Night 56: The Grand Ballroom

[witchdetective]

[ from here ]That feeling of vertigo that came with using the ring seemed to be getting worse with each trip, Erika thought, as she saw the world spin around her and felt that tugging sensation pulling all three of them. Well prepared this time, Erika braced herself as she felt wind roaring in her ears and saw the surroundings change into that

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[bodhiandspirit]

[from here]

When she emerged from the dark stairwell, Rita had to wince as her eyes adjusted to the brightness of what appeared to be an elegant ballroom. The marble floor, the fountains, the chandelier... It was like being inside a palace.

"What is this place?" she wondered, her eyes wide in awe. How did they build a place like this beneath the institute? And why? It didn't seem to serve any purpose other than to show off how much money and resources their captors had. Did they have no sense of practicality

[ninelivesonce]

The room was beautiful. It wasn't unusual to find this kind of thing lurking in the basements of those with more money than sense, from what she knew, but she hadn't put Martin Landel in those ranks. Power, yes, but the kind that delighted in cruelty, not beauty. Very few liked both, she found. Fewer still were men (or women, or herms) that were successful at gaining them. Of course, whether or not Landel would retake his House was an interesting question.

"Your guess is as good as mine. Let's take a look, yeah?" The closest set of doors were plain, like bulkhead doors. They didn't quite fit with the rest of the room, though if you didn't look too closely they could just be a wall. "I wonder which side is the other sideAnother group of patients had just disappeared down the far hallway -- and there were two more sets of doors. She started jogging towards the eastern set. "I was told that you needed three people to get anywhere down here, but I never found out exactly why." It wasn't like there were signs posted, after

[bodhiandspirit]

When Taura approached the eastern doors, Rita followed, looking around the room as she did. It was uncertain whether the doors mentioned by the Head Doctor were the ones those patients had just disappeared behind, or perhaps the ones behind the stairs. In any case, they needed to investigate things for themselves

[ninelivesonce]

"I thought there'd be a crowd down here, after that radio broadcast. Maybe we just got lucky." Sometimes you had to count on luck, when everything else failed. It was better than despair. She cheated the odds by waking up and breathing every day; it wasn't always as easy to be optimistic, but she tried.

"That or they're pulling something else." They rebuilt damaged doors every morning; who said they couldn't do it in the middle of the night. Split people up, isolate all of them further. That wasn't a friendly thought.

"Find anything?" She was thinking along the same lines as Rita, and came and stood by her. If it was weight, she massed enough for two, at least when they were Rita's size.