IC Thread - 01

Zorro and Aki:

The sink won't budge when Zorro is touching it, but you can hold it still in mid-air for him to climb or jump to. With your help, he might be able to climb up to the top of the building.



Zeto:

The CONTRAPTION fires a grid of lasers over the crater, mapping it out, then reaches out with a claw and takes a sample. After a few moments' processing, sheets of data start pouring from the side of it.

You discover that the meteor impacted at exactly ninety degrees to the ground, and seems to have vanished after the impact - at any rate, no meteoric residue is in the crater. There's less Outside dust in the ground than you'd expect, but that's probably due to what Matty just did. The impact as a whole looks like the effects of a wish, but you're fairly sure Chuubo's more responsible than this with his wishes. Not responsible enough to avoid accidentally putting out the sun in pursuit of an ice cream, mind, but he's definitely not the kind of person to destroy a chocolate store with a meteor.

Amy:
You recognise the colours of the inner and outer areas as being the same as DERSE and PROSPIT, the two DREAM MOONS you have occasionally found your friends' dreamselves in. The bits attached to them by chains must be the ROYAL QUARTER, which the carapacian people inhabiting the moons have refused to allow you into.

The four-planet shape fits with sculptures and bits of mythology that you've seen around those dream-worlds as well; supposedly, there are four worlds that orbit Skaia, and when the sovereigns of those four lands return it will signal the coming of the FINAL BATTLE and blah blah blah. You briefly regret having wandered away from the tour guide.

Hmm. These are really detailed. If you look closely, you can almost see... whoa.



Matty:
Leonardo steps forward. "You fool! You've destroyed priceless research dat-ack!" he shouts, cutting off as a glob of chocolate hits him in the side of the head. Rinley glares at him, and he glares back, then stalks away muttering about getting revenge on those fools, oh yes.

Rinley puts her other arm around you. "Don't listen to him, you did great." She pauses to lick some of the chocolate from her right hand. "Plus he was distracted enough for me to swipe his discs. Sucker."

Like any good hyperactive magical girl teenage shrine maiden, Amy jumps straight to the center of the issue. And by center of the issue she means the shiniest. But it's in the middle of the ORRORY, so it totally counts. And, you know, as a planet fought over by four great whatevers in some kind of glorious FIGHTAN then it has to be covered in shinies. Or dragons. Or both.

So, she looms over it, getting her eye closer and closer in an attempt to see thought the clouds to the depths below. Or at least divine some kind of dream-meaning in the thing. Of course, it's only when she accidentally sticks her head in a cloud that she realizes that the rules have changed. Oh, and that GRAVITY has appeared and glomped her. (Adorable universal force that it is).

Buuuut falling with style gives the most awesome view of the... disappointingly mundane GIANT CHESSBOARD type thing.

She pouts.

There is a terminal lack of shinies. Also dragons.

The sky whizzes past as she wonders why anyone would want to fight over a giant chessboard. Absently flipping herself upright her hair forms a Halo around her as she descends. Straight past the two giant BLACK and WHITE CARAPACIANS. She blinks, absently wondering when they got there and forgetting that people are supposed to go splat on landing from that height (gravity-chan doesn't notice either).

She looks around at the pair of GIANT KINGS, apparently locked in MORTAL COMBAT. Also frozen in time. Or statues. Or something. She shrugs. It's not really her place to tell the giant chessboard planet what to do with itself. (It's not that interesting either). There is however a spot of colour- each statue wears a RING of FOUR ORBS. For a moment she considers stealing it.

Then one of them breathes.

She blinks, waves, and yells up at them. "Hii~ Nice chessboard you have here. How are things?"

Matty looks up at that, SHOCK breaking him out of his FUNK.

"Rinley! That's stealing!" he hisses quietly to her, though his outrage is tempered slightly by the knowledge that RINLEY just sees it as "BORROWING".

"Maybe I can get him a copy when I get mine. Might distract him from his PROJECTS which nearly always end in parts of Arcadia EXPLODING...."

Matty starts going around the square helping people out, his soothing presence still putting people at ease, even giving a few kind words and a smile to Leonardo. His CALMING AURA seems to help him say just the right thing to brighten people's days, and he doesn't move on till people have smiles on their faces.

Eventually, he returns to Rinley and Zeto. He GRINS at them.

"So, shall we go and get our games? With all that excitement, I'd like to get back to the relaxing simplicity of a shopping trip..."

Zorro:
You reach the roof, and applying your boundless supply of cunning, find an unlocked door. Inside, you find a way down into a corridor; at one end is a conference room, with a human-height STONE ORB at the head of the table, engraved with the SKAIANET spirograph. The door at the other end is marked "STAIRS" but is locked or jammed. The other doors lead off into individual OFFICES; most of these just have desks with steamwork computers and papers, but one of them (larger than the rest) has a map board covered in PICTURES and BITS OF STRING. The name on the door isn't one you know, but seems oddly familiar - Apocynum, J.

The pictures include YOURSELF, AKI, MATTY and ZETO - a nearby note says "Two Zs and only one A - imbalanced?". Other clusters appear around Town - four near the School, one of whom is clearly (heh) a ghost. RINLEY's picture appears off to one side, with a thick black border and a large question mark. A later note in red pen just says "Damn it, Rinley."

As you're examining this, Edony squeaks in surprise - the drawer she's opened contains a FANCY SWORD, a HEROIC TUNIC and a FLUTE. A note on top of it says "Zorro, it's dangerous to go alone. Take these. (Well, not alone, yet, but you will be. Edony, the flute is for you; make sure you hold on to it.)". The note is in a distinctly different handwriting to that on the map.

Amy:
They both turn their giant heads ponderously to look at you. As they do, the CHESSBOARD starts to warp under and around you; you can feel probabilities change and shift as they each ponder what you mean. Hills and valleys form as the board bends, and then with a great CRACK the ground splits underneath you, separating the two of them.

This has left you in the uncomfortable position of not having anything to stand on, and, indeed, falling to your kind of dream death. Again. Sigh.



Matty/Zeto:
"Good plan, Sub-Assistant Captain Matty! Strike while the other gamers are distracted by the chocolate crisis. Move out!" Rinley says, then dashes toward the gaming store. J3-NNY confirms that she can indeed handle the data collection for now, freeing Zeto to follow you to the GAME STORE.

Rinley has saved you a spot in line, and you begin the process of queueing. As you wind your way through the shuffling queues, you go past displays of peripherals and merchandise, including an official SBURB "Sylladex Expansion Pack", whatever one of those is.

An interminable wait (of about ten minutes or so, but having to deal with a bored Rinley) you manage to check out, fresh new copies of SBURB in your hands. As you walk back to where the crater was, there's a high-pitched whistling sound, and another meteor, this one only about the size of a tennis ball, lands in the fountain near you with a SPLOOSH.

Aki:
Looking around the lower floor of the factory reveals a lot of smooth white MACHINES of strange design, with glowing green lines on them in artistic patterns. Various mechanical thingummibobs seem to indicate that they're used in manufacturing something, but how it's done is beyond you. There are some large spaces on the floor that look like they could accomodate other pieces of machinery, with writing on the floor of them that's too small for you to make out with your screen's resolution.

At one end of the factory floor is a HUGE COMPUTER. The screen currently shows a large gear and a countdown, reading "00:00:06:15". In front of this screen is a LARGE PINK FLOWER on some kind of computerised PEDESTAL.

"Another one? Hey, Jenny, did you get that?" Zeto calls over to her robot FRIEND. At least this one was less chocolate-shop-levelling. She runs over to the FOUNTAIN to inspect and possibly RETRIEVE the fallen meteor for future analysis and/or SCIENCE!

Aki watches the TIMER for a few moments, then hastily opened up her chat window to Zorro, because hell, if she couldn't be there, at least he might be able to. Something was seriously off about all this... unless it was a trap? Everyone else sure as hell seemed to have cleared out.


aridFirefly began pestering nibblingQuestant
<aridFirefly> yo, when you're done up there I found some interesting stuff downstairs, some writing I can't read and a countdown on some flower thing. here's some directions if you want to check it out but be ready to fucking run, I'll scout you out an escape route too.


So, what was the quickest way out from there...