QUIETUS [S!5] [Round 3: Deluge]

Robin had Chaete's soul on the brain too, though it was probably less of a good thing.

The Outsider had dumped her in some kind of dormitory, a hallway flanked with walls arrayed all trypophobic extending up to the distant ceiling. Some of the holes (the old inhabitants weren't simian, Robin discerned that much) were still plugged up with some kind of gel, hardened through eons of disuse and crumbling at Robin's touch. The space between the walls, though wide enough for five people to walk through shoulder-to-shoulder, felt narrow against the sheer size of the walls on either side.

Robin swatted spun-sugar fragments of once-liquid door out of the air, before giving up and kicking off the wall to somewhere tidier. The wall lit up where she struck, just enough to let her properly see what she was doing, before she bounced (in a stately manner, she hoped) off the other wall. She punched a few more walls for good measure before easing herself down to the ground, just in case someone turned on the gravity on without warning her. (Wait, was this even the floor? Robin deliberated, then eased herself and her gear into one of the cells. Better safe then sorry, right?)

Robin struggled around for a bit, trying to repose herself in a way that'd avoid bruising anything regardless of potential falling direction, then carefully unlocked her briefcase and fished out her equipment. She untangled the wires, listened for anything over the ambient creaks of the ship, then booted up her laptop and plugged everything in, including her headphones. That done, she unfolded a motionlessly energetic piece of paper from her pocket, and fed it into the auxillary machine once her computer got done installing device software.

"Alright. Mr. Cathedral, can you hear me?"

A burst of static. Robin had to remind herself to not seek patterns in the white noise; what her conscience parsed as bestial fury could just as easily be a cry of post-mortal confusion. She click-dragged the audio clip into the - alt-tab - spectrography program, and tried again.

"Up you get," Robin chided, muttering further encouragement to the hissing in her ears. "Yup, yeah. Good." A tiny grin froze at an untoward sound from somewhere beyond the dorm, but the first chunk of audio finished scanning with a reassuring ddink. The language was unrecognised; translation quality, 12%. Robin hit "playback".

<expletive>, <query>, <expletive>, <expletive>, <expletive>

"Good good good. We'll try the command line next, ok?"

It started with /querip spec1 NAME, and proceeded pretty smoothly from there. Simple questions, simple answers, stringing together from cobwebs and branching logics a Stygian bridge. Robin ran the original clip through the improved translator, grinning a bit wider at the sheer creativity of the spirit's foul mouth. A wordsmith and a saint-to-be, probably, if only he'd run most anyone else through the stomach.

"Awesome. Ok, so. Cathedral. You're listening? That's rhetorical. Anyway, here's what's up."

<expletive>, <command>, <amend-"kəˈθiːdril"/"diːkən kəˈθiːdrəl">, <expletive>, <expletive>, <query>

"You got a rather fatal case of systemic, uh, hypoxia - heheh - on the operating table, what with all of your blood ending up outside of you. I patched up that sack of Godzilla antagonist offcuts, but we couldn't have you in charge of it, obviously. So! I put an Inderigan in there and figured, hey, why not keep you on hand?"

<expletive>, <expletive>, <expletive>, <command>, <expletive>

"Haha, yeah. I'll release you, sure. Don't bother trying to haunt me or anything though, we've both got better things to be doing." Robin glanced at the animeter, which clearly wasn't doing its desired job in zero gravity. She'd have to go find Florica after this; stop getting distracted when she had more important things to be doing. Robin hadn't even considered how lucky she was, that the round had ended while her and Florica were in the operating circle. Could Florica carry her resident spirits between universes? If Cathedral hadn't "killed" Robin in whatever sense of the word qualified in the eyes of the Outsider, then what had happened to the worm?

So much to think about, and at least three, wait, no, four - five? people who'd be a better use of her time to talk to. She'd only met the one fellow contestant that whole time in the valley; had it been the same for the others?

Cathedral, meanwhile, had not been waiting patiently. Robin refocussed, scanned the three-odd minutes of foul invective with disinterest.

"Right. Yeah. So, once I release your spirit, I need you to try find your way back to your home universe. Not that I know what kind of afterlife Visindi or anyone else has set up for you guys, but I'm sure you'd rather the final fragments of your stab-happy existence disintegrate back into that reality instead of this one."

<query<APPEND: fear>>

Robin shrugged, running a finger around the blood-encrusted stab wound in her coat. There'd be one on the back, too, wouldn't there? "It's my going theory. Not a sure thing, but think of it this way. If you make it home, and I manage to track you all the way back, then we'll be communicating across universes! Visindi'll be pretty pleased with your discovery, if he's still alive. Hell, maybe the Inderigans will build you a new chassis if you sell the secrets of the multiverse out to them."

<expletive>, <query>

"It's your funeral. Uh, choice of final resting place. Look, I've got other souls to work with if you're dead-set on doing everything to avoid helping me. I'm just giving you a chance to be part of something bigger, you get me?"

Robin began packing peripherals away, saving audio clips and project files and giving the battery meter in the corner of the screen a pensive look. She left everything hanging for a moment as she poked her head out into the main hallway, alert to any signs of life.

Nope. No, wait. Double-nope! All this gravity business had gotten her looking in the completely wrong direction, as somewhere up near what was (albeit by total conjecture) the ceiling, one of the tunnel-like hallways out of here was the source of a distant "eeeeeeeeeeeeee".

Robin just waited patiently for a moment, until that lady with the witch hat was launched bodily out into the main hallway, roughly contiguous with the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeing. Anila clipped a handrail with her foot, motion shifting seamlessly from torpedo to boomerang. She barely got her legs back between her and the section of wall she was about to collide into, springing off in what probably wasn't the intended direction.

Robin grinned, then ducked back into her requisitioned pod-chamber and quickly scooped everything up back into her Visindian field backpack. Anila hurtled by just as she stuck her head out again, yelling "hey!"

I told you to keep quiet, Anila! What's the point of announcing your presence to potential threats?

What's the point in fretting over a potential threat if they greet me? Come on! Let's go say hello, just as soon as I figure out which way's up.

Robin had, meanwhile, drifted out into the space between the hole-studded walls, trying to look like she regularly talked to bluish people without showing any emotions along the lines of concern. "Hiya. I think we're in that thing together, with the Outsider?"

"Hey! You're that necromancer, aren't you?" The adventurer still hadn't quite gotten the hang of conserved momentum, and the two halves of that sentence ended up in two different ears.

"I prefer necrologist," Robin said in her best neutral voice, hooking an ankle round a rail and fixing a receding Anila in her vision. "People tend to get funny ideas with that word. Start worrying I'm going to raise an undead army, or steal your soul to power a flesh golem or something."

"So you - oof!" Anila slammed into the wall beside Robin, scrambling for handholds and catching her breath before turning to a flagrantly upside-down necroma-sorry, necrologist. "So you don't actually do those things?"

"No." Robin took the look she was given as disappointment, and grinned a bit. "I'm working on it. That's a joke. As for what I actually do, I'm... hrm. Do you have physicists where you come from?"

Anila was looking around for her hat, spotted it lurking up near the opening she'd entered from. "... Physicians? Fzz'i'drits? Last I heard I killed the last of those off. By accident! I thought it was just a regular old dragon-"

"I'll figure out a way to explain it," Robin sighed. "Later. For now, how about we fetch your hat, get to making some sense of this place, and figure out what we know?"