fandomtownies | Around Fandom, Tuesday Morning

Well... that was weird. Norman had set out for work this morning, like every Tuesday morning, expecting... sunshine or something. Since it was spring, and all. The big orange dome in the sky? It made his eyes twitchy just to look at, like there was something of death behind its very existence, and if there was one thing Norman was hard-wired to notice, it was death.

"Well," he muttered to himself, grimacing a little as he peered up at it, "that thing has to go."

And Prompto had just been getting starting on his usual morning jog when this whole thing went down. Or, err, up, he supposed. Either way, he went pretty quickly from enjoying the beginning of what seemed like a really nice day, was thinking of maybe heading to the preserve for some shots later, feeling glad he hadn't decided to go back to Insomnia for the week after all, and the next thing he knew, he was tripping over his own two feet, stumbling into a bush, because what the fuck?

He was still picking twigs out of his hair when he came across Norman...almost bumping into him, really, as his eyes kept training upwards at the sky. Or lack thereof.

"It's not even a very good forcefield," he offered his own muttering. "Like, no style, no finesse, guady as hell..."

And it definitely didn't feel like anything good. And you knew it had to be bad when the boy who'd lived his whole life up until recently underneath a protective dome was concerned.

Still, he offered Norman a faint smile, the one he always pulled out when he was trying to mostly convince himself not to panic or start worrying. "Hey, Norman," he said. "What's up? Besides, I mean..."

His finger lifted, poking at the air just slightly.

Norman glanced at Prompto, offering him a smile right back that seemed to be coming from more or less the same place. This was fine, right? No big deal, just a little bit of giant horror bubble right there.

"That kind of seems like it's it, doesn't it?" He flicked those faceted blue eyes back up toward the dome again, made a face, and squinted a bit. "Unless you've noticed anything else that I haven't?"

Well. Anything else that Norman and a few spirits passing by that he'd quizzed for information had noticed. They didn't seem to have any more idea about this than he did.

Prompto shook his head a little, brow creasing with a frown, and he at least tried not too look up again. He knew it was there; it's not like gawking at it was going to help anything. "Probably not, dude," he admitted. "I mean, it's weird, right? This isn't, like, a normal thing here, is it? Big ol' domes just...fwoop...popping up outta no where?"

He was new-ish, sure, but not that new anymore.

"I mean, there was a wall of blackness last year when the fish got mad," Norman offered. "And that didn't mean anything good."

He chewed his lip a little.

"This thing is kind of like that, I think. I, um, I think there's something bad," something tied in rather closely to the dead, "behind it."

You know. Said totally casually, like just anybody ought to be able to see that sort of thing at a glance.

Yeah, nothing about wall of blackness seemed to be a good thing. Prompto's chewed his lower lip for a moment, looking u--no, no, don't just keep looking up at it, Prompto, it was going to just start driving you a little crazy, not being able to see the sky. At least Insomnia's sheild was transclucent, at least you could still see the sky, at least it didn't make you suddenly feel like the sky had just closed itself in on you tightly...

Funny, how something so big could still make you feel so claustrophobic all of a sudden. Prompto started fidgeting, digging into the corner of his thumbnail with his teeth as he thought. Or tried to think, anyway.

"So maybe it's here to protect us," he said, though the words tasted wrong even as he said them. He knew what protection felt like, and this ain't it. Insomnia's sheild, when you happened to even notice it, made you feel warm and safe. This one, so obtrusive you couldn't even help notice it, felt oppressive and ugly. So he swallowed and said the other side of that thought.

"Or to keep us in."

Ding-ding-ding! That one tasted right. Which was funny, because it definitely didn't settle well in his stomach.

"Which you could argue," he ventured, his voice rising in the pitch of despreately attempted hopefulness, "is maybe a waaaay of protecting us? From whatever bad miiiight be behind it?"

"Or whatever is on the other side of it is afraid of us. Why would it want us to stay away otherwise, right?" Norman reasoned, frowning a little. And then looking at Prompto, his expression solidifying into something determined as his mind was made. "I'm going to take it down."

A pause.

"Somehow."

Yeah, it didn't take too long at all to put together why something bad out there would want to keep all the bad-assery on the island in here, and that slight pause, that faint admission of uncertainty after so much determination, made Prompto grin faintly. He even laughed a little.

"Well," he said, folding his arms in front of him and tilting his head thoughtfully, "you're not doing it by yourself. But, yeah, this thing's gotta go. If it was someone here doing it, they'd let everyone know, right?"

And if they didn't, well, then, that was their own damn fault. Communication was important, people.

"so then it's gotta be someone out there, and that someone out there should know better than to just go throwing up rando shields over people without at least a warning first. So...." His nose scrunched up, the confidence he'd been able to muster slipping a little. "...do you think....I mean....this is kind of the opposite of my thing. My job's going to be protecting a forcefield one day, not taking it down..."

But maybe he could figure out a way to reverse-engineer this shit. Ooooh. That was a cool idea...

"Protecting a forcefield means you have to know the weak points that need protection the most, right?" Norman offered Prompto a little grin at that. "So think of this as a valuable educational experience, maybe."

He looked up at the shield again, made a face, and then reached up to rub at his eyes.

"I was headed to the magic shop anyway. Want to walk with me and we can see if there's anything there we can use to take this thing out?"

"Good plan," said Prompto, nodding, gesturing for Norman to lead the way although, obviously, he knew where it was, and he started chewing on his lower lip again as he thought and walked. That lip was going to be raw and bleeding by the time this was over, probably, but it would be saved at least a little bit as he decided he might as well think outloud, bandy around a few ideas and see if anything stuck out.

"I mean," he rambled, "this thing is way different than what we have at home. You can tell just by how it feels, and that's before even how it looks different, too. So who even knows what caused it? But I do know...um, well, Insomnia's shield is maintained by a crystal. Like a giant magical crystal infused with the power of generations and generations of Lucian royal blood. I think..." he hoped, and he grinned a little, snagging a small bit of optimism about the whole thing, "...that what we're dealing with here is definitely pretty small potatoes compared to that."

"It's got to be, right?" Norman was digging into his pocket for his keys as soon as the magic shop came into view. He glanced over his shoulder at Prompto thoughtfully as he went. "If the thing maintaining it is a crystal but this thing was set up by someone off the island, it's probably out there, right?"

So, there wasn't much they could do about that in particular, provided that was the case. He pursed his lips a little as he mulled it over some more, walking up to the door and unlocking it.

"But maybe we could use other crystals to kind of... confuse the signal or something? Like putting mirrors in front of a laser to direct the beam somewhere else?"

"Or maybe we can just try blowing it up with a laser," said Prompto, who mostly just wanted to picture blowing things up with a laser, and he laughed a little. "I can definitely see that going south real quick if that thing's laser-proof, though. I'm not sure I want to be here to find that out the hard way."

His smile softened a little, though, breathing out to chase off some of the general icky feeling about all this as he looked around. "But, yeah, I mean, if a forcefield can be maintained by crystals some places, why couldn't they be taken down by them, too, y'know? And you guys have lots of crystals here, don't you?" Probably safer to try that than lasers."

Although not nearly as potentially fun.

"Anyway, I'm fresh out of lasers," Norman replied, smiling wryly and shrugging his shoulders. "But crystals, we have."

A pause.

"Even if some of them are kind of banana scented."

Still.

Thanks, Mae.

For a brief moment, Prompto sort of perked up and he looked about ready to say something before his actual brain caught up with his stomach and advised against it. Then his head just tilted, he opened his mouth to say something else, closed his mouth, and then shook his head.

And asked it anyway.

"Does the banana scent help them be more powerful or something?"

"No, we just had someone mixing potions in here that really shouldn't have been mixed," Norman sighed. "But maybe if we use those ones, we'll end up with banana rain or something."

He did not figure that would actually happen. But nobody was rushing in to buy the banana quartz, so what was the harm in it? He made his way over to one of the display shelves and picked up a nice, hefty chunk of it, clear with a faint yellow tint, and held it up for Prompto to see.

"How does this look? Promising? If you want to look at the crystals and pick some really good ones, I can start flipping through books to see if I can find some kind of... I don't know... disruption spell or something."

Prompto shrugged a shoulder. Banana didn't seem to be a bad place to start, really, considering he had no idea where to start. He didn't actually know anything about any of this stuff, but it wasn't like he was about to let that stop him from trying.

So he headed over to start looking over the others. Maybe just pick out the prettiest? The shiniest? Or the opposite: the real power was in the ones that wouldn't catch your eye so easily. Maybe if there were other scented ones? Maybe if they tried a whole rainbow of them, but then what? No one here had Lucian blood to set them off, but...

"Yeah," he mused, "there's got to be a spell or something, otherwise it's just a bunch of shiny rocks. Unless we can activate it through the sheer power of will, but we're down at least a few scrappy members of a ragtag team and an unexpected adventure to bring us all together to make that work."

"I can be plenty scrappy on my own," Norman mused, flipping through a book that fell close to hand. "But... you're probably right. My power of will isn't half bad, but it could use at least a good set of runes or a chant or something backing it up."

"For all the stuff in those books about summoning daemons," Prompto murmured, a little surly about it, shaking his head, as he diligently sorted out crystals: definitely setting up a rainbow of the shiniest and brightest over here. There was a small pile of blue-ish, transclucent shards that he was just drawn to over there. And a few that he'd sniffed and maybe smelled like other various fruits or maybe that was all in his head and his stomach needed to calm down right now over there, "there's got to be something at least about magic shields or domes or forcefields or else I'm gonna suggest whoever's in charge of stock here really should look into diversifying."

"That would be me," Norman replied, smiling wryly. "But this book has a whole chapter on wards and shields, so that looks kind of promising."

He held up the book and started flipping past the table of contents to find the section on shielding and protective barriers.

"There aren't as many for disrupting barriers in particular, but we could probably reverse-engineer... something?"

"I am always down for reverse-engineering something!" Prompto said, bouncing a little at the prospect, even if his reverse-engineering always had to do with, you kow, machines and guns and gadgets and a lot less to do with magic. Feeling he'd sorted through the random crystals as best he could for now, though, he took that bouncing to bring him over to Norman and the book for a better look.

"Like, what's it say? If anything, the easiest way to reverse-engineer something is just to sort of flip the process, you know? Start at the end and work your way to the beginning. Doesn't seem like it would hurt to try at least...."

It should be noted that that last bit dragged off a little into the murky territory of Prompto's brain that had absolutely no trouble thinking of the various different ways it possibly could hurt to try...buuuut....clearly, it wasn't enough to actually not try.

Norman shrugged a little, holding the book out to Prompto.

"Some people say that half of what makes magic work is the belief in the fact that it will. Do you figure we can run this backwards using crystals to disrupt the shield? I have a pretty good feeling about it."

Prompto, head tilted, took the book to look it over, half-expecting it to all by some mystical arcane nonsense that he wouldn't be able to make heads or tails out of, but found it refreshingly comprehensible, and that alone made him grin. But he did give it a good read-through, making sure he did understand, already putting pieces together (backwards) in his head, which bobbed along as he did it, the rest of his starting to bob a bit, too.

"Yeah," he said, with a small breath of a laugh, and then a bigger one, "yeah, me, too, buddy! I mean, totally! It actually seems like it's be really simple to do."

Too simple, maybe? Nah, whatever. Don't know if you didn't try, right?

"And, hey, if half the battle is just believing its going to work, then I've got a great feeling about it!"

"See, we've got this," Norman said, and then, after a moment of hesitation, he held up a hand for a high five.

... That was something that people did, right?

High fives were totally what people did! And Prompto's face burst out into an immediate beaming smile as he met that high five with gusto.

Followed promptly by an enthusiastically encouraging and perfectly platonic slap on Norman's butt.

Because that was a thing that Prompto did and he kind of just got caught up in the moment. He was just coming off of a week full of butt-slapping training goodness, and it was still very much in his system.

"We got this!" he cheered, handing the book back to Norman because he was clearly the more magical type between the two of them, and he bounced over to collect the crystals. The rainbow ones. He had the best feeling about those ones, really. "To the causeway? We should probably be as close to the thing as we can get if we're going to try to take it down, right?"

Norman had not seen that butt-slap coming, and blinked a bit in surprise at it, pulling the book to his chest in a momentary fit of confusing.

Wait. Wait, was this a thing that dudes did? Was that a friend thing?

"Uh... yeah! Let's get to the causeway. If we can get these crystals set up by the edge of it, that's a stronger signal!"

It was not a wifi connection, boys.

But...but...magic was kind of like wifi, right? Only with elements?

Look, he couldn't even use magic in his world unless he was connected directly to the prince, so it totally made sense in Prompto's narrative head.

"Exactly!" said Prompto, cradling the crystals in his arm carefully, realizing this might not work too great, and thinking he needed more clothes with better pocket space. "Line these bad boys up, go through the motions and words, and viola! No more weird oppressive done shield thinking. Or at least hopefully no explosions. Or maybe an explosion to bust through the things, I don't know, but I'm willing to find out."

And it was interesting, too, wasn't it, how not even once in this whole conversation did it occur to them to maybe just go and ask someone. Clearly, two teenage boys with no idea what they were doing had it handled just fiiiiine.

Hey! They had a book! And belief! That had to make this theory sound, right?

One of them was going to end up smelling like a banana for a month, at this rate.

"Well," Norman said, reaching for a box that looked big enough to dump all the crystals in, and then, on a whim, grabbing some salt and a piece of chalk, "I wouldn't be opposed to an explosion to bust through the dome, anyway. Just so long as we're not caught up in it."

He held the box out to Prompto.

Prompto dumped the crystals, perhaps not as carefully as he should have, into the box.

And then added the shiny blue ones.

And then the banana ones.

And then took up the box. "How much distance do you think we can get between ourselves and the crystals before we set them off?" he asked. "Maybe we can do it like on a trigger or something so there's a good distance between us and the shield, just in case."

"Like..." Norman looked thoughtful as he headed back toward the door, book, chalk and salt in tow. "Maybe a snap of the fingers or something?"

That's right, boys. Just Thanos that shield away.

"Oooooh," said Prompto, following easily with his box of somewhat aromatic crystal, "I likey. Stylish. Assertive. Adds a nice bit of flair. We set these beauties up, reverse the ritual, say the words, take a good few steps back, and..." He snapped his fingers as best as he could while also still holding onto a box.

"Bam. Done. No more shield. Or blown up shield. Or possibly some other third thing we haven't thought of yet."

Like disappearing only half the shield.

Honestly, the more they talked about it and the closer they got to actually doing it, the more perfect everything about this whole plan sounded.

Which could only be a good thing, right? Right.

Norman was squinting a bit as they headed toward the causeway, two dumb boys and their collection of crystals and bad ideas, the shadow of the shield looming overhead. Yeah, just looking at it was making his eyes itch, and the more he looked, the more he needed it gone, like, yesterday.

"I mean, that's pretty easy," he decided. "Actually, that's probably the most straightforward plan... pretty much ever."

There was no way this could backfire!

Edited 2019-04-30 17:10 (UTC)

Yeah, it really didn't take long at all once they were outside of the shop to be reminded just how awful that thing was, sending a creep straight up Prompto's spine. He rolled his shoulders and shifted a little with the effort to chase it away again, frowning at it again, remembering how if even he felt the heebie-jeebies about it...

"What's that they say?" he mused. "The best answer is usually the most simple? Something like that..."

He wasn't even really feeling worried about what had put it up anymore. He just wanted it gone and, with it, the feeling that they were slowly, slowly being closed in by it. It was probably in the exact same spot as it was when they'd reached the shop, sure, but what if...

"Blech." Yeah, the full-body shiver that went with that thought required a sound effect to go along with it, it was that strong.

"My sentiments exactly," Norman agreed, wrinkling his nose and shuddering a bit. "So," he was holding his breath as he stepped onto the causeway, squaring his shoulders and steeling himself as he made his way toward the barrier, "let's get started and get rid of this thing, huh?"

Getting closer to it, Prompto just sneered at it for a moment and was half-tempted to just start lobbing the crystals at it. He both wanted to touch it and felt his skin crawl at the mere idea of being thise close to it. So he was just going to ignore it as best he could for now, kneeling down beside the box of cystals as he set them down.

"Let's," he said, brushing his hair futilely away from his eyes for a moment before reaching in, "so, do we need to lay anything out before we set down the crystal? Like runes or markings or anything, or...since we're reversing it...crystals first, then runes? Or...words, crystals, runes, back the fuck up, and...snap?"

More your thing than Prompto's, really, Norman, but he was ready to take whatever you said and do it.

Norman's brow creased as he looked at the book, reading the ritual from front to back a few times, considering. And then nodding a little.

"Crystals first," he decided. "Usually there'd be a rune first, and that might be difficult to do with the crystals in the way, but I can pour salt for that, or just use a glowing line trick one of my teachers taught me."

Bob, look what you'd done.

"...Coooool," said Prompto, with a faint, crooked grin that seemed to come with actually realizing that they were seriously about to do some sweet ass magic (maybe) and actually do something (perhaps) about this stupid barrier. So Prompto bounced a little in his crouch, reaching into the box for the colorful crystals.

"Right, crystals first!" he said, putting them carefully in reverse order of the spectrum in his best estimation of the shape that he'd seen from the book and, satisfied with how they looked, he stood back up and stepped back over by Norman, admiring his work a little bit as if he'd done something way more complex than just setting rocks down on the ground in a certain order.

"You're up, buddy. Gotta admit, that glowing line trick is something I think I'm gonna have to see."

"It's, uh, it's really nothing special," Norman replied, smiling crookedly as he reached a finger down and, looking at the book for reference, started to trace a pale green glowing line - the same pale green of the orbs that danced around any ghosts he saw with those weird eyes of his - that hung in the air just overtop the crystals. Bob's had always been more vibrant, orange and full of far more oomph than Norman's greenish ones, but Norman had gotten fairly good at the trick, and his suspended light tracings would hold until something disturbed them, or fade slowly over the course of another twenty minutes or so.

He was kind of proud of that.

There was, he had to note with some wry amusement, a moment where the rune looked a little more like a duck than the intricate pattern in the book, but apparently that was what happened when you traced it out backwards, and he didn't let it deter him from finishing the job, stepping back to admire his handiwork.

"Usually the crystals would be on top of it," he noted, "but maybe this is better for a reversal spell anyway."

"Totally better," Prompto agreed with an emphatic nod, his grin only getting somehow bigger because, sure, maybe it was totally amatuer and kind of pulled out of their butts, but he felt they were doing a really great job over here. "Everything in reverse if we want to do an anti-shield, right? So I guess...we can slowly start backing up, you start saying the words or whatever, and when we got it, we snap, and that's....that."

Or nothing at all would happen, he realized that was still a possibility, but how cool would it be if something actually did happen??

Norman nodded, dusting his hand off against... the book, mostly, as he started to back away.

"I wonder if I need to say the words backwards, too," he mused. "Maybe I can just say them in Pig-Latin or something."

He was, for the record, joking about the Pig-Latin.

"...what's Pig-Latin?" asked Prompto, who didn't even know what regular Latin was, which was really ironic considering that's what his name was, as he carefully started backing up, too, checking over his shoulder to make sure he wasn't about to trip on anything as he moved.

And you may have been joking, Norman, buuuuut....it's not like it was any more of a ridiculous suggestion than anything else so far.

"It'sway away ademay upway anguagelay atthay ustjay indkay ofway amblesscray ordsway upway away itbay," Norman explained. And then smiled crookedly. "You just take the syllables of words and rearrange them, and then add 'ay' to the end. It's kind of fun once you get into the swing of it."

He looked back at the book.

"Like, say," he cleared his throat, threw up one hand, and pointed at the barrier, speaking in a low and ominous tone:

Otectpray ethay islandway everyway ayday, omfray ethay eservepray otay ethay ausewaycay,
Omfray ealtay eertay otay argelay alotway, inway uddingpay ainray orway unsay at'sthay othay,
Ithway ystalcray owerpay eatecray irectday, away ubblebay erehay otay andstay erectway,
Otay andstay untilway ethay angerday oesgay-- owhay onglay? Onlyway ethay emlinsgray owknay!

He hardly noticed as a wind kicked up around him, mostly just... lost in trying to translate the text to Pig-Latin in the first place.

[OOC: Never let me write poetry. Translation can be seen on the mouse-over if you're a masochist.]

Well. It definitely sounded all magical and arcane, whatever it was, and Prompto's brows lifted a little as Norman managed to get into a steady cadence with the words. He did notice the wind picking up; it was kind of hard not to, and he was pretty sure the crystals were starting to glow, too, or maybe he was just being influenced by the whole...everything of it all, but when Norman reached that final part, which, even without translating it in his head, had a certain of finale to it, he sucked in a deep breath, lifted his hand, and, not even daring to breathe back out again, snapped his fingers.

As Prompto's fingers snapped, a small star appeared on the dome's far plane, like a crack in a windshield. It certainly sounded like one, too.

Quickly, the cracks spread, cutting through the vibrant orange. The inside of the star crumbled, and then the crumbling rolled outward like a wave, building momentum.

Around Fandom, Tuesday Morning

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