war table: one giant leap.

[propulsion]

WHO: Intrepid heroes
WHAT: Forging a path to the second Crossroads Gate, and then poking it with sticks.
WHEN: Late Drakonis
WHERE: The Crossroads
NOTES: n/a

Comments

crunching

[heirring]

Just getting to the island where the Gate is waiting for them is studious, nervy work that entails a great deal of watching one's feet to make sure neither wanders off narrow crumbling bridges or dizzying stairwells. And it's hardly as if there's any shortage of things to poke and prod and look at once more or less secure among the crumbling ruins. One might be forgiven for overlooking certain discrepancies until this point; maybe she's spent much of the expedition standing beside the Wardens. Wysteria herself certainly hasn't noticed the drab, unaltered quality of her person compared to the other Rifters of their party gleaming away in the crossroads.

One handed, she hefts the brass tripod up and over to the left. —And then, no, to the other left.

"Once this is all arranged, I'm going to take one of the Wardens into the ruins with me. I would like to map them and see if there's any pattern to how they've been altered by the Gate. Here?"

She flicks a little bead of rubble out of the way and reorients the tuning rod by a half degree to avoid some slant in the floor.

[propulsion]

Tony raises the thaumoscope, making the by now familiar motions of resetting it as the runic engravings emanate faint light. Wholly consumed in distraction for the moment while he makes sure everything calibrates like its meant to. He says, "Good call," on her intentions, and squints over at the placement of the rod.

And then at her, and the thaumoscope tick-tick-ticks in his hand, ignored. He'd been wearing a pair of wholly unenchanted sunglasses to combat the headache inducing Crossroads light, and now he tips them down further on his nose to evaluate her.

"We have this thing," he says, after a beat, "on my home planet called movies. Think of, like, thousands of individual images that capture the motion of a—we've gone over this, you know, like a zoetrope. Anyway, there was this one called The Wizard of Oz," and by now he does occupy himself back with his task, moving aside to adjust one of the rods, holding up the thaumoscope towards the churning, corrupted rift, "mega popular, and it's kind of this fairytale about this girl, Dorothy, who's from Kansas, and winds up in the magical land of Oz, and spends the whole time trying to get home again. To emphasise its, you know, magicality, the scenes in Kansas are shot in black and white and grey, and the scenes in Oz are in bright colours."

He gestures at her with the thaumoscope as he says, "So now you have the full context when I say—no place like home, Dorothy?"

[heirring]

The task of anchoring the carefully balanced tripod consumes a great deal of this explanation. She extends and locks into place the stabilizing feet from the foot of each leg with a soft serious of clicks and clacks, head cocked halfway toward Tony as he prattles on about Oz and fairytale princess and so on. It's only during this last bit that Wysteria has fully straightened from the task so she might squint at him and the sunglasses perched at the very tip of his nose without interruption.

She bats some measure of invisible or non-existent Crossroads dust from her skirts.

"Pardon?"