peterverse | ooh, shiny!

mrsparkle posting in

Sadde is running.

There is no particular reason why he is doing this. He just hasn't really done much of anything properly fun for the past five years, at least for the sake of having fun, so the wind in his hair and the occasional glimmer his skin projects on random surfaces when he's hit by the sun are enough.

Until he finds a key.

He doesn't actually say "Ooh, shiny!" but he does think it.

He comes to a halt and peers at it. It's on the ground, half-hidden by grass, and there's a tree right over there that would have obscured his view had he been running a foot to the right. But as it is, he found the key. It is a very small key, as if sized for a child to hold, and it has a certain shine to it that's not quite like any other keys he's seen during his vampire life.

He explores a radius of about a mile around the key. There seem to be no houses or cabins or mansions or anything like that where such a key might have come from. He returns to it and peers at it, then shrugs and picks it up.

He doesn't pocket it, though, because the moment he touches the key he's quite certain it's a magical key.

It doesn't actually do anything, it doesn't explode or shoot fireworks or glow, there's no mysterious voice saying that he has found the Artifact of Doom or anything like that. He just- knows.

When he straightens up, he notices how he knows it. There seems to be a certain sense produced by the key, a feeling of sorts, that shifts and moves about as the key is moved through the air. He waves it around a bit, and reaches two conclusions: one, most spots in the air don't feel like anything; two, what a spot in the air feels like depends on the spot itself, and if he waves the key around a given spot multiple times he feels the same thing each time.

O-kay, this sounds fun. Now what does the key actually do?

...well, it's a key, presumably it opens doors. It's a magic key - does it open all doors?

After thirty minutes - during which he runs to the closest town, finds the least observed door, and tries to open it with the key, followed by several further attempts on several different doors - he has determined that the key does not in fact seem to have the property of opening all doors.

He has also determined that locks consistently don't feel like anything to the key. Which seems to suggest that, if he wants to use it, it's not going to be on an actual door. So he decides to try the obvious thing. Except not here, this is not a good place, so he finds an isolated spot in the woods to try the obvious thing.

Upon finding an appropriate isolated spot, he waves the key around until it feels like something, then he pushes it and turns it, as if he were unlocking an actual door.

That one works.

He pulls it, and the door opens before him. The scenery on the other side is subtly different, though similarly wooded. He removes the key from the door - it remains open, good - and walks through it.

Is that a statue of a unicorn?

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From:

pythbox

It is, it is a statue of a unicorn! A very pretty one, too, carved - was it carved? - with an eye to detail. The unicorn is more deerlike than horselike, and her horn is depicted as broken, and the statue is detailed and realistic enough that it almost looks like a real unicorn which has for some reason been turned to stone.

And hey, if we're already positing real unicorns, turning them to stone doesn't seem like such a leap...

That's another statue over there, though, and it is of the same unicorn, broken horn and all. So perhaps not.

From:

ooh, shiny!

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