Chapter Text
Barry had worked a lot of bad jobs before. They’d dealt with rude customers throwing tantrums when the sports stadium concession prices were higher than expected. They’d bowed their head patiently while listening to a furious tirade about how they hadn’t spelled the name “Kymbyr’leigh” correctly on a customer’s coffee cup. They’d watched, bucket and mop in hand, as theatre-goers threw popcorn and sodas in the air when the Chao in Space said his iconic meme line. All of that was manageable. By being purely bad, they could look forward to the end, and look back on it with no uncertain feelings of disgust. That sucked. Glad I’m not there any more!
This casino job had mostly been like that. Watching people lose money and leave disappointed, heartbroken, despairing, and being instructed to feed into their spirals - it had taken its toll on Barry. They’d resolved to quit and find some other, more wholesome work, something more like their short-lived stint on the Mirage Express. Their two-weeks-notice had been submitted, but because fate seemed to always have trouble ready for them, only 2 shifts from quitting, a lemur had picked them up and barged into an employees-only area which had somehow transformed into an inescapable caravan driving down a forest road. Somehow.
And yet, trapped as they were with an aggressively-rizzless lemur and tediously self-pitying jackal, today was the most fun they’d ever had on this job. Solving the ‘escape room’ puzzle that Letters had seemingly conjured was a cool challenge, despite the two big distractions, but in a way those distractions made them feel like the most put-together person in the room, something they couldn’t say about themself often. Perhaps it was selfish or a little delusional, but they were relishing in the fantasy of being the hero, worshipped by an admirer.
“You are so too handsome when you are working the things out.”
Barry allowed a smirk to creep up their face. “Yeah. I’ll figure it out.”
“You are even more handsome if you are doing it quicker.”
That snapped them out of their daydream. Loki the lemur was lounging on the folded-out bed, spinning a set of keys on his finger. They had already been used to unlock a new part of the puzzle, so it wasn’t an impediment, but it was a reminder of how little he’d contributed. Barry straightened up and folded their arms. “It’d be going quicker if you helped.”
Loki glanced over, then immediately spun into a come-hither pose and stuffed the keys in his mouth to dangle them sultrily from his teeth. “Zhis would be no fhair to you. I would be getting in all of your waysh.”
Barry needed a different strategy to coax him into helping, but nothing immediately came to mind, so they turned to the front of the caravan, where Quatre the jackal was slumped in the passenger seat, staring blankly out of the windshield and sighing like he’d been doing for nearly an hour now. Barry poked their head into the cab and waved gently in the periphery of his vision, and the jackal looked over, a vacant look on his face. Barry smiled politely. “You seen anything yet?”
“Nothin’ to see. Just the same old road, same old trees, same old clouds...” Quatre mumbled, then sighed again, eyes turning back to the road. “You ever feel like you’ve spent so much time trying to make somethin’ work... but it ain’t workin’ out, like it was all a waste of time?”
Barry resisted the urge to point out their attempts to get help from him and Loki. “Yeah. Sorta,” they said simply.
“We used to have such good times. Me and the Squad, and the boss. Doin’ little hits on Eggman’s oil rigs, or Wasteland villages who put bounties out on us... but then the boss went and worked with Eggman. We tagged along for a bit, but none of us was too happy about it... then, one day, we all got beat up by Shadow, and the boss went a little...” Quatre raised his hands to flap them chaotically around his head. “Next thing we hear, he’s got this new Egg-tech that he uses to win the war for Eggman. But who’s even benefittin’? Not us. Most of the others, they don’t wanna deal with the boss no more, but me and Trois stayed loyal, so it was just us when he got beat by Sonic and that Wyre. But he just pushed us away and ran off... then he disappeared. For years.”
Barry tried to look attentive. Unsolicited sob stories were a common ‘perk’ of customer service work. Usually, the storyteller would make some grand point near the end which Barry could respond to, and then it’d look like they’d actually paid attention to the whole thing, even as they were mentally planning a big takeaway treat for after today’s shift was over.
“Me and Trois, we moved on. Tried doing our own merc work... but it wasn’t the same. We drifted apart, too. Started new lives, but I know neither of us was happy. Then, out of nowhere, he came back. The boss. Found Trois first, then me. Thought he’d only been gone for a few weeks, so he went lookin’ for the rest of the squad, too, but they was all scattered, couldn’t find ‘em, I dunno. And all this time since he came back, he was goin’ crazier and crazier about this Wyre. We figured we could find him, maybe help the boss, fix things. And then maybe that’d bring back his notoriety, and the others would all hear, and the Squad would all be back together and things would be good again. But... that was never gonna happen, was it? The boss was just... chasin’ ghosts. Like we were.”
Barry opened their mouth to say something reassuring, but they were interrupted by Loki sliding up next to them and looking into the cab himself. “Wyre is too strongly for three too-useless jackdaws to catching like the frog on the fish hook,” the lemur said assertively, then looked to his side at Barry, squeezed up against them, and fluttered his eyelashes. Barry quickly slid into the cab and took the driver’s seat to avoid any further personal space violations.
“Understanding the problem is the first step towards solving it,” they said, quoting a self-help seminar they’d attended. “Maybe you just need to have a real talk with your boss about what’s going on and what you want, instead of just what he wants.”
Quatre sighed again, but didn’t say anything. Instead, it was Loki’s suddenly-sullen expression that caught Barry’s attention, and the lemur fidgeted with the keys in his hands. “What if I- if Quatre is only wanting his boss to be happy and this is all he wants?”
Barry glanced over at Quatre, who was looking idly out the windshield again. “Well... that can’t be all, right? Quatre said he wants things to be like how they were before.”
Loki rolled his eyes. “Maa, ii ya, I am speaking for myself. Wyre is the one saying to go there and do this and I am going too. I am not wanting to going anywhere, doing things for myself. What am I needing to doing?”
Barry sank into their seat. They hadn’t expected to become a relationship counselor all of a sudden. “Uh... I dunno. You really don’t want anything for yourself?”
“I am wanting things to be normal. Wyre not to grumping everywhere so much... that is all.”
“It sounds like you’ve got the same problem. You’re both trying to do the same old stuff, but things have changed, and you haven’t changed with them. You’ve gotta look ahead, at the future, and try to adapt to meet it,” Barry said. That self-help seminar had been a load of waffle, but it at least sounded vaguely profound, and both Loki and Quatre were quiet for a moment. Then Loki raised his head.
“But I cannot changing. Only Wyre can doing this.”
Barry furrowed their brows in confusion at the lemur, only for Quatre to suddenly sit up straight and point through the windshield. “Speakin’ of lookin’ ahead - is that a sign?!”
Barry turned and spied out of the caravan at the roadside ahead, noticing a large wood sign rapidly approaching. It had a smiling, old-fashioned depiction of Letters the Rabbit on it in weathered, faded paint, and the words “ROAD ENDS AHEAD: [3] MILES! We hope you enjoyed your trip!”. Barry heaved a sigh of relief.
“Guess we didn’t have to solve the escape room puzzle after all,” they chuckled, only for a loud “hrm” to come from Loki, drawing their attention to the lemur’s finger pointing out of the cab again at another sign with a winking Letters reading “Don’t forget to solve the escape room puzzle!”. Barry’s heart dropped, and the caravan automatically turned a slow corner to reveal a third sign of the rabbit’s face leering menacingly, overlaid by the text “OR ELSE.”
“We’re doomed,” Quatre moaned. As the caravan sped up along a forested straightaway, Barry thought they spotted a small sign with the word “YEP” quickly pass by the passenger side window behind Quatre’s head. This was absurd.
“Only if we don’t work together and figure it out!” they said assertively, then pushed out of the seat, past Loki and walked into the back of the caravan. In the back of the cage they’d unlocked with the keys Loki had been messing with, there was a safe with a combination padlock keeping it shut, still currently unsolved, although instead of numbers, the lock had card suits on them. They’d tried all 24 combinations of no-repeats, but to no avail, and knew that there were another 200 or so combos with repeats, which would be tedious to bruteforce. No, there had to be some clue, that was how escape rooms worked.
They looked sidelong at Loki and Quatre, looking back toward them expectantly, and straightened their back. “Get over here! C’mon, we haven’t got long left,” they commanded, and to their surprise, both of them shuffled out of their spots and joined Barry next to the cage. They hadn’t expected it to work, and floundered for the next command. “Uh... right, um, we gotta find playing cards. For this lock. The combination, uh, lock.”
Quatre bent down and looked at the safe. “Have you tried pullin’ open the safe normally? Without undoin’ the lock?”
Barry sputtered. “Buh- wuh- n-no! There wouldn’t be a padlock on it if it was that easy!”
Quatre leaned forward and grabbed the safe handle, then pulled on it. It didn’t budge. Barry’s heart unfroze, spared of the potential embarrassment. “See?” they snapped, and Quatre stood back up straight, sighing.
“Yeah. I’m useless, I know.”
The quokka rubbed their forehead, unsure what to say, and instead looked at Loki, whose eyes were distant and forlorn. “Any ideas, Loki?” they asked, but the lemur didn’t seem to hear them. Barry glanced over their shoulder at the road, where another sign read “[1.6]528LES TO GO!”, the numbers painted outside the box and over the other letters. A little panic set in, and they went for the nuclear option. “Loki, you are so, uh, so too very hot and... hot and sexy when you... uh... solve the puzzlings...”
Barry tried to ignore Quatre’s expression of absolute bewilderment in their peripheral vision as Loki’s face very slowly turned to look into Barry’s eyes. Their face was flush with awkwardness, but Loki’s mouth gradually became a wide grin, and then all of a sudden he darted to the side and jumped into the passenger seat. Barry took a moment to shake themself off, looked sidelong at Quatre sheepishly and quickly snapped their eyes away again to follow the lemur into the cab. Loki was pressing his face against the window, and leaned back to point at the wing mirror. The reflection showed the side of the van - a painted logo reading ‘Arcadian Aces’, and four playing cards underneath, all the aces of the four suits. “Heart, Club, Diamond, Spade,” Loki said proudly, then looked around at Barry with a smirk. “Now how are you thinking of me?”
Barry furrowed their brows, and opened their mouth to begin to say they’d already tried that combination, but Loki’s hand clapped over it suddenly. “No, do not saying it, I am already having a boyfriend, do not being so jealous.”
“It worked!” came Quatre’s voice from the back of the van, and Loki slipped past Barry, waggling his eyebrows like a pair of windscreen wipers as he went. The quokka was overwhelmed and lost for words, and looked down at the wing mirror at the reflection of the Arcadian Aces logo. The cards underneath were now all Jokers, somehow, and depicted Letters in a colourful waistcoat and tipping a top hat. Was this the casino management’s revenge for them trying to quit?
Loki appeared in the cab and grabbed Barry’s hands, spinning them to face him, and shoving some sort of chunky bracelet on their right wrist. They finally broke out of their stun to look into Loki’s confident face. “What- what did you find?”
“This,” Loki said, holding Barry’s wrist up. “Wyre’s zip-grapple. How is you with the shooting?”
“Uh, I’ve never-” they began, and was interrupted by Quatre.
“It’s open! We can get out!”
Barry leaned forward and looked into the back, where Quatre was holding a long hand-crank reaching up to the ceiling, where the skylight window was now open. Barry wasn’t sure how that could have fit inside the little safe, but this place didn’t seem to run on logic. Quatre dropped the crank and jumped off the bed to reach up to the window and pull himself through, and Loki joined him by curling his tail on the ground and springing off, launching through like a rocket. Barry stepped over underneath the window and looked up, seeing the others looking around, then climbed onto the bed and jumped for the roof themself. Their hands grabbed the rim, but they didn’t have the upper body strength to pull themself up, and dangled helplessly. “Ah... help? Guys?”
Loki looked down and smiled, then swung his tail down and wrapped it around Barry’s body, gripping them firmly and lifting them out onto the roof in front of him. The lemur’s fur rushed in the wind, and he pressed his face close to the quokka, still wrapped warmly in the tail. “You’re welldone.”
Barry felt blood rushing to their face again, but this time, it wasn’t out of embarrassment. It took them by surprise, and they squirmed out of the tail to avoid thinking about it, then looked around at the car’s surroundings, and once again, they were left speechless. What had just been a smooth, pleasant road lined with forest on both sides was now a precarious cliffside path, one side a sheer rock face and the other a hundred-foot drop toward a collection of sharp-looking rocks and the sea beyond them. The sun was edging the horizon, descending into the sea alarmingly fast. It didn’t take understanding the strange logic of this ‘Escape Room’ to understand it represented the time they had left, and it was running out.
“What do we do now?!” they cried over the streaming wind. Quatre moved to the back of the van and glanced down at the road rushing beneath them, then looked back with a grimace.
“We could jump, but it’ll hurt!” he said, and almost in response, a rumbling shook the van and all three of them staggered to catch their balance. Barely a few feet behind the van, the cliff face and road began to collapse in a gargantuan rockslide, chasing them as the vehicle continued barreling down the road. Barry stared in horror and Quatre fell onto his tail in shock, while Loki scratched his chin.
“This might becoming a problem,” the lemur mumbled, barely audible over the rushing wind and crashing rocks. Barry turned to him and grabbed the bracelet on their wrist.
“How does this work?!” they cried. Loki shrugged.
“I have never using it.”
Barry’s heart sank again, and they slumped, mentally drained. Quatre shuffled backwards and looked up at the pair, brows furrowed. “The rockslide is getting closer!”
Brought to alertness yet again, Barry joined Loki as they peered over the end of the vehicle, where it did look like the avalanche was creeping closer and closer to the caravan’s back tires. Another time limit?! Barry sighed in exasperation and looked back down into the cabin. “I think... someone needs to go back in and push on the accelerator.”
Loki slicked his hair back, only for it to get blown out of place immediately by the wind, then winked at Barry as he hopped back into the van and skipped into the driver’s seat. The sound of the engine rose and exhaust pumped out of the back of the van, but Barry watched the landslide start to get further away, and finally they felt like they could breathe properly. But... the sun was still setting, its descending semicircular form casting beautiful golden shimmers over the vast, empty ocean. It was subtle, but beneath the increasingly distant rumblings of the rockslide and the roaring of the engine, they could hear the almost-calming crashing of waves on the rocks below. What a trip. They hadn’t realised just how exhausting the past 10 minutes had been.
“Boss- I mean Barry, bad news.”
Barry looked around at Quatre knelt on the edge of the caravan’s roof. “What now?” they groaned, then followed the jackal’s trembling finger pointing at the road not far ahead, where a bevy of signs pointed arrows at the sudden end of the cliffside highway. After everything, Barry could hardly find the energy to panic. They looked down at Quatre. “I’m not your boss.”
“Sorry, bo- Barry,” Quatre chuckled. “I’m just... tryin’ to seem helpful.”
“Quokki, there is some problems coming ahead!” Loki’s voice called up from below.
“That’s not my name,” Barry called back. Loki’s head sprang up through the skylight, looking concerned.
“So what are we to doing?”
Quatre scratched the side of his head and Barry shrugged. If this was what the casino did to people who left, who were they to stop it? Letters could do things beyond explanation. On the Mirage Express, they had Sonic and his friends’ help to stop the runaway train. Now they had the help of some weirdly flirty lemur and a depressed jackal. The house always wins, they thought with a sigh of resignation.
Wait... unless the house was bluffing.
The end of the road surged closer. Only seconds away from the edge, Barry looked at Loki with a half-hearted smile. “It’s ok. It’s a bluff. Letters wouldn’t wanna kill any of us.”
“Yes, me,” Loki nodded, eyes wide. Barry’s heart dropped, and the car smashed into the signs and all four wheels became airborne. In one rapid move, Loki’s tail wrapped around Quatre, scooping him up, and the lemur jumped over to Barry and grabbed their right arm, pointing it at the cliff wall and flicking their wrist for them. Out of the bracelet he’d attached earlier, a thin wire shot out and pierced into the cliff’s rock, and right as the caravan began to fall away from them, tumbling forward and down toward the rocky sea, the bracelet suddenly yanked on Barry’s arm and pulled them, screaming, right toward the rock face, pulling Loki and Quatre along with them.
All three slammed painfully into the cliff and were stunned, but Loki shook himself out of it quickly to affirm his grip around Barry’s shoulders and lean over to their bruised face. “Leaving your wrist like this! Do not be moving it!” he cried right into Barry’s ear, and they flinched and ears rang while Loki looked back down at Quatre and the sea far below, where the caravan finally hit the water with an enormous crash. “Hm... Wyre is not to be very happy for this...”
The three took a few moments to shake off their pain and stress, but it seemed like they were alive, and Barry thanked every deity they knew of for the luck. Their wrist was starting to ache, supporting the weight of two others dangling off their back, but it was kind of energising to be the hero again. Quatre started yelping and Barry cautiously looked down, only to see the jackal swinging back and forth in Loki’s tail. “Stop it! Stop that!” he wailed, and Loki laughed. Barry chuckled too. As annoying and weird as he could be, Loki at least knew how to keep things light.
Then, as the raining sound of all the water the caravan’s plunge had launched into the air faded and its wheels became invisible beneath the surface, another sound replaced it. Rumbling rock and cracking earth reached them, and their teasing laughter stopped instantly. The sun was almost fully set. All three looked back toward the road, and the cascading rockslide was visible again, thundering toward them like it was sentient.
“Keep swinging!” Quatre suddenly yelled, and both Loki and Barry looked down at the jackal, kicking his feet back and forth to pendulum as much as he could in the lemur’s tail-grip. Loki obliged, swinging his tail and soon his whole body, and slipped down Barry’s back to their legs to get an even longer arc. Still dangling uncomfortably close to the rough cliff face, Barry didn’t have much space to contribute themself, but Loki’s swinging began to sway them back and forth as well, and they could hear horrible noises coming from the rocks where the zip-grapple’s wire was lodged. To their left, the avalanche wave was getting closer and closer, and only the thinnest strip of the sun covered the horizon, Quatre was swinging higher and higher, and Barry’s wrist ached terribly-
-and then the sun set. On one last arc upward, Barry flicked their wrist again and the wire unlatched from the rocks, zipping back into the bracelet. Quatre carried the most momentum and was catapulted high into the air, while Loki kept his grip on Barry’s legs and brought them with him as they somersaulted through the air and away from the cliff before gravity began to catch up with them. Barry’s throat ached from screaming, but they did anyway, yet the ocean below didn’t seem to be coming very fast. They felt Loki’s arms stop gripping their legs, but with the whole world flipping constantly they couldn’t see what was going on, and flailed like a baby. Then his voice cut through everything.
“Pointing your toes!”
Barry’s head snapped around, and they could vaguely make out a couple of black-and-white blurs amidst the spinning, but wasn’t sure which was Loki. Nevertheless, they took his advice and pointed their shoes down as much as they could, clutching their arms to their chest and squeezing their eyes shut, almost perfectly in time for them to hit the water. Their feet pierced the surface tension and they slid in smoothly, the liquid slowing their spin just enough for them to see Loki swandiving flawlessly and Quatre hitting the surface with a full belly flop that echoed painfully even beneath the waves.
But the panic wasn’t done yet - the cliff was still collapsing. Barry thrashed about to right themself then quickly swam to the surface, bursting out and taking a deep breath, then panting as they span to stare toward the rockslide. But it wasn’t there. Loki surfaced beside them and shook the water out of his hair quickly, then looked out onto the open, moonlit ocean that Barry was staring at in despair. “Where the hell are we?” they gasped.
“The sea,” Loki said flatly, then turned around. “Oh. The side of the sea.”
Barry looked around and the lights, sounds and smells of the city all suddenly hit them as if they hadn’t existed a second ago. They were only a couple dozen feet from a beach lined with closed umbrellas and empty lounge chairs, a road and cars and towering buildings just beyond it. Quatre was pathetically dragging himself onto the sand, groaning, and Loki started into a frontcrawl swim to make his way over as well. Barry wasn’t sure if it was real or still a part of Letters’ game, but as they trod water and felt the sloshing in their ears, they decided they weren’t going to find out by staying there.
Quatre lay face-down in the sand while Loki wrung the water out of his tail and Barry emptied their shoes. After making sure that Quatre was okay, to which Barry received a weak thumbs-up, they turned to Loki in amazement. “How did you know I was going to land like that, so I could use my toes to break the water? I was spinning just as wild as Quatre...”
Loki shrugged. “I am acrobat. Acro-lemur. I am letting you go at the right time for trapeze tricks,” he said, then ruffled the water out of his hair with his hands. “You are not so bad at trapezing. Bonne dive.”
Barry felt blood rushing to their face again. “Th-thanks,” they mumbled, then noticed Loki smirking at them, and looked away. At the edge of the pavement was an electric sign advertising Twinkle Park, which was odd. Barry hadn’t heard of it since moving here for their casino job, but the electric display was showing a series of short clips of people enjoying rides and eating snacks. Then, suddenly, the display seemed to glitch and streaks of red flashed across it, and an image of Letters appeared, a short animation of it winking at the reader looping beside the words “Thanks for playing my Escape Room!”. Barry waved their hands frantically at the billboard.
“Loki! We did it! We survived!” they cried, and Loki trudged up through the sand beside Barry to look at the sign, shortly followed by Quatre. But as soon as the lemur arrived, the display switched back to advertising Twinkle Park, and Loki screwed up his face.
“What are you meaning?” he mumbled, eyes narrowed at the clips of couples rubbing noses on a Tunnel of Love-looking boat ride. Rubbing his chest painedly, Quatre managed a feeble laugh.
“They wanna take you on a date there,” he chuckled, and Barry’s head snapped over to Quatre furiously. The jackal raised a defensive hand, but he was still smiling. “Hey, sorry, Boss, I just couldn’t help but overhearin’ you guys earlier...”
Barry glanced back over at Loki awkwardly, but the lemur was staring intently at the screen. When they followed his gaze, they saw the clip reel had changed to a collage of 5 photos of couples, labeled “Today’s Cutest Couples!” at the top. After a couple of seconds, one of the photos would expand and cover the whole display, and some text would appear describing them, before shrinking back down to reveal the other pictures. After four other pictures, the final one to expand was an image in profile of a beastly-looking wolf with glowing markings scowling at a black-and-white jackal with a milky-blue scarred eye, similarly snarling back at him. A twinkling star wiped across the screen and revealed the text “Ferocious Love!”.
“Boss...” Quatre gasped, and Barry looked over, thinking he was still referring to them, but he was staring in horror at the screen.
“Wyre?!” Loki snapped, and Barry looked at him, glaring hatefully at the beastly wolf. Oh no, Barry thought.
Loki gripped their hand tight, squeezing hard enough to be painful, and they whimpered. The lemur seemed to ignore them. “We are going on the dating now after alls,” he growled, then started stomping through the sand and onto the pavement, dragging Barry helplessly along. Quatre stared at the sign for a moment longer before the display transitioned into another sizzle reel showing customers enjoying the rides, then scrambled off the sand to catch up with the others.