Poke it With a Stick | Day 9 | Afternoon [OPEN]

[seerchlight]

[Scenario A: for Aradia]

As soon as Lights has finished fashioning some sort of belt to hang mysterious treasure pouch (containing one particular eye shaped jewel) he goes off in search of one girl he knows for a fact will be very excited to hear about these kinds of discoveries.

He's not entirely sure why he feels the need to show off, or to impress her, but he ends up settling on the fact that life has been fairly boring as of late, and if they are going to find a room full of mysterious treasure he may as well invite the changeling with a noted preoccupation with such things. Also, he kind of likes appearing to know things that other people don't - so it's best to get this out of the way before news of the secret rooms gets blown wide.

So as soon as he finds the glass fairy girl, he is quick to approach her with the most tempting of inquiries:

"Hey. Wanna see a dead body?"

[Scenario B: OPEN]

Okay, so there is definitely one more corpse in this room than he remembers there being. Most importantly, the second corpse looks distinctly like Huo from the search party.

The bird woman they found on the table initially is still lying there, her chest covered in the same shimmering green blood. But now there is also Huo on the floor, with a spilled bottle at their side. They definitely seems pretty damn dead. He checked and everything.

With the initial hysteria passed, Lights is mostly trying to decide what to do. He's not heartbroken exactly, but he's unnerved. How do you deal with a corpse around here?

Meanwhile, the secret entrance to the Hearth Room is just hanging open, allowing any passerby to observe this predicament.

[Scenario C: OPEN]

A little bit later, Lights is buzzing around the rest of the house looking for a friend of his. He figures she should know that the fucking page is dead, after all. He floats here and there, occasionally calling her 'name.'

"Hey - uh...Brimstone? Something has kind of come up that you should probably take a look at. Kind of a big deal, here."

Comments

[hourglassfigure]

"Hmm, if you say so." She sounds a little skeptical, but not in the kind of way where she actually resents taking his word for it. "I guess you'd better be careful with it then! So where's this corpse party at?"

[seerchlight]

"Here," he says, as he makes it to the base of the Hearth Room's staircase. He points at the far wall, at the gears beside the fire itself. "Just gotta unlock it in the right order."

He moves to the wall and starts pulling switches.

[hourglassfigure]

Satandir watches curiously and doesn't interrupt – she's trying to memorise the sequence, for future use, and she makes no attempt to disguise that fact.

[seerchlight]

Finally, he gears turn and the entrance appears out of the metal machinery.

For a moment Lights just stands there, stunned. His hand hands in the air where it was while pushing switches.

"Uh." He swallows. "Okay, for the record there was only one body before."

Now there's a second. It's Huo.

[hourglassfigure]

"... Huo," she says in surprise. Her expression isn't one of great distress, but there's a little consternation there; she looks ... disappointed, perhaps, but also kind of curious. She drifts forward a little to get a better look, and glances only briefly back at Lights. "What do you think happened?"

[seerchlight]

Lights just stares into space, examining the body with all of his attention as utter bewilderment settles in. He moves forward suddenly, and points to the bottle in Huo's hand.

"...That bottle. Why the fuck, the spilled it everywhere- fuck, that must have something to do with it."

[hourglassfigure]

She's right up in poor dead Huo's business already, in order to gently poke at the body's face with one finger, and she looks up abruptly when Lights starts making Deductions. "What is that, poison –?" She leans over to take a closer look.

[seerchlight]

"Apparently...?" he says. "Fuck, we had no idea what any of this stuff did, why the hell would you drink it? This is like one of the Keeper's laboratories for fuck's sake..."

[hourglassfigure]

She frowns, reaching for the bottle – and then pulls her hand back quickly. "What if it's magic?" she says. "What if picking it up compels you to drink it whether you want it or not??"

[seerchlight]

He stares at her, horrified.

"Well, don't fucking touch it then!"

[hourglassfigure]

"I wasn't going to!" she says. You cannot actually tell if she is rolling her eyes or not. "I'm not stupid, Livingston. Not like this poor guy!" she adds, gently nudging Huo's mouth open so she can peer inside.

[seerchlight]

"Well it's not like I knew that," he says. Well, he could have known, in his way. But he's too freaked out to consider that coherently. "You just sounded so damn excited about this horrific mind control poison you made up out of fucking nowhere."

[hourglassfigure]

"Well, it would explain it, wouldn't it?" She frowns down at the body, in that contemplative sort-of-disappointed way, like someone would look down, with a sigh, at a misbehaving child, rather than like someone would look at the deceased corpse of someone they knew. "I mean, Huo didn't seem that stupid."

[seerchlight]

"Yeah, but let's be real, the bar is pretty much just laying on the ground here. It's been such a lazy slob for so long its getting wicked suntan from the afternoon sun."

[hourglassfigure]

Satandir gives him a puzzled but slightly amused look, over the corpse. "What's that supposed to mean?"