Quoted By:
>Yell "FIRE" in a crowded area
"...Lucky," you say hoarsely.
"Huh?"
"<span class="mu-i">Lucky.</span>" Shouldn't it be obvious? "Come on!"
You scrub viciously at your tear-stained cheeks and grab Gil 2.0 by the wrist and drag him whirring and stumbling along behind you: you have broken out into a jog. If you didn't have ten minutes of winding downhill trail before you, it would've been a sprint, but as it is your lungs burn by the end of it. (Claudia is not an athlete.) Gil is wheezing less than you are, hatefully, but as you corner onto flat ground he still hasn't grasped the situation- he's been pleading with you to stop and explain. You haven't. Time is (most likely) of the essence, and anyways he needs to be taken down a peg. Enlightened or not, he can't go around thinking he can tell <span class="mu-i">you</span> what to do.
You had been passing an increasing number of people hustling upwards as you hustled down, but down at sea level it's even worse: there's easily hundreds of festival-goers surging in your direction. (Enlightened or not, you are glad to have Gil with you.) <span class="mu-i">Now</span> you can smell smoke, though you mainly feel it in your eyes and nostrils. The level of yelling and banging and general commotion solidifies your feeling of correctness: there isn't supposed to be <span class="mu-i">arson</span> on a perfect sunny day like this. There just isn't. And the culprit isn't remotely mysterious, either: you have gotten yourself separated from a man with both a pathological hatred for the 'unnatural' and a pair of torches.
So Lucky woke up. Great! Surely you can talk him out of burning this whole place to the ground, surely, <span class="mu-i">surely,</span> if you can find him first. This is a tall order. Even with Gil behind you to shoulder people out of the way, fighting upstream against the crowd is proving nightmarish- particularly when there's people in megaphones barking orders to HEAD FOR THE EXITS LADIES AND GENTLEMEN THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY DO NOT PANIC WE WILL GET THIS UNDER CONTROL at regular intervals. At least the location of the fire is obvious... but is Lucky <span class="mu-i">there?</span> Or has he slipped away in the ruckus to find more targets?
You don't know and have no solid way of knowing. You think about and refrain from asking Gil 2.0 if he is now capable of PROGNOSTICATIONS: mainly you don't want him to be. Him <span class="mu-i">acting</span> like he knows more than you do is one thing. Him actually knowing... yeah, well. It doesn't matter, anyhow, because you have successfully ducked into a side alley of abandoned food tents (you could go and steal kettle corn right now and nobody would ever know) and are weaving skillfully toward the source of the ever-blackening smoke. Soon you-
"MA'AM! SIR!" A sweaty, mustached man cuts directly in front of you. "You're headed in the WRONG DIRECTION! We're asking that everybody please gather in a SAFE ZONE while our brave volunteers contain the fire!"
(1/2)
