I'm About As Organized As Ran, I Guess? [closed post]

[summerdude]

"And then we realized Frigg was knitting with clouds. Actual factual clouds," Magnus says, passing another box that, as it turns out, holds nothing useful down to Galahad. He climbs up another rung on the little stepladder and starts in on the next shelf. "How many boxes of Legos do we have so far?" He knows it's certainly not enough for a bachelorette party yet, but surely there's something they can go on. He'd kind of tonight that this far after Dark, there would be... more? "Do you think we should find another room to look in? Maybe the game room isn't the best choice."

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[summerdude]

"Mmmmmm.... microplastics," says Magnus, helping himself to a brownie. It's stale. He eats the whole thing in three bites anyway.

[onthewillowsthere]

"What are microplastics?" Since Magnus has already eaten one, Galahad takes a brownie as well. Five, he signs. A stale brownie is still a brownie, especially to someone who didn't eat sweet things until he was twenty-one.

[summerdude]

"No clue, actually," Magnus admits. He signs, Agree. Five. "Alive nonhomeless people are really scared of them where I'm from, cuz apparently they last forever."

[onthewillowsthere]

He tries to envision something immortal and frightening that could be inside a stale brownie, and comes up with something akin to a worm. It's always bad to have a worm inside your body. "You can eat them without realizing?"

[summerdude]

"Yeah. They're probably microscopic?" Magnus takes another brownie. They might be stale, but he's peckish and he's had worse. Such as, for a totally random example, Claudius's recent experiments with gelatins. "I'm pretty sure, at least. From the name and the fact you don't know they're there most of the time."

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad has no such basis for comparison, because Claudius did not share those experiments with him. Claudius is a loving and knowledgeable fiance. "We should take one back and look at it with the microscope." He wraps a brownie in one of the innumerable store brand white paper napkins and slips it into the pocket of his hoodie.

[summerdude]

"Oh, gods yeah," Magnus says, grinning. "Science." If no one here will teach it to him he and Galahad can teach themselves!!

[onthewillowsthere]

"You choose the next room."

[summerdude]

Magnus takes them further down the hallway to the next room. He opens the door long enough to see impossibly high ceilings, rough-hewn wood furniture, and a cage with an enormous goose, and then slams it shut again. "We don't need to go in that one," he says, with a shiver.

[onthewillowsthere]

"What was that?"

[summerdude]

"It looked just like a house Thor sent me to in Jotunheim," Magnus says, frowning. "When he lost both his staff and his hammer and couldn't watch Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or whatever. There were these two giantesses and their dad. They tried to kill us." Not that murderous giants particularly stand out, in Magnus's afterlife. There are a lot and they keep on coming. Actually, this place has been a nice respite from giants who want to grind his bones to make their bread, or whatever.

[onthewillowsthere]

That's an excellent reason not to go in there again. Galahad nods and opens the next door.

There's an inexplicable whirring sound and a blur of movent in front of them, which resolves into beetles. No, beetle wings, attached to tiny cats no bigger than a thumbnail -- hundreds and hundreds of them, flying, crawling, eating, because they are in the process of entirely denuding the large skeleton of a dragon from every scrap of flesh left on it.

[summerdude]

"Holy shit," Magnus breathes, trepidatiously pocking his head further in. "Um. Let's not tell Temeraire about this one."

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad stares, transfixed. It's bewildering to look at -- the tiny cats, the whirring and clicking of their wings and their jaws, swarming over the bones.

[summerdude]

"I'm obsessed," Magnus decides. "I love these guys."

[onthewillowsthere]

"We should mark this door. So we can find it again."

[summerdude]

"My best friend is a genius," Magnus says. He pats his pockets, then grimaces. "You think marking it with lube will work?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"I have charcoals," which are surely a better marker than lube. He extracts the box from the same pocket into which the brownie vanished.

[summerdude]

"Even better." Magnus stares at the door. "Do you have any idea what those things were?"

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad draws a beetle on the door. "No. They were eating it."

[summerdude]

"I wonder if anyone here would know," Magnus says, thoughtfully, as he flings open another door.

He pinwheels for a moment, throwing an arm out to keep Galahad from stepping forward. The threshold is cut off, jagged, falling away in a sheer cliff face. Inside is an enormous chasm. Flickering ephemeral lights glint here and there, and either their sources are tiny or the chasm is the deepest one Magnus has ever seen, stretching infinitely in either direction. From deep below, there's a slithering sound of something rough scraping against rock.

[onthewillowsthere]

He looks down -- he can't help it. It's almost impossible to conceive of the vastness of the chasm below then, and he can't see more than a few feet into it. He hears the same rough scraping.

Silently, he asks Snake?

[summerdude]

It sounds like one, Magnus agrees. Let's skip this one. He carefully eases the door shut.

[onthewillowsthere]

For a moment, he just stands in the hall. On the one hand, this search has been exhilarating, exciting, opening each door and finding some bewildering piece of another world behind it. On the other hand, it's also overwhelming. None of these things are what he wants to find. The idea of that yawning chasm existing just beneath the mansion, right under their feet, opens a vein of anxiety in him that wells up and spills out. He has to think carefully about the next door. He has to be careful.

Careful, he says, fingers fluttering.

[summerdude]

Magnus, for once, misinterprets Galahad's meaning as being about making sure others can take care with this door. He turns the knob of the door again -- mostly trying to see if there's some kind of locking mechanism, so that nobody stumbles across it by accident -- but it swings right back open again instead.

The chasm is gone. Instead, behind the door, is a government cheese cave.

"Huh." With trepidation, Magnus pokes a toe onto the floor. It's not an illusion: his foot doesn't sink through it.