paixaorpg | Golden City on the Horizon... [Completed]

Entry tags:

Golden City on the Horizon... [Completed]

Character(s): Piers, gatekeeper, someone?
Content: SEARCHING FOR THE NEXT GREAT ADVENTURE!!1
Setting: Niflheim Gate
Time: Hmmm... Let's say afternoon-ish?
Warnings: Old?

Piers checked and doublechecked to make sure he really had locked the door to the cabin this time. He didn't want to come back to ~~snakes~~ monsters on his ship. They'd been hard enough to get rid of the last time, and he'd had help from Felix and Jenna and... whatever that cheeky blonde girl's name had been.

He shouldn't have forgotten that. He could remember Felix, he could remember Jenna, he could remember the scholar who had traveled with them, but he couldn't remember the blonde girl's name. It couldn't have been that long, it was only a century, right? Right?

"Only" rang in his mind. A century was longer than any of his friends had lived-- they weren't Lemurian, they didn't drink the water from the life-giving springs. They aged as normal outsiders did. And in the meantime, Piers had merely changed from a young adult to a grown man (not that it had changed his appearance too much).

But he digressed. What was important was that (once he unlocked it and went back in for the Black Orb, stupid him forgetting his most important possession) Piers locked the ship and went to that golden city in search of his next adventure. The Wise One had sent him beyond Gaia Falls to seek this place, and the wanderlust was rising within him to find out what this new adventure was.

So he set out towards the golden city rising above the trees, taking note of small glowing creatures that seemed more intent on avoiding him than fighting him for the moment, and presently arrived at a large gate of spun silver, laden with pearls and crystals of blue and white and shaped to look like a frozen arch...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Reepicheep stopped in front of the gate that now stood before him. The mouse had explored the city ever since he'd left the ninjas, and all his wandering and asking around (though little that had done him) had led him to this point.

This was a gate similar to the one where he'd first entered the city; however, unlike the other one with its artifical trees, this one had more of an icy look to it. So this place had more than one way into it, huh? Or perhaps more than one way out, depending on how one looked at it. Reep had no intention of even trying to leave yet, however; his current adventure was with this city, and he wasn't about to leave until he was certain he'd seen all he could.

He pattered towards the silver ice gate, keen on getting a good look at it before he went on to his next destination.

There were many people lined up at the entrance to this city, bigger and more grand than any city Piers had seen yet, encompassed by golden domes forming a structure much larger than the entire island had been. Many more people than he had seen inside of a single city, too most of them fragile, wistful, doll-like, blonde and blue-eyed, some with such outlandish features that Piers didn't feel overly out of place with his different clothing, light blue hair, and yellow eyes. He joined the line and marveled to himself at the architecture, watching as one after another, each person gave their name and was given papers and a small rectangular item and bidden to enter, those who asked questions being redirected to read the papers they'd been given.

So when he arrived at the front of the line, he was not surprised as the doll-like blue-eyed blonde gatekeeper pushed a blue rectangle and packet of papers to him with a bored query of "Name?"

"Piers," he replied. Half of him wanted to announce where he'd come from, but his were a secretive people, and the last thing he wanted to do was draw unwanted attention. Besides, this wasn't Weyard anymore, what would they even care where he was fr-

"I said, 'WELCOME TO PAIXAO AND ENJOY YOUR STAY'!" repeated the gatekeeper.

"Oh! My apologies..." And Piers skittered away through the gate into the domed city, a cold wet gust of wind blustering with him. He was simply going to have to work on his absent-mindedness.

There was nothing of interest besides the actual gate itself that had caught Reepicheep's eye right now. He had just turned to go explore somewhere else when he was stopped in his tracks by a large white something - a cat-like lumen which had somehow snuck up close to him while he'd been looking elsewhere. While Reep had seen some of these glowing white creatures at times, he'd never seen one up close. He tried stepping to the right, and the lumen followed suit. He went over some more, and yet the lumen kept following his steps.

"Erm, excuse me, sir - or madam, whichever you may be - but could you please move out of my way?" the mouse said to the lumen, in case it could understand language. Either it didn't understand, or else it did and chose not to comply with what was said, for a moment later Reep found himself being pounced upon by the glowing white kitty. The mouse got himself free and turned and ran for the moment - if he were to strike back, he would need to get his rapier out, and he couldn't do that while entangled with something that had claws and teeth.

However, in running he very nearly ran into the legs of the blue-haired man who had just come through the gate.

Piers whirled sharply at the rush of air caused by the near-impact, glancing first around and then down to see... what could definitely be termed a rodent of unusual size. Unlike the vermin monsters he was more than familiar with from his travels, which tended to be brightly colored to advertise their danger potential to enemies, this one was dusky brown... and busily trying to evade one of the glowing white creatures, a feline one that was all too appropriately attempting to sink its teeth into a decidedly large mouse.

After a second or two of deliberation-- this mouse was about the right size for one of the vermin, even if armed with a small sword instead of the more expected pitchfork-- and a quick look around, Piers decided that if the rodent was armed in a manner suggesting civilization, and the feline creature was not, then a good splash would go relatively unnoticed by passersby, and he might get an ally out of it. He gathered a small quantity of water out of the surrounding air, ready at a thought to unleash it.

"Here, you!" the sailor barked at the cat-like creature, waving his arm to shoo it and spraying it with a harmless Douse of water, which had the expected effect of driving the lumenescent animal away (perhaps for allies of its own, but it hadn't seemed like it would be that intelligent). To any onlookers, it would appear he had thrown the water at the beast, perhaps from a flask or something, and other Adepts who might recognize Psynergy usually didn't give him anything to fear unless they were from Prox.

And the large number of doll-like figures with bright blue eyes showed quite clearly that this was not Prox. Along with the potentially intelligent mouse-person, to whom Piers turned next. "And who, may I ask, might you be?" If it carried a sword, it ought to be intelligent enough to understand speech, if not to reply, he reasoned.

Reepicheep had turned around to face the lumen on his own and...discovered that it was already running off. The mouse looked visibly affronted for a brief moment.

He stepped back and looked up at Piers. "I assume that was your doing, sir? I thank you for that, though I honestly could have driven that foul beast off by myself. But I suppose it doesn't matter too much now." He might not have gotten the satisfaction of driving away an enemy, but at least there was no possibility of becoming something's lunch. "I am Reepicheep the talking mouse...and might I have the honor of your name as well?"

Ah, good, it spoke. And the chivalrous manner suggested "he" might be a more appropriate pronoun in the future. Amazing how at Piers's age, a talking mouse really didn't seem quite that bizarre anymore. Though, perhaps it wasn't wise to think of himself as "old" when to most Lemurians he was still a young man.

"I'm Piers," he finally said, recalling that the mouse-- that Reepicheep, he had a name, had asked for his name as well. "And yes, but I'm not entirely sure how foul a cat can be if it acts like any other cat... maybe it's because I'm not from around here? Do you know this city very well?"

"Only from here to one of the other gates," Reep replied. "And even then I'm still there's so much more of this city to see."

He blinked up at the sudden dusting of snow that he seemed to be receiving. Come to think of it, the weather had gotten cold all of a sudden. How very odd. And rather alarming, too.

"Hm, how strange that this stuff suddenly popped up," he mused, shaking it off himself. "I know it's been cold, but not cold enough for this. Looks like it might be time to go find somewhere to stay for a while."

Piers hadn't quite noticed the cold a moment ago, but now he was feeling it worse than ever-- and suddenly it was snowing quite heavily, too. He shook snow out of his hair and headdress and off of his tunic.

"I could swear it wasn't snowing a minute ago..." he muttered, forgetting for a moment that Reepicheep could most likely hear him. "Could my memory be getting that bad?" Abruptly he remembered the mouse. "Uh, yeah, a place to hole up-- pardon the expression-- would be nice..."

Half of him wondered how long Reep's life expectancy was-- that of a normal mouse, or closer to that of a human?

"That would be because it almost literally wasn't snowing a minute ago," said Reepicheep. He took his tail up in his paws for a moment, and wrung them around it. He might have had fur, but it didn't do anything for his tail. The tip of it was starting to go numb. "Follow me, then," he said, dropping his tail from his hands. "Assuming that things don't get worse, we should be able to find somewhere to stay in no time."

Almost as soon as Piers nodded, a flash of lightning arced across the domed ceiling above them, and a rumble of thunder echoed right behind it. The soft but insistent snow abruptly vanished into whipping winds and rain that didn't fall so much as it sliced due to the wind.

"Do not belittle the power of the wind!" the girl scoffed, haughty and self-righteous to the point of being nauseating. Sheba! That was the little blonde girl's name. Piers mentally groaned that he remembered it now, when it didn't even matter anymre, but congratulated himself that his memory wasn't going quite that fast.

"Let's hurry, shall we? I'm pretty partial to the rain myself, but wind and lightning can be dangerous at this force!" Piers had to shout over the gale to be sure the mouse heard him-- he was talking to a mouse. Was he sure he wasn't going senile?

Reepicheep was puzzled. Never in all his adventuring had he experienced weather shifts quite like this. This...this was just highly unnatural - thunderstorms didn't just pop up out of nowhere right after a bout of snow!

The mouse squinted his eyes against the rain, and listened carefully in order to hear Piers. He nodded, and then hunched himself against the gale. It threatened to just about literally sweep him off his feet, but he was determined to hold fast against it. Even so, he ended up stumbling a few times as he tried to keep his footing.

As abruptly as it had started, the wind and lightning ceased. This did not mean that the precipitation had stopped-- in fact, it increased, until the effect was less of being outside in the rain than it was of standing under one of the waterfalls at Aqua Rock, only cold and dreary and without the Apojii Islands sun shinging warmly overhead.

Still, no matter how much of it there was, rain was merely water, and Piers, as a Mercury Adept, knew all about water. "This, I can handle," he told Reepicheep, trying to smother the vanity in his voice. "Let's just find some place with an overhang for now and wait for the weather to clear before worrying about an actual building."

In a city with buildings crowded so closely together, surely there was an awning or an alley where the rain wouldn't fall quite so heavily. Even standing under one of the wrought-metal trees would work. Piers could turn the rain into a sheet of ice over their heads, then dry both himself and the mouse off with his Parch ability. Then, if it resumed either the snow or the wind and lightning, he'd have that much ice and water to work with for a shelter.

Wind and lightning were dangerous, but water was easy enough.

Reepicheep nodded, taking a little bit of respite in the fact that he wasn't about to be swept off his feet anymore. No, now he'd have to battle any large puddles of water that might form. At least those he could handle...he knew how to swim!

He continued leading Piers onward, still trying to find the best kind of shelter around here. Even if it was kind of hard finding it with all this water in his eyes...

ooc: Kind of behind, since they'd probably have found something by now, and the weather's gone, but I wasn't about to assume anything. ^_^; I'll see what you wouldn't mind doing about these two when you're off hiatus.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Golden City on the Horizon... [Completed]

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject