Welcome to Gaia! ::

Upon entering this new room with its towering doors and what seemed to be a never-ending blackness, Vanessa was struck suddenly by the idea that she'd shrunk like it had slapped her in the face. She inhaled sharply, intimidated by the immensity of this eerie space, and stood up a little straighter. The mirror shards she'd bound to her broken chair-leg-turned-club had all been destroyed in the little war Super Van had wrought against the winding hallways, but she held it protectively in front of herself still.

Tiny flecks of glass stuck in her face and glistened off the candle light. One corner of her cape was stiff with dried blood. Lips were pressed into a thin, white line as she examined her surroundings with a critical eye.

"This place is so weird," Vanessa elbowed Polaris and gestured at the great room with her thumb, as though the other girl wouldn't have been able to see it if it hadn't been pointed out. "Ugh. I'm so sick of doors. Why would anybody need doors THIS BIG?"

Her voice echoed off the walls, and disappeared somewhere above their heads.

Vanessa smirked, deciding that she liked this room, and cupped her bloody hands (Polaris had tried to clean them, but the little provisions they had had made it almost impossible) around her mouth. She was about to yell something stupid, something silly, when she spotted the cluster of skeletons.

"Oh. My. GOSH," There were echoes again, and Vanessa practically ran over to the door where the bodies lay. She looked very excited, and pointed at them eagerly. "Look, Polaris! Aren't they gross?"

This was not the first time she had seen a dead body. Mrs. Rae's funeral had been open casket. Hairy Pete had died practically in her arms. Vanessa was no stranger to death and, while she did not revel in it, she had always secretly dreamed of finding skeletons in this fashion. It was like a pirate adventure- minus the pirates and the parrots and the treasure, but Super Van was willing to take what she could get.

It was absolutely sinister. It was totally repellent. It was everything that she'd ever imagined it would be.

Feeling both repulsed and undeniably electrified, Vanessa could not resist the urge to touch. Caught up as she was in her delight she didn't stop to consider how very disrespectful this behaviour was, and plucked up a skull. It was the part she'd wanted the most.

"To be or not to be?" She recited sagely, and peered into the empty eyes of the skull, recalling that she'd watched that Hamlet dude do something like this in the movie. She did not know that the lines she spoke were wrong. "That is the question."

She hadn't yet connected these forgotten bodies to the souls that had lived and breathed and died in them.

A dusty, ornate-looking door opened and spat out two oddly dressed men before it insinuated itself back into the wall. The first of the two immediately backed against the wall as he took his bearings -- he was balancing a broken chairleg on his shoulder and two candles in his other hand. His companion was carrying what appeared to be a copy of Whistler's Mother in very bad condition.

The man with the chairleg took the dimensions of the room with a couple flicks of his eyes -- settled on the corpses and the inscription for a moment, made a face -- then settled on the other people in the room.

"Hey," he called out to Super Van. "Wonder Woman. I'd rethink touching that if I were you -- you ever seen any movie with an old temple in it? First person disturbs the dead is a bona fide redshirt, and I'd hate to see a good kid like you go that way."

He had a definite Dixie drawl, and he smiled at her -- but he was already walking over to the dead bodies as well, pausing at the cabinet to run his hand through the dust, test the lock, and then look at the inscription. Whoever he was, he clearly didn't suffer from analysis paralysis.

Looking reflectively at the mousehole for another moment, he shrugged and continued the rest of the way to Vanessa. "Alas, poor Yorick. You knew him, Horatio." He raised his eyebrows at her. "What's a pair of nice girls like you doing in a place like this?"

It was light in here, if nothing else. The man blew out the candles he was carrying and pocketed them; left with just the chairleg, he let it drop to his side. It was wooden, splintered, not much of a weapon, but perhaps it was the best he could find wherever he came from. Lowering it seemed to be saying: it's all right, I'm not your enemy.

"I don't know what I'm doing here either," he said to Polaris. "But you're right about one thing -- we need to get a move on. The room I woke up in wasn't exactly comforting, and this ain't much better: I'm really not feeling this implication that other people died trying to get out of here. It's giving me the creeps a bit. So what do you say," he looked over the four of them at large, "quick introductions and we start our great escape?"

In the brief ensuing silence he tucked the chairleg under his arm and dusted his hands off, a little theatrically. "My name is John and I'm an alcoholic," he said with a grin. "Hi, John."

-He could have been lying. Wasn't it a proven fact that the worst and scariest sociopaths in the world were incredibly charming when they needed to be? He could be feeding them sugar just to lure them in, cackling inwardly to himself the whole time.

She wanted SO much to hope though... and in the end Van made her decision for her. Aurora was reminded more and more of her youngest brother at five the more time she spent with her. Energetic, curious, always straight into everything.

Letting the bat fall to her side finally she let the weight rest on the ground, holding it only with one hand.- "More help is never a bad thing. We could have used a few extra hands and feet in the room we woke up in."

"Super Sailor Polaris, another champion of justice." -She joined the introductions, finding it appropriate to add the Super since Super Van had. After all, despite John's choice of cape... he looked fairly normal. The other man in the background too. Civilians probably? She'd yet to make any connections between the situation and the Negaverse yet, so it didn't seem strange.-

"Never had a drink of anything before myself" -She added after an awkwardly long pause. It was obvious she was pretty young, and that despite trying and a soft smile.. she wasn't exactly the funny type.-

At that moment, two more girls entered through one of the strange, here-and-then-not-here doors. Europa stepped through first, having been forced ahead after a brief moment of awkward "you-go-no-you-go" playing, and blinked at the assembled group. They were the first other living things they'd encountered so far, proof that there were other people in this strange maze - unless - did they live here? Wait. No.

One of them was her science teacher. Another was a classmate from Meadowview, although wearing the most ridiculous homemade superhero outfit Europa had ever seen. She didn't recognize the man in the cape, but she certainly recognized--

"Sailor Polaris!" the teal-haired senshi exclaimed, and flung her arms around her friend's shoulders. So there was another Basterd here! It was reassuring, but also a bit of a shock: who else from her team had gotten caught up in this madness?

Releasing the other scout, Europa rocked back on the balls of her feet and surveyed the assembled company with pursed lips. "It looks like we're late to the party," she said, frowning. "What was the question?"

Impending sense of doom and mystery aside, this situation seemed to be getting better and better by the minute. Perry's presence there soothed Vanessa, and she practically radiated with joy when John bowed. No man had ever done that for her before. This simple action, combined with the compliments he offered them, ensured the magician a special place in her heart. Super Van, still smiling, returned the gesture with her own cape.

"It has its days," she told him seriously, "I've killed some monsters, which was kinda awesome- okay, no, it was really awesome. But you're right. It is hard work, and not everyone likes to co-operate. And I don't even mean just the bad guys. Once, a girl hit me in the face with her purse 'cause she thought I was going to attack her. It sucked. A lot."

Talking. It was what Vanessa did. She wondered, idly, if John was actually any good at magic tricks and then answered his questions.

"I'm eighteen," Super Van told him, flashed her smile at Europa and Tate, and then continued, "I think we've been kidnapped, but I have no idea where we are. Wherever we are, it isn't normal."

It was difficult to tell whether or not she disapproved of this.

"Oh, I WISH that I had superpowers," It embarrassed her to have to admit that she didn't and, with her cheeks flushed slightly pink, Vanessa said, "I can hit things, though. I've got good aim and a good arm."

It was a miracle that after hours and nauseatingly countless hours of etching away at their map and checking doors, one of the doors finally opened. Melted back into the wall, sure, but -- progress. Hopefully. There was an equal chance that they were just wandering deeper into this bizarre lab as it was that they were finding some way out of it.

And Perry still heavily suspected that they were dead. Or, at least, until the sight of corpses caught the corner of his eye. Human corpses, that was the first they'd seen of any. It had all been birds and beavers and bugs up until this point. But there they were. Dead people. Dead people who looked like they had been dead for a really long time.

"How're we doing, kids," he was saying good-naturedly, sharing handshakes and the other typical introduction gestures. "Good to see we're not the only ones stuck in this godforsaken shitpile, at least." Teacherly curse filter: deactivated.

At John's question, he clomped a couple steps over to the sagging skeletons, leaning down and peering with his defaced copy of Whistler's Mother crumpledly tucked under an arm. "I dunno what I can tell ya besides the obvious, Lids. There was a struggle, they weren't happy to be here." He extended a boot, experimentally prodding at the torso of the body closest to him. "Maybe the door killed 'em."

Sad thing was he didn't sound like he was joking.