hmph

[freedomsuitsme]

(come_sailaway IC inbox)

"Do try to keep your handwriting legible. I've enough on my plate without having to decipher chicken scratch."

"Correspondences written on a dirty bar napkin will not receive a response."

Comments

[takethatnature]

What do you mean, you have an ace up your sleeve?
-W

[freedomsuitsme]

Been working on a ritual. Not sure how much I should say here.

-M

[takethatnature]

[ No text back. Quick but not quite running-speed footsteps with timing matching Wilson's stride length up to the door, and then a rapid KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK- ]

[freedomsuitsme]

Maxwell opens the door, looking just a tiny bit disheveled.

"Higgsbury."

[takethatnature]

Wilson's caught with his fist upraised for another knock. He quickly lowers it. "It's me. What's your ritual supposed to do? Is it for stealth, or protection, or..."

He squints. "Your tie's crooked."

[freedomsuitsme]

A tiny shadow hand slinks out from inside his coat and adjusts his tie, while Maxwell doesn't break his gaze away from the scientist.

"It's... a catch-all emergency measure. I was planning on using it if we needed to rapidly generate more fuel for the ship, but it can be... adapted."

[takethatnature]

Wilson's eyes are drawn to the shadow hand at Maxwell's collar. It's startling, appalling, and compelling all at once to see Maxwell use shadow magic for trivial tasks. Nothing will top the time he used a similar shadow hand to hold his fried drumsticks instead of taking the risk that his gloves would get greasy.

"Doesn't the ship run on terror and anguish? If you wanted to upset everyone at once, it'd take more than your personality. I think Tayrey's beaten you to it, between the transmission and the lighting everything on fire."

[freedomsuitsme]

"Which is why I've begun to consider altering my plans. If you believe our position here is threatened, there are greater things to worry about than keeping the ship running. Now, tell me everything you know."

[takethatnature]

"I'm certainly not going to do that out in the hallway." He's coming into the cabin whether Maxwell gets out of the doorway or not. Once Wilson's inside, instead of making use of the chance to sit down he paces back and forth in the small amount of floor space available.

"She must have been the one who put up the 'no rules, go burn something' posters, so that Friday would be too busy with all that mayhem you decided to nap through to stop her from setting the rocket off. Everyone went nuts, someone filled the Tommy Bahamas with sausages and made the theatre seats sprout teeth, somebody replaced the flooring outside Stellar with a giant pastry, one guy just ran around screaming continuously for at least ten minutes without stopping to take a breath, you get the picture. After about an hour I didn't see Friday trying to do anything about the fire anymore, so that's probably a bad sign, either she ran out of power or she gave up, either way she didn't try to stop Tayrey from taking over the public address speakers and that was a while after that. The actual launch must have been between those."

"So then Tayrey made her announcement, and she said," Wilson's cadence changes, reciting the wording she used as well as he remembers it instead of trying to summarise and drifting halfway into imitating her Tradeliner accent in the process, "'the rocket had passed outside this realm, and with it a long-range beacon and the details of our long captivity.' And that she's breaking us out of prison when everyone said it was impossible, we're getting rescued, probability help us, etcetera."

"She didn't say what she said about the ship in it exactly, but if she was sending it to someone specific instead of just throwing out a flare for anyone to see-" - Wilson flails one arm upwards like he's tossing an object into the air - "-then she didn't mention it."

"Oh, and Phil said we should wear our leis as much as possible for protection, but I threw mine at a monster in the Labyrinth of Suffering and lost it, so I'd have to see if Friday will give me a replacement."

[freedomsuitsme]

"If Friday is too occupied with getting things back in order to help you with that, you can borrow mine. Gods know you need more warding than I do."

He steps back, not wanting to get in the way of Wilson's pacing.

"So it could be that Lft. Tayray has Opened a Door, in some fashion. But that means we can only hope that either something better than Them answers, or that They answer before something worse finds us."

1/2

[takethatnature]

He does prefer to load up on armour and take the blows he can't avoid head-on rather than put all his faith in his dodging skills, even without making any comparisons between the amount of trouble the two of them get into.

"Thanks," he says, only a little bit begrudgingly. "Better to have it hit me with something I can walk away from than hit you and shatter you into a million pieces. I'll work on my lightning rod impression."

2/2

[takethatnature]

Wilson stops pacing to stare wide-eyed at Maxwell. "Worse than- stars and atoms, you really know how to find something reassuring to say in a tough situation."

That little Deerclops sculpture with all the moonglass spikes impaling it through the body and eye comes to mind.

[freedomsuitsme]

"I'd like to be ready for the worst, whether it's coming for us or not. Always assume your opponent is two steps ahead of you. I've made the mistake of thinking I control the board before, as you very well know."

[takethatnature]

Wilson cracks an off-center, fiendish-looking smile, made more so by the fangs left as a parting gift from the Nightmare Throne. "I do know."

He frowns, eyes drifting vaguely ceilingward. "Maybe it's a good sign that They haven't already made a move. If They were waiting for us directly outside the wall, wouldn't They have reached in and grabbed us while They had an opening?"

[freedomsuitsme]

"In theory. Although..." He strokes his chin, thinking.

"The probe may not have been enough of an invitation. To open the Door wide enough, They... or anything else... may need to be called by a more deliberate act."

[takethatnature]

"So is that something we should be doing or trying to stop anyone else from doing? If we don't want to be obliterated or eaten or turned into half-dead moonglass porcupines?" Wilson's frustrated frown isn't going anywhere; he's out of his depth in a field he doesn't even want to be working in. "Is your ritual something like that?"

[freedomsuitsme]

"It's... it's whatever I need it to be, to put a stop to whatever madness might ensue. But I don't know it would be enough to overpower something coming in from the outside."

[takethatnature]

"So it needs a more potent power source?" He doesn't know what that would be, or how one would go about connecting it, but maybe Maxwell will.

[freedomsuitsme]

"I... I don't know. It could address almost anything already present on the ship. But I don't think the force behind it would be a match for any sort of power cosmic." Not without the rest of Tiamat's power, and I'm certainly not giving her that without a very good deal, he thinks.

[takethatnature]

"I suppose that's to be expected," Wilson says, pinching the bridge of his nose. "The Captain can control what abilities we get to keep, and if you could harness enough power to fight off a cosmic monstrosity singlehanded, you could probably use it to blast your way out of here."

[freedomsuitsme]

"So it's less for fighting anything on the outside, and more for taking control of whatever is already in here. And from what I understand, it will only work once. So I need to play my hand carefully."

Oh Max, if only you knew how complicated this was going to get...