Welcome to Gaia! ::

General Benitoite
Action: Speaking to Murikabushi and Kerberos.

Turning and staring at Murikabushi the petite blond nodded slowly, thoughtfully. "So then you are seeing the now and I saw the beginning - that what was and what can be again. So a beast, a god to ancient people perhaps, who was bound and locked away. Still might fit with myths that have been written down and taught verbally for a long time, things change and parts were lost, but the bare bones are still there. Changed, altered, as it's changed languages and people over the times but it lives and breaths below us then. What I saw shows what it's done and will do again...if allowed to free itself and hunt again." Lovely, just lovely, and he'd only just turned twenty nine recently. He did hope he'd see thirty, if he got lucky, he just wasn't sure he wouldn't have a good amount of grey hairs joining him then.

"So we need to get down to it and kill it - before it kills us all...before it does to us what it did in the past." Before it did what he'd seen it do in the past. He had seen Hercules as a child, not because he wanted to see it but other younger members of his family had, and as much as he doubted Disney for faithfully telling stories, one hundread and one dalmations as a prime example, he did remember the Titans had been locked up under ground. While this didn't sound like a Titan, as they'd been human like gods as far as he remembered, it did have a similar feel to it. He was still betting on Norse of constellations as well. But that didn't mean all three weren't true...as he's pointed out. Stories changed over time, across languages and boarders, it could have all come from one story, whatever this story was, and ti had given birth to the ones he was thinking of and potentially others.

"We need to kill it." He said, again, more firmly while nodding his head.

"It might wish to be free but it's freedom would be an end for us." Finally the senshi at Jet's side gained his attention as he turned once more, facing them, he stared for a moment before speaking. "Celestial theater...like a theater for plays or what sort of theater?" Tapping his foot, thinking, trying to process thigns and put pieces of a puzzle together, it was coming together but far slower than he liked, he didn't have all the pieces and it bothered him. This was important and to not be able to figure it all out...it was bothersome to say the least.

Sara Draconia

Guine

amorremanet

Noir Songbird

“Dorothy” (Eternal Murikabushi of Hunger)
Action: Asking Benitoite a perfectly reasonable question. Then, conferring with the others. No investigation yet.

Murikabushi listened to the General he’d never met before with an open mind, but the more he heard, the more he frowned uneasily. “Respectfully, General, but are you serious,” he said, the self-protective tears somewhat starting to clear up as Muri’s face spoke to exactly how little he could believe what he was hearing right now. “We are talking about an ancient, magical world-eater, and there are eight of us. Ten, assuming we can pull Faustite and Heliodor out of the room they went to. I respect the nerve, I really do. But if we try to break into the prison on our own and fight that thing now? The Negaverse is going to lose two General-Sovereigns, two Generals, an Eternal senshi, and a Captain—and when we fail to stop it, we’re going to leave it free to go attack the Earth. They won’t be prepared at all if we don’t get back there alive.”

General Aquamarine
Action: Throwing ideas around

Aquamarine took his hand away from the wall, drops of energy at his fingertips, ill-formed and insubstantial.

“I saw them—whoever the ******** they were—hammering one of the spikes. It had a crack in it.”

Had it been faulty from the start? Was any of what they’d been seeing real to begin with? Were the murals literal, an exact recreation of what happened in the past, or a metaphor? The girl Senshi spoke of stories from her world. Myths. Cautionary tales. Benitoite, too, spoke of the stuff of legend. The truth may still not be represented by what they saw here.

“How do we know for sure this isn’t the prison?” he called out to the rest, raising his voice to be heard over the conversation they’d fallen into. He stared across the room, to the flickering eye on the opposite wall. “The thing was trapped somehow, we know that much, but you’re assuming it’s beneath us. What, like a ******** basilisk locked in a chamber? Does it have to be that literal? What if it’s already here, around us, trying to reform? The spikes there,” Aquamarine gestured to the previous mural he’d examined, where he’d seen the one spike begin to break and the lightning lose its uniform nature and dance erratically, “and the flashes of lightning… the hexagon you see on the floor, they were tied together. The hexagon reacted to every strike of lightning. Is it some sort of seal? You’re all magic, aren’t you? Doesn’t s**t get sealed away by magic people all the time, not necessarily in physical form. So maybe that piece of s**t there broke,” he gestured to the dark circle, “and some of it’s leaked out. I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but that ******** eye over there hasn’t gone away.”

Whatever the truth actually was, he felt like a ******** idiot stumbling around in the dark, trying to piece it all together.

Faustite

Faustite's attention fixated on a point leagues away from the room as he drank in the image of so many different starscapes. Some were more strikingly alien than others, with spectacular views of galaxies or binary stars or even the cusp of a black hole as it devoured a distant planet. They were parts of space that, until now, only existed in books with artists' renditions of physicists' dreams. They were tales of adventure to the scientifically minded.

They were journeys likely taken by the before-Knight who once carried his starseed. The boy, Velvet, who went to and fro across the universe looking for people with that bracelet of his. He must have seen a hundred different views of the stars, much like that. Perhaps he even glimpsed that serpent devouring a distant world.

But this wasn't the simple transition of place to place that came with mundane travel. It felt as though ages passed between visions of space, far beyond what Faustite had experienced in concept. He wondered, then — was this what the serpent had seen? Was this presumable Cosmos knight pursuing it, and then perished here before they could do anything about it?

He wouldn't put it past a member of the White Moon to fall so woefully short of the mark. Thinking little more of it, Faustite spat on the skeleton.

Then his gaze meandered up to the featureless door before him. He'd encountered strange little catches of memories like these when the Negaverse discovered and explored what was now the Transverse Workshop. In addition, he'd seen such featureless slabs that functioned like something of a database, though he was a poor choice of candidate to run one. It was once an old factory where the Negaverse manufactured weapons, which led him to wonder — did the Negaverse of old have a hand in making those spikes from the murals? If so, could they have constructed wherever this was?

That would put the Negaverse in a uniquely superior position for dealing with this serpent, particularly if it was currently trapped in the vicinity of Earth. However, Faustite began to wonder — would it really benefit them to blindly follow along the mural's depiction and keep the creature contained? Or would they be better off investing in new ways of draining energy, such that they could tap into these powerful and ubiquitous storms that so seemed to portend the creature's arrival? Surely the energy it put out was orders of magnitude beyond what the Negaverse collected from the denizens of Destiny City.

Though, as he considered it, Faustite wondered if it was an option to simply give Earth over to the serpent. Let the creature hollow it out and drive men to extinction. Give the remains over to youma, that they may live freely in the wake of what grown adults did to each other. Let humanity have the end it long deserved.

Faustite stood, then approached the door and reached out to touch it, half-expecting a smattering of words to come to life before him.

But as he did so, the sound of shuffling down the hallway caught his attention and he looked back to lay eyes on Heliodor. Immediately, Faustite sprinted toward the boy, where darkness clawed him over and tried to claim him, jilting him back and forth as if indecisive about its quarry. In case it tried to seize him again, Faustite caught hold of Heliodor's arm and pulled him back toward the room itself. When he thought they might be safe, he then tried to stow the star artifact in his subspace so he could free up his hands.

When he tried, however, he was met with an uncharacteristic resistance that had him snarling in incredulity. He forced his way against it, and eventually that pressure gave way, though sparks and lightning began sputtering to life around his hand. This caused the boy to blanch, and he immediately abandoned the idea of subspace in favor of shoving the star down the front of his pants.

It was good enough for freeing up his hands. Are you okay? He signed.

"Captain" Chalcanthite
Passive: Tossing orb towards Jet
Active: Standing on circle between wall 2/3 to look down that hall

With Aquamarine mentioning a different experience, Chalcanthite paused. "It was whole when I saw it, not broken." Was it because they'd touched more than one mural?

At Benitoite's mention of the Dark Mirror senshi, he bit back the refusal he knew he wanted to bring up. It wasn't for the court overall, he trusted them as much as he could trust someone, but he didn't like the idea of Liam being pulled into this. Already he was trying to figure out how to avoid telling them and getting them involved. They needed to stay home and remain safe, far from whatever monster seemed to be lurking.

Curling his fingers around the orb, he walked closer to the hallway to his left, closer to the darkened circle. Something seemed to tug at him and while he watched Jet and Kerberos interacting with that darkened circle, he decided to look at the lit one and its hallway, standing on it carefully. It was a risk, but at this point, he wanted to see where things went before something else shifted and decided to drain him instead of letting him pull some energy.

"The hallways seem to be calling out, something quite that I cannot make out. Try this on the darkened one? I pulled it from the mural before it changed for Aquamarine." Tossing the orb gently towards Jet, he wondered if, given its purity, it would hold its form and might help out with their attempt.

Character: Super Sailor Solaris
Active: Wall 3, trying to focus on how the prison was built
Secondary: Peeking down the hall



Solaris listened carefully to the others as they exchanged ideas and their findings, her gaze flicking between them and Encke as she watched the latter's condition much as she could. She wasn't sure which she believed more--that the serpent might have been reduced in size enough to be held in this room as it's prison, or that this had been a sort of... control center where someone could check on the status of the different parts of the prison down below. Or perhaps they were all wrong, and the actual prison was somewhere else, far, far away. If Mauvians could turn from small cats into tall humanoids, she wasn't completely immune to the idea of a world-eating serpent being somehow brought down to the size to be trapped in a small space like this hexagon.

If anything, the idea of a much, much smaller snake writhing around all pissed off, hissing out threats to destroy its captor, got a corner of her lips to quirk up in amusement. It added to her bit of extra mirth that Murikabushi referred to her as Sailor Angel Dust, and she needed that lightness to push away some of the dread and terror that still weighed her down. Breakdown later, like she'd told Encke. Focus for now.

When Encke seemed to stabilize somewhat, she slowly released their arm and shoulder, keeping her hands hovering a moment before pulling back. "Going to check out the third and maybe fourth panel--we should probably get as much info as we could on how this thing had been imprisoned, and if we can re-create it on some level," she whispered to him, removing her field journal and pencil from under her bodice to flip it back open as she began to head towards the Third Wall.

She was mindful of the Chaos agents around as she moved, though as she passed by the hall between the second and third walls, she peered down it carefully, trying to see if she could make out anything down there or hear anything, before continuing onward to her main objective. Once there, she again took a moment to sketch the mural, or at least the key parts in rough, rough detail that she believed would be more important later--and a note asking herself to check into the Celestial Theatre Kerberos mentioned at the.... Moon Palace? Hm. The fact the constellations weren't exactly familiar, but felt more... across vast skies, was both a marvel and disturbing. She couldn't pin-point the world in question--there were too many, if she understood it all correctly, never mind her own frames of reference applying or not.

At least for the third wall, she focused on the forge, and after taking some initial notes in her book, scribbling between Solarian and quick sketches, she finally reached her hand out to it. "How did you do it? How did you know to do it?" Her mumbled words likely wouldn't direct the vision, but it was worth a shot, and she pressed her hand against the people working on the spikes. She wasn't so sure about killing this thing, even with all the combined forces she could hear one of the agents (Benitoite) referring to amassing, but if they could get the info and resources to weaken it enough, trap it...

General King Jet
Action: Still dragging Kerberos around.
Passively Inspecting: The giant eye on the wall.
Actively Inspecting: The floor where the dark circle is, wanting to determine if it needs energy from them to be reestablished. Now using the energy collected from Chalcanthite.

“You don’t think I’m being civilized?” Jet hissed in response to Kerberos’ complaining, gripping his hand tighter around the Senshi’s arm.

He heard Chalcanthite’s call and turned just enough to catch the orb of pure energy that was tossed to him. He watched the “Captain” warily, but nodded when Chalcanthite stood on the circle. He still didn’t think it was a good idea to potentially get separated, but he could only do so much.

“Thanks,” he called back to the “Captain,” and for a few moments, Jet admired the orb.

They couldn’t let whatever this monster was live. If this was a prison, and it was already starting to fail, their best chance would be to keep it contained as long as they could manage, before getting much needed backup.

Jet took a deep breath and pressed the orb into the dark sphere, his hand beside Kerberos’.

Though Encke tried to read the letters on the floor, they were impossible to decipher; there was something innately familiar about them, but they were meaningless to Encke. The emotions tethered to them carried a lingering weight. It was firm. Intense. Hopeful. It was as if the remnants of whoever had written them–whoever had been in this room last–had lingered, even if the language did not. There was a distant sadness, and a fear, but whoever had been here last had overcome the impossible.

Maybe they could too.

The eye on the wall shifted several times, looking first to Aquamarine as it met his gaze, and then to Jet, and then again to Kerberos. And then, finally, to Murikabushi.

The pupil narrowed again, focusing on Murikabushi’s hand.

And then all hell broke loose.

A horrible roar rumbled from outside. The walls shook. The floor shook. The action was so violent that it was almost impossible to stand throughout it.

For a split second, something had clicked into place.

When Kerberos laid his hand on the dark circle, he felt ice. He felt something greedy, trying to soak up whatever energy he could give. It wasn’t until Jet placed the orb of energy Chalcanthite had tossed that there was a real reaction, but it was impossible to tell if the results were born of any single thing, or the unique combination of all of it at once.

The energy orb glowed intently before it began to burn, hot and searing. The dark circle sucked that up, too.

For a second, it glowed.

For a second, the dark barrier that shrouded the hallway between walls one and two dissipated. They could see down the dim hallway enough to locate Faustite’s pauldron. It lay on the floor in a heap of rubble. The hallway had once extended some distance, but now the walls and roof had caved in. It was no longer greatly sealed, and as the wind rushed through, it whistled faintly. The flickering lights were visible between the mountain of debris.

Earlier, as Solaris and Chalcanthite peered down the hallway between the second and third walls, nothing had immediately changed. It had been as dark as all of the others. Now, the barriers briefly flickered down all hallways. Five of the six hallways were still intact, and all identical in design.

Thirty-some feet down the hallway was a single well-fortified door. There were no windows, no ornaments, no embellishments. Just a dim blue light that led from each corner of the hexagon, down the hallway, to the door.

The shadow-walls restored themselves almost immediately but it was too little, too late.

Chalcanthite felt the effects of it first. He stood on one of the hexagon’s points, and as the light gathered around his feet, something else triggered. The same lightning that stole Faustite came for him–and Benitoite. The bolt struck him painlessly, but with enough force that it still stole his breath. Like a manacle, it bound him to Benitoite. They were flung down the hallway between the second and third wall, deposited in a heap just outside a thick door.

Solaris had just barely had time to try and identify anything on the third wall; she was able to make out the sensation of a hammer in her hand, and of raw power. Her arm throbbed, maybe because of the image, or maybe because when the hammer struck on the mural, the force sent her stumbling backwards.

She might not have meant to, but it sent her teetering to the corner of the hexagon between walls three and four. Power was surging through the room and she only needed to make slight contact with it before the lightning came for her, too. It danced over her skin and struck Encke, next.

They wound up at the end of the halfway between the third and fourth walls.

Energy surged through the air, and loud crackling sensations made it impossible to hear anything.

The eye continued to stare down Murikabushi. In some way, it seemed to fight back; a pulse of raw power shoved Murikabushi from the wall, sending him sprawling. It wasn’t intentionally that he landed on another point on the hexagon; the eye widened just slightly, but the lightning came for the Senshi of Hunger next, and from him it leapt to Kerberos as well.

They disappeared through the dark barrier and vanished into the hallway between the fourth and fifth walls.

The room continued to shake; it was only a matter of time before Jet and Aquamarine were sent tumbling, too. A strange wind had begun to swirl in the room. It seemed to have no source aside from the erratic bursts of energy. If they’d stayed, they would have been picked up and flung against the walls, but the lightning spared them, too.

Aquamarine and Jet were given sanctuary down the hallway between the fifth and sixth walls.

Faustite and Heliodor were not oblivious to the chaos of the other room, but they were spared the worst of it. When Faustite first rushed to Heliodor, he might have missed the sudden glow of the door, as if it were reacting to the General-King’s attention. Whatever was hidden behind the door hummed, loud enough that it might as well have been someone screaming for him directly into his mind.

He, nor Heliodor, would have missed the sudden darkening of the room they were in.

The hum of energy was sickening; it made the air feel dense and wet.

They could make out a bit of what happened in the other room–maybe more, when the shadow-wall that separated them flickered briefly.

The flash of a giant, glowing eye filled Faustite’s mind as it stared him down. It flickered, gone as soon as it was there.

The shadows in Heliodor’s mind spread, awakened by either the energy or his summoning. A hunger gnawed in his gut, nipping and sharp. There were no words, but it was an answer. His mind was filled with darkness as the shadows rolled through like a fog. Suddenly, a quick flash–Faustite’s pauldron in the rubble. The sound of something smashing. Debris, floating helplessly in space.

The entire structure trembled, as if it had collided with something, but there seemed to be no noticeable damage aside from the jarring sensation. The main room was sealed off, but a storm was brewing ferociously. The only thing protecting the ten of them from the worst of it were the remnants of darkness, but there was no telling how long those barriers would last. The light was growing in the main room, and small, pinprick holes were appearing through the darkness.