Snippet #1576568

Most unbecoming of a room with automatic locking doors and ominous pop-up books, once Ardin approached the book on the pedestal, the books on the selves didn't suddenly burst out and form origami warriors or whatever. Instead the book allowed itself to be picked up. A dreadfully boring read of a book, mainly due to the complete lack of words. The book itself was composed of five pages. A man with machines, a girl in a clock tower, a woman with a contract, a girl dancing with a scarecrow, and a girl stuck in an hourglass. Whoever the author was they weren't very good at author-ing.

However the book itself was seemingly of not too much importance as removing it from the table was seemingly the only thing needed to solve this ridiculously complex mind-boggling puzzle as lo and behold there was a key in an indent of the table beneath it. Oh and a magic wand-thingy with a label basically saying "Try me! But not on people." In several (non-existent) languages.

Then Lorelei jumped all happy-like. Most in-character mind you, and they wouldn't have expected any sort of explanation unless they didn't feel the flicker at all, in which case IT WILL FOREVER REMAIN A MYSTERY.




DRR...DRR...DRR...

Unfortunately the sounds didn't seem to pay mind to the sound of pitiful cowering children as they didn't abate at all or turn out to the the sounds of marvelous cookie-making (though that would probably scare Meil as well).

Skipping over the narrative part of Mr. X's decision process, he eventually came to the conclusion that even though it might be a bit dangerous to leave the two back here, the tunnel seemed to lead only in a single direction so it would be possible for him to check out the source of the sound then come back to fetch them later.

"Listen you two," Mr. X tried calmly as possible to address them, "It looks like this place is the safest as it will get in this tunnel for now. I'm going to check out the source of the sounds. Once it's safe I'll come back for you two. Alright?"

Not waiting for much of a reply he got up and turned around, heading down the dark "slide" when-

The goddamned floor opened up again.

This time dumping them onto a strangely slick surface the three of them found themselves sliding down quite a ways, somewhere close to half a mile or so before they were unceremoniously dumped into a faintly illuminated room. Quite a large one at that. With heaps of what appeared to be scrap metal arranged in what could only be called a maze, any sort of ceiling was well beyond sight.

Oh, and the sound was much louder now.

Shot of happy or not, today wasn't looking to be the brightest of ones.