Night 56: The Grand Ballroom

[witchdetective]

[ from here ]That feeling of vertigo that came with using the ring seemed to be getting worse with each trip, Erika thought, as she saw the world spin around her and felt that tugging sensation pulling all three of them. Well prepared this time, Erika braced herself as she felt wind roaring in her ears and saw the surroundings change into that

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[bodhiandspirit]

[from here]

When she emerged from the dark stairwell, Rita had to wince as her eyes adjusted to the brightness of what appeared to be an elegant ballroom. The marble floor, the fountains, the chandelier... It was like being inside a palace.

"What is this place?" she wondered, her eyes wide in awe. How did they build a place like this beneath the institute? And why? It didn't seem to serve any purpose other than to show off how much money and resources their captors had. Did they have no sense of practicality?

Once she was able to get over the bizarre appearance of the room, she realized there were already people there. They must have come another way, if she and Taura were the first to get through the kitchen entrance. The portal rings, perhaps? Rita knew she wasn't the only one who had one.

Whatever they were doing didn't necessarily concern them, so once she confirmed they weren't enemies, Rita looked to see what their options were. There was a large door ahead, one behind them, and two on either side. "Where do you suppose we should go?" she asked, looking back to Taura.

[ninelivesonce]

The room was beautiful. It wasn't unusual to find this kind of thing lurking in the basements of those with more money than sense, from what she knew, but she hadn't put Martin Landel in those ranks. Power, yes, but the kind that delighted in cruelty, not beauty. Very few liked both, she found. Fewer still were men (or women, or herms) that were successful at gaining them. Of course, whether or not Landel would retake his House was an interesting question.

"Your guess is as good as mine. Let's take a look, yeah?" The closest set of doors were plain, like bulkhead doors. They didn't quite fit with the rest of the room, though if you didn't look too closely they could just be a wall. "I wonder which side is the other side?"

Another group of patients had just disappeared down the far hallway -- and there were two more sets of doors. She started jogging towards the eastern set. "I was told that you needed three people to get anywhere down here, but I never found out exactly why." It wasn't like there were signs posted, after all.

[bodhiandspirit]

When Taura approached the eastern doors, Rita followed, looking around the room as she did. It was uncertain whether the doors mentioned by the Head Doctor were the ones those patients had just disappeared behind, or perhaps the ones behind the stairs. In any case, they needed to investigate things for themselves.

"Three people...?" Rita echoed, a dubious expression on her face. How did that even work, from a technical standpoint? And more importantly... "Why didn't you say so earlier!?" If it was true, then they were at a dead end, and an avoidable one at that!

Unwilling to accept that the trip had been a waste of time and effort, Rita ran her hands along the carvings on the door, hoping to find some sort of hidden switch or secret.

If they needed three people... could it be there were three switches, spaced so that three people would be needed to press them all simultaneously? Or a section of the floor was weight-sensitive, and acted as a switch itself... Mulling over these thoughts in her head, Rita tried to rationalize how such a requirement could be applied, if it was even the truth. After all, if she could figure out the trick, then there could be a way to bypass that requirement.

[ninelivesonce]

"I thought there'd be a crowd down here, after that radio broadcast. Maybe we just got lucky." Sometimes you had to count on luck, when everything else failed. It was better than despair. She cheated the odds by waking up and breathing every day; it wasn't always as easy to be optimistic, but she tried.

"That or they're pulling something else." They rebuilt damaged doors every morning; who said they couldn't do it in the middle of the night. Split people up, isolate all of them further. That wasn't a friendly thought.

"Find anything?" She was thinking along the same lines as Rita, and came and stood by her. If it was weight, she massed enough for two, at least when they were Rita's size.