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Antoinette held her breath as she supposed others did as the menacing creature she could only recognise as Erik walked about, making demands for his Opera-- Don Juan Triumphant. She'd never heard of it before, but she supposed now that that's where all the paper and ink went. All of it went into that opera. How many years had he been working on it? What else was there that he had not told her?

Ill feeling of betrayal aside, she watched as Christine and Erik found each other through all this gruesome business. For a moment she swore that underneath that death's head his expression had softened towards the girl.

But the timid moment melted away as the chain from around Christine's neck was snapped away, leaving those around them to gasp in horror and shock. Antoinette wanted to grab Erik's shoulder then and there and demand he be civil, but she did not want to appear to know him lest this stir any more trouble than the new opera would.

That and, sadly, she feared him for just a moment. The emotion was nothing but a flicker, but she recognised it nonetheless.

Only briefly did she catch the phrase on the train of the great-coat before something smashed against the floor, letting flame rise up. This startled nearby guests, who all gave different reactions of horrified surprise, all jumping a good four feet away.

Antoinette recognised through the smoke that one of Erik's many trapdoors had been set off. She herself would have run through it to catch up with him had the Vicomte not done it first, armed with a sword and perhaps even a pistol.

When the Viscount jumped through, it closed to any others who might have the gumption to follow. Antoinette felt her heartbeat increase tenfold in her chest, leaving the corset around her waist very tight and very annoying.

She knew there were mirrors down there. Erik had explained the device to her once, when he was still young. There was a switch of some sort that got the mirrors to moving. Something about the mirrors would drive any of the victims insane. She hadn't understood it then and still didn't, but she knew of a way to get in. Antoinette had to get the Vicomte out of there!

Picking up her skirts, Antoinette rushed right out of the hall and into the dimmer lit hallways of the Opera house.

She could only hope she would reach him before the noose was dropped and he accepted it.

"Fool," muttered Erik quickly growing bored with watching the Vicomte slash and stab at one relfection after another. It had been rather humorous the first couple of times the man had done it, but the novelty had quickly worn off. One would have thought that he might eventually be able to distinguish the genuine article from the reflections, but de Changy seemed incapable of seeing through the illusion. It would have been so easy to kill him now. The man would never know where the attack was coming from.

As the mirrors turned and for a moment there were no reflections of his that the other man could see, he slipped through the hidden door and departed the room. It would have been too easy to kill him. There was no sport in attacking a man when he was so disoriented by the revolving mirrors that he would have had almost no chance of defending himself. "You may have this one, de Changy, but I will keep the ring," he said quietly as he began walking down the dimly lit hall. He did not seem to take into account the high improbability of the man escaping on his own, or, if he did, he simply didn't care.

((Well, I was going to wait and see if Fuoko wanted to post again before I did. But I can go ahead and make my post if you want. Either way works with me.))

((Yes, that would be irony for you. And at least you'll never have to worry about replacing me. I love this roleplay far too much. Then again, I love all 9 of the roleplays I'm in *shrug*))

Antoinette fumbled for the keys she kept with her at all time. There were several dozen keys on the ring, considering she went a lot of places in the opera house, but where she had hid them in this dress was as good a guess as anyone else's! She had no inner pockets on the skirts, and she knew she wasn't stupid enough to hide them in her garters or corset.

Her hands patted everywhere she could think of frantically as she rushed down some steps into the cellar below the first floor. The cellars were Erik's domain besides his home across the lake in the fifth one, even though the stables, sets and other things were stored down here.

How could she have let him make that trapdoor? Actually, he hadn't asked. The mirrors had been acquired some other way and when he was finished he had instructed her on how it worked.

"You push this stone here, on the east wall." He said to her. "That'll open the door which leads into the area around the chamber." And then there was another door that lead in the room of moving mirrors. Antoinette had wanted to see how it worked, but he had denied her that, saying it would drive her insane.

Such a thought made her even more afraid for the Vicomte, who was trapped inside. Would he lose his mind long enough to consider the noose Erik was so fond of including in every dark plan of his?

"Yes!" She hissed, pulling the ring from her top. Why hadn't she though about the possibility of hiding it outside the bustier? Oh well, she had not time to register that!

Antoinette slammed her fist against a few stones in the appointed wall, finally hitting the right one. Her palm ached and she was sure a blood vessel popped somewhere, but she cast the thought to hell's wind and rushed in the outer rim of the chamber.

She did not know where the switch to stop the mirrors was or even if she could gather the strength to push it whatever direction it had to go in, so she quickly tried each key on the ring. Finally a silver one gave with the lock and the spinning room was revealed to her.

Mirrors, reflections.. a thousand versions of herself and the Viscount. Her head spun, but she grabbed ahold of herself by a good pinching of her forearm and biting of the lip before she could focus enough to see the real Viscount, staring at the noose as if it were the most fascinating object he'd ever encountered.

"Come with me, monsieur!" She pleaded, dragging him out by the collar of his coat and locking the door behind them both. When she had them both safely out of the chamber, Antoinette hit her back against the wall and heaved a heavy sigh of relief.

What had become of Erik? Why was he acting this way? This was not the Erik she knew and cared for. Those thoughts almost brought tears to her eyes. Fortunately, she cared more about Raoul's health than her own misery and began to lead him back up the way she had come.

She was sure he had questions, but she did not want to answer them.

((That's why I've recently become convinced that irony is really what keeps the world spinning.))

Erik had stopped as he heard too sets of footsteps. They were near, but they were in a different passage from the one he currently travelled. There were even some hidden corridors in his labyrinth of secret passages. It was the product of a creative mind with too much time and not enough distraction.

One set of footsteps held a familiar rythm, but for a moment he could not figure out who they belonged to. He knew the quiet rythm well, and after concentrating on it he realized why he had been unable to recognize it immediately. There had been no cane to punctuate every other step. One of the walkers was Antoinette, and he could guess who the other was. She would not lead anyone through the secret halls unless they had already been there. He could guess that she'd gone to retrieve the Vicomte from the torture chamber.

It didn't anger him that she had rescued him from the mirrored room. The boy would never have been able to find his way out on his own, and it would have actually been rather disappointing if his rival had ended up committing suicide after being driven insane by the spinning mirrors. Ridding oneself of an enemy in such a manner lacked all sense of satifaction.

Even though he trusted that Antoinette would not give away any of his secrets, he decided to follow the pair more out of an academic curiosity. He'd never actually had anyone go in the mirrored chamber before, and he was curious to find out what effects it might have had on his mind. It was a rare opportunity to find out what adjustments or refinements he might need to make to the room. He'd built it on priciples and calculations. It had never actually been tested before, and, like any scientist, he was curious about the results.

((Apparently that it does, UP. At least we moved along without any sort of nonsensical outbreaks.))

Antoinette wasn't sure her heart would ever stop pounding as it was. She was sure this incident alone would knock maybe five years from her alread shortening lifespan. But what did it matter? She was not dragging a viscount from a cellar for her own health, oh no sir.

Finally when she sensed that the Vicomte could very well hold himself on his own two feet (though Antoinette was not sure she could do the same for long) she let go of his hand and slowed the pace. It was then that he asked her of the room of mirrors. How odd that she registered that before his gratitude.

How could she answer such a question? If she said anything it could lead to more questions about the man who made it and his purpose for hounding the opera house. But if she said nothing, the question would become more forced until he demanded she say something. Antoinette knew her place on Society's dirty ladder, but she wouldn't betray the man she considered a brother.

"It is a chamber of mirrors, sir." She said at last, very slowly, like she was talking to a child. But perhaps the Vicomte was a child. He could not be anything more than one and twenty. "Its purpose is to drive men mad. Mirrors can kill, monsieur, I can very safely tell you that." It was a phrase Erik often said as she recalled. Though even for the beautiful and vain, mirrors were still a source of suicide. Mirrors told the truth. And in a world where there are so many lies, the truth is what can not only set one free, but can make drive them to the brink of insanity.

Antoinette put both hands against her abdomen, feeling the corset stretching as she tried to regain her breath. She would have to return to her room and sit before she ended up having a stroke.

Looking to the viscount, she saw that he as well was a little ruffled.

"Perhaps Monsieur le Vicomte would accompany me for the moment to my room. I can lend you a kerchief to wipe your face with." It was a drastic change of subject, but she wanted no more to do with the incident this evening and to instead simply bang her head into a stone wall until it cracked open and her brain shlumped out like egg yolk.

Without waiting for a reply, Antoinette picked up her pace once more, trying to make it to her room before her knee decided it was going to be a good idea to give out.

She ignored his question for the longest time, ushering him inside her room, the door ajar for manners' sake. Antoinette knew that if she closed that door for any reason and any passersby came, there would be fuel to the fire of her own demise in the eyes of her fellow workers here.

Quietly she turned the little brass knob at the base of the oil lamp, light slowly filtering in. Antoinette was sure the Viscount thought her a ragamuffin with all these things hanging and set everywhere in the small room. She had very few worldly possessions, but they were all kept here away from the world as she mostly kept herself.

Searching through a drawer, she found a slightly dusty kerchief, but cleaning it off and hit it against her knee until the white cloth was just so again. She handed him the kerchief with a small smile before she cleared off a bench for him to sit if he wished.

The items in her arms were all old journal pages and love letters from her deceased husband, all tied up with roped string. The perfume they had been sprayed with when new was stale and uninviting to her nostrils, but the after-scent it left her with brought back days of yore for the old ballet mistress.

How long ago those days seemed tonight.

When the papers were set aside some place else, her knee gave a shock of pain out to her entire leg, telling her to sit or fall. She had her pride, so she gingerly sat in the bench before her vanity, reaching slowly for the silver handle of her black cane. When the thing was calmly in her grasp, she dared look at the Viscount.

"Monsieur, there are many things I am willing to tell and many more I will and can not." She started with a sigh as if she had repeated this words all her life. "That question happens to be the latter."

She had promised Erik she would never tell. No amount of bank notes could change her mind, if he even tried buying her words. Erik had bought her silence with his friendship.

"All I can tell you, Monsieur, is that you are not safe here."