at young kids she was in, that interview where she talked about collaborating with that vlogger who allegedly set a school on fire—"
"Sounds like they don't like her," Thea said.
"Who could blame them?" Holly muttered. "She's annoying."
"Must be whoever gave her that gift basket, then," Jasper said. "Which is hilarious, but sadly not relevant to our mission."
"Wait, there's another program in the menu," Grace said. "Should I see what it is?"
"Go ahead," Thea said.
The screen that popped up took Grace by surprise. Row after row of camera feeds. She squinted at the boxes, trying to identify where the cameras were located. Some of them looked familiar...
"It's camera feeds from around town," Grace realized.
"Seriously?" Jasper asked. "Send me a picture of the screen."
Grace obliged. A moment later, Jasper groaned.
"Looks like they're monitoring the race course," Jasper said.
"Is it Skybreaker, then?"
Jasper didn't respond. After a few seconds of silence passed, Thea asked, "Can you check if there's anything else on the tablet?"
Grace spent a minute or so searching for any extra menus or icons, but there was nothing. "I think it's just the browser and the camera feeds—"
An engine roared in the distance. Grace's heart stopped in her chest.
"Jasper?" Grace asked. "You're not—on your motorcycle right now, are you?"
Holly was the one to respond. "Jasper is currently trying to convince one of the Star Conqueror's writers that there should be a love confession scene between two of the side characters."
"I'll take that as a 'no,'" Grace muttered. She turned off the tablet and slid it back into its hiding space with trembling hands.
By the time she was out of the room and pushing the door shut behind her, the engine sounded much closer. Grace moved in what she hoped was the opposite direction—the opposite way from which she'd come—and hurried around the corner.
The moment she was out of sight, she heard a screeching noise alarmingly close. The engine entered the hallway.
And then it stopped.
Grace pressed herself against the wall and focused on quieting her breathing. Footsteps echoed through the hall. The door to the room she'd just fled swung open.
Grace risked a peek around the corner. A white motorcycle with huge tires was parked in the middle of the hallway. The door still hung open.
"Grace?" Thea asked. "You okay?"
"Yeah, what's up, Angel?" Jasper added. Even she sounded concerned.
As quietly as she could manage, Grace took off down the hall. "Just a minute," she dared to whisper.
This hallway emptied into a massive, empty room. Grace reached the middle and turned in a frantic circle, searching for somewhere to run. Or somewhere to hide. Was it her imagination, or was it getting hard to breathe down here?
"I'm trapped," Grace gasped. "Someone showed up, I got away before they saw me, but I'm in this weird basement—"
"Angel, take a deep breath," Jasper said. The concern hadn't left her voice, which only made Grace's heart beat faster.
Grace closed her eyes. Did as Jasper asked. Focused on the air filling her lungs. Panicking wouldn't save her. "The hallway I was in opened into this giant room," she said. "It seems like a dead end. But I can't go back the way I came."
"Have you tried looking up?" Jasper asked.
Grace wiped her sweaty palms on her pants. "I don't think positive thinking is going to help me here."
"No, I mean literally look up."
Oh. Grace tipped her head back. "There's a giant opening above me. A shaft of some kind." The darkness didn't exactly look welcoming, though.
"Is it big enough for you to fly into?"
"Looks like it."
"Do that, then. Worst case, it's a dead end, and you can hide up there until we come find you."
Grace's jaw clenched. "Don't waste time coming to rescue me. I'll find a way out." She pulled off the black jacket that marked her as an assistant and stretched her wings. "And I have to be honest, this hole looks like something out of a horror movie. I think the worst case scenario is a monster eating me."
Irrational, sure. But she couldn't help but imagine what might be hiding up there—
Grace shook her head. There was a real threat that could walk in any moment. Now was not the time to get freaked out by a dark shaft that didn't have anything living in it. Except maybe mold.
She jumped and beat her wings against the air. The opening swallowed her, and the darkness left her blind within seconds. She forced herself to keep moving up.
"How we doing, Angel?" Jasper asked.
"I'm okay," Grace replied. Up. Just keep going up.
"Was it the person who owned the tablet that showed up?"
"I think so."
"What did they look like?"
"I don't know. I didn't see them."
"You think it could have been Skybreaker?" Holly asked.
"I don't know," Jasper said. "The articles make me think it was just a highly motivated Sarena Trench hater. Why would Skybreaker care about Sarena?"
A speck of light appeared far above Grace. She flew faster.
The tips of her wings grazed rough stone.
"But they had camera feeds," Thea countered. "You said yourself it looked like they're monitoring the course."
The shaft was narrowing. And curving. But the light ahead was getting brighter fast. Grace kicked her legs back against the wall being her, pushing herself against the stone in front. The slant of the slope, combined with the uneven surface, allowed her to get a solid grip.
"None of this makes any sense," Jasper muttered.
Grace began to climb.
"Angel, are you okay?"
"Fine," Grace forced out between ragged breaths. "I think I'm almost to the surface."
Within minutes, she transitioned from climbing to crawling. The surface beneath her became completely horizontal. The stone abruptly changed to metal. She was in another ventilation shaft.
"Hm," Jasper said. "Maybe this is good. If Skybreaker is some anti-Sarena Trench fanatic, that could be the real reason they took control of the races. They might have no connection to Ringmaster or Starr whatsoever."
"And that would be good because that means they aren't an obstacle in taking down Starr, right?" Grace asked. She found the grate that was letting all the light in. This one, sadly, didn't give away as easily as the others had.
"Bingo," Jasper replied. "But we shouldn't get our hopes up."
Grace kicked her legs against the grate, launching it into the air and sending screws flying.
"Hey, Grace," Thea said. "I finally found some maps. Looks like the halls you found were the last things constructed in the caverns. They were planning to build a mini warp station, just powerful enough to bring people down from the surface."
Grace still laid on her back. She needed a minute to catch her breath before she dealt with whatever was on the other side of the grate. "Any idea how someone could have gotten a motorcycle down there?"
"Motorcycle?" Jasper asked.
"Yeah, it's possible," Thea said. "They put in an elevator shaft down the opposite hall. The elevator was never installed, but someone with ropes and enough time to spare could manage it.
Jasper spoke again. "Grace, did you say this person had a motorcycle?"
"Uh, yeah," Grace said. "Why?"
Jasper was quiet for a moment. "Nothing. Never mind. Lots of people have motorcycles."
Grace's head was spinning too fast for her to give that much thought. She forced herself up and climbed through the opening above her.
The vent opened into an alleyway. Grace slid the grate back into place, though she didn't bother with the screws. Her hands were still shaking violently. As she left the alley, she found herself glancing back, terrified she might find someone pursuing her.
But no one followed Grace as she stumbled out of the alley's shadows and into one of Netu's rare patches of sunlight.