[CITY OF GLASS] There must be some kind of way out of here
Who: EVERYONE EVER
What: KICKIN DOWN KALLISTE
Where: ... KALLISTE / HELIX
When: SATURDAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
Warnings: VIOLENCE
Notes: Teal will be VERY SLOW to tag this. She's really sorry D:
ALSO: TAG YOURSELVES IN DO IT FOR SCIENCE
... ALSO ALSO: You don't have to TL;DR as much as I did. Quicklogs are just fine if you want to move faster!
Early on the morning of the twentieth, you feel something. You can’t quite identify what it is, except that it is similar to the same feeling that brought you to this city in the first place. An itch you can’t scratch. An idea you can’t drive out. Perhaps you resist for a moment, but you feel it - a tug on your very soul.
West, it says.
So you walk west. Or you fly west. Or you teleport, or somehow swim, or wiggle or slide, but in any case West is where you are Called and West is where you go. You cross the border into the District of Infernos, the sky turning a lurid red, the moon (still at its lofty perch at this hour) seeming to split in two. You keep walking, until you at last arrive at the great fire-and-gear emblazoned gate of the West, large enough to dwarf even most Cybertronians. It opens at a touch, and you cross the great golden bridge that arcs over Megatron’s territory, and soon you come to the second gate, Helix’ Grand Porticus. It, too, opens, but this time with a sound of grating gears and clicks.
You enter the silent city, the only sound soft birdsong and a slight breeze through the trees. You notice that today, instead of the usual searing heat, there are clouds to cut the baleful glare of the desert sun.
You walk to the center of the city, where stands Ameras, Scion of the South, once called Aaron de Bertilak, twin brother to Isis. He is dressed in leather armor dyed bright green, and strapped to his back is a double-headed axe and a light crossbow. Across his chest is a bandolier of throwing knives and crossbow bolts. At his feet, crabgrass has sprouted, even in the sand that surrounds Solaris’ domicile.
Solaris himself is in his natural shape, tall and imposing, lit as though by another sun, light glittering off the crystal plates that make up his outer shell. He holds a great spear.
Near them, the creature known only as Saviel looks frail and inconsequential, yet it is to this creature that both turn their attention, indicating that you should do the same. It draws in the air.
“It is known to me that there are seven Gates - Time, Space, Matter, Form, Energy, Dream, and Truth. It is known, also, that each had a puzzle as part of the unlocking mechanism. Once the puzzle was solved, the Ashura or Deva present would know the shape of the key required to open the lock, and it would take only a little of their power to do so. More than that, I do not know.”
It bows, and walks off into the city. If you try to follow it, you find no trace of its passage.
Solaris then does something, something which causes the fabric of reality to shimmer like a heat mirage, and the entire floor of the sandy plaza at the center of the city shifts, the whole thing lifting up out of the ground to reveal two sets of stairs leading down into gloom. It is large enough for Cybertronians to pass through, and one of the sets of stairs is sized for Solaris, while the other is clearly for beings of closer to human.
You descend. It is warm and dark and dry inside, with amber lines of light every few feet, marking passages. Other lights in other colors glow softly, labeled accordingly. Engine room. Reactor core. Lens A. Lens B. Lens C. Mirror A. Mirror B. Mirror C. Great Gear.
Eventually, you emerge onto a catwalk enclosed by glass, and then the full view of the Great Machine is revealed.
There are gears the size of skyscrapers honeycombed with rooms; there are coils and cables thick as tree-trunks, there are lenses and mirrors too big to be believed that dwarf even the likes of Megatron. It is mind-boggling to look at.
You travel until you reach a cablecar - again, huge, sized for Solaris. He twists reality to make it large enough to accommodate the Cybertronians, and you all enter. The car’s doors clang shut, and you are off, traveling through the belly of the beast, the veins, arteries, and nerves of Helix. Along your way, you catch a glimpse in the heart of the machine of what looks like a vast, dim sun; though you are distant you can feel the heat even through the windows of the car. Then it is gone, and you are not certain if you really saw it in the first place.
At last, you reach a room suspended from the center of one of the largest gears. The cablecar pulls up to the side and stops. Solaris enters first, striding into the room with confidence.
It is clearly a bridge of some sort, wrought in iron, brass, and copper; seats all around, screens decking the walls displaying diagnostics, amber and red lights everywhere. There are seats, and Solaris gestures for those of you assigned to this room to follow him.
The rest of you continue with Aaron. He stops, first, at what seems to be a medical bay, full of tables and equipment designed to care for every species imaginable, before taking the rest of you to a huge waiting room with great windows, strewn with pillows. Refreshments sit on a table nearby for every species, and you realize, to your shock, that for the first time in a long time (for some of you, almost a year) you are hungry.
“Nautilus provides everyone with sustenance,” Aaron shrugs. “Helix doesn’t. Eat up, if you’re hungry.”
If you do, the food is all delicious.
Back on the bridge, Solaris steps onto a dias where cables snake down and slide under his plates with a click. Glowing lines appear on his armor, and suddenly, the ship begins to move. His voice comes over the speakers in the bridge, and he instructs the rest of you on how to fire the ship’s weapons, how to spool up the engines when he isn’t there, how it works, and so forth. Simultaneously, he instructs those in the medical bay how everything there works, the location of the landing skiffs, and anything else they need to know.
In the lounge, the whiteness of the area outside Nautilus gives way to the strange star-like expanse of the Between, dozens of lines of light connecting parallel worlds, Chaos roiling and difficult to look at far below, a shimmering light far above. Many of the glittering “stars” all around have turned violet.
Higher and higher the city goes, until it reaches what looks like a huge planet surrounding a bright white star.
“That is one manifestation of the Light,” says Aaron. “It is both here, as a sun, and below, in the Senate, at the same time. It’s… many things, really.”
The city-ship descends slowly through the atmosphere. Something invisible on the outside shimmers - an invisible shield. It ignites from the friction of descending through the atmosphere, and then you break through the clouds.
There is a world below. Most of it is blackened and blasted, twisted by forces you can only imagine. Entire areas are changed - you start with what looks like it was once a desert and hit an area that looks like a toxic swamp right in the middle; great tentacle-things split buildings of cities, and there are some areas you can’t even look at properly without something in your mind shutting off, turning away, refusing to see. Aaron still says nothing - these are the scars of the war he helped start.
Eventually, you reach a sea, but as you travel, the sea ceases to be water and turns to violet glass. The sun is no longer white, but rose-colored, and the sky changes from a slate grey to pink.
And there, before you, is Kalliste.
In comparison to the ravaged landscapes you just passed, Kalliste is clean. Too clean. It is obvious that the city is exactly as it was before the war began: a gleaming, beautiful metropolis which, if this were a television show, would be played by Vancouver. However, there is one distinct thing which could not possibly have been true before the war: every single building is constructed from various kinds of rose colored glass and porcelain.
Aaron takes a deep breath.
“Here we go…”
The ground teams are lead back through the tangled maze of the Great Machine to a room not entirely unlike the transporter on Star Trek - if Star Trek had been written by Jules Verne, anyway. You are ushered onto the pads and shortly teleported to your drop points.
Good luck.
You’ll need it…
What: KICKIN DOWN KALLISTE
Where: ... KALLISTE / HELIX
When: SATURDAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
Warnings: VIOLENCE
Notes: Teal will be VERY SLOW to tag this. She's really sorry D:
ALSO: TAG YOURSELVES IN DO IT FOR SCIENCE
... ALSO ALSO: You don't have to TL;DR as much as I did. Quicklogs are just fine if you want to move faster!
Early on the morning of the twentieth, you feel something. You can’t quite identify what it is, except that it is similar to the same feeling that brought you to this city in the first place. An itch you can’t scratch. An idea you can’t drive out. Perhaps you resist for a moment, but you feel it - a tug on your very soul.
West, it says.
So you walk west. Or you fly west. Or you teleport, or somehow swim, or wiggle or slide, but in any case West is where you are Called and West is where you go. You cross the border into the District of Infernos, the sky turning a lurid red, the moon (still at its lofty perch at this hour) seeming to split in two. You keep walking, until you at last arrive at the great fire-and-gear emblazoned gate of the West, large enough to dwarf even most Cybertronians. It opens at a touch, and you cross the great golden bridge that arcs over Megatron’s territory, and soon you come to the second gate, Helix’ Grand Porticus. It, too, opens, but this time with a sound of grating gears and clicks.
You enter the silent city, the only sound soft birdsong and a slight breeze through the trees. You notice that today, instead of the usual searing heat, there are clouds to cut the baleful glare of the desert sun.
You walk to the center of the city, where stands Ameras, Scion of the South, once called Aaron de Bertilak, twin brother to Isis. He is dressed in leather armor dyed bright green, and strapped to his back is a double-headed axe and a light crossbow. Across his chest is a bandolier of throwing knives and crossbow bolts. At his feet, crabgrass has sprouted, even in the sand that surrounds Solaris’ domicile.
Solaris himself is in his natural shape, tall and imposing, lit as though by another sun, light glittering off the crystal plates that make up his outer shell. He holds a great spear.
Near them, the creature known only as Saviel looks frail and inconsequential, yet it is to this creature that both turn their attention, indicating that you should do the same. It draws in the air.
“It is known to me that there are seven Gates - Time, Space, Matter, Form, Energy, Dream, and Truth. It is known, also, that each had a puzzle as part of the unlocking mechanism. Once the puzzle was solved, the Ashura or Deva present would know the shape of the key required to open the lock, and it would take only a little of their power to do so. More than that, I do not know.”
It bows, and walks off into the city. If you try to follow it, you find no trace of its passage.
Solaris then does something, something which causes the fabric of reality to shimmer like a heat mirage, and the entire floor of the sandy plaza at the center of the city shifts, the whole thing lifting up out of the ground to reveal two sets of stairs leading down into gloom. It is large enough for Cybertronians to pass through, and one of the sets of stairs is sized for Solaris, while the other is clearly for beings of closer to human.
You descend. It is warm and dark and dry inside, with amber lines of light every few feet, marking passages. Other lights in other colors glow softly, labeled accordingly. Engine room. Reactor core. Lens A. Lens B. Lens C. Mirror A. Mirror B. Mirror C. Great Gear.
Eventually, you emerge onto a catwalk enclosed by glass, and then the full view of the Great Machine is revealed.
There are gears the size of skyscrapers honeycombed with rooms; there are coils and cables thick as tree-trunks, there are lenses and mirrors too big to be believed that dwarf even the likes of Megatron. It is mind-boggling to look at.
You travel until you reach a cablecar - again, huge, sized for Solaris. He twists reality to make it large enough to accommodate the Cybertronians, and you all enter. The car’s doors clang shut, and you are off, traveling through the belly of the beast, the veins, arteries, and nerves of Helix. Along your way, you catch a glimpse in the heart of the machine of what looks like a vast, dim sun; though you are distant you can feel the heat even through the windows of the car. Then it is gone, and you are not certain if you really saw it in the first place.
At last, you reach a room suspended from the center of one of the largest gears. The cablecar pulls up to the side and stops. Solaris enters first, striding into the room with confidence.
It is clearly a bridge of some sort, wrought in iron, brass, and copper; seats all around, screens decking the walls displaying diagnostics, amber and red lights everywhere. There are seats, and Solaris gestures for those of you assigned to this room to follow him.
The rest of you continue with Aaron. He stops, first, at what seems to be a medical bay, full of tables and equipment designed to care for every species imaginable, before taking the rest of you to a huge waiting room with great windows, strewn with pillows. Refreshments sit on a table nearby for every species, and you realize, to your shock, that for the first time in a long time (for some of you, almost a year) you are hungry.
“Nautilus provides everyone with sustenance,” Aaron shrugs. “Helix doesn’t. Eat up, if you’re hungry.”
If you do, the food is all delicious.
Back on the bridge, Solaris steps onto a dias where cables snake down and slide under his plates with a click. Glowing lines appear on his armor, and suddenly, the ship begins to move. His voice comes over the speakers in the bridge, and he instructs the rest of you on how to fire the ship’s weapons, how to spool up the engines when he isn’t there, how it works, and so forth. Simultaneously, he instructs those in the medical bay how everything there works, the location of the landing skiffs, and anything else they need to know.
In the lounge, the whiteness of the area outside Nautilus gives way to the strange star-like expanse of the Between, dozens of lines of light connecting parallel worlds, Chaos roiling and difficult to look at far below, a shimmering light far above. Many of the glittering “stars” all around have turned violet.
Higher and higher the city goes, until it reaches what looks like a huge planet surrounding a bright white star.
“That is one manifestation of the Light,” says Aaron. “It is both here, as a sun, and below, in the Senate, at the same time. It’s… many things, really.”
The city-ship descends slowly through the atmosphere. Something invisible on the outside shimmers - an invisible shield. It ignites from the friction of descending through the atmosphere, and then you break through the clouds.
There is a world below. Most of it is blackened and blasted, twisted by forces you can only imagine. Entire areas are changed - you start with what looks like it was once a desert and hit an area that looks like a toxic swamp right in the middle; great tentacle-things split buildings of cities, and there are some areas you can’t even look at properly without something in your mind shutting off, turning away, refusing to see. Aaron still says nothing - these are the scars of the war he helped start.
Eventually, you reach a sea, but as you travel, the sea ceases to be water and turns to violet glass. The sun is no longer white, but rose-colored, and the sky changes from a slate grey to pink.
And there, before you, is Kalliste.
In comparison to the ravaged landscapes you just passed, Kalliste is clean. Too clean. It is obvious that the city is exactly as it was before the war began: a gleaming, beautiful metropolis which, if this were a television show, would be played by Vancouver. However, there is one distinct thing which could not possibly have been true before the war: every single building is constructed from various kinds of rose colored glass and porcelain.
Aaron takes a deep breath.
“Here we go…”
The ground teams are lead back through the tangled maze of the Great Machine to a room not entirely unlike the transporter on Star Trek - if Star Trek had been written by Jules Verne, anyway. You are ushered onto the pads and shortly teleported to your drop points.
Good luck.
You’ll need it…