Click.
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Click.
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Click.
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Click.
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Echoed Charlie’s heels on the floor, the emptiness and sterility proving nothing to gawk at. She sighed. She was getting one step closer to having everyone she missed back. In hindsight, though, she wished she’d told more than just Reliviana where she’d be going, Peirce must be worried sick, and she didn’t exactly tell her sister to tell the others of the situation.
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She continued walking, the hall sloping violently downwards as a light emanated from the end of it, a guiding light to her destination, if you will. She went onward, the various doors and departing hallways nothing she’d let distract her. Her algorithm guided her onward, her hope that the hotel would yield standing.
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The hall continued to slope violently, and within a few moments, abruptly so, it leveled once again. Her database pinged, and she smiled. She found it. The home of her proposed cousin.
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Hotel Lizenna.
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The Village, 11:00 AM
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Reliviana sat at a table near the window, staring out the view, thinking. Kids and others chatted and ate behind her, speaking whatever they had in mind. If only she could do the same. She frowned and sat up.
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Even though Charlie was her ‘sister’, she still felt it wasn’t fair of her to leave her with… this. This mess and chaos. She never understood how it felt to be in charge of such administrative purpose, to be the one that, though they didn’t know you, they still came to you because they were willing to trust.
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Trust.
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Now who could she trust with this information? Charlie had confided with her her suspicions that someone within the village was working with the executives, and as much as Reliviana wanted to deny, there was no other explanation for how Mialee had disappeared.
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It just didn’t make any sense.
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How did she go missing? Why did Charlie think she could bring everyone back? And most importantly, how was she to manage the village herself? Not only did she have to manage her sister’s infant filled brownstone, along with her own shop on top of that, she was now the one the executives called whenever they needed to contact the village, and over the past few days, they did so more than ever.
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She stood up, realising something.
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Charlie had gone to retrieve the others–a dangerous affair, and here she was, complaining and whining about a little stress! If Charlie could be fine, there wasn’t anything stopping her from doing just as well as her sister.
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She walked over to the reception counter, and smiled to herself.
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She’d do her part, and things’d be back to normal in no time.
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The Decadent Facilities, 11:11 AM
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The majestic building stood like a swamp upon a lake, its height, proving the reason for the abrupt downward slope, being apparent. It stood at an awe-inspiring height of a mile and a half, Charlie watching it, wondering how the founders even fit such a thing underground.
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The room alone, even if you ignored the building, was impressive simply in how much engineering and or magic went into it. It was oval shaped with wires and all going across the walls, some leading to some switches within the room, and others trailing otherwise. There was a five thousand two hundred eighty foot drop from the level she stood on and the first floor of the hotel, a distance bridged by multiple flights of stairs leading.
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The hotel itself was a towering behemoth of multiple buildings, accounting to six in total. The tallest one, in which Lizenna herself resided, was home to the younger spectrum of children, most of which were left there for the summer, and also to the eye spectacle of the main complex.
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A huge lozenge, diamond in composition, formed a window that stretched from the top to the bottom of the skyscraper, on each side of the building, uninterrupted only by a door on the ground floor on one side of the building, the entrance of such.
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Two sky bridges extended from it and connected to two shorter buildings about half the size of the mile and a half tall main building, connecting slightly lower than the shorter building’s skyline. The two shorter buildings were topped with pools that reflected whatever light reached the place, the buildings themselves designated and the stay areas for the adolescents.
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Three other even shorter buildings, slightly shorter than half of a mile, also stood adjacent, connected to their taller companions by skybridges. One of the buildings was a sleek office building where their former staff used to inhabit, another building was used for overflow when they had too many children present, which happened often when the village was still considered a city. The last building was entirely designated for additional play space and the registry and front desk for the hotel.
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Charlie looked at the menagerie. Though the building was beautiful, it was unpleasantly tainted by destruction. A vile smell, broken windows, and the rotting aroma of animals trapped within the hotel when it shut down served as blotches and stains upon the building. They were things that shouldn’t’ve been there, but were anyways, all thanks to the second reset.
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Charlie walked onward, declining the stairs and coming level, but still far off, from the base of the hotel itself. Unruly gardens, untended and and ignored, spotted the huge lawn around the hotel, more stains and despair against the hotel–or at least what the hotel used to be. The hotel used to be beautiful.
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Just like the village.
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Walking onward, Charlie passed the greenhouse, thankful she could override her sent receptors. The smells of the place were even worse than the engine room’s hall–here there were corpses of animals who’d resolved to cannibalism, thereafter dying themselves, and their decomposing feces consumed by the plants whose only food was the shit they were provided.
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It took a few moments before she’d reached the door, then a few more moments to register that she had. Of all the people she’d lost to the reset, she most missed her cousin. A cousin who was like a mother to her, a heart of gold, and, if you will, deputy mayor to the Shapist’s City. You can guess who the mayor was.
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She wasn’t exactly ungrateful for Reliviana, or for Peirce, or for all the sweet time Tranquilivence gave her, listening to what she had to say. She didn’t exactly dislike them, but at some point, she’d gone numb to the majority of her neighbour's comfort. She only ever trusted Reliviana and, while she still had him, Martin, but even that had begun to wane as of late.
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Prying the doors open, she entered the building, the one where Lizenna’s lifeless body was most likely to be found, waiting to be powered up again, waiting and hoping with whatever consciousness she had left to be pulled from the light.
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Charlie knew what that felt like.
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She knew what it felt like to lose everything. To die, to no longer have a reason to live, or a purpose.
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The First Reset, Thirty Years Ago
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Charlie woke with a start. What was going on? Why were people shouting? Why were people shouting? Why was it so warm?
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Warm.
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It was warm.
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Her eyes up until this point closed, shot open, and her cpu shot into overdrive, trying to comprehend what in the name of all existence was going on.
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There were thousands of people running about, trying to force their way out, a mishmash of children and staff, some holding infants, whether sibling or child, close to their chests, not bothering to hush them as they shoved their way out. People were being trampled left and right, almost as if the floodgates had parted.
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So to her left, people ran, screamed, and rushed to leave.
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To her right–
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To her right.
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Flame. All she saw was flame. The City of Objects, some way somehow, had caught flame and was burning to ashes, to the ground, before her eyes. All.
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Before.
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Her eyes.
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If it was possible for a robot like her, her ears rang, and blocked all sensible thought.
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She jumped off her charging podium.
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She looked to the fire.
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And ran into it.
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She refused to let her sisters die. She refused to let her brothers die. She refused to let the love of her life die. Else, how would she live with herself? How’d she live knowing she could’ve done something? Well, for one, she wouldn’t.
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She rushed down the village's main road, firefighters trying to put out flames that refused to go out. Heels clicking rapidly against the concrete, she followed the main road to the places where she’d knew her family, and her friends, to be.
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The mayor’s tower stood before her, the entirety of the structure ablaze. She’d chosen to go for a charge and leave her deputy mayor to organise the meeting, and the fire–the fire must’ve started while they were still in the building. Charlie forced the door open, and ran up to the stairs, the carpet she stood on ablaze in itself. Her system warned her that it was overheating, and that soon enough, her motherboard would begin to melt, but she ignored it.
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Charlie reached the third floor of the building, and results puddled beneath her feet. There they were, every member of the village cast, melted, the heat too much to handle. It’d done more than just fry their circuits, it’d melted them entirely, and it promised to do the same with her.
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“No…” She shouted, “No No NO NO NO!” She screamed, stumbling backwards as her own paint started to melt off of her. She tumbled backwards, falling down the stairs, finding herself upon the landing.
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“N…o…why…” Charlie choked out, her motherboard finally hitting its limit and shutting down.
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In the end, she’d been the only one to survive, everyone from the first era of the village being eviscerated of their lives. The founders told her so.
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The worst thing about being a robot is that when you ‘die,’ it’s not darkness that takes you—it’s an endless, blinding white.
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The Decadent Facilities, 11:42, Present Day
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Charlie snapped herself out of the memory as soon as she reached the top floor. “Get it together Charlie,” She told herself, “Get it together…”
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She turned her attention to the extensive hallway that extended before her. Her first vestige of hope drew ahead, waiting patiently, almost beckoning her. She walked onward, the end of the hall withholding Lizenna’s office, door ajar. Ripped paper was scattered upon the beautifully tiled floor, and the walls were lined with pristine white doors, untouched and presumably locked.
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Charlie pushed the door open at the end of the hall, and Lizenna’s body sat limp within her chair, eyes rolled upward in opposite directions. Her chest cavity was open, and sand, commonplace within her, pooled at the bottom, as wires reached out for something obviously missing.
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She walked over to Lizenna’s body as it sat limply in the chair, and peered into Lizenna’s empty chest cavity. “Huh,” Charlie murmured, “Her motherboard is still intact, good I guess…” She said, pulling away and wheeling Lizenna away from her desk. She stood before said desk and opened the top drawer, revealing a collection of buttons ans wires, obviously leading to their respective things within the hotel.
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Charlie looked toward Lizenna and smiled, a sliver of light cast upon their metal bodies, flowing in from the window. “Hold on for me.”
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She grabbed the main power switch within the drawer and pulled. With what seemed to be a snap and a click, light, for the first time in years, returned to the hotel. The adjacent building thundered on, and then the main on itself, the power welcome to a building that didn’t have any for an insurmountable amount of time. Charlie smiled at the light, her hope growing, but she wasn’t done yet.
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“Sera?” She called, but received no reply.
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“SER-” She began, but was interrupted.
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“Yes, miss?” The robot replied. Charlie exhaled, her brief annoyance melting away.
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“Thank you. Please find the sandstone gem and bring it to me. You’ll know what it is once you see it.”
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“Request received. Processing.”
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Within moments, the gem, a perfect sphere, found itself upon the desk before Charlie, the chute it had dropped out of closing, returning to a normal roof tile. The gem in question was a magic engineering marvel that Charlie somehow managed to produce, a source of infinite electricity that, though untested, was bound to work, right? Sure, she didn’t test the nuclear lozenge within her, so this was sure to work.
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She picked up the lab-created orb and placed it into Lizenna’s chest cavity. It floated there for a moment, the sand rising up like a mountain below the sun, before the wires within the chest cavity began snaking toward the orb, with a will of a person determined to keep their blood flowing through their veins.
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Then, out of nowhere, in quick succession, the wires roped around the blue sparkling menagerie, and the sand rushed toward it to bind the gem-wire mix together, before the cavity slammed itself shut and the opening sealed like it was never there to begin with.
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Charlie waited with bated breath, the volume of the slam echoing her ears, through the very atoms of her metallic body, through the halls of the hotel, and through every part of the facility. She stared at Lizenna’s body, almost giving up, when-
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Click.
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Woosh.
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Lizenna’s eyes squeezed shut, and the sand within her hourglass body began flowing upward into her upper bulb. Her open mouth closed, and with gentle, careful hands, she sat up, her eyes fluttering open.
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Eyes upon the floor, Lizenna looked up to find the mascot before her.
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“Charlie…?”
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