Scene #2960: That Which Can Eternal Lie

Owner	Pose
Septette Arcubielle	The number of humans who have ventured into Shinjuku since the city's fall can be counted on two hands. Thousands of feet of solid rock lie between the dead city and the surface world; it's accessible only through miles and miles of twisting, monster-infested tunnels. Above it, the shifting and treacherous ground of the Forest Folk's home threatens to bury interlopers. Below, the Claret Hollow, replete with nameless horrors, digs its fleshy tendrils into the bedrock, slowly undermining the petrified city's foundation. If it weren't for an activated Geomagnetic Pole and a helpful yggdroid, visiting Shinjuku would be almost too dangerous to contemplate. But if one can put those dangers out of mind, the city seems calming- almost serene in its static beauty. Towering skyscrapers made of strange blue metal buttress the cavern's ceiling; trees the size of redwoods have grown up between the buildings, died, and crystallized over countless centuries. The light of bioluminescent fungi illuminates the city almost as brightly as the sun did in ages past, giving it a shadowless, dreamlike appearance. The Geomagnetic Pole is on the top floor of one of these skyscrapers, overlooking the vast city and casting a rosy actinic glow over its immediate surroundings. Here, Septette awaits her guest, carrying a picnic basket and wearing a warm anticipatory smile.
Kyra Hyral	Warnings of the hazardous neighbors the city had well in hand, Kyra takes advantage of the Geomagnetic Pole, using the Rafflesia to lock on to what amounted to a beacon, teleporting down from the reclaimed ship. Normally she would have conscripted some of her friends into coming with her on this trip as the Light Warriors definitely had 'exploring off-world dungeons' in their club charter. However, none seemed to be available at the time so she instead comes along on her own. Of course, she's already taking plenty of pictures to show them later. When Septette said that there were crystal trees, she thought that was an abstract way of calling the usual cave-type geological features. She's surprised to see that it actually meant crystalized, or rather petrified, wood brought to this state by time. After appearing on the pole, she gives Septette a hug in greeting before immediately taking several pictures from the skyscraper-borne vantage point.
Septette Arcubielle	Septette returns the hug very carefully, angling her sharp edges away from Kyra so as not to hurt the healer accidentally. She pulls back after a moment and gives Kyra's hoodie pom-pom a playful flick, her smile widening as she notes her friend's apparent delight in the scenery. "Pretty, isn't it? Not hard to see why the Forest Folk considered this place holy ground once." A slight problem should quickly become apparent: there's no obvious way down from the skyscraper's roof. Not one to be deterred by such minor obstacles, Septette walks to the roof's edge and glances down, then frowns a bit. It's a truly dizzying drop, though the ground isn't even visible for the crystallized trees! "I guess you can't just jump, huh?"
Kyra Hyral	The pom pom bounces, the string reinforced with a spring to give it a perpetually bouncy property. Kyra laughs and slips her mPhone, which is what she was using to take pictures, away into the front pocket of her hoodie. "Yeah! And it's so /huge/ in here too. What happened? Was this place built underground entirely or did it get covered?" she looks meaninfully at the petrified trees with this question. When she looks away, she seems to be searching for the roof access on the skyscraper. Skyscrapers were common on Ramuh after all as were means to get on top of them to expose onself to the perpetual, continent-covering storm. "Jump? Well, I could put float on myself and it'll let me fall a lot slower. But if I jumped otherwise that'd splatter me on the ground." She murmurs a few words, flicking her hand in the air, and moments later she starts to hover about a foot off the ground. When she moves, she walks as if she was walking on a solid surface and is propelled forward still despite lacking any sort of friction against her feet.
Septette Arcubielle	"It was originally aboveground, yes," Septette replies after giggling softly. "There was apparently a force field of some kind that once surrounded the city. Ash and dust accreted on top of it until, eventually, the whole thing was buried. By the time that the force field failed, the rock above was able to support its own weight." After inspecting Kyra's levitation for a moment and nodding approvingly, Sept takes a few steps backwards, and then leaps off the roof towards an adjacent, shorter skyscraper. For a moment it looks like she's going to slam into the side of it gracelessly, but her talons dig in on impact, and she slides down the exterior wall before landing on a breezeway a couple of hundred feet below. Glancing around, Sept confirms the area is safe, then waves up at Kyra. "Come on down. The weather's fine!"
Kyra Hyral	"Ash and dust...oh, was there a volcano involved?" Kyra asks, picturing a force field warding off molten rock long enough to create a solid dome around the city. "How long did it take for this city to be buried, out of curiosity? It seems like there was some sort of extreme geological shift involved. Unless there was something along the lines of a sand wave-see on Ifrit, one of our plates, the sand can shift and swallow domed cities. A trapped city will...only survive for a few months, though, before problems set in." Kyra shudders at the thought, then shudders again imaginine such a civilization-toppling fate happening to the inhabitants of the Deep City. She leaps off the building after Septette, falling, though she falls like a feather would through the air. Falling at a slow rate, it actually takes her a while to get to the breezeway. When she does, she bobs just a little and continues to float a foot off the ground. "Oh, getting up will be a problem for me because this spell just lets me float, it doesn't let me fly."
Septette Arcubielle	Septette shakes her head and holds up a strange, iridescent string that's tied in a loop. "Warp wires," she explains cheerfully- "the adventurer's salvation. They're one-use teleportation devices that can take you back to a pre-set Geomagnetic Pole- in this case, the one in the Deep City." The breezeway itself is rather odd: it's made of the same metal as the buildings, but there are dried bloodstains near the middle, and the railings have been broken in places. It looks like there was some kind of struggle here, long ago... As they stroll (and float) across the suspended walkway, the robot girl listens intently to Kyra's explanation before replying: "Nobody's quite certain what kind of catastrophe buried this stratum. Near-apocalyptic calamities are distressingly frequent in Etria's history. In fact, this is the fifth stratum from the surface in this area, and each was seemingly created by some kind of world-scouring event. There's at least one more stratum below this one, and in some places, there are even more." Finally, they arrive at some kind of heavy door on the exterior of another skyscraper, etched with glowing lines. Next to it are some exposed electronics, recognizably modern in design, but just as aged as the rest of the city's architecture. It opens when Septette comes within a few feet, revealing a brightly-lit chamber that resembles the interior of a server farm...
Kyra Hyral	"Ooooh." Kyra reaches out to take the wire so she can look it over herself. "That seems unimaginably handy. I know several dungeons I have been in where I would have /loved/ to have such a device available!" She passes the wire back and looks around, spotting the ancient remnants of blood, leading more to her imagined scenario of an isolated city descending into chaos. "Yikes, this place is just a big ball of apocalypses, isn't it?" Kyra shudders, "At least six diffferent civilizations destroyed. You've watched this world for a long time have they all had to rebuild from scratch eatch time?" She steps through the open door and looks...somewhat surprised. Servers are non unknown things where she's from. No, it's moreso something else: "Are these servers still online?"
Septette Arcubielle	Handing the wire to Kyra for her inspection, Septette nods, looking rather proud of the implement. "I'm not sure if it'll work outside of this world, however- you might want to test that." Following the healer's gaze to the blood, she smiles slightly: "That's only a few years old. There was an... encounter between two groups of explorers. Probably the first time that seven humans had been in this city simultaneously in centuries, and they all managed to get in a fight with each other." "I'm two hundred forty-eight years, ten months, twenty-seven days old. The last catastrophe occurred a good while before I was made," she explains, "and the Abyssal War narrowly averted another. I've never personally experienced such a disaster. Nor has he," she adds with a gesture towards the computational devices. "Unauthorized entry detected," states a calm, disembodied male voice. "No match in database found." There's a quiet rumbling from the back of the room, and something that looks like a small red tank trundles forwards, leveling its four cannons at Septette and Kyra. "Identify yourself so that your corpse may be properly catalogued." Septette just crosses her arms and glares at the tank. "MIKE. Do you have to do this every time I bring a visitor?" It lowers its cannons slightly, managing to look disappointed and mildly guilty. "... No, Septette."
Kyra Hyral	"I don't think we have anything precisely like the geomagnetic poles that the wires are attuned to here, save for maybe some certain rock formations in the middle of Odin's wilderness. And given the dangers of that particular continent, teleporting into the middle of it would be inviting suicide. Maybe, however, there is a way to recreate the effect with machinery. Supermagnets that can be transported and placed at the entrances of dungeons, primed for wire use...it would cut down on dungeon deaths drastically in my world." Kyra nods. "Granted, it may remove some of the heroism involved in exploring dungeons but..." She thinks of Dominic, who has recently signed up to apprentice as a dungeon evaluator in Galinda. "...I think it would be worth it." She nods, both at Septette's explanation and the reveal of her exact age. She seems ready to comment when the server room addresses them and deploys an armed tank to confront them. "-oh dear." she says, backing up over the threshold of the door, angling herself to put Septette between her and the tank. "I'm Kyra Hyral and I'm very opposed to being killed and catalogued!" But she edges back in afterwards as Mike is properly scolded for his 'greeting'. She seems to relax after that. "Hello."
Septette Arcubielle	"Hello, Kyra Hyral," MIKE intones in that calming, yet emotionless voice. It's an interesting contrast to Septette's: hers is clearly synthetic but sunny and expressive, whereas MIKE's is almost indistinguishable from a human's in timbre, and yet completely devoid of emphasis or affect. Given his mischievous behavior, he certainly seems to have emotions worth conveying. "To answer your earlier question, yes, these servers are online. However, their installment postdates the evacuation and inhuming of Shinjuku." Septette cuts in to explain: "MIKE is an artificial intelligence of human design, dating from the same era in which Shinjuku was built. He went into hibernation just before that calamity, and was 'rediscovered' a few decades ago. His main core is elsewhere- I helped build this server room for him so he can monitor and maintain Shinjuku's power grid."
Kyra Hyral	"...what a contrast. Though it reminds me of someone..." Kyra mutters as she hears the voice of MIKE. "That serious deadpan of yours, that is." She slips in to look more closely at the red tank MIKE has chosen to use as his movable proxy, assuming that this was only one extension of MIKE and not entirely MIKE himself. Septette confirms her assumption moments later by explaining that MIKE's center is located elsewhere. "Oh! Wow, more real artificial intelligences-that's not an innovation my world has yet accomplished so meeting them is always fun for me. I'd shake your hand but...well, I could shake your turret instead maybe? Septette had mentioned that she takes care of this place and was kind enough to take me here to visit."
Septette Arcubielle	The tank slowly rolls forward until it's a couple of feet away from Kyra, clumsily tries to 'shake' her hand with one of its long barrels, and ends up gently bonking her on the shoulder with it instead. MIKE makes a couple more similarly-comical attempts before finally giving up and holding still so Kyra can initiate the handshake instead. "Thank you, Kyra Hyral," he finally intones. "Septette takes care of this place in a manner of speaking. But she doesn't write. She doesn't call." MIKE lowers the tank's turret by another few degrees, and it emits a grinding noise that sounds almost like a deflated sigh. "So lonely. Septette, meanwhile, is glaring at the tank with a cuttingly dry expression. "You are so full of shit. Ricky and the others visit you every single weekend in Gladsheim. You're spoiled rotten, is what you are." "No, Septette," he answers in the same tone as ever. "Inorganic matter cannot become rotten."
Kyra Hyral	Just as awkwardly, Kyra tries to capture the turret to shake, only to miss several times as MIKE swings it around. It isn't until he holds it steady that she's able to grab the wayward 'appendage'. "Oh, but she does come to visit every now and then, doesn't she?" Kyra asks sweetly, "Isn't that enough?" Septette's retort draws a giggle from the white mage. "Nor can it spoil! Not in the literal sense. Figuratively, of course, in all figurative definitions of the word. Though I doubt you've seen any movies recently that I'd recognize enough to be spoiled. Who is Ricky? Is there anyone else in this city?"
Septette Arcubielle	"Snape kills Trinity with Rosebud," Septette murmurs quietly before glancing back up at Kyra. "He's going to keep referring to you by your full name until you tell him to do otherwise. I'm not sure if that's just him being a pedantic jerk or if his protocols dictate it- it's really hard to tell sometimes." "Yes, Septette," he replies opaquely, to which she responds with an exasperated groan. "Ricky does not come here. She visits my core in Gladsheim, a separate facility. She is a human who was placed in suspended animation at roughly the same time that I was. Septette visits occasionally, but she enjoys being mean to me. Ricky is a vastly better person in all measurable regards." Despite a complete lack of body language or intonation, it's clear that MIKE would be sticking his tongue out at Sept right now if he could. The yggdroid, for her part, turns on her heel and walks over to an elevator, punching the buttons on the control panel nearly hard enough to break them. "Right," she says faux-sweetly. "It's been wonderful talking to you, MIKE- it really has- but I promised to show Kyra some of the pleasant aspects of Shinjuku, so we really ought to be going."