Snippet #1655928

Elysium ~

Bright eyes drifted over to meet Lyra's gaze as she came over, asking him about the victim - he assumed - that her servant had dropped off earlier. He shrugged.

"I'm planning on setting her out in the maze as soon as she's healed from the wounds you inflicted on her," he answered softly. "Rule thirty-five prevents me on setting her out in the maze until she is of able physical strength, as she was given to me and did not enter the maze of free will. Once she has had her fun within it though, I'm thinking of making her into a door," he continued absently, putting down his tea. "There's a lonely door towards the east that could truly do with a companion every other Tuesday."

Jonathan ~

He glared at Artemis, but nodded slightly, drinking a bit of his tea. "The cutlery wrecker has a point," he said. "We would be idiots if we tried going after all of them at the same time. The more we are, and the fewer they are, the better. I'm guessing you've all seen what one of those bastards can be capable on their own, now try imagining them teaming up. Though I suppose they'd spend a lot of time bickering about the best way to kill you, eventually, they would have. Probably in the most horrible way imaginable to man," he finished.

Jonathan suddenly look surprised, as if he'd remembered something incredibly important while the others spoke. He got up from his chair, knocking down his teacup on the way, but completely ignoring the loud crash it made as it hit the papers covering the floor.

The March Hare practically jumped into a larger pile of papers in the corner of the room, beside the fireplace where the hatch still stood open.

"As soon as I went into hiding, I tried my best to get as much information on the main Alice's as I could," he explained, dragging forth a A4-shaped box from the bottom of the pile. "Though it’s difficult to gather anything on these people without getting yourself killed, you'd be surprised what you can understand from simple observation."

He paused, blowing a strand of hair out of his face, bringing the box up to his face. "Hm," he said. "Wrong box," before throwing it away and diving into the pile once again.

"Ah. Now. The maze stretches as far as the eye can see, and in-between several dimensions. It's attuned to the mind of its owner, and I don't even think he has complete control over the entire thing. Our best shot would be to lure him out of it, and hope the maze falls when he dies," he explained, covered in dust and small pieces of ripped paper having settled in his hair.

"I've only ever spoken to one survivor. They don't know how old or how cruel the owner is, as he seldom comes out. To break a part of the maze can either result in getting even more lost than you already were, or you could call upon yourself the rage of the creatures that live within it," he was reading aloud, now, squinting his eyes at the page in front of him. He was getting old. "As for the owner himself... In truth, I've never seen him. Never met anyone who has."

Pushing some more random papers of yet another table inside the room, he began putting down the ones that included information about the other Dark Alices, as far as Jonathan had managed to gather over the many years he'd been here.

They were all orderly written out, all including things like "type of madness", "domain". Under "description", there were two that stood out. Elysium, though not named, was a crudely drawn picture of a reptile or dragon like creature with large bug eyes and tentacle hair. On Lyra, the Mad Hatter, there was a slightly out-of-focus picture of a young girl; quite different from the one Artemis and Kit had run into earlier. It was still quite obviously the same girl, and yet there were many small things that simply seemed... Off.