Path to Enlightenment
Sep. 5th, 2024 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madimpossibledreamerdesmond is absolutely being extra about the emotes, he does not have to go that far
Main Points:
Assassin's Creed/The Secret World
Summary: Desmond and his recruits investigate the Illuminati Archives.
Word Count: 2526
Rating: Teen
Chelsea has the potential, as she’s definitely strong enough, but given how grumpy she’s gotten, she might have a phobia of heights or something. For better or worse, though, she has absolutely no sense of when to quit, gritting her teeth and continuing even when she’s turned a little pale and clammy, actually snapping at him when he’d suggested they could take a break and come back to it later.
And then there’s Lydia. “Please, this is nothing! You should know how many places I’ve trespassed.”
“Not sure I should, actually,” Chelsea mutters under her breath.
The thing is, he’d been worried about them not getting along, but it...actually seems to be helping the Templar. Unless she falls—and he’s keeping a pretty close eye on her and sticking close enough to catch her, hopefully—she’s not pushing herself enough to hurt, and keeping going out of sheer spite is distracting her from her fear. Rukh is flying in lazy circles within arm’s reach, occasionally letting out a quiet burst of clacks from his beak that Desmond’s pretty sure are supposed to be encouraging. Given Shaun’s and Rebecca’s reactions, though, as funny as they were, he doesn’t think he’s actually teaching them the Leap of Faith. Not anytime soon, anyway.
He does get to surreptitiously scarf down a few bars of jerky—it’ll get harder to hide that, over time, and eventually he’ll just have to suck it up and eat in front of them, potentially giving something away, but he’ll put that off as long as he can. He also gets out the little packet of freeze-dried fruit—as much as he’d love to eat that himself, and he’s pretty sure Rukh would prefer fresh, his raven does deserve something. Chelsea does have to agree, as she climbs up the last of the roof tiles, that the view is nice, fifteen types of undead aside. The ghostly raven leans in affectionately to brush his hand before snapping up the food, eyeing Lydia when she joins them and pulling the bag away from her, sidling away a few steps. His grudge, as far as Desmond can guess, is that she’d hurt his pride. Maybe the same is true of Chelsea?
Getting down is a little more difficult, and the Templar nearly falls. Not too far, thankfully, but it’d still be a problem. It’s the goth girl that catches her, and Chelsea reluctantly accepts the help, which is something.
And then they hit another snag in their actual mission—the key, for lack of a better way to put it, doesn’t want to work this time, freezing in the lock under the cement and refusing to turn or even be pulled back out. Nate and Lydia have to confer and finally pull out some kind of magic spell that does the trick, which automatically means Desmond’s going to have to bug them later about how they got that to work. Magical lockpicking would be handy to know, especially given how often he’s actually had to use either variety recently.
This time, the golden line of wooden planks is straight ahead, but he turns left anyway. Rukh lets out an angry croak and nips at his ear.
“I want to retrieve the other artifacts,” he explains, and his raven runs his beak along the edge of his ear as if trying to soothe away the hurt. His bird is utterly ridiculous and he’s not sure he should even be surprised at this point. Sure, they don’t seem important, judging by the lack of a gold glow, but it can’t hurt. If it slows down Beaumont at all, it’s worth it.
Back the way they came and then on the gold wood road, there’s another plaque and the same set of slots in the wall, though the caption this time is “of Khufu, of the Grand Lodge”. By process of elimination, especially since it doesn’t seem like he absolutely had to go back and retrieve the other two artifacts, that’s the pyramid and the weird sextant-thing (it’s apparently a symbol of the Freemasons, so he probably should have known that, given that Benjamin Franklin among others was a Freemason, but he’d had a few other things on his mind at the time). And what he sees on the other side...Lydia whistles and steps inside immediately, because this is a secret library. Very possibly a booby-trapped secret library, but still...he’s not a fan of the Illuminati, but he can’t fault the décor even if they have plastered the pyramid everywhere including as semi-pretentious art on every side of the possibly magical blue flames that serve as the only source of light in this place. No eagles (or his raven) actually call out when she starts touching the bookshelves, so they’re probably safe.
Which, if he thinks about it, is really weird. These are the guys that want to protect their own monopoly over knowledge so badly that they’re spending a lot of time spreading fake rumors, right? Which is a very Abstergo thing to do. So why wouldn’t they be protecting their books? Most likely, he realizes grimly, because whatever they see as extremely important is further in.
A couple volumes do catch his eye, in the glowy ‘this is important’ sense, so he picks them up quietly and adds them to his bag. Maybe they’ll help for figuring out this whole ‘end of the world’ thing. Shaun would probably know.
Rukh takes off again, poking around the corners of the room, and he’s gotta hope the bird has a good enough sense of danger to not get himself into anything too dangerous.
Of course, like he’s jinxed them somehow, the second he thinks that there’s green gas rising from the floor. “Back, to the tunnel!” he yells immediately. Hopefully the mechanism only covers the room, or they’re probably not making it back to the entrance in one piece. At least when he gives an order his recruits absolutely follow it immediately. And fortunately his instincts were right, and it just fills the room, so they back up a ways down the tunnel, watching the gas slowly sink back down.
“I’m sorry—there was another room to the right. I forgot to look at the floor.” Chelsea looks like she’s beating herself up about this.
“Hey, no worries—we make mistakes, we learn from them, and we don’t make them again, right?” This is something Ezio would make a teaching moment out of, he’s pretty sure. The least he can do is try to follow in the guy’s footsteps. “Everyone good?”
Nate takes that as an opportunity to heal everyone, just to be sure, and then, when they’re absolutely sure it’s safe, they go back in. The architects weren’t messed up enough to start it going again immediately, so they get to gather around and stare at the letters on the floor. And it’s not like he could just jump across—there’s a blue glowy fire wall in front of the closed door that suggests it’s not opening for more than one reason unless they do this correctly.
“‘Jehovah begins with an I’,” Nate says, in a tone that suggests he’s quoting something. A movie, probably. Desmond’s gotten used to that enough from talking to Rebecca. He hasn’t quite managed to fix his blank stare in response, though. “...Indiana Jones?” he adds, and Desmond shrugs.
Eh, why not. It’s served as a good enough cover up until this point, and it is kind of true. Might as well keep going to avoid awkward questions. “I grew up in a cult.”
“And here I thought I had it bad,” Lydia responds casually. “Okay, here’s the clue. It is a religious thing, so that was pretty appropriate, but I don’t know my Bible, so.”
“Let me look.” Chelsea kind of snatches away the paper, but at least they’re sort of getting along at this point? “Abyssus, I think, assuming they’re going with the original Latin.”
“How do we get the second s? There’s no path like that,” their new acquaintance points out.
“Maybe we hop on the spot?” the ‘Agent’ suggests, and shrugs at the stares he gets.
And then Rukh lets out a loud croak and flies over, landing in front of the letters. “Are you...offering to try it?”
He clicks his beak and leans in before going back, Desmond realizes with a smile, to looking like he’s standing to attention.
“If something goes wrong, he probably can fly out faster than we could run…” he considers. Also, the bird would probably not forgive him for not letting him try, and he really doesn’t want the raven mad at him. “Let’s try it, I guess.”
Apparently the suggestion worked, because even though they’d retreated just in case, no gas rises, and soon enough Rukh’s returning with a triumphant cry. Desmond doesn’t want to fish out a treat right now, just in case, but he seems to be accepting the petting just as well.
The library continues, only now there are what look like...musical pipes on the wall? They’re labeled with notes, and there are levers with different note lengths. And a crumbling sheet of paper with music notes. Honestly, it seems like he should be able to figure this out himself, except it’s not that easy, he’s pretty sure, because there’s a part smudged out and he assumes it’s the missing part that this weird mechanism booby trap wants to be played. He doesn’t recognize the song.
He spots another gold glimmer in a corner with an actual seat and wanders over to pick that up, too. Another book. Shaun’s probably going to enjoy this.
“Another note from the floor. They’re trying real hard to make this look accidental. Anyone have a clue who this Dolandi is?” Lydia asks, and Nate pulls out his cell phone. It looks like one Rebecca would approve of.
“On it.” And then he laughs. “Well, would you look at that. First result; that makes a change. Nobody directly by that name, but there’s a guy who occasionally signed his name as Dolandi, and the line about ‘weeping’ matches the song title of ‘Flow, my tears’. Looking up the sheet music now.”
...Yeah, those notes match, okay. That’s easy enough, and this time, there’s no gas. Take that, Bill. He probably would’ve thought learning guitar was useless, but here it’s actually paid off.
And then the next room has...statues. Desmond eyes them carefully. He doesn’t trust that they’re not going to start moving and potentially trying to kill them.
“Hang on, what about that book you found?” Lydia adds suddenly as they stare at the statues, Nate having wandered off this time. They’re just all picking up interesting books at this point like this is actually a public library, and, well. Illuminati. It’s probably better off in their hands, at this point. Rukh looks a little dejected at the lack of actual treasure loot thus far, though, and Desmond gets it, because where are those gold bars that people had been finding? “The one you found before the tomb,” she clarifies as he rummages through his bag—huh, he does not remember having shoved this much in there—but yeah, that makes sense. He’d picked it up, but it hadn’t been useful before.
“A soldier’s probably the representation of the Old Empire. Honestly, that might be a dig at the Templars. This probably is what we needed, too.”
“An angel, that’s probably the Holy Symbol…” Chelsea agrees grudgingly, reading over Lydia’s shoulder. It’s not annoying the teenager at all.
“‘Schemes Coiled and Chaotic.’ That’s not subtle at all. Lumies.” Nate shakes his head, having wandered back. Desmond had noticed him coming back, but Chelsea jumps a little. Seems he might be a natural at the whole stealth thing, good.
“Which leaves the Olympic Games guy for ‘exertions of his fellows’...but what does the rest of this mean?” The Templar tries to cover up for her getting startled, and she’s actually doing a pretty good job there.
“Gram mentioned that sometimes to protect their secrets people will use magic statues that can sense stuff, and the natural ‘church-going’ thing is to pray, right? It’s probably gesture-based,” Lydia reasons.
“I’ve heard of that, too,” Nate confirms.
What ends up happening is the three narrating his actions after a hurried conference arguing about the most appropriate gestures, telling him to first clap for the disc-throwing guy, turn and pray for the angel, turn and spit on the soldier (which is kind of gross and what’s worse is that he thinks he can spot where people have done that before because it’s definitely in worse shape than the rest) and turn the last way, covering his eyes in front of the snake. It’s as Lydia and finally Chelsea start giggling at him that he realizes he probably didn’t need to be that exaggerated about it, but he wanted to make very, very certain he got this right, because this room probably has gas traps too and it’d probably be tricky to run out avoiding the statues. Though, he realizes as he puts his hands down and glances down, Rukh had decided to stand next to him and...mimic his gestures. A little bit. He launches back toward Desmond’s shoulder.
“We should probably do it too—the wall’s still there,” Nate notes quietly.
Unfortunately, it’s a little downhill from there. Still no treasure. A note confessing to having poisoned a rival for the Grand Master position. At least he’s got those books, so someone should be happy. Besides the pastor, maybe, assuming he doesn’t take this as a huge insult as a hobbyist Illuminati or something.
Rukh kind of volunteers himself for the position of delivery boy through yet more gestures and some forceful beak clicking, which Desmond doesn’t think is possible briefly before he remembers that, oh yeah, he’s got that money pouch that’s bigger on the inside, too, even if it’s a pain dumping out all of that into his regular bag and it’s just going to get worse when he has to put everything back later. Nate is happy to help with the knots to secure it carefully around Rukh’s neck, and after a test flight to make sure he’s not too unbalanced, the raven’s off.
Desmond’s already missing him.
Main Points:
Assassin's Creed/The Secret World
Summary: Desmond and his recruits investigate the Illuminati Archives.
Word Count: 2526
Rating: Teen
On the way back, Desmond decides that if the Illuminati secret tunnels aren’t going to bring the Assassin tombs to them, he might as well go out of his way to see if his new recruits have any foundation to start with. Nate takes to it easily, so easily that Desmond would think he’d done it before if not for the time he’d spotted the guy watching him very, very carefully as he demonstrated, so yeah, his self-proclaimed Agent is just a really quick study. Though he doesn’t have quite the strength Chelsea does, seeing as he’s poured most of his focus and practice into magic, he’s no mere pencil-pusher either, and given what muscles he does have and his incredible sense of balance, Desmond wouldn’t be surprised if the guy actually did turn out to be a surfer.
Chelsea has the potential, as she’s definitely strong enough, but given how grumpy she’s gotten, she might have a phobia of heights or something. For better or worse, though, she has absolutely no sense of when to quit, gritting her teeth and continuing even when she’s turned a little pale and clammy, actually snapping at him when he’d suggested they could take a break and come back to it later.
And then there’s Lydia. “Please, this is nothing! You should know how many places I’ve trespassed.”
“Not sure I should, actually,” Chelsea mutters under her breath.
The thing is, he’d been worried about them not getting along, but it...actually seems to be helping the Templar. Unless she falls—and he’s keeping a pretty close eye on her and sticking close enough to catch her, hopefully—she’s not pushing herself enough to hurt, and keeping going out of sheer spite is distracting her from her fear. Rukh is flying in lazy circles within arm’s reach, occasionally letting out a quiet burst of clacks from his beak that Desmond’s pretty sure are supposed to be encouraging. Given Shaun’s and Rebecca’s reactions, though, as funny as they were, he doesn’t think he’s actually teaching them the Leap of Faith. Not anytime soon, anyway.
He does get to surreptitiously scarf down a few bars of jerky—it’ll get harder to hide that, over time, and eventually he’ll just have to suck it up and eat in front of them, potentially giving something away, but he’ll put that off as long as he can. He also gets out the little packet of freeze-dried fruit—as much as he’d love to eat that himself, and he’s pretty sure Rukh would prefer fresh, his raven does deserve something. Chelsea does have to agree, as she climbs up the last of the roof tiles, that the view is nice, fifteen types of undead aside. The ghostly raven leans in affectionately to brush his hand before snapping up the food, eyeing Lydia when she joins them and pulling the bag away from her, sidling away a few steps. His grudge, as far as Desmond can guess, is that she’d hurt his pride. Maybe the same is true of Chelsea?
Getting down is a little more difficult, and the Templar nearly falls. Not too far, thankfully, but it’d still be a problem. It’s the goth girl that catches her, and Chelsea reluctantly accepts the help, which is something.
And then they hit another snag in their actual mission—the key, for lack of a better way to put it, doesn’t want to work this time, freezing in the lock under the cement and refusing to turn or even be pulled back out. Nate and Lydia have to confer and finally pull out some kind of magic spell that does the trick, which automatically means Desmond’s going to have to bug them later about how they got that to work. Magical lockpicking would be handy to know, especially given how often he’s actually had to use either variety recently.
This time, the golden line of wooden planks is straight ahead, but he turns left anyway. Rukh lets out an angry croak and nips at his ear.
“I want to retrieve the other artifacts,” he explains, and his raven runs his beak along the edge of his ear as if trying to soothe away the hurt. His bird is utterly ridiculous and he’s not sure he should even be surprised at this point. Sure, they don’t seem important, judging by the lack of a gold glow, but it can’t hurt. If it slows down Beaumont at all, it’s worth it.
Back the way they came and then on the gold wood road, there’s another plaque and the same set of slots in the wall, though the caption this time is “of Khufu, of the Grand Lodge”. By process of elimination, especially since it doesn’t seem like he absolutely had to go back and retrieve the other two artifacts, that’s the pyramid and the weird sextant-thing (it’s apparently a symbol of the Freemasons, so he probably should have known that, given that Benjamin Franklin among others was a Freemason, but he’d had a few other things on his mind at the time). And what he sees on the other side...Lydia whistles and steps inside immediately, because this is a secret library. Very possibly a booby-trapped secret library, but still...he’s not a fan of the Illuminati, but he can’t fault the décor even if they have plastered the pyramid everywhere including as semi-pretentious art on every side of the possibly magical blue flames that serve as the only source of light in this place. No eagles (or his raven) actually call out when she starts touching the bookshelves, so they’re probably safe.
Which, if he thinks about it, is really weird. These are the guys that want to protect their own monopoly over knowledge so badly that they’re spending a lot of time spreading fake rumors, right? Which is a very Abstergo thing to do. So why wouldn’t they be protecting their books? Most likely, he realizes grimly, because whatever they see as extremely important is further in.
A couple volumes do catch his eye, in the glowy ‘this is important’ sense, so he picks them up quietly and adds them to his bag. Maybe they’ll help for figuring out this whole ‘end of the world’ thing. Shaun would probably know.
Rukh takes off again, poking around the corners of the room, and he’s gotta hope the bird has a good enough sense of danger to not get himself into anything too dangerous.
Of course, like he’s jinxed them somehow, the second he thinks that there’s green gas rising from the floor. “Back, to the tunnel!” he yells immediately. Hopefully the mechanism only covers the room, or they’re probably not making it back to the entrance in one piece. At least when he gives an order his recruits absolutely follow it immediately. And fortunately his instincts were right, and it just fills the room, so they back up a ways down the tunnel, watching the gas slowly sink back down.
“I’m sorry—there was another room to the right. I forgot to look at the floor.” Chelsea looks like she’s beating herself up about this.
“Hey, no worries—we make mistakes, we learn from them, and we don’t make them again, right?” This is something Ezio would make a teaching moment out of, he’s pretty sure. The least he can do is try to follow in the guy’s footsteps. “Everyone good?”
Nate takes that as an opportunity to heal everyone, just to be sure, and then, when they’re absolutely sure it’s safe, they go back in. The architects weren’t messed up enough to start it going again immediately, so they get to gather around and stare at the letters on the floor. And it’s not like he could just jump across—there’s a blue glowy fire wall in front of the closed door that suggests it’s not opening for more than one reason unless they do this correctly.
“‘Jehovah begins with an I’,” Nate says, in a tone that suggests he’s quoting something. A movie, probably. Desmond’s gotten used to that enough from talking to Rebecca. He hasn’t quite managed to fix his blank stare in response, though. “...Indiana Jones?” he adds, and Desmond shrugs.
Eh, why not. It’s served as a good enough cover up until this point, and it is kind of true. Might as well keep going to avoid awkward questions. “I grew up in a cult.”
“And here I thought I had it bad,” Lydia responds casually. “Okay, here’s the clue. It is a religious thing, so that was pretty appropriate, but I don’t know my Bible, so.”
“Let me look.” Chelsea kind of snatches away the paper, but at least they’re sort of getting along at this point? “Abyssus, I think, assuming they’re going with the original Latin.”
“How do we get the second s? There’s no path like that,” their new acquaintance points out.
“Maybe we hop on the spot?” the ‘Agent’ suggests, and shrugs at the stares he gets.
And then Rukh lets out a loud croak and flies over, landing in front of the letters. “Are you...offering to try it?”
He clicks his beak and leans in before going back, Desmond realizes with a smile, to looking like he’s standing to attention.
“If something goes wrong, he probably can fly out faster than we could run…” he considers. Also, the bird would probably not forgive him for not letting him try, and he really doesn’t want the raven mad at him. “Let’s try it, I guess.”
Apparently the suggestion worked, because even though they’d retreated just in case, no gas rises, and soon enough Rukh’s returning with a triumphant cry. Desmond doesn’t want to fish out a treat right now, just in case, but he seems to be accepting the petting just as well.
The library continues, only now there are what look like...musical pipes on the wall? They’re labeled with notes, and there are levers with different note lengths. And a crumbling sheet of paper with music notes. Honestly, it seems like he should be able to figure this out himself, except it’s not that easy, he’s pretty sure, because there’s a part smudged out and he assumes it’s the missing part that this weird mechanism booby trap wants to be played. He doesn’t recognize the song.
He spots another gold glimmer in a corner with an actual seat and wanders over to pick that up, too. Another book. Shaun’s probably going to enjoy this.
“Another note from the floor. They’re trying real hard to make this look accidental. Anyone have a clue who this Dolandi is?” Lydia asks, and Nate pulls out his cell phone. It looks like one Rebecca would approve of.
“On it.” And then he laughs. “Well, would you look at that. First result; that makes a change. Nobody directly by that name, but there’s a guy who occasionally signed his name as Dolandi, and the line about ‘weeping’ matches the song title of ‘Flow, my tears’. Looking up the sheet music now.”
...Yeah, those notes match, okay. That’s easy enough, and this time, there’s no gas. Take that, Bill. He probably would’ve thought learning guitar was useless, but here it’s actually paid off.
And then the next room has...statues. Desmond eyes them carefully. He doesn’t trust that they’re not going to start moving and potentially trying to kill them.
“Hang on, what about that book you found?” Lydia adds suddenly as they stare at the statues, Nate having wandered off this time. They’re just all picking up interesting books at this point like this is actually a public library, and, well. Illuminati. It’s probably better off in their hands, at this point. Rukh looks a little dejected at the lack of actual treasure loot thus far, though, and Desmond gets it, because where are those gold bars that people had been finding? “The one you found before the tomb,” she clarifies as he rummages through his bag—huh, he does not remember having shoved this much in there—but yeah, that makes sense. He’d picked it up, but it hadn’t been useful before.
“A soldier’s probably the representation of the Old Empire. Honestly, that might be a dig at the Templars. This probably is what we needed, too.”
“An angel, that’s probably the Holy Symbol…” Chelsea agrees grudgingly, reading over Lydia’s shoulder. It’s not annoying the teenager at all.
“‘Schemes Coiled and Chaotic.’ That’s not subtle at all. Lumies.” Nate shakes his head, having wandered back. Desmond had noticed him coming back, but Chelsea jumps a little. Seems he might be a natural at the whole stealth thing, good.
“Which leaves the Olympic Games guy for ‘exertions of his fellows’...but what does the rest of this mean?” The Templar tries to cover up for her getting startled, and she’s actually doing a pretty good job there.
“Gram mentioned that sometimes to protect their secrets people will use magic statues that can sense stuff, and the natural ‘church-going’ thing is to pray, right? It’s probably gesture-based,” Lydia reasons.
“I’ve heard of that, too,” Nate confirms.
What ends up happening is the three narrating his actions after a hurried conference arguing about the most appropriate gestures, telling him to first clap for the disc-throwing guy, turn and pray for the angel, turn and spit on the soldier (which is kind of gross and what’s worse is that he thinks he can spot where people have done that before because it’s definitely in worse shape than the rest) and turn the last way, covering his eyes in front of the snake. It’s as Lydia and finally Chelsea start giggling at him that he realizes he probably didn’t need to be that exaggerated about it, but he wanted to make very, very certain he got this right, because this room probably has gas traps too and it’d probably be tricky to run out avoiding the statues. Though, he realizes as he puts his hands down and glances down, Rukh had decided to stand next to him and...mimic his gestures. A little bit. He launches back toward Desmond’s shoulder.
“We should probably do it too—the wall’s still there,” Nate notes quietly.
Unfortunately, it’s a little downhill from there. Still no treasure. A note confessing to having poisoned a rival for the Grand Master position. At least he’s got those books, so someone should be happy. Besides the pastor, maybe, assuming he doesn’t take this as a huge insult as a hobbyist Illuminati or something.
Rukh kind of volunteers himself for the position of delivery boy through yet more gestures and some forceful beak clicking, which Desmond doesn’t think is possible briefly before he remembers that, oh yeah, he’s got that money pouch that’s bigger on the inside, too, even if it’s a pain dumping out all of that into his regular bag and it’s just going to get worse when he has to put everything back later. Nate is happy to help with the knots to secure it carefully around Rukh’s neck, and after a test flight to make sure he’s not too unbalanced, the raven’s off.
Desmond’s already missing him.
