Gilles just kept quiet to keep up with appearances. He was just muscle, so instead of talking he just smiled and nodded appreciatively when a feast was mentioned.
"Come, come!" the butler invites everyone to come in.
Lulu dances forward, playing the role of a carefree child. Waltzing into the door, she urges all to hurry up. Zeke has yet to dismount.
"Thank you for you and your liege's generosity! I must say, his reputation precedes him, and for good reason. I do hope to meet him in person to properly thank him."
A large gate opens to the right, and in rides a guardsman on a black horse. From the door issues a characteristic equine odor--it must be the stables.
"Your steed, sir?"Zeke won't be allowed to bring his horse inside the buildings.
Johan was too busy looking around and examining the area to pay much attention to what was going on.
It seems that the castle itself is built in loops around the center atrium. Up ahead, to the far side of the guard station, is the entryway to the residential part of the castle; to the right are the stables, and the barracks is to the left, marked by an "Armed Personnel Only" plaque that looks like it was milled from a block of steel.
The dining room is large enough to serve two dozen people. It stretches across both the castle's inner and outer walls, with a grand window on each end. A ventilation shaft hums overhead, the windows closed off to the outside spring air.
The servants hastily prepare a table of cooked goods. Despite the lavish presentation, all of the foods so far are relatively common, such as caramel apples, and poultry. There is no chocolate, fish, or anything else so exceedingly rare from the Sanctuaries. A reminder that the liege, for all his reputation, holds only the title of Count, in a village no less.
Lulu hovers close to Lucene, while a sumptuously-dressed man walks in from the door across the table, and smiles.
"Ah! I was told this was a knight's entourage. What would a child be doing among you all?""What am I, to leave her all alone?" answers Lucene.
"Aye. Perhaps it's rude of me to ask."He glances at everyone else.
"Especially when you have such fascinating company."The man extends his hand, to greet each member of the party.
"My name's Quintain. I once held the position of Mayor, but my powers in these times are few and far in between."The cooks arrive, one brandishing a live lobster. "The food won't be ready for some time," they explain. "Sorry. We didn't expect guests today." They say it'll be done in about thirty minutes.
"Then we ought to distract our visitors until then. Perhaps a tour of the castle?" proposes the former mayor.
Solj hangs for dear life, held aloft by levitating drones obscured in a fog that looks like a raven to outsiders. To Solj, however, the fog merely wreaks havoc on sensors.
For a time, it becomes possible to peer into the open top of the building, into the courtyard and the bridges above. The party made it inside the castle, though the plan for the future remains uncertain.
Solj feels a ping in some microwave frequency, registering qualitatively as some kind of a sound to put it in human terms. The language, er, protocol seems simple enough to decode, being nothing but binary strung in 64-bit packets.
After some time, the living weapon's fearsome digital processing unit decodes the channel. The other agent is communicating in basic ASCII characters, and the first ping he heard was a 64-bit encryption key.
We meet again.
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Topic: Exmortal (IC Thread) (Read 48711 times)