Kirumi Tojo's Palace | The Ultimate Maid's Failures

[kandata]

By now everyone may be used to find themselves in bizarre locations, between going into palaces and visiting Nekyia. It might not come as a surprise that it has happened again.

What might come as a surprise, though...is how empty this place is.

All around you there's nothing more than a large, gray, featureless expanse. In the distance there seem to be bars, curving upwards to gather so, so high above you, possibly hundreds of miles above, so high it’s hard to distinguish.

It’s a cage. So unfathomably large. You could escape, were you to get to the edges of the cage, but...it would take forever. No matter how you look at it, you're trapped. The atmosphere is so...hopeless. Devoid of anything even remotely positive.

Not that you want to hang around for long, do you? After all, this is someone's palace. Not a place to stick around at. What to do, though?

It’s all so...empty. Silent. Featureless. A flat expanse of hard gray tiles.

Gather together, everyone. Gather and choose a direction. North, East, West, South. All directions look completely identical, but could it affect your time in this place, somehow? Probably not. But all treks start with the first step. Perhaps, if you get moving, you'll progress?

Comments

[vogelfrei]

[ As always, McGillis is uncomfortable. There has not been a single palace end in which the words of his own comrades haven't hit him like poison barbs, and this is no different. He's grateful, really, that Shalem is off-setting the sentimentality a little.

But his attention is still on Kirumi. Kirumi, who lies and cheats and manipulates... Kirumi, who finally seems real to him after he'd spent so long trying to look behind the facade of the selfless maid. ]

You're not my friend. I'm only here because I was forcibly summoned to this place, and I'm fighting you to leave it. All of that is correct.

[ Not mincing words here. ]

And doubtlessly you look at me as a bad example right now - someone whose foolish admission of his own actions has compromised on the power we are meant to lend Braphine.

[ He can understand her desire to erase it all. Everybody's been looking at him differently since his dirty laundry has been out in the open - since he made that step, somewhere between liberation and self-destruction. ]

But right now? Right now, you're throwing out resources. Erase our memories? Your own memories are a mess. You hardly trust your own mind, and you think you can throw out the perspective of others?

[ McGillis brings the Exisal forward as he speaks to her, and then with a movement that is astoundingly swift for the capacities of the robot takes hold of Kirumi and restrains her. (20). ]

For me, the Kirumi Tojo I have seen here, the one who is willing to do whatever it takes, is a person I want as my ally. A resource I myself would be loathe to discard. Come back with me.