Entry tags:

[OTA] Midas is king and he holds me so tight;

WHO: Karen Page
WHERE: Various
WHEN: 8 January 2018, throughout the day
OPEN TO: All, with 2 locked starters
WARNINGS: Standard blanket warning for Netflix MCU spoilers

In the Forest

OTA - 3 max threads

It was probably only a matter of time, Karen thinks. This morning she woke up to find three big boxes sitting in the middle of her chilly bedroom floor like they'd been dropped off overnight by the FedEx Fairy. She's three days out from her one-month anniversary stuck in this place, and she has officially been anointed by the gods.

As much as her instinct is still to be wary, curiosity takes only a beat to win out. Sitting cross-legged in her absconded "I'm not Daredevil" shirt and chili pepper socks, she pulls each box open and lines the contents neatly beside her on the floor. Shampoo, journals, underwear, earmuffs. When she's done, she can't shake the feeling that this is less divine intervention and more care package.

And weird as that concept may be under the circumstances, she's not looking the gift horse in the mouth.

She feeds the furnace and indulges in a longer shower than normal, then starts the process of organizing her notes in her new journals while her hair dries. Then it's out into the snow, bundled like the true Vermonter she is, pack of supplies on her back as she looks toward the horizon. There's a voice tutting in the back of her head that sounds mostly like Frank, sometimes Matt, and funnily, occasionally like Claire, but she's never really been very good at listening to people who tell her to sit still. Boots crunching with each step, she pushes into the forest's edge.

[Feel free to find her in the forest, on the way there, at the canyon wall, or on her way back.]

Canyon's Edge

for Peggy

Here's the truth: It still freaks Karen out a little bit that Peggy (and others, but mostly Peggy) are from points in time so far-flung from her own. The people who say they're from alternate realities, other planets, that doesn't get her as much — She stood in the aftermath of the alien assault on Manhattan. But the time thing she's still getting her head around.

But in the moment, it's usually an easy enough detail to forget, and Peggy makes it easier by being the sort of woman who, when Karen asks if she'd like to come with her to try and scale the canyon wall, agrees without hesitation. It's possible Peggy is mostly looking out for Karen's well-being— Because yeah, OK, it really isn't smart to go mountain climbing solo — but the fact that Peggy seems interested at all, especially when she's been here so long, is encouraging. In Karen's opinion, it's way too easy to be complacent in this place.

Home Again

for Claire

The stomp of snow-clotted boots on the porch announces Karen's return home that evening before she pushes open the door with a sigh of relief. It's warm inside, which means Claire must have been home long enough to feed the furnace. As Karen unwinds herself from her scarves, she can hear the distant sounds of another person in the house, and she smiles, grateful, almost bursting to tell what she's discovered today.

"You won't believe what happened today," she calls out, shrugging from her coat and then plopping onto the sofa to begin working off her boots. Pulling at a heel, she winces; she had a misstep earlier while climbing, and her wrist is killing her.

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"The part with the lab," he agrees, one hand trailing a branch to sweep snow from it in a diagonal fall. A small effect, but he feels the need to have one--if not to leave a trail in case they die horribly in a cave, then to make up for the way his notes seem to change after their description of it. A crack in the wall, burning insects, a lab beyond it. His empathy returning in time for the spark of paranoia, getting worse, something about Margaery fainting and seeing the future.

There's a page before it all cuts off that just says Tim, Lexington, and it's meaninglessness carves an empty place in him that has the shape of anger.

Right now, it's just gotten him a cold, wet hand. He stuffs it back in his pocket. "All the more reason to scope it out; there might not always be good climbing spots, depending on the day."

Karen nods; the notion should seem absurd, but over the last weeks she's had to learn to adjust her worldview. It isn't the shock to the system that the Chitauri had been, but she hasn't decided yet whether that's good or bad. The notion of this place having a sinister underpinning is one she can't shake no matter how many shared lunches and community projects she's witness to; the steady drip-drip of oddness amid normalcy is just one example.

"And it's better with two pairs of eyes," she admits, hefting her bag higher on her shoulders. "Different people pick out different details." And you never know what might be useful, in the end.

The walls shift is absurd; the idea of a space that was safe and passable one day being dangerous or broken the next no longer is. Not the way the looters and mercenaries had divided up the island. He'd heard about the mess of camps and dead trains in the subways, and he couldn't imagine a worse place to wait out a plague.

Here though, tunnels seem worth exploring.

"The walls are the part that shifts, right?" As they exit the immediate tree cover, he pulls an oversized pocket knife from his pocket to mark the trunk nearest the rise of stone. Experimentally, he crosses the gap and scratches a 1 into the wall. Pursing his lips, he crosses back and carves the same number by the mark. "You want a knife?"

"I've got one," Karen replies with a shake of her head. This isn't New York, no, but in some ways she'd be even more crazy to go out in this place unarmed, even if it's just a paring knife with the blade wrapped in a scrap of fabric and stuffed into her boot.

"And I guess we'll see," she allows with a cant of her head toward the tree. If they can't find it again, at least the sun seems predictable today and they're unlikely to get lost amidst all this experimentation. "How far should we go between markings, you think?"

"Of course you do," he says, tone dipping as he re-oriented his idea of the village around its room full of hatchets and survival knives. Everyone having a knife must be why he found at least three in his supplies: logically more knives made him safer and more prepared for all the cooking and greeting people he'd done.

Not for the first time, he plunges forward into the trees and thinks: what is my life?

"If we wanted to make a project of it, we could double the distance between each and see which numbers end up where," he offers. "I don't know how much daylight that might eat up if you're trying to get to the top in one go." Taking a single step forward, he scratches a two; two steps past that for a three. Slow progress, bad for conversation, and the walls themselves don't see to be going anywhere.

"I don't know if anybody's done anything like this before," Karen says, and sighs as she watches Kira make a second mark, her breath shivering opaquely in the air. "By which I mean, maybe it's better to start small. Make a few marks, maybe not that far apart, and come back later to see if anything's changed. Then, you can get more scientific about it."

She can't speak for Kira, but she wouldn't call herself an expert on the scientific method or how to go about launching a broad-scale experiment on what may or may not actually be real.

"Plus, I want to get to that lab."

Edited 2018-02-10 02:04 (UTC)

"That's fair," and enough in line with his own goals that he gives the wall two more scrapes at five steps apart, then moves back to the tree line. "I'm just going to mark a few trunks as we go, about where my hand rests when it's down."

If he didn't give himself something to do in the woods, he'd lose his fucking mind in them. Nature brings a deeply overrated kind of solitude.

"Is this your first--" his searching gesture is a slip of dull metal against the winter light. "Excursion? Fact-finding mission?"

"No," Karen replies with a shake of her head, their feet crunching against the snow as they make their way down the gap between the tree line and the face of the cliff. "I actually found one of the pods the other day. The first one, I think— Well, I think I found the cave. But I didn't have climbing gear with me that day and it was too high to risk without it."

She's done more, too, walking out to the ocean and along long portions of the canyon walls, but it hadn't yielded much of interest. Talking to people who have already spent their time mapping out the place has given her better results.

"Have you been to see Mark, yet?" His own journal goes back a year, but its pages are just as likely to contain snippy comments about residents he doesn't even know anymore, personal anecdotes, and things like Lexington. If his past self had known he'd return, he likes to think he wouldn't have left it to Mark at all. "He stores a lot of notes about things they've found, you could get a better idea of what you're dealing with."

Like the specimen room: Bodhi, of all people, had an original sketch of the place hanging on his fucking bedroom wall. He hardly slept in the room, but Kira wouldn't either if that's how he'd decorated it. But as they walked north along the wall, he knew to pass several smaller and wider gaps by the shape sketched in his journal.

"I think it's this one." Another mile up, closer than he expected to find it. But the crack is just wide enough to slide into, head ducked for hanging ice, and under the blue sheet the point of it trails off to the left. "Before they found the room, there were some aggressive insects in here, and I don't know that the cold will change that." No mention of them since, but he still lines up at the entrance to go in first. "How did you want to use the equipment in here?"

"I think Mark is probably tired of seeing me at this point," Karen admits with a soft huff of laughter, a little white cloud in the chilly air. "I was gifted some notebooks by the powers that be not too long after I got here, and I've been taking notes on anything he'll give me." It's an unbelievablt resource really, when held against the circumstances. She only wishes she felt like it actually mattered.

Bracing a hand carefully against the edge of the crack and intensely aware of the icicles above, Karen leans into the darkness a little. Her eyes start to adjust, but there's nothing to see yet.

"I don't know," she replies, stepping back. "This wasn't on my list today, so I'm playing by ear."

"I mean, rope probably never hurt a situation." Looking at the gap between the wall and the nearest tree, he considers the coils of it they have between them. "We could at least make ourselves a lead to follow if it starts twisting around in there," he suggests, nodding at a slim, young tree standing out from the rest.

"Or it could just point someone to our corpses, but, nothing ventured." Swinging his pack down at the entrance, he pulled out the first coil, a nylon rope that had been stored with the pitons and shoes.

Stupidly, Karen hadn't really thought about needing a guide back out, or even the potential for getting lost inside despite the inky darkness. The tsking voice in the back of her head sounds like Frank.

"That's probably a better idea than just bounding in there, yeah," she admits, and hefts off her own backpack to pull out the rope inside. "Do you have any kind of light?"

"Candle and flint, yeah," he says, wishing the electricity at the Inn had done more for the village night life. It's still hard to navigate after dark, and he'd rather not rig up another torch for such a tight space.

"From what I've read, we'll see how far we can go before we need it. That room they found had florescent lighting, that must have some reach." How well it meets up with the daylight is anyone's guess, but he'd rather conserve light for the trip home, if they have to make it after sunset.

He walks over to the tree, looping the nylon rope around a juncture of branches; it might hold for a bit even if untied. "Did your plan to climb the walls involve knowing how to tie a knot?"

Edited 2018-02-28 22:24 (UTC)

"I spent too many summers camping to not know how to tie a knot," Karen replies and steps over, her own rope looped over her arm. "Here, I'll get it."

She reaches for the end of Kira's rope and ties it into a hitch around the trunk of the tree. "We always used to tie a line," she explains as she pulls off her gloves and lets muscle memory guide her fingers. It's been a long time, but it might as well have been yesterday. "They're good for lots of things when you're roughing it."

She adds her own rope to the end of the first, testing the knot with a strong tug. "OK, we're good."

"If we don't die in a cave, teach me that for later." He watches attentively enough that he has some idea, but guided practice never hurts.

He loops the end of their new line around his wrist a couple of times, leaving more than enough slack for her to do the same, and tucks the last bit into his hand. "We'll walk as far as we can with this light and use the candle," he says, starting in through the crack. He has to hold his pack in his other hand and slide through sidelong, but after a couple of yards there's more than enough room to shoulder it and walk.

"The notes say Margaery found some kind of wooden door in the wall, but it might still be standing open."

This feels insane, if Karen lets herself actually think about it. She doesn't know why it should when her personal experiences have run the gamut of being held hostage (multiple times), shot at (multiple times) and watching alien spacecraft tear through skyscrapers, and yet there's a tiny, tight ball in the pit of her stomach that she knows will send her running the other way if she lets it spool out. It's all just too fucking bizarre.

But maybe that's the point. Not that she's never been in the middle of anything bizarre, but that she has — That her boyfriend wasn't hiding another woman from her, but rather that he was a blind vigilante, or that she's used the pistol in her handbag for escaping a lunatic bomber but never once needed it for a mugging.

She's done weird, and weird has really never been fun for her. Yet here she is, stepping forward into the dark, nothing in front of her but rough stone walls and the slope of Kira's shoulders.

"If they found it without looking for it, surely we can find it," she says, and then huffs out a scoff. "Except for how that would be logical, and who knows where that applies around here."

"Well, it also said Margaery had a vision of the door that led her out here, so." For all the stock he puts in visions, Kira crumples his bottom lip against the top, turns his hands out, and squeezes his shoulders up to convey not at fucking all.

If it feels less insane on his end, it's because the fountain brought him out the other side. The ball already spooled: there is still nowhere to actually run, in any direction.

Just a cave, and a rope, and a voice to keep them from going crazy in the claustrophobic tunnel. "The way this place is, we'd be as likely to find a completely different door with some Star Trek bullshit behind it. Not that I wouldn't welcome being beamed anywhere else with oxygen, or a young DeForest Kelley, but just--"

Just wait a second; the moving shapes of light from their entry re-align with his feet, as he feels his way past the narrow entrance and into the first turn. "Take it slow," he says from around the corner. "It's darker around here." Not impossible to see, as his eyes adjust and they clear away from the source of light, but an adjustment. Shapes resolve into walls, layers of blue and black that imply deeper caverns and turns, and a few stalactites dripping overhead. There's a winding ribbon of reflected light, a thin run of water that implies the center of the space.

"I miss DeForest Kelley," Karen allows, her voice softening with nostalgia before Kira speaks again, directing, and she suddenly becomes aware of how utterly dark it is now. Her fingers reach out tentatively, nearly blind in the inky darkness, and light upon the rough face of the cave wall. She can hear the soft pinging of droplets falling, make out the blurry edges of what might be the shape of the cave around them, but it only makes the disorientation worse. She thinks of Matt and closes her eyes, but then nearly stumbles on a stone, catching herself just before she crashes into Kira.

They really should have brought a light.

"I don't suppose you have any idea of how far in this door is," she says, mostly just to hear herself speak, her voice instinctively hushed but still echoing in the space around them.

"Give it a second," he says, feeling the rope tap the back of his leg, lift, tap again. She's closer behind now, and a skitter of stone speaks to the lack of grace. He's deciding: light the candle now while he can almost see what he's doing, or see how long he can navigate by shapes. What we wants is some kind of change on the walls, some sign of this supposed door.

If they'd just said what side it was on, they could go by touch--but he doesn't know what the other side holds, or which is which, and he'd hate to separate.

"Far enough that I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel, but close enough they stumbled onto it without any supplies. They might have just gotten lucky that day." But they're not stumbling; they're here to do this. "I'm going to crouch down, I need you to hold something for me." At the edge of where he can reasonably see, he slings is pack down into his lap and feels around for a few items. "Here," he adds, slowly pushing his journal at her. "I've got a candle, but we're not going to see very far if it's in our faces, we'll use that to direct the light."

He just has to light it with a flint in the dark of a cave, and not lose any of the pieces.

This seems like an idea that will probably end up with Kira's journal accidentally going up in flames, but Karen doesn't have a better idea, and she's desperate enough to see even a little bit around them not to argue.

"Sure," she allows, and takes hold of the journal, flipping it open so she can turn the white pages out once Kira's lit the candle.

"Hand me a page," he says, not loving the odds of hitting a wick with a spark in a drafty cave. Even with inches of paper to work with, it takes a few tries, but he lights the candle with the curling edge, and sits in the glow for several more moments, digging through his bag. "Next time I'll just do this outside."

He hadn't exactly gotten far enough on his first try of this cave, to know how deep it went before losing daylight.

When he's finished--following the clink of glass through his pack to find a jar, letting the candle burn off some wax into the bottom to stick the candle in place--he takes back the journal and folds it around the glass, letting his eyes adjust again as it angles the light out of them. "Alright,"he says, aiming the soft light slowly along the nearest wall, "let's try not to die in a cave."

None of what Kira ultimately did was what Karen had imagined, but they have some light at the end of it, and that's all that matters. The world seems to shrink to within the tiny circle of light, but better that than the yawning darkness.

"You said the others first came in here because one of them had had a vision?" she asks, mostly for something to say, a break in the scrape of their feet and distant drop of water.

Near to a year without electricity, he's learned to improvise--though he appreciates having to hide his light from a sleeping bird instead of armed looters. Pointing the glow out lets it gain some distance, but eventually the glow diffuses and the cavern is defined in shades of grey.

"Margaery," he says, remembering the name from the notes he'd found in Mark's collection. "She'd started having them, along with some nasty headaches."

Tracking along to the right, he aims the light at the bottom edge of the wall, watching where they step. Eventually there's a break in the smooth, pebble-strewn line. "She saw a door," he adds, as he lifts the light to reflect off of wood grain instead of stone. Tracing the edges, he can't see anything more out of the ordinary than a whole ass door in a cave.

"Well, this is bonkers."

That's putting it lightly, but then again, 'bonkers' can be used to describe any number of things they encounter on a daily basis anymore. Hell, just being here is bonkers: In front of this door, in this cave, in this canyon.

"Maybe we'll get lucky and it'll actually be Narnia on the other side," Karen says, no mirth to her voice, and steps forward to put a tentative hand on the knob while Kira holds the light. It's cold but otherwise unremarkable, and she goes ahead and turns it.

It's definitely not Narnia on the other side, but at least they've got some more light.

"Jesus," she whispers as she steps through the door, eyes sliding from detail to detail, stepping to the transparent barrier so she can press fingertips against the smooth surface. Glass, or maybe some kind of plastic composite.

Reading about it--even having that creepy drawing hung up on Bodhi's wall--doesn't prepare him for standing on the other side of the glass. It's the absurdity of the door, turned up to eleven. It's like stepping inside of a movie, and he thinks he'd almost rather meet Mr. Tumnus in a snowy clearing.

Goat legs he could almost roll his eyes at. This--he blows a breath through the narrow gap of his teeth and lower lip, then rolls it into a bite.

The fluorescent light washes them out; he closes the book and sets it on the jar, suffocating the candle to save it, and puts his own hand up inches from Karen's. The barrier is solid and cool, their dark silhouettes connected by the rope tied between. Its length isn't quite taut at the door, but it has raised from the ground, cutting the corner about a foot high.

"I keep wanting this to be the world's longest episode of What Would You Do," he says, removing his hand to fish the glasses from his pocket. It's no less unnerving when brought into focus, though a little less alien abduction re-enactment. "Fuck--" he points to the nearest cooler, the vials labeled with letters and spots of color. "Are those initials?"

[OTA] Midas is king and he holds me so tight;

In the Forest

Canyon's Edge

Home Again

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