theairlock | Fifth Trial

[You get a little time after your investigation is over, but not too long. PAL gets bored easily and doesn't like to be kept waiting, after all.

When everyone has gathered at the elevators, the one going down turns on automatically. It...it looks like you're taking a leap of faith into an elevator shaft, not gonna lie. But the first person to step in finds that it's a carefully-balanced anti-gravity field made to just shoot you down and deposit you gently at the end of a long hallway. Like a walk-through aquarium, the walls and ceiling are all made of thick glass, giving you an even better view of the stars outside.

You're led to a wide-open area, empty except for a circle of podiums in its center. They've changed from last week, with the three previously empty podiums replaces with greyscale portraits of everyone you've lost this time around, including Ardyn and the Doctor. If anyone remembers where Jamie's portrait was in the simulation, however, that spot is now where Xander is meant to stand. The walls here are equally transparent, and they seem to have lines of large hatches going along them, as if this is where one might park one's small short-journey craft when getting ready to go on vacation to a galaxy far far away. Shame you don't know anything about those.

You already know what you're here to do. You'd best be getting along with it.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ Very quietly, from next to him. ]

Junpei...

[He can't meet her eyes, arms wrapped around himself. He's not that much older than her, really. Not far removed at all from the kind of love that'd bring down a storm.]