cosmicsommers | open rp post

Nikola might not need or dare to accuse Helen of becoming closed off, but it is the truth. She had kept to herself, pushed everyone away, and very nearly had no personal connections to show for it. That would have been the icing on the cake of her year. How glad she is that everyone seems to have, if not forgiven her, then been willing to push it aside. For as much as she might try to keep to herself, she is a social woman. Helen thrives on human and abnormal interaction. She needs both to survive.

As Nikola finally takes a seat by her, she turns just a little more towards him, sipping further at her wine as she listens. She had known that even the barest mention of the new Sanctuary would catch his attention, even more will what she has in store for him.

"I managed to get my hands on a good deal of technology you had shown an interest in," she continues, watching him for signs of his reactions. "The upgrades to the Sanctuary infrastructure have made everything much more stable, which was the point, but I had hoped you might come to see it. Praxis may be gone, but parts of it live in the new Sanctuary. I would hate to be unable to share that."

It's the best she can do, honestly. She can't change what happened -- or, well, she had the chance to but refused for a multitude of reasons -- but she had been able to procure either the blueprints for their technology or pieces of the technology itself. Either way, the Underground Sanctuary has become something of Praxis rebuilt. If that isn't tempting for him, she doesn't know what would be.

By the time she's done explaining the nature of the new Sanctuary she well and truly has him snared. Which he rather suspects is the point, even if he doesn't care to say it right away. After all, she's bound to know already, and that's the most important part, really. Still, he makes not even the slightest effort to hide the slow shift of his expression into one of something that is most definitely a variation on the theme of intrigued.

Which is not to say that he's ignoring his wine, but the further on she gets in her explanation the more he seems to be ignoring it.

"You don't say," he begins, once she's finally laid it all out before him, and while he sounds more than interested, he leaves it at that. On the other hand, he's not condemning her for not doing more to save at least something of Praxis, and maybe that's enough. "And I suppose someone's going to have to make sure Heinrich hasn't completely made a mess of the computer systems."

Which is to say, of course he'll come. Even if Praxian technology hadn't been involved, he'd have had no shortage of curiosity about Helen's new Sanctuary and not just because it had been built in secret and possibly quite literally under his nose. Plus there's still a part of him that can't help but feel that she does owe him, a little. Even if he isn't about to even remotely begin to address that fact, much less let it actually show in his expression.

"If anyone can do that, it's you," Helen agrees, trying and failing to hide a smile at the idea. She will be very interested to see how he takes to everyone and everything in the new Sanctuary. Her life's work. Her second life's work. What an interesting way to put it.

They stay up for quite a while, talking about the Sanctuary among other things. After a while, Helen's body simply gives out. After the stress of the last 114 years -- this last year included in that hot mess -- she hasn't slept nearly enough or eaten or taken care of herself in general. And the last few weeks were probably some of the worst. So, at some point during the night, Helen's eyes finally slide shut and, in what is highly contradictory to her typical light sleeper nature, she falls into a very deep sleep while sitting upright on the couch.

The upside to this, for Nikola, is that by the way she was leaning against the back of the couch, she ends up with her head resting on his shoulder.

When she finally wakes in the morning, she will feel quite pleased and lucky to have someone who so thoughtfully tucked her into bed without making a fuss about it, someone she can trust and feel safe and comfortable enough to leave herself vulnerable because she knows he would never do anything to hurt her. Not intentionally.

There's a nod and a smile in return for her comment about being one of the few people who could manage to double check someone else's work on a project that he hasn't been involved with much less seen before. And if it colors the conversation for a bit afterwards, at least it's not a bad thing to having coloring events, and he's more than glad to simply talk about whatever should happen to cross their respective minds.

That said, it comes as a surprise, when Helen simply falls asleep - and not just that, falls deeply asleep besides; for a moment or three he simply stays where he is, enjoying the fact that her head is resting on his shoulder. But eventually, he does set his (long-since emptied) wine glass aside and shift enough to carry her gently to bed before retreating once again to the couch.

When she wakes again, that's where she'll find him, idly turning the projector for the holo-map over in his hands.

"Awake again, I see."

Helen notices that she's alone in the bed before anything else comes to mind. After that, she takes note that she's still fully dressed and well tucked into the sheets, as though Nikola had only had her comfort in mind. Such a gentleman.

She makes him wait at first, long enough to get into a change of clothes. Something just as nice as what she had been wearing, but something that hasn't been slept in. A hot shower would be nice, yes, but she isn't cruel enough to make Nikola wait through that. Instead, she makes her way to the couch, smoothing her skirt as she takes a seat dangerously and pointedly close to him.

"I suppose I have you to thank for my position tangled in the sheets," she says, her voice and tone soft, thoughtful. Perhaps a touch grateful. "I should thank you for not leaving me to the crick in my neck that would have been my reward."

He won't deny that it had been tempting to get into bed with her. But it's been a hard day for the both of them, and to be honest, he'd rather not push too hard just yet. And in any case, it should really be her choice, he figures. Partially because he knows how much she prefers being able to control at least something of the shape of things, but because it'll mean just that much more when she does invite him to share her bed.

And to be entirely honest, if she had wanted to take a shower, he would have been more than willing to wait for her, besides. Not that he isn't more than glad to have her making her way back over to his side, but he's reasonably certain that he could have managed to wait.

(He might, in fact, be wrong about this, but as she decides to not make him wait the point is moot anyway.)

"You don't need to thank me for that," he answers, and like hers, his voice is soft; honest in a way that he very rarely is. "The bed was there, and it was clear you needed the sleep."

"Apparently so," Helen agrees, glancing at the shoulder she had fallen asleep on, "considering where I was at the time."

Not that she doesn't enjoy Nikola's company, but the fact that she fell asleep with someone else in the room and on someone else besides means that her body had literally given up on her. Rarely has she been that exhausted around another. Even more rarely has she done it somewhere other than at her desk.

"All the same... Did you have a good night?" Her eyes move towards the object in his hands. "Don't tell me you were contemplating that all night."

She wouldn't be surprised, but she had hoped he would have waited for her.

Up until relatively recently, Tesla had forgotten what it was like to live in a mostly mortal body. In something that couldn't keep up with his habits of keeping odd hours and pushing his body to the limits of what it can stand. But he knows too that Helen is a lot more human than he is, for all that she tries to pretend otherwise; that her body might react to be run ragged is not entirely surprising.

Still, he doesn't mention it. There's no need to, and he doesn't think she'll thank him for indicating that for all her longevity she is still mostly human.

"I can't imagine it would have made for a terribly comfortable pillow," he answers instead, with a shrug. For all that he won't deny that he had enjoyed those brief moments before he'd seen her settled somewhere he knows very well that his overall body type could probably best be described as 'lean', which doesn't exactly make for terribly comfortable pillows.

(Or at least, not under the current circumstances.)

Her question - and the following comment - have him blinking, on the other hand, as if he'd honestly forgotten what he's playing with.

"No," he answers, and its the honest truth. "The genie has stayed in the bottle." Mostly because he'd ended up being rather lost in thought, while she slept, but it's not the first time and it's not likely to be the last either. True, he might, briefly, have had an inclination to go poking at it, but the projector is also a neatly convenient size to fiddle aimlessly with, and he's always had a tendency to want to be doing something with his hands, regardless of what that something happens to be.

Normally, Helen's body can handle a lot. But normally she hasn't been recovering after pretending to have blown herself up, lived the last 114 years in a state of near-constant stress -- particularly the last one -- or finally had a row with one of her oldest friends over the whole ordeal. She had, quite frankly, overrun herself and her body had needed the rest. Apparently it had chosen that particular moment and place to give out on her.

At some point, she should make breakfast happen, but right now she doesn't particularly want to. Things like this may or may not have also led to her body giving out on her.

"I've had worse," she replies softly, her lips twisting slightly. She has had worse. The various places she slept in or on during the two World Wars say enough as to that. Now, if she were lying down next to him and fell asleep on him that way? That would be much better. Not that she'll say as much.

"Well, then, shall we uncork the genie?"

As though she has to ask at all. She motions towards the book for him to do the honors.

Eventually, breakfast might happen. Admittedly, it'll have to depend on one or both of them not being so distracted by the map that they quite simply forget, but it's certainly something that might well happen. And in either case, he's more than willing to let the topic of food slide in favor of scientific curiosity.

(Which would probably be more detrimental in the long run if he weren't essentially immortal and also not tied quite so much to the need to actually eat.)

"I think we shall," he answers, neatly sidestepping her comment about having had worse places to sleep. He's well aware that their lives have not always lent themselves well to comfortable places to sleep, but that doesn't mean that she needs to stay somewhere that would have been less than comfortable. Not when there had been better options available within easy reach.

But this too is nothing he says. Instead, he simply rises from where he'd been sitting as if he'd been half-expecting her to make that exact gesture, and maybe he had been. Either way, it's not long at all before the map is rising up around them once again, in all its glory. (And this time, somewhat less as merely a backdrop for the assorted grievances and arguments of earlier.)

Letting anything rest on one or two of them not being distracted by anything, let alone something as enticing and fascinating as the map, is asking a whole lot and probably isn't the smartest idea. Well, they will figure that out later. As it is, scientific curiosity is certainly winning out.

Helen will pay for it later, but for now it doesn't matter.

As Nikola moves to uncork their genie, Helen gathers the other books they might need, ones that they used last time. Ones that help translate Summerian. While that isn't exact, it is, at least, a somewhat close translation. With these in hand, she makes her way to Nikola and the map, appreciating it as she goes.

"This never does get old, does it?" she murmurs, not bothering to specify whether she means the map itself, working things out, or working with Nikola on solving a particularly intricate problem. The answer could be buried in any of the three. Or it could be all of them.

"Though, this time, do try not to knock out the power. That will be far to difficult to explain."

As long as she doesn't end up running herself into the ground again, later is good enough for him. Which is not to say that he might not be keeping more than half an eye on Helen, but he'd have been doing that anyway, to be perfectly honest. And if it looks like she might benefit from taking a break for something like food at some point, he figures he can mention it when it happens to come up and not before.

(And if this gives him freer rein to throw himself headlong into the map at least for the time being, he's not about to complain about that.)

That said, neither can he help but roll his eyes a little at her comment about knocking the power out and never mind that he's well aware that it would be far more difficult to explain than it had been last time he'd accidentally knocked the power out.

"I managed to compose a reasonably understandable message, in Praxian, from inside a computer. I think I can handle whatever this thing has to throw at us."

He is, of course, aware that this is very similar to what he'd said last time, just before accidentally knocking out the Sanctuary's power. But he is at least aware of some of the map's defenses, this time, and either way he doesn't waste any time in calling up the same array that had proved so disastrous last time.

(And if he still hasn't any idea of what the password it might or might not be asking for is he figures they can work it out.)

On the plus side, she may or may not also have the vampire shields he made tucked away just in case so that Nikola will not need to generate a constant magnetic field to block it out this time. She also has the synchrotronic light source tucked away that he used the last time, but they might not need it this time if he doesn't knock out the power with another EM pulse. Who comes prepared? Helen Magnus does and at least this time she knows some of what to expect.

"'Reasonably understandable' might have been enough for Henry, but it may not work against our lovable genie," she points out, though her lips curl upwards in amusement. His response was perfect, exactly what she would have expected. With their song and dance perfectly intact as usual, she sets several of the small books out of the way and picks up the one she knows she will need.

With luck, he really won't knock out the power and force her to call him Dobby again.

"All right, what symbols do we have here?" she muses, trying to match up what she sees in the air with what she sees on the page. They need a password is what it boils down to. The trick is to ask what sort of password the ancient Praxians would have set up. Helen's heart misses half a beat at the thought of the Praxians. If she could have found a way to save Ranna... or her father...

She shakes herself inwardly and the moment passes. Not that she thinks for an instant that Nikola did not notice, but that remains among the long list of things that do not require commentary.

"Do you think one of these is the symbol for holy water?" she asks after a few seconds of consideration, still looking through the book in her hands and sounding for all the world as though she is commenting on the weather.

She's not the only who's prepared. He might not have expected to be dealing with the map again, but he'd like to think that he's gotten at least somewhat more practiced with his electromagnetism since his last go-round with this particular section of the map. And while he can't be entirely certain he'd be up to countering an EM pulse in time to keep it from knocking the power to the entire hotel, he's not unwilling to at least try.

(And even if he does knock out the hotel's power, it's not particularly likely that the staff would let him in to anywhere he'd need to get to in order to fix things.)

He does notice, too, the way she seems to have been lost in thought for a moment, but he doesn't address it. There are too many things that have been lost, now, and Praxis is just one of those many things. That and he knows Helen, even if he isn't entirely aware of the people she'd met during her trip, and can all too easily guess that she blames herself for not being able to do more to either prevent the catastrophe that had leveled the city or save more of the people and culture of the city.

"C'mon, Helen," he offers instead. "You know as well as I do that particular... legend didn't come into being until well after this would have been designed."

He is, admittedly, assuming that it isn't a creation of Helen's father, but given the thoroughness of it, and the way it react to vampires (or those with vampiric blood) he rather doubts that's case. A trail for Helen to follow, almost certainly. But not something her father had a direct hand in.

Of course, neither does he so much as attempt to look for a symbol that might be anything close to Helen's suggestion, but he knows well enough that he hadn't been meant to, and so he simply moves on to try to figure out what the password might be.

"The last time it needed something like a password it was ... 'gateway,' wasn't it? Although I suppose we don't have any way of knowing if they'd use the same one twice."

He wouldn't, and some of that probably comes through in his voice, but neither is he the map's creator. And it's not impossible that what's worked before will work again.

The map's make-up and design almost certainly aren't in Gregory Magnus' style, either, and no one would know that better than Helen. Considering his reaction to the Source Blood, she wouldn't doubt that he would put in measures to counter vampires, but he would never do anything to jeopardize his own daughter. After the Source Blood experiment, he wouldn't have put in safety measures like this, ones that could easily have killed her rather than protected her.

Now if he had known she would be safe from it, he absolutely would have done something like this just because he was never particularly fond of Nikola. Her lips tilt upwards at the thought of what Gregory would say to the idea of Helen having willingly kissed Nikola Tesla. He is, after all, an acquired taste and oh how she has acquired a taste for him now.

"Mmm," she replies instead of voicing any of this. She also refrains from mentioning that password, preferring not to skip straight to the outer map itself. This one still has many more secrets to give and they could learn a great deal from not skipping. "I doubt they did. I would assume 'gateway' gets us to the outer map and something else would make it to another level of the inner city map."

The question is what that 'something else' is.

"Is there another word that might be similar? 'Entrance' perhaps?"

Edited 2016-03-29 00:25 (UTC)

They could learn a great deal by not skipping straight to the outer map, it's true. But that still leaves the question of what exactly the password might be and for all his earlier boasting this really isn't anything at all like his work on cracking the Enigma code. That had at least been working in a language he'd known, with an alphabet loosely analogous to the English alphabet, neither of which can be said here. But given that he doesn't mean to try anything until they're at least agreed that it probably isn't going to backfire horribly.

"Mmm, too similar, I'd imagine. But it could be 'enter'."

Which has the added bonus of also being a valid computer keystroke, for all that he can't imagine that Praxian society will have had anything even remotely similar to the computers that he and Helen are more familiar. But the idea is sound at the very least, even if neither of them is doing much more than theorizing at the moment.

(But that is, of course, part of the thrill of it, although it's nothing compared to the triumph that will inevitably come of getting this figured out properly.)

Nikola has a point, but to that end perhaps it could be something else. Helen flips through the book in her hand, a slight frown creasing her brow. If only they knew more about the ancient Praxian society. She has only the barest glimpse into their world, even now, and she does her best to remember as much about it as she can.

"Heavens, perhaps?" she guesses, her gaze taking in as much off the pages as she can. "Or haven. Something related to safety or security?"

"Would an underground city think to use 'heavens' the same way we might?"

It's an honest question, too. He doesn't doubt that there's probably a word for 'heavens' in the Praxian language - if only because the city hadn't developed underground - but who knows how the meaning and usage of the word might have changed over the centuries? Or when the map was created, as relative to when the city moved underground.

"Haven might work, but I'm going to guess it's not a vocal command, given all this."

He gestures at the display in front of them, at that, which is still blinking merrily away. Although on the bright side, it doesn't seem like letting it sit is going to have any detrimental effect on the system on the whole, and that's at least one less thing that they're likely to have to worry about.

That is a good question. Helen's brow creases slightly into a frown and she considers her answer. "Not particularly. They might take it to mean 'surface.' As in surface-dwellers or something of its ilk." Something related to the surface, she thinks. But that is another guess.

She nods and moves forward to see if she can properly match some of the symbols. "Here." Haven. She points to the symbol in the air and then the book, shifting so he can read over her shoulder. "That one matches. I wonder if any others do."

It's not an unreasonable guess, to be entirely honest. The question of what, exactly, it might have come to mean over the centuries is another one entirely, not to mention one they can't exactly ask, but it makes sense at the very least.

Still, rather than dwell on that, he turns his attention to the book in her hands. They might have found one matching symbol, but he doesn't for a moment imagine that's going to be enough to get them into the next level of the map. One password might have been enough to get them to the next level last time, but neither had there been something as involved as what they're currently staring down.

"That one," he comments, after a moment or three, reaching over her shoulder to point at a symbol that's translated as 'home.'

Helen glances up to find the symbol he indicates in the book, her eyes quickly zooming in on the correct one. A slight nod accompanies that. So they have two. Like Nikola, Helen isn't ready to think that one or even two will be enough. They need more, something along these lines.

"So that's 'haven' and 'home,'" she muses, returning her attention to the book. "What else can we think of to look for? Something related to these two words, but not exactly?"

Unless it really is a two-word password and everything else is to throw them off. She finds 'sun' soon, though it isn't quite the same.

"Sun? Or perhaps... heat? Something related to the geothermal energy in the center of the Earth?" The Praxians had used that geothermal energy source, after all.

It could be a two-word password, that much is true. But knowing what little he knows of Praxian society he somehow doubts that they'd leave their security to something that easily cracked. And besides, if they're only going to get one chance at this, it's better to have figured out all the possibilities beforehand. Especially given that it'll make it easier to pick out which option seems the most reasonable.

"Protection, maybe?" he offers, mostly as alternative to what she's suggested. It's not impossible that there's something related to heat in the password, but it's not the sort of thing he'd really choose, and never mind how important geothermal energy had been to the Praxians as a whole.

There's a pause there, and then he speaks up again.

"Actually, does Praxian even still have a term for sun? Or is it something that's become so archaic that it isn't in use anymore?"

"They have the equivalent of celestial horizons," Helen replies, recalling the symbol and translation from their first attempt at cracking the map. "Whether that is also their equivalent of sun, I have yet to see..."

Her voice trails off as she turns another page, musing over that idea. It's a very good point, odd as it might sound to the average person. The same could be said about things like day and night. Stars. Things they take for granted that the more recent Praxians never had.

"If you see something like this--" She points to the symbol for sun in her book. "--we may have a match." Otherwise, she might just assume that he's right and the symbol simply isn't used any longer.

"Friendship..." Her expression turns from mildly surprised to interested. Not one she would have immediately jumped to in her book, but one that jumped out at her. "Home. Travel. Wealth, although what kind of wealth is unclear. I assume material wealth, though with the context in the map, it could mean something completely different."

For all that he'd like to think that the concepts of day and night were universal, there's little denying that neither are something that would be naturally occurring underground. Whether or not the Praxians had arranged to make something that would at least approximate the solar cycle is something that he can't answer (and still wishes he could) but he supposes that at least the earliest Praxians must have remembered life on the surface if nothing else. How well that will have translated into the map itself... well, that is rather the question at hand, isn't it?

"A wealth of information, perhaps?"

It's a stab in the dark, yes. But it's not like everything else so far hasn't been. And what's one more, if it actually gets them closer to what they're looking for, in the long run?

"Perhaps," Helen agrees, drawing the word out slowly as she considers. She wouldn't doubt that if the map's creators had managed to seal so much into it. A wealth of information would make sense.

But there's another that keeps coming back to her. "What about this one?" she asks, pushing herself upright so she can move towards the panel in front of them. Her finger points first to the holographic symbols and then to one of them in the book. "Friendship. There's another like it on the other side. It could be an allusion to inter-species cooperation. Were we certain of when this was created, I might suggest that the creators meant a friendship between Hollow Earth and the surface. Either one that existed or one that they perhaps thought possible in the future."

The only question is what that second symbol really stands for. Helen glances at Nikola, eyebrows slightly raised, to see if he has any ideas before she returns to flipping through the book in her hands.

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