revenance_rpg | What's this, what's this?

The woods weren't very big, all told, from what York could tell; he wasn't very far in before he caught sight of the gates. They'd have to pick around the trees carefully, since the ground seemed pretty uneven, but it wasn't as bad as he'd worried about. And for all people were nervous about the mansion, it didn't look that bad from the outside. Well, not from here.

"Yeah, let's get in the house and see what there is to see. Maybe we won't find anything."

Really, aside from a few minor Nightmares in the woods, there really weren't any problems. The mansion wasn't that far off, though Sora did wonder sometimes at it being so close to a busy part of town and yet having no roads or paths at all leading to it. It was run down, but now that he really thought of it, it didn't seem as though it had actually been empty for all that long. Then again, that could have been due at least partially to its recent use as a base of operations while Riku, Namine and DiZ had been scrambling to get Sora's memories put back together.

Then again, they still had no idea what point in time exactly that the world was dreaming of. The mansion might be intact, for all they knew. Not for long though, if there were going to be Nightmares to fight inside. He managed not to chuckle as that thought caused him to recall the chat he'd had with Xion regarding property damage and its causes. They really had just been goofing off by that point in the conversation.

"I dunno about finding nothing at all. There's probably at least some Nightmares to fight." Actually, he half suspected the computer in the basement might have something and he realized he might be the only one who knew the password. Granted, there was a possibility that Roxas knew it, assuming the one in the fake town had had the same password or had even needed a password. But it didn't seem likely that Roxas would willingly go anywhere near the mansion at this point and Sora sure as hell had no intentions of forcing him to.

Edited (wrong icon...) 2013-03-24 05:14 (UTC)

Having investigated the forest to her satisfaction, Celestia wasted no time in leading the group ahead to the mansion proper. Through the gates and inside, perhaps impolitically, but she considered answers too important to allow denizens inside more opportunity than necessary to hide them.

It’s obvious from the first glance at the foyer that this place used to be something large and grand. Glass cases are placed by the doorway, and dual alicorn statues stand at attention along the walls, guarding twin staircases that lead to an open upper level. Sadly, now the mansion is simply just big. Three of the four glass cases have been shattered or are missing entirely; only the fourth still stands, holding its treasure of what looks to be ancient golden pottery. The floors are covered with debris, the statues coated with dust, and in one corner of the room several dinner plates lay cracked and forgotten. There are three doors here: two are on the upper floor at opposite ends of the hall, one on the right and one on the left; the third door is on the lower floor. Be careful - there are Nightmares here, and they won’t hesitate to knock you down a flight of stairs.

"So, which way first? Maybe we should work our way over to the one that doesn't involve taking the stairs." Not that York's too worried about the dream eaters in the room, but if they're going to case this whole place, no sense in starting with the hardest part.

Sora hadn't been in the mansion in a while, but he remembered the layout. The foyer was pretty wide open, but there was still some debris on the floor to be underfoot if it came to a fight. There were two doors on the first floor, one of which was pretty thoroughly blocked off with debris. Last time he'd been there, all Sora had found in the other room was a ruined dining room with a chandelier having fallen and taken out the table.

Well, there was a third door, a glass on that seemed to open into some sort of courtyard, but Sora hadn't gone that way before. And at the moment, he was thinking maybe they ought to just head for the hidden rooms. On the other hand, who knew what they would find?

"It's a dining room. There wasn't really anything interesting there in the waking world, but I couldn't say for sure now."

"Wait..."

The obvious thing had drawn Celestia's attention -- the twin alicorn statues. She stepped over to one of them to examine it, checking for any hints or clues to its identity, both visually and with a quick spell. As far as she had known, she and Luna were the first ponies this dreaming world had seen, let alone the first alicorns.

"Think there's something to the statues?" York looked around at the debris, glass, plates and all. "It looks like something trashed this place on purpose. Hope it doesn't come back while we're looking around." He made his way over to the room anyway, though he stopped short of opening the door; he didn't want to ignore a lady.

"Were the statues there in the waking world, Sora?"

"Yeah, they were," he said in response to York's question as he noted Celestia's interest in the statues, "And the mansion was in this condition in the waking world too."

He hadn't personally found them all that interesting, but he supposed he could see how they would be interesting to Celestia. As far as he knew, except for the one in the library glaring at the floor, there wasn't any significance to them.

"From everything I have heard thus far, I thought Luna and I were the first ponies to come to this world, sleeping or waking," she said thoughtfully, lifting a hoof to touch the statue. Even if they held no relevance, they were an odd reminder of home she hadn't expected, like a small piece of Equestria had appeared here.

Mantling her wings slightly, she stepped back and away with some effort.

"Well...where I come from, alicorns are in stories," York said. "If they exist somewhere in the universe, we haven't run into them yet, but it's something that people think about anyway." He paused, looking Celestia over. "...you know, the one person who went home for a while said that he woke up right after he lost consciousness. I know it's hard to be so far from home, but at least you know your friends are safe while you're here."

He wasn't sure if it was what she needed to hear, but he hoped that it was. It's hard to be away from home, but at least, as far as he knew, she had something to go back to when she woke up. York pushed the dining room door open; maybe looking at something else would distract her.

This room is an absolute wreck. The buffet and china cabinets against the wall and the table and chairs in the middle of the room make it obvious that this was once a dining room; however, the cabinet is run down and nearly empty, china is cracked and cutlery is bent, the chairs are broken and scattered about the room, a handful of crayons is scattered across the top of the buffet, and the table is smashed in the middle and lying in pieces in the center of the room. One of the largest intact pieces of table seems to have a small symbol drawn on it in white chalk.

Sora didn't remember the room looking quite so bad. Then again, it was probably the smaller details and the fact that the last time he'd been there, he hadn't actually been looking around. The easiest thing to notice was the smashed table in the middle of the room. Beyond being a wreck, though, there doesn't really seem to be anything of interest.

Bruce noticed the chalk symbol of the table first and swooped over to have a look. He wasn't sure what it was supposed to be, but he chattered excitedly anyway, trying to draw attention to it.

Shaking his head at the bat's antic, Sora went over to see what he was going nuts over.

"Huh, that's..." Something he hadn't expected to ever see for himself. It was the symbol that Roxas had found in the fake town. Sora still wasn't quite sure how he'd known to fill it in or with what. And now it was here, still in the mansion, but in a different room. Unless it was still in the library too. "Strange."

The concerns Roxas had voiced when Wash had posted about the idea of exploring the mansion came to mind again. They'd all been dreaming of Keyholes again. Last time they'd been dreaming of them, they found one... after nearly getting themselves killed in a magical explosion that flattened the greenhouse. There'd been a guardian to fight then, there might be one now and it made a small amount of sense that doing something here in the mansion might cause it to show itself.

"Thank you. It's more confusing than that, even," she said, stepping awaty from the statues to follow the others. "Luna and I come from very different points in time. Much has happened to me that she does not know, and yet she was there for all of it when it occurred."

She came over to the table in turn, looking down at the symbol with Sora.

"Does this mean something to you?"

This room seemed as much of a wreck as the last one. York looked over the symbol, but if it meant anything to Sora, it didn't to him. He headed over to poke at the china cabinet and buffet. There didn't seem to be any sort of pattern to the violence; everything was just smashed to pieces.

He frowned at the crayons; were there kids here? Probably not living there in the dream world, but still. "Are there kids here, Sora? There's a bunch of crayons."

Well, yeah, the mark did mean something to him. But did it mean the same thing here that it had when Roxas had seen it? He shrugged, "It might be a key to something somewhere else in the mansion."

He hadn't noticed the crayons until York called attention to them. Had those even been there in the waking world? "Not that I know of. The place is abandoned even in the waking world."

It hadn't actually occurred to him to try to figure out what had even happened in the mansion before it was abandoned. The wreckage did suggest random violence and there'd probably been some looting after the fact. It hadn't been important when Sora had been here last but it might mean something to their current situation.

Well, then. Celestia summoned her magic to wrap the pieces of the table in golden light, lifting them off of the ground. She quickly reassembled the table like a jigsaw puzzle in midair, using only telekinesis to hold it together rather than magically repairing the damage, before setting it down in front of them.

York stared. He'd seen the ladies move things sometimes, but usually not something so big; he hadn't thought that they could do something like that. "...right, so if the pattern there is a key to something somewhere else, we should copy it down." D could record it for him - probably already had. "D's on it."

It was part of a puzzle, actually. Sora just wasn't sure what needed to go in the third circle to fill it in completely. Even though it had been among the memories Roxas had shared, it wasn't clear.

Come to think of it, hadn't Roxas found that information elsewhere?

"I think we're supposed to fill something in for the third circle, but I'm not sure what," Sora said thoughtfully, "Maybe that's elsewhere."

Possibly the White Room, now that he thought of it.

"Then let us search for it." With a muffled band, golden bands wrapped around the table to hold it together without mending the damage, which she still wasn't certain she could write off as incidental. "If you have any ideas, please, lead on."

York eyed the crayons and scooped them up. If there weren't kids here, maybe he could take them to Namine. She was always drawing or painting; she'd probably like something else to do her art with too. He headed out of the dining room and turned to Sora. "Which way should we go?"

Sora thought about that for a moment. If he had a clearer image from Roxas's memories of what belonged in that third circle, he'd opt to skip the White Room. But he was drawing a blank on it.

"There's two doors upstairs. The one on the right is where we'll probably find that symbol again and have to fill it in. On the left, that room might have a clue for us at least."

They hadn't encountered any Nightmares inside the mansion yet, but Sora was pretty sure it'd be just their luck that they'd run into some on the stairs.

"We should stay together and investigate each in turn," Celestia said as she let the magic around the table fade. "Not that I truly think any one of us would be in danger on their own, but better safe than sorry. Let's not play into any horror-story cliches."

"Definitely no horror cliches. Never split up the group." York looked around at the three of them. Celestia would probably be the final girl...he was pretty sure Sora hadn't had sex, so that meant that he'd die first if they split up anyway. "Let's head up and see if we can find the symbol."

York headed out of the room and up the stairs. This place was giving him the creeps, even if nothing really weird had happened. Which was dumb, because he'd been in places a lot worse than this; empty abandoned houses should have been nothing compared to some of what he'd been through.

"Horror cliches are some of the most ridiculous in fiction." And frankly, Sora didn't like horror stories anyway largely because the protagonists of those stories made Pete look smart. "Unless we were suddenly stripped of all powers and weapons, I'm pretty sure we'd be fine if we did get split up. But staying together is probably better anyway."

Empty places tended to be creepy on principle. Especially since they weren't always as empty as they seemed to be. Sora wasn't so sure what could be here besides possible Nightmare encounters but the Nightmares were reason enough to be on guard.

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