TBOS R5 - Lighthouse Vale - Part 3 by Oreramar, literature
Literature
TBOS R5 - Lighthouse Vale - Part 3
COMMENCE SUPER-SIMPLIFIED OUTLINE BECAUSE THIS OTHER APPROACH IS STILL TAKING TOO LONG:
>City is dark. Only candles, lanterns, torches work anymore. It's a big beehive of anxiety and terror of the Blackness, because if there's anything all these collective peoples of all these collective worlds have learned, it's that Blackness is decidedly Not Good, and only the Light held it back.
>Gramaire returns at last, in a strange mood, a sort of strained calm. He tries to get his boarders to calm the heck down and avoid hysteria; he's of the opinion that if the Light really was sabotaged, or destroyed, or stolen, then it won't be long before the pe
TBOS R5 - Lighthouse Vale - Part 2 by Oreramar, literature
Literature
TBOS R5 - Lighthouse Vale - Part 2
"Welcome to Lighthou" A brown-haired, bored-looking teenage boy in pressed slacks and a collared shirt started to say, before he performed the most classic double-take Bobu had seen in recent memory. Had he been drinking something rather than speaking, there may well have been an impressive fountain imitation as well.
"What the hell are you?" the youth burst out.
"Well, that's rude. You should stick to the lines they feed you to recite. I don't suppose you have them on a little card or something? You might want to try reading off of that; I somehow doubt you have the brain cells necessary for such complex memorization," Bobu snapped c
TBOS R5 - Lighthouse Vale - Part 1 by Oreramar, literature
Literature
TBOS R5 - Lighthouse Vale - Part 1
Ricco stood on a narrow path in a vast expanse of darkness, surrounded on all sides by swooping ribbons of white and brilliant, shining stars. He looked about in awe, wondering how he would go about capturing the terrible, beautiful majesty of this night-like void in a song...wondering if he could capture it at all. Colors shifted at the edges of his vision, across the black and the white alike. Reds, yellows, greens and blues, never there when he fixed his eyes on a point, always teasing him from the sides.
A flicker caught his attention. He turned and looked with curiosity, then with a dawning disappointment and sadness as one little star
TBOS R5: Lighthouse Vale - Prologue by Oreramar, literature
Literature
TBOS R5: Lighthouse Vale - Prologue
Firelight flickered and gleamed on gold; countless open braziers illuminated the glittering mountaintop city. The flames were so numerous that the air in the streets shimmered with warmth, ripples of heat pressing against the natural cool of late evening. Though few people were out at that hour, those who were walked with evident good cheer, nodding and smiling as they passed one another, exchanging wishes of good fortune and safety. Two women stopped to chat on the sidewalk, and the young daughter of one stooped to play with the cobbled stone street, tapping rocks one after another and giggling as they gained a golden sheen, one drop at a ti
TBOS R4, Sanctuary, Part 5 by Oreramar, literature
Literature
TBOS R4, Sanctuary, Part 5
For several seconds, all Ricco could do was panic while he tried very hard not to imagine the missing child being found in a similar state to the Corian. When that didn't solve anything, he attempted to formulate a plan based on the question "What would Bobu do?"
His first thoughts involved a lot of censored swearing. A more focused attempt brought him a slightly more reasonable answer: "scour the area and question everyone." He would have loved to have a nice video game guide at hand (the Vyltian may be found by the Well in the northeastern corner of the Green; conversing will open the Quest of the Butterflies...), the sad fact remained tha
TBOS R4 - Sanctuary - Part 4 by Oreramar, literature
Literature
TBOS R4 - Sanctuary - Part 4
It was impossible to tell morning from night inside Sanctuary; the underground caverns, while not completely closed off from the outside world, didn't allow much in the way of natural light to reach their depths. Battery and gear-powered clocks scrounged from the abandoned ruin of a surface world made sure that no daylight was lost, however, and Ricco had gotten so used to setting it that he didn't realize that it wasn't his team's shift for foraging until after he'd gotten up, dressed, and picked up breakfast.
By then he was too awake to go back to bed, and so he sat down on a rocky ledge near that pretty mechanical deer (which appeared to
TBOS R4: Sanctuary, Part 3 by Oreramar, literature
Literature
TBOS R4: Sanctuary, Part 3
Sanctuary's unofficial name made it sound far grander than it was in reality. Jaya's first sight of it was an isolated, ancient farm-style house on the outer edge of the city, where suburbs slowly gave way to largely undeveloped land, folded into wooded hills which were little more than black shadows under the night sky. It wasn't truly wild, but anyone who called it farmland would have been brutally ridiculed by the 'real' farmers and ranchers of the plain areas around the World. Neither was it technically city-owned territory; the dividing line had been crossed at least two miles before the house itself came into view. It was, at best, in a
TBOS R4: Sanctuary, Part 2 by Oreramar, literature
Literature
TBOS R4: Sanctuary, Part 2
It was getting dark fast.
Streetlights had already flickered on, and Ricco knew that this was essentially his last warning. Leave now, or get eaten by the mostly-nocturnal beasties roaming this world.
He hefted a cloth pillowcase forlornly, feeling the weight of it and hearing the cans inside shift against each other. Half a pillowcase wasn't a bad haul, but it certainly wasn't a good sign, either, particularly given how far they had to go just to get that much.
The anthropomorphic Mexican whale shark let his gaze rove up the quiet street, taking in all the houses he had not yet searched for spare goods. There were a fair few; with an aver
TBOS R4: Sanctuary, Part 1 by Oreramar, literature
Literature
TBOS R4: Sanctuary, Part 1
The transition between worlds was extraordinarily gentle.
No other passage had felt like this one. Normally there was nothing to feel; the white expanse was there and then gone, without as much as a deviation in temperature or appearance. At most one might feel a disconcerting rush of motion while remaining perfectly still, or perceive the emptiness of the void in a brief unsettling thought. Then it would be over, and the wealth and stability of another world would wash away the moment of transit as though it had never been.
But this Jaya doubted she would ever forget this brief journey. She didn't think she ever wanted to.
The whit