We are our Avatars

[Nayt]

Once she'd sufficiently calmed, Emma wiped away the last tears in her eyes and set the sunglasses aside. She really didn't need them, not once she (unintentionally) had a good excuse why her eyes were red and puffy. That should go soon, anyway.

"Uhm, welllll . . ." Emma trailed off, about to admit that she'd gotten absolutely nowhere in the search.

But then he pulled out a gun. Which should have scared her a little. But he wasn't really pointing it at her, and seemed more surprised by it than she was. That also made him a skeleton in silly clothes holding a revolver. She should've taken that more seriously. A little serious, to be sure. Unless you were a hardened soldier, if someone brandished a gun around you, you'd feel the hairs stand on the back of your neck every time. But that was the extent of it here.

"Oh, okay," she said and shrugged, "I mean--cool gun, though, right? A-anyway," she paused and cleared her throat, "I, uhm, didn't really get anywhere. Well. I got to this chair, and the fire's real warm, so I've just kinda . . . been here."

[Sabwones]

"Fair enough." Sab shrugged. "Honestly, this place...I haven't a clue. If it was trying to kill us, or, I dunno, something malevolent, I could understand that. We'd have something to fight. This, though, it's a glorified waiting room and someone's lost the door. It's more frustrating than dangerous. Somehow, that feels worse."

He sat and contemplated the fire for a while. The coals in the grate radiated heat, flecked with the beginnings of ash. The clink of the grate became the only sound in the room.

Sab listened.

He waited.

He heard it again.

The clink of the grate.

A crackle, maybe something shifting further up the flue, but then, quite distinctly, the clink of the grate expanding as the fire took hold.

One mississippi. Two mississippi. Three mississippi. Fo-

Clink.

"Is..." Sab leant forward, cocking his head, "...is the fire repeating?"

[Nayt]

Emma raised an eyebrow. She hadn't thought of that. Hadn't really put much of her attention on the fire, really, but honestly wouldn't have thought of it even if she had. She didn't answer Sab, not at first. She just looked at the fireplace and let another silence wash over the room. Hyperfocused on the fireplace, she began to hear it. Every three and a half seconds, the same noise. She let it pass a few times, just to make sure she wasn't going crazy.

"Huh," Emma replied, "It is. Like . . . Same image and everything."

She shifted in the chair to poke half her body out the side of it and look behind her, back towards the kitchen. Continually refilling food. Constantly repeating fire. Endless hallway of new rooms.

Emma sat back in the chair again and looked to Sab. "According to Jack, the food refills infinitely. And there's infinite rooms to stay in. I bet if there were more people, there'd even be more lounges like this one."

[Sabwones]

"That'd be the reasonable assumption." Sab, not turning away from the fireplace, as if it'd somehow vanish if he turned his back on it, reached to his right and felt for the coaster he'd seen placed on the small table beside each of these chairs. It was thick, soft card, the disposable type you normally saw in modern bars. With it in hand, he crept to the fireplace, knelt before it and carefully fed a corner into the cycling flames.

Under his breath, he began to count.

The flames took, crisping and flaking the card apart as the fire burned with a light yellow hue.

Two mississippi.

He counted a third beat, then suddenly, the fire vanished. The coaster remained unblemished in his hand.

Clink.

"I suppose that answers that question." He muttered, standing back up and tossing the coaster back onto the nearest table. "Otherwise everything'd be on fire by now."

Sab flopped back down into his chair. "Patterns. Cycles. Containment." He sighed. "This is starting to feel less like a home and more like a prison."

[Nayt]

Emma nodded her head, briefly enraptured by the experiment. It was only after the theory was proven--that the damage would be undone within three and a half seconds--that she realized she'd been staring. Emma leaned back, arms crossed over her chest, a myriad of thoughts invading her mind.

Experiments. Theories and hypothesis. Thought exercises. That had dominated her life before all of this, hadn't it? Beyond the boasting and false bravado, she had to have actually been well educated. As far as she knew, kids her age didn't think like that. Right? How . . . old was she, anyway? Young, definitely. Teenaged? Probably teenaged. On the younger side of the teenage years. Eleven through thirteen, one of those. Probably. There was a way to tell, a particular developmental scale, but she'd have to check that later. Once again, though: science. Biology. A theory ("I must be this old") and a process to prove it.

"I think I'm a scientist," Emma blurted out.

Soon after, though, her cheeks flushed. She was so excited to conclude something about herself that she kind of lost the topic they were looking into. Mysteries of the Inn. Not mysteries about herself.

"A-ahm, sorry," she quickly added, voice a little higher pitched from the slight embarrassment, "I didn't mean to deviate from the, uhm, Inn topic. Just, uhm, just now kinda realized what I was probably doing before this, uh, prison, I guess."

[Sabwones]

Sab thought on it for a moment. It made an odd kind of sense. Confident, but awkward. Acting mature beyond her years. It was possible that she was genuinely gifted. Some kids had it in them to go far, but if they couldn't thicken their skin quick enough, it'd be more of a curse than a blessing. Maybe that explained...well, a few things.

He felt a gentle knotting in his gut that maybe he'd jumped on the easy explanation and missed the mark entirely.

"So a wizard, a skeleton and a scientist get trapped in an endlessly repeating paralell dimension..." he tailed off, "...I don't think I can make that one work."

He shuffled around in his seat and rested on one elbow, now peeking his eye over the rim of his sunglasses at Emma. "So, Dr Emma, d'you have a specialist field, so to speak? Or are you more general?" He gave a mock gasp. "You'd better not be one of those 'mad' scientists I've been hearing about. All bubbling flasks and goggles and Doom Rays and such. Otherwise I'd have to thwart your terrible plans for world domination...and I figure that's not going to play too well on your end-of-year report card."

Sab let out a small rattling cackle, something distinctly non-human, but it descended quickly in a natural, lower laugh.

"I'm mucking with you, lass. But you say you're a scientist - that's interesting. Should come in handy."

[Nayt]

She felt a little more heat rise to her face at the teasing, but didn't let herself respond to it. She had no idea how to respond, anyway. What was she going to do, tell him to go bone himself?

Actually, that would've been pretty funny. Oh well. I'll save that for later.

"I dunno if I had a specialty. Or . . . I guess if I was even accredited? Like a title or anything. But Dr. Emma does sound nice," Emma mused, "I just-- I dunno, I don't really remember anything before all this? Or how I got to this place-- this prison, right? I kinda just realized that I've been picking it apart like a logic puzzle since I got here. And more than just this place. Like . . . for example, I don't know how old I am, but I somehow know all the physical stages of childhood development, so I could actually tell by looking in a mirror. Plus I know a little about architecture. This place is pre-Renaissance. Tudor architecture. The death throes of medieval gothic."

"I even know the history of science fiction, and just literature in general. I know Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and The Tempest like the back of my hand--even that the former was his first big production, and the latter was his final big production," Emma paused and took a breath. "I dunno how I know any of that. I'm, like, what . . . between eleven and thirteen, I'd guess, and I really don't think the average middle school teaches those things. So I have to be college educated . . . or . . . or something. And judging by how I absolutely can't help but pick every little thing apart to its most basic elements, I can only assume I'm, like, a scientist. Or something akin to one. Maybe studying to be one?"

[Sabwones]

"My God."

Sab sat up his his chair, swiveled and cried out at Jack.

"She's a nerd! SHE'S A NERD! RUN, JACK! A WILD NER-

At that point, partially out of over-exuberance, partly on purpose, Sab threw his weight forward enough to tip the chair backwards, sending him sprawling onto the floor with a cacophanous crash of bones and cursing.

-bugger!"

Spreadeagled on the ground, he rolled onto his elbows and laughed.

[Nayt]

"Oh my God, Sab," Emma groaned, "Go bone yourself."

There we go.

She lounged in her chair as if Sab's display didn't bother her: slouched down, arms outstretched across the rests, and giving Sab the most bemused look she could manage.

"I'm just trying to rationalize why I'm here, in magic jail, with the two of you," she said, "I remember things, but not events; I'd really like to know what I did, and if there's some kinda magic lawyer I should be contacting to get outta this place."

[Sabwones]

"Bone myself?" Sab righted himself and rested his arms on the back of the seat, chalkstick fingers drumming the wooden frame. "Well, I do have a designated zone for boning, I suppose. Fair point. D'you think I should sell tickets, or just do the equivalent of an open mic night?"

Emma's explanation made sense. If nobody could work out the 'how' of their imprisonment, then they should be able to start puzzling away at the 'why' of it all. How, though? This place operated on a set of rules, that was clear at least, but understanding those rules was another matter entirely. Let's think again.

"This place is clean, well-stocked and designed to keep the people within relatively safe from harm. So this place is intended to hold, but not to punish. Maybe its ends are still nefarious, but if so, they're subtle enough not to tip their hand too early. So it's either a guest house, a very plush prison, or a trap." He sighed. "I don't like how only one of those is anywhere close to a good thing. Still, all three should have one thing in common." He paused for a moment, then added. "People might want to cover their eyes for a second."

He gripped the chair with both hands, swung it overhead and threw it against a wall. The frame was sturdy and the masonry on the walls was solid, but through leverage, supernatural strength and a generous amount of righteous annoyance, the chair splintered at the joints and sent huge splinters of wood across the far side of the room. The crash reverberated around the lounge, although Sab's counting was still audible, just barely.

"...three mississippi. Four mississippi. Five."

He kicked the ruins of the chair once again and nodded. It remained stalwartly and irrevocably fucked up.

"One thing they all have in common. Caretakers. Let's see if anyone comes to clean up the mess."

[JetSet]

Spoiler: show

Between preparing to move, school, and a new job, I'm surprised I hadn't totally forgot about this rp. Sorry about that guys. -w-;

Jack's thoughts had wandered from the conversation long before the two had started going at it, gently smoking his pipe and watching a spot on the wall, where a stone had a pit in the center, like someone drove a pointed bit at it and cut a groove. He thought about how he had been the first here, and how he had wandered to find the Inn through pure chance, right when he was at the edge of death.

'What a wonderful time that had been.' He thought and put a hand on his shoulder, wincing at the fresh burst of pain that shot through his chest and up to his neck.  Pain brought his thoughts back to reality to hear something about 'boning' at which he tuned out again. Bad puns had a way of doing that for him.

Thoughts went to the exploration of the place, the land, the lake. There was a lot of things that just didn't make sense about this place, but some of it just felt right, leaving him more and more confused at what this was supposed to be.

His mind was wrenched from the thoughts of the past when he heard the snapping of the chair against the wall. He pulled himself from the chair, scanning the room like he was about to deck something, silver glowing blades springing from his wrists. The energy pulsed, giving the same sense of security from the supernatural as Sab had felt before.

When he noticed it was just Sab who broke a chair, he relaxed, the blades vanishing. " Do I want to know why you're breaking furniture?" He asked, taking the pipe in his hand as his gauntlets vanished again.