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 Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 6:53 am
The extent of Harrison's reading was usually lumps of gaming and Halloween-themed magazines, but he wasn't beyond the occasional ratty pulp fiction while he was on guard duty.
Early on, he'd gone through about 5 years of October Home and Garden, hoping it'd mention some kind of lizard bone monster that lived in the desert and kept piles of corpses in its nest.
All he'd found was how to make bat cupcakes.
National Geographic wasn't any better.
Newspapers from the area weren't English.
B0nez told him he'd make a lousy Death Trainee, and Harrison told him to shut up, he was trying to concentrate. It wasn't much different from police work. The crime scene was just...bigger than he was used to working with. Pretty soon, the whole pile of information on the Horsemen came into light, and the mystery was solved. So he dropped it. Famine Horsemen. When possible, steer clear of the Sahara.
Random portals popping up everywhere recaptured his attention. This time he checked out a whole pile of Travel magazines, boasting local restaurants, beaches, and historical landmarks- touristy s**t. Learning from his past experience with magazines, he'd also checked out some old books to leaf through- surely something somewhere would mention areas where space was on the unstable side.
It was one of the books- he didn't know the author, although from the crappy binding it looked like it was written in house, that listed something besides wine tasting. He only stopped because there were drawings of some weird, portal-looking doors. And, hell, it even mentioned walking around and finding yourself somewhere else-
"Hey, the Weeping Forest sound familiar to you?" Harrison asked Rep.
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 7:02 am
For Rep reading was a frustrating experience and always had been. Anything longer than the duration of a twitter message and his slow and deliberate reading speed fell behind what his attention span could handle. The result was often a lot of staring blankly at pretty pictures of exotic locales and filing the text under maybe try and read later. He wasn't much good at all when it came to research, though the well-meaning intentions were there.
As Harrison spoke, he looked up from an article on various nude beaches around the world that clearly had everything to do with the portal rumours they were supposed to be looking into."Weeping forest?"
He looked thoughtful. "Isn't that that forest in Japan where all the kids kill themselves?"
Rep wasn't very helpful for much other than moral support.
"What does it say about it?"
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 7:11 am
"Sounds likely. Hand me the one on Japan," Harrison said, flipping the page over to see if any additional info was on the back.
The JAPAN magazine was plastered with a picture of Mount Fuji and travel package deals.
"Hell if I know. There's a lot of writing. Mentions portals though, see." He held the book up so Rep could see the drawings, "I just feel like I've been there before." He muttered, mostly to himself, "It's not in the Scarefari, that one's the Dark Forest."
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 7:18 am
Rep helpfully rummaged in the pile and handed over the Japan magazine, feeling helpful that at least he could do that much.
He was about to go back to his nude beach article when Harrison held up the book, he froze, eyeing it as he was struck with the same feeling of deja vu. It took a few moments but suddenly he remembered what it reminded him of. It took a while to get his mouth and brain on the same page, pointing and making sounds for a few seconds before he managed.
"That forest. The forest with the golems, where we like... where we go in a lot of times. Like. With the trees and s**t. Halloween!"
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 7:27 am
Harrison opened the Japan magazine on the bed, looking at it while Rep made thinking noises. Once Rep said forest, however, he gave him his full attention.
"Oh s**t! The one next to the school! No ******** wonder they got portal problems. Haha, what a bunch of dumbasses."
Harrison turned the book back around, grinning, but the triumph faded, and he looked thoughtful instead.
"But the event we went to wasn't next to the School. It was in the main...town or whatever. So there's gotta be something making them pop up where they're not supposed to be." It would just be a Halloween problem, except they had missions in Halloween and nobody wanted to find themselves dragged back into the fog. Or...wherever the portals took people.
"One of the horses had that mirror thing," Harrison suggested uncertainly.
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 7:35 am
Rep furrowed his brows thoughtfully, he was no good at figuring s**t out, a lot of the things that went on in Halloween seemed to have as much rhyme or reason as an acid nightmare. "So now they have ******** portals to their world and out of their world popping up all over. Think it's related to the haunted house? I mean I guess that insanity s**t ******** it up, and it was like the big kahuna like, portal-wise before."
He nodded. "And aye, that like, mirror thing too. Bastards, the lot of them like, ******** up all the fabric of reality. Making our jobs harder."
Giving up on his magazine he sprawled out feline on the bed. "So like. That book." He gestured at the one with the portals mentioned. "Wherever that was recorded. Probably good place to start. Does it say?"
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 8:06 am
"Might be. Since all the students decided they looked better in grey. This insanity s**t is poaching people's partners-"
He looked uneasy.
"Don't think I want to go back to the Haunted House. We got our asses kicked and we had almost a full squad out there."
He flipped to the front of the book, to find the publishing information. Like he'd thought. "Looks like it was printed here. Probably by one of the Life or Death guys." He pushed it over to Rep, then started gathering up all the travel magazines, "I think I got an idea."
He pulled his gym bag over, dumping them in there and zipping it up.
"Keep looking through it. I'll be right back."
Harrison shouldered the load, and headed to the library. When he came back, the gym bag was still full. This time when he unzipped it to reveal a mess of thick titles like OBJECTS OF POWER and MAGICAL ARTIFACTS AND THEIR HISTORY. He dumped them onto the bed, and pushed a couple of random books over towards Rep.
"Start looking. We need to find like, I dunno. Something that either gives already-magic s**t some range, or has to do with moving s**t from one place to the other."
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 8:27 am
"Naw, I'm with you, you couldn't pay me enough to go back there alone. I like having Tracey back, I don't want to end up ******** squishy again."
He took the book and eyed it in more detail. "Right." he added as Harrison headed off with the travel magazines. It was slow going but it did look like there were weird portals bleeding into the human world in places, with people ending up somewhere else entirely. Maybe Halloween, maybe it was something else completely - it wasn't hugely reassuring regardless.
It was impossible not to look dismayed as yet another delivery of very thick and complex looking books were ditched on the bed. "This s**t is why I could never be in Life or Death man." He was starting to get a headache just from reading, especially the books with the absolutely tiny footnotes he couldn't actually read - he couldn't understand why anyone would write in a font so tiny and blurry.
Still, he opened the books he'd been passed and slowly but surely proceeded to read through the details of the artifacts.
"Looks like artifact things get graded like weapons. Like some are awesome, some are not so awesome." He read on a bit with curiosity, starting to draw a line between one thing and the next, if these artifact things were powerful enough, in theory they could be the ones changing s**t around and causing portals. There was probably a connection involved. The items listed as possible candidates for further investigation were almost all connected to names, what looked like specific historical figures, probably mythological, the book didn't detail who they were.
"Who are these names?"
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 8:38 am
"I don't know how they expect people to pronounce half this s**t," Harrison looked over at Rep's book.
"Uh, let's see, the back got a directory?" He commandeered it, bookmarking the place Rep had pointed out with his thumb, then searching for the name. "Here it is. He's got another entry on 162."
Harrison skimmed the paragraphs. "Titan. In charge of holding the planet up. Uh, let's see, the other guy..." more flipping. Same thing. I guess..." there were a few minutes where Harrison read silently. "They sound like these sort of- B0nez says elemental- guys that pissed the gods off. Now this planet guy, I bet he could get around if he wanted to. It say where they hang out?"
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 8:54 am
"I don't ******** know either. Seriously. Hep..hep..heface..hefacetius. Whatever. Whoever named these guys was a ******** sadist." He didn't protest as Harrison took the book to have a flick through it, almost relieved to have him deal with it.
"Titans? If they were like, badass enough to piss off the gods then they must have been pretty ******** strong." It made sense that the things they left behind, had they existed - and everything ******** seemed to in the worlds he'd learned of since becoming a hunter - would be potent.
"It... yeah. It said something like. Back near the front. It was like. Class C s**t is suspected to be like.."
He took the book back for a moment and flicked back to what he'd been looking at. "Aye, this. "between worlds"." He wasn't sure how he felt about that, it made it sound something like the haunted house yet again, and that place had turned out dangerous as ********. The text below though, discussing what sort of places these between locations were suspected to be was once again written in that ******** agonising font. He squinted angrily before offering the book back with a resigned sigh.
"It says more but I think the ******** writer was a moron. Its totally unreadable."
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 9:08 am
"There was a war," Harrison said slowly, "and after that they got locked up underground. This guy seems to think it was underwater- kind of like, James Bond prison-type lair."
He rubbed the back of his neck.
"Well, ******** if I'm going to play submarine adventures in the Atlantic. But, okay, say there's places like this, and they're stuffed full of...either really badass guys, or what's left of them, and these portals have been opening up to these places-and these object things that anybody can use-"
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 9:15 am
"These really powerful things that anyone can use."
He felt like the stress was necessary.
"So like. Maybe we'd get some like, really good kudos if we managed to bring those things back. I mean, sure it's probably like. Dangerous and s**t, but so is going for a ******** swim in the ocean around here, or a walk on the training fields for that matter."
He eyed one of the books on the bed with an inventive illustration of a tiny man fighting a massive horrible monster on the cover.
"And I could probably do with a bit of a boost in my like, competence rating."
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 9:24 am
Harrison grinned. "Wouldn't say no to a hefty bonus check either."
He chewed it over. They could take some pendants and bandaids, get out of there if it got too heavy... and maybe they were talking about missions that were over the heads of a couple of trainees, but as far as battle partners there wasn't anybody he felt more confident with.
B0nez was all attention and excitement at adding to the equip list.
"Okay, say we get Clearance to poke around- you feel like some Indiana Jones level s**t?"
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 9:29 am
"Aye, a bit more money and a bit of credibility, it's win-win." Getting off the island was just another perk on a long list, if he had to spend one more day trapped here on the island with as much hostility around him as he'd find in any subterranean lair, he'd go crazy.
"I'm game."
He thought about it a bit, one major factor of Indiana Jones standing out to him.
"As long as there aren't any ******** snakes."
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2012 9:41 am
"Or bugs," Harrison grumbled, but the chance of underwater bugs was, at least, low.
--
Getting clearance turned out easier than expected.Quote: Getting into the Underwater Labyrinth: - You need to camp out in the Weeping Forest after reading the information. Hunters can enter Halloween as well without a golem (recommended as the Labyrinth itself is very golem unfriendly due to its climate and high altitude as well as natural enemies), for a max of 30 minutes. Each roll takes 5 IC minutes - Hunters will need to exit and enter back again. - All players roll 1d100. - Rolling 50 or less will let players find a portal that randomly leads to someone's house. Feel free to RP this as you please as awkwardly as you please - Rolling 80 or less will let players find a portal that leads to the Land of Holidays. Right now is really not the time for Xmas cheer...and the creatures there seem extremely hostile - Rolling 90 or less will lead you to the Haunted House. - Rolling 91 or higher will let you find the portal! Success! You can now proceed inside. Quote: We get 6 rolls each before we have to exit.
"Alright," he muttered, "Keep an eye out for portals. We end up somewhere we don't want to be, pendants should get us back to the lighthouse."
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