WEEK 7

[bathymetric]

Another Saturday gone and just like that you wake on Sunday, down five of your number. The largest dent taken out of you at once so far - it's surely noticeable, the head count being cut by a third. Almost enough to make you wonder how many of you will even be left by the next motive or two. Surely this isn't a sustainable rate for body counts to increase... right?

There's a new and, it looks like, final wing of the building to explore, bringing everything full circle. Maybe you'll get some more answers to some of the questions and mysteries of this place there - or at least, you can certainly hope for them. Time to turn your investigative eyes towards one last batch of rooms, who knows what you might find?

Angel remains around at night, her appearances much more common now that... well, she's certainly seen a downtick in necessary surveillance work, hasn't she? The app giving you a line to The Professor remains open, and well... whatever's going on with that ouija in the library continues to happen! You're not suffering from a shortage of leads, at least, even as things get more bizarre.

Something's going to have to give here, eventually. Right?



SUNDAY | MONDAY | TUESDAY | WEDNESDAY | THURSDAY

[ ooc: Welcome to your last player case week! AC is over here, regains as always are over here, and... well, enjoy! After this we get to take our big turn towards the Serious. ]

Comments

[hardnosed]

[ Is this a motive for murder? Nah. It's a motive for punching everything, and it rules.

If you see Jasper around today, she's probably wearing her weapon, a bright orange helmet with a giant battering ram in the front. As has been reiterated numerous times, it is absolutely the dumbest fucking thing you've ever seen. She's been using it as a sort of canary in the coal mine for her powers — if the helmet dissipates, she knows they're not working — and since they're on and off, she has to resummon it at least twice an hour. Every time, she gets this intense look on her face, and it either suddenly appears on her head, complete with sparkles, or nothing happens and she growls with frustration.

You might even see the absolutely unthinkable, which is her going through her room door to the lounge, early in the morning, without having to duck. Jasper is still tall, and her hair brushes against the top of the door, but the rest of her is just short enough to pass underneath unscathed! She has in no way altered the rest of her physical form, so she's still exactly as wide, just less tall, like a funhouse mirror version of herself. Whether or not she realizes she's been spotted, the inherent indignity of making herself smaller can't be tolerated for longer than it takes to test out her shapeshifting — her whole body glows white-orange for a second, and she shifts in height, stretching back out to her original dimensions. Once she's herself again, she grimaces. ]

Ugh.

[ After that, she heads to the fitness room, where she does something a little similar to the "training" from the first two weeks, only this time she's not lifting weights and dragging machines. She's lifting the machines, some with one hand, and dragging the entire weight rack, and the excitement of being able to actually act like she's supposed to completely erases any memory of, say, finding a body underneath it. Everything she moves around goes near the door, just in case the rush to the secret passage necessitates her pulling some of it into the halls. There's probably also occasional very loud impact sounds, when her powers suddenly go out and she inevitably ends up dropping hundreds of pounds of gym equipment from several feet. While she's angry literally every time this happens and incapable of modulating her emotions, at all, the satisfaction of it all is far more overwhelming.

Until she remembers. She remembers why they're getting this motive now, and what she would have done with her powers had it happened sooner, and what she could have done. She also remembers, a second later, what would have happened if she had succeeded. Everything comes rushing back to her, and she has so much inside her that she doesn't know where to put it all, and—

Jasper stalks out of the fitness room and stands, squaring off, at the threshold where Area A becomes Area E. She's staring straight ahead of her, not looking at anyone else unless they're directly in her line of sight, but does bark a warning. ]

Get out of my way.

[ And then she just... she just fucking starts doing this in the direction of the vault door. It probably does nothing other than scuff it up, and, most importantly, it looks so dumb. Jasper doesn't care. Even after it becomes obvious she's not going to be able to break through it while spindashing, she doesn't care. She just starts headbutting it. This is probably going to keep happening until her powers cut out again and she bangs her forehead straight into it.

At some point, she calms down enough to remember what they're doing today. Before she gets in position, she has time to head to the waterpark and test something else out. She's at the bottom of the wave pool again for a while, her helmet on. It's still on when she comes shooting out of the pool like a cannonball, surrounded by yellow energy, and then lands on the pavement next to it. ]

Are you serious?!

area a/e

[philoxenia]

[ Probably the thing she hates most about this whole motive is that... it kicks in at the absolute worst times. Listen, she tries not to intrude on others' feelings, and for the most part, it's worked, but here, where there are several people she actually knows and she can't know for sure when it'll kick up... yeah, it sucks. Sucks bad.

Especially when something like what Jasper's feeling just sort of hits her like a ton of bricks. It's an anger she's never felt before, and while it makes sense, it's absolutely not what she wants to feel. Not now, or ever. It's already intrusive enough--she wishes her necklace worked, but that would be asking far, far too much. ]

... What? [ It's like she hasn't even registered what Jasper's said, which is probably strange! So is that distracted, vaguely distressed look in her eyes. Or not. Maybe it's just because it's getting close to the end of the week and everything from earlier happened.

She definitely can't look Jasper in the face at all. ] Oh-- Sorry.

[ And there's absolutely no way Jasper could know this, but she's not just apologizing for being in her way. ]

[hardnosed]

[ Jasper, running on anger and grief and extremely uninterested in reading the feelings of others at the best of times, absolutely doesn't know it. All she knows is her own self-pitying self-hatred, and if Mira is going to apologize, that's fine. She should be sorry. Everyone here should be sorry for standing in her way and holding her down, and the ones who should be the sorriest are gone and incapable of feeling anything at all. She's gonna—

Her helmet vanishes into thin air. There's a fresh wave of anger, of course. Her reserves are endless. ]

—Why? Why now?

[ Much like Mira, she's talking about more than one example of unfortunate timing. ]

[philoxenia]

[ More anger, and grief, and she draws in a breath. It shakes and shudders, and Mira's aware that Jasper is one of the last people to provide comfort; she doesn't expect her too, either, and that's fine. She'll deal. It's something familiar, the press of feelings down on her--even her shoulders drop slightly.

It's sharp and cutting, this anger, and Mira doesn't know what to do with it. She can't look Jasper in the face, but she lifts her head. There are a million things she could say, but what she lands on is-- ]

... Have you ever done parkour?

[ Well, okay. ]

[hardnosed]

—what?

[ Well, it doesn't defuse her in any way, but it sure does throw her off! The anger is momentarily supplanted by overwhelming confusion as Jasper blinks down at her. ]

The thing from that book? [ Is that how it's pronounced... ] I didn't know it existed until the machine spat it out.

[philoxenia]

[ ... well, that's a little better! ]

Yes, exactly. The waterpark could be used for more than just swimming, after all. And it could be nice, to-- have something to focus on.

[ ... Has she been thinking about this? Maybe. ]

[hardnosed]

I've got plenty to focus on.

[ And there's another wash of that anger, but it's a reminder of knowledge she already has, not the harshness of it hitting her for the first time. Her eyes fix on the vault door again, though she doesn't yet ready herself to run for it. ]

We're still trapped. We're still here.

Waterpark

[bolderfell]

[As before, Therion wanders over from the bar. At least this time, he's not nearly as concerned.]

Something wrong?

[hardnosed]

I'm still drowning.

[ WELL OKAY, THEN, ]

Even when everything else works.

[bolderfell]

[Oh. Uh. Gosh.]

I thought you didn't need to breathe.

[hardnosed]

I don't. [ She pauses, shaking the water from her awful, awful mane, and inhales deeply. ] I'm not supposed to. Half the time, when I'm not in water, I probably still don't need to.

[bolderfell]

You think... he got to pick and choose what powers came back to us? So you'd still be vulnerable here?

['Here' being the pool, which he points to.]

[hardnosed]

Not like he'd have a straight answer for me if I asked.

[ She stands at her full height, now, and the helmet dissipates from her head, which does nothing to make her feel any better about this situation. ]

But ugh, maybe. He must have added it on at the beginning — to make sure Rose and I couldn't just break out of this dump. Not that she would have tried. [ But let's not talk about that! ] But it had to be something specifically designed for us. It's not like Gems have some power he could suppress that makes it so we don't need to breathe. It's just part of being made of light.

[bolderfell]

[He opens his mouth and closes it, remembering Rose's shards. If that's what they really are on the inside, why should they need to breathe?]

You're right. That doesn't make any sense. What did he do, make lungs for you? How would that work?

[Therion has no concept of basic biology, but even he knows this is horseshit.]

How can you make someone need something they don't?

[hardnosed]

[ Weirdly offended, and also grossed out: ] I'd know if I had lungs.

[ nobody question how jasper has been occasionally eating and drinking things this whole time without the ability to shapeshift a digestive tract, because you don't wanna know and i don't wanna think about it ]

He must have tampered with my gem somehow, changed the programming — but it doesn't make sense. How did he even know it would work?

[bolderfell]

...Maybe he's dealt with Gems like you before. We don't know how long he's been at this, taking people from other worlds and... doing things to them.

[This conversation is now uncomfortable for everybody. Hooray!]

Or if it isn't him, specifically, then the other one. The Doctor. The one whose machines he uses. We don't know anything about her, how many times has she done something like this?

[hardnosed]

... Maybe. [ Hate that!! ] It's not like they just brought some foot soldier here. He captured and altered a Diamond. There's no way they'd just take a chance like that without some kind of trial run.

[ jesus christ is that why the ocean jasper is here ]

If they made a mistake, the best case scenario would be her escaping.