ꙮ At the Obsidian Road. Possibly already on the Liminal Express headed to the Beast’s platform, who can say? (It’s Aurelius. Aurelius can say.)
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#hunter
#sq
can’t imagine there’s a lot to do or say that needs notarization before that point.
ꙮ Fair enough. So–
The train’s kaleidoscope wings beat joyously, and even though there’s so much MORE train now it feels like it moves faster than ever through the Void on its moonsilver tracks–
ꙮ Until, before you know it, you’re at the platform.
flips the Conductor his customary lucre before jumping out and heading through the gate.
ꙮ On the other side of the gate: The Cathedral, just as you left it. The Mother of Monsters’ eye fixes on you almost as soon as you step in, then immediately saccades over, treacherously, to the far wall of the Cathedral, where the Scorpion Queen is sitting, cross-legged, with two of her hands tucked behind her arm.
sees Aurelius and gives him a cheerful wave with one of her free arms, and immediately starts disentangling herself to stand up. “Hey!”
: “Didn’t feel like surprising the group with Caion?”
: “Honestly, I only just finished making the path out of here less of a pain in the ass, like, a little while ago. Didn’t feel the need to upset the applecart given that there’s about to be a Gate right near Queenstown anyway. Which, thank you in advance for that.”
: “Yeah, no problem. There’s a lot more people there than here in the middle of nowhere.”
: “Damn right.” She turns, gives the Cathedral’s eyeball a jaunty little wave. “Didn’t wanna hafta bother the weird fiends more than I had to, either. Way easier to evac through Queenstown. What kinda space you need to set up the Gate, by the way? We can find somethin’.” And she walks towards the other end of the Cathedral, then, and there’s a weird contraption on the floor, a circular pad about big enough for two or three people to stand in. (Or just two people, if one of them’s the Scorpion Queen.) “…anyways, heard you were coming, and I wanted to make the part that’d be a pain in the ass easier for you.” And she takes a step onto it.
: “Not much, just some space that’s roughly a scorpion-queen in size. So it can go basically anywhere. Honestly the only reason we didn’t put it back in town in the first place was because we didn’t have the coordinates yet.” He rolls a shrug, taking a moment to glue a tracer device to one side of the gate, before liberally applying some ductape over it. He then makes his way onto the platform as well. “I guess just riding a lift up’s easier than the alternative.”
: “(Not really sure why Out+Return needs different ones than In, but it does.)”
laughs in brief delighted amusement at being a metric of size now, and nods, and stomps a foot on the circular contraption, and a column of light flickers into being stretching up far higher than the eye can see, at which point they both start accelerating upwards, carefully contained within the column of light, at what must be astonishing speeds but which are basically imperceptible within the column. “(Right, that’s weird, isn’t it?)”
: “Hold up you can make sci-fi elevators but have the world running on barely-steampunk tech?”
ꙮ Not too much longer, and you reach the top of the column of light, which curves slightly and elegantly at the very end and instead of going bulletting into the ceiling of the cave the borehole’s in, you’re gently deposited at the edge of the borehole.
: “Oh, steampunk’s more fun. And it’s what people are comfortable with. But for you, I’ll pull out the good stuff. More a bag of tricks than shit I really properly understand, don’t think I could build a whole-ass city on these.” And she starts leading the way out of the Revenantoj habitat - gives a friendly wave to a couple of them, but they mostly keep her distance from her, and she respects that.
: “…Fair enough.”
asks, as they’re picking their way across the bridges in the magma chamber, “Want to get back to Queenstown the fast way or the slow way?”
: “Is there a benefit to taking the slow way?”
: “The fast way involves a piggyback ride? Didn’t wanna weird you out.”
: “I mean, if you can outrun a train then by all means.”
grins. “Oh, fuck yeah I can outmanoeuvre a train.” Through the tunnels, then, which seem remarkably well-lit just by the Queen’s presence, until they finally make it outside again, and she hunkers down close to the ground. “Aight, hop on.”
hops on.
: “Oh yeah.”
: “Yeah?”
: “When you see Zaedulf, you might wanna tell him there is, for some inexplicable fucking reason, an airship hanger in the basement of the ziggurat???”
: “So I guess bring those plans with him.”
: “Oh, goddess, he’s gonna flip his pancakes. It alright if I show it to him?” Without waiting for a response, she takes a deep breath, and kicks off from the ground, -hard-, hard enough to go soaring right into the air, and then she half-turns, midair- “Hold on tight-“ -wreathes herself and Aurelius with burning gnosis, and kicks the air hard enough to cause a sonic boom well behind the two of them. A very small meteor streaks through the sky of the Beast, very low on the horizon, towards Queenstown; a small herd of brontosaurus look up in brief, cow-eyed alarm.
: “Yeah.”
ꙮ The Scorpion Queen can definitely outmanoeuvre a train.
: “Hella.”
: “I suppose you did not, technically, agree that you could outrun one…”
: “I could maybe outrun a train but this is so much cooler.” The Beast’s terrain passes by beneath you - there are some cracks and fumaroles visible that look new, belching oily-looking smoke. After a little while, Queenstown rises in the distance, and the Queen slows, cants slightly groundwards, and comes to a dust-devil skidding stop with her heels, laughing like a madwoman.
: “Yeah, okay.”
waits for the skidding to mostly come to a stop before hopping down.
gives him a thumbs-up, and walks with him into the city. “There’s a place that’s not SUPER in the middle of everything but that has good transit options that I think might work really well for evac staging, actually” – and she leads him there, a raised metal platform above the confluence of three of the outer train lines in the city, and fairly close to one of the gates besides.
: “People rushing to one side instead of dead center’s probably better over all too… I think.”
: “Yeah that’s basically what I was thinkin’. Like… transit in the direction of the Bazaar ALREADY gets super fuckin crowded as is, putting it there just feels like it’d suck. Especially if shit got down to the wire. Anyways, uh, you need anything to do your thing?”
: “Yeah. And nope, not really.” He heads towards the back of the platform and crouches down before pulling out a pen and sketching some runes and gylphs into the ground. A moment later the pen’s gone, and he places a hand on the circle they form and floods it with liminal gnosis.
ꙮ Gnosis floods in, and the metal warps and goes matte and breaks apart into chunks as a Kinder, Gentler Path pushes itself up from underneath.
: “Huh. That’s pretty cool.”
: “Ayup. There’s a train platform on the other side too, so that’ll be… honestly probably less weird coming from Beast now that I think about it. Don’t mind all the void darkness around it I guess, though they have some lamps and stuff up now.”
: “Lookin’ forward to seeing it.” And then she pauses, and half-turns away. “Thank you. Again. Both of you.” She gestures vaguely, but politely, at the air. “No idea what’s actually gonna happen here but it’s more of a shot than I’ve ever been able to take.” She sounds, a little bit, like she was forcing herself through that one word by word.
turns a few sentences over in his head, before nodding slightly. “It probably helps having access to an inter-dimensional rift, rather than a single no-lay-over Gate that doesn’t even always work.”
snorts very softly, and smiles. “Like pickin’ yourself up and huckin’ yourself into the future by your own ankle. Doesn’t always work great, not much room for company.”
: “Yeah. There’s actually a guy stuck in the middle of the one on Almachadta, though I imagine Tasna may have mentioned that before.”
frowns. “Yeah. Salme’s talked about it, too. My… my trick’s different, I don’t understand what happened there. Or why those gates were leading here in the first place. Would really like to know.”
: “At the time I had thought maybe Zosimos set ‘em up for a world tour to get things set up, but that doesn’t seem as likely now.”
: “Yeah? Got any theories as to what’s goin’ on?” She turns back towards him, curiousity getting the better of her.
: “Not so much, it just seems more likely whoever he was fractured alongside the planes at this point. Which is I guess kind of a crazy thing to say makes more sense, but yeah.”
: “He didn’t say anything noteworthy to you before or after you beat his ass?”
: “Makes sense to me, honestly, but maybe I’m also crazy.” She shakes her head. “Not really, no. Just… wanted to talk and fight me. Like he was gettin’ a handle on who I was and what I wanted.”
: “Talk about what, your motivation slash goals?”
: “Not… even, really? It was weird! It was weird, it felt… impulsive, on his part. Like he just saw me and went, ‘yeah, this one’. And I, an idiot, didn’t ask him questions I wish I’d asked.” She shrugs with two of her arms.
: “Hmm…”
: “Maybe he left something behind in one of the towers? Couldn’t hurt to give them a once over when things reset before you start building the city back up.”
: “Yeah, got a better idea of what I’m lookin’ for, this time around.” She straightens up, punches one of her fists into another hand.
nods slightly. “Anyway, you and Zaya got a lot of moving parts to line up, and there’s probably stuff for me to do on the other end to make the process smoother, so I should let you get to it.”
: “…Probably get someone to point Lucja’s dog in the Gate’s direction too.”
: “Aww, yeah, that’s a good shout.” She nods. “Gonna be weird as hell meeting everybody. But I’ve already been talking to Caion a bit and– yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot of work to be done.” A beat. “Take care of yourself, Aurelius. Thank you for the Gate.” She inclines her head to him, in a tiny bow.
nods back. “Yeah, you too. Good luck with the crowds.”
ꙮ When you swing the Gate open, you can see the platform connected to the Deepforge in the near distance, with the train still pulled up there. After a few moments, it seems to notice that it’s at the wrong platform, and starts executing an elaborate couple of loop-de-loops on moonsilver rails to get to the right place.
waves from the other side of the Gate, and waits until it’s closed.
steps through. “…I probably could’ve just crossed the gap but thanks…!”
ꙮ It’s very helpful! The Gate swings shut, and the train pulls into the platform, and on the other side, the Scorpion Queen rolls up her metaphorical sleeves, and starts to get to work.