"I promise this is not hazing," Jedao says. "Fox's honor." Which no one from his own world would trust as far as they could throw him, but that's neither here nor there.
On the third floor, he walks to cabin four and lets them inside. It has a plain, unpainted wooden door, and flatpack cream furniture inside. It's sparse in the way of an area that gets regularly tidied, but not much actually lived in. As soon as the door closes behind them -
"We have a lot of extra protections on the Engine Room, in case keys get stolen by people trying to harm the barge. If you tried to step inside it before we add you to the magical wards, you'd get teleported here."
Jedao goes to one blank wall and touches something, which opens a hidden door into another room: a small, neat room with plush carpeting. There are a few different comfy chairs, even a bean bag, all inside of a chalk circle, with a little red dot a few inches inside the circle. There's a basket full of little water bottles, juice boxes, and snack bars from the commissary. Painted on the wall, in neat, bright red letters eight inches high, is a message.
HELLO INTRUDER!
YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO ENTER THE ENGINE ROOM. YOU HAVE BEEN DIVERTED HERE. AN ENGINE ROOM ATTENDANT WILL BE ALERTED AND WILL RELEASE YOU SHORTLY. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE UNCONSCIOUS UNTIL THE ATTENDANT ARRIVES, SIMPLY ERASE THE RED DOT ON THE FLOOR IN FRONT OF YOU. OTHERWISE, PLEASE MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE UNTIL AN ATTENDANT ARRIVES.
"...I suppose I could have let you get here the fast way, but it seemed a little rude."
Fox's honor? Are foxes particularly honorable? Isn't there a saying about being sly as a fox, and doesn't that indicate that they are not, in fact, all that trustworthy? Vash has never seen a fox (outside of a wildlife show he saw as a child) but he's pretty sure that this is, in fact, going to end up being hazing.
...Which is fine, really. He didn't have anything else to do today anyway!
Jadeo explains their side route, and Vash just nods along because yes, okay, this is a ship that's half full of people who were brought here against their wills to try and get them to stop committing crimes. It's reasonable that they'd have extra protections around the engines, just in case they...
Wait.
"...Magical wards?"
Then the wall sides open, and Vash spots the comfiest prison cell he's ever seen. Huh.
"Localized time suspension. The same thing happens if you try to destroy or break out of the circle. Anyway, me and a couple others get an alert when the spell triggers, and then someone has to come down here and do a bunch of math to deactivate the containment. We've only had to use it a few times, but better to have it and not need it, and all that. The Engine Room is...it looks like a lot of nonsense, but it's closer to being the real barge than most places. If it gets really damaged, there could be problems," he explains.
"Problems," he repeats, still trying to wrap his brain around all that information. "Magical problems, with the magical engine, that you're solving with magic."
Sabotage he understands. Trap doors to prevent intruders, sure, that's reasonable enough! But Jedao is talking about magic like it's a real thing.
Is this the hazing part? Is he being hazed right now?
"It's overlapping gravity generators, or compressed magnetics. It's not magic. Magic isn't real."
At least, not on his world. For Vash, the only 'real' magic is tricks for children, sleight of hand and concealed, planned reveals. Scarves tucked inside a ring, or coins hidden behind a knuckle, just tricks.
The word for what happens to Vash can only be explosion. He flings himself back faster than a human his size should have been able to move, arms and legs loving at triple speed as he tries, simultaneously, to climb through the wall, grab something to wield as a weapon (although he's aiming more for the fly swatter variety of weapon -- a rolled piece of paper would do nicely), to hold himself up in his shock, and to demand answers while also yelping in utter surprise. It's a lot of flailing, and noise.
"Drugs!" he lands on at last, casting an accusing finger in the bird's direction. "Drugs, you gave me drugs! But when? How?!" People don't just turn into birds!
"Was it the pastry? Did you drug an innocent fruit horn!?"
Jedao is much more vulnerable as a swift, but fortunately he's also extremely dexterous in the air. He zips away in a little tumbling whirlwind and lands in a corner on the far side of the room, where Vash would have to make his way around the invisible walls of the containment circle to get to him. As a swift, he's also not terribly stable on flat ground, without anything to grip and perch, although the carpet is better than tile would have been.
To that exact point, he gives a shrill, indignant peep.
The bird flies off into the magic cell, and Vash watches it go, curl of paper in one hand still ready to swat at any other hallucinations that might decide to pop up.
Because he's hallucinating. He has to be. "That's really the only rational answer," he replies to himself, backing towards the room's door and away from the bird. "I finally lost it!"
Honestly, it's kind of a relief?
"I didn't think it'd be birds, but I guess it could have been worse!"
"Your world probably didn't have magic. But the barge is an intersection," Jedao explains quietly, without coming closer. "That's actually one of the things the Engine Room is doing, I'm pretty sure - mediating all those different sets of universal rules."
Look, he can't say he hasn't noticed things, okay? Places on the ship where the ceiling goes higher than it should be able to, the amosphere on the deck, yeah... whatever is going on behind the walls in the Enclosure...
But none of that is somebody turning into a bird. He's catching up, he really is, but he needs a minute. The rest can be explained with science that's simply beyond his understanding, but...
"...But there's rules though. The universe has a set of rules, science has rules." He might have spent most of his life an outlaw and gunslinger but once upon a time he had a truly remarkable education, and that education taught him that physics wouldn't allow for a person to turn into a bird.
"Conservation of matter, for one! The displaced energy when you transformed, it should have..." He brings his hands together and then pops them apart, a visual explosion. "There should have been heat, light, radiation!"
"Your universe has one set of rules," Jedao says patiently. "Relativity, right? Well, one of the fairly well known sets of rules in my universe is that relativity has a loophole. It's all about your frame of reference. Invariant relativity says there's no difference between me moving toward you, and you moving toward me. But if you set things up right, you can actually pick one of those reference frames to be dominant, and that lets you do all kinds of things you can't do under normal physics, depending on how you set up the underlying math."
He shrugs. "The barge is just doing that on a bigger scale. Some passengers are from worlds where magic works."
He keeps saying magic, but at least Vash now has an explanation that he can accept -- not entirely understand, but accept.
"I've never been good at math," he grumbles in reply, dropping his improvised fly swatter back onto the nearest surface. "How much am I going to need to know to work in the engine room? ...Assuming that job offer's still on the table?"
"The Admiral gives out keys, not me. And you don't need math for the Engine room, just...a willingness to engage with the metaphor, I guess. That'll make sense once we get your access sorted out."
Jedao scoots around the edge of the room, back to the wall, avoiding the circle on the floor.
"I do have to take you to see our resident magician for that, though."
He'll argue with the resident magician about what that something like that will look like when they get there, Vash decides. If there's no way around it then there's no way around it, but he'd like to keep his blood on the inside, thanks.
He follows just a couple paces behind Jedao, never losing sight of the man.
"So where did you learn the math to turn into a bird? Did somebody here teach you how to do that?"
"It was a gift from our colleague," Jedao admits. "I can't do any magic." He can do a lot of dubious shit regarding gravity manipulation, but that is science.
"If you are very polite to Herr Leikenbloom, he might give you a gift that will allow you to do that," Jedao clarifies. He turns onto level 5, then knocks on Florian's door.
Herr Leickenbloom, it turns out, is a rather small dandy with pale skin, pale hair, and glassblue eyes who is just waking up at this hour. Vampire bedtimes are what they are.
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On the third floor, he walks to cabin four and lets them inside. It has a plain, unpainted wooden door, and flatpack cream furniture inside. It's sparse in the way of an area that gets regularly tidied, but not much actually lived in. As soon as the door closes behind them -
"We have a lot of extra protections on the Engine Room, in case keys get stolen by people trying to harm the barge. If you tried to step inside it before we add you to the magical wards, you'd get teleported here."
Jedao goes to one blank wall and touches something, which opens a hidden door into another room: a small, neat room with plush carpeting. There are a few different comfy chairs, even a bean bag, all inside of a chalk circle, with a little red dot a few inches inside the circle. There's a basket full of little water bottles, juice boxes, and snack bars from the commissary. Painted on the wall, in neat, bright red letters eight inches high, is a message.
YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO ENTER THE ENGINE ROOM. YOU HAVE BEEN DIVERTED HERE. AN ENGINE ROOM ATTENDANT WILL BE ALERTED AND WILL RELEASE YOU SHORTLY. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE UNCONSCIOUS UNTIL THE ATTENDANT ARRIVES, SIMPLY ERASE THE RED DOT ON THE FLOOR IN FRONT OF YOU. OTHERWISE, PLEASE MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE UNTIL AN ATTENDANT ARRIVES.
"...I suppose I could have let you get here the fast way, but it seemed a little rude."
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...Which is fine, really. He didn't have anything else to do today anyway!
Jadeo explains their side route, and Vash just nods along because yes, okay, this is a ship that's half full of people who were brought here against their wills to try and get them to stop committing crimes. It's reasonable that they'd have extra protections around the engines, just in case they...
Wait.
"...Magical wards?"
Then the wall sides open, and Vash spots the comfiest prison cell he's ever seen. Huh.
"So what happens if you erase the red dot?"
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Sabotage he understands. Trap doors to prevent intruders, sure, that's reasonable enough! But Jedao is talking about magic like it's a real thing.
Is this the hazing part? Is he being hazed right now?
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More or less; magic is the safer word for it, in Jedao's opinion.
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Isn't it?
"It's overlapping gravity generators, or compressed magnetics. It's not magic. Magic isn't real."
At least, not on his world. For Vash, the only 'real' magic is tricks for children, sleight of hand and concealed, planned reveals. Scarves tucked inside a ring, or coins hidden behind a knuckle, just tricks.
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"Drugs!" he lands on at last, casting an accusing finger in the bird's direction. "Drugs, you gave me drugs! But when? How?!" People don't just turn into birds!
"Was it the pastry? Did you drug an innocent fruit horn!?"
Vash, you brought the pastry.
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To that exact point, he gives a shrill, indignant peep.
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Because he's hallucinating. He has to be. "That's really the only rational answer," he replies to himself, backing towards the room's door and away from the bird. "I finally lost it!"
Honestly, it's kind of a relief?
"I didn't think it'd be birds, but I guess it could have been worse!"
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"Okay, buddy. You call me when you're up to speed."
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"I'm really gonna need you to stop doing that!"
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But none of that is somebody turning into a bird. He's catching up, he really is, but he needs a minute. The rest can be explained with science that's simply beyond his understanding, but...
"...But there's rules though. The universe has a set of rules, science has rules." He might have spent most of his life an outlaw and gunslinger but once upon a time he had a truly remarkable education, and that education taught him that physics wouldn't allow for a person to turn into a bird.
"Conservation of matter, for one! The displaced energy when you transformed, it should have..." He brings his hands together and then pops them apart, a visual explosion. "There should have been heat, light, radiation!"
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He shrugs. "The barge is just doing that on a bigger scale. Some passengers are from worlds where magic works."
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"I've never been good at math," he grumbles in reply, dropping his improvised fly swatter back onto the nearest surface. "How much am I going to need to know to work in the engine room? ...Assuming that job offer's still on the table?"
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Jedao scoots around the edge of the room, back to the wall, avoiding the circle on the floor.
"I do have to take you to see our resident magician for that, though."
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Until then?
"Why not?"
Vash steps away from the doorway, and gestures for Jedao to lead the way.
"Let's go meet the wizard."
Engage with the metaphor. What the hell kind of place did he sign up for?!
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Jedao heads down the stairs toward level five, waving Vash behind him.
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He follows just a couple paces behind Jedao, never losing sight of the man.
"So where did you learn the math to turn into a bird? Did somebody here teach you how to do that?"
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God this ship is so big! He's never minded taking the stairs, but you'd think, with nine or so decks, that there'd be a lift.
"I wouldn't mind being able to turn into a bird! Did you get to pick what kind of bird you turn into?"
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"How can I help you gentlemen?"
Jedao gets a more familiar nod.
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"I've been assigned to work in the engine room," Vash offers by way of greeting. "And it sounds like I need your assistance with that!"
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sorry did not see this tag
no worries!
Re: no worries!
Re: no worries!
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