eswareinmal | The Princess and the Tower

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The Princess and the Tower

WHO Anyone who wants to rescue Sansa! Also Loki and Sansa.
WHAT Rescuing Sansa from the Ice Tower
WHERE Upstream on the river.
WHEN This IC day/the next IC day
NOTES I'll be setting up subthreads for the ice maze, the guardians outside the tower, and the stairs inside the tower. The group will start out all together in the ice maze and then be separated into two, I believe. The groups are (correct me if I'm wrong) Cho, Sif and Faolan, and Giles, Helios, Kay and Bakura. It's not too late to participate! If you would like to, hit up the plurk linked in the below paragraph.

The general sequence of events can pretty much be assumed to be: they get through the ice maze, they get through the guardians, they get up the stairs. If anyone would in particular like your group to be the winner, that's cool with me, go ahead and jump in here, otherwise it'll just be whoever manages to RP to that part first.

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Hooray! Jerky for Faolan! He wags his tail at Cho as he eats it, looking back and forth between her and Sif.

Sif wants to know which way to go? Faolan turns and sniffs at the different paths, then points down the one that has the strongest smell of Loki.

"Well, I wouldn't have." There's an edge to her voice. She doesn't enjoy being condescended to.

Faolan agrees with her, but if Sif needs an explanation she'll humour her. She points down one path she doesn't intend to take. "That path seems to lead directly to the tower. If I were trying to keep someone away from a destination, then the paths that appeared to lead there would not, and the ones that appeared to lead directly away also would not, since I'd assume that anyone with a mind for puzzles would refuse the obvious way." Now she nods her head at the path she chose, the one where Faolan now waits. "So I'm going this way, and so is Faolan." Sif can come or she can go her own way.

Before they set off, though, Cho crouches down so that she is at Faolan's height and pats her knees to get him to come close. "Listen to me. You can come with me, I'm not going to send you back. But this could be dangerous. I'm your pack mother, and that means it's my job to take care of you. So if I tell you to do something to keep you safe, you have to listen to me. And if I tell you to get back in the bag, you have to. I want you to promise."

If Sif notes the edge in Cho's voice, she does not acknowledge it. What she does instead is raise the tip of her blade to the ice, etching a line in it experimentally. The mark doesn't fade or morph away, as she half expected it to.

"Your reasoning is sound enough. I would only caution, as I suspect you know, that if this maze is Loki's doing the rules of it are like to shift as soon as they are named. I will go first, if there are no protests."

She moves to walk in of Cho and Faolan -- a greater risk is a fair trade, if the sorceress is willing to act as a pack mother. Sif has no talent in the arena. The closest thing she's had to a child in recent memory was a cursed dream she was forced to decapitate.

As she walks, her sword makes swift, nearly soundless cuts into the ice, marking off where they've been behind it.

Edited 2012-10-08 05:36 (UTC)

Faolan raised a paw to Cho to promise to be good. His tail wagged, and he hopped up to lick her face in assurance. Then he darted off after Sif, sniffing at the ice and the air to make sure they wre on the right trail. They neared another branching of the path, and Faolan paused to sniff down both branches. He barked twice, pointing down the one he wanted them to take.

"And if it's not his doing, then whoever got the drop on him probably doesn't care about playing fair, either." She hates not having all the information, hates going in blind. "Either way, I suppose it's a good thing I don't play by the rules," Cho murmurs, almost to herself, mapping out the maze in her own way. Raw magic crackles on her fingertips, held at the ready. Facing foes head on is the honourable thing to do... sneaking up from behind the more sensible.

She watches Faolan, tries to move to keep him between herself and Sif. Cho accepts the promise, and trusts Faolan to keep it. He must be able to trust her to keep her promise in return, to trust that she will keep him safe.

She also agrees with his nose, when they reach the next branching off.

Behind them, a passage quietly shifted, looping it around to where they were about to turn. Taking them back in the wrong direction.

If it's a scent trail they follow, it seems to go straight into a wall....

If there is one thing that Sif trusts in Faolan, it is his ability to...sniff out Loki, for lack of a better term. He seems to prefer the Trickster's company above all others.

Loki gets along so well with the children pulled here. Faolan, Gretel, and Sansa. They all seem to trust him, to some extent. Trust is such a dangerous thing to give out. Something that the young hold in such ready supply.

It is the gift of an ice flower -- how Loki first introduced himself to Sansa -- that Sif is thinking of when their path is block by a wall. One that has the mark of Sif's own blade etched in it. Vertically.

Sif has been leaving her markings horizontally.

"We are being played for fools, Sorceress."

Faolan, meanwhile, has been following a scent trail. When it leads to a wall, he whines and paws at it. How is he supposed to find Loki if the trail is wrong?

"What else is new?" Cho asks quietly, mouth set in a grim line. She doesn't need the marks to know where they've been. The maze forms itself in her mind, growing more complete with every step they take. She now stands at the beginning of the branch Loki has shifted to lead them back, assesses the distance in her mind and notes where it cuts sharply to the left. "This way leads us in a circle." They won't be taking it.

She walks along the ice walls, trailing her fingers over them and thinking. When she reaches Faolan's wall, she looks down at him. "You want to go this way?" It seems a good general direction to choose.

A dagger slips out of her arm brace and traces a circle in the ice, little flicks of her wrist ornamenting that border with complex runes and symbols. When she's finished, she places the cold steel back against her skin and places her hands in the center of the circle. The power flows out of her, lights up the etchings, and begins to melt the ice. She stops when the hole is roughly the size of a trash can lid and turns to her companions. "I suggest we crawl through the wall. If the rules are being broken, then we shouldn't feel restrained by them. Sif can go--" But the hole, now that she glances back at it, is already closing up. Cho curses softly and then puts her hands back on the wall. Her magic once again begins to melt their barrier.

When it's large enough, she looks down at Faolan. "Get in the bag," she tells him, leaving no room for argument. "Sif, you go through first. Once you're on the other side I'll pass my things through and then I'll follow you."

Sif is not Thor -- she does not betray stealth in favor of laughter. That is a tendency in her friend that has gotten them all trampled by hoards of bilgesnipe in the past.

Still, she approves heartily that Cho is doing with magic what Sif so keenly desires to do with her own sword: tear these cursed walls apart. The grin that she shoots Cho's way is likely the friendliest that the sorceress has ever seen her.

She moves through the hole swiftly, though. A cursory glance around to see that no enemies are waiting for them on the other side, and her gaze is trained back to those still waiting to cross.

Oh, no enemies are waiting.

However, once they all get through, they might find that they're in a box of ice.

Also they might find that the walls are slowly growing inwards, encasing them in barriers of increasing thickness. Of course, this growth only starts after all of them are through the hole.

Faolan obediently climbed into the bag. Because he was a good boy, he would stay there until Cho told him he could get out.

[Until then, assume he's being good and still. He can be skipped in posting order until he is released.]

Cho passes her bag through, with Faolan safely inside, then her weapons. Then she slowly starts to work her own way through the hole, balancing and stretching and twisting around until both her legs are on the other side and her back is resting on the ice, hands still pouring magic into it. "Sif? When I say go, I want you to pull me through as quickly as you can."

The ice will begin to close the moment she takes her hands from it, and she doesn't exactly have the leverage to guarantee that all of her is through to the other side before that happens. "Ready? Go!" As soon as she says it, she sticks her arms out above her head so that Sif only has to pull her straight through.

Sif sets the bag onto her back, not trusting the land around them well enough to set Faolan down. When Cho gives the signal, she grabs her legs and pulls. Hard. Sif may no longer have the strength of a god, but she is still more stalwart than most mortals.

Cho gets through safely, but the moment they are once again assembled, the ice creaks. Shifts. Sif growls and shifts around, yelling towards the direction she thinks the tower may be.

"Enough of these games! We have a child with us, you petty idiot."

As soon as her hands are off the ice, the hole begins closing up. By the time she's on her feet again, it's down to nothing. She hears Sif shouting, but she ignores it. Whoever is watching them knows Faolan is there.

She just walks to the other side of the rapidly shrinking box, the spire of the tower right ahead of her in the distance. "Faolan, stay in the bag." The dagger comes back out of her sleeve and her off hand traces a symbol in the air, throws it into the leather of the bag. Sif may notice that it stiffens against her, the leather suddenly as unyielding as stone. Cho traces a new circle on the new wall, an exact duplicate of her last one.

With her hands in the center of it, the ice begins to melt. "I can do this all day," she says, eyes on the far off spire. Her voice isn't anywhere near as loud as Sif's shouting, just slightly raised, as though issuing a challenge to an opponent sitting just above her. Her voice will not carry to the tower, but she's sure she's being heard. "If you're not playing by rules, then neither am I. I will burn through every wall between you and I, and then I will burn through you. If you want to test me, go ahead, put me in another box."

When the hole is large enough, she shifts around to expose it. "Sif. Same as the last one." Her eyes don't leave their mark.

Once they are free of the box, it appears that there are no more special obstructions.

Of course, that would be until they run into the first invisible wall. Or fall through the first visible but insubstantial wall.

You brought this on yourself.

They brought nothing on themselves. They're playing his stupid game on the slim chance that it's real. He's inflicting himself on them and at least two of their party are foolish or gullible enough to believe he's not a monster.

Cho takes her bag and weapons back from Sif, undoes the shielding spell around the bag and lets Faolan out, rewarding him with another piece of jerky for being so well-behaved.

They choose another path and begin walking, Sif again insisting on going first, and Cho moving to keep Faolan always between the two of them. If another ice wall is going to crop up and split their small group even further, she doesn't want the boy on his own.

For a while, nothing happens. Cho maps the maze in her mind and hugs her cloak tighter around herself. It doesn't help much; it's a bone deep chill. So she distracts herself from her worry by crafting a spell to shift a balance. Of temperature. She reinforces her personal shield, pulling the warmth from the space just beyond herself into her body. Her breath fogs the air around her, now slightly colder than the rest of the maze, but she remains comfortably warm. Balance. It's the most calming thing her Magic has given her.

Sif is the first to hit the wall. It happens after they have gone for a few minutes without interruptions. Cho's weapons and bag are returned to her, and Faolan allowed to walk free.

That Loki -- and she is certain that this is Loki's doing, now. She has been both ally in and target of his schemes for centuries, and every mark of this day has his thumb print in it -- has momentarily abated his assault does nothing to appease her anger.

Loki said that Balance had claimed him, when he led a charge against the Hero of the Mountains. If that is true, there certainly seems to be no balance, here. Only a waste of time. A game.

A bit of fun.

Irritation makes her swift of foot, and distracted. Her distraction is unproductive, which the wall itself punctuates. Her nose cracks against it, and Sif curses, pinching the bridge. She opens her mouth to curse, loudly, but Faolan’s presence stops her.

“You,” she instead hisses, “are acting like a child.”

She turns to the group, and speaks louder.

“A child’s trick. This was one of his favorites, growing up.”

[ooc: kicking it over to Faolan~]

Faolan is glad to be out of the bag, and accepts the jerky as his due for being so good.

He continued in his place between the women, sniffing the air and pointing when he thought it was helpful to show them which way to go.

"Let me see," Cho says, walking up to Sif and holding her hands out. They're cold now, almost the same temperature as the ice around them, but that will be good for the swelling. She tips Sif's head back and then to the side, looking at her. "It's broken. I can fix it. Hold still."

She pushes down on Sif's shoulders until the taller woman is closer to Cho's level. "I'm going to count to three. One. Two." And then she presses on both sides, realigning what's been broken, with a sickening crunching sound. "Three." she finishes, once the job is done.

Then she pulls a roll of bandage out of her bag and cuts off two small pieces, rolling them up. "Here. Put these up your nose."

Sif nearly protests -- it is only a broken nose, and she has certainly fought through battles more dire with injuries more severe. But that was in a god's body. Sif is not currently in such a state.

She closes her eyes, the only indication of pain as Cho sets the bone.

"Thank you, sorceress. Care to help me break the bones of the one responsible for this in kind?"

"We need to find them, first." Still not entirely willing to believe that it's Loki, still holding on to that one in a billion chance that this could be someone else pulling the strings. And if that's the case, if Cho walks away and allows a friend and an innocent girl to be hurt, she'll never forgive herself.

The walls are unreliable, but the air, she thinks, might be safe. So she creates weather on a very small scale, spreading a layer of warmth six inches over the ground, even as ice crystals spread through her hair and over her clothing, and she uses the fog it causes to tell where it is and isn't safe to walk.

There are walls that appear to be solid, but are not. Sif is still the one going first, but Cho directs her, and hopefully by now she has earned the trust to not be questioned.

That she has. Cho and Faolan have both proven themselves to be worthy guides -- and therein is the true challenge of this maze, to Sif. To follow mortals in step, as she might follow her comrades on Asgard.

And it is not quite the same -- Sif does not have blind faith in those raised so far from Asgard's glory. But it is more trust granted to these two mortals now than Sif has placed in their kind before.

All at once, she leads and follows.

((ooc: good time for a Loki interception and/or maze solving?))

They walk for over an hour. Cho offers each of her companions warming charms for their clothing (even though she can't actually see Faolan's) similar to the ones she might use in place of central heating for a room as a whole. She doesn't dare risk maintaining the internal temperature of a whole group when she might have to access defensive magic at any moment.

Eventually, they reach the innermost part of the maze and in Cho's mind their steps fill in the blank gaps until she's sure they've seen every inch of the innermost wall. "There's no way out." Her voice is resigned and sour. "Screw it," she says, almost to herself. "We're making one." This wall is considerably thicker than the ones she already melted through, and she's not sure if Sif would be able to pull her through fast enough.

She flicks her dagger down into her hand and begins chipping out a new spell in the ice. "It'll be a minute. You two get ready for whatever's on the other side." And then she thinks about that. "Actually... Sif, toss Faolan up in the air?" If she can get him higher than the top of the wall, maybe they'll be prepared. "Tell us what you see."

The tower is beyond the wall, and the two ice guardians. The wall isn't terribly thick, but it is thicker than the other maze walls, and this one will regenerate faster.

The Princess and the Tower

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I am back from Maine and can tag again!

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