Re: The Phenomenal Fracas! (GBS2G6): [Round Four: The Warped Edifice]
05-17-2012, 07:00 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by SleepingOrange.
Muriegro was surrounded by props and boxes, costumery and hurriedly-hidden construction equipment. Cans of paint and rolls of carpet mingled with the more glamorous trappings of a large theatrical establishment's sundries. For all that the storage room he'd materialized in was fairly crowded, it was also surprisingly clean. It was also only crowded in the area immediately surrounding him; farther into what seemed to be some sort of attic, there was next to nothing, just wide expanses of recently-scrubbed floors. And then, even farther back, there were... Well, it was too dark to tell. Looked like more boxes and crates and forgotten clutter, anyway. Muriegro certainly wasn't about to spare any of it a second glance; he was too occupied frantically patting himself down and rifling through the containers nearest him. There was a distressing lightness about the priest's robes, and the closest approximation of concern that his slack face could muster was making itself obvious.
Years of only nominally free will had left Muriegro without the emotional range to effect a shift from Ambitus to the palace; his god, on the other hand, was a bottomless wellspring of rage, especially if it had just had another intoxicating victory toppled out from under it.
---
She was the youngest princess, which meant that she certainly wasn't expected to attend to any affairs of state. On the other hand, she wasn't so young anymore that she had handlers constantly buzzing about her, telling her what she could and couldn't do. Well, in theory she still did, but she'd finally gotten to that age where she'd realized she could just tell the various nurses and nannies and guards what they were allowed to tell her to do and where she could go. It was the same thing in practice, really.
She was also at that age where tea parties had really lost their luster, and frankly, all the high-society parties that were constantly being thrown for this reason or that one were just tea parties with more guests and less to do. And so, on her mother's birthday, she'd hung around as the party had started, and as the most important guests had been announced, and as the orchestra started and a speech was given. And then, once she was no longer expected to sit still and look pretty and dainty, she'd slipped away. It hadn't been hard; nobody really expected her not to, and her father really was the indulgent sort, especially doting on his little girls.
On this sort of night on any other night, she'd probably have fetched one of her interchangeable playmates and taken them down to the cliffs to watch the sea crash as great storms brewed on the horizon. They always blew off to the west, presumably to wreak havoc on the Green Duchy, but it was exciting to watch them build up, exciting to see herself silhouetted by every flash of lightning. Besides, when she got bored of the wind and clouds and thunder, she could always take to climbing the jagged promontories that comprised nearly the entirety of the castle ground, or threaten to push her friend off unless they thought of something fun to do.
But, of course, it wasn't any other night. There were people everywhere, and thus nowhere to explore outside that wouldn't be full of the kind of guard that would drag her back into the palace regardless of how loud she yelled, or worse adults cluttering the place up doing adult things. So, she'd had to find somewhere indoors to amuse herself; since the party meant nearly everywhere in common use would be crammed with dullness and dresses, she'd dragged her companion of the evening up into the spacious attics and storage spaces that littered the upper reaches of the place. The Winter Palace was the least-used of her ancestral homes, and had been designed with the knowledge that would be the case; as such, it was simply crammed with nooks and crannies and closets and large rooms filled with old furniture and outdated clothes. They were always exciting, or at least interesting, to roam through if nothing better was possible.
At this very moment – although perhaps the concept is a little muddled in a place that spans a hundred years at once – she was picking her way over a pile of dressmaker's dummies, skirts balled up in her left hand and the right holding tight to a nearby wardrobe. Her friend was lagging behind; she was rapidly tiring of his clumsiness and constant fretting, but he'd been the best she'd been able to find. Well, okay, the first. She hadn't wanted to stick around and weave through the party to find a better playmate.
"Lillian, wait up!"
She turned around, nearly losing her balance. For a moment, she considered sneering something along the lines of that's Princess Lillian to you, but at heart she just wasn't that kind of person, royalty or no. Besides, she supposed it wasn't his fault he was a couple of years behind her. Still, boys were supposed to be less slow and clumsy than this, apprentice wizards or no.
She tapped her foot a couple times on a hollow chest, then nearly lost her balance again and clung to the wardrobe while he caught up. She stared for a moment as he reached Mount Dummies before realizing he was waiting for her to give him a hand up. With a sigh, she reached down and pulled. Needless to say, both of them toppled over the crest of the heap, landing in a tangle of limbs and bruised dignity on the other side.
"Oh, oh, owowowowwww..."
For once, Princess Lillian wasn't annoyed by his whining or general uselessness; she wasn't even paying attention to the piteous mewls he was spewing. Almost as soon as she'd landed, she sat bolt upright.
"Did you hear that?"
He furrowed his brow and sat up, biting his lip and cradling an elbow in the other arm.
"Hear what?"
"I don't know... It was like someone whispering, I think."
He cocked his head, but didn't hear anything. He hadn't heard anything before, either, but perhaps that wasn't surprising.
"Come on, let's go find it. Nobody should be up here, maybe it's a ghost!"
He shrank back slightly, but tried not to look too cowardly in front of the princess.
"I don't think, uh, I don't think looking for ghosts is a good idea."
She flounced as she stood up.
"Oh, pooh. Don't be such a..." she waved a hand, not having developed a very good vocabulary for this sort of thing. "I've met ghosts. They're not scary. Mostly they're kind of... Sad, I guess."
He climbed up by levering himself on the wardrobe's doors.
"Who said I'm scared? I just don't think bothering the kind of ghost that would hide in an attic is a very good idea."
"Hmph." She gently caressed an ornate brooch at her throat, bathing her fingernails near-imperceptibly blue. "Well, it's not a ghost, anyway. But there is something up here. I can feel it."
"Well, if it's not a ghost, then..."
"I don't know what! That's why we're going to find out. How can you not hear that?"
He cocked his head the other direction this time, but still heard nothing. Maybe she was playing some kind of joke on him; he'd heard she could be kind of mean sometimes. Royalty usually could be, even the nice ones. Probably that was just him worrying, though; he did tend to get teased a fair bit.
While he was musing, she'd already started off, and he scurried to keep up. It wasn't as hard to move here, at least; the attics tended to be better-organized the farther back you went, since older things get needed less often and nobody's going to go too far from the entrance to just shove something. There were still narrow squeezes here and there, though, and she was gaining ground pretty quickly. He was just considering levitating another drift of crates out of the way when he lost sight of her completely.
"Lillian?"
There was no response, and his heart started fluttering in his chest. Maybe there was a ghost, or worse. Maybe it had gotten her, and...
Something hit his head, and he panicked, shouting and throwing up a magical shield. Above him, wicked laughter cackled out, and he knew some sort of horrible witch was going to swoop down on him in about four seconds and tear his throat out and... Okay, a very young horrible witch. That giggled more than cackled.
As his shield flickered and faded, he looked up to see Lillian perched on top of the crates, holding an armful of what looked like wafer-glass baubles like the kind people hung from their ceilings around the solstices.
"You're so jumpy!"
He frowned, trying hard not to show how upset he was.
"That wasn't very nice."
Lillian's grin faded, and she slid down to the floor in a flurry of skirts and sleeves.
"Alright, I'm sorry. I just thought it would be kind of funny."
He sniffed hard. "It wasn't."
"I said I was sorry!"
She dumped her remaining missiles onto a nearby box and shrugged.
"Look, if you want to go back, I can–"
He shook his head. There was no way he was going to almost cry AND run back to the party over something so stupid.
"No, let's find your ghost thing. I can't not know what it is now."
She perked up and swirled off.
"I knew you'd start acting like a boy eventually! Come on, it's this way."
She didn't move as fast this time, letting him keep pace and lending a hand occasionally. He wasn't so useless, she supposed; probably just didn't have enough time to go out in the fresh air off studying magic and books. She'd have to make sure to get him in the sun more often. It'd be nice to have someone who could levitate things for her but wasn't so slow and frail.
Whatever she was hearing, she was hearing it a lot more loudly now. She had to be getting closer. What was a general direction was becoming a beeline, and her face and body tensed with excitement as she approached... something. Finally, she saw a large, ornate footlocker come into view around a corner, and she knew she was nearly there. She took a few steps, beckoning for her playmate to catch up, when a force gently grabbed her hand and pulled her back like a parent stopping their child from getting too close to a deep river.
"Oh, cut it out." She shook her hand hard, freeing it from the grasp. "You said it wasn't a ghost."
Behind her, a little voice said "Maybe you should listen to it if it says something's dangerous. There's worse things than ghosts, probably."
She clicked her tongue. "It says everything's dangerous. I'm still fine, aren't I? You said you didn't want to not know. Well now we're going to find out!"
Ignoring the wordless whispers of a dark presence is ahead, she shook her hand again and moved across the floor to the chest. After a moment of trying to lever the lid up, she beckoned. He nervously approached and gave her a hand opening the heavy wooden chest, and the pair, one excited, one apprehensive, peeked inside.
"... Empty? That's not fair!"
"I can't believe there's be nothing. What was your guardian spirit warning you about then?"
"I don't know, I can still hear... Hang on, wait... Haha, how silly of me!"
With a self-deprecating grin, she swished around behind the chest and picked something up. Grin widening to a beaming smile, she held her prize aloft.
"What is it?"
"It's magic."
---
In one timeline, which could not now be said to exist, there had been a revolution. The people had finally seen fit to throw off their monarchical rule; depending on who you asked, it was because their king and queen had been unjust and decadent, or because a decade of famine brought about by climatic change had spurred the peasantry to action even though it could do nothing to help them, or even because a small group of propagandists and assassins had decided that life would be better for them without royalty in it. Perhaps it didn't matter.
Legends were traded in the aftermath of brutality meeting brutality. The royal family was wiped out, they said, but for one survivor. The eldest daughter, whose beauty had always outshined her mother's and her sisters', had pleaded with the man who was to kill her; he'd taken pity on the tear-streaked vision in alabaster, secreting her out of the palace and replacing her with the body of someone else killed in the struggle.
In another, which would likely be replaced again as the minutes ticked down to the arrival of several beings from outside this place's history, much the same thing had happened, but the legends had changed. Now, it was the youngest daughter that had survived; she'd stared down the men that had killed her family, her friends, and simply said no, and they turned their swords on themselves as she swept imperiously past and disappeared into the night.
A woman that hadn't existed in what could be called the "true" history of the Ambitus Opera House sat huddled in the lee of some boxes. In her left hand, she held one gift from her mother, and in her right, she stroked the other. In her mind, a voice assured her that the moment she'd lived for was near at hand.
Muriegro was surrounded by props and boxes, costumery and hurriedly-hidden construction equipment. Cans of paint and rolls of carpet mingled with the more glamorous trappings of a large theatrical establishment's sundries. For all that the storage room he'd materialized in was fairly crowded, it was also surprisingly clean. It was also only crowded in the area immediately surrounding him; farther into what seemed to be some sort of attic, there was next to nothing, just wide expanses of recently-scrubbed floors. And then, even farther back, there were... Well, it was too dark to tell. Looked like more boxes and crates and forgotten clutter, anyway. Muriegro certainly wasn't about to spare any of it a second glance; he was too occupied frantically patting himself down and rifling through the containers nearest him. There was a distressing lightness about the priest's robes, and the closest approximation of concern that his slack face could muster was making itself obvious.
Years of only nominally free will had left Muriegro without the emotional range to effect a shift from Ambitus to the palace; his god, on the other hand, was a bottomless wellspring of rage, especially if it had just had another intoxicating victory toppled out from under it.
---
She was the youngest princess, which meant that she certainly wasn't expected to attend to any affairs of state. On the other hand, she wasn't so young anymore that she had handlers constantly buzzing about her, telling her what she could and couldn't do. Well, in theory she still did, but she'd finally gotten to that age where she'd realized she could just tell the various nurses and nannies and guards what they were allowed to tell her to do and where she could go. It was the same thing in practice, really.
She was also at that age where tea parties had really lost their luster, and frankly, all the high-society parties that were constantly being thrown for this reason or that one were just tea parties with more guests and less to do. And so, on her mother's birthday, she'd hung around as the party had started, and as the most important guests had been announced, and as the orchestra started and a speech was given. And then, once she was no longer expected to sit still and look pretty and dainty, she'd slipped away. It hadn't been hard; nobody really expected her not to, and her father really was the indulgent sort, especially doting on his little girls.
On this sort of night on any other night, she'd probably have fetched one of her interchangeable playmates and taken them down to the cliffs to watch the sea crash as great storms brewed on the horizon. They always blew off to the west, presumably to wreak havoc on the Green Duchy, but it was exciting to watch them build up, exciting to see herself silhouetted by every flash of lightning. Besides, when she got bored of the wind and clouds and thunder, she could always take to climbing the jagged promontories that comprised nearly the entirety of the castle ground, or threaten to push her friend off unless they thought of something fun to do.
But, of course, it wasn't any other night. There were people everywhere, and thus nowhere to explore outside that wouldn't be full of the kind of guard that would drag her back into the palace regardless of how loud she yelled, or worse adults cluttering the place up doing adult things. So, she'd had to find somewhere indoors to amuse herself; since the party meant nearly everywhere in common use would be crammed with dullness and dresses, she'd dragged her companion of the evening up into the spacious attics and storage spaces that littered the upper reaches of the place. The Winter Palace was the least-used of her ancestral homes, and had been designed with the knowledge that would be the case; as such, it was simply crammed with nooks and crannies and closets and large rooms filled with old furniture and outdated clothes. They were always exciting, or at least interesting, to roam through if nothing better was possible.
At this very moment – although perhaps the concept is a little muddled in a place that spans a hundred years at once – she was picking her way over a pile of dressmaker's dummies, skirts balled up in her left hand and the right holding tight to a nearby wardrobe. Her friend was lagging behind; she was rapidly tiring of his clumsiness and constant fretting, but he'd been the best she'd been able to find. Well, okay, the first. She hadn't wanted to stick around and weave through the party to find a better playmate.
"Lillian, wait up!"
She turned around, nearly losing her balance. For a moment, she considered sneering something along the lines of that's Princess Lillian to you, but at heart she just wasn't that kind of person, royalty or no. Besides, she supposed it wasn't his fault he was a couple of years behind her. Still, boys were supposed to be less slow and clumsy than this, apprentice wizards or no.
She tapped her foot a couple times on a hollow chest, then nearly lost her balance again and clung to the wardrobe while he caught up. She stared for a moment as he reached Mount Dummies before realizing he was waiting for her to give him a hand up. With a sigh, she reached down and pulled. Needless to say, both of them toppled over the crest of the heap, landing in a tangle of limbs and bruised dignity on the other side.
"Oh, oh, owowowowwww..."
For once, Princess Lillian wasn't annoyed by his whining or general uselessness; she wasn't even paying attention to the piteous mewls he was spewing. Almost as soon as she'd landed, she sat bolt upright.
"Did you hear that?"
He furrowed his brow and sat up, biting his lip and cradling an elbow in the other arm.
"Hear what?"
"I don't know... It was like someone whispering, I think."
He cocked his head, but didn't hear anything. He hadn't heard anything before, either, but perhaps that wasn't surprising.
"Come on, let's go find it. Nobody should be up here, maybe it's a ghost!"
He shrank back slightly, but tried not to look too cowardly in front of the princess.
"I don't think, uh, I don't think looking for ghosts is a good idea."
She flounced as she stood up.
"Oh, pooh. Don't be such a..." she waved a hand, not having developed a very good vocabulary for this sort of thing. "I've met ghosts. They're not scary. Mostly they're kind of... Sad, I guess."
He climbed up by levering himself on the wardrobe's doors.
"Who said I'm scared? I just don't think bothering the kind of ghost that would hide in an attic is a very good idea."
"Hmph." She gently caressed an ornate brooch at her throat, bathing her fingernails near-imperceptibly blue. "Well, it's not a ghost, anyway. But there is something up here. I can feel it."
"Well, if it's not a ghost, then..."
"I don't know what! That's why we're going to find out. How can you not hear that?"
He cocked his head the other direction this time, but still heard nothing. Maybe she was playing some kind of joke on him; he'd heard she could be kind of mean sometimes. Royalty usually could be, even the nice ones. Probably that was just him worrying, though; he did tend to get teased a fair bit.
While he was musing, she'd already started off, and he scurried to keep up. It wasn't as hard to move here, at least; the attics tended to be better-organized the farther back you went, since older things get needed less often and nobody's going to go too far from the entrance to just shove something. There were still narrow squeezes here and there, though, and she was gaining ground pretty quickly. He was just considering levitating another drift of crates out of the way when he lost sight of her completely.
"Lillian?"
There was no response, and his heart started fluttering in his chest. Maybe there was a ghost, or worse. Maybe it had gotten her, and...
Something hit his head, and he panicked, shouting and throwing up a magical shield. Above him, wicked laughter cackled out, and he knew some sort of horrible witch was going to swoop down on him in about four seconds and tear his throat out and... Okay, a very young horrible witch. That giggled more than cackled.
As his shield flickered and faded, he looked up to see Lillian perched on top of the crates, holding an armful of what looked like wafer-glass baubles like the kind people hung from their ceilings around the solstices.
"You're so jumpy!"
He frowned, trying hard not to show how upset he was.
"That wasn't very nice."
Lillian's grin faded, and she slid down to the floor in a flurry of skirts and sleeves.
"Alright, I'm sorry. I just thought it would be kind of funny."
He sniffed hard. "It wasn't."
"I said I was sorry!"
She dumped her remaining missiles onto a nearby box and shrugged.
"Look, if you want to go back, I can–"
He shook his head. There was no way he was going to almost cry AND run back to the party over something so stupid.
"No, let's find your ghost thing. I can't not know what it is now."
She perked up and swirled off.
"I knew you'd start acting like a boy eventually! Come on, it's this way."
She didn't move as fast this time, letting him keep pace and lending a hand occasionally. He wasn't so useless, she supposed; probably just didn't have enough time to go out in the fresh air off studying magic and books. She'd have to make sure to get him in the sun more often. It'd be nice to have someone who could levitate things for her but wasn't so slow and frail.
Whatever she was hearing, she was hearing it a lot more loudly now. She had to be getting closer. What was a general direction was becoming a beeline, and her face and body tensed with excitement as she approached... something. Finally, she saw a large, ornate footlocker come into view around a corner, and she knew she was nearly there. She took a few steps, beckoning for her playmate to catch up, when a force gently grabbed her hand and pulled her back like a parent stopping their child from getting too close to a deep river.
"Oh, cut it out." She shook her hand hard, freeing it from the grasp. "You said it wasn't a ghost."
Behind her, a little voice said "Maybe you should listen to it if it says something's dangerous. There's worse things than ghosts, probably."
She clicked her tongue. "It says everything's dangerous. I'm still fine, aren't I? You said you didn't want to not know. Well now we're going to find out!"
Ignoring the wordless whispers of a dark presence is ahead, she shook her hand again and moved across the floor to the chest. After a moment of trying to lever the lid up, she beckoned. He nervously approached and gave her a hand opening the heavy wooden chest, and the pair, one excited, one apprehensive, peeked inside.
"... Empty? That's not fair!"
"I can't believe there's be nothing. What was your guardian spirit warning you about then?"
"I don't know, I can still hear... Hang on, wait... Haha, how silly of me!"
With a self-deprecating grin, she swished around behind the chest and picked something up. Grin widening to a beaming smile, she held her prize aloft.
"What is it?"
"It's magic."
---
In one timeline, which could not now be said to exist, there had been a revolution. The people had finally seen fit to throw off their monarchical rule; depending on who you asked, it was because their king and queen had been unjust and decadent, or because a decade of famine brought about by climatic change had spurred the peasantry to action even though it could do nothing to help them, or even because a small group of propagandists and assassins had decided that life would be better for them without royalty in it. Perhaps it didn't matter.
Legends were traded in the aftermath of brutality meeting brutality. The royal family was wiped out, they said, but for one survivor. The eldest daughter, whose beauty had always outshined her mother's and her sisters', had pleaded with the man who was to kill her; he'd taken pity on the tear-streaked vision in alabaster, secreting her out of the palace and replacing her with the body of someone else killed in the struggle.
In another, which would likely be replaced again as the minutes ticked down to the arrival of several beings from outside this place's history, much the same thing had happened, but the legends had changed. Now, it was the youngest daughter that had survived; she'd stared down the men that had killed her family, her friends, and simply said no, and they turned their swords on themselves as she swept imperiously past and disappeared into the night.
A woman that hadn't existed in what could be called the "true" history of the Ambitus Opera House sat huddled in the lee of some boxes. In her left hand, she held one gift from her mother, and in her right, she stroked the other. In her mind, a voice assured her that the moment she'd lived for was near at hand.