All In (Ovmar)

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Jared Ovmar"]

In the wake of their guide, they descended into the monolith. Its featureless corridors branched, became chambers then corridors again. Sound dopplered oddly; redshifts and blueshift distorted the light on occasion. Rekali led them unerringly, though Rave couldn't have said where. They saw no signs of life.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Rave Merrill"]

A part of the Sith Lord wondered if Rekali wasn’t trying to lead them into some kind of loop. They seemed to walk endlessly and this was the perfect place to accidently get lost and never return again, a chilling thought, but one Jared quickly discarded. He hadn’t felt any treachery radiating from her, and Merrill didn’t seem all too concerned either.

So he kept on walking, there were no signs of life and yet… every now and again Jared had the feeling they were being watched. Shadows at the edges of his vision, perhaps it was just his imagination, but the Sith Lord doubted it.

No words were said, this was not the time for that.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Jared Ovmar"]

She'd walked in temporal flux before, here and there. The Chiloon had its eddies and whirlpools, as did the Tyus Cluster, and she wasn't convinced her ship wasn't developing similar disturbances. But the monolith was exponentially more complex. She wound up leading them short stretch by short stretch, often pausing to take an instinctive taste of the temporal ambience, or to use her tool -- a threaded steel nut on a long piece of string. By tossing it and watching how it fell, then reeling it back in, she could locate the boundaries of temporal shifts, some of them very destructive. One ripped the nut off the string; she pulled the string back, then tied another nut to it and carried on. Her guidance to Ovmar, Merrill, and their droids was to follow her footsteps exactly.

 

[Arage Bao]

Which is what they did, slowly tracing back every of their steps to the kid who was no longer an actual kid. Here she was the metaphorical god, one-eyed King among the blind and all. Neither he nor Rave had the familiarity with the realm to try this by themselves. Jared was slowly mapping the place in his mind though, perhaps attempting was a better descriptor, because he wasn't making much progress with it. All the halls looked the same to his eyes which didn't say a lot but still.

Perhaps they would be able to traverse this place and even bend it to their will in the later stadium, but for now? They needed Rekali and needed her badly. Its good that the Sith Lord raised the price when he did, few would forget two hundred fifty kay.

They still kept their silence, simple acceptance of the realm they were in and the current position of the food chain they occupied here right now.

[member="Alec Rekali"]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Jared Ovmar"]

At last they came to a chamber with about seven or twelve branching corridors -- it seemed to change depending on who was counting, and which direction they faced. Some of those corridors had daylight at the end. After spending a good hour analyzing the room with her gut and her nut-on-a-string, Alec indicated the red marks made by the dye jet at the heel of her shoe. "You've got your breadcrumb trail to get back if you need to," she said. "This spot's as stable as any large room we've found, and it's a good setup point. I'll spend the next couple of days marking out the side passages a little ways, seeing where they go safely, if anywhere, but this is the place to make camp."

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Alec Rekali"]

At the mention that this should be considered Base Camp the entourage started to make the chamber more befitting of the destination. Nothing all too permanent, of course. At this point none of them knew enough about the dimension to say if it was safe enough for such a display of faith, if they needed to bug out real quick, this would do the job good, while also providing stability and some support. Alchemical no-names of Rave, scientifical no-names of Ovmar, copies of some archives, this and that, all of it got settled in while Alec busied herself with scouting the other roads.

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Jared Ovmar"]

The chamber lost its stillness as the droids and assistants got to work, but in one place, at least, that stillness prevailed: the Orb of Passage. The palm-sized time machine-slash-ordinary pebble had hummed, twitched and vibrated throughout the trip, and she'd been at her wits' end to figure out what any of it meant. Sometimes hubris got you success; sometimes it got you killed. Sometimes, though, it was just an inconvenience. It led to oversight, and so she couldn't tell whether oversight was a factor here or not. The stillness, at least, had the kind of significance she could readily interpret. Over the next couple of days' settling in, the Orb received as much of her attention as their surroundings, perhaps more.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Jared Ovmar"]

"Here ya go."

The map was hand-drawn, painstakingly so, and a second draft. Though she had no desire to come back here, ever, she'd kept the first draft. She handed the map to Ovmar three days into the expedition.

"Every corridor, flux point, temporal shear and chamber for about three hundred meters in all directions. I've marked six doors that open into...a place you probably shouldn't disturb.". The denizens of the massive garden or miniature world had made that very clear to her.