[Card= A of hearts]
He sat down on the stone floor, wishing more of the coolness would soak through the suit. He would need a bath, and the suit would need aggressive cleaning when this was all over. For the time being, the calm before the storm, and the cold stone floor would have to do.
Jolting off of his stone bench in the infirmary, spilling his bucket of well water over in the process, plumpy acted like had just been bitten by a giant mosquito, or stung by a bee.
Weird didn't really care. Who knew how a giant fungus managed to think, let alone be sentient, considering the complete lack of a nervous system. A few quirks and oddities were likely to be expected from such exotic sentience.
Well, he didn't care, until plumpy waddled over, his disturbingly phallic shaped head dropping off bits of charred cruft as new myconoid tissue grew underneath as it bobbed into view.
"What do you want plumpy?" He asked, rubbing his forhead earnestly. He felt like a nosebleed was coming on. He hadn't had those since he was a very little kid. God, that seemed so long ago now.
"I... well.... we.... uhm."
"Out with it plumpy, I'm a busy man. I still have to re-rig the flaps on the reagent vials."
The plump helmet man scowled.
"We have to drop the barrier." He said flatly.
"Barrier? What barrier?!" Joykill scoffed back. "If you mean the rubble in the doorway, you need your fungus examined, because that's fucking stupid!"
The scowl on the plump helmet's disturbingly cute face was a twisted caricature of anger mixed with permanent joy.
"The... .. the timelock, whatever the hell that is!" Plumpy shouted, purple rushing into his stem.
"Timelock? Why would we be under a timelock?"
"I don't know! I just know I was resting in the infirmary, and a really loud roaring voice demanded that I tell you to breach the timelock. I don't know what a timelock is, why we would have one, what one does, or why I was told to tell you, but I did. Jeeze!"
Memories of clockwork hugo's cagetrap monstrosity in the vents above the dining hall came to mind. Getting in there would be a real trick, given that the door was blocked with rubble, swung *IN*, and was bowed OUT from the collapse. Those doors would be more likely to crumble than swing after what they had been through. On top of that, there was the deadly gas he has jettisoned in there about an hour earlier. There wasn't nearly enough metal in there to bind with all the chlorine and hydrocyanate he had filled that room with. The vents would be choked with deadly corrosive gas. That assuming hugo hadn't moved the damn thing, or that he could even get in.
"Thanks plumpy." Weird said. "Go back and rest a bit more. Hell's coming to breakfast. Let's try not to be the main course."