Yukari Quest III - A Z-Machine Adventure

[Hello Purvis]

> Step through, quickly!

>You step through it, but you can already feel that it is beginning to crumble and will need further attention. A particular aspect of the border, which you absolutely need to remain in a position best described as horizontal, is beginning to tip like a seesaw. You have enough time to use one of your tools to correct this before it is too late.

>_

[Yaersulf]

>Stout stick, I choose you!
>Use the hourglass to maintain its postion long enough to pass through safely.

[Hello Purvis]

>Stout stick, I choose you!
>Use the hourglass to maintain its postion long enough to pass through safely.

>You do this, and slow that particular border's tip, but you are unable to stop it or correct it.
>Emerging on the other side of the gap. you find yourself back in the cavernous place where you took your earliest steps. In particular, you are back in the chamber with many entrances and gravity that seems to apply itself differently depending on how you entered it. The faint purple glow from before still fills this room, and the feeling of instability is just as bad as it ever was. You notice, however, the light is growing brighter, the borders feel increasingly less stable.

>_

[Yaersulf]

>Could we use the pliers to close the gap to a dormant state that could be reopened or would that destroy the link completely?

[Hello Purvis]

>Could we use the pliers to close the gap to a dormant state that could be reopened or would that destroy the link completely?

>You cannot close it beyond its natural closed state without severing it.

>_

[Yaersulf]

>Could we use them to bring this gap to a state that wouldn't agitate the borders? Preferably without severing the link.

[Hello Purvis]

>Could we use them to bring this gap to a state that wouldn't agitate the borders? Preferably without severing the link.

>In theory, it has already returned itself to such a state. But the borders have been agitated already.

>_

[Kilgamayan]

> Close the gap behind us, if that hasn't happened naturally already.
> Are there any exits in this room that we can reach with our current gravitational orientation?

[Hello Purvis]

> Close the gap behind us, if that hasn't happened naturally already.
> Are there any exits in this room that we can reach with our current gravitational orientation?

>The gap has closed.
>There is an tunnel leading from here ahead and to the left a bit.

>_

[Kilgamayan]

> Head down that tunnel, back into the larger room with the promontory. These cavern halls had roots them, so be wary of those as we go.

[Hello Purvis]

> Head down that tunnel, back into the larger room with the promontory. These cavern halls had roots them, so be wary of those as we go.

>You make your way through the exit and into the tunnel that curves up toward the promontory. Taking care to avoid the thick roots growing in the wall, you find that they still manage to bother you on a basic level just as much as they did before. You are also aware that the purple glow is continuing to brighten behind you.
>You return to the larger chamber, and find that it is just as you remember it, with its corkscrewing bridge that extends into the darkness and the yawning black chasm above and below. The other four entrances are still there as well. Everything is still and quiet, and the air still chilly against your skin. You are again thankful that you were able to find your shoes.

>_

[Yaersulf]

>Go the way that leads to the statue room.

[Hello Purvis]

>Go the way that leads to the statue room.

>You head for the rightmost exit, dodging around the stalagmites, and begin to descend down the tunnel. Roots line the walls here, uncomfortably close to you. While they are immobile and for all purposes inert, after your experiences with them yesterday in reclaiming your pliers, you find yourself imagining that there is some kind of malevolence to them.
>Thankfully, that all remains in your imagination, and the tunnel soon widens to a chamber so large you cannot see the ceiling or far walls. The rock here still has it's odd fibrous quality, giving it a look that reminds you of various fungi. The outcroppings and protrusions are as you remember them, some bearing partial carvings of figures you cannot quite tell are humanoid or something else entirely... One familiar one is nearby, a face whose unfinished or weathered countenance seems to watch you.  In the distance, from an outcropping some yards tall, you can see the outline of what is either a two-headed thing looming over uncarved rock, or possibly two figures carved loosely into the same one. While you remember these things, you cannot help but feel they have moved slightly since you were last here. It is as if they had moved slightly in their rocky bases, but you can't quite tell where it would have happened.

>_

[O4rfish]

>Search for gap in this room.

[Hello Purvis]

>Search for gap in this room.

>You proceed inward, carefully picking your way around the strangely fibrous protrusions of stone, and trying not to pay too much heed to the rough carvings upon them, lest you convince yourself further that they are moving ever so subtly. It is still difficult to tell whether they are unfinished works, or carvings so old that time has withered them away. You pass by a carving of half of a lower back of a young woman, a lone carved hand massaging it as though relieving soreness, then a carving of androgynous pair of legs that disappear up into the rock before meeting with the very edges of fingertips hanging close to them. Soon, as you pass by a carving of two hands meeting their fingertips to make a kind of diamond shape, you come to the part of the gallery where the fabric of space has grown more loose and abnormal. This passes quickly, and you begin to catch sight of the gap, so to speak. By this point, you have come far enough into the chamber to lose sight of the side walls, leaving a feeling that you are outside somehow, in perfect darkness. This gap is quite spread out and disparate; without your pliers you would have been unable to open it.

>_

[O4rfish]

>Examine gap.

[Hello Purvis]

>Examine gap.

>You examine the gap, but you aren't really able to learn more. It seems reasonably stable, at least.

>_

[Yaersulf]

>Open gap with pliers.
>Standard stick test.

[O4rfish]

>How much belonging do spatial gaps in general have to their surroundings? Do they occur naturally, and are there factors which influence their production?
Sorry if this question has been answered before. There's a lot more exposition for Yukari than for anyone else, and we don't have a wiki to look it up on.

[Hello Purvis]

>How much belonging do spatial gaps in general have to their surroundings? Do they occur naturally, and are there factors which influence their production?

>Three dimensional space tends not to have a strong influence on their formation. The factors that influence them tend to be further imbedded into the background of reality. However, where two significant borders meet, based in normal space or not, there's is a strong chance to find a gap. Significant, however, is a very subjective descriptor. In this place, however, the borders are so messy and slipshod that its largely impossible to predict where gaps would be; not to mention there are much much fewer than what you would encounter outside.

>Open gap with pliers.
>Standard stick test.

>You open the gap, and place the stick through it. The stick comes back unharmed.

>_

[Kilgamayan]

> She who hesitates is lost! Step on through.

[Hello Purvis]

> She who hesitates is lost! Step on through.

>You step through!
>Emerging, you immediately notice the monolithic structures that surround you, extending hundreds of feet into the air. Made of steel, glass, and concrete, their blocky frames are clearly of outside world design. Just as clearly, they are crumbling away; their stony exteriors broken, their glass shattered in so many places, and their steel rent and rusted. Nothing here is intact; everything is broken. You've seen devastation like this in the wake of modern wars, but you do not know if you've ever seen anything so utter and thorough. No matter where you look, there is only devastation. The air is is cool and smells faintly of dust, smoke, and rust.
>Your eyes are drawn upward as you seek the tops of these ruined structures, only to find more buildings, broken and destroyed. They stretch across the sky, parallel to the ground, nothing but layers of shattered outer world structures. Here and there you can see roads of black stone crisscrossing this broken mass of buildings; cracked and ruined. It stretches across the sky as far are you can see, as though someone had folded the land upon itself like a piece of paper. Looking down, you see that you are standing on the crumbling facade of yet around building, running horizontally. Much as the sky is filled with and composed of ruined buildings, so too is the ground. Other buildings that rise vertically are rooted into this surface of broken monolithic structures, as though it were the ground itself. In the distance, sandwiched between the sky and surface of broken buildings, you can make out the horizon, which is red as the setting sun.

>_

[O4rfish]

>Have we heard of the Infernal Battlefield of Acheron?

[Hello Purvis]

>Have we heard of the Infernal Battlefield of Acheron?

>No.

[Kilgamayan]

> Is there no visible ground?
> Are the environmental borders as shot here as they are everywhere else?

[O4rfish]

>Have we heard of Christopher Nolan?

[Hello Purvis]

> Is there no visible ground?
> Are the environmental borders as shot here as they are everywhere else?

>As far as you can tell, there is nothing traditional ground here. You cannot see any soil or the like, just colossal ruined buildings that stretch horizontally.
>The borders here are as bad as anyplace else.

>Have we heard of Christopher Nolan?

>I haven't heard of Christopher Nolan.

>_

>_

[Kilgamayan]

> Look around. Is there anything that stand out in the sea of destruction?
> Take a peek inside the closest shattered window.

[Hello Purvis]

> Look around. Is there anything that stand out in the sea of destruction?
> Take a peek inside the closest shattered window.

>It's hard to tell what stands out, looking around in the immediate area. You stand on the concrete facade of a building that stretches ahead and behind as far as you can see.  The standing buildings, you note, don't all seem to fit into the neat patterns that outside cities tend to have. Many do, but then one or two stand out in the middle of what would be a street. Piles of rubble and twisted steel litter the side of the building you stand on, some high enough to loom over you. You aren't sure if you would trust many of the vertical buildings' structural integrity enough to spend much time in them.
>Looking to the left, which you decide corresponds to west, you note a chasm between the edges of two horizontal buildings, some distance away. Ahead, to the north, you can see a large, half crumbled building that stands in the middle of the way a few dozen yards ahead. Eastward, the buildings are too close together, to the point they practically form a wall. To the south, the way is clear, save for some piles of debris.
>You look through the nearest broken window, which is on the ground not too far from where you stand. The window is a lined with glass shards that you would rather not touch if you can help it. Inside, you can see a darkened room littered with broken furniture. They rest on what would technically be a wall about twenty feet below, but it seems that gravity holds here and the debris has fallen like it normally should. For whatever passes for normally should in this place, anyways. You can make out a desk, some chairs, and the like among the rubble, as well as strange outer world appliances that you can barely make sense of. Nothing seems to be in one that you can see at a glance.

>_

[Yaersulf]

>Is the building we are on connected to other buildings in such a way as to allow us to walk between them?
>If so, is this true for the majority of the buildings?