• Graded • The Maze: Round 4: Eliza and Max

[Pegasus]

Eliza & Max Round 4

1st Vhalar 718
Are data from the world of Sense,
In that case, valid evidence?
What in the universe I know
Can give directions how to go?
...

All Mathematics would suggest
A steady straight line as the best,
But left and right alternately
Is consonant with History......

Anthropos Apteros stirred in his sleep, his dreams impacted by... something outside. One of the people in his dream said a word, and with her word, she changed the story. Changed the ending. Changed what they

Another picked a flower. One he and his sister had seen once. How strange, his dreaming mind considered, that such a thing should happen. Ripples of confusion and grief flew out from the Slumbering Man and, the rain stopped. Suddenly, without warning, the rain was no more and, though the vestiges of it remained as their feet splashed on the floor, the sudden, bright light was glaring. It was so bright it blurred edges, made the world seem a briefly different place. Colours faded and changed, things shifted in hue and texture.

And from above, the crow cawed, signalling to all that the Wingless Man still slumbered.

"I hate hanging round here, waiting"
"Aye,"
"It's not like he's going to go anywhere"
"Nope"
"Don't know why they do it, really. It's not like he's going to get up and move is it?"
"Nope"
"Err, Jim... he's moving..."


Eliza & Max
Eliza picked up the feather and, as she did, the compass started to spin and then it burst into bright, all encompassing light. It was so bright that she had no choice other than to turn her head or close her eyes - to shield her vision somehow. For Max, the light came apparently from nowhere. The light was gone as quickly as it came, but then the two of them were in the maze once again.

And this time, they were together. Eliza holding a feather. Max held nothing and seemed,

frozen in place

Nothing about them had changed. But the Maze? The Maze had. In fact, the Maze had changed - a LOT.

For now they stood in a maze of mirrors.

And as the light from the compass died down, it seemed to become.... a ball. A bouncing ball of light which hit one mirror and bounced to the next in a random manner. As the Wingless Man dreamed, so things changed and moved. They had ten steps. Ten footsteps each.

On one of those steps, they saw a reflection of themselves. A different time. A different place. On another, the glass around them in one of the panes, shattered. Mostly, they stepped and did not see anything other than themselves.

And on one of the steps, the ball of light from the compass shot straight at them. Aimed directly towards them like a crossbow bolt, straight at the chest.

Which might be something they wanted to do something about, really.....


Rewards Achieved Last Round
Eliza

1. All Must Do Objectives from Round 3 met.
   • Crystal Clear! You've got a crystal! Remember that later, it might be.... useful?
   • Got Direction We know where you're going...
   • All Can Do Objectives from Round 3 met.
     • Item Described! This item just increased in value. Well done!
   Max missed last round.
   

   OOC Info

   Things to note!

   • I will post a plot post again this time next week: Monday 5th November
   • For this round -- and for reasons which may become clear -- your companion may be NPCd by you in your post.
   • You can also converse, of course, with each other.

   Objectives

   !

   Message from: Must-Do Objectives

   Please note: You can use items you have previously picked up - they might help you![/b] Explicitly state what you do when the glass pane shatters Explicitly state what you see as you have a vision of your past. Explicitly state what you do as the ball of light shoots at you. Please note - dodging it is not possible. If it hits you, there will be a consequence - that might be positive, neutral or negative. You may work together as much -- or as little as your like!

   !	Message from: Can Do Objectives
   	None this round.... the must do ones are too important.

[Eliza Soule]

So did the compass in Patrick's hand start spinning because she had picked up the feather? Or had it begun spinning because Patrick picked it up? Eliza might never know, and didn't have time to give it more than a trill's thought before she was forced to trow up her arm to block the intensity of the light that came flashing around them. Then it was gone just as quickly, and Patrick was gone. "That was unexpected wasn't it?" she said to Eberhardt, the small monkey on her shoulder, and then lowered her arm.

When she'd chosen the feather, she'd expected a path to the right to open up in front of her. Like an old hidden passage behind the bookcase in some storied, old haunted mansion on a hill. She probably ought to stop anticipating the more expected things and...."Oh, hello," she said, noticing the other woman for the first time. When the daughter of Ymiden didn't receive an immediate response, however, she frowned curiously and took her first real look around. So was she in the same place as she was before, and was it only her surroundings that had changed? She hadn't done any walking, hadn't gone round any corners. So that must have been it, because everything now had changed dramatically.

So the blinding light that had sprung from the compass...Maybe it was or had been the compass, was now careening around a strange hall of mirrors like a bouncing ball out of control. Finally she started moving, careful to take care of the bouncing ball of light. "Are you alright?" she asked the other woman. And then, after just two steps, Eliza looked down. It was her that she saw in the mirrored floor. But a younger version of herself. Back then, she'd looked like any other mortal girl of twelve or thirteen. All elbows and knees, skinny, awkward. But happy. She remembered she'd been happy back then, though it was more than a century ago. Her family, as those things went for her, had consisted of just one man, who called himself her grandfather, and who she'd called Poppa.

They'd lived in one of those old castles that were cut into a high mountainside. The kind that most people thought only existed in stories. She and Poppa had lived in less than half of the structure, while the other half was in ruins. It was the ruins that she'd loved to explore back then, while Poppa had spent his trials in his lab. Francois Robichaud had been an alchemist, he'd had a wild eyed and wild eyed look about him, and he'd been a little bit mad. He'd already been an old man when he'd taken her in, so it hadn't lasted very long. Not nearly long enough, Eliza acknowledged with a melancholy smile when she looked at the scene at her feet. But she'd been happy.

She snapped out of it when the glass shattered. "Watch yourself, Eberhardt!" she warned her little companion, as she turned quickly away and pulled her cloak tighter to shield them both from the flying, razor sharp shards. Once they'd landed where they would, Eliza left them be and went back to considering how all of this worked.

So, this was Emea, if that's what they called the place where dreamers did their dreaming. But how could the dreamer know about her childhood home? Was someone poking around in her head and her memories? Or, she wondered, had they plucked the memories out of her own dreams? And then she looked at the bouncing ball again, and began for the first time to think that while this might be someone else's dream, maybe she...and others like Patrick, did have a hand in the way things were going. He'd picked up the compass after all.

Maybe she wasn't at the mercy of her surroundings to the same extent that she'd believed she'd been. And was the ball really bouncing off the mirrors, or was it being reflected off and away before it made contact with them? After all if it was hitting them, then why had only one of them shattered and not all?

So she saw herself in all the mirrors. Just her, and she dipped into the pocket of her cloak to draw out the mirror, to have a look as she took another step forward. What would she see reflected back at her? She hardly had time to blink before the bouncing ball did an about face and shot straight at her. And Eliza acted on impulse, keeping in mind the mirrors that hadn't shattered. "No! No! No!" she commanded as she raised the mirror in her hand, it's reflective surface aimed at the hurtling ball of light. Angled just the slightest bit so she might deflect it off in another direction. Away from her. Away from both of them, if she was lucky.

[Max]

Beatrice the Badger probably hadn't meant to make the high woman pause mid-walk when she'd said what she'd said, but it happened nonetheless. It wasn't the prying about how she'd escaped prison that paralyzed Maxine. It was the follow-up question to the feat. The raw truth was that her talking animal companion was right. Whatever connection Beatrice had to Maxine's psyche had evidently given the creature enough knowledge to know she hadn't been alone in The Beneath. There had been another. Another she deeply cared for. He was a man she'd fought for, and under the right circumstances, she might've elected to die for him if need be. There were times she came close. For all their closeness, their struggles, and their pain weathered as one, they had been separated. One trial he was there. The next he was gone. Maxine had spent her final trials before her escape completely alone in the dark. She'd left him in that despairing pit. She knew he was dead. She could feel it. And it was her fault.

The statue, the maze, all of it was swallowed up in a flash of blinding light. Maxine's eyes were forced closed by the bright assault. It was over in a trill. When she opened her eyes again, she was disappointed to find herself still trapped in the forsaken maze. It wasn't quite the same as before. Mirrors rather than stone surrounded her. Her gaunt, tired face haunted her from just about every angle she could find. There was no looking away from the reflection that dug at her pride. The mental toll incarceration had taken had been evident as soon as she interacted with the social world beyond Slags Deep. Avoiding people had been impossible. For most trials, however, Maxine had been successful in avoiding literally running into herself. That luxury was long gone now. Again she was forced to see what everyone else saw. Her gloved hands balled into tight fists.

Weak.

So consumed by the mirrors, Maxine nearly missed the other woman suddenly in her presence. She turned her head to blink at the stranger and her monkey, brow furrowing slightly when she spoke. Her body bladed away from the woman, a foot dropping back. In a trill's notice she could shift into an obvious combat stance. Her fingers itched to curl into fists, but she let her arms hand harmlessly at her sides instead. Her caramel eyes studied the woman as she moved about the maze. It was starting to become impossible to decipher what was real and what wasn't, if anything in this place was real at all. The mirror had led her to consider that the Rharnian man had been in the maze, too. She wasn't sold on the image being real either, but it was enough to let her consider the newcomer was a living person from reality rather than a hallucination.

"You're probably as real as Beatrice here," Max sighed with a shrug toward Eliza. "I've been making a habit of talking to not-real things. Why stop now?" She followed after the woman through the mirror maze. "I'm good." Max had taken two steps when she spotted the other woman freeze in place, staring at one of the mirrors. "You alright?" Something in her peripheral view caught her attention. Max stopped and snapped her head, finding herself face-to-face with another reflection of herself. This time it wasn't one with dark circles under the eyes of a scarred face. This version of herself was smaller. Younger. The apparition of herself had to have been when she was young enough to have been in the Etzori orphanage. That wildfire still burned in her eyes even then. Small hands were fists at her sides. Bruises and minor cuts littered her body from play and practice. Gazing into her own young face, she could see such...promise there. Those eyes still saw a future for herself in which she reigned queen of her own world, no matter how dark it was. It was a time when she believed she would see a day filled with nel and profit, with everything at her fingertips. So naive. So wrong.

Max shook her head and turned from the image. The pane to her right shattered. She felt some of the shards harmlessly bounce against her flank before scattered about her feet. The ex-convict stared down at the hundred tiny reflections of her true, skinny form of the present. She gave one of the larger shards a spiteful kick before she paced forward again. The ball of light continued to bob around the mirrors, but it wasn't until it came screeching straight toward the two women that Max paid it any mind.

"Out of the way, B!" the ex-convict advised her honey badger companion before her eyes settled on the incoming projectile. Her gaze moved next to the stranger, noting how one of her hands held out a mirror. It was ridiculous, using the object as a defense against the assaulting light. It was ridiculous, that is, until Maxine remembered that she'd been inexplicably gifted a similar one. She rushed forth to stand side-by-side with the other condemned to the maze, her own mirror extended outward beside Eliza's. Perhaps two mirrors were more sure than one. It sure was a better, more logical plan than trying to take a swing at the thing.

[Pegasus]

1st Vhalar 718
This Round, You're Somewhere Else!
Max: HERE!

Eliza: HERE!

[Pegasus]

Review!

Max

Overview

Max and Beatrice the Badger are just... beyond delightful to me. I'm so sorry for the Mrs Doubtfire vision - but it's fixed in my head! Apologies for the delays here.

Points

XP: 15 (not for magic)

Renown: 5

Loot

Knowledge

Discipline: Trying to ignore emotions is hard.
Discipline: Self-blame can be very destructive.
Tactics: Use your environment wisely.

Eliza

Overview

Apologies for the delays here! I love the rich background you've got for Eliza - fun to read and clear visual.

Points

XP: 15 (not for magic)

Renown: 5

Loot

Knowledge

Detection: Look around carefully to get the lay of the land
Tactics: Protect yourself and your companions
Tactics: Use your environment wisely.