"Oh, we did it!" Helen raised her arms and quietly celebrated. Sadly, Simon did not seem to participate with her. Instead, he was much more focused on the strange mechanical contraption ahead of him.
He looked around for a bit, grabbing a mirror from his bag to look at the corners.
Luckily for him, the place was illuminated with random blinking contraptions that appeared to be miniature lanterns.
Once he saw that the coast was clear, Simon stepped forward, looking closely at the massive metal lobby.
Simon noted that the very center seemed to be much more elevated than the rest and even disconnected in some fashion.
There were also metal beams on the end of the center that stretched up to the ceiling for some reason.
Suddenly, Helen gasped and rocked around on Simon's shoulders excitedly. She was still sitting on them, and his head was getting squished by her thighs, but it was quite pleasant.
"Oh, oh! It's an elevator! It's a thing! Get closer to the console! It probably has a big red button!"
She patted his head and pointed forward like an excited child, and so he sighed and marched ahead towards the console, and sure enough, amongst all of the levers and buttons, there was a big red one in the middle.
"We press it, and then this whole floor goes up! It probably opens the ceiling too. We do this, and we go to the next floor where a cutscene plays, and then we fight some minions!"
Helen leaned over to try and press it but Simon gently grabbed her hand. "I would rather not fight some minions right now. Although… hmm."
He began to think aloud, looking around. "I heard of an elevator before, some kind of contraption to get to another floor. It's usually reserved for the wealthy and the mad… but what I know from interacting with both is that there are always stairs nearby, in case the elevator did not work."
Simon began to look around, walking across the whole lobby, perusing at the walls and gently gliding his hand across the bricks until he found a metal door with engravings on it that read out:
"Emergency Exit."
"Aha, here we go." He tried to push it, but it sadly required a lock.
"Alright then, let's see if I can pick this-"
Before he could even take a knee, Helen had already pointed a finger at the lock, creating a small blast from the tip that knocked the door wide open.
"…Or you can just… do that… I guess."
"You're welcome~" Helen then jumped off his shoulders and finally walked on her own, stretching out her arms and legs as if she were about to race.
"I guess we're doing the secret stealth option then. It's not so bad, usually this nets us some extra reward and another ending."
"Uhm… sure, the reward is I don't get to fight…" He led the way, walking through the door and up a few flights of stairs.
Helen cheated a few times by levitating a little bit so that her legs wouldn't get sore.
After reaching the third floor, voices could be overheard in the far-off distance, one of them being a familiar echo from Simon's recent past.
"Let's make one thing here, bird, Just cause you're a made woman does not mean you get to rule these streets. It's a family business that's needed around here, and your family… it's not very homely let',s say that much."
It was the Underboss of the Bouldeaires: Franklin the Butcher. He was an actual butcher, both of cows and of men, but mostly of cows.
Franklin was a tall brute of a man, always smelled like he just got out of a meat freezer.
He had a pretty clean face with a bald head, nicely shaven, which was a surprise because he shaved with a butcher's knife he kept on his belt, even on his suit.
In the past, Simon had swindled him many times over under different guises, the most recent one was pretending to be a man named Zacharias who was a tax collector.
Simon slowly began to tip-toe across the top of the stairs, luckily they were hidden behind another door with a window mesh on it.
Both he and Helen looked out of it and were astonished with what they saw:
Walls with gears moving every second, pistons underneath a glass-covered floor, constantly whirring and giving off some steam. The ceiling was arched, filled with some other mechanical bits that just seemed to whir and jingle.
The guards from earlier seemed to be delivering all the strange goods from the city to many storage rooms that were littered around.
One of the many rooms in the hallway had Franklin's voice in it, alongside some other much quieter voice.
One that was of.. a girl? Who appeared to be quite soft-spoken as well.
"Oh? But there's nothing quite wrong with what I'm doing now. It's not disrupting anything, is it?"
"It's disrupting the way we think it should be handled. Now then, we came here to make you an offer you can't refuse."
"Oh, my~ really now? What is it?" Simon slightly recoiled from her tone. There was something just so dangerous about it that he couldn't put his finger on.
He even looked at Helen for second thoughts, and she just stared back at him, whispering.
"Oh, that guy is a jobber!"
"A what?" Simon was going to have to make a dictionary to understand all these strange terms that Helen kept pulling out.
"You know, like he's going to get his ass handed to him even if he sounds tough?"
"What? How do you-"
Then wi,thout any warning whatsoever, a cry came out from the office room.