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... So... yeah.
Everyone was apparently nuts. With the possible exception of Mis and himself and... oh hey. Spare person. With both functional arms.
He hadn't even seen them show up, but he had every intent to try and get some help from someone who had both arms functioning, and unceremoniously turned and shoved the bronze and gold bulls head that had formerly adorned his non injured shoulder at her like a pointy horned boobie prize.

"Here! You've got both hands! Try and get this goddamn thing into the room away from the science idiots!"

He was not feeling especially charitable, and even standing this close (he'd considered trying to slide it in himself like that... whatever it was in Curling, but thought better of it, especially since even standing this close was making his hair stand up and his metal boots shocked him every time he so much as twitched.

"See if we can draw some of the electricity."

WARNING: Death solo, contains blood, gore, death, graphic imagery.

Degrasse watched, concerned, as the pair of Knights went for the power plug, her hands clenched into fists and smooshed against her face. But then the plug finally wrested free, she let out a whoop of victory, bouncing so much that it rustled the fringe of her skirt.

"See? It was the water thing!" Degrasse proclaimed, holding on to her hat for fear that it might fall off in excitement. Ha, her little sister was going to be so peeved whenever she heard about this! Every day, in and out, Ashlyn always said 'Gwen, don't bother' or 'Gwen, you're weird' or 'Gwen, you're stupid'. But now, she was Degrasse, and she was solving puzzles and fighting crime like a champ! Gwen might have just been a stupid blogger on the internet, but Degrasse was doing things, she was a cosmic warrior in cute shoes and there was nothing better to be.

Except, you know, composed and elegant. Maybe.

After her little victory dance, the Page was quick to pull herself to attention, fanning out the map with a flourish of her hands and a quick tilt of her nose to look more 'dignified'. "Ah, uh, yes! So we were, um--going this way?" She gave a nod, as if she'd been granted the authority to lead with her last little stunt, and with a widening smile she stepped through the doorway, eager to see what challenges arose in the rooms to come.

Ting.

Degrasse had just enough time to glance down at her flats, and then back up to the rest of the party, her glance tremulous and unsure. She dared not move, not when she could hear the sounds of metal creaking like mechanical insects skittering inside the walls, not when lifting her foot could be the catalyst that finally set off the trap.

It might have been better if she'd at least tried to duck.

Wire exploded from both sides of the archway, and Degrasse shrieked, trying to cover her face with her hands. Barbs clung fast to her skin, her dress, and as she began to try and wiggle free they dug deeper, pinpricks of blood trickling down the white of her clothes. But despite the pain, the page continued to try and struggle against her bonds, hyperventilating like a frightened bird in a trap as the wire wrapped tighter around her still. Her eyes darted everywhere, and then down to herself, when she began to truly scream. In the efforts to protect her face, she found that several of her fingers had been mangled beyond recognition, cut to slivers by the wire. Chunks of freckled flesh lay scattered beneath her like confetti, and blood began to trickle from her shawl.

'See what I mean? Stupid stupid stupid.'

Something in the walls began to whir again as the trap charged up, and Degrasse looked out to the throng of knights, desperate pleading in her tear-rimmed eyes. "Helpmehelpmehelpme, please," she whimpered, beginning to sob between her choked attempts to breathe as the wires pulled tighter, cutting open swatches of red on her arms, her legs, her cheeks. And then the final mechanism triggered, pulling the wires taut and firing shrapnel from all directions. Degrasse tried to scream, but the cry was cut short as wire ripped through her vocal cords, her torso, her arms and legs. The thin metal string slivered her face into three sections with about as much resistance as if she'd been made of warm clay, each piece sent flying a different direction of a room by buffets of shrapnel.

The plus side to Degrasse's rapid dismemberment was that there was little to distinguish the Page from a pile of raw meat, other than the remains of shredded fabric and a single shoe that had been kicked away to freedom in her wriggling. The downside was, of course, that she'd gotten blood all over everyone's shoes in the final explosion of viscera.

How thoughtless. How very stupid.

Silverah

Shazari

Ivynian

Ryuthulhu

AMItotic

LP

Songstress Kitsune

the_scowling_cat

Cove took a long, slow breath as his shaky arms drew the glowy cannister to chest. The whirring and the lightening was gone- he spared a look over at Babylon at the panel. At least they wouldn't have to risk the thing reactivating with THAT kind of party dance on the machinery.

He heard people moving around, Degrasse's clear voice in celebration about the canister he was lowering to the ground. He toned the question to general, "Does anyone think we should bring this along? in case there's something we need to power later like a bridge-"

A shriek.

He stood quickly, turning on heal and scanning for the source. "Degrasse!"
No no no no no, "For pity's sake someone cut the wires!"

He wasn't going to just stand there still, across the room. He shifted even as he yelled, but it felt like the room had become a giant version of the canister- air gone jelly and impossible to move through. The struggles are making it worse. Calm her down, calm her down, calm. Calm her down and cut the lines, cut the tension.

Cove was just getting to the side of the arch, to try to do something, anything, and there was a shower of wet. He'd been looking at the wires. He stood still, eyes tracking to the pile of viscera and realizing that his raincoat was wet. It's raining. Oh god, Degrasse, its raining.

Three chunks. He was staring at a chunk that was staring back at him.
Someone was screaming nearby. His own voice was a croak, thick in his throat, "No sweetpea....never like that. Not like that."

TW GORE/VIOLENCE

When it happened he could not even cry out before it was suddenly over. It was as though his voice just wasn't there when he needed it. The hardness he thought he could rely on, gone.

He tried to reach for her, one armed and all, but it was achingly too slow, even for a man who had lived much of his life in pride of his speed and prowess. His ability to react in the span of a blink.

It was still much much too slow. He fumbled first with the wrong arm, rewarding himself with pain, and then it was already too late even as he reached to touch fingers to wire, slicing the pads of his fingers on wire for the second he could hold on.

Then it was raining. And all he could think about was having held a living star seed in his palm, fluttering and warm like a humming bird. Hers would flutter no more.

It hit him much harder than he thought it would. The first death since the chaos had been peeled away, and it left him feeling staggered and cold in spite of the warm rain of blood... And then angry.

Maybe it was easier to be angry. He'd lived on rage long enough.

He knew he should go to Mimi's, or anyone. Someone alive and in need of comfort but instead it was everything he had not to walk into that nightmare and try and tear the place apart at the seams. He barely even knew he was yelling until he had roared "What the ********!" Twice.

"What the ******** is wrong with this place? What the ********? Who would ******** do this?! We're trying to ******** reinvent the ******** cell phone and someone just.... Just... She was a ******** kid!"

This was not the White Moon as he had come to understand it. This was something from the mind of a General King. This was evil and wrong.

"What the ********, Babylon! This is your world too! The ******** do you have to say about this ... This... " he had no words. "TALK!" Babylon had hosted his ancestor... Must know something. Something that gave this tragedy sense.

"Anabel Page," said the toneless Code-voice, "there is a request for your attention on Level Seven."

Mistral wiped her mouth on the back of her gloves, sat up straighter and tried to block the bloody aftermath of Raziele's trap from her mind. The little Cosmos Page, the tiny girl, she was dead now. Mistral had watched it happen, and--she had known the sort of traps her past self's mother had laid. Her mistake had been in thinking that they would be alright without the knight of Mistral to guide them. That the traps could discriminate between Order and Chaos.

But no. They worked without prejudice. If it was living and not the Knight of Mistral, it was an intruder. Mistral puked again, and then pushed herself to her feet. "Which button to talk to them," she asked the Code. It didn't answer.

there was paper and ink near to hand. She grabbed the sheets of thick vellum and the pen, and she scrawled a missive to him:

Babylon--

Can't find microphone button. Panic button in room 5. May lead to way out?

I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

Mimisbrunnr barely resisted when Babylon dragged her off. She stared down at her uniform, and distantly realized that it was far too clean - only a few places had any blood on them at all. Her sleeve, her fur accents. Because of course the rest of it was some kind of water resistant, why wouldn't it be?

She finally stopped screaming, as she stumbled backwards, falling back onto the ground where Babylon hauled her. Standing was too much work. Standing would mean that she was in anything close to a condition to keep going, and right then, she was wondering if she couldn't just sort of...leave.

"How is this worth it?" She croaked weakly. "Is-isn't there a way to, to disarm these things before they activate?" There had to be, there always was, just trapping things without an off switch was ridiculous.

And then she started crying, which she had somehow managed to hold off. She wasn't cut out for this. "I just want to go home and grade homework, damn it," she said between sobs.

TW: Gore!

Everyone was going to pieces and looking at Babylon like he had answers, and he didn't. Just wearing Mercury's sigil and having been here before was not enough to open Mistral's doors to him. He was of the bloodline, but he was not its knight, and the distinction was clear.

Mistral's reply appeared in front of his face, and Babylon snatched the velum out of the air. Room five. Room five- where was room five? Where was the map?

He felt a little sick to realize that it was still with who'd had it last - Degrasse. Or, what remained of her, anyway. "We knew it would be dangerous coming down here," he said, fighting back nausea. "We all volunteered." Which didn't make it okay. It was the worst kind of excuse. But he could do nothing to stop Mimisbrunnr from crying. "There's access panels," he said. "Where you can disarm the works. They open to Mistral's touch."

So, that was not going to do them any good.

He went back to the little library, and knelt beside the bloody mess that, minutes before, had been a page. "Sorry about this, kid," said Babylon, tears welling behind his eyes as he picked through the ruined clothes for the map transponder. He came up with a sigil of cosmos first, a star-inscribed disk and a series of metal curlicues that had come detached from the page's hat, and when his hand closed around it he could not bring himself to put it down.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, he found the transponder and called the map up above his blood-soaked hands.

"Mistral says there's a panic button in room five, if we want to go there," said Babylon, returning to the group. "She doesn't say what it does. Maybe it'll disarm the traps. If we keep moving forward through room three, we'll get to the stairs and we can leave, but there could be another trap waiting for us there. What does everyone want to do?"