open rp post

[stellationing]

Leave me a scenario (one of your own or choose from here) and include any particular preferences as well if you wish.

Or, if you want to just leave a comment with a picture or a word as a prompt and suggest which muse of mine you want, that works too! I might just be a bit slow with those.

Make a reply asking for anyone here on the subject title.

If you choose a character on the maybe list, I will definitely be slow with them.

If you know a specific "verse" of character you want, specify. If it's a cross-canon scene and you don't specify, you might get a CR AU.

Alternately, if you'd rather place a comment on the muse's contact post. Or if you want to do something a little more privately, let me know and I'll set something up elsewhere.

Go to the RNG if you don't have a specific scenario in mind.

Have fun!

Comments

[vampere]

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.

[lifelines]

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?"

[vampere]

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.)

[lifelines]

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?"

[vampere]

"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.

[lifelines]

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."

[vampere]

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.'

[lifelines]

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.

[vampere]

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?"

[lifelines]

"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."

[vampere]

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?

[lifelines]

"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.