RE: THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN CANCELED [S!1][ROUND THREE: PORT CERIDWEN]
03-20-2018, 12:18 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-20-2018, 01:51 AM by seedy.)
Bennie's sword sparked as it swung, hot blue-white and brighter than anything in the benthic gloom. It carved a black line into the nightmare as she spun like a matador away from its tusks claws spikes fangs.
This was getting tiresome.
It collapsed next to the other slain beasts, raising a plume of sand. Bennie had been striking the fine line between toying with her prey and brutally and efficiently dispatching them for the past five minutes. She hadn't asked how to kill them. She didn't need to ask things like that.
Across the rows of stone-carved audience boxes, the mer-officiants seemed both tired and unsatisfied. It stood to reason once you saw a stranger stylishly gut a hulking predatory rhinoceros you'd want to find a reason to deny her access to your city. Tschic could sympathize, but he wished they'd face up to the inevitable. They weren't going to stop Bennie from getting what she wanted.
And if this kept up, she'd probably get...bored.
Tschic was imagining where this could go next when a frightened-looking mer-aide swam up to a nearby MC and whispered something into his ear. The man stood up and raised his hand, quieting the cautious whispers that echoed across the coliseum.
“One final task,” He began, “One final task for our guest.”
Bennie beamed up at him. Her smile was even brighter than her sword.
“Come. We shall lead you to it. If you succeed, you shall have what you seek, for if we were to fail, we would have nothing to keep or give.”
Riddles, sighed Tschic.
. -. - .-. -.--
The submarine’s corridors were rusted and winding. METAL had been inside some pretty large submarines, the biggest, of course, having been that of the League of Leagues (get it?), but this was...something else. The ship seemed to be twisting back on itself, giving them false turns and dead ends. And before...one moment they had been standing on its deck, and then the world shifted (like in a dream) and they were in a small damp room (and according to METAL’S readouts) a couple hundred feet underwater.
METAL was starting to regret not having been a part of the team that had directly fought Dr. Nyx. But the realm of the subconscious had never been his strong suit. And besides, Magenta had insisted someone needed to stay behind to keep Freefall from dashing off (heroically) to her comrades on the front lines at the first sign of trouble.
“Do not let your mind wander, knight.”
“S0RRY.”
“This ship is woven straight from nightmare-stuff. As an outsider, perhaps you do not realize how rare this is...to have no substance, to be nothing but thought and will...most dream-ships, they are built on a skeleton of a ship, a base that gives form to the whimsy. But this is not that. This...what kind of mind could be strong enough to create this? A whole ship, and no more substantial than a soap bubble...yet strong enough to contain us. I had thought this the work of a wizard, but…”
“THAT 1S 1NTEREST1NG, BUT REMEMBER Y0UR CAUT10N F0R A WANDERING M1ND.”
Veltria smiled. “You are right. This is unlike me. We will plan, not muse.”
“WHAT D0 Y0U PR0P0SE WE D0?”
Veltria frowned. “I cannot ken a way past this maze. But it will shift again, and soon. I feel it. It reaches its goals...it will not be able to focus on us. And then we will strike.”
“...AFF1RMAT1VE.”
. -. - .-. -.--
The edifice the guards led them to was a mirror of the Awen Library. Distorted, seen through the ripples of a lake or the glint of a dark gem, but a mirror all the same. It shimmered like a mirage. Tschic searched the guards' faces for some sign of is it supposed to look like this normally, but found nothing.
“We suspect a poison in the land-dweller's simulacrum has wormed its way into the heart of ours. Root it out and any answer you choose shall be yours.”
Bennie strode forward, saying nothing, her excitement cutting the water in front of her like a knife.
Tschic didn't see as he had many choices right now, and followed after her. Maybe I should have stayed with Aaron.
-.. --- --- .-.
“Is this the right way, Aaron? The sign said the councilroom's that way--”
“We're not going to the damn councilroom.”
“Huh? But--”
“We're going what you might call the source. The Patternroom. It's been closed for weeks, accessible only to a select few. I've started to think that they're hiding something. They won't be able to simply turn me away this time.”
“Weeks?” Freefall raised one eyebrow, and when Aaron didn't respond, switched to the other. “Aaron, we've only been here a few--”
She was cut off by his hand gesture and the doors they stood in front of. They were dark wood inlaid with sea-blue lapis and gold, abstract naturalistic patterns somehow telling the story of the Port's beauty and life, the ebb and flow of dreams.
“It's behind here.”
“What...is it?”
“A map.” Aaron let out a long breath. “A perfect map.”
Now, knock these down.”
.... . .-. --- . ...
The interior of the mirror-library...well, Tschic would have liked to say it was a distorted version of the other library the way the outside had been. Tschic would have liked slightly less but still appreciated being able to say it was a sticky pulsating mess like the inside of the nightmare had been. Tschic would have liked being able to apply any sort of adjectives to the interior, really.
But he couldn't. He and Bennie walked through a void. Occasionally vague impressions of parquet floors and Venetian doors sluiced through, transient and echoing like the dripping tap you can't find.
Bennie kept forwards, sure of her direction. She was lit by a sourceless light, and he was lit by the light bouncing off of her. Good thing she wore white. He was suddenly possessed by the disturbing urge to anchor himself by grabbing her hand.
“Are we...clo—How much further?” He asked.
“I can feel it. Can't you?”
“No...maybe.” Hard to say where a sense of dread is coming from.
“It's the only direction left. No matter where we went, we'd reach it.”
“Are you...uhh...”
“It's okay. We're the heroes.”
.... . .-. --- . ...
The heroes walked through a dark mirror version of the interior of the Awen Library, although they had never been there and therefore couldn't appreciate the symbolism.
“Do you sense anything, Magenta?”
“Yeah. Somewhere...below. We need to go downwards. Everything the mermaids asked us to do...it's down there.”
They looked down the stairwell at murky flights that slithered disconcertingly in lazy uneven spirals into the depths.
“Welp.”
.... .- ..- -. -
"What."
"It's simple, you just--"
"No. Nope. Gonna cut you off right there. I'm not some--battering ram you can just drag around to do whatever fucked up new plan you have in mind.
“I mean, ‘for weeks’? What the f--What does that even mean? This place, it-it messes with your head, but you? I’m not stupid! What’s wrong with you, Aaron?”
Freefall didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and started punching holes in the wall almost absentmindedly.
"You know, I don't know why I even came here with you--it's not like, like you have a great track record, like everything you've done has worked out great and now I just trust you--not like you didn't murder a whole platoon and then laugh about it--don't know how I forgot that one!!"
They weren't really even people
Freefall stopped punching. "What...? What did you say?"
"There are answers behind that door." Aaron's voice was flat. No energy to convince her. Needed it to move forward.
Freefall shook her head. "I don't think so. The big monster I can kill, the villain that needs to be convinced to change, the switch that needs to be flipped to turn off the machine--I don't think it's there, Aaron. I don't think--" She shook her head again, smiling bitterly. "I don't belong in this city."
"...Open the doors, Freefall."
"Open them yourself." She turned to walk away.
The doors swung open.
--. --- .-.. -..
They stepped into the room, and it resolved around them. It was wide, and octagonal--no, more than that. Dodecagonal. Of course. No need to even count.
The walls were tarnished gold hung with black draperies, shadows that refused to change as the light shifted. It shone from glass net-floats clustered in the middle of the ceiling, scintillating across the floor as if it had traveled through water to get there.
In the center of the room in a tall glass case was a golden suit of armor that wore a golden mask and held a golden sword. In front of it stood...a figure. Absence and presence, a skeleton, a gestural drawing made of painted wood and the curve of rooflines. Tschic recognized it. It reached towards the clasp of the case.
Bennie stepped forward, about to run.
An instinct deep in Tschic snapped out, grabbed Bennie by the back of her dress, and pulled.
The abyss yawned beneath her, full of teeth.
The room was a bowl like the bowl of the sky, at their feet was infinity, the far walls as distant as stars.
In the center burned the sun, caressed by serpents.
Near to it, nearing it, was a shipsubmarinehousespaceship. A spaceship. It was somehow still welcoming-looking, despite everything. Its docking bay was opening.
“Thanks,” exhaled Bennie, “Knew I was right to drag me with you.”
The blackness swirled across blackness.
“So,” Bennie attempted to pace around the edge of it, “Some kind of illusion?”
“No...just…” Tschic shrugged, “More real than the other room.”
“What the hell is that thing?”
The walls shook.
“I don’t think. Most of this place is very real. Like, in general.”
Bennie stared at him, then at the stars. She spread her arms frustratedly.
“There must be a way. We need to get to it first.”
Do you even know what it is you’re trying to get to? “Can you fly?”
Deus ex machina. The doors swung open.
-.. --- --- .-.
The library impeded their progress at every turn, walls sprouting arms, or tentacles, or something in-between, floors snarling into gaps rimmed with teeth.
Magenta couldn’t tell if the malice was directed at them, or if they were just caught in the throes, whatever inky life that animated the shadows writhing and spitting. At times the floor shifted beneath their feet, contracting like a serpent, like layers of muscle pushing them forwards. Then suddenly each step they took pushed against a force, and the next door would recede into the distance before their eyes.
It was hard to say if they were making any progress.
Ace seemed focused on the mission, his Trump Cards efficiently slicing through a keloidish umbral web that clogged their path. But Magenta knew that he couldn’t help wondering if Freefall was somewhere like this--or somewhere that made even less sense.
At least this doesn’t seem to be drawing on our subconsciouses. Magenta thought. They at least had that. And she couldn’t help feeling sure--perfectly sure--that if Freefall was truly in trouble, not just captured or in a mess or in danger but really, truly in trouble--she’d know, immediately.
If only she’d reach out to me.
If only there was some wood to knock on.
A glittering ahead interrupted her. As they walked closer towards the doors, they tarnished in reverse, black pulling away into brown into gold.
Ace and Magenta steeled themselves like true professionals, and touched the doors.
They swung open.
-.. --- --- .-.
Out stepped two spandex-clad young adults. It didn’t make any sense, but Tschic couldn’t help thinking they’d had their costumes designed by whatever hack had done Freefall’s. Then again, it wasn’t like they matched up with anything else in the Port. They were strikingly graphic against the muddied dream-substance and intricate metalwork, which Tschic didn’t really need on top of everything else right now. He sort of wondered if he was seeing things again, but he could hardly miss Bennie’s excited gleam.
He made a motion as if to summon paint out of his fingertips, then remembered he couldn’t do that stuff anymore.
Ace and Magenta experienced an intense moment of vertigo, as the threshold led into a starscape that looked impossibly wide. In the center, a skeletal starship and a skein of shadows orbited a star, dancing around it like cat and mouse.
On the landing with them were two wildly disparate people. There was a chance these were some of the “wrong hands” the mermaids had been cryptically worried about their “secrets” falling into, but Magenta was having trouble getting a clear reading in the chaotic empathic fields.
The ratty-looking one was eyeballing them disgustedly. The (tall, blue, ripped) one was eyeballing them hopefully.
“I’m Bennie, this is Tschic. Can either of you fly?
“We’re trying to get out there.” She added unnecessarily, thumbing towards the celestial dance playing itself out in the distance.
Ace raised an eyebrow. Magenta made a quick calculation and bubbled herself and Ace, flying them out to get a better view of the situation.
“Stay there, it’s not safe.” Magenta called back to the duo, more as a cover for ignoring them than any real warning.
Like before, the distance seemed...odd. Magenta felt at the edge of an invisible barrier of meaning. She pushed through.
In dimensions that humans have no need of occupying, the Traveller’s Rest and the Mirror Library fought. They were really fairly similar entities, dream-stuff and infinite as thought. Both of them had lost more than a few of their restrictions recently. They were at a standstill until Magenta, pure being of love and light, pushed through like a little star of her own. The Traveller’s Rest, far more canny and experienced of the two buildings and twice as animalistic, seized the chance in its jaws. The room pulled once more as it sunk its teeth into the writhing flesh of the Library, the space shifting into a torturous merging of lecture hall and lobby, half filled with water and ink, half still-metallic spaceship hull.
Veltria and METAL seized a chance too, taking the diverted attention of the Rest and its momentarily-nebulous geometry and blasting a hole in its too-riddled hull/wall. It coughed them out like parasites and where they fell from a gash howling with the void, neither Rest nor Library but a space without housing. Water began to gush out from the room in an unopposable torrent.
Magenta quickly bubbled METAL and Veltria, then bubbled Bennie (clinging to a pillar with one arm) and Tschic (clinging to Bennie) without a second thought. She was a hero after all.
As the water drained around her legs and dampened her long coat, a woman dressed like the captain of a ghost ship strode to a shining golden case that stood in place of a podium. Behind her was a woman with vines across her skin and an eyepatch that looked wholly decorative. Bennie banged on the bubble holding her and shouted words that Magenta couldn’t hear past the roar of water and nothing. But she got the intent.
Magenta held that intent, its point sharp with desire and ambition--oh, Bennie could feel ambition--and threw it.
Pink volition turned the floor between the captain and her prize to sparks, and all the bubbles popped. They wasted no time, running towards the captain, only half-sure of what they were even trying to stop. Ace’s cards pinned her coat to the ground and METAL shot blasts that kept the pirates from moving any further.
But something else moved anyways. Crawling through the floor, fighting against the floor, the metal of the ship contorted against the pilllarlike case pulling it, subsuming it.
“Don’t even try it!” shouted Bennie, and shattered the glass.
Light flooded out. Neither was willing to give up. But the ship would be stronger.
“Fall back!” shouted the captain, pulling free of her coat desperately, clashing weapons with Veltria. The other woman fired unpracticed musket shots.
And it did. It couldn’t lose anything more right now, warm bodies, hot minds. It settled for less.
The light convulsed and split. For a second Magenta thought someone had been beheaded, then realized a mask had been torn from a golden helmet. The armor dissolved like dreams in the morning as the ship sucked itself backwards, molluscing its charges away safe in its iron belly and retreating through the hole it had torn in the Library.
It was over. Bennie knelt where she had been blown back to, holding a golden sword in her hands. Strangely, she didn’t look happy.
A black smoke, viscous and heavy had started to flow into the room from the wall that wasn’t there anymore. Magenta had an impression of the library as a sick beast, too hurt to even lick its wounds.
“We have to go, Ace.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Only problem is,” said Veltria, “There don’t seem to be any doors in this room.”
Bennie had gotten up from the floor. She stared at the golden sword, then pulled her gaze up to Tschic. He looked resigned.
“Be careful with that--” said Veltria, as Bennie tossed it through the air.
When Tschic caught it, it was a strange small dagger, blunt but no less golden. Its handle was black.
Bennie smiled.
Tschic’s hand lifted with the golden athame and sliced a clean line down through the air.
A door opened.
This was getting tiresome.
It collapsed next to the other slain beasts, raising a plume of sand. Bennie had been striking the fine line between toying with her prey and brutally and efficiently dispatching them for the past five minutes. She hadn't asked how to kill them. She didn't need to ask things like that.
Across the rows of stone-carved audience boxes, the mer-officiants seemed both tired and unsatisfied. It stood to reason once you saw a stranger stylishly gut a hulking predatory rhinoceros you'd want to find a reason to deny her access to your city. Tschic could sympathize, but he wished they'd face up to the inevitable. They weren't going to stop Bennie from getting what she wanted.
And if this kept up, she'd probably get...bored.
Tschic was imagining where this could go next when a frightened-looking mer-aide swam up to a nearby MC and whispered something into his ear. The man stood up and raised his hand, quieting the cautious whispers that echoed across the coliseum.
“One final task,” He began, “One final task for our guest.”
Bennie beamed up at him. Her smile was even brighter than her sword.
“Come. We shall lead you to it. If you succeed, you shall have what you seek, for if we were to fail, we would have nothing to keep or give.”
Riddles, sighed Tschic.
. -. - .-. -.--
The submarine’s corridors were rusted and winding. METAL had been inside some pretty large submarines, the biggest, of course, having been that of the League of Leagues (get it?), but this was...something else. The ship seemed to be twisting back on itself, giving them false turns and dead ends. And before...one moment they had been standing on its deck, and then the world shifted (like in a dream) and they were in a small damp room (and according to METAL’S readouts) a couple hundred feet underwater.
METAL was starting to regret not having been a part of the team that had directly fought Dr. Nyx. But the realm of the subconscious had never been his strong suit. And besides, Magenta had insisted someone needed to stay behind to keep Freefall from dashing off (heroically) to her comrades on the front lines at the first sign of trouble.
“Do not let your mind wander, knight.”
“S0RRY.”
“This ship is woven straight from nightmare-stuff. As an outsider, perhaps you do not realize how rare this is...to have no substance, to be nothing but thought and will...most dream-ships, they are built on a skeleton of a ship, a base that gives form to the whimsy. But this is not that. This...what kind of mind could be strong enough to create this? A whole ship, and no more substantial than a soap bubble...yet strong enough to contain us. I had thought this the work of a wizard, but…”
“THAT 1S 1NTEREST1NG, BUT REMEMBER Y0UR CAUT10N F0R A WANDERING M1ND.”
Veltria smiled. “You are right. This is unlike me. We will plan, not muse.”
“WHAT D0 Y0U PR0P0SE WE D0?”
Veltria frowned. “I cannot ken a way past this maze. But it will shift again, and soon. I feel it. It reaches its goals...it will not be able to focus on us. And then we will strike.”
“...AFF1RMAT1VE.”
. -. - .-. -.--
The edifice the guards led them to was a mirror of the Awen Library. Distorted, seen through the ripples of a lake or the glint of a dark gem, but a mirror all the same. It shimmered like a mirage. Tschic searched the guards' faces for some sign of is it supposed to look like this normally, but found nothing.
“We suspect a poison in the land-dweller's simulacrum has wormed its way into the heart of ours. Root it out and any answer you choose shall be yours.”
Bennie strode forward, saying nothing, her excitement cutting the water in front of her like a knife.
Tschic didn't see as he had many choices right now, and followed after her. Maybe I should have stayed with Aaron.
-.. --- --- .-.
“Is this the right way, Aaron? The sign said the councilroom's that way--”
“We're not going to the damn councilroom.”
“Huh? But--”
“We're going what you might call the source. The Patternroom. It's been closed for weeks, accessible only to a select few. I've started to think that they're hiding something. They won't be able to simply turn me away this time.”
“Weeks?” Freefall raised one eyebrow, and when Aaron didn't respond, switched to the other. “Aaron, we've only been here a few--”
She was cut off by his hand gesture and the doors they stood in front of. They were dark wood inlaid with sea-blue lapis and gold, abstract naturalistic patterns somehow telling the story of the Port's beauty and life, the ebb and flow of dreams.
“It's behind here.”
“What...is it?”
“A map.” Aaron let out a long breath. “A perfect map.”
Now, knock these down.”
.... . .-. --- . ...
The interior of the mirror-library...well, Tschic would have liked to say it was a distorted version of the other library the way the outside had been. Tschic would have liked slightly less but still appreciated being able to say it was a sticky pulsating mess like the inside of the nightmare had been. Tschic would have liked being able to apply any sort of adjectives to the interior, really.
But he couldn't. He and Bennie walked through a void. Occasionally vague impressions of parquet floors and Venetian doors sluiced through, transient and echoing like the dripping tap you can't find.
Bennie kept forwards, sure of her direction. She was lit by a sourceless light, and he was lit by the light bouncing off of her. Good thing she wore white. He was suddenly possessed by the disturbing urge to anchor himself by grabbing her hand.
“Are we...clo—How much further?” He asked.
“I can feel it. Can't you?”
“No...maybe.” Hard to say where a sense of dread is coming from.
“It's the only direction left. No matter where we went, we'd reach it.”
“Are you...uhh...”
“It's okay. We're the heroes.”
.... . .-. --- . ...
The heroes walked through a dark mirror version of the interior of the Awen Library, although they had never been there and therefore couldn't appreciate the symbolism.
“Do you sense anything, Magenta?”
“Yeah. Somewhere...below. We need to go downwards. Everything the mermaids asked us to do...it's down there.”
They looked down the stairwell at murky flights that slithered disconcertingly in lazy uneven spirals into the depths.
“Welp.”
.... .- ..- -. -
"What."
"It's simple, you just--"
"No. Nope. Gonna cut you off right there. I'm not some--battering ram you can just drag around to do whatever fucked up new plan you have in mind.
“I mean, ‘for weeks’? What the f--What does that even mean? This place, it-it messes with your head, but you? I’m not stupid! What’s wrong with you, Aaron?”
Freefall didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and started punching holes in the wall almost absentmindedly.
"You know, I don't know why I even came here with you--it's not like, like you have a great track record, like everything you've done has worked out great and now I just trust you--not like you didn't murder a whole platoon and then laugh about it--don't know how I forgot that one!!"
They weren't really even people
Freefall stopped punching. "What...? What did you say?"
"There are answers behind that door." Aaron's voice was flat. No energy to convince her. Needed it to move forward.
Freefall shook her head. "I don't think so. The big monster I can kill, the villain that needs to be convinced to change, the switch that needs to be flipped to turn off the machine--I don't think it's there, Aaron. I don't think--" She shook her head again, smiling bitterly. "I don't belong in this city."
"...Open the doors, Freefall."
"Open them yourself." She turned to walk away.
The doors swung open.
--. --- .-.. -..
They stepped into the room, and it resolved around them. It was wide, and octagonal--no, more than that. Dodecagonal. Of course. No need to even count.
The walls were tarnished gold hung with black draperies, shadows that refused to change as the light shifted. It shone from glass net-floats clustered in the middle of the ceiling, scintillating across the floor as if it had traveled through water to get there.
In the center of the room in a tall glass case was a golden suit of armor that wore a golden mask and held a golden sword. In front of it stood...a figure. Absence and presence, a skeleton, a gestural drawing made of painted wood and the curve of rooflines. Tschic recognized it. It reached towards the clasp of the case.
Bennie stepped forward, about to run.
An instinct deep in Tschic snapped out, grabbed Bennie by the back of her dress, and pulled.
The abyss yawned beneath her, full of teeth.
The room was a bowl like the bowl of the sky, at their feet was infinity, the far walls as distant as stars.
In the center burned the sun, caressed by serpents.
Near to it, nearing it, was a shipsubmarinehousespaceship. A spaceship. It was somehow still welcoming-looking, despite everything. Its docking bay was opening.
“Thanks,” exhaled Bennie, “Knew I was right to drag me with you.”
The blackness swirled across blackness.
“So,” Bennie attempted to pace around the edge of it, “Some kind of illusion?”
“No...just…” Tschic shrugged, “More real than the other room.”
“What the hell is that thing?”
The walls shook.
“I don’t think. Most of this place is very real. Like, in general.”
Bennie stared at him, then at the stars. She spread her arms frustratedly.
“There must be a way. We need to get to it first.”
Do you even know what it is you’re trying to get to? “Can you fly?”
Deus ex machina. The doors swung open.
-.. --- --- .-.
The library impeded their progress at every turn, walls sprouting arms, or tentacles, or something in-between, floors snarling into gaps rimmed with teeth.
Magenta couldn’t tell if the malice was directed at them, or if they were just caught in the throes, whatever inky life that animated the shadows writhing and spitting. At times the floor shifted beneath their feet, contracting like a serpent, like layers of muscle pushing them forwards. Then suddenly each step they took pushed against a force, and the next door would recede into the distance before their eyes.
It was hard to say if they were making any progress.
Ace seemed focused on the mission, his Trump Cards efficiently slicing through a keloidish umbral web that clogged their path. But Magenta knew that he couldn’t help wondering if Freefall was somewhere like this--or somewhere that made even less sense.
At least this doesn’t seem to be drawing on our subconsciouses. Magenta thought. They at least had that. And she couldn’t help feeling sure--perfectly sure--that if Freefall was truly in trouble, not just captured or in a mess or in danger but really, truly in trouble--she’d know, immediately.
If only she’d reach out to me.
If only there was some wood to knock on.
A glittering ahead interrupted her. As they walked closer towards the doors, they tarnished in reverse, black pulling away into brown into gold.
Ace and Magenta steeled themselves like true professionals, and touched the doors.
They swung open.
-.. --- --- .-.
Out stepped two spandex-clad young adults. It didn’t make any sense, but Tschic couldn’t help thinking they’d had their costumes designed by whatever hack had done Freefall’s. Then again, it wasn’t like they matched up with anything else in the Port. They were strikingly graphic against the muddied dream-substance and intricate metalwork, which Tschic didn’t really need on top of everything else right now. He sort of wondered if he was seeing things again, but he could hardly miss Bennie’s excited gleam.
He made a motion as if to summon paint out of his fingertips, then remembered he couldn’t do that stuff anymore.
Ace and Magenta experienced an intense moment of vertigo, as the threshold led into a starscape that looked impossibly wide. In the center, a skeletal starship and a skein of shadows orbited a star, dancing around it like cat and mouse.
On the landing with them were two wildly disparate people. There was a chance these were some of the “wrong hands” the mermaids had been cryptically worried about their “secrets” falling into, but Magenta was having trouble getting a clear reading in the chaotic empathic fields.
The ratty-looking one was eyeballing them disgustedly. The (tall, blue, ripped) one was eyeballing them hopefully.
“I’m Bennie, this is Tschic. Can either of you fly?
“We’re trying to get out there.” She added unnecessarily, thumbing towards the celestial dance playing itself out in the distance.
Ace raised an eyebrow. Magenta made a quick calculation and bubbled herself and Ace, flying them out to get a better view of the situation.
“Stay there, it’s not safe.” Magenta called back to the duo, more as a cover for ignoring them than any real warning.
Like before, the distance seemed...odd. Magenta felt at the edge of an invisible barrier of meaning. She pushed through.
In dimensions that humans have no need of occupying, the Traveller’s Rest and the Mirror Library fought. They were really fairly similar entities, dream-stuff and infinite as thought. Both of them had lost more than a few of their restrictions recently. They were at a standstill until Magenta, pure being of love and light, pushed through like a little star of her own. The Traveller’s Rest, far more canny and experienced of the two buildings and twice as animalistic, seized the chance in its jaws. The room pulled once more as it sunk its teeth into the writhing flesh of the Library, the space shifting into a torturous merging of lecture hall and lobby, half filled with water and ink, half still-metallic spaceship hull.
Veltria and METAL seized a chance too, taking the diverted attention of the Rest and its momentarily-nebulous geometry and blasting a hole in its too-riddled hull/wall. It coughed them out like parasites and where they fell from a gash howling with the void, neither Rest nor Library but a space without housing. Water began to gush out from the room in an unopposable torrent.
Magenta quickly bubbled METAL and Veltria, then bubbled Bennie (clinging to a pillar with one arm) and Tschic (clinging to Bennie) without a second thought. She was a hero after all.
As the water drained around her legs and dampened her long coat, a woman dressed like the captain of a ghost ship strode to a shining golden case that stood in place of a podium. Behind her was a woman with vines across her skin and an eyepatch that looked wholly decorative. Bennie banged on the bubble holding her and shouted words that Magenta couldn’t hear past the roar of water and nothing. But she got the intent.
Magenta held that intent, its point sharp with desire and ambition--oh, Bennie could feel ambition--and threw it.
Pink volition turned the floor between the captain and her prize to sparks, and all the bubbles popped. They wasted no time, running towards the captain, only half-sure of what they were even trying to stop. Ace’s cards pinned her coat to the ground and METAL shot blasts that kept the pirates from moving any further.
But something else moved anyways. Crawling through the floor, fighting against the floor, the metal of the ship contorted against the pilllarlike case pulling it, subsuming it.
“Don’t even try it!” shouted Bennie, and shattered the glass.
Light flooded out. Neither was willing to give up. But the ship would be stronger.
“Fall back!” shouted the captain, pulling free of her coat desperately, clashing weapons with Veltria. The other woman fired unpracticed musket shots.
And it did. It couldn’t lose anything more right now, warm bodies, hot minds. It settled for less.
The light convulsed and split. For a second Magenta thought someone had been beheaded, then realized a mask had been torn from a golden helmet. The armor dissolved like dreams in the morning as the ship sucked itself backwards, molluscing its charges away safe in its iron belly and retreating through the hole it had torn in the Library.
It was over. Bennie knelt where she had been blown back to, holding a golden sword in her hands. Strangely, she didn’t look happy.
A black smoke, viscous and heavy had started to flow into the room from the wall that wasn’t there anymore. Magenta had an impression of the library as a sick beast, too hurt to even lick its wounds.
“We have to go, Ace.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Only problem is,” said Veltria, “There don’t seem to be any doors in this room.”
Bennie had gotten up from the floor. She stared at the golden sword, then pulled her gaze up to Tschic. He looked resigned.
“Be careful with that--” said Veltria, as Bennie tossed it through the air.
When Tschic caught it, it was a strange small dagger, blunt but no less golden. Its handle was black.
Bennie smiled.
Tschic’s hand lifted with the golden athame and sliced a clean line down through the air.
A door opened.