multiversallogs | the little one stops to shut the gate

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

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.

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"That's... some impressively slow-acting stupid, actually," he says, sounding amused. A whole month or two, really? That's incredible, in his book. What nice people. He's looking at the paintings, now. "This is all kinda weird."

A subtle frown is developing as she picks her way through the place, but she says, "We're in Stepford, Oz. Everything is weird. Including the stupid."

"That is the creepiest thing I have ever heard," he declares animatedly, shuddering a bit and giving Ilde a scandalized look over her shoulder. "Don't wish that on nobody, that ain't nice - oh for." He swears in French, and does a little dance-in-place around some wandering ants. "You don't got the deed, little friends, we're allowed to party crash."

Judging by the tightening of Ilde's jaw, she hasn't forgotten the recent attack any more than those she thinks of as 'the locals'; her fingers flex on the handle as she jerks back a step, both irritated and progressively more inclined to stab the things that irritate her. Is that even going to work on an ant? Fuck.

-well, she'll have the opportunity to find out, she's backing up into one of their big sisters. The inability to hear movement behind her is a problem.

He catches her reaction, and notes to himself that perhaps sudden movements and loud noises around this one are not the best avenue to take, no matter how prone he is to dramatics. So he turns to face her in a much calmer manner, and then... tilts his head. "Idle," he says, firm, and stretches out a hand to illustrate. "Stop walking."

Too late?

Just barely not; she rocks forward on her tiptoes as she stops in response, glancing behind her. Oh. That's annoying, but she's quite good about reacting and then thinking, these days. It's safer to get into the habit. Probably. Sooner or later there's going to be a situation where it's the exact wrong thing to do, that's just her luck.

"Okay," she says, quieter. Then, "This house is too small." On the inside. It's like a reverse-Tardis, and she doesn't like it.

"Yeah." He side-eyes some of the larger ants who're staring to fuss. Weird. "I seen this with drug traffickers, smugglers, you build stuff to hide it. Usually a bit more elegant, though." Since this is pretty noticeable, and all. Remy starts to go prod at the light switches (to no avail) and pull on doorknobs, pressing on walls...

"Hey," she says, raising her voice (she already speaks a little louder than she should most of the time, so...he's not going to miss this, and probably no one else within earshot would either). "I found something."

Maybe nothing, but the box of candles looks as if it's been disturbed, like they're in use, and there's a box of matches there with it. Not for the first time today, she wishes she'd brought cigarettes.

His first thought when he leans over to spy what she's got is that maybe her eyes don't work so well in the dark above water, either - not like he's got cat-vision, but he's got a little boost. (Even if it's sometimes red-tinged, for him.)

So he leans over and presses his fingertip to the wick of the candle she's holding, and it suddenly ignites.

Having not been expecting that, she swears - in Italian, she learned English first but it wasn't what she spoke most often until she was attending boarding school - and then laughs, gurgling, shaking it off. Okay. He does things. She already knew something of the sort.

"That's not what I-"

Ilde stops, abruptly, staring at the wall.

"Put your hand on the candle."

That's a funny laugh. Not the weirdest he's heard, though, and he's distracted by voicing the beginnings of a 'That's awfully forward of you' crack (in French) when he actually does put his hand on the candle.

He senses the change before he sees it, perception pulling at the sides of his eyes, and looks.

"Oh." A beat. "This ain't good."

Ilde understands just enough of what he says to give him a withering look (though if she's taking the time to bother making an expression, he can safely assume she's only doing it out of a sense of play), but as she says, "No, it's not," she's already moving towards the door that's emerged in the candlelight.

"My god! An expression." More French - not European French or anything, but still French. And then she's moving, straight through a huge ant trail, and he finds himself a little uneven again without the candle. He mutters a swear and digs to grab another candle out of the box, and lights it as he moves after her, knocking some ants away in the process. (What, it's dark.)

"Stop that. My French is shit." ...there's absolutely no need for her to say that in Russian, but since they're picking at each other- as a side-note, Ilde has more or less decided she likes him after all. Which is good, since this door is only short a sign declaring THIS WAY TO BAD IDEAS and she opens it, leaning into the rooms hidden behind the light. It's dark in there, too, and it looks as if it were rushed out of too quickly to clean up.

"Only to a Frenchman, which I'm not." Italian, because he thinks she'll enjoy it - there's a clicking from behind him, and he passes it off as just the ants, and the odd sensation of being inside a room that shouldn't exist.

"So who got chased outta here, hm?" He crouches down to look through some scattered leavings, finds more of the strange marbles Ilde'd picked up. "What's this?"

Nobody's spoken Italian to Ilde since her father put her on a plane to Boston, and it does please her, more than a little. Not enough to distract her from what they're at, though, and she says, "A crow-pearl, according to everyone. It's what's left of one of those talking birds when they were killed, during the-" some vague gestures here. "That."

She's collecting the ones she finds here in her purse, still, but she abandons searching for more to begin leafing through the papers - Wanderset's writings, a list that doesn't mean anything to her, myth research...

Holding one of the papers, her expression slowly drains away into blankness.

Remy is reading through the papers, not having a problem doing it quickly or committing it to memory - thieves are like that - but all he's seeing are lists of names and bits of fairy stories. (He knows better than to dismiss them, of course, but it's nothing that's making him go still.)

It takes him a second to notice Ilde's reaction, and he steps over to her and looks over her shoulder instead of asking.

The paper Ilde is holding discusses the innate superiority and supremacy of the human race, and the necessity of joining together against xenians 'for Earth'; her hand is white-knuckled as she looks back over her shoulder, otherwise nearly placid. "You lit that candle. What else can you do?"

Can he make this place go boom?

With all Remy's been through, when he reads it, there's no dark moment; his stomach doesn't drop, his face doesn't become drawn and angry. He just looks at it, and it's so expected that for a moment he's faintly, distantly surprised that he doesn't have the kneejerk impulse to sigh or roll his eyes. Happy, though - it isn't funny. It's disgusting, it's tiresome, and worst of all, it's predictable.

"Enough."

He turns away, and goes through another stack of papers, picking them up and shifting them into a cardboard box. He doesn't speak until he looks back up at Ilde and knows she's watching, so she can hear. "We'll pull everything out first. See how deep it goes."

This is stupid, and he knows it's stupid, and he's doing it anyway. He doesn't care. He's been in a new dimension for less than forty-eight hours and already, this shit, where there's not even a mutant population; it's just people being people and it never gets better, does it? Well, fuck that. What's an empty building full of ants, besides really shoddy terrorism? It'll be a benefit to blow off enough energy to take out a house.

Ilde forces herself to exhale the desire to just break everything and starts packing paper and books into the box that Remy's found. They need the myths, she decides; there's a lot in this city, and she wants to know it, mostly so she and Sonja can punch most of it in the face or whatever else seems appropriate and damaging. They'll take everything, they'll get out, and they'll blow it to hell.

It's a nice, comforting thought. Break what needs breaking.

"Candlelighters," she reads off one of the pamphlets, before she drops it into the box. Well.

He says something vulgar in his native language, a suggestion for their new name, perhaps, and then rises to yank open the door at the far end of the room. More clutter, another door to one side, and two mirrors on opposite walls, facing each other. In the dim light, they look like solid black pools.

(Outside, the ants click. It sounds like there's more of them.)

"Y'know what. No." Walking along one side of the room, Remy moves quickly and reaches out, yanking down one mirror and sending it to the floor glass-first, then moves to do the same to the other. He has no aptitude for magic, but he knows a bad idea when he sees one.

With as much as they're getting out of the first room, Ilde picks her way through the broken glass to the room beyond it - more mirrors, the walls covered in them, nothing else. Just reflections refracting a hundred times over; his red and black eyes in her face blink back at her a hundredfold.

When Remy comes to stand behind her shoulder, he only waits long enough for the mirrors to catch and amplify the light from their small candles. He takes a good look in there, and then: "Take the box and go back outside."

The firelight and the endless reflections of that instruction blur oddly in her mind, but she understands the tone of his voice without needing to properly hear it. She stares into those reflections a moment longer before she turns away, wordless, to get the box.

Which turns out to be slightly less simple than she'd anticipated. Picking up the box is fine, but the locals are getting restless and her path to the door isn't as clear as she'd like. "Remy," she says, loud and brief. "Problem."

She will get past these. She's just letting him know.

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.

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

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