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

[rhinemaid]

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.

[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.