timeandtides_backup | Protecting My Devotion

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Protecting My Devotion - Group 15

Characters: Balthier Bunansa, Setzer Gabbiani, and Rygdea.
Progress: Ongoing
Summary: Old!Memoria
Location: Memoria
Date: March 11th, 1805.
Warning: ... too many well-dressed men?

He didn't know what to expect when the sky had suddenly burst with the color of sunset. Since his arrival in Gaia, it was safe to assume that anything could happen at any time. People were taken home whenever the fates saw fit, with no warning, no impetus. When the haze cleared and he found himself standing in front of the elevator at the Draklor Laboratory, he surmised that it was simply his turn to return from whence he came.

Though given the option, he wouldn't have chosen Draklor. Too many memories there. Ones he would rather leave behind if he was going to have any semblance of a life that didn't leave him shackled to the past.

In the distance, an alarm was droning, though it was muffled, as if it were several floors below him.

Just what had he returned in the middle of?

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Empires. Why did it always have to be empires. But if he had to tangle with one yet again he supposed it might as well be one that he barely knew. They wouldn't know what his ship was and wasn't capable of when it came time to take to the skies once again and he certainly couldn't imagine that this little excursion would end any other way.

But as he knew little of this place he was quite content to follow Balthier for the time being. Whatever grudges he may have had against the place, he certainly a better idea of what to expect than Setzer himself did.

Still, Setzer could hardly say that he'd expected to find them walking into a room that was as devoid of people as the one they'd just left. It was stranger yet to find Balthier addressing thin air, and moreover addressing it familiarly. A trickery of the place perhaps? Or had he unknowingly stepped into the hands of yet another madman? Of course, that path had a madman calling his unseen ... foe? ... mad and there was certainly no small amount of irony in that. Yet for all that he wanted to believe that this man was no Kefka he couldn't help one of his hands from creeping into his pockets just in case he had to fight.

Before he could get much farther than that, however, the world around them begin to fade.

"No man enjoys a game forced upon him."

Rygdea remained silent, his frown returning in earnest. He'd seen crazy people before, Eden had its fair share of mentally ill, but to watch someone go from coherent to raving to empty air in a split-second was...unnerving. It wasn't until he looked over at the silver-haired man that he realised that the room they were standing in...wasn't the room they had been in. Some sort of magic, then? Perhaps he wasn't crazy at all, maybe he'd just been seeing something they couldn't.

"You an' Cid should talk," he muttered, in response to the other man's comment, then shook his head and brought his focus back to the matter at hand. "So...what the hell just happened?"

"I can't be certain," Balthier responded, clearly on edge and more irritated than not by the scene he had just participated in. "If I had truly returned home, let us just say it was at an inopportune moment. However, considering the state of our surroundings, I think that an unlikely explanation at this point, or if I had, it was a particularly brief stay."

He crossed his arms, not bothering to be mindful of the wrinkles it might cause his good shirt, and looking up to survey their new environment. "Wherever we are, it's changing. We ought to move."

"I'd be inclined to agree," Setzer answered, giving the new set of surrounding a rather critical eye. "I'd rather the hand stabilize before we set about seeking answers."

If there even were answers to be had, but that part of the hand could just as easily be discussed when they weren't interrupted be further spates of almost-madness. The sooner they were out, the better. Preferably without whatever that had been catching him in its nets as well.

Edited 2011-03-17 02:19 (UTC)

"No arguments here," Rygdea agreed. Deeming now as good a moment as any for introductions, he offered, "I'm Rygdea, by the way."

"Balthier," the pirate offered in return, omitting his last name. He had, more or less, given it up when he had initially fled Archades, after all. Looking in either direction, he quickly began to make his way through the only apparent exit, pressing his lips together into a thoughtful frown as their surroundings continued to shift.

"Setzer," he answered, even as the surroundings began to take on a form that was all to familiar to him. The walls vanished, replaced by nothing more than a viewpoint that offered miles of wasted land. It was a tower. A tower built of what seemed to be nothing more than the rubble of a thousand buildings.

Oh, the floor underneath their feet was stable enough. But all around was bits and pieces of something else. Here a piece of what could have once been a roof. There, something that looked very much like it wouldn't have been out of place in a scientist's lab. A thousand, thousand pieces of rubble and ruin, held together by nothing more than sheer magic.

And with the height of the tower itself, getting back down was not really going to be the best of options. It was the last place Setzer had ever wanted to be yet again and he couldn't help but sigh at it all.

"So...what exactly happened back there?" He looked over at Balthier as he spoke. "I mean, I'm not gettin' the crazy vibe from you, so.." He trailed off, catching a strange shifting out of the corner of his eye. Again, the scenery around them had changed, becoming a panorama that made his head spin. He was used to the laws of physics being flexible, Coccoon was a planet held up by fal'Cie will, after all, but...to see all of this, with no fal'Cie in sight, it made him feel distinctly uneasy.

"Crazy?" Balthier questioned, curious. What had his conversation with Cid looked like to his companions, he wondered? He supposed that for those who were unaware of the context, he might have seemed a little needlessly irate, but certainly not insane. He would leave that to the higher branches of his family tree. "If you knew the full scope of the argument, I suppose it would make more sense, but what you saw was the result of a madman's thirst for power reaching its height." He paused. "Did you not see--" he began, but cut himself off as he fully realized that their surroundings had again shifted.

Rubble as far as the eye could see, fashioned into something larger than any town it might have as its components. "What is this place?"

A madman's thirst for power? Now there was a damning statement and one that was more than a little familiar. One he could have done without really, given the current location. If they were set to revisit the various madmen in their lives this would certainly be the place for it.

"A tower erected by the local madman," he answered. "A monument to his own twisted genius."

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Protecting My Devotion - Group 15

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Next memory go?

On it! And sorry for taking so long to get to this, I was away most of the weekend

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Sorry, missed the notif. :/

No problem~