multiversallogs | the little one stops to shut the gate

Entry tags:

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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"It's certainly unusual. I'm not sure what a shop for sewing machines would need to hide under that kind of protection..."

She sweeps a glance across the counter for anything else of interest; she doesn't see much, other than invoices.

They say curiosity killed that cat. Hopefully, if death can be reversed in strange places such as these, then satisfaction will bring it back. She carefully dodges the ants' constructions (which are, really, not bad for not having opposable thumbs), and turns the handle on the door.

So they were venturing through, then? Well, all right. Cassandra propped the plank of wood on her shoulder and moved to stand behind Jones' shoulder. Perhaps, she mused, Jones would prefer to go it alone. Certainly, Cassandra had nothing useful to contribute to this little venture. But she wouldn't even entertain the notion of being left behind.

"I suppose the most obvious answer is that the shop was part of some act," she said. "One that wasn't important enough to keep up, perhaps."

She frowned. Oh, it was obvious, all right. But Cassandra didn't like obvious answers. They were too easy. The Pythia of Delphi never gave straightforward answers. She made pilgrims work for it. And Cassandra was working to find something now.

Something occurs to Jones: "Say, you'd been here before, hadn't you? Or maybe I'm just assuming so, but still—did you know the people who worked here? Did you notice anything suspicious?" She shrugs. "I mean, I know next to nothing about most of the city, so..."

She opens the door.

Cassandra shrugged slightly. "I've visited once or twice. I work for a tailor shop down the road. They've sent me here once or twice to repair the equipment, but I haven't had much interaction with these people beyond that." She paused. "Frankly, I never paid much attention to their work. I prefer sewing with my hands."

Spinning her own thread too, for that matter. Cassandra did not care for the pre-fabricated silks and threads that they used in the shop. Something about it was just too...uniform. It didn't look like the clothing was made by people at all.

"What do you see?" she asked.

It's a medium-sized room, although there are doors on the opposite wall and the one to the left, which suggest that there's more to this. In the room is a desk and a table, both strewn with papers, some of which have fallen to the floor. On a chair lies an open book. There are no sewing machines in sight—or ants, actually.

"Nothing particularly strange," says Jones, slowly. "I'm not sure I like this. Although it's nice not having to step over ants in here. I've been hearing they get a bit nasty if you step on them."

"Legend tells of a great warrior named Achilles," she said. "He had a great army of men, so fiercely devoted to one another that if you harmed one of them, you harmed them all. The stories say that they were all once ants, that the gods turned them into men in order to serve Achilles' father, Peleus." She glanced back at the ants. "I have no doubt that if you upset one of them, you upset them all."

She turned to examine the room. "You're right. There's nothing particularly strange. Which, I suppose, makes it stranger." Cassandra looked at Jones. "So what happens next?"

Jones is already shuffling through some of the papers on the table—they have words on them, how could she not. Something—looks like a fairy tale, the way it's written; something about a baker. Normally, she'd not take much notice of it, but her recent dealings with things out of fairy stories makes her more than a little suspicious of the stories themselves. Particularly in locations that are already suspicious. She hands the paper to Cassandra. "Can you make any sense of this? It's not a story I'm familiar with..."

Something else, though, has already caught her eye—a list of names and very familiar-looking numbers. CiD numbers, judging by the format. Oddly, some of them look familiar, although she doesn't know any of the names...

Cassandra took the paper, eying Jones as she flitted from place to place like a mayfly. The woman did not have the most firm of attention spans, but Cassandra supposed, if she knew anything about any of this, perhaps she'd be just as eager and curious.

She felt so useless!

Sighing softly, she looked down at the paper.

[What am I seeing here?]

[It tells the story of the local urban legend, the Baker. I understand it's a bit like Jack the Ripper sort of thing.]

Jones, meanwhile, sets down in one of the chairs to read through some of the things she's collected. This just gets stranger and stranger.

Quietly, Cassandra read the story. A slight man who stole children away? There was one of those in almost every civilization she had known of. The Greeks alone had several.

"It seems common enough," Cassandra muttered. "Like flood stories or legends about people who are one way by day and another by night." She frowned slightly. "I haven't seen many children around Baedal, have you?"

Jones purses her lips. "I suppose that's true," she says. "I suppose if the city chooses who ends up here, then it might just—but no, I know someone was brought here with his young daughter. I'd peg her at maybe between five and seven." A frown comes to her face. "I don't know why precisely a city with such a heavily adult population would have stories like that. Those stories are made up for children..." Curious. And slightly distressing.

She glances at what she's got in her own hand. "Induce and Justify..." Oh, that's familiar. She's seen those in the Militia office. The gist has been briefly explained to her—a cult that tries to convince people to go out into the fog in hopes of going home. Of course, she's certain that the Militia position isn't the whole truth, but the literature speaks for itself and it's more or less common knowledge that going into the fog is best described as suicide.

The important part, though, is that there's something going on here that's bigger than the ants. She's got a feeling.

"Hey—I'm going to put out a CiD call real quick. You can keep looking through the papers..."

"Of course," Cassandra said, as though it were a simple matter.

Nothing was simple. What could Jones possibly have to say to the network? Well, she could only hope that whatever it was, she would say it out loud.

Half-heartedly, she sifted through the papers. It all seemed overly...zealous, to her. Yes. That was the word. And really, Cassandra had little patience for such. Which made her hate the ants all the more.

[this call happens.]

She shuts it off afterward, and turns to Cassandra. "Anything interesting? I suppose if there isn't we could try the other doors..." There's a note of uncertainty to her voice that wasn't there before—she doesn't know what they'll find in the rest of this section, and the not knowing worries her. Maybe talking about something else for a bit will settle her nerves. "God, this is so strange. I suppose of all the things I could say about home, at least it doesn't have giant ants. Where's home for you?"

"It's all the same," Cassandra said, tossing the papers behind her and listening to them flutter to the ground. It was amazing how much paper could sound like a crow's wing.

She leaned over to pick up another handful when Jones asked her about home. They had been so wrapped up in the whole ant matter that it was only then that Cassandra realized they had not yet played her favorite game: See if they recognize her from mythology. She didn't have the best read on Jones, so she couldn't really guess.

"A city to the west of Persia," she said absently. "It was called Troy."

Persia... where was that again? That was sort of over by Africa, wasn't it? Maybe Mediterranean, then. "Gosh, that's quite a ways. From Chicago, anyway, I suppose. I guess everything is a long way from here." More papers; some look like they're in a sort of code. The Militia is definitely going to want to hear about this. She stands.

"Maybe we should check the other rooms...?" She's not easily spooked, but she's getting the feeling that she'd prefer not to stay here much longer than she absolutely has to. Papers they can bring along, if they need to. Toward that end, she stuffs a sheaf of them in her bag.

Cassandra smiled a genuine smile. She was pleased that Jones wasn't jumping down her throat with a million questions about if she was that Cassandra. It was refreshing and it immediately made her just a bit more favorably inclined toward her.

She still felt useless, but at least she was a little less depressed about it.

"All right," she said.

Jones is, of course, up on her mythology—it was one of the first things that she'd gotten up to speed on after Awakening—but, after all, she knows plenty of people with strange names (one of her colleagues calls herself Nimue, for Pete's sake), and, hey, there could be more than one Troy. "All right, then." Two doors. "Door number one, or door number two?"

"Two," Cassandra decided. "There are two of us, it seems fitting." She scanned the doors, trying to figure out which one was number one and which one was number to, but she began to get the sense that it was really more of a formality than anything else. One of those peculiarities which had evolved out of time and distance and such.

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.

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?"

"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."

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.

"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."

Well, Jones was the expert.

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

"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?"

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

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