[X] Plan: Pig Is Door
"Homura, have your birds check the dining hall from the floor beneath it. If we're right and they find something..."
You find something. You send one of your birds into the room beneath the dining hall and up through the hole in the floor-Pig, and "It's like a completely different building." Just looking through your bird familiar's eyes, you can see that you've come up, not from the room beneath an opulent dining hall, but from a dark staircase and entered into a concrete-walled room. A harsh but pale green light illuminates the room from thin beams running along the lower third of the walls surrounding you, and above "your head" you can see a network of metallic pipes lining the ceiling. It reminds you of what you saw down in Sidonia's workshop several months ago, but of a more modern and cleaner, almost sterile, construction. Like you're in a creepy hospital that's somehow both abandoned and still operating at the same time, rather than the dingy Tetanus-riddled basem*nt of a madwoman.
There's a heavy metal door blocking your bird's path, hermetically sealed and with several tumbler locks that you couldn't possibly hope to telepathically guide your bird through picking. So, you're forced to turn back, and send your bird out to find you by returning through the dark stairs it came up from. But upon sending your bird down the dark stairwell, you find that it hasn't returned to the room underneath the dining hall: it's instead found itself lost in the darkness. It's still alive, you know that much. You're still receiving mental feedback from it, meaning you know you're still seeing through its eyes. But what you're seeing is pitch black, and when you try to turn your bird around to head back to the light, you find that there is none. Your bird is trapped for the foreseeable future.
"There's a heavy door we'll have to get past to reach Kim's workshop," you say. "On top of that, when I tried to turn my bird around, it instead got lost in a completely black stairwell." You look to Medusa, adding "Hopefully we don't get split up in the course of dealing with Kim. We'll need your ability to guide us without sight if we ever have to turn ourselves around once we're in."
There's a chorus of "Of course it would be a trap" going around the team as you speak, but it's Kirika who first speaks up to you directly. "So… What do we do then?" she asks. "Do we just go charging in? Or do you have a super-smart plan to get us through this without getting lost?"
"I have a plan," you whisper to Kirika. You want to not make it obvious what you're planning, to hopefully retain some measure of the element of surprise. "Have Berserker use his Noble Phantasm to turn into a duplicate of Magnusson. We'll pretend to be bringing him back to Kim in exchange for my daughters. Then, we'll spring him once his guard is down."
Kirika nods her head, but you've got your doubts about the plan even as she's telepathically giving her orders to Berserker. For one, you doubt Kim will seriously buy your attempted ruse. He's arrogant and showy, but he's not an idiot. But there's another layer to your plan besides what you've told Kirika: Knowing that Kim is arrogant and showy, you're actually hoping for him to catch your ruse, so that when he gloats to you about how he saw right through your plan from the very beginning, you can use that as an opening to attack him while his guard is down.
"Ah~" Berserker – now Magnusson – runs a hand through his golden locks, his voice dripping with poisoned honey as he asks "How do I look? Hopefully I've managed to dazzle you all with my impeccable countenance?" The response is silence, so Berserker gives a very showy snort, adding "Fine, be that way! I'll just have to keep at it until you admit I'm better-looking than you are."
"Sorry," Kirika says. "But even at her frumpiest Oriko's wa~ay sexier than you are." Kirika shoots Oriko a seductive wink, adding "But then, you'd know a thing or two about being gay, yeah? You should know better than to try your luck with a bunch of gay girls."
"Well, there were men in the audience, the last time I checked," says Berserker, eyeing Archer and Saber with an equally seductive glare. "I suppose the tanned one is a bit too happy with the wife, but supposing this hunk of a man were interested…?"
"Knock it off," Saber snarls. "We get the point. You pull off a good impression of that creep. Now let's get serious about this and move out already." Saber is about to do just that, move out, but he stops and asks Archer "I don't suppose you or your master have a plan for what happens next, do you?"
"Tomoe-san will tie Berserker up," you respond. "For everyone else, I want anti-illusion magic up front, vulnerables in the rear. With any luck, this should be the last fight of the day, so let's all try to keep on our toes now that we know Kim is desperate."
Your team, with Saber, Archer, Lancer and Assassin up front navigating, moves through the physical and illusory space inside of Kim's opulent mansion. There still should have been a doll sitting at the base of the spiralling stairs leading to the upper floors, right? Even with two trackers and two illusion-breaker up front helping to navigate through the mansion's corridors, it still feels easy to get lost, either in its opulent, distracting splendour, or in the mental and physical tricks the mansion plays on your mind and your body. Locating the room underneath the dining hall is tricky, almost feeling substantially more so than trying to find the dining hall, but eventually you do manage the task.
"No wonder I couldn't sense a hidden entrance in here," Medusa says as she cranes her head up to the ceiling. The hole melted through the Pig still makes the dining hall above visible, even if you know it's hiding the entrance to another part of the building. "Thanks to the Pig's presence, it would have been impossible for me to smell anything else even if the door had been right under my nose." "Best to keep on our guard. I smell something foul, and it isn't the Grief radiating from Akemi. It's something else… It feels... Unlike anything I've ever felt before. I can't describe it. All I know is that it's pure evil." The Pig – as well as the rest of Kim's 'curse-breaker' puppets – must have been the "pure evil" Medusa spoke of sensing.
"Clever," adds Archer. "Hiding your hidden entrance even from senses that can't be tricked, by concealing it with something even more obvious. I wonder how much longer we could have gone without figuring it out if Kim hadn't sicced those things on us."
"Maybe we would have gotten lucky and found out where the other end of that hidden passage Homura's bird got lost in came out of?" Kirika suggests. "I mean, she said her familiars that are like creepy little versions of us found their way into Kim's workshop, right? Maybe they figured out the other other way in?"
"They better have," says Kyouko. "'Cause otherwise, we're gunna need ta figure out a way up through the f*cking floor, first." Kyouko first looks to you, but as if quickly dashing whatever idea she first had, she turns instead to Hitomi, asking her "Hey, think you can give us a lift?"
"Certainly." Hitomi kneels down and touches her hands to the floor. In an instant, a spiral staircase lifts up from the floor, twirling and twirling until it pokes through the hole in the floor-Pig. In ten, or twenty, or however many years it takes for you and Madoka to agree to have children, will they be playing 'The floor is Pig' instead of 'The floor is lava'? Hitomi steps aside, and like an elegant maid gives a curtsey for everyone else as she presents her creation. "Ladies and gentlemen, if you would please proceed up the stairs in an orderly fashion," before adding just for you "Akemi-san, I hope it's safe for us to pass so close to the, er, hole? How did it melt, by the way?"
"I shot a supercharged Grief arrow at it, and that caused it to melt," you respond. "I hope it's safe. It didn't seem to have any adverse effects on us when we passed through it in the opposite direction."
True to your recollection of passing through the Pig in the other direction, nothing happens to you or to your teammates as you ascend the stairs up through the Pig. You don't see anything out of the ordinary as you're looking up through the hole, but once you pass that invisible barrier going up, that's when everything changes. Reality melts around you, and the opulent mansion scenery gives way to the cold concrete of the abandoned-hospital-like room you saw through your bird's eyes. It's a tight fit, squeezing everyone into the entrance before the metal door, and you want to make sure nobody is forced backwards down the stairs, lest they become trapped in whatever darkness your bird stumbled into.
"Tomoe-san, ribbons up," you whisper. "If we get separated once we're on the other side, I want to make sure nobody gets lost."
"Right." You admit to being a little hesitant to let Tomoe-san use her ribbons on everyone, but your concerns about getting lost in whatever last nightmare Kim has cooked up to guard his innermost sanctum outweigh the risks of letting Tomoe-san wrap her razor-sharp ribbon-wire around you. "Everyone, let's try our best."
You nod your head and "All right, Berserker, it's showtime." With everything riding on the performance the captive Berserker is meant to put on for Kim, you hold your breath. If it's good enough that it actually fools Kim, that'll be a win. If it's bad enough that Kim takes the time to gloat over 'seeing through' your plan, that's also a win. The only way it's not a win is if Berserker's performance is so bad that Kim doesn't even acknowledge the attempt.
With everything riding on Berserker's performance, Archer knocks against the thick metal door, and he calls out "Kim, open up. We've got someone you want, and you've got something we want in return. Let's make a trade." There is no response. The door doesn't open, and Kim, wherever he is, says nothing. Archer tries again, knocking just a little harder this time as he calls out "Did you hear me? I've got your buddy here with me. Let the weird little children-looking things go and we'll hand him over." Still nothing. Berserker tries a third time, knocking just a bit more furiously as he calls out "Damnit, Kim, why aren't you answering! I've brought your stupid little partner Magnusson back for you! Now open this damn door so we can both get what we want and go home already!"
But still, there is nothing.
[ ] Wat do? (write-in)
