THE DUNKER, all tuckered out from a day of conquest and victory, elects to rest as instructed by the fat dude, telling his loyal queen platoon to guard him well while he slumbers, plopping down on the ground and letting his multitudinous adipose folds cushion his internal organs as he progressively loses consciousness. He must have been pretty exhausted with how eventful the day has been.
So exhausted, in fact, that by the time he awakens from a largely dreamless sleep, it seems to be late in the afternoon. The queens are nowhere to be seen, and neither are his associates. The pit has disappeared, and the place looks rather clean.. Hm. Where could they have all gone? And why did they think it safe to leave him here alone with a leyline? And where did the queens go?
Truly this is an inauspicious start to the day.
* * * * *
Halesey is never one to refuse a challenge of faith, so he immediately does as God has instructed - well, not quite immediately, as he does take a deep breath to prepare, but nevertheless in short order.
[Halesey's body roll: 3]
He pokes all his limbs into the vortex quite easily despite how counterintuitive doing so may seem, but he does run into a terrible problem - the head! The head's not fitting in! Quite woeful, that, as his limbs feel pretty nice inside the vortex, what with the slightly lower temperature and lesser amount of abrasive potatoes out in the normal world. Some contortionist skills may be required, he realizes.
* * * * *
There's only a couple things a proper law-abiding
Dave can do as a pair of eyes plus a floating pig, and clearly the most effective course of action would be to aggressively disbelieve and will away the terrible things that seem to be happening to him!
But sadly, no matter how much he wills, he is exploded! He cannot reconstitute that which has been exploded, can he, even if it does not make sense that he is still alive in any shape or form. Hm. The obvious answer would be to analyze the matter deeper, though he can't help but have slight reservations since the fact remains that he probably
shouldn't be alive, and that examination of this would probably only prove him correct in a way that the universe may notice as well.
"Hey, Dave, you still alive?" asks the Denture God.
"You don't look too alive. I'm taking back the divine jim-jam in any case, okay?"Dave suddenly feels terribly deprived. His sense of identity is beginning to fade. Was that what was keeping him alive? Oh dear.
"A shame. You were a cool guy, Dave."* * * * *
Eta is about to go to hell, and this is far less distressing to her than it probably should be.
"Oh, that's good. Nice to see work conditions improving," she idly makes conversation as she gets her stuff back into her bag and checks over her clothes, which seem roughly hell-appropriate, even with the slightly singed bits.
"OK then. Ready. Anything I should know before we go? About Hell or the thing you want me to do?""Just that there's nothing to worry about as long as you don't get in with one of the bad crowds. Problem is, a bad crowd's our objective today, and you're gonna need to get in with it. But that's adventure for you, as it were. On we go!"Eta grabs Clive's hand, and with an unceremonious popping sound accompanied by the puff of smoke experiences a change of setting - the slightly disorderly hotel room is wiped away without delay, and the visage of a staircase leading up to a brick wall painted with a very delicate mural of a spindly fellow in a suit stepping aside and revealing a brightly luminous eye set in a black triangle in the wall beside him. Something is written in a perfect circle around the mural that Eta can't quite manage to understand before Clive pulls her out of her spot, where a tranquil man covered in icicles materializes, completely still and almost lifeless up until the point where he, too, moves on with just as little ceremony as Eta has.
"We'll have plenty of time to linger on the train, now hurry," he mutters as Eta looks ahead, as she currently seems to be guided down the staircase.
Before her is a rather sizable square, all concrete with whimsical paintings breaking up the monotony, largely variations on the triangle-eye thing and various associated people, plus elaborate shadows that take her a moment to realize are actually not cast by anything in here. The square appears to be full of shadows as well - however, these appear to be entirely solid, with glowing eyes of blue and purple by and large, with some yellows and greens in places, and move exactly like what Eta would expect from a bunch of evil shadows, a looming, slithering mass of creatures making tracks all around the lower area. Seven staircases lead down to it, some filled with upward, some with downward, some with mixed traffic, and on the far side of the square few things can be seen at all, as the yellow light that bathes the overcrowded square is rather scarce there.
Clive, without another word, guides Eta down to the square and into the mass, where nobody seems to spare her a glance - clearly they've seen worse and possibly even more interesting than her today. He moves swiftly, and Eta tries to follow as best she can, as they make their way to the far side, where she sees the train - it's a great machine, about the height of a two story house, seemingly made entirely of mingling steel and plastic, painted surprisingly garishly for a hell vehicle. But Eta supposes this isn't exactly the typical sort of hell, either. The train is in constant, not overly quick motion, and doesn't appear to have a beginning or an end as far as she can see, with shadows are constantly disembarking from it, with the occasional much more defined person and even a few shadows getting on. It is surprisingly easy to get on it and not fall on the tracks, Eta notes, although it's a bit slower than she'd really like her public transport to be. She and Clive stick together as the train is boarded, and this seems to be only mildly less overcrowded than the outside, despite having a cross section about seven times that of any train Eta's ever been on. And even in here the passengers seem to be in constant flux, moving in the direction the train's moving, and off in the distance she thinks she can spot kiosks of various kinds with their own little lines of clientele.
"Right," her demonic companion says, not pausing in his stride a moment.
"Pretty light traffic at this hour, so we're lucky. Now, we should keep walking. It's not far, granted, but the sooner we're there, the better. Want some refreshments on the way, maybe?"* * * * *
Larry agrees that pleasing one's superiors is an adequate way to spend time - all the time spent kissing ass only makes the fierce kicking of the same that follows only that much sweeter, and then the cycle resumes for some other person.
The drive's short enough to make Larry suspect that the van mostly serves a cosmetic role, and the end result appears to be... darkness. Not hellish darkness, of course - more of a basic, boring darkness, at a comfortable temperature and humidity, no less. Cal looks around for a moment, then opens the door, surprised to see it bumping up against something and refusing to budge. Everything's kind of quiet in here, and he squeezes out of the opening, closing the door behind him as he starts searching about.
"No good parking spots in hell, I've noticed. Maybe shouldn't have bothered with the van," he says, fumbling around in the dark right up until the moment he manages to locate a light switch, illuminating the surroundings.
They appear to have landed in a rather crappy office, or rather what used to be a rather crappy office. Now most of its contents have been soundly broken and destroyed (aside from a potted red plant in the far corner), and its walls scratched where Cal just opened the door. There appears to be even less room on Larry's side, to the point where he doesn't think he can even open his door more than a crack. Whoever worked here probably isn't going to be very pleased to find out about this latest development, that's for sure.
"And the dang door's locked, too," observes Cal as he messes around with the plain white door of the office.
"Probably would have been better to do this without the van in retrospect, yeah."
Author
Topic: The Forgotten Art: Approaching the Nexus (Read 255160 times)