Welcome to Gaia! ::

Oh. He had noticed the bones. Pendour’s lips pressed into a line. “Those are a long story,” she said. Perhaps it was a story she would end up telling before the end of the day. A little tension began to build in her shoulder blades.

Well, maybe Irving would end up telling it himself if Orias kept asking the right questions. “You could maybe test it, with your gadgets?” she said about the pearls, but that was about all she had time to say before Irving was there, and regarding the both of them with his cold, ghost-pale eyes.

"Pendour is but a title," he said, even as Pendour herself cut in, softly, saying, "Oh, um Sarandon is my other name. Sadie, really. I prefer Sadie, but, um," she nodded to her ancestor, "He doesn't."

She really didn't want this to turn into too much of an argument in front of her guest, so she kept it at that and reminded herself that at least he'd stopped calling her granddaughter.

Irving's gaze was fixed on the Mauvian, and his head was slightly inclined. A long moment passed after Orias's introduction before Irving spoke. "You lack subtlety," he said, matter-of-fact. "Although you do not lack enthusiasm. Some of your other friends could learn from that, Sarandon." His expression did not change, although he glanced to her.

Pendour wondered, vaguely, what Irving had been like as the charming host of this place. She could see a little of it in how he carried himself, but the years of death had worn on him, and now here he was like an old man who no longer cared much for tact or subtlety himself.

"Saturn is where you'd want to go for the trappings of death, by the way," he said. "A bit dim and dreary for my tastes, but-" he trailed off, giving an exaggerated shrug.

"Um," said Pendour, then straightened. "We were going to go look at the basement, at the pipes? The entrance is around here, isn't it?"

Irving nodded, all business. "Of course, of course. Check under the rug."

The room beyond was large-ish and had a lovely abstract mosaic on the floor and a skylight in the ceiling that gave it the same soft, undersea lighting. There was a four-poster bed and a chest and a desk that seemed to still be reasonably solid, but anything fabric or more delicate had crumbled to time. That included the rug in the middle of the floor, which was already looking rather gray. It ripped cleanly in two as Pendour slipped quickly past Irving and tried to peel it up, but she did see the line of a trapdoor underneath.

If Irving had any idea what a missile was, he didn’t show it. Instead, he regarded Orias with narrowing eyes.

“Her, unfortunately,” he said, following the Mauvian’s gaze to Pendour. She was pulling at the trapdoor, fighting centuries of rust and dust. His emotions were generally kept veiled, but a hint of annoyance snaked through. “Or whoever is next in line, if she continues on the path she’s taking.”

Pendour heard. She pressed her lips together and wrapped her fingers tighter around the tiny handle.

Irving’s lips did quirk upwards at the brazen request, but he shook his head. “Just because your generation is careless about keeping their bodies intact does not mean that I am. No.” If Orias tried to touch the ghost anyway, he would find him completely intangible, if perhaps a bit cold, but there wouldn’t be much time for that. Irving was seemingly done with the banter. He vanished.

With an angry creak, the rusted hinges of the trapdoor gave out completely. The old nails snapped in half, and Pendour was left holding what remained of the boards. She stood blinking at it for a second, then set it down and peered into the stairwell that had been revealed. She thought she could see a hint of light at the bottom.

Then she turned to Orais, brushing her hands off on her skirt. “Sorry about Irving. He’s, um,” she paused, “Like that. You can borrow my eye, instead, if you want.” She reached up to fish her ocular prosthesis from the socket and she held it out to him. It wasn’t a ghost toe, but it was a kind of technology, and she was finding that it wasn’t so difficult to catch his attention.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there are secret rivers around,” she added. “A few of the waterways are already working.” There were certainly places on the wonder that had been carved out for rivers, once.

"Oh, that's a common misconception," she said with a small smile and a tone that suggested she'd had this conversation a few times before. "I can't see out of it. It's just acrylic. Beautiful plastic, that's all. It's so I don't um, scare people so much with the eye hole."

She reached up and brushed a few locks of hair in front of the socket, the way she'd done back when the scars were fresher. "I'm sorry. Does it bother you? I can probably figure out a patch." She had a few in her apartment, just in case, but she didn't wear them, really. She'd never really liked the pirate look or the feeling of the string on her head. The empty socket wasn't uncomfortable, but she knew it could be a lot to look at.

She knew, and she turned her bad side away, trying to keep the tone light.

It wasn't so hard once she saw what he'd done with the eye, and she gave a little giggle. "It's a good look for you," she said. "I'd let you keep it if it wasn't so expensive. At least it can be your friend on our adventure. It was the closest thing I could think of to a ghost toe."

As she talked about adventure, she started down into the secret stairwell. While it was a little dark, it wasn't particularly long or winding, and Pendour only found herself almost tripping once on the way down. Then she was there. The light at the end of the tunnel was, in this case, another room.

It was too bright to look like a basement. The walls were glass, probably an extension of the upper dome, and the sea was visible beyond. That let in plenty of light. Other than that, though, this room was much more utilitarian. Everything was plain stone. There were no pearls or mosaics here.

What was there was pipes. Some were as tiny as a thumb while others would have been too big for Pendour to wrap her arms around. They were on the ceiling and the floor, and they twisted around the walls like vines. Each one was a beautiful, familiar shade of blue, and none of them appeared to have rusted, although even at a glance it was obvious that some of them had been damaged from other things. The largest one had a particularly nasty rip in it. The squire stepped forwards and looked around, her jaw going a little slack.

"So this is where it's all meant to come through," she said softly as she walked forward and laid gentle fingers on one of the pipes.

Pendour found herself tensing when Orias called her eye a big marble, which was odd. She didn't think she had any attachment to the thing. It felt heavy and false in her face, but maybe in the past two years when she'd been wearing it daily, it had almost began to seem like a part of her.

"Well, it's a four thousand custom painted and fitted work of art," she said, and at least her voice was not defensive. She slowly made her way around the room, looking at the pipes one at a time. A few still seemed to be in working shape, while others had cracks and such that she hadn't seen at first glance. "If you want to try making a prostetic, though, I'd be interested to see what you could come up with. It has crossed my mind before. With all this magic, it seems like there should be something that should help when people get hurt."

She tilted her head towards Orias with a soft smile. "Or Mauvian technology, maybe."

Hiding in a corner of the wall that was not a giant window was what looked to be some kind of control panel. Pendour spent a long time looking at it with interest. There were knobs made of the same strange metal as the pipes, and even a few labels carved into the stone above them. Unfortunately, they'd been worn down over the last thousand years like everything else, and the ones that she could still make out were in an odd, swirling script that did not look like any Earth language.

Eventually, she pulled her attention away from it enough to follow Orias's gaze out to the empty sea.

"I don't know," she said. "I haven't seen anything alive, but there are mosaics of all kinds of sea life up in the main area. Irving might know the details, but, um," she paused, pursing her lips and considering tact before she simply said, "I don't think he wants to talk to you."

“I wouldn’t mind having better vision to admire it with,” said Pendour, although her tone was polite and noncommittal, as if she wasn’t quite ready to hope for such a thing.

She moved on quickly. “You think you could get internet up here?” In some ways, that seemed ridiculously far-fetched, just as much as the rest of what he was offering. Neptune was the out on the fringes of the solar system, sometimes the farthest planet even of you counted Pluto. Still, she knew senshi had phones that worked across galaxies, sometimes, and even Earth scientists communicated with their probes that were out this far, so internet was a concept she could at least wrap her head around.

“When I get around to doing the bedroom here, I want it to be all cozy,” running a finger over the control panel because she couldn’t help herself. “Blankets, beanbag chairs, at least five of those candles that smell like cookies. Netflix would really make it all complete.”

She had heard the comment about Irving, but she was silent for a moment, waiting to see if he’d show up out of nowhere to defend himself. He did not. “Irving is a lot,” said Pendour, after the third glance over her shoulder, “But I think I, um, agree with him on this one? His ghost body is all he has left. Even if he could give you some of it, that’s a lot to ask of someone.”

"I don't think I'd want to stay here full time, even with high-speed internet," said Pendour, glancing from the cracked pipes to the clear waters beyond the glass. There wasn't so much as a barnacle blocking her view. This wasn't a place for anything alive, not really.

Not yet.

She was trying to fix that, with the plants and all, but it was a long process. It would be nice to have a cozy getaway, though," she murmured. That seemed like something she could do in her lifetime, in a few years, even. Now that she'd found this area, she might even be able to patch some tears and turn some knobs and end up with a getaway with running water.

She walked around the pump to take a look at where the pipes actually went. Several vanished straight into the ceiling, while others snaked down smaller hallways and crawlspaces that weren't as well lit as the control area.

"Well, I think we've found what's in the basement," she said. "It's all maintenance access. It's lovely and helpful, but I am going to need to bring up a few things before I can do to much here."

Caulk, for one thing, and maybe a magical trinket or two.

She turned back to the Mauvian. "If there's anything upstairs you want to see, I can take you. Otherwise, I think I'm going to do my garden work and then head back."

Pendour watched Orias as he watched her. She could almost see the gears turning behind his little cat eyes. She nodded softly. "You can look around. There's plenty you can explore without getting your feet wet."

If he went looking for mind-blowing technology, or whatever it was he'd been dreaming of when he'd asked to come visit, he'd likely be disappointed, but there was masterful delicate architecture around, and mosaics under a thin layer of dust studded with pearls and jewels, and crumbling sculpture, and all kinds of other ancient odds and ends.

"Don't bother the bones," she said as she began to head back towards the main area, almost as an afterthought, "But the rest is okay." It was true that Orias had all the subtlety of a missile, but it was also true that almost all the fragile things here had already been broken.

She looked over her shoulder, still careful to only show her good side. "I'll meet you by the cove in half an hour or so and we can go back."

Then she headed off to tend to her plants and the chores she had taken on for this place.