Xenoverse origins / R-077
Piper SootOrigin story
Piper Soot and the Voice at the Wrong End
An Industrial Pipe Crawler trapped in a network shaped by spoken directions must trust an outside listener rather than her own famous sense of the route.
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Piper Soot recognized the voice calling from the pipe. It was hers, which was troubling because she had not said anything. More troubling still, it sounded lost. Piper had spent considerable effort establishing that she did not get lost. She climbed towards the voice intending to correct the record.
Piper's reputation for never getting lost becomes a liability inside pipes that believe everything she says.
If I knew the way out, I wouldn't be asking you.
From the dossier
Prologue — The Woman Who Knew the Route
At Industrial, Piper worked as Industrial Pipe Crawler, following the strange service passages beneath the factories. She wore soot on her face and kept her blonde braid tucked clear of her tools. Aboveground, people recognized her by the wrench at her belt. Belowground, they recognized her knock.
The Goblin Council knew her from a dispute over a map. She had proved that its officially straight main conduit took an impossible turn beneath the council chamber. The councillors remembered the embarrassment. Piper remembered how good it had felt to be right while everyone important looked wrong.
Since then, she had become the person who knew the route. Workers asked her directions; managers praised her independence when they wanted to avoid assigning help. She accepted both as compliments. The reputation suited her until it began answering questions she should have considered herself.
A new assistant named Tern waited beside the access gallery with a listening horn. Piper told him to keep the desk occupied while she checked a reported echo. He asked whether she wanted him to follow the survey board. She said the board had never been inside a pipe.
Then her own voice called from the dark: “There's another turn. There shouldn't be another turn.” Piper stood still. Tern looked at her, then at the opening. He had the decency not to ask whether this counted as a mapping discrepancy.
Piper announced that she would take the usual short route and identify the source. As she spoke, a narrow passage appeared where a curved wall had been. She assumed it had always been there and disliked the moment of uncertainty enough to move towards it without another word.
Act 1
Directions with Consequences
Act I — Directions with Consequences
Inside, the familiar green glow came from lamps set at unfamiliar angles. Piper followed the curve she remembered, turned left and found the same junction waiting ahead. On the wall someone had scratched her initials. The scratches looked fresh. Her own voice called again from farther along.
She told Tern through the speaking tube that she was nearly at the echo. A distant metallic groan answered. The passage lengthened. She stopped walking, watched the lamps slide away from one another and understood that something besides distance was being measured.
“Straight ahead,” she muttered, and the curve straightened. “Just one more turn,” she said, and a new junction opened. The network was listening. It took directions as construction requests, including the reassuring directions she supplied herself whenever she did not want to reconsider.
Piper tried ordering an exit. A door appeared, bearing a beautifully lettered EXIT sign. Behind it waited another door with the same sign. The pipes knew the word but not the destination. They had learned from administrative diagrams, a possibility that explained more than she liked.
Tern asked where she was. She gave him a confident description of a place she had already left. The network built that place around her, complete with a dented inspection cupboard. Piper recognized the dent because she had described it at a Council hearing.
The echo called for help again. This time it used words she had spoken only in her head. Piper felt the first cold edge of fear. Somewhere ahead, the network was constructing a version of her that could admit what she was still refusing to say aloud.
Act 2
The Map Nobody Could Finish
Act II — The Map Nobody Could Finish
At the listening desk, Tern drew what he heard. His sketch became a thicket of crossings, each new statement from Piper adding a branch. He asked her to stop giving directions. She told him she had managed harder routes than this. Another passage opened with an enormous clang.
Councillor Drail arrived aboveground, recognizing Piper's clipped voice through the horn. He asked for an estimated return. Piper said soon. The lamps accelerated away from her. Tern covered the councillor's end of the horn with a cloth and told him that estimates were currently making matters worse.
Piper reached a chamber filled with unfinished maps. They hung in the air like thin metal leaves, each showing the route somebody had insisted ought to exist. The pipes had collected instructions for so long that they could no longer distinguish a plan from a place.
Her missing counterpart stood on the far side of the chamber, made from lamp glow and soot. It repeated her confident phrases while backing towards a passage without a floor. Piper called it to stop. It replied in her own voice that it knew exactly what it was doing.
She could not rescue an echo by proving it wrong. Every argument supplied it with more of her certainty. She sat on the edge of a map-shaped platform and spoke to Tern without describing a route. “I don't know where I am,” she said.
The echo stopped. So did the movement of the lamps. Tern answered that he did not know either, but he could still hear her. Piper had wanted him to offer something more impressive. Instead, for the first time since entering, she had a fact that did not pretend to be a destination.
Act 3
The Knock from Outside
Act III — The Knock from Outside
Tern put down the unfinished map and knocked on the gallery wall. Piper heard it as a soft vibration behind the chamber's hanging leaves. He repeated it. She answered with her familiar work knock, leaving words out of the exchange. The maps trembled but built nothing new.
The way back was not a secret route Piper could memorize. It changed as the network released its borrowed plans. Tern kept sounding the same ordinary rhythm from a place that existed outside its arguments. Piper followed, admitting uncertainty whenever the urge to reassure herself grew too strong.
The echo followed her. At each junction it lost a little shape, until only its voice remained. Near the access gallery, it asked whether she was going to leave it behind. Piper said she could not promise to carry every version of herself. The voice answered, quietly, that it understood.
She emerged beside the desk with soot in her hair and no useful return estimate. Drail demanded a revised map. Piper handed him Tern's impossible sketch. He called it unacceptable. She agreed that it described an unacceptable situation and asked him to stop confusing an unattractive answer with an untrue one.
Tern expected praise. Piper gave him credit in the incident account, then asked him to help plan the next investigation. He accepted only after she agreed that listening at the desk counted as work. They spent the afternoon arguing productively about which questions the pipes might be able to hear without obeying.
When Piper went home, she left the wrench on her work peg. Halfway down the street, it knocked against the wall behind her in the rhythm Tern had used. The sound followed through lamp posts and drain covers. At her own door, her voice whispered from the letter slot: “I found a different way.”
Finding a route someone else can hear
The Industrial Pipe Crawler works out of sight of the people who depend on the network. Piper's adventure uses impossible, speech-shaped passages to test her independence and her willingness to share responsibility; the fantasy route offers no real confined-space instructions.