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 Posted: Fri May 21, 2010 10:58 pm
Previously... rosemilk "Yes," said the doorknob. "I never said it was very good."
The door swung open. Beyond was a corridor with wood-panelled walls and peeling wallpaper. The corridor split off in dozens of paths left and right, new corridors to consider, the floor covered in dust and dirt and bits of left-over machinery and broken jack-in-the-boxes and flotsam of all sorts.
And there were doors. So many doors. None of them would open.
On the walls there were sconces with candles to light their way. They could go whatever way they pleased. Every so often the wallpaper would change into paint or stripes or bare wall, and there was junk in massed piles everywhere the eye could see.
What would Sailor Europa and Tate do now?
[Europa and Tate have completed the puzzle room and are free to wander the corridors. Your reward is being able to explore without interference -- for now. Remember that you can't meet up with anyone else until Stage One commences. Good job!] Europa forced her mouth shut and took a step over the threshold, motioning for Tate to follow her. She picked her way along the corridor, boots occasionally squashing down on a discarded cat toy or warped spring. She stepped gingerly over the scattered, quietly decaying small animal carcasses, unwilling to disturb their eternal sleep or to even think about them too much. They reached the first fork. "I think it's probably a good idea to stick together," she said to Tate. The hallway to their immediate left seemed the faintest bit brighter, and so she chose to follow that one. The ceiling sloped downwards at first, but then leveled out, leaving the space feeling claustrophobic. "Any guesses how we got here?" she asked conversationally, and then paused. A glimmer from down a branching corridor had caught her eye. Europa turned to investigate. It was an antique mirror, dusty and corroded, probably made of polished metal. For the first time, she could see the spread of the ink across her face. It was still an intense, rich shade of peacock blue, but in the flickering of the candlelight it was very clearly iridescent. Europa pressed a hand to her cheek and contemplated her reflection.
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Posted: Sun May 23, 2010 10:23 am
Wasn't any good. Wasn't any good? Was that really all the door had to say? She wanted to stay and b***h out the door, except she did retain some small amount of logic and God, none of that should have worked. Jam doorknobs for a jammed door, what the hell. The brunette, therefore, stayed fairly quiet as she followed Reiter down the hallway, consumed more in safely compartmentalized complaining.
This was really, really dumb.
"I dunno," said Tate. She'd been... walking, she'd been walking to a restaurant to meet up with her future employer. And as she'd passed one of the little parks in the city... she had awakened on that pile of shoes, or whatever it was. She looked over her shoulder, but couldn't see the room after the dip in the floor. All well and good; Tate wasn't planning on going back, anyway.
When she turned back towards Reiter, Tate blanched and stepped backwards so fast she tripped over her own feet and sprawled along the hardwood floors. One hand was in a pile of fabric, and she stared horrified at her own reflection. It was Tate, but a little different; the Tate in the mirror looked just the same. In fact, she looked more like the Tate Europa would have found familiar. Outside--where-ever this was--Tate had a sharper nose, narrower eyes, a fuller lower lip. Here, her features were a little... idealized. The biggest difference between them was the black pits that took the place of Tate's eyes.
Europa only had a moment to absorb all this before Tate sprang forward, the tablecloth in one hand coming up over the mirror, blocking everything out. There was a certain desperation in how she smoothed the grimy, checkered fabric along the frame with rigid, shaking hands. Her mouth was a thin, tight line.
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Posted: Sun May 23, 2010 9:23 pm
Europa scrambled to get out of the way as Tate lunged at the mirror. She looked from her companion to the covered frame, and then back again, not quite certain she believed what she'd seen. Empty pits for eyes - she'd had a nightmare like this once. But Tate - the real Tate, the one standing in front of her - Tate's eyes were fine.
The senshi shuddered, but couldn't think of anything to say to appease the other girl. She'd have liked to look at the strange, glittering shade of blue spreading across her cheeks a while longer, but it seemed best not to linger here.
"We should probably keep moving," she said, shakily stating the obvious. She glanced up and down the hall, but all of the forking paths were starting to look the same.
"The labyrinth can't go on forever," she added. "If we keep walking we have to find a way out eventually."
Buildings had to have exits, after all. She gestured vaguely to the branching corridors. "Which one should we take?"
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Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 7:42 am
She didn't say anything until she was sure the mirror was covered. It was... unnerving, to say the least, to see something out of your nightmares. Especially since they seemed to be someplace that very definitely felt like the real world, even if it didn't seem to work like one. They stood at the fork in the path for a moment, and rather than answering verbally, she grabbed Reiter's wrist and pulled her towards the left.
The farther they got from the mirror, the calmer Tate seemed to become, the looser her grip on the sailor soldier's arm became. Eventually, she let go and stopped at another intersection, this one characterized by a reimagining of American Gothic. It looked pretty much the same until you looked a little harder at the material that made up the man's coveralls. "Look for string," she said, "a ball of yarn or something. When we come to a dead end, we want to be able to find our way back."
She added, after a wait, "Like Theseus and the Minotaur."
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Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 8:54 am
The man in the painting was definitely wearing coveralls made from the tanned flesh of another human being. If you looked closely enough, you could see where the eye sockets and mouth had been sewn shut and the nose flattened. Europa blanched, went slightly green, and nodded to Tate. "That sounds like a good idea."
Partly she just wanted to get as far away from that awful painting as humanly possible - the hallway to their right looked promising. Piles of nicknacks spilled out across the path from where they'd been haphazardly stacked. An iron cage style mannequin did a precarious sideways tango with a taxidermied chimpanzee. Europa stepped distastefully over.
"Maybe there's a sewing kit in here somewhere?" she asked. A wicker basket looked promising, but when opened revealed its contents to be a rotting picnic lunch. The senshi slammed the lid and backed hastily away. She resolved to be more careful opening boxes in the future.
The next time she stuck her hand in a pile, a mousetrap closed on it. Europa swore and pulled it back out. The trap had snapped shut on her pinky and ring finger of her left hand, and she gingerly pried it open.
"I think they might be broken," she winced, finally taking her stained glove off. It was sort of hard to tell. "Any luck finding string over there?"
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Posted: Sat May 29, 2010 12:35 pm
Tate sifted through the piles of crap on the floor, poking through with the toes of her boot. "Twine," she said, picking up the ball of string and tossing it overhead. She turned to look over at the senshi just in time to see her draw back, rather weirdly slow. Broken? But the sailor soldier wasn't moving all that fast to yank out her fingers. And she wasn't even crying or screaming. She gave Reiter a skeptical look and muttered, "I doubt it." She reached up and tied the end of her twine ball around the nail of what she was going to call American Bloody Gothic, tugged on the end to make sure it was tied tightly, and started to walk again. "Can you bend them?"
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Posted: Sun May 30, 2010 10:29 am
Europa tried. "No," she said wincingly, and followed Tate away from the god-awful painting. "Did you see... what he was wearing?" she asked. It hadn't been just in her head, had it?
She cradled her fingers gingerly in the cupped palm of her other hand. She knew she should probably brace it with something, but she wasn't sure what she could use to as a splint - certainly nothing here, as they were currently walking past piles of nothing but rotting apple cores.
"This place is gross," she stated, wrinkling her nose. They tuned a corner and the apples gave way, first to chicken bones, and then to a hall of taxidermy animals posed like they were writhing in pain. Europa flinched back.
"Oh my god," she whimpered.
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Posted: Sun May 30, 2010 3:05 pm
"They're probably sprained," said Tate. She didn't particularly look around more than she had to--no one wanted to see the Symphony in Black and Gold, no matter how much they loved Impressionism. Tate personally had a mild distrust of Impressionists. It was just a thing. She also didn't like fauveism.
The brunette kept untwisting twine as they walked, toeing through the apples every so often. Even if the scout's fingers likely weren't broken, they should still be set, or bound, or something. Tate didn't know first aid, she just knew fingers could be messed up very easily. Because of this, she was already raising both eyebrows at the chicken bones when they turned left into another hall.
She tried to look dispassionately at the monstrosities lining the hallway; it worked, a bit, but the tense curl of her mouth said she really was disturbed. "Come on," she said, reaching out to grab Reiter's arm. The scout seemed disinclined to move, and Tate flicked an uneasy glance over her shoulders at the animals. Was one of them moving? "Reiter. We're moving. Come on."
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Posted: Sun May 30, 2010 5:18 pm
"Sailor Europa," she corrected quietly, trying not to look at the writhing animals as they inched past them. Oh, god, were their eyes moving? She steeled her eyes ahead, clenched her tongue between her molars, and allowed Tate to pull her reluctantly forward.
After a moment, she quietly asked, "What's your name?" It had occurred to her that, while she knew Tate's name as a civilian, they hadn't been introduced here. There glamour was still working, even if none of her powers were, hence the whole 'Reiter' thing, or whatever she'd just been called.
They were finally past the monstrous taxidermy, and now they were faced with a series of paintings of a burning village. Europa frowned at Tate. "Left or right?" she asked. In one direction, the destruction increased. In the other, the village was increasingly intact.
Meanwhile, the stain around her eyes continued to shift colors, and now the edges were starting to look a bit textured.
After a moment's deliberation, they selected the direction with the less threatening-looking paintings. This hallway eventually terminated in a door that, when tried, opened easily. "After you," said Europa, gesturing with her uninjured hand.
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