5568/Exploration: Chopping Grounds (3)

Exploration: Chopping Grounds (3)
Date of Scene:	13 November 2017
Location:	Lumiere
Synopsis:	More mysteries of Lumiere are revealed, providing as many questions as answers.
Cast of Characters:	513, Staren, Priscilla, Count Kord, Tomoe, 974

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Finna (513) has posed:
Drat and darnation! She finally gets here only to be outfoxed. A competetive urge is starting to boil in Finna. She MUST get one up on this strange figure who keeps outmanuevering her. But a part of her brakes screechingly on those thoughts - just not enough. Any girl who's casually walking around here and able to complete elude her must be very powerful.. or some kind of illusory trick.

    But she appeared in that vision.

    Doubts and uncertainties play across the Lunar's vulpine face as she looks around.

    She turns around and very nearly leaves in a huff... but then the kind of room she's ended up in catches her eye. Writing. Writing everywhere.

    Maps. Papers.

    "... Did she lead me here on purpose? ... Did she know I was following her...?" Either of those answers would be troubling. Finna dives right back into investigating the room and starts looking over the materials. She's no scholar, but maybe she can make a little sense out of what sort of person used this room? What they were up to?

    She looks up and... blink blink blink.

    Finna smoothly shapeshifts back to human form, allowing the divine power flowing through her veins and soul to manifest as her own glittering silvery Changing Moon mark on her forehead and a gently burning aura of filmy, wispy, cold-fire moonlight wraps her up. She's armed herself with the Moonsilver bow, quiver at the ready this time.

    "Okaaaaaaaaaay. Who's playing games with the huntress?"

Staren has posed:
    Suddenly the ground is falling away. Staren is so surprised that it takes him a second to remember he can fly -- and then, seeing Tomoe, he dives after her, avoiding blood waterfalls (man that would be unpleasant to get covered in, even if this body can't throw up). "Gotcha!" Using both thrusters and wings, he flies back up into... Emptiness? <"Guys? Guys, is anyone here?"> He looks around for a few seconds, then starts scanning the area with more esoteric sensors. "...Looks like we fell through a one-way portal. I don't detect any spatial anomalies indicative of return portals." He elaborates, for Tomoe's benefit. "I guess we'd better see where we are."

    Since the Grim Bone Gate(?) is such an obvious landmark, he lands by it. "So what do you think? Lumiere is below the world above... and now we're below Lumiere? Is this the gateway to Double Hell? Where things go when they double die?"

    (Wisecracking is how Staren deals with stressful uncertainty, and distracts himself from the thought of how he doesn't exactly know how to get back from here)

Priscilla has posed:
    Priscilla has faith in both Staren and Tomoe that they're built surprisingly tough and both good at getting out of the lurch consistently (relatively) intact. That's been her experience with having them with her through Lordran, and elsewhere.

    Though it is no fault of their own, maybe that's an estimation she shouldn't have gambled on, when Priscilla sneakily squeezes through the thrashing crowd to extricate herself from the growing melee, only to watch the floor to crumble behind her, and see Staren and Tomoe both drop into the Abyss. Granted, she wouldn't be too eager to take that fall herself, not being possessed of any sort of flight like they are, but it's a bit of an anti-karmic gut punch, to say the least. All she can do for several seconds is linger behind at the edge of the gap and hesitate on what to do, before the strange illusion takes over.

    "Again, with this." she says aloud, almost hoping that the ill-advised noise making would draw something else out. Lumiere is almost worse when it is suddenly empty and quiet, than when it is crawling with the dead. "And again, with thee." she says with even less pleasure when Finna pops back out. "I am most certainly hoping that the only association this world wouldst draw between the two of us is so plainly demonstrated upon the marble" she says, gesturing towards the moon iconography. "Otherwise . . ."

    "Never thou mind." She eventually decides to just leave it, slipping in to check on the writing, to see if any of it is comprehensible, taking any maps that appear to be useable especially.

Count Kord has posed:
    Kord has a dark structure to advance upon. His only mercy is that he doesn't have the others to distract him right now. He flits toward the strange, infested structure, his silhouette muddied by his power over darkness and sound muffled by his owl-like flight.

    He inspects the building, top to bottom, seeking any entrance besides the front door. He looks for a way to enter that seems the safest. But if he has to, he will enter through the front door. He has decided to investigate what he can of the illusions the Darkness brings to him... if, indeed, they are illusions at all.

    He pulls a frigid coin from his pocket, and inspects it in the middle of his investigations, the physical proof that the illusion may not be a mirage at all.

Tomoe has posed:
So things are just getting worse here, Tomoe might even question her own sanity of poking into things like this further. Then again she can't leave once she's started something normally and in the end people with nothing to gain? Helped save her and the rest of the SAO survivors from. However things are going bad she does not have any light of the type she needs to fly. so she's falling, she's falling and making ready to do what she can to use this shaft? Or is it a shaft? She has no idea at this point.

Her mind races she makes ready to attempt to use the wall in a way to start rebounding down but then comes Staren. She's caught and looking very sheepish as this happens.

"Thanks."

She hopes Priscilla, Kord and Finna are all right, but there's little she can do about that for the moment..

"...right and it seems I owe you one Staren."

She looks about trying to take things in.

"Not enough over done Christian symbolism to be double hell I think."

Carna (974) has posed:
    The maps and writings that were kept in a small room, behind a chained door, are now freely accessible to Priscilla in this new environment. Or this new version of the old one. There is no door to block her path, no chains, no obstacle of any kind. The building is still smallish, but easily enough for a human-sized person to fit into. The maps and writings seem to depict a number of areas, some of which they've been to, some they haven't. Some seem to be blue prints for machines of some kind.

    But the vast majority seem to be designs and drawings of dolls, puppets, dresses and accessories, as well as something like circuit patterns expressed in runes and glyphs. There is even a doll nearby, incomplete, but demonstrating that exact pattern all over its porcelain skin.

    It is much brighter here than in the other version of this place. Light is ambient as well as shining down from crystal panes high above, producing shafts of pale white moonlight on everything.

    Of potential use, at least one of the most prominently displayed maps collected includes a helpful layout of the very streets they now walk, in a place apparently known as the 'Sub-Terra Luna Temple'. Clearly marked on the map is a large platform of some kind that seems to link this place to the 'ground level' of Barrowville above, here denoted as Tafos Anapafsi. Everything written on these papers is in some dialect of Greek.

    And signed at the bottom of this map, in golden letters, is the name 'Cro'.

    There is suddenly a squeaking sound from nearby. It appears there's something like a furry white lizard about the size of a large cat sitting outside the building staring at them with big yellow eyes. It sits up on its hind legs, fore legs held like a dog begging, or like a prairie dog, dipping its head this way and that and peeking at the goings-on of these two strange people. To Finna's senses, it smells like morning dew, and like night-blooming flowers, and like a misty lake under the moon, rather than like an animal. But this is the land of the dead, so maybe it's better than the alternative.

Carna (974) has posed:
Sub-Terra Luna Temple (Moonlight) - <Lumiere>
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    An area seemingly made up of pristine white sandstone buildings, or possible some sort of marble is what lies ahead and around. They appear almost like habitations, but perhaps more like shrines or temples. The ones accessible are open and empty, while others don't appear to have any intended entrance or exit, and are simply solid stone. Everywhere, the imagery of the moon can be found, especially crescent moons. The sensation of something like a divine influence adds additional presence to the air, light and feathery in its touches upon the mind, rather than an oppressive power.

    There is ambient light here, as well as occasional shafts of such from above, pale like moonlight... For that is what it is. Where once were cracks in the distant ceilign formed by the gaps between buildings, leading to the grounds around Escher, there is now a vaulted ceiling, with fluted columns bending like skeletal ribs towards crystal panes that refract and distribute the moonlight all over this... Temple city.

    There are no signs of inhabitants, but there are silhouettes upon the walls in places. Painted there or some kind of shadow art is unclear, but they depict a variety of people engaged in a variety of activities, forever frozen in the moment.

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Contents
Finna <Shining Silver Tattoos>
No One <She's Not Here>
Priscilla <A Pair Of Footprints Follows Her Around>
White Furred Beast <Chirping And Squeaking>

Carna (974) has posed:
    After Staren and Tomoe land, they find themselves in an area strikingly familiar. If not for the towers of machinery around them, the recently addition of lava-blood pooling and melting through the ground, and all the wreckage that has fallen down in their wake, producing an enormous racket that echoes for several minutes in this vast space, it would be a perfect reproduction of the place that people arrive in initially when they enter Lumiere. Oh, and the gate is red instead of gray here.

    There is an awful lot of machines here, some archaic computer-looking, others more digital, others far more ancient like steam pumps or something, and the rest difficult to ascertain any purpose to at all. There are also almost bio-mechanical tubes and cables snaking across the floor and throughout the maze of machinery. In places, it appears to be merging into the other machines, gradully corrupting and converting it into psuedo-flesh.

    The bodies of the Lantern-like things that normally work down here, and fell with them, not possessing the ability to fly, are already dissolving into Dead Lights. Hopefully the things they needed their weapons to fight won't be drawn by the sound or the smell of soul essence to be consumed.

Carna (974) has posed:
Second Layer (Law and Chaos) - <Lumiere>
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    A great expanse of black marble stretches out in every direction. Pools of flaming blood have begun to form and spread across the vast plane, and melt down through steel grids over emptiness into even further, darker depths below. Wreckage has fallen and heaped up in an area nearby a large red gateway of some kind. Outside of this cluttered locale, there are bridges and walkways, ladders and platforms, all arranged in the midst of the towering labyrinth of working machinery of strange and hard-to-define purpose. Whether they are computers or steam pumps or the workings of some less earthly contraption, is hard to say.

    But power flows through them, giving electricity to at least part of Lumiere. The red gate greatly resembles the Grim Bone Gate, right down to the design of the skeletons either seemingly trying to pull the doors open or hold them shut. Where it leads, however, is very different. The patterns of wheels and gears seem highly prevalent here, clockwork, systematic, orderly. And yet, there is an element of randomness as well, as some of the environments seems almost orgagic. Bio-mechanical, perhaps? Huge cables like veins snake their way through the area, and it seems that they are merging with and blending into the more formulaic machines.

    And yet... There is a circuit pattern spreading across those same cables in place, as though the structures machines are trying to take over the invasive influence in turn.

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Contents
Bleak Bone Gate <Waiting To Be Opened>
Staren <His Eyes Are Gears Covered In Veins>
Tomoe <Her Movements Trail Light>

Carna (974) has posed:
    Kord's investigation shows the unnatural growth of some toxic black mold is much like that which was seen in the Temple of the Drowned. A corruption that eats into the steel and stone, covering it and replacing it with something... Other. Whatever it is may be very unsafe to touch. Assuming it's even real. He seems to be alone for the moment. There's no more of those red silhouettes at least. But with how dark everything has gotten, and the way this place seems ravaged by some calamity, like rot has had ages to pour over it and settle into the very fabric of its existence, it would be hard not to think that some grotesque monsters lies right around the next corner.

    For a moment, as he investigates, he may think it is somehow snowing, as white flakes drift down all around him. But so far underground, how could that be possible, even for Lumiere? Well, it probably IS possible, but that's not what this is. They are ashes. Ashes that pour down from above somewhere unseen. The cracks in the ceiling that used to show a highly fragmented view of the area around Escher, are simply dark space. If there are furnaces at work in this place, they are not producing any light to judge their positions by.

    Whispering voices guide Kord, urging him to move on, to not linger for too long lest he be found. And more firm voices speak to him with a clarity that has not been present so far.

    There is something ahead you must see. And something you must slay. Open the path, and you will be one step closer to the truth.

    Cryptic as ever, though.

Carna (974) has posed:
Chopping Grounds (Darkness) - <Lumiere>
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    An area seemingly made up of dark industrial-style apartments or other habitations of some description is what lies ahead and around. They are not apartments in the modern sense, so much as bleak, blocky structures with multiple levels. The windows have heavy iron shutters on them, armored as though built with fending off attacks and attackers in mind. The doors are mostly shut by force, chains and other barriers reinforcing the sliding panels.

    The streets are narrow, winding, not unlike the paths leading into the Chopping Grounds from the pristine plagueway, but where that was the dregs of big city slums and New York alleyways and the like, layers and layers of city ontop of each other, this is more like an underground mining complex or something. It was built with pure utility in mind. There is heavy corrosion and black staining on just about every surface, and ashes seem to fall continuously like snow from somewhere in the blackness above.

    A faint static sound can occasionally be heard, seemingly without source. Whispering voices carry like an undercurrent below everything else, nudging away from the signs of other beings when such evidence is encountered.

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Contents
Count Kord <Dripping Hands>
Wounds <Stop The Bleeding. They Can Smell It.>
Static Signals <You Are Not Alone>

Finna (513) has posed:
Oh there's that scent. And the voice. Finna lowers her bow, but her lips press together thinly and she's clearly doing her best to hold her tongue. Though her best still includes cracking, "You're no cousin of mine. Should try smiling sometime! Though what do YOU have to do with the Moon?" At the end of that her bluster turns to honest curiosity, if a bit guarded. She's ready for a few hostilities from Priscilla, though she's LAST on the list of where she'd expect hostilities from right now.

    The Lunar confidently twirls her bow before tucking it away again...

    And resumes scanning some of the papers as she was before Priscilla interrupted her.

    "... Ungh." She does discover that she's not much better at reading Greek than anything else, because she's actually only barely literate at best. "Underground moon shrine?" Is her best translation of some of it after much peering. The signature is the only thing that stands out. Something about it troubles her, but she'll need more time to examine it before she believes the Shadow has anything to do with this!

    The sudden squeak is what prevents her from devoting those thoughts! Her ears snap to attention and she swings about in a motion that sets her hair swaying to and fro! Eyes straight on the strange creature. Blink blink blink.

    She knows that scent. The scent of night time adventures that resonates with her soul. The same smell as her own gently glowing self. It sets her a bit at ease. The foxgirl cracks an uneasy, hesitant smile.

    "And you are?"

Staren has posed:
    Staren shrugs. "Your tanking has allowed me to focus on blowing things up in the past. No need to worry about who owes who." He chuckles at Tomoe's comment about Christian symbolism, and goes to look at the computers, searching for a terminal or something. ...But it soon becomes evident there isn't one nearby, so he decides to look through the gate instead. And he also notices something else new: "What's that glowing trail mean?" he asks Tomoe.

Count Kord has posed:
    Kord doesn't sit still. No, he doesn't wait for something to catch onto his scent, to the smell of blood on his hands. He slips between shadows, moving with speed and silence, like a true creature of the night. His eyes are lightless points that nevertheless give away his location, however briefly, in the dark that he slinks through. He doesn't try to open anything that seems tightly shut, and follows the path of least resistance to where he can further examine the world. He ignores the ash that falls down around him, eyes flicking here and there.

    He listens to the voices that talk to him. He progresses with a single-minded purpose, seeking new ways to advance through the obstacles of this eerily silent and still landscape, and cases his environment. He does not stay in one place long enough for anything that may be hunting his fleeting presence to catch up to him, bouncing between shadows like a blur even to those things that have dark vision like him. He is very careful not to touch the strange moldering substance that permeates this layer of perception, as he is almost certain it is something he will immediately regret touching.

    Not all truths are worth knowing.

    A soft warning chimes in his mind from Yveltal. He ignores it, for now. He doesn't hear anything else, though, and that worries him more than the protests he would usually get. As if it was less demanding for him to do something, and more preparing him for more horror.

    He's just glad he doesn't have to see familiar faces warped by this darkness. He was growing nauseated by that nonsense.

Tomoe has posed:
Tomoe is back on her feet and not a pancake thanks to Staren and she now takes a moment to look around her new surroundings for a moment. It's the entry point to Lumiere, a very coloured altered replica of it but it seems to be it. She notices Staren's seeming changes for a moment before she takes not of any of what is going on with her. She's trailing light as she moves and shes' only now staring to notices it. 5R
"ummm I have no idea and ... Staren your eyes what... is ..."

She's just staring at Staren's now cog eyes and the Veins within them, she shakes her head. She'll pull a small mirror from her inventory to let Staren get a good look at himself if he wishes.

"So what do we do it looks like the gate is the only way to go."

Priscilla has posed:
    Priscilla takes her time poring over the documents. Far from just being scene clutter, they're packed with details of potentially great importance, and cover a wide number of topics. Priscilla sniffs more than a little dismissively at Finna --/Finna/ of all people-- demanding more smiles from her, before finishing up and concluding that 'underground moon temple' is probably accurate enough for government work.

    She makes absolutely sure to take the map with the signature on it, for a very important reason. "The Shadow, in his previous life, went by these letters reversed. It wouldst be odd if he were to hath penned such a document previous to our meeting him, but post whatever had transformed him, lacking physical substance and limbs overall as he was." Imagining armless Crow writing a map is certainly a feat alright. Still, there's no one else Priscilla knows of to whom it could be connected.

    After studying the rest, however, she decides a great deal of it is important as well. She picks up a number of unfamiliar maps with the hopes that they might actually prove useful if and when they stumble into the areas they depict in future, and one of a previous area simply to compare, as well as one mechanical blueprint that she thinks Staren would easily be able to make sense of, and then one that seems far more complicated, hoping some kind of technical insight will come of it. These, she rolls up into a very traditional map case, and leaves them with the small handful of other tiny cases on her silver linked 'belt'.

    The content featuring dolls, she feels a personal, rather than professional attachment to. She is far less certain of their usefulness, but her fondness for the things had proven an exceptional boon once before, and if the mythos of dolls here is rooted in the same strange, moonlit realm as she has been dropped into twice now, Priscilla can't help but assign it some weighty significance. She takes the incomplete doll as well; it isn't as if anyone else is going to finish it. The drawings she simply commits to the recording function of communicator, not expecting that they'd need to be extremely closely examined, potentially under multiple angles or in different arrangements, like secret maps would be. When she takes the doll, she makes sure that it is selectively invisible, such that nothing should get the bright idea of trying to snatch it back.

    Done with pillaging the hell out of the significant-looking loot, she turns to see a furry white lizard with yellow eyes, and then briefly consider whether it's supposed to be significant to her, or to Finna, because it seems a little bit like it could be either. As long as it isn't hostile, however, she plans to walk on out the door anyways. Either it'll do something prophetically significant, lead on like the Cheshire cat, or scamper away like an animal would (provided it doesn't reveal itself to be a mimic or something). She has the map, and is intending to reference it to the nearest connection back to Barrowville, for various reasons.

Carna (974) has posed:
    The white-furred creature Cheep!s and bounces away several feet when spoken to, its feathery-furred tail flowing behind it in waves. It stops further up the street outside the building, as though it's waiting for Finna to follow. If it's capable of speech, it doesn't appear to be willing to speak in any language that is translated by the Multiverse. It may be more like the domesticated animals it is acting like than a truly sapient being. But it might have some intelligence at least. When Priscilla emerges and starts heading down the street, the creature continues its leading retreat, though given the map obtained seems to be leading them in the same direction it's going, perhaps its guidance, if that's what it is, is unnecessary.

    Assuming Finna comes along with Priscilla or follows after the strange creature, both moon-affiliated women will come across some areas of this temple city where silhouettes of people are on the open walls. Whether painted, some form of magic, or something else entirely, these decorations of people are odd after everything they passed through being completely empty, the only designs or artistry being the emblems of the moon, stars, and the night sky.

    Further, the placing is irregular, patternless almost, except that the further they go, the denser the silhouettes become, until they begin blending together, and become almost indistinguishable. They passed by people waving to each other, a mother leaning down to pat her child on the head, what might have been a merchant and his cart selling something or other, a procession of individuals in an orderly line, and many more still-frames of life, only to come into these huge crowds of dark imprints upon the walls.

    Eventually, the furry creature stops, looks off to its left, and then darts off into a building after its floppy fuzzy ears twitched and turned like a cat's, orienting on something undetected. Well, that's not where the map showed they should go, and even if they should move to follow the lizard-thing, they'll be coming around the corner of a building soon, and to that big open space on the map. It's so vast and takes up so much room, that even before they come to it, they can see the plaza. The walls have long since become black with silhouettes, and the streets as well. The street, in fact, seems to have become greatly uneven, buildings likewise showing signs of damage. Almost before they have time to process the shift in their surroundings, they are likely to see what lies ahead of them.

    A gigantic hole. A blast crater with no bottom, where once was some magical platform to grant movement to and from the various layers of Barrowville, or 'Tafos Anapafsi' as the map called it. And above them, all the way up, it where the greatest concentration of moonlight spills through a charred ring in the ceiling that extends up and up and up, through cut-off escape tunnels like those they used to flee the Unlit in Final Destination.

    That was no mural. No clever art. Those were the shadows of the Lit gathered here at the moment when something terrible happened. Their outlines, burned into the surrounding buildings, and the ruins heaped and strewn all about, by the flash of a great power. A power that Priscilla recently witnessed on October 31st.

Carna (974) has posed:
    Staren advances on the red gates and pushes them open. Like the Grim Bone Gate, it opens readily despite its vast size, though the two doors creak and groan in protest as though they had not been moved in a very long time. And probably they haven't. On the other side is... A single black marble path or bridge or walkway of sorts. Flat and even, narrow, and on both sides are pools of, visible in Tomoe's trail of light, dark-red liquid. All the way at the other end of the bridge is another red gate, identical to the one they just opened. Sitting in the center of the walkway is a Shrine of Light, apparently not activated, and waiting to be turned on as a beacon and escape point.

    But... Those deep red pools. This is Lumiere. What are the chances that there's nothing in them? Do they try to just fly to the other gate, pass by their chance at an escape route, or take a chance?

Carna (974) has posed:
    With his own abilities and the guidance of the Darkness, Kord bypasses many threats. He can hear static on his radio when he nears something hostile, though at times it seems the static is coming from inside his head instead of the radio itself. Bodies run through with pipes, suspended in the alleys between buildings by the impaling tools being wedged against the walls. Wheels covered in barbed wire, with still-moving shapes tied to them sometimes roll through the streets, hunting for prey. And once, he may have even caught a glimpse of a humanoid shape with an enormous pillar of writhing, multi-limbed flesh extending up from where its neck should be, like some hideous centipede-for-a-head, with no hint of where its end lies. But thankfully, he is not lingering to stare at such hideous things, twitching and spasming at high speed like a camera in fast-forward.

    He is on the move. Until he reaches his apparent destination. A massive plaza surrounded by ruins, with creeping black rot spreading outwards from it to turn paved stones into a carpet of disgustingly fuzz-textured, moist, ebony mold. High above, a similar hole leads upwards. But down... Down is where the intense smell of blood comes from. Blood and rot and viscera. And blood drips down from the edges of this ring, a mere trickle compared to the constant rain of red from the ceiling. Down there, somewhere, there's an emanation of an alien presence that Kord felt recently, on October 31st.

    A fragment compared to what the Crimson King wielded, but enough to make grown men, less hardened than Kord, wet themselves in terror and flee screaming.

    Down there somewhere, in the dark, is the target they seek. The second Marble Guardian.

    And something much closer, fleshy and squishing, like a mass of many forms woven together as one.

Count Kord has posed:
    Kord slips by horrors that remind him of things that crawl Lumiere at all times... but are altogether different. He makes sure to get a good look at any of the more obvious shapes while staying out of their apparent range of perception. He makes note of their tortured appearance, of the hellish landscape he has found himself in.

    It's alien... but he understands that this represents suffering, of darker impulses, of evil and negativity. Which is why, when he comes across the hole in that ruined plaza, he hops right up to the edge. He leans to look down in a crouch. His eyes gaze down into the abyss, the hopeful flame in his heart burning hot. He can feel one of their prey down there... somewhere.

    He just isn't going to just jump down there without thinking, not after seeing all of those twisted beasts along the way.

Finna (513) has posed:
Apparently having had as much of Priscilla as she's willing to tolerate for ten seconds, Finna responds to the weird little thing by diving forward and after it.. and landing on all fours, completing a seamless shapeshift back into her fox form and playfully keeping pace with the creature that seems intent on being a guide.

    But experience with Lumiere at this point has taught her not to lower her guard. She is completely alert for any surprises!

    Of course things start getting creepy. The decor brings some curious peers from her and a momentary pause.. but it's only when they get dense enough that they can't be REMOTELY appreciated artistically that she stops right in her tracks and all her fur stands on end.

    As if she's ready for them to come alive and emerge from the walls...

    "Silhouettes of people. Like Crow is a shadow...?" Was Crow somehow born here?

    An oddball she might be, but Finna is no idiot. She quickly begins scouring around the area and checking the spread pattern...

    "... like... like a great flaming hand came through here and... smashed everyone flat. Instantly. No time to even scream."

    The little fox nervously approaches the hole, briefly letting the strange animal alone to instead peer into the hole...

Priscilla has posed:
    Truth be told, Priscilla had an inkling of the truth long before she had arrived at that terminal concentration of burnt-on shadows. Not for any particular foreshadowing of Lumiere, as this place has been its utter opposite in many ways, but coincidentally for the similar feeling she had gotten walking the shattered streets of Caelondia, once, picking through its markets and homes, cluttered with thousands of its citizens still frozen in their last moments, though turned to petrified ash rather than charred outlines.

    It's not as viscerally unpleasant as Lumiere typically is, and so Priscilla is not in an immediate hurry to return to gutter streets full of fleshy gore and wiggling finger-faced monsters. Eerie, surrealist loneliness is something she is more than familiar with. She indulges the turn off into the plaza, and then stops to look up as far as she can into the massive hole left in the ceiling, where the conduit had completely blown out.

    "A rare place whence the exact moment of Lumiere's demise, or perhaps better said, the demise of the world of the living, is so perfectly preserved. Overlaid on top of the hideous modern reality that it is, I can only assumeth this realm to be either a time of Lumiere's past, frozen as such, or perhaps more likely, an impression left by it, visible to only those of the correct disposition." Priscilla gestures up at the streaming moonlight. "Light hast always been a fixture absent of Lumiere, to the point that the land itself was designed to provide it throughout its many spires and churches. If the light, even of the moon, were ever so naturally omnipresent, the word wouldst long ago hath lost its sacred significance."

    A form of elevator seems a likely culprit to have suffered the bizarre obliteration of the mysterious apocalypse. Conduits of travel for dead souls seem to be a theme, in terms of being ground zero. The same phenomenon had hit the entry gates of Lostrata especially hard, completely destroying the Umberdark, and flooding the strange abyss of prisons below it, possibly being responsible for breaching the Candle's lowest level and opening it to the horrors that awaited in the dark deep below Lumieres base. Remembering that 'place' is why she doesn't go as far as to examine where the floor has been destroyed too.

    "The question then becometh why it is populated at all, and why the gods wouldst chooseth to leave their valuable works preserved here. Likewise, I cannot imagine such hand-written significances, trifling as they perhaps art in scale, being left about a simple, pedestrian street house, even so long ago. They were clearly for the examination of those capable of entering this vision." Priscilla takes a minute to check out the celestial iconography. Specifically, she checks to see which end of the lunar cycle all these crescents are /on/, and if any of the stars constitute any recognizable or significant shapes.

Tomoe has posed:
Tomoe says "Staren we need to go now, if something's coming staying behind to fight right now isn't a good idea! MOVE!"

She's going to make for the gate trying to get Staren along, she's not able to fly, and while it's often an common issue for her, here? It's even worse than normal because if she could fly this would be a hell of a lot easier to do.

"It's time to go."

She's going to make for the Shrine, though she knows there may be troble she'll be ready to fight, but it could end badly. Still staying around doing nothing would be even worse.

Staren has posed:
    So, a bonfire that's an Obvious Trap, even if it's not a mimic. And no knowledge about what might be in those pools.

    So there are some various possibilities here: 1. There just happen to be some pools, with nothing in them. 2. Monsters lie in wait to ambush anyone going for the bonfire. 3. Guardians lie in wait for only specific targets, which A. includes him and Tomoe or B. doesn't.

    Staren thinks 2 is most likely, and that 3B is incredibly unlikely. He and Tomoe formulate a plan: Agitate whatever's in the lakes and fight it on their terms, rather than its. It's the right call in cases 1, 2, and 3A.

    To that end, he aims his beam cannons at the pools...

    And then Tomoe decides to be bait instead. Damn it! He watches the pools uneasily as Tomoe approaches the shrine.

Carna (974) has posed:
    The stars in some places seem to emulate those as seen from the Earth, though given their multitude, if they are meant to represent spans of time, the very constellations are different because of how many billions of years they convey. The buildings were constructed at different times over the history of the Living World, possibly predating humans completely... Or perhaps post-dating them. Crescent moons seem to be the most dominant phase, though there are others to be found on strips of cloth inside of temple-homes, as decorations on banners and discarded clothing, and gold and silver boxes that store baubles and keepsakes of onlt emotional value. There are pale-gold pendants of crescent moons on necklaces hanging from marble pegs on one of the walls.

    Lots of evidence of how these Dead lived, a way to peek into their existences before this calamity. But there is a small interruption. Cheep! Cheep! The squeaking of the lizard thing emerges from behind Finna and Priscilla, distantly, back in the building it came from originally. The sound is growing louder. If they care to look behind them, they will find the creature in the arms of the girl in the ragged gown, with that enormous mass of hair. However, looks somehow different. Her hair is shorter, for one, though still spands the entire length of her body to stop just short of touching the floor. Her gown is pristine white, the hem embroidered with symbols of the moon.

    She is not dirtied or worn with age and rot picked up from the environment, though she is still barefoot.

    Her face can still not be seen, except for stiff-looking lips, closed tight. She still has no presence to her. If not for that she was not standing there before, she could be a statue that the furry lizard wormed its way into the arms of.

    But then the girl speaks wordlessly, voicelessly, her lips remaining still.

    Meet me on the moon. I will tell you everything.

    And then the world is dissolving, the moonlight being gobbled up by the dark, the temples becoming plated in black steel, covering up the celestial iconography, leaving prison-homes in their places, and bleak abandoned streets spreading outwards from a charred, bloody crater, mirrored in the ceiling above, like cracks in a skull around a bullethole.

    They are not alone.

Carna (974) has posed:
    Kord makes his way towards the huge hole in the center of the destroyed plaza, from which all this corrupting mold spreads. That frigid coin he carries seems to push away the mold on the ground as he alights upon the shattered tiles and churned earth from what must have been an enormous shockwave coring straight through Lostrata. The pressure emanating from it can be felt in Kord's hand. And as he looks down into that hole, he will see there are a number of small balconies that were once probably actually rooms, now rendered into ledges overlooking the bloody depths below by the power that tore this place asunder. And standing on one of those balconies are a pair of figures. One he has seen recently. The other he was embodying recently. Belara and Prospero, the figures responsible for drawing the Shadows to Lostrata, and for engineering the transportation device that would carry them to the city where they could try to repair the link between Lumiere and the Living World.

    Their robed and masked forms would be invisible to someone without Kord's ability to see in the dark, and are even more made out from this distance by his equally strong vision in general. Prospero empty eye holes in his mask has glowing blue orbs in them now. Belara has glowing green ones of a similar appearance. Prospero and Belara appear to be discussing something as they look down. Then Prospero looks up. For a moment, Kord may feel as though Prospero is looking directly at him. The feeling may intensify as Belara does the same. But they are look higher up, towards the ceiling from which the blood flows.

    Then the two turn and walk away out of sight. And a single shadow moves and forms into a humanoid shape, gaining solidity and features, and a pair of small horns. The cloak of shadows falls away, revealing a gleaming figure in gold and platinum armor, a quiet power that is being contained and hidden touching Kord only due to his repeated exposures to it.

    The one he knows as the 'Orc' form of Crow looks up as the other two did, but then looks after Prospero and Belara, and holds up something between thumb and forefinger of a gauntleted hand. Anger and disgust radiate from the god, and then he makes a throwing gesture. A tiny glimmering disc flies up towards Kord, seemingly by coincidence, as Crow's old self dissolves back into the shadows and moves to follow the two wizards out of sight.

    The disc that lands at Kord's foot is identical to the coin he carries, though this one is flattened along one edge, where a pair of strong digits pinched it into two-dimensionality.

    Then all the corruption and decay begins to melt away and retreat, though what the reality revealed looks like isn't too terribly different. It is, in fact, the same reality that Priscilla and Finna stand within. And now Kord does too.

Carna (974) has posed:
    Tomoe boldly advances along the walkway, cautiously examining the Shrine upon her arrival. Nothing happens to her immediately. The Shrine does not attack her, and there is no sign of movement in the blood ocean surrounding them. As near as any sensors or senses can ascertain there is no sign of any entity in this place they are in now, outside of themselves. Not that that always means anything, but it is at least usually a good indicator of Unlit, at least. If there is something that's about to happen, it might not happen unless the Shrine is activated. And if nothing is going to happen... Standing around waiting is not going to change that.

    However, Staren, with his capacity to detect spatial anomalies, may suddenly be getting pings in that department. Is it just an optical illusion, or is the gate at the other end of the pathway getting closer? Actually, is the distance between HIS side of this pathway and the Shrine at the center getting shorter as well?

    ...Great. Space is compressing or something. It's hard to say whether this is going to stop eventually or not. But it's clear that staying here might be more hazardous than taking action. They have four choices now. 1. Try to go back through the gate they entered through. 2. Try to go through the gate on the other side. 3. Try to activate the Shrine and get out o fhere. 4. Take their chances in the blood ocean without touching any of this stuff. Though here is always option 5. Other, but that requires trying to think of something that isn't right in front of them to do.

    Oh, yes, and from Tomoe's position on the center platform, it appears to her as well that the gates are gradually closing in on her from both sides as space is shortened. It's kind of claustrophobia-inducing, honestly.

Count Kord has posed:
    Kord stares down into the abyss, down and down and down, to the pair of figures down there. He feels a sense of vertigo, a sinking in his stomach, as his mind tries to cope with the heights that seem to lack wind. He stares down at a discussion, a silent one.

    His heart nearly lept into his throat, when he felt himself being stared at. And then... again, when 'Orc' appeared before him, as if a glimmer of a time already passed. He cracked open his mouth, and his fanged maw almost formed words to shout down to Crow. But he hesitated as the coin flew up and landed at his feet. He watched the shadow leave...

    He crouches to retrieve the frigid coin, and holds it in his palm to examine it. His eyes fixate on it as he stands, and that is when he senses that the world has changed around him, and something is in his periphery. He lifts his head to look at Priscilla, and swivels his gaze to look at Finna. Then he looks down into the hole in the world.

    "Down there. We must descend to find the Marble Guardian," he tells them, pointing down into the endlessly deep pit. For once, he refrains from leaping down, himself.

    He holds up one coin in each hand, examining either of them for differences.

Staren has posed:
    Huh. No monsters.

    Instead, space starts compressing. Well... Staren was planning on using the shrine to leave /anyway/, so this doesn't exactly change the plan! He flies over the walkway to the shrine. But before actually leaving, he tosses a quadrotor drone out over the ocean. If radios continue to work here and he can get a good signal, maybe he can see what happens to this place after he leaves.

Finna (513) has posed:
Finna is quiet - not unusual for Lumiere, but pretty unusual when staring down someone she has every intention of talking to. But something about this girl has kept her tongue-tied. Now that she reappears here.... a few ideas start clicking in her head. The light of realization fills her gaze--

    And just as she's about to speak, the silent voice resounding in her head drives down the urge.

    And then it's all over with...

    With Kord nearby, and the exact place they just left... and...

    "... There's a HOLE HERE TOO?!" The little fox jump-backflips away from it, landing once again in human form looking pretty jumpy and freaked. "How did I miss that thing?! ... ... the others fell down this one?"

Priscilla has posed:
    Only moments earlier, Priscilla had said something about being, for whatever reason, favoured by the 'gods' of Lumiere on the radio. She had meant it fairly casually, for the fact that she had apparently been spared the horrific imagery Kord had signed up for when he decided to interact with the core Darkness eating at Lumiere, and instead been taken somewhere marked with the handiworks of legendary figures.

    She had not felt it was quite so literal until the eerie girl she had been intersectionally chasing around for days showed herself all of a sudden, and had those words to say.

    "As I had said." she continues, faux-patiently. "The experience was almost certainly an impression, moment in time, interpretation, or other representation, of the reality we art currently beset with in this present moment. They art not two different places, in all likelihood, but different casts upon it. Different aspects, perhaps, visible from angles of perspective of which only some art possessed." Truthfully, Priscilla is perhaps a little bit unhappy that Finna gets to see the secret details at all. Less than she feels bad for what Kord has to see, though.

    "Unfortunately, I am far from certain where we art to venture in order to reach 'the moon'. Last and only I hath ever seen it, it hung far too close to the earth on the thirty-first of each October, and concerns of limited time prevented us then. As I believeth we witnessed the last of such grand occasions in existence only two weeks ago, I believeth it not a viable lead. The way can only be upon another level, and the only way to access such wouldst inevitably be through the second and last Marble Guardian of Lostrata."

    To make progress: Kill More Bosses.

Tomoe has posed:
Tomoe is making ready for something to attack here, nothing happens, with it, nothing happens at all. Then something seem to happen, space seems to be compressing on her. She's not looking pleased, heck she's finding it rather claustrophobic to be perfectly honest.

"Staren...we need to go."

She so her best to wait for Staren to get there but she's going to activate the shine the moment he gets to her. She tries to not freak out but she gets the feeling they could end up crushed if this doesn't work.

Carna (974) has posed:
    As space threatens to pinch shut around the two, Staren flies to Tomoe, and together they activate the Shrine. And something highly peculiar happens. The light that Tomoe's body trails suddenly radiates from her. Her skin glows. Her hair glows. Her armor glows. Her eyes glow. Even her skeleton glows through her own radiant skin. Every moment, the light builds and builds, seeming as though she can not possibly contain it all, even as she seems to grow beyond herself, becomning more full, 'larger' without actually changing shape or dimensions, becoming ever a more perfect vessel to contain the swelling illumination.

    The ocean of blood, gorey as it may be, takes on the appearance of crimson sand, dunes spreading outwards under the ripples of the power shining from her, channeled through her.

    Staren has an altogether different experience, though no less uniquely strange and awe-inducing.

    He is connected.

    From the moment he touches the Shrine, he is directly linked into the mechanism of Lumiere. Its 'operating system'. Circuit patterns spread outwards, printed upon space, upon time, layers peeling up to reveal planes of existence undreamt of, like cyberspace replicas of lands and worlds that existed invisibly, parallel to the one he has been walking in until now.

    A voice speaks in Staren's head... No, not even a voice. An output prompt, printing messages in unfamiliar runes and glyphs, endlessly, in vast streams of data, that sound to him as song. Math that has become music. And not just any math.

    Across the inside of his being, the mathematical formula describing the reality he current exists upon is written.

Carna (974) has posed:
    <<Lumiere System Message: New Access detected.>>

    The message is expressed in symbol and song, none of it any familiar language, but all of it understood. This is the voice of Lumiere. A voice of possibility, of renewal, of second chances. An eternity to learn, to improve upon something bigger than one's self, to be shared and enjoyed by all. A collaborative work of art that will grow only more and more perfect as time goes on. And yet underneath it all, is a layer of... Sadness. Stagnation. Decay. There is a mournful undertone to the glory of the World Voice. Something damaged and broken.

    <<User Identified. Welcome back, Moderator Solaren. Your intent has been registered. Creating exit.>>

    Space Parameters: 9715-2118-Z-C7-991085.5 by... Tt continues to rattle of numbers and designations at speeds that only a computer or an equivalent brain could parse, describing mathematically where Staren and Tomoe are, and where they wish to be.

    Moderator Solaren -> Bypass Active -> Exitting Space-Time Claudication with Passenger: Tome.

    And then the pair of them are relocated, bounced from the slowly-crushing space they stood upon, into the same location as Priscilla, Finna, and Kord. Only now, there is a huge red gate mirroring that of the Grim Bone Gate, though of obviously different coloration, standing there with them as though it has always been there.

Carna (974) has posed:
    The connection Staren felt is gone for the moment. But there is now a sort of 'connector' in his consciousness. An 'open port'. And if he can find a way to connect again...

    Tomoe continues to shine like the sun, the ground crawling with lines and symbols not unlike a fusion of the spells used in ALO and the same runic glyphs that appear to represent circuits here in Lumiere. It is not like she is creating the symbols, but that the light radiating from her is exposing what was there. The symbols of the moon react to the light by shining straight through the black steel meant to cover them up, as though someone intended to hide them, ashamed they ever existed, or perhaps to deny the small comfort of reminders to those who survived this horror.

    However, the glow eventually fades, retreating into a core within Tomoe, and then even that is gone. But her wings manifest on their own, that internal light coming forth when she calls upon it, to give her what she needs to fly in this domain of darkness.

    All are gathered together once more, with a lot of notes to compare and strange experiences to share (or not). But Lumiere is not done with them yet.

    A wet gurgling, slithering noise, utterly revolting before they even see what produces it, has been gradually growing louder. Drawn by the light Tomoe has produced (or 'Tome' as the Lumiere System called her), a heaving mass of worms and corpses comes piling up out of that huge hole in the center of the plaza. The worms peel back enough to expose a massive, lipless mouth. Bare teeth in blackened flesh, the vague shape of a head. And then Wormfeast cries out ravenously with no voice at all, but only the sound of countless revolting creatures squirming together in shared hunger, and anger, as they recognize those who harmed it once before.

Staren has posed:
    Staren races to the shrine, and then... sees... something? It calls to mind how people think 'cyberspace' might look, but OH NO VOICE IN HIS HEAD WHAT IS IT GOING TO DO

    Staren mentally recoils, searching for a way to shut it off, expecting some form of psychic attack... But none comes. Instead, he's sent a bunch of data he can't quite parse, but somehow he knows it's a mathematical description of Lumiere. HOW does he know that? What should, perhaps, be an epiphany of insight is tainted by concern: How can he know this? Why does he know this? Is something messing with his head??

    He's connected to... was Lumiere actually a virtual world before everything died?! And it's mistaken him for an administrator. Could he use that to help get to the bottom of things?

    But just as he's beginning to think of the possibilities, the connection is gone.

    And he wonders if maybe it was just a hallucination... Isn't it suspicious, that he's always hoped for a world to have such underlying rules that he can understand and manipulate? He never thought he'd find it for Lumiere, but with it, he could solve so many problems and fix the place.

    Isn't it exactly what some force that can read his mind and wants to manipulate him would want him to think existed? It's too tempting to pass up...

    ...Even knowing it might be a hallucination.

    Before he can ruminate on that further though, Tomoe glows like the sun. "Tomoe? Are you okay?" Whatever that was goes away too, but leaves her with her wings. They work here now? Whether that's a hallucination is scientifically testable...

    But before he can analyze THAT, suddenly the Mysterious Hole becomes worms and a giant creepy mouth. He's not sure what it is, but it sure seems hostile, and he fires at it, backing away warily as he tries to imagine how a mouth stuck in the ground might attack.

Tomoe has posed:
Tomoe is glowing she feels like something is changing within her, she's not sure what's going on at first, she feels a bit afraid fo a moment but then the fear fates she sees the symbls she watches, she seels different she feeols good and then she sees that her wings are out, that they are still there. She looks to Staren.

"I think, I'm okay I just feel ... good, really good."

She's also looking at her wings in suprise.

"They are still ... here."

Count Kord has posed:
    Kord seems quite unimpressed with the coins, but their significance is not lost to him. After determining that both of the coins bore important symbology for Lumiere in some way, he pockets them once more... in separate pockets, paranoid about them jangling while he moves. As he does, now Staren and Tomoe have appeared nearby, bringing along a bizarre door. His head turns to fixate on the strange sight, eyes wide behind his mask. He hadn't expected that... the Grim Bone Gate was something he was only familiar with on his entrance to Lumiere, and now this differently colored doorway showed that it wasn't the only one.

    He doesn't have time to appreciate the oddity. Wormfeast crawled out of the deeps, a swarm of worms that has grown to titanic size. He doesn't wait for it to attack. He strikes a defensive posture, and he points one arm up at it. His fingers spread outward, and he fires a blast of Dark magic energy right into its hungry maw. The blast is accompanied with a loud WHUMPF, the energy displacing air the way a cannonball might, complete with blowing back his cape. Nothing fancy, just reacting with immediate violence to the thing that preyed upon his hard work before.