Re: Intense Struggle Season 2! (Round 2: Infinity Express)
01-21-2011, 04:13 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by MalkyTop.
Karen didn’t exactly leave behind a relaxed atmosphere. Everybody stood around for a while, sort of glancing at each other, knowing where to go but not exactly comfortable with the current company. Sarika stared at Burden suspiciously while she found herself standing between Marcus and Lillian. The girl was clutching onto her dress and glaring at Marcus in a way only a child could and Marcus tried to ignore this as he healed up and tucked the leftovers of the potion away. But it was still a little funny glancing at her and watching her flinch and hide behind the bird woman.
It didn’t sound like a fight had started yet. “Alright,” said Sarika, clapping her wings together, hardly making a sound at all. “I guess we—“
She couldn’t say much more than that because the train gave a warning shudder before, quite loudly, shutting off the strong magnets that held it to the tracks. Or at least one half did. The other half wondered what the hell it was doing and was thus too busy to think to stop before something disastrous happened.
Then something disastrous happened.
The train, which had been going around a corner at the time, suddenly had the back end go careening off the tracks, dropping slightly as it spun around from its tether. The front end continued barreling forward, meaning the back that trailed beneath would never really catch up and bash itself right into the side of the front.
And then the rest of the magnets shut off.
The front was pulled down off the tracks by the back and the train was then just spinning in space, end over end (actually slightly diagonally but whatever). Not a lot of passengers expected this, though most of them didn’t need to worry.
Marcus acted quickly, at least, and caught hold of a seat as he fell, thanking god that something else didn’t happen like his arm dislocating or something. A few seconds later, Sarika bounced lightly off his head and clung to his shoulders before she could fall any further, hitting his head with her staff in the process. A few seconds after that, she caught Lillian as the girl fell by. On the other side, Burden had managed to grab on and sit down in a seat. Slowly, the train continued spinning and the ceiling became the floor.
It was spinning slowly enough that Marcus felt safe dropping down, especially seeing that Burden had dropped down as well. The ceiling was already starting to slope towards the front of the train, but it wasn’t quite an incline yet. As Sarika comforted Lillian again, Marcus glanced out the window, though it wasn’t like he was going to see something. He managed to catch sight of the glowing tracks as they floated serenely away. Everything seems to float serenely in space. Or a void.
“Well, it looks like the train has been derailed,” Burden said, sounding suspiciously chipper.
“Yes, derailed it has been!” a voice crowed from the other end of the train.
Lloyd stumbled and hung onto the frame of the doorway for support as the train started tilting drastically again. Behind him, Reudic floated stoically, not at all affected by these topsy-turvey shenanigans.
Marcus slid down closer before taking a seat on the back of a chair. “Well, I guess that’s one thing done for me.” He paused, listening to the soft voices of the other three further back. A tiny ‘thump’ further along seemed to indicate the start of a fight. “Now what?”
A few seconds passed as the train went full circle and the floor turned into the floor again.
Sarika was with them this time. “There doesn’t happen to be a way to stop this stupid train spinning, is there?”
Lloyd shrugged. “I can’t say I really thought about that so much,” he admitted.
“I see. So you derailed a train without knowing if you’ll be able to steer it afterwards.” Lloyd nodded back much too happily for Sarika’s liking. “And why did you even do this?”
Lloyd paused to let the ceiling become the floor again. At the other part of the car, Lillian found that while the plush carpeting was soft, the smooth ceiling allowed her to slide around quite a bit. And this she did, using the train’s growing incline as a slide. Not good to let a good slide go to waste.
“You wanted to derail it too, didn’t you?” he finally asked and Sarika impatiently nodded. “Well then.” He managed to bow graciously and sarcastically at the same time. “I did it thinking of you.”
Sarika turned her head and made a scoffing sound. “Well, while you were busy derailing the train in the name of love, did you happen to notice anything that could possibly steer a train?”
Lloyd raised his hands defensively. “Hey, I’m an electrician, not a train engineer.”
The others let this pass without question.
“Well,” Marcus started. “They had to have had some procedure in case something like this happened. Maybe rockets.”
“Yeah, there might be something about rockets on the control panel. We could go check.”
“I can’t really help but think that it would be hard to control rockets while the room is spinning,” Sarika commented. “…But we should probably go check it out. Karen can’t hold up against Charlie forever.”
“Karen’s fighting Charlie?” Lloyd frowned at the other end of the car. “…She told you not to help, did she.”
“In so many words,” Marcus smirked. “She basically told us to go back to the kitchen while she went to do the dirty work.”
Lloyd grinned widely. “Knowing her, she probably even welded the door shut so you couldn’t follow her.”
“We didn’t check yet,” Sarika said, her tone the most serious out of all of them. “Let’s go before the train starts turning again. Let’s go, Lillian!”
And thus began Sarika’s backtrack across spinning rooms she had been to before. The bar’s floor was littered with broken glass where the drinks had slid right off. A few of the patrons there were in various stages of spitting their drinks out. Sarika glanced at Lloyd before picking up Lillian (who was a little heavier than she thought).
“By the way,” Lloyd whispered to her. “Who’s the frog man?”
Sarika looked over to Burden for a few seconds, who seemed to be quite happy striding behind them. “I have no idea.”
Ballroom car. Parts of the floor seemed to have gotten slipperier since the last time she had been here. Some parts of the crowd had fallen victim to this strange turn of events. Sarika glanced at Lloyd again, who wasn’t particularly bothering to hide it this time. How fortunate that they were on the ceiling for now.
“You know,” Lloyd said casually as they tried to quickly cross the rather large ceiling. “If you’re so hung up about whether we can actually steer the train or not, can’t you look in the future and see if the train still happens to be spinning?”
Sarika remained silent for a moment. Reudic gently but crossly told Lillian not to hang onto his vines. “Well, I certainly can’t say how far I’m looking, but in the future, we’re already out of this room.”
“Couldn’t have guessed,” said Marcus, who she hadn’t realized was even listening. They passed on into the next car.
“Ha. In any case, I think it was still spinning. Also…” she hesitated for a moment, causing both men to glance at her. “Also, I think we should hurry.”
"What? Why?" Though nobody really doubted her enough to not walk briskly.
“I’m not quite sure yet. Let me get back to you on that.”
They crossed over to another car.
“Okay, so what did it look like?”
Sarika hesitated again. “I…the car sort of…just…” They crossed over to another car. “...slid out of view.”
A moment’s silence. Sarika picked up a tired Lillian and once again marveled how heavy she was.
“You mean like moving over to the next car?” Marcus asked as they exited the sleeping quarters.
“Um, maybe. But there wasn’t any car. Just, you know, blackness. Like outside.”
This indeed implied something worrying but it wasn’t like any of them exactly knew how it would come to be. But as they stood on the wall of the door that led to the next car, Sarika suddenly said, “Oh my god I’m an idiot.”
“What?” Lloyd asked sharply before Sarika suddenly thrust Lillian into his arms. The girl struggled to an upright position.
“Wait! Where’re you going?” she cried out, almost tearing up.
“Can’t explain. I can take care of it myself. You guys keep going and make sure you figure out how to steer this train fast.” And with that, Sarika launched herself from the wall and held on to a door knob. The door opened and served as another platform for her to leap off of, and in seconds, she was moving back through the door they had just entered.
Lloyd and Marcus exchanged glances, stared at the door again, then looked at Lillian, who was making the sort of face that usually preceded a rather wet and salty emotion.
“You don’t happen to know—“
“No,” said Marcus very firmly. Lloyd turned towards Reudic and immediately thought better of it.
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And yes, here it was, about three cars down, back in the gloomy business room. She slightly suspected Lloyd had also done something here though it wasn’t immediately obvious yet. She waited. And yes, there was the tick, the tick she had previously convinced herself wasn’t there. Some snooping around uncovered a slowly ticking briefcase.
Some point in the future, it was obviously supposed to explode. The ballroom car was floating away because it was separated from the rest of the train. Everybody from there all the way to the end of the train would be stranded in space. All the passengers. And Karen.
Oh god what was she supposed to do with bombs was she supposed to disarm it? But Sarika quickly stopped herself from opening the briefcase. What if it was supposed to explode once she opened it?
Okay, she could probably throw it out the window.
But though Sarika was no science nerd, she had at least heard stories about that thing. Explosive decompression or whatever. That didn’t sound pleasant for her or for the businessmen that happened to be in the room with her.
The room turned again as she ran through random ideas. Okay, okay, so she just had to let it explode in another part of the train. She couldn’t let it explode in a car with people in it though. And it shouldn’t end up stranding anybody. That would mean…carrying it all the way to the end, probably. Though wait, did Marcus say something about blowing windows out? Was that supposed to be an exaggeration? Well maybe if she happened to see open windows along the way, she’ll chuck it out. But wait, she had to get past Charlie and Karen’s fight so that Karen wouldn’t get freaking stranded.
Sarika found that she had already started moving, briefcase clutched tightly in her metallic hand. Whatever happens, she had to get it out of the way before it exploded.
Karen, if you really did weld the door shut, I will hate you forever.
Karen didn’t exactly leave behind a relaxed atmosphere. Everybody stood around for a while, sort of glancing at each other, knowing where to go but not exactly comfortable with the current company. Sarika stared at Burden suspiciously while she found herself standing between Marcus and Lillian. The girl was clutching onto her dress and glaring at Marcus in a way only a child could and Marcus tried to ignore this as he healed up and tucked the leftovers of the potion away. But it was still a little funny glancing at her and watching her flinch and hide behind the bird woman.
It didn’t sound like a fight had started yet. “Alright,” said Sarika, clapping her wings together, hardly making a sound at all. “I guess we—“
She couldn’t say much more than that because the train gave a warning shudder before, quite loudly, shutting off the strong magnets that held it to the tracks. Or at least one half did. The other half wondered what the hell it was doing and was thus too busy to think to stop before something disastrous happened.
Then something disastrous happened.
The train, which had been going around a corner at the time, suddenly had the back end go careening off the tracks, dropping slightly as it spun around from its tether. The front end continued barreling forward, meaning the back that trailed beneath would never really catch up and bash itself right into the side of the front.
And then the rest of the magnets shut off.
The front was pulled down off the tracks by the back and the train was then just spinning in space, end over end (actually slightly diagonally but whatever). Not a lot of passengers expected this, though most of them didn’t need to worry.
Marcus acted quickly, at least, and caught hold of a seat as he fell, thanking god that something else didn’t happen like his arm dislocating or something. A few seconds later, Sarika bounced lightly off his head and clung to his shoulders before she could fall any further, hitting his head with her staff in the process. A few seconds after that, she caught Lillian as the girl fell by. On the other side, Burden had managed to grab on and sit down in a seat. Slowly, the train continued spinning and the ceiling became the floor.
It was spinning slowly enough that Marcus felt safe dropping down, especially seeing that Burden had dropped down as well. The ceiling was already starting to slope towards the front of the train, but it wasn’t quite an incline yet. As Sarika comforted Lillian again, Marcus glanced out the window, though it wasn’t like he was going to see something. He managed to catch sight of the glowing tracks as they floated serenely away. Everything seems to float serenely in space. Or a void.
“Well, it looks like the train has been derailed,” Burden said, sounding suspiciously chipper.
“Yes, derailed it has been!” a voice crowed from the other end of the train.
Lloyd stumbled and hung onto the frame of the doorway for support as the train started tilting drastically again. Behind him, Reudic floated stoically, not at all affected by these topsy-turvey shenanigans.
Marcus slid down closer before taking a seat on the back of a chair. “Well, I guess that’s one thing done for me.” He paused, listening to the soft voices of the other three further back. A tiny ‘thump’ further along seemed to indicate the start of a fight. “Now what?”
A few seconds passed as the train went full circle and the floor turned into the floor again.
Sarika was with them this time. “There doesn’t happen to be a way to stop this stupid train spinning, is there?”
Lloyd shrugged. “I can’t say I really thought about that so much,” he admitted.
“I see. So you derailed a train without knowing if you’ll be able to steer it afterwards.” Lloyd nodded back much too happily for Sarika’s liking. “And why did you even do this?”
Lloyd paused to let the ceiling become the floor again. At the other part of the car, Lillian found that while the plush carpeting was soft, the smooth ceiling allowed her to slide around quite a bit. And this she did, using the train’s growing incline as a slide. Not good to let a good slide go to waste.
“You wanted to derail it too, didn’t you?” he finally asked and Sarika impatiently nodded. “Well then.” He managed to bow graciously and sarcastically at the same time. “I did it thinking of you.”
Sarika turned her head and made a scoffing sound. “Well, while you were busy derailing the train in the name of love, did you happen to notice anything that could possibly steer a train?”
Lloyd raised his hands defensively. “Hey, I’m an electrician, not a train engineer.”
The others let this pass without question.
“Well,” Marcus started. “They had to have had some procedure in case something like this happened. Maybe rockets.”
“Yeah, there might be something about rockets on the control panel. We could go check.”
“I can’t really help but think that it would be hard to control rockets while the room is spinning,” Sarika commented. “…But we should probably go check it out. Karen can’t hold up against Charlie forever.”
“Karen’s fighting Charlie?” Lloyd frowned at the other end of the car. “…She told you not to help, did she.”
“In so many words,” Marcus smirked. “She basically told us to go back to the kitchen while she went to do the dirty work.”
Lloyd grinned widely. “Knowing her, she probably even welded the door shut so you couldn’t follow her.”
“We didn’t check yet,” Sarika said, her tone the most serious out of all of them. “Let’s go before the train starts turning again. Let’s go, Lillian!”
And thus began Sarika’s backtrack across spinning rooms she had been to before. The bar’s floor was littered with broken glass where the drinks had slid right off. A few of the patrons there were in various stages of spitting their drinks out. Sarika glanced at Lloyd before picking up Lillian (who was a little heavier than she thought).
“By the way,” Lloyd whispered to her. “Who’s the frog man?”
Sarika looked over to Burden for a few seconds, who seemed to be quite happy striding behind them. “I have no idea.”
Ballroom car. Parts of the floor seemed to have gotten slipperier since the last time she had been here. Some parts of the crowd had fallen victim to this strange turn of events. Sarika glanced at Lloyd again, who wasn’t particularly bothering to hide it this time. How fortunate that they were on the ceiling for now.
“You know,” Lloyd said casually as they tried to quickly cross the rather large ceiling. “If you’re so hung up about whether we can actually steer the train or not, can’t you look in the future and see if the train still happens to be spinning?”
Sarika remained silent for a moment. Reudic gently but crossly told Lillian not to hang onto his vines. “Well, I certainly can’t say how far I’m looking, but in the future, we’re already out of this room.”
“Couldn’t have guessed,” said Marcus, who she hadn’t realized was even listening. They passed on into the next car.
“Ha. In any case, I think it was still spinning. Also…” she hesitated for a moment, causing both men to glance at her. “Also, I think we should hurry.”
"What? Why?" Though nobody really doubted her enough to not walk briskly.
“I’m not quite sure yet. Let me get back to you on that.”
They crossed over to another car.
“Okay, so what did it look like?”
Sarika hesitated again. “I…the car sort of…just…” They crossed over to another car. “...slid out of view.”
A moment’s silence. Sarika picked up a tired Lillian and once again marveled how heavy she was.
“You mean like moving over to the next car?” Marcus asked as they exited the sleeping quarters.
“Um, maybe. But there wasn’t any car. Just, you know, blackness. Like outside.”
This indeed implied something worrying but it wasn’t like any of them exactly knew how it would come to be. But as they stood on the wall of the door that led to the next car, Sarika suddenly said, “Oh my god I’m an idiot.”
“What?” Lloyd asked sharply before Sarika suddenly thrust Lillian into his arms. The girl struggled to an upright position.
“Wait! Where’re you going?” she cried out, almost tearing up.
“Can’t explain. I can take care of it myself. You guys keep going and make sure you figure out how to steer this train fast.” And with that, Sarika launched herself from the wall and held on to a door knob. The door opened and served as another platform for her to leap off of, and in seconds, she was moving back through the door they had just entered.
Lloyd and Marcus exchanged glances, stared at the door again, then looked at Lillian, who was making the sort of face that usually preceded a rather wet and salty emotion.
“You don’t happen to know—“
“No,” said Marcus very firmly. Lloyd turned towards Reudic and immediately thought better of it.
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And yes, here it was, about three cars down, back in the gloomy business room. She slightly suspected Lloyd had also done something here though it wasn’t immediately obvious yet. She waited. And yes, there was the tick, the tick she had previously convinced herself wasn’t there. Some snooping around uncovered a slowly ticking briefcase.
Some point in the future, it was obviously supposed to explode. The ballroom car was floating away because it was separated from the rest of the train. Everybody from there all the way to the end of the train would be stranded in space. All the passengers. And Karen.
Oh god what was she supposed to do with bombs was she supposed to disarm it? But Sarika quickly stopped herself from opening the briefcase. What if it was supposed to explode once she opened it?
Okay, she could probably throw it out the window.
But though Sarika was no science nerd, she had at least heard stories about that thing. Explosive decompression or whatever. That didn’t sound pleasant for her or for the businessmen that happened to be in the room with her.
The room turned again as she ran through random ideas. Okay, okay, so she just had to let it explode in another part of the train. She couldn’t let it explode in a car with people in it though. And it shouldn’t end up stranding anybody. That would mean…carrying it all the way to the end, probably. Though wait, did Marcus say something about blowing windows out? Was that supposed to be an exaggeration? Well maybe if she happened to see open windows along the way, she’ll chuck it out. But wait, she had to get past Charlie and Karen’s fight so that Karen wouldn’t get freaking stranded.
Sarika found that she had already started moving, briefcase clutched tightly in her metallic hand. Whatever happens, she had to get it out of the way before it exploded.
Karen, if you really did weld the door shut, I will hate you forever.