[Fic] "Trollstuck," part 9 -- Homestuck
May. 20th, 2012 03:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingback to part 8
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Trollstuck, part 9
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====>Explore the door with your sign
You walk through the east door. This leads to a small antechamber with several closets and a lot of hooks on the walls, probably for hanging coats. You think the rows of ash on the floor along the walls might have been shelves for boots. A massive set of double doors is painted with a flaking mural of the landscape surrounding the buried town: the ocean, the fields, and the volcano in the distance, looking green and peaceful under the light of exaggeratedly large stars.
You cannot open the doors; they are blocked by many cubic meters of solidified volcanic ash. You wonder what used to be outside them. Fields? A stone plaza? A street and then another building? There is no way to tell.
You sigh. Raptormom butts your leg and then nuzzles your hand when you reach down to scratch the base of her horns.
You turn and go back to the strange room with all the symbols.
====>Open the south door to ventilate the locked rooms
It suddenly occurs to you that locked rooms are generally locked to protect what's inside them, which means what's inside them might be important. You also remember that sometimes air goes bad in enclosed spaces underground.
Hmm.
You extend your telekinesis around the edges of the door, getting a sense of the locking mechanism. It's a set of pin and tumbler deadbolts, basically three cylinders going sideways from the door into the frame. The vertical pins that held the bolts in place were probably wood or thin pieces of metal, long since fallen away, but the bolts themselves are solid stone like the door itself. There is no way to unlock this even if you had a key.
Fortunately, you don't need keys. You just sheer the bolts in half and push the door in, standing carefully across the room in case a rush of bad air spills out.
The room or corridor beyond is totally dark, of course. Everything down here is totally dark unless it's reflecting the light of your headlamp.
You decide to leave the unfamiliar doorway for later.
====>Brave the maze of twisty passages, all alike
You decaptchalogue the ball of yarn from your sylladex and look around for something to fasten it to the north doorway of the symbol room. There is nothing on the floor, but one of the lamp niches is fairly close to the doorway and has a stone lattice around its edge. You tie the yarn through one of the holes and venture into the maze.
This part of the communal hive is much less formal and organized than the large rooms you've just left. It's also much less decorated -- instead of stone tiles or elaborate mosaics, the walls are plain concrete with occasional murals. The art has not weathered the millennia consistently. You're not sure if that's because different areas were exposed to more or less outside influence, or because different artists used different types of paint.
None of the doors back here have locks or bolts and most of them have swung open over the sweeps. You can see signs of simple lever latches, probably made of wood or soft metal. Most of the rooms seem to be respite blocks, judging by the shallow pools built into the floors. If those aren't primitive recuperacoons, you'll eat your hat. (And it's a very cool hat, so you wouldn't bet it on anything you're not sure of!)
Maybe half of the pools have drifts of ash in them. Apparently the volcano struck during the day when people were asleep. But either this site was severely underpopulated or something drove off significant numbers of trolls before the town was destroyed. You've been doing some research on volcanoes and you think the first eruption probably scared people off, but either the volcano seemed to settle down and some people came back, or they just didn't leave in the first place for some reason. And then there was another eruption, only this one caused a pyroclastic surge that baked these trolls in their sleep. They probably wouldn't have had any chance to survive even if they'd been awake. Volcanoes are sneaky like that.
====>Enough about volcanoes; get back to exploring
It's not like you stopped exploring while you thought about volcanoes, but 0k.
The trouble with these rooms is that they are all alike. Aside from the symbols over each door (which probably identified the troll who claimed the respite block in question), they are all the same size and they have exactly the same arrangement. There's no way to tell if the trolls who slept in them were leaders or followers. This community seemed to place a lot of emphasis on equality! You think that's pretty neat in the abstract, but in practice it's kind of frustrating.
You've lost sight of raptormom, but you know she hasn't gone far and she'll come bounding back if you whistle.
You take pictures of the signs over each door. Sometimes there's a line of that unknown alphabet painted above or underneath the sign. You take pictures of those, too. Maybe they're titles. Maybe they're just graffiti. It's a mystery!
Most of the rooms are largely bare. Any possessions were made of perishable materials and have long since disintegrated, like the bones and flesh of their inhabitants. But a few things remain. One troll apparently collected ceramic boxes with enameled lids. Another covered every exposed fraction of wall space in tiny, cramped writing. (You photograph that very carefully for Alonde, in case it's important.) Another apparently put a window through the outer wall of this communal hive and set up a row of pots for a little garden. That room is half-filled with volcanic ash now, since apparently whatever the troll used for a protective sun screen wasn't as sturdy as the rest of the building.
As you glance through the meager remnants of other trolls' lives, you can't help wondering what some future archaeologist might make of your own hive, if it were similarly buried and preserved. If nothing else, the artifacts you've collected would probably confuse them terribly, since they're from all different eras and locations.
====>Are you lost yet?
You are an intrepid explorer. You do not get lost!
Besides, you're drawing a map. You stop at each turn in the maze to add to the diagram. It's tricky! A couple times you've turned a corner and almost tripped on your own trail of yarn, when you would have sworn you were heading in a completely different direction. It's especially confusing because the maze includes half-flights of stairs, as if it's built on five or six different levels all at once, but jumbled together instead of being organized into tidy layers. There's something about the effect that feels very comfortable, almost cozy in fact, except for the minor problem of everything being pitch dark and unfamiliar.
(0k, and you being pretty thoroughly lost. But that's what the yarn is for!)
You are about to call for raptormom and start retracing your steps when you see a door with that strange, scratched version of Davven's sign. Huh. If the trolls who lived here thought that symbol was important enough to single out in their special sign collection room, maybe it means something important here, too?
It would be kind of funny if the symbol really was an archaic version of Davven's sign, and this respite block belonged to someone in his lineage, maybe even someone similar enough to be his actual Ancestor.
You decide to take a look.
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And I'm going to cut there for tonight, since I need to get to bed. :-)
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continue to part 10
The trouble with this chapter is that I can't jam any chatlogs into it, since it's an important plot point that Aradia has her laptop turned off and stuck in her sylladex which is why she doesn't answer Jarlia a bit later in chapter one. (Wow, English grammar just failed me there...) Ah well, so it goes.
Anything I say about locks, volcanoes, and archaeology is basically down to about five minutes' research on Wikipedia. In other words, don't trust me too much. *wry*
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Trollstuck, part 9
---------------------------------------------
====>Explore the door with your sign
You walk through the east door. This leads to a small antechamber with several closets and a lot of hooks on the walls, probably for hanging coats. You think the rows of ash on the floor along the walls might have been shelves for boots. A massive set of double doors is painted with a flaking mural of the landscape surrounding the buried town: the ocean, the fields, and the volcano in the distance, looking green and peaceful under the light of exaggeratedly large stars.
You cannot open the doors; they are blocked by many cubic meters of solidified volcanic ash. You wonder what used to be outside them. Fields? A stone plaza? A street and then another building? There is no way to tell.
You sigh. Raptormom butts your leg and then nuzzles your hand when you reach down to scratch the base of her horns.
You turn and go back to the strange room with all the symbols.
====>Open the south door to ventilate the locked rooms
It suddenly occurs to you that locked rooms are generally locked to protect what's inside them, which means what's inside them might be important. You also remember that sometimes air goes bad in enclosed spaces underground.
Hmm.
You extend your telekinesis around the edges of the door, getting a sense of the locking mechanism. It's a set of pin and tumbler deadbolts, basically three cylinders going sideways from the door into the frame. The vertical pins that held the bolts in place were probably wood or thin pieces of metal, long since fallen away, but the bolts themselves are solid stone like the door itself. There is no way to unlock this even if you had a key.
Fortunately, you don't need keys. You just sheer the bolts in half and push the door in, standing carefully across the room in case a rush of bad air spills out.
The room or corridor beyond is totally dark, of course. Everything down here is totally dark unless it's reflecting the light of your headlamp.
You decide to leave the unfamiliar doorway for later.
====>Brave the maze of twisty passages, all alike
You decaptchalogue the ball of yarn from your sylladex and look around for something to fasten it to the north doorway of the symbol room. There is nothing on the floor, but one of the lamp niches is fairly close to the doorway and has a stone lattice around its edge. You tie the yarn through one of the holes and venture into the maze.
This part of the communal hive is much less formal and organized than the large rooms you've just left. It's also much less decorated -- instead of stone tiles or elaborate mosaics, the walls are plain concrete with occasional murals. The art has not weathered the millennia consistently. You're not sure if that's because different areas were exposed to more or less outside influence, or because different artists used different types of paint.
None of the doors back here have locks or bolts and most of them have swung open over the sweeps. You can see signs of simple lever latches, probably made of wood or soft metal. Most of the rooms seem to be respite blocks, judging by the shallow pools built into the floors. If those aren't primitive recuperacoons, you'll eat your hat. (And it's a very cool hat, so you wouldn't bet it on anything you're not sure of!)
Maybe half of the pools have drifts of ash in them. Apparently the volcano struck during the day when people were asleep. But either this site was severely underpopulated or something drove off significant numbers of trolls before the town was destroyed. You've been doing some research on volcanoes and you think the first eruption probably scared people off, but either the volcano seemed to settle down and some people came back, or they just didn't leave in the first place for some reason. And then there was another eruption, only this one caused a pyroclastic surge that baked these trolls in their sleep. They probably wouldn't have had any chance to survive even if they'd been awake. Volcanoes are sneaky like that.
====>Enough about volcanoes; get back to exploring
It's not like you stopped exploring while you thought about volcanoes, but 0k.
The trouble with these rooms is that they are all alike. Aside from the symbols over each door (which probably identified the troll who claimed the respite block in question), they are all the same size and they have exactly the same arrangement. There's no way to tell if the trolls who slept in them were leaders or followers. This community seemed to place a lot of emphasis on equality! You think that's pretty neat in the abstract, but in practice it's kind of frustrating.
You've lost sight of raptormom, but you know she hasn't gone far and she'll come bounding back if you whistle.
You take pictures of the signs over each door. Sometimes there's a line of that unknown alphabet painted above or underneath the sign. You take pictures of those, too. Maybe they're titles. Maybe they're just graffiti. It's a mystery!
Most of the rooms are largely bare. Any possessions were made of perishable materials and have long since disintegrated, like the bones and flesh of their inhabitants. But a few things remain. One troll apparently collected ceramic boxes with enameled lids. Another covered every exposed fraction of wall space in tiny, cramped writing. (You photograph that very carefully for Alonde, in case it's important.) Another apparently put a window through the outer wall of this communal hive and set up a row of pots for a little garden. That room is half-filled with volcanic ash now, since apparently whatever the troll used for a protective sun screen wasn't as sturdy as the rest of the building.
As you glance through the meager remnants of other trolls' lives, you can't help wondering what some future archaeologist might make of your own hive, if it were similarly buried and preserved. If nothing else, the artifacts you've collected would probably confuse them terribly, since they're from all different eras and locations.
====>Are you lost yet?
You are an intrepid explorer. You do not get lost!
Besides, you're drawing a map. You stop at each turn in the maze to add to the diagram. It's tricky! A couple times you've turned a corner and almost tripped on your own trail of yarn, when you would have sworn you were heading in a completely different direction. It's especially confusing because the maze includes half-flights of stairs, as if it's built on five or six different levels all at once, but jumbled together instead of being organized into tidy layers. There's something about the effect that feels very comfortable, almost cozy in fact, except for the minor problem of everything being pitch dark and unfamiliar.
(0k, and you being pretty thoroughly lost. But that's what the yarn is for!)
You are about to call for raptormom and start retracing your steps when you see a door with that strange, scratched version of Davven's sign. Huh. If the trolls who lived here thought that symbol was important enough to single out in their special sign collection room, maybe it means something important here, too?
It would be kind of funny if the symbol really was an archaic version of Davven's sign, and this respite block belonged to someone in his lineage, maybe even someone similar enough to be his actual Ancestor.
You decide to take a look.
---------------
---------------
---------------
And I'm going to cut there for tonight, since I need to get to bed. :-)
---------------------------------------------
continue to part 10
The trouble with this chapter is that I can't jam any chatlogs into it, since it's an important plot point that Aradia has her laptop turned off and stuck in her sylladex which is why she doesn't answer Jarlia a bit later in chapter one. (Wow, English grammar just failed me there...) Ah well, so it goes.
Anything I say about locks, volcanoes, and archaeology is basically down to about five minutes' research on Wikipedia. In other words, don't trust me too much. *wry*
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-21 02:19 am (UTC)*__*
okay, no suggestions to make here. Welp.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-21 02:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-21 03:33 pm (UTC)...Hmm.
"All work and no play makes Troll Jack a dull boy"?
The Troll Communist Manifesto?
Semicoherent ranting and/or conspiracy theories...that happen to be completely accurate? (i.e. the Condesce's involvement and true motives in the land war, the arrangement between Magician and Condesce that will ultimately result in Gl'bgolyb's summoning, prophecies re: the Ancestors yet to come and their descendants, especially those connected in some way to the Signless and Karkat)
Trashy fanfiction about Dayblade and/or the Demoness?
A primitive shipping grid?
All of the above and more?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-22 01:53 am (UTC)