the little one stops to shut the gate :: [OPEN]

[baedalites.livejournal.com]

Who: A whole lot of ants and YOU!
What: Exploring houses overrun by giant ants! Interacting with ants!
Where: Three specific ant hive houses have cropped up in Baedal.
When: The ants become visible late Sukkardi, so any time after Shundi will do.
Notes: To organize expeditions into the ant hives and to see what your characters will find there, please see the OOC post. NPCs, general GMing, and mod guidance are all available upon request.
Warnings: Bugs! Possible horror. Will update as needed.

When the ants come out of the ground it happens very quietly and it happens at night. Baedal wakes up to chitinous sound of insect labour. At first there is some panic - memories of strange creatures emerging from below to attack the city fresh in everyone's mind - but it is soon evident that the ants, while curious, pose no immediate threat to the City. They seem content to work and live inside the houses they have occupied; houses no one has noticed or cared about for years.

Soon, the ant-occupied houses begin to change. The ants are building something on the rooftops, something like towers, stretching towards the heavens. Birds that fly too close to the buildings quickly disappear.

Comments

[bangyoudead.livejournal.com]

He picks up a broken section of a mirror frame to use first, careless, and is in the process of tossing the now-glowing object into the mirrored room when Ilde calls out to him. He closes the door enough so that the accompanying BOOM! isn't quite so harsh, but it's still very startling - to the ants, anyway.

"Oh. Damn, gimme a minute-" He opens the door again and with a flick of his wrist there's half a deck of cards in it, fanned out, and a heartbeat later they're glowing a bright red-magenta color. He chucks them into the room in a wide spray, and then slams the door. A second later it's off its hinges.

[rhinemaid]

"Jesus," but she sounds so pleased about it. (Her expression doesn't significantly change, under the circumstances; Remy's probably seen enough not to find that as unsettling as some might.)

With the box in her arms, getting past the ants is primarily a matter of dodging and knocking the smaller ones into the larger to confuse the issue and get her past, although bracing her back against the wall and kicking the first one to interfere with her clear into the one opposite is satisfying when she hears the crack of the carapace.

[bangyoudead.livejournal.com]

He doesn't know if the candle spell will trap him in here or separate the rooms, so he decides not to take his chances. It's not like he's got any limit of energy to use. Still in the hidden room, Remy crouches down and puts one palm flat on the floor. It starts to glow. This is difficult, because this is not a moving object, but just like he can calculate the kinetic potential of something, he can force that same potential into something without it. He'll just need a trigger to convince it, and from the sounds going on in the main room, he's sure he can find one.

Once the floor is glowing uncomfortable, he gets up and goes to join Ilde, kicking ants out of the way. A particularly large soldier ant zooms after him, and he sends a charged shard of glass into it.

[rhinemaid]

The explosion of the soldier ant sends the others scurrying and leaves Ilde fleetingly grateful for having worn jeans and not jeans she cares much about staining. Ant innards aren't pleasant, and she kicks one of the others back into the mess it made as she shoves herself out of the hidden rooms, candle still clutched in her hand. That it's still lit is some kind of miracle, and convenient enough that she takes the time to touch it to a few dry places before throwing it down as she runs for the front door.

[bangyoudead.livejournal.com]

"That'll work," Remy observes, and charges the candle he's holding before chucking it against a wall. He kicks one and, steps on another, and turns around in the frame of the front door, one hand braced on the side, crackling color spreading through the structure from his palm. A soldier ant charges him and he kicks it, lets it gnaw on his shoe a bit, then pries it off one-handed and then hurls it back inside, even as he's already taking backwards steps.

Between that last combustive ant and the fire..

Well.

"Time to run, fille!"

[rhinemaid]

Ilde feels it when the house goes, the impact of the explosion rocking through the earth beneath it and the heat of the fire catching new life behind them - it drives her forward, stumbling and righting herself, and she grabs a hold of Remy's jacket to push him in another direction (not the way they came) when she hears someone further back yelling for the Militia.

[bangyoudead.livejournal.com]

Ugh, explosions. Someday his hearing is going to go (and how it or something else hasn't is either his luck or his x-genes or both), but he just runs. Business as usual, all over again. Ilde shoves him and he goes, because she knows the area better. They're long gone before anyone else shows up, and in the dark, no one even saw them to begin with.

There are worse ways to arrive in town.

( visual | locked | jones, remy, sonja )

[rhinemaid]

[ OOC NOTE: this message is sent the day after this and this. ]

You sent a message out about the Candlelighter houses a few days ago.

( visual | locked | jones, remy, sonja )

[wandandsickle]

So you found Candlelighter materials, too. That had a lot to do with what I was wondering about, actually. Which house? We were in the one on Amicable Ally. [A pause; she looks unsure about something:] Was there a warded area in the place you visited, as well?

( visual | locked | jones, remy, sonja )

[rhinemaid]

Echomire, and yes.

[ ilde touches her tongue to the back of her teeth, then- ]

I'd rather not have this conversation on the network.

( visual | locked | jones, remy, sonja )

[wandandsickle]

Yes, that's... yes. This would probably be a better conversation to have face to face, now that you mention it. Um... is there a good place for talking? I don't have much privacy where I live at the moment, unfortunately.

( visual | locked | jones, remy, sonja )

[rhinemaid]

Let's go for a walk along the river. Where's it nearest to you? I can meet you there.

( visual | locked | jones, remy, sonja )

[wandandsickle]

[She indicates a location that's near where the river branches, between Griss Twist, Flyside, and Brock Marsh.]

Will that work?

( visual | locked | jones, remy, sonja )

[rhinemaid]

I'll be there.

[wandandsickle]

Jones can approve of that answer—the significance of numbers is something she's well aware of. By her reckoning the rightmost door is Number Two, although really, looking at the doors, one could think them interchangeable: same wood, same worn brass fixtures, no markings on either.

Of course, she would hardly want to go in blind; unfortunately, she never mastered Life magic, but she can check for trapdoors and other similar dangers easily. It seems safe enough. Funny, though; unless there's something mixing up her magical senses, there must be an impressive collection of fancy silver cutlery in there, for all of that material she can sense. But not being a werewolf, she doesn't really care about silver, so: into the breach it is.

It's only opening the door that she figures out what exactly all the silver is coming from, stopping her in her tracks. Mirrors. The room is covered, on every wall, in mirrors of varying sizes and shapes.

Well, this has now officially crossed the line of weirdness she is comfortable with.

[cassie_of_troy]

Cassandra blinked, staring at the mirrors. Suddenly, crossing into that room didn't feel like the best of ideas. Not that there was really any other way to learn anything. Still, she paused, reaching into her dress and taking out a small bobbin with blue thread around it. She couldn't really claim credit for the idea. It was something she had seen in a vision. She no longer remembered the details of the vision itself, but the idea remained.

Thankfully.

She tied one end of the thread to the knob of the door, trying to make the situation a little less intimidating by smiling wryly. "Well," she murmured, "whoever built this chamber clearly had an ego, didn't they? Do you think it goes very far back?"

[wandandsickle]

"It does," Jones says, a little absently. This, this she doesn't like. Mirrors have all kinds of supernatural uses and there's that old superstition—don't walk between two facing mirrors? There is more going on here than she feels comfortable handling by herself; she's competent, yes, but not a one-woman army.

"This... I don't like this," she murmurs. "I don't think we should go in there."

[cassie_of_troy]

Well, that was fairly peculiar. Up until this point, the other women had seemed, to Cassandra, at least, entirely fearless. Curious. And fearless. Why should the mirrors be any more threatening than enormous ants? Cassandra could think of nothing.

Unwinding a bit of the thread from her bobbin, she took a few tentative steps forward, a bit amused, really, by her own reflection. She had never quite anticipated looking like a Spartan girl before. Apollo, doubtlessly, would have a lurid comment or two about her legs. Fortunately, he was nowhere to be seen.

Coward.

"Do you sense something?" she asked Jones.

[ofminastirith.livejournal.com]

Clever. It's not the first time he's admired his employer's thinking, and it probably won't be the last.

"Right," he says, sounding rather decisive about it, too.

[suninhades]

Right it is. Integra goes first, pushing the door open easily and still holding her candle, as much for light as for making sure that this whole place doesn't dissolve around her or leave them trapped in a wall.

There's nothing immediately alarming in the next room - a mirror on the wall, a dresser on the opposite with a number of innocuous items, papers in boxes, abandoned. She begins to look about, seeing what she can read.

[ofminastirith.livejournal.com]

Boromir does likewise, holding his candle as steadily as possible and trying not to squint in the dim light. At the dresser he picks up and dusts off what looks like a pamphlet. One word in particular stands out. "Candlelighters. Hm." He does his best to flick through it one-handedly.

[wandandsickle]

"No, it's just..." She wrinkles her nose. "Mirrors are rather magically potent. From the look of this place, I'd have to wonder if someone was doing a major working in here, or... I don't know. I can't tell what they were doing in here, which is rather what worries me."

[cassie_of_troy]

Well, Jones was the expert.

Delicately, Cassandra walked back over to her. "All right," she said. "We won't go in."

[wandandsickle]

"All right," says Jones, slowly. "Well, we should probably check the other room, as well. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to find this very interesting, if they haven't already investigated this themselves." The Militia in particular. Perhaps this'll get her off the hook for good behavior, who knows?

She shrugs her shoulders a little, a stretching motion, as she heads toward the other door. "Do you make anything of this?"