001 || so we didn't screw up as badly as we could've

[reddeadvirtuoso]

Characters: Jade Strider and all of the people
Setting: Room 2-01, Floor 30, Cafeteria
Format: Starting action, but I'll do whatever!
Summary: Jade wakes up in the tower, and has quite the day before she finally makes it to the network terminals.
Warnings: Probably foul language and violence against generic Tower monsters, will update if needed

[Room 2-01]
[Her waking up is rather uneventful. One minute she'd dragging some needles across a giant disc while talking on and off to Eridan, the next minute she's... well, asleep apparently. It's admittedly a bit blurry and blinding since she doesn't have her sunglasses on, so those are the first thing she reaches for.

She simply skims the letters without much of a care (yeah yeah the world is over she's got it whatever), and she makes her way towards the trunk at the end of her bend. She quickly wrestles the white suit off to put on her pants and red atom shirt (she didn't really feel up to Godliness at the moment), and starts shuffling through the trunk for the rest of her belongings.]

[Floor 30-- Perpetual Nighttime]
[In a dramatic stroke of Jade Strider Luck, Jade ended up falling plop down on the floor when the staircase fell, letting out an unceremonious yelp. She recovered quick enough, standing up and... it was a toss up between looking at everything tinted dark and looking at everything blurry, so she hazarded a chance her eyesight might've improved with the whole god tier thing, and propper the sunglasses up on her forehead.

Not that it... helped much, so she just opted to keep walking until she found the staircase. And that was when she noticed she stepped on something and holy shit ow her foot ow ow ow-]

What the--!! [She'd been smart enough at least to bring her gun with her, and immediatelly whipped it out while she tied to clumsily jump away from whatever was at her feet, and started shooting blindly at where she thought the black blob of evil might be.]

[Floor One-- Cafeteria]
[It was quite the trial to actually get down to the cafeteria, and she had dutifully eaten the oatmeal she had been handed because son of a bitch she was hungry. The oatmeal wasn't quite enough to satiate her appetite for the moment though, and now she had an...interesting looking egg in front of her. And it was black and shiney and she was pretty sure it wasn't supposed to be.

Right now she was just kind of poking it and looking at it distastefully.]

Comments

[reddeadvirtuoso]

[....Wait did he seriously believe her.

...

Crap now she kind of felt bad uh]

Dude. I'm kidding.

[geometry]

...Y-you were?

[Oh god. Oh GOD.]

I-- I'm sorry! I... I didn't... I thought you were... um, never mind.

[...That was kind of mind-bendingly pathetic. And now he looks way more concerned about this than he really should be.]

[reddeadvirtuoso]

[She nodded, and snickered a bit under her breath.] If the end of the world really involved a party we'd all've spent Sburb getting stone cold wasted and aiming for the toilet as a victory condition.

Don't sweat it, man. You apologize too much.

[geometry]

Sor-- [FUCK.]

...Um, anyway. You were going to... traverse this maze? [It would be a first time for both of them. He had a bow and some arrows in his sylladex, so he wasn't completely unarmed, but that big old gun she carried around was a lot more comforting.]

[reddeadvirtuoso]

[ROLLING OF THE EYES seriously man if you were gonna hang out with her, you were gonna have to shove a sock in that sorry socket of yours.]

Yeah. You comin'?

[Which apparently wasn't really a question, because the way she's going off now and waving for him she's kind of expecting him to just follow.]

[geometry]

[Hahahaha... ha ha... ha. Yeah, good luck with that, Jade.]

[But as for her question, um... he figured that he ought to, just because Jade was new and there might be something in there that she wasn't familiar with. Of course, he would probably be unfamiliar with it too, but oh well.]

...I suppose.

[And when Jade began to move, he followed behind her obediently, pulling out his bow.]

[reddeadvirtuoso]

[At the least, it was the only way they were getting the heck out of this floor without any flighty powers!]

C'mon bro, no sense of adventure? Gotta get out from behind the computer some time.

[Hypocrisyyyyyy]

[geometry]

I...

[But he doesn't want to--]

[Oh god. Actually, that last sentence delivered a significant pang of guilt, though for what he wasn't quite sure. Mostly because he's Equius, and Equius understanding his emotions is a sin that cannot be committed in any universe, lest the very fabric of time and space fall apart.]

[So he continued to follow Jade, lapsing into silence.]

[reddeadvirtuoso]

[TOO BAD I mean

The cutting himself off and the silence is noticeable, considering the fact that Jade usually hung around with a bunch of idiots that talked to much.

...Not that she was any exception, buuuuut]

What's your problem?

[She looked back a bit curiously, but kept walking, keeping one hand on the maze wall.]

[geometry]

Um, nothing.

[Blatant lies. He has a lot of problems. But again, even attempting to explain them is probably too many big steps at once.]

[reddeadvirtuoso]

[Oh hell no man, when your friend is David Lalonde and you had to put up with a bunch of unhelpful grey aliens, you do not put up with dodgy shit.

So she stopped and turned around, crossing her arms and fixing him with a look.]

Don't bullshit me, bro.

[geometry]

[It was kind of amusing to watch his reaction -- he basically flinched and receded into himself, expecting much more than a scolding. But when worst didn't come ot worst, he actually did her the favor of responding.]

Sorry.

I don't really like... adventures.

[If that's what you'd call this tower.]

[reddeadvirtuoso]

Why not? Isn't that exactly why we set out to play that stupid game? get out of the shitholes we lived in, go on and have some super awesome imp-slaying adventures?

[She uncrossed her arms and held them wide out by her sides in a very general gesture. Yeah because that adventure was so super fun and stuff.]

[geometry]

I did it because... I was curious.

[To see what he could code out of it, of course. That mysterious relic with all of the strange glyphs on it -- it had seemed to have some pattern, some syntax, some language that he could potentially decrypt. He had started the project... on a whim, almost, after he bought the thing at a black market in equally unsolicited foolishness. Might as well get his money's worth out of it, right? But... it never stopped. It shaped up to be something more than a simple message. And he never stopped either, out of the feeling that he couldn't; this was important. Even though the signs he gleaned from the coding pointed to certain doom.]

[Did he... did he really want to do it, had he known that all of this would come as a result? As usual, he wasn't quite sure.]

[reddeadvirtuoso]

....Eh, 's a pretty good answer.

[Sounded kind of like why David might've played, to be honest.

Then again she...wasn't really sure why she had decided to play it, actually. She wasn't really cut out for this Rogueish Adventurer thing.]

Not curious about this place at all then?

[geometry]

[That makes two of them.]

I... I've been here for several months. I've seen what it can do. [And 'what it can do' overrides his curiosity with the powerful urge to hide under the covers and never come out.]

[reddeadvirtuoso]

So then the next step is figuring how to cheat the system, get into the cracks, and get the fuck out of here, right?

[Sburb has basically taught her that the System hates you. Obviously the best way to deal with it is to crack it over your knee.]

[geometry]

...Yes. But that kind of seems a long way off. We don't really... know much about this tower. [How much of this theory is serious concern and how much is not wanting to cheat the system is entirely unclear. It's probably a whole lot of both, though.]

I mean, people tried before, but... they all failed.

[reddeadvirtuoso]

I know a lot of "tried and failed"s in my life, but that never stopped me from trying and failing again, no matter how many times folks told me to stop. [That was...supposed to be encouraging. Yeah.]

Point being, so we don't know much about this place, we dig more into its cracks. Didn't know shit about Sburb when we started and we figured out how to become little godlings and push a cosmic reset button.

[geometry]

[He feels really encouraged. Thanks.]

...How did you even figure that out, anyway...?

[reddeadvirtuoso]

[She would be a Grade A motivational speaker if the Earth didn't blow up.]

Eri and John figured it out. Everyone else was way better at that mess of a game than me. John dug up some info, Eri and I made the plan, and then I mostly had to pick up the tools to do it with.

[geometry]

[Hey, maybe she can start it up in the Tower. SURE, YOU'RE TRAPPED IN A MYSTERIOUS HELL PIT. SURE, YOU'VE GOT A PSYCHOPATHIC SCIENTIST LORDING OVER YOU. BUT YOU ARE THE PILOT OF YOUR OWN LIFE--]

Where did John get the information from?

[reddeadvirtuoso]

[FORGE YOUR OWN WAY AND REACH FOR THE STARS THAT MAY OR MAY NOT STILL EXIST.]

No idea. He IMs me out of nowhere one day and tells me he's got a plan. Figured he probably found some Old World Guidebook on his Land or heard about it from one of you guys.

[geometry]

[Oh. Well that's interesting. Apparently John still talked to some of the other trolls? Didn't he give up on the species completely or was it just him?]

Well, I suppose that's rea-- ... [Oh. Whoops. While they were having their inspirational speech party, it seems Jade had led them both directly into a dead end.]

[reddeadvirtuoso]

[GODDAMNIT she wasn't necessarily bad with direction, but these things were proooobably best left up to Rose normally.

So after mumbling some obscenities under her breat, she turns around and motions for Equius to follow.]

To be honest, there was probably some Time Wimey Shenanigans, but I'm not even gonna try and touch on that.