chikaidestroyer | ∞ 103: Doors to anywhere [voice/action]

[With the summer weather being what it is, it's been somewhat difficult to sleep at reasonable times -- even more so when you're still attempting to fix your sleeping schedule after resting from a mission. This is the only reason that Albert is preparing to take a shower at midnight, having collected his clothes for changing afterwards.

However, those plans vanish upon passing through the bathroom door as darkness immediately floods his vision. The air is thick and smells of sulfur, and the breeze tells him he's no longer safely indoors. He stumbles blindly for all of ten seconds before he stubs his foot on something and falls forward--

--right into the hot springs. With a resounding splash.

His journal luckily does not land in the water, but hits the ground in just the right way to start recording. There's coughing and several other splashes as Albert drags himself out of the water.

A few minutes more pass before the recording is stopped. It starts again several minutes later. Albert sounds hoarse, and the journal screen may be dim with firelight.]

[voice]

"The fun starts at midnight," indeed. Do be careful of the weather today, everyone; it looks like it's going to be raining.

[action]

[Once he gets his bearings and has changed out of his soaked clothes into his drier set, Albert will attempt to leave the hot springs. This unfortunately means passing through another doorway to ... somewhere. Beware the accidental intruder in the middle of the night.

In the morning, he can be found drowsily sitting on the front steps of house 42. He's not taking the chance of walking through the front door and ending up somewhere else.]

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Mm. It smells like rain. [Even over the smell of the ocean, the weather those dark clouds are bringing is easy to tell.] Well, enough of this one.

[Yun shuts the door again, waits a moment, then opens it again! This time it opens to a whole lot of green. Tall green plants rising up from a dirt ground, any rocks in view are strangely huge, maybe boulders since they don't seem to be coming out of the ground itself.]

That's strange... I don't recognize this place.

[Looking at the world without having to leave your bedroom had taken on a completely different meaning here. Albert steps a little closer when he sees the new place that Yun has opened to door to, his brows knitting together.]

It looks closer to a jungle than anything I have ever seen in the enclosure.

But it can't be outside of it, can it?

[She purses her lips thoughtfully at the sight through the doorway, then carefully lets the door sit open as she turns and fetches the other books she's left laying near the bed. They make a decent door stopper once she puts them down by it.

It's pretty obvious what she intends to do. With the door now propped open by the books, Yun steps out of the room. She only goes a few steps away before she stops to close her eyes and listen.]

[The way the green plants shoot up into the open air without a trunk or much of a visible base is strange, and he tries to compare them to any plants that he's seen before. He glances between the plants and Yun as she steps outside, but he doesn't follow after her.]

What are you doing?

[The closest comparison that could be made with the plants are perhaps if grass grew so big.

As for Yun, she answers him after another moment of listening to her new surroundings.]

Checking something. [She looks back at the doorway.] We are still in the enclosure, I can tell that much.

Checking something. [He repeats, blinking once as he thinks of how she had come to that conclusion.] You are listening to the spirits?

Correct! [Alas, she does not have a gold star to give him for being right.] They're still Luceti's spirits.

[Now that she's made sure of that, she wanders over to take a closer look at the stem of one of the big plants.]

Though that doesn't tell us where in Luceti we are.

It doesn't. [Albert agrees, moving to stand next to the door frame. He frowns deeply when he sees water rushing out of the ground and gathering into a large pool at Yun's feet, the water rippling dangerously as it continues rising.

He doesn't call out a warning of any kind... He just watches.]

[Albert's lucky that she doesn't need a warning to notice the puddle of water oozing up from the ground near her. She looks down at it, backing away as it rises up further before falling away upwards towards the sky.]

Was that...?

[That looked like a raindrop to her. Only massive and going the wrong way!]

Water drawn out of the ground. [He shakes his head, having to look away from the scene in order to process the idea quickly.] ...You may wish to get out there before something comes along and finds you in the grass.

[The grass? Yun steps to one side to avoid another puddle of water pooling up out of the earth and looks up towards the tops of the plants. With that in mind, it's true. They do look like blades of grass!]

So that's why it wasn't familiar.

[There's a moment of hesitation, like maybe she doesn't want to leave yet, but she will. Yun returns to the door, walking around other raindrops as she goes. She stops at it just long enough to dust dirt off of her feet before stepping back in.]

But wouldn't it have been interesting to see a grasshopper or a butterfly at that size? If you could avoid all the spiders and such, I suppose.

I'm sure it would be, if it was guaranteed that you could be out of harm's way before the environment turned against you. [His voice is a bit flat as he thinks about what this could mean for the rest of this experiment ... and the rest of his evening.]

It's not much of an adventure if there isn't some danger, right?

[Not that it's easy to sneak up on her, so she, quite frankly, wouldn't be worried. Being able to move out of the way in time on such small legs, however... That'd be a problem.

But they won't be having that particular adventure today, since she's shutting the door once more.]

An adventure would be more welcome-- [or more tolerated, for that matter] --if it was not the middle of the night. [...Which brings something else to mind that he had questioned earlier.]

What are you still doing up at this hour?

[Someone isn't a late night person, huh?]

I was reading. I think you may have met my book firsthand. [Ah, right. She did throw that.] Sorry.

[While he does stay up late a fair amount, he's rather surprised to see a girl Yun's age up so late.]

It's fine; that was certainly not the most ... eventful thing to happen tonight. [She may be able to see his falling head-first into the hot springs.]

[That's worth a giggle. It's not as if a random laugh from such a cheerful child is too strange, anyway.]

That's true. You may want to try looking through the door before stepping through it next time.