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Post by Bee on Sept 7, 2009 18:41:55 GMT -5
Thalia grabbed the notebook from Senka and looked at the scribbles thoughtfully.
"Nope!" she said, cheerfully. Then she decided that teasing Senka probably wasn't a good idea. Senka didn't seem to be the type to enjoy teasing. She was, actually, perhaps the oddest Corvie Thalia had ever seen, by simple virtue of not being odd. It was interesting. Thalia liked her.
It took her a couple of minutes. The Hair twisted about itself contemplatively. She made several thoughtful "hmm" noises. Her brain reorganized things. Then she had it.
"They're primes," she said. "Whose reversals are primes. This was a mean puzzle. You put them together like this, simple ascending order." She scribbled the numbers down. 13. 17. 71. 79. 107. 113. 149. 157. 199. "The missing ones--the sequence only goes to 200, I assume--" And here she gave the speakers a somewhat baleful glare. "--are 31, 37, 73, 97, 167, and 179. So she wants us to remember the number 1317313771737997107113149157167179199?"
What use could they possibly have for such a huge number? It made her brain hurt more to say the final number than to figure out the puzzle itself.
"Okay," she said, to their friend the disembodied voice, "we've got the sequence right and the number."
"Splendid," said Miss Arborea, and there was a peculiar edge to her prim voice that had not been there before. "And since you didn't seem to find that puzzle very exciting, I thought I'd spice up your adventure by making your next room a field of lava. Please to enjoy."
A chunk of the wall crumbled. It was very, very hot. There was a single platform in the distance. Thalia frowned. This was just sadistic.
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Dark
Five of Diamonds
Bladed Hare
You are not prepared.
Posts: 2,105
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Post by Dark on Nov 5, 2010 17:57:46 GMT -5
"I believe there was mention of lava being too expensive to import," Senka noted dryly, feeling rather difficult and not at all happy with the proceedings. What logical explanation could there be for putting them through such inane tests? There was none, and it annoyed her to distraction.
Whoever was behind all this was obviously off their rocker, and Senka was not amused. Not even the vague promise of revealing her mysterious parentage--she admitted to being curious, but it didn't have much bearing on her life; Ezra was the one who had raised her, and the only one that mattered as far as she was concerned--was enough to encourage her to play along with the disembodied voice.
She wanted to be done now, thank you.
"It's on a grid," Senka said with a flash of insight, and not much interest. "Can you fly?" she inquired of Thalia, taking note of her suit, "the platforms--so clever to use an optical illusion to blend them into the background--correspond to the numbers from the previous room, but quite a few of them are far enough apart that I don't think we'll make it jumping."
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Post by Bee on Nov 5, 2010 18:08:06 GMT -5
"I can fly," Thalia said, happily. "Sort of."
The truth was that her flying ability left a lot to be desired. She couldn't do it for very long and due to the massive amounts of flailing everything everywhere, she wasn't the most coordinated flier, either. But she could hop and skip around until they were done with this mess.
Thalia loved puzzles. She loved being smart and solving them. But when lava became part of the equation it was probably time to admit that things were getting out of hand. The room was already oppressively warm, and hard to breathe in. Some sciencey thing about lava being hot and all that stuff. A remarkable number of people in novels tended to forget that even being near lava was likely to result in terrible things happening to you.
She flew, haphazardly, from platform to platform.
"No no!" shouted Miss Arborea. "That is ALL WRONG. You cannot do it that way. I'll throw you into the lava. Right now I will!"
But Thalia was not yet in the lava, so she continued. Finally, a door opened, hidden, and clearly not the one they were supposed to go through. She grabbed Senka. "Time to finish this!"
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Dark
Five of Diamonds
Bladed Hare
You are not prepared.
Posts: 2,105
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Post by Dark on Nov 5, 2010 18:34:31 GMT -5
The door led down a narrow, ill-lit hallway with no immediate danger to be seen, though it seemed unnaturally cold after the heat of the lava room and Senka found herself shivering uncomfortably for the first bit of the sojourn. Somewhere, there was a pipe dripping, and the plip plop of water accompanied their hasty footsteps.
Miss Arborea was rather conspicuously quiet during their walk, and Senka wondered at the reason. She'd expected angry shouting, at the very least.
Eventually, the hallway let out into a brightly illuminated room full of blinking lights of various shades and machinery that Senka couldn't fathom the reason behind. It all looked very important, and Senka fancied rather gleefully that they must have stumbled upon headquarters.
And she hypothesized, looking at the many darkened hallways branching off from the room, that they could probably get nearly anywhere in the complex from this central point. Which meant one of them led out.
How disappointing, Miss Arborea hissed, deciding to announce herself.
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Post by Bee on Nov 5, 2010 18:41:21 GMT -5
Thalia didn't see what there was to be so disappointed in. To her way of thinking, they had managed something awfully clever, bypassing the rest of the insane tests to get right to the prizes. Maybe some congratulations were actually in order. Maybe some confetti.
She was quite transfixed by all the machinery, though. She imagined a place with so many death traps must have some powerful central location to run all of them, but this was beyond the pale for the standard science of the age.
"We're not disappointing," she said. "We just got bored. I like all your blinking lights. But where are you?"
You'll die before you find that out, she grit out. Please return to the primary testing facility at once and continue on. You have four tests left to pass. Please return to the primary testing facility at once.
"I think," said Thalia, tilting her head at a particularly blinky piece of equipment, "that you can't do anything to your central hub, so I'm really not concerned. "I think," she continued, "that you should tell Senka what she wants to know."
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Dark
Five of Diamonds
Bladed Hare
You are not prepared.
Posts: 2,105
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Post by Dark on Nov 5, 2010 19:48:00 GMT -5
Senka hummed in agreement, and started to explore the room. It really was interesting, for all she had no idea what any of it was for and a general apathy towards the scientific field and all that in entailed that kept her from really enjoying what she was discovering.
She did, however, find one significant thing of note, and if she wasn't mistaken it was Miss Arborea, or what was left. The emaciated figure was slouched in a command chair, and plugged into a plethora of wires that connected it and the chair to the nearby machinery. The body didn't so much as twitch.
"Thalia," she called, inching closer.
No, cried Miss Arborea, This is all wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong! The voice echoed from a dozen speakers, but the woman in the chair didn't stir.
Was the voice just an echo of a Corvie accident, long dead, or was the woman still actually alive? Senka shivered at the thought.
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Post by Bee on Nov 5, 2010 20:03:26 GMT -5
Thalia felt a surge of not repugnance, but of fascination so intense that she nearly managed to forget what she was doing. Her brain spun through a dozen theories before settling on the most likely one. If she looked closely enough, paid enough attention, she could hear faint breathing, the little thump-ump of a sluggish heartbeat. This machinery--this whole building?--must have been some kind of...life support system. Incredibly advanced.
"Wow," she said, with noticeable awe. "How long has this been keeping you alive?"
For ages and ages, you horrible little girl, and you ruined everything, you and the rat, and now it'll be ages more, more...
Some sort of seizure raced through the equipment, perhaps some manifestation of Miss Arborea's helpless rage. She had taken a flying leap off the composure cliff. Thalia felt a twinge of sadness mixed in with her curiosity, but not enough to stop her asking questions.
"You want to die, then? Can't you just...shut yourself off?"
No, no, she hissed, miserably--madly. It was disconcerting, to hear her voice without so much as a quiver from her mouth.
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Dark
Five of Diamonds
Bladed Hare
You are not prepared.
Posts: 2,105
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Post by Dark on Nov 5, 2010 20:26:01 GMT -5
Senka frowned thoughtfully, eying the apparently still alive--though barely--form of Miss Aborea.
"Can you be shut off? Would you like to be shut off?"
The machines flickered again, Yes, oh yes. But you ruined it. Stuck down here for ages and ages, and more ages to come. Wretched little creatures. Why'd you have to ruin it?
Senka got the sense that Miss Aborea had been stuck down here just a little past her expiration date, but felt compelled to ask:
"How did we ruin it? How do we shut you down?"
The key, you need the key. But the tests! How else were you supposed to get down here? And you didn't finish them! Oh, oh.
Key? As in, the little silver key they'd gotten in the first room? She glanced at Thalia.
"If we found the key, would you be willing to tell us how to leave? And the other information you promised me?"
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Post by Bee on Nov 5, 2010 20:35:48 GMT -5
Oh, anything, anything at all, said Miss Arborea feverishly. Then her tone went heavy and menacing. Don't taunt me, little girls. The only way to shut this down was to complete the tests, to get...here...
And that was where logic crumbled to a fine grey sand and blew away with the wind. Thalia knitted her brow.
"Miss Arborea," she said, gently, for that was how one handled mad people--and spacey people apparently, as slow and gentle was sometimes how people talked to Thalia, too. "We are here, and we have the key." Her hair wiggled protectively around it. It was till up there. Making friends with the sugar packets and rubber bands. "I think this is going to work out," she continued, more brightly. "We can help each other. Tell Senka what you promised her, and tell us how to get out, and we can...we can shut you down."
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Dark
Five of Diamonds
Bladed Hare
You are not prepared.
Posts: 2,105
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Post by Dark on Nov 5, 2010 21:00:24 GMT -5
Miss Aborea thought about this for so long in silence that Senka began to wonder if she had forgotten they were there, but the lights continued to flash in agitation, and eventually the voice crackled into existence again.
If you're here, yes. Yes, I suppose. If you're here. The lights flickered off down a hall to the left, Go that way to leave. There are stairs to the street. As for your parents, girl, you are a descendent of the Eumeleia and D'Allesio lines. Now let me sleep, you wretched girls. Let me sleep. Keep your promise.
Senka felt something in her chest seize up--she knew a D'Allesio; he was a very good friend of her Uncle Ezra, in fact. The woman couldn't possibly mean that D'Allesio. Why wouldn't he have ever said anything? Did he even know?
For something that she'd continually told herself didn't matter, it--upset--her. And who was Eumeleia?
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