Larry, feeling like the wizened, grayish stubble is straight-up popping out of his face even as he thinks, opens up his binder and takes up the challenge of being a human filter once more as the knowledge begins to pour through him.
[Larry's mind roll: 5+1+1]
And the magic sticks easily to his prepared mind - he is like one of those wacky sea sponges, with all the rank seawater of glory and power getting sucked into him, then emptied of its vital magical nutrients and dispersed through his not very well-developed magical body apparatus. It's actually pretty great, and Larry can't help but wonder if a sedentary, filtration-based lifestyle might not be the true way to go, really. If he became truly spongelike, somebody could dice him into hundreds of little bits, and each one would create a new Larry, which would probably lead to either a pretty bitchin' battle royale or the best dictatorship mankind has ever seen.
But he digresses. He has a whole bundle of new spells, and that's what's important!
1. Disintegrate Aspirin
2. Volley of Spiky Lice
3. Evoke Depressing Monocle
4. Evilize Platypus
WELCOME BACK, MORTAL! THOUGHT I'D NEVER HEAR FROM YOU AGAIN! HAVE YOU GOTTEN A SECOND LEYLINE YET? YOU NEED TO MAKE PROGRESS! AND ALSO CHECK IN MORE OFTEN! NEW SPELLS ARE COMING IN AS I SPEAK! TAKE ANY OF THESE THAT YOU LIKE!
* * * * *
Being in Potato Heaven,
Halesey can think of no better thing to do than open his mind to the spirit of the potato - it's not every day that one can behold God for inspiration, after all. Opening the binder, he attempts to harness the power of the holy... vegetable? Probably a vegetable, yes.
[Halesey's mind roll: 3+1]
The flow of knowledge is slow, but definitely there! And all of it, pleasingly enough, appears to be potatoes! It should not be long until Halesey has properly configured his mind for optimum potato reception, oh no! He will become a veritable radar dish for that stuff, and know the glory of all potatoes, all day, all night, all year round.
1. Empathize With Potatoes
2. Repel Potatoes
Well. That's an unconventional direction for things. Be careful, friend. Meddle not with dangerous things, particularly of the divine persuasion. It rarely ends well.
And with that, Halesey is sure that he wants this, and wants this rather badly, and begins to send out good quest-accepting vibes toward God.
"I sense you accept the quest. You shall become great yet. Now, be off, and seek the path of demons," God tells him, and without another word a vortex appears behind him - it seems to lead to the material world, and yet does not seem to exert any pull on him. Curious, he finds that he can easily swim into it, and suddenly reappears in an alley seemingly quite a ways off from the bar he entered through, judging by the relatively higher grubbiness of the architecture. He quietly wonders if his vortex is still there, actually. Somebody might fall in. Not that that's a bad thing, of course.
* * * * *
Dave, not at all minding the terrible cognizance and disturbing acceptance of his own imminent mortality, floats on in the denture void, trying to think positively about it all.
[Dave's body roll: 5-1]
As he begins to go with the flow, the general dread and cold feeling also seems to decrease, which is pretty good, he guesses. At least now he has a direction to go in, or at least passively submit to. That's always a wonderful thing to have. Maybe there's something here aside from the terribly salty and biting dentures. Something that could possibly help. His mind is filled with optimism as the homogenous denture mass carries him onward, the enchanted angel ghost trying to hug him a bit befuddled at the way Dave does not seem to be even a little frightened of it.
Time passes as he floats onward, seconds turning into minutes turning into hours turning into days turning into goddamn years, or so it feels like, at least. It's impossible to take a nap here, even though Dave does feel like he could really use some of that. There is nothing here to keep his attention aside from uncomfortable poking - no idea of progress made, no distractions, nothing whatsoever anywhere. Everything shifts, and the patterns Dave can discern aren't even that interesting. Everything seems to be heading towards doom. Nothing at all to do aside from practice his dance moves, and that's not particularly fun in what seems to be zero-g either.
Dave tries humming a tune to pass the time, but he fails to remember any tunes that he'd care to repeat. The hosts of the outer planes will consume the world. And he's already exhausted his mental list of jokes that he can tell himself and laugh about, as well as the jokes that just provide him with some good memories, or even jokes that he doesn't particularly mind. He begins to find it odd that he doesn't remember much of his childhood at all. It seemed like such a vivid time back then, but now it's just grayed out in his thoughts. Cognitive ruminations are fun, or at least here they are. Gods, this is boring as hell. Denture hell, to be more precise. Denture hell that seems very eager on rubbing salt into each and every one of his bodily surfaces - his eyes start to hurt.
Actually, he's not sure he's entirely accurate in his previous assessment about the impossibility of napping here. In retrospect, he seems to have nodded off a few times already, not that it's helped much. Hard to tell when that sort of thing happens if you're bored out of your mind already. He is struck by the suspicion that he might not really be going anywhere right now, and he finds it only mildly troubling. His death-ghost seems to have disappeared somewhere. Hm.
* * * * *
John, of the opinion that one must take all the advantage of extremely cheap food that one possibly can, goes up to Chow and asks for more chow.
"An appreciator of Chow's chow, eh? You remind me of good old Karl!" Chow says, pointing at a plaque on a nearby wall commemorating an individual by the name of Karl Truman Jenkins, a jolly young man whose appreciation of Chow's chow has apparently made him the most revered of Chow's customers. According to the information available on the wall, Mr. Jenkins died earlier this year at the age of 37. Quite tragic, really. Still, John's mild sadness is alleviated by the fact that the waiter, upon John paying Chow another two dollars, reappears almost immediately with another bowl of oily noodles, and John is equally quick in scarfing it down over at the table next to his previous one, because his previous one has been taken by a man with quite a lot of knives and even more appreciation for some discount chow - when John clears his throat slightly in the man's vicinity, the fellow shoots him a deadly glare for daring to interrupt his meal - not one to cause trouble this late at night (an hour earlier would have been perfectly fine, but now he's had dinner and it always seems so pointless to cause violence after dinner), John just sits at the next nearest table and finishes this bowl of noodles as well, then picks up his rather food-filled torso and laboriously makes his way home, collapsing into his nice, wonderful bed and journeying into dreamland.
He proceeds to have eight solid, uninterrupted hours of vivid nightmares from the kilogram of oily noodles he ate right before bedtime, and wakes up in the morning feeling like some of that copious cooking oil has seeped into the rest of him. Seriously, he feels like he's been sweating nothing but GM rapeseed throughout the night, and smells like it as well.
* * * * *
Eta quickly fights off the impulse to question the way she didn't need to either pay or sign in to get a room, and thanks the fellow.
"Thank you very much. Now if there's nothing else, me and my friend are getting tired and would like to retire to our room. I assume it's upstairs?""Nah, nah, ground floor, down the hall. It's Room 102. Ground floor, second room. That's what the 102 means," the man explains, gesturing toward a nearby hallway. Eta and Lois, not ones to argue with that kind of solid logic, head down the hallway.
"If you need anything, just holler at me, okay?" he says as they leave the reception area.
"He seems very... simple," Lois quietly says to Eta as she follows her to Room 102 - the first floor appears to have about twelve rooms in total, and each seems fairly large, to be honest, an impression that is reinforced when Eta and her friend enter Room 102 - it's nicely decorated, with exquisite-looking drapes over the windows and what look like authentic, if slightly bland paintings of fruit, and a minibar and a very comfortable-looking couch and armchair complete with accompanying coffee table, not to mention a more than slightly old CRT TV and an aging, though very much functional minifridge. There's even a sizable wardrobe that looks like a genuine antique, and a private bathroom. Slightly less pleasingly, there's only a single double bed, though it does look like it'd be downright righteous to sleep in.
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Topic: The Forgotten Art: Approaching the Nexus (Read 255129 times)