Toshihiko Two rolled 1 10-sided dice:
3Total: 3 (1-10)
Toshihiko Two
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Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 12:36 pm
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3. A Castle Room: This room looks exactly like a giant castle, but with more solid walls. Inside it are very long hallways containing rooms with only desks and chairs - how boring. You keep on walking further and further and it is rooms and rooms of the same until you reach the end. The door is locked. Nothing will open it but you hear screams coming from inside.
Nod was quite done with the Wood. And although he had received a Card for his troubles, and had run into Defile, he didn't feel any closer to understanding what exactly was going on. Dream wasn't his realm the same way it was with the Baku, or various other types of Dreamwalker. Until meeting Defile, dreams had been his solitary fortress, and he retreated there often for necessity, but also for pleasure. Since he spent so much time there, he had, if not a full century, perhaps 70 or so years of sleep under his belt. Defile's intrusions had been welcome.
He had not tried to expel Defile, but perhaps he should have at least tried, while he had the chance with someone known and friendlier. And now they were both caught up in something...strange. They and an untold amount of others.
Nod felt the reprieve from trees was necessary, so he leaned against the bar and ordered a strange drink via a strange token.
He was very tired. He had watched the capture and wholesale dismantling of students his age, and nearly of Calder, and very nearly of himself, and now she was standing there with a smile in her eyes.
He did not think it was very funny at all. The thorns brewed and bubbled in a thick, black, writhing mass behind him, which she could not see because the door was only half-open. Wrath, like Lust or Pride or any of the other six, were not his sin, and after he was angry he was always vaguely sick afterwards, as if he had swallowed something that disagreed with him. But he was almost, in that moment, as angry as he was tired, and the vines in one snapping motion snared his wrist and upper arm, and his claws curled into a fist, and threw all of it forward...
Nod sipped at the mug. It was, as promised, very frothy, and he ended up with a foamy mustache. He tucked his upper lip in to take care of it. In this world, his face was slender and clean-shaven, the thin goatee he normally sported disappeared completely.
He let Defile order a drink as well. "What do you say we see what the downstairs is like?" he asked, and in no hurry (and without his usual fear of stairs), descended into the dim and to a hallway full of shut doors.
Nod chose one at random.
"They do like their doors," he said. But this hallway was certainly distinct from the rest of the basement. The air was cool, and the surrounding stones old, and when he tried another door the room behind it was very plain, with only one chair and one desk.
Nod found this somewhat unnerving.
"Well, that's familiar, isn't it." He shut the door. "Perhaps we'll come back to that one." But the next door, and the door after that, and the door after that, were all the same. Small rooms. Abundance of desks.
"We're a bit spoiled for choice," Nod said.
Baneful
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 5:00 pm
Defile was glad to be out of the woods himself, the place had been in complete defiance of common sense and what was really reasonable to expect in a forest. It veered on the side of unsettling rather than scary and that in itself was upsetting, what self respecting place would forgo intimidation tactics in favour of colour and jack forbid whimsy?
He decided to also grab a drink from the bar while they were there. He ordered the frothy looking one.
Anger was a weakness in Zar, a thread which ran deep, deep under the anxiety, the fear, the apologetic simpering and cowering. It ran there like a shadow under deep water, vast and terrible and all his life he had been afraid of it.
He felt it there, only a shadow's width away, iron strong, lethal and powerful, waiting for him to embrace it.
When his father had picked him up by the throat and shook him, told him he was useless, that he was disowned, that he had failed his only purpose, he had felt the anger gather in him like massed shadows, rage running through him but restrained. It took so much to make him angry. Angry enough to snap.
But his father had come very, very close. And even defeated, afterwards he had felt stronger, like the walls were eroding.
He eyed the mug suspiciously, rather unsettled by the memory and the associated feelings that had overtaken him for an instant. He had forgotten about that moment, repressed it deep below the surface once again. He was always upset by the hairline fractures in his stability. He was starting to feel like an office built on some vast, bottomless sinkhole and that it was just a matter of time.
Following downstairs, he kept close to Nod and when they were presented with a room with a chair and a desk in it, he looked anxious and tense. Despite some positive experiences almost all the experiences he had ever had around desks were dark, helpless and awful. "This place is terrible." he said, and from his tone it was apparent, he meant it.
Baneful Crew
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Toshihiko Two
Sugary Marshmallow
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Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 5:06 pm
"A lot of hard surfaces," Nod agreed, taking another leisurely draw from his cup as he reshut another door.
They worked their way down the corridor, where there were distant noises.
"...Occupied?" Nod asked Defile. From this distance, they could both hear the screams.
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 5:08 pm
Defile kept his mug close to him as tilted his head in the direction of the screams. "Sounds like it." He had gone from relaxed to drawing his wings up tight around him. "Whoever it is, we should leave them to it." Whatever "it" was.
Baneful Crew
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Toshihiko Two
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Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 5:19 pm
"Relatively private, at least. Unless you are planning on being especially loud. Lots of empty rooms. Could do some prying into what exactly kind of a dream this is, or," Defile seemed slightly upset. "We could check the other doors. See if there's somewhere a little more...comfortable."
Although Barth suspected seeing the inner cogs of the Woods and Tavern might end up being less comfortable.
Baneful rolled 1 10-sided dice:
7Total: 7 (1-10)
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 5:23 pm
Quote:
7. A Lost Room: This room is actually split into four rooms. Each room contains a different theme...
The first room is made entirely out of an asian theme, the floor surfaced in water, with little wooden walkways and bridges. The room seems a lot bigger than it should be, and in the center is a veranda. There is tea on the table on the veranda.
The second room has a desert theme covered sand. A large cave juts out and as you walk in you reach the inside of what seems like a very cluttered arrangement. Alchemic bottles and books hang off haphazardly in shelves. You can't really read much of it, it's mostly gibberish, but everything looks touchable. On a table they seem to be serving your favourite - dead insects as food.
The third room is covered entirely in tall trees. You see a ladder on one of the biggest trees and climb up up up until you reach a treehouse. On the top of the treehouse, or inside it, is a nice fireplace and a warm table serving raw meats. It doesn't hurt to try...
The fourth room is dark, and a molten lava fountain dribbles from one corner. It looks like an ancient temple, and you can't help but feel quiet, more reserved. You walk through the temple and see statues, of unfamiliar faces. At the end is a single table serving only pomegranates.
"There is always such thing as too private. Or too homey." he frowned at the desk again as if doing so would make it melt away. "I have spent considerable time sitting at one, if my dreams involved that sort of thing as well I should never want to learn to dream."
Another door sounded like it was in order.
He turned and led the way back through the rooms they'd come through and further up the corridor, keen to put distance between himself and desks. As he wandered into the room he'd found, he looked pleased. "Now this is familiar. Do you know on that ill-fated school trip I spent my entire time on conquest? I dominated several people at the game of diplomacy." Johnny Danger and his sister still owed him favours.
Baneful Crew
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Toshihiko Two
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Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 5:32 pm
"I actually managed to avoid that one," Nod said.
This room did, admittedly, seem much nicer. There were cushions, at least, and the aesthetic was peaceful.
"What would Conquest be doing here?"
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 5:38 pm
"If it was a dream, I would say it could be drawn from my memories. But we have already established this is under the control of neither of us so I cannot begin to say." He let his wings drop back from their tight grip around him to rest more easily at his back. His tail also relaxed and with the muted thump of heavy hooves, serenely wandered across the walkway, as if absorbing some of the ambient zen of the expansive room.
He smiled toothily, as he looked back towards Nod, even his voice more relaxed, his tail curling like a subconscious beckon. "What conquest did here - or at least in a place like this - was sit around drinking tea, painting letters, and making trinkets until they were destroyed by more capable beings."
Looking over his glasses, his faintly lavender eyes were half lidded. "I should think you would approve of it."
