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 Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 1:38 pm
The three knights popped into existence in the little guard outpost that Mistral and Babylon had found on their last trip, and Babylon let the mattress leaning against his arm fall to the ground. Plumes of dust flew out and up from beneath it, and Mistral waved a hand in front of her face. While he wrestled the thing into the old bed-frame, she said, "So, what we're trying to do is get as low as we can within the labyrinth before we trigger something terrible or otherwise die. We don't have a map." Which made sense, because who would leave a map in an easily-accessed room? "We don't even really have a general direction other than, 'down, and hope that my memories trigger and find something useful'." Like an ancestor. Babylon had Space Uncle Mendel; Mistral evidently should have Space Mother whatever her mom's name was. Yet, no sign. None at all. She crossed her arms over her chest, shivering despite the fact that the temperature within Mistral was on the warmer side. Just being here was weird. "I'll walk ahead of you guys," she said. "So I can tell you when there's a trap. And then--Sessrumnir, you're an engineer, if I can get the workings exposed, can you nullify them?" He was really the outlier here, the one that she didn't really know if she should trust. But she had to trust someone other than Babylon with this--and she wasn't willing to go somewhere alone with someone she didn't know well, ally or not. "We'll try to do this as fast as possible," she said decidedly.
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Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 1:49 pm
"Sounds like a plan," said Babylon, stepping back from the bed frame. The mattress wasn't a perfect fit, but it wasn't at risk of falling through onto the floor. Given a few more visits, they'd make this little guard post into a really nice home base. "Are we still looking for a way to key visitors in, or are we giving that up for the time being?" he asked, dusting his hands together. It'd be convenient, but from what he recalled it was just a hunch that it was possible and they didn't have time to waste today. As they headed into the hallway, Babylon turned to Sessrumnir and said, "I'm counting on you to keep us from getting, like, impaled on spikes or whatever." The traps they'd encountered last time had been pretty innocuous, but everything was sure to get more dangerous the further they intruded.
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Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2014 5:55 pm
Popping into existence indeed, Sessrumnir lifted a hand to wave away the dust expelled from the mattress being dropped, not bothering to hide his sour expression upon viewing their new surroundings. He’d thought that, in agreeing to help this young knight with her Wonder problems, he could maybe feel a little better about this whole knight thing himself. Maybe they were capable of helping one another and working to… who really knew…? He certainly didn’t, and as he turned his back on the other two to take in a better idea of this… outpost, he grumbled to himself.
“‘Go to Mercury’ they said. ‘It’ll be fun’ they said,” he huffed, lifting his arms to stretch over his head before turning back to the other two. One he’d met only briefly before agreeing to this harebrained plan. The other he felt like he should probably know more about, but never really cared to. “So the idea… is to just wander aimlessly and hope not to be killed? What the hell place is this??” he let out a breath, raising an eyebrow at the two Mercury knights.
“Look, I don’t know if I can do anything here. This stuff could be as simple as cutting a color coded and labeled wire, or it could be protected by powerful magic — I don’t know,” he said, not bothering with any optimistic bull. “And let’s not count on just me, okay? This is your turf, not mine. You pull your weight in keeping us alive, and I’ll do my part,” he said pointedly, but ready to follow Mistral into the oblivion that was her wonder. But not before muttering under his breath, "I got a bad feeling about this."
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Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2014 1:04 am
"Yeah," said Mistral, "but the best way to do that would probably to try to find… my past me's mother's study. She was the knight, I was the squire. Or… that's what I remember?" Was that how it worked? She rolled her eyes at Sessrumnir's dramatics. "Try doing this with half your internal organs missing," she told him, "it gets a lot less exciting." Well, at least he was honest with them. She liked that in a person. "I don't think they're magical," she said, as they headed out into the hall. She kept her right hand up and on the smooth-surfaced stone wall, like that would help her detect the traps. She'd had a thought during her three weeks away from her Wonder, one regarding the weird scratch she'd found. In hindsight, it seemed to look a lot like her signet would've fit in it. "I think this was some sort of research facility. Well, um. According to Space Uncle Mendel." She had actually found nothing other than the Improbable Flowers to indicate that this was actually true. That, and the traps. Speaking of, Mistral coughed when she walked straight into one of those spiderwebs. "Okay, stop, stop." She ran her hand across the wall at about the level of the mark she'd noticed the first time through his level, and found it. Just like she'd expected, the mark perfectly mirrored her signet, and when she pressed the ring into the wall, there was a distant kthunk. On the opposite side of the wall, another kthunk preceded the stone jolting backwards and then sideways. "Mercury is so cool," she said, unironically. The new gaping hole in the wall exposed a fairly simple pulley system, all shining silver carabiners and what looked like steel cabling. The cabling ran further down the shaft in which it hung. "I don't even want to know what that does," she told the two men on the other side of the trap. "Can you reach that from there? Maybe if you just… unscrew a carabiner?" Although, who knew how heavy the carabiners would be. And the system of pulleys would make it easier to unhook one and see what happened.
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Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2014 6:34 pm
"It is," agreed Babylon, a little self-indulgently. As he surveyed the inner workings of the trap, a low whistle escaped his lips. Even though he theoretically could reach the cabling, he doubted his own ability to properly dismantle it. "Damnit, Jim," said Babylon, stepping aside to let Sessrumnir have a better space to work in. "I'm an ecologist, not an engineer." "Mercury is fun," he added. "Usually." It would be more fun once they figured out how to stop Mistral from trying to kill them, but he figured that was probably doable. No one ever made any progress from sitting tight and refusing to explore their wonder. "Anyway, shutting up now." It wasn't like he knew Sessrumnir particularly well, but he could imagine the guy probably worked better without people yammering in his ear.
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Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2014 5:15 pm
“Cute,” Sessrumnir mumbled as Mistral used her ring to unlock secret mechanisms inside the wall. Of course, he had to remind himself that not every place was the same. Some obviously had more magic embedded into it, and others were much more technical. He wasn’t sure which he prefered just yet.
“Why the hell would anyone’s internal organs go missing? What, do the Vidiians live here?” he prompted, turning with an expectant look at Babylon and then Mistral, before his eyes rolled to somewhere above him. “Nevermind,” he grunted, taking a step forward to inspect the pulley system, not too sure he was willing to stick his hand in there. Regardless, he pushed back the cape that draped over his shoulders in order to get his arm inside the hole.
“So, either of you mind sharing what we should be looking out for? Or is this a blindly follow kind of mission?” he huffed, finding himself struggling with the age old pulley system. “Like, if this is going to guillotine my arm off, I’d like to know ahead of time.” He eventually got part of the system loose, cringing as he waited for his hand to go missing or something crazy.
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Posted: Sat Jun 14, 2014 9:01 am
Mistral tried not to laugh as she lowered her arm. The panel didn't slam closed on Sessrumnir--not like she had expected it to--and her ability to hold her arm at that height for a prolonged period was not something to write home about. Or maybe it was, for the sheer brevity of it? "If the Vidiians live here, I haven't found them yet," she said, cheerfully, "but if they do and I happen to run into Captain Janeway, I will not hesitate to let you know." She had caught up on a lot of old television whilst being bedridden and half-dead. Star Trek hadn't been her favorite, but she could see how it would leap to mind, if one were ancient. "No, my organs all got crushed by a mountain," she said. "Getting a bunch of them pulled out saved my life." Sessrumnir wrestled with the pulley system, and Mistral said, "We're looking for a lab. Probably my lab. I'm hoping to run face-first into a memory to tell us exactly where it is. But what I want to find is visitor's passes so other people can walk around Mistral and not have to do, well, this. Because, due to said organs being crushed, I can't really do this stuff for more than thirty minutes at a time." Was that reassuring? She hoped it was reassuring. The carabiner came loose and, when dropped, there was a loud clunk-thunk, followed by the slithering sound of rope pulling through the gears of the pulley system at a high speed, and then--from somewhere deeper within the lab--she heard a metallic crash. "Whoops," she said. "Hey, Babylon, try taking a step forward?"
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Posted: Sat Jun 14, 2014 11:49 am
Mistral didn't need him to fight her battles for him, thought Babylon, working the tension out of his jaw. Well, she did - but not this battle. Sessrumnir might be tactless and sarcastic, but he was sure that he hadn't really meant to be hurtful with his remark. If Mistral setting him straight didn't cow him, well... They were just here to get the stuff and get out. Trap hopefully disarmed, Babylon nodded to Mistral. "If this thing's not off and I lose an arm, I'm counting on you to get my a** back to earth before I bleed out," he said, "but, like, just tell me something, because I've got a weird feeling - am I the redshirt on this mission?" Mistral was the captain, Sessrumnir was the science officer, and Babylon was being told to walk into the recently-disarmed trap. Of course he was the redshirt. Babylon stepped forward expectantly, and nothing happened. He took another step. Still nothing. "Okay," he said, spreading his arms. "I think we're good. Sess, no guillotines here, so breathe easy, buddy. Should I just start a running tab of how many bags of fancy trail mix you owe me for my services as crash test dummy, Mistral?"
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Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2014 12:56 pm
“Sounds good to me,” he snorted softly as he grinned in amusement, refraining from commenting on how she was an admiral by the end. “She was always my favorite.”
While he didn’t usually like to reveal any of his closet nerdiness, it was always amusing to find others who understood references others might not, regardless of how much of a fan they were or not. Or how much of a fan he was.
He grimaced when she mentioned her organs, but it could have also been the mechanism that he took a little longer to focus on than turning back to her. “No s**t,” he let out a huff when she said she couldn’t do things for more than thirty minutes at a time, although it probably sounded more nonchalant than he really felt about it.
“I figured you’d be more of an original series kinda guy,” he glanced in Babylon’s direction at his redshirt reference. He wondered if it was ironic that Mercury knights responded more to Star Trek references rather than Star Wars, but it wasn’t really anything to dwell on.
“Hey, I’m not the redshirt, so I’ve got nothing to worry about,” he smirked, before looking up at Mistral again. “Oh we’re being paid with trail mix?” Sounded good to him. He followed where Babylon went, not wanting to be left behind on Mercury of all planets.
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