strangetrip | [GP/EP] THE FLOOR IS LAVA

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[GP/EP] THE FLOOR IS LAVA

It was arrival day, and therefore it was possible that there would be new inmates arriving at any time. Someone else might have delayed this until some other day, but for Loki the prospect of new people was simply a bonus. New arrivals tended to be confused and upset already, any consideration from him was unlikely to change that, so he didn't plan on displaying any. He'd already raided empty rooms and moved much of their furniture into the hallways, that was enough general consideration for one day.

Instead, he took a seat on the front desk (ignoring Darryl, who also ignored him) and wove a spell that would let him be heard by everyone in the Inn. "Good morning, fellow residents. It's been a quiet few weeks, hasn't it?" All the weeks, barring undead invasion, tended to be quiet here. It wasn't exactly maddening, but Loki had spent two months being quiet and exceptionally well-behaved, for him.

"To break the monotony, I give to all of you a rousing game of The Floor Is Lava. For those of you who may not know it, it's a descriptive name. When I call time, the floor will become lava. If you touch it, you will die. Metaphorically, at least, so take this seriously." Those who sincerely wished not to play would have no difficulty; the lava was an illusion, and any 'reality' to it depended on belief or buy-in. For those who sincerely didn't want to play, the floor would simply look odd. This was fun mischief, not viciousness. "Also, because I know some people need encouragement in order to engage with fun, the spell creating the lava has been broken and invested into several individual runes and hidden around the Inn, discoverable only by those playing the game. The lava ends when all of those runes are disrupted - you win - or when no one is left alive to disrupt them and I win." That was only sensible. There was no reason to continue playing a game when no one else was playing it.

"Furniture only, staircase railings are fine. No books, no bags, no cloth, the dead can't speak but if they wish to continue playing they may come back as a lava monster under my dominion." Even in games, there were fates worse than death. "Lava monsters may do as they please, including trying to pull the 'living' into the lava. Should there be a clear non-me winner somehow, I'll owe that person a favor of their choice, at some point in the future."

Did that cover everything? It seemed like it, but he could always make another announcement if he had to. "The floor becomes lava in ten... nine... eight... seven... six... five... four... three... two...." He spaced out the countdown enough to make sure that everyone who wanted to scramble for furniture high ground was easily able to do so.

"...One." Loki released the spell and the floors everywhere in the Inn (for those who believed it or at least bought in to the game) turned to churning hot lava.

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"Nah, not a chicken, you're clearly a--..." Tony gestured sluggishly, trailing off, "Sorry, what are you?"

F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s facial scanning recognition identified the tenant as Emma, but his notes were few and far between.

Well, if they were going to actually talk... Emma flew over, grabbed a chair, and brought it closer to the sofa. Standing on its seat, she released her projection, the wings fading away as her eyes returned to their usual emerald green.

"A mutant," she finished for him. She wasn't going to hide what she was, not that she really could have after he'd seen her projecting wings. On the other hand, she didn't know what kind of reality he was from. Maybe they didn't have mutants on his Earth. "I'm a mutant."

Tony gave a knowing hum. Kitty, Illyana, Ororo, there were a cavalcade. 'Cavalcade? What do you call a group of mutants...?'

"Gotcha." Tony rolled over, extending his armored arm for a handshake as the lava flowed between them. "Tony Stark. Homo sapiens, subspecies ferrum virum."

"Marie-Ange Colbert," she offered, shaking his hand briefly before settling more comfortably on the chair to avoid the lava . "But that's a mouthful and old-fashioned. Emma is easier."

She could feel herself starting to bite her lip, and made herself stop. It was better to ask, right? "My French and Italian are good, but my Latin's practically non-existent. I'm pretty sure that's not meant to be Iron Virus, but..." she trailed off with a shrug.

" Oh no, no." Tony pushed up on the cushion to sit, wincing beneath his face plate at the stiffness in his neck. "Ferrum, easy enough, we've got an element named after it. Virum, in this case, is the singular accusative version of vir, meaning man. Virus is pretty similar sounding but it borrows from the Proto-Indo-European root 'weis,' for something that flows or melts."

Despite getting pigeon-holed as the hard STEM type, Tony Stark had other interests. His first summer abroad as a sixteen-year-old he had spent in Italy and developed a fixation with picking up every Latin type language he could. The express purpose was for picking up foreign women and then wow'ing the ones from home. What made it even better was there were many, many participants on either side of the coin willing to give or receive lessons.

Hard to even play at being sexy with the lava around, though. Among other things.

"So. Emma. You in it to win it?" Tony gestured at their surroundings.

That actually made a kind of sense, but Emma was going to have a hard time not thinking of him as Iron Virus from now on. Not that she would admit it. Well, maybe to Sunny. Or Jag.

She laughed softly and shook her head. "I spend most of my time here cooking for people. I've been slacking off on powers training. Avoiding Loki's lava seemed like good practice." Especially when those powers suddenly worked differently than she expected or meant them to.

The temptation to flop back down was there, scratching at Tony's skull, but he shrugged his shoulders and worked the stiffness out.

"Well. I've got nothing going on. Want a sidekick?"

Emma blinked, too surprised by the question at first to come up with an answer. Did Tony Stark just offer to act as her sidekick? Tony Stark. Sidekick. For her. It wasn't like she paid a lot of attention to the business or science news back home, but even she'd heard of Tony Stark and Stark Enterprises. He was right up there with Frank's dad.

"Since when does Tony Stark offer to sidekick for anybody?" she asked, surprise and confusion bypassing her usual filters completely. "Sorry. That was rude. Especially when I know alts can have very little in common with each other. I probably should've stuck to sidekick in what way?"

A wry chuckle. "You know me. Alright."

Or some Tony Stark in a universe far, far away. When he looked at it positively, it was at least comforting to know all Tony's had some consistency.

"Don't get me wrong, this isn't a habit of mine. But I'm here, I've been around the block. Supporting the youth and all that."

It still felt weird. Someone wanting to be her sidekick. What did that even mean?

"I'm more used to sous-chefs than sidekicks. I wasn't even training for the team back home. But I'm willing to give it a try if you are."

"Well then we can bunny-hop over to the kitchen, douse the place with champagne and make a mean flambé." Emma couldn't see his expression, though his cheekiness was expressed readily in his tone. "C'mon, you'll do great. Just let me know if you want me to act the mentor, the foil, or the comic relief."

Another pause and a look before she answered, surprised by the cheerleading and deciding, "Sounds like you're already trying for comic relief, if you're wanting to flambé anything with champagne. Either that or you're just really bad at chemistry." Unlike Tony, whose cheek was audible if not visible, Emma went for a more deadpan response.

"Mostly, I was thinking to practice maneuvering through dangerous terrain using my psi projections. So if you know a good way to be a foil or comic relief with that, go for it."

'Up and at 'em, Iron Man.' Despite telling himself that, Tony used a brief and carefully controlled repulsor blast to propel himself up. Work smart, not hard.

"Scavenger hunt it time it is. Where to next, Boss? Your guess is as good as mine."

"If we're guessing, your guess is maybe better than mind, since you know Loki better. Right?" Because of Thor if nothing else.

"But. Why guess, when I can See where we need to go?" What was the use of having powers if you didn't use them, and Emma had been relying on the tarot most of her life, for sillier things than this. It was practically habit pulling the deck from her pocket and beginning to shuffle.

"Also? Don't call me Boss. That's... weird."

"I'm not looney tunes enough to know about what goes on in Loki's head." Emma's divination was an extra excuse to be lazy, too. Tony hovered over her shoulder, paying close attention to the movements of her hands and the cards.

"Most of the telepaths I know would probably say knowing what goes on in other people's heads is often overrated, even when they aren't gods of mischief." So that was probably hyperbole, and she knew how helpful telepathy could be at times. But she was glad she wasn't that kind of psi.

She went for a simple spread, only three cards, and instead of laying them out, held them fanned between two fingers as her eyes unfocused, seeming to look at something beyond the cards.

Oh, that little... trickster god.

Putting all but one of the cards away, Emma stood on the chair again. If she hadn't, projecting the wings might have tipped her off the chair and into the lava, which would bring the challenge to a quick, and embarrassing end. A glance at the card she'd kept out, and the color faded from her eyes, leaving them solid white as she projected Temperance, the red wings reappearing from her back.

"To the kitchens, Bunny!" Why she channeled Raffles just then she couldn't have said. Just that Tony Stark was definitely not a Jeeves, and Emma didn't want to be a Sherlock.

'Did she just...?' Lifting off the chair, Tony hovered and followed dutifully, mentally directing F.R.I.D.A.Y. to keep on the lookout for any unfortunate soul playing Lava Monster.

"Rune discovered at yonder mess hall?" Delivered with an appropriately hokey Victorian accent.

She'd definitely left herself open for that, she thought, laughing. Oops?

"Something like that. And if we're going to go find a rune, might as well start in the place I know best." Mostly it had been the easiest space to recognize, in the psi montage the cards had given her. One pink, gilt, and floral space got hard to distinguish from the next after a while. The kitchens, luckily were free of most of that.

"You wouldn't happen to have any idea how we're supposed to disrupt them once we find them, would you?"

Tsking, Tony adjusted his position upright to leave a hand free--using it to drum at his metallic head. He'd dozed in and out of the friendly announcement. "I'll give it a friendly pat, see where that goes. Run a diagnostics check beforehand." Not that F.R.I.D.A.Y. Was especially attuned to magic. Yet. But as the sidekick and armored partner, it seemed only decent to be the guinea pig.

If asked, Emma would have said it wasn't the role of sidekicks to be guinea pigs or targets – she wasn't Batman... or the previously alluded to Raffles, who had a tendency to use Bunny that way too sometimes, if she remembered correctly – but It did make sense for the one in full, and she assumed super-high-tech armor to put himself in the line of potential fire, compared to the entirely squishy one. And Stark was supposed to be some kind of genius.

"It should be somewhere in the dry storage," she explained once they were in the kitchen. Flying through doors was getting easier the longer she practiced, although having someone else going ahead of her didn't hurt. "I couldn't narrow it down more than that, so we'll just have to search."

"Better that than the freezer." Mark 50 was perfectly temperature controlled, but sticking an artifact to be found in a game of magical hide-n-seek in a freezer was asking for trouble. Though, that raised another question. The freezing temperatures weren't sentient enough to be affected by the lava, but how exactly would one go about perceiving an environment simultaneously freezing and scorching?

Meh. Convection wasn't a thing anyway. The effects were restricted to touching it. The more he tried applying real world physics to perception and human cognition, the later he'd be able to return to his nap.

Tugging the doors to the dry storage area open as he floated over, F.R.I.D.A.Y. ran a scan of the interior. The metal racks housed countless cans, jars, boxes, and clear containers of dated product. All of them seemed unaffected by the imaginary lava. Yep.

"One inconsistency detected, Boss. This may be pertinent."

"Of what kind?"

"Lettering. Everything recorded in here's consistent with the English alphabet but there's a Germanic outlier behind the pickles."

"Bingo." Tony headed for the jar section, nodding for Emma to follow. "Wanna watch me touch it?"

Emma wanted to assume touching the rune wouldn't do anything dangerous, since this was supposed to be a game, and if people got hurt, it would be more trouble for Loki. And if anything, she was almost more worried about the food stores than herself. But she was also curious.

She kept her distance as best she could in the store room, focused on trying to hover steadily which was a tricky thing with wings, but where she could see what Tony was doing and the shelf where he'd found Loki's rune. "If you're sure you're ready."

Tony picked the jar off the rack and shoved it on top of a box of powdered milk since there wasn't much room for it to go, squinting at the unassuming piece of paper through his face plate.

"Jera...alright." He turned his head to Emma. "Elder Futhark. Migration Period stuff. I've been brushing up." Turning back to the paper, he held up an armored hand. "If I touch it, maybe we'll be get a bountiful harvest."

He pushed a single finger to it, and...nothing. Tony looked down and around, as if honestly expecting fields of wheat to rise through the floor.

Emma had done some reading on runes – she wasn't sure when, but it had been awhile – but they'd never made the same kind of sense to her or her precog as the tarot, and even the decks that used runes as part of their symbolism couldn't agree on loose correspondences.

She thought she remembered Jera being about cycles, jera::year. So harvest would make sense. Except for the part of reaping what you sow that was necessary for a cycle to come to completion, and they hadn't done much, had they?

Either way, whatever Tony was looking for didn't appear. "Or maybe we get what we deserve? That sounds like a more Loki interpretation of what little I remember about that rune."

"What, does he want us to dance harder for it? I'd argue that you should drum up a more difficult challenge than punish your monkeys for showing a little ingenuity." Tony scoffed. His arm reformed into a canon in short order, aimed right the rune. "Permission to poke a bit harder?"

[GP/EP] THE FLOOR IS LAVA

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