And the power of the people shall come to believe they do rule

[mickey-cops.livejournal.com]

((Continuing from this post.))

In the passageways beneath the park, where a group had gathered to break down a long-closed door, a laser beam was widening, and a broad circle began to blacken the surface of the wood, the locks melting and streaming down in shining rivulets, to puddle at the doorstep. The room was getting hot, now.

Outside, all at once, the rides all stopped. Animatronic figures jolted still; boats bumped each other confusedly; rollercoasters fell to the bottom of their tracks and did not continue up. The lights inside the buildings flickered off; the perpetual background noise of music and soundeffects went silent.

Below, the hole in the door began to crackle and spark around the edges, and for just a moment all the eyes trained on the door could see through it a fathomless darkness. An odd, organic silence filled the air; everyone's breathing and small movements were audible, but so too was a new absence of sound, as though the walls were all holding their breath.

And then the air around the door began to shimmer.

Comments

Below...

[late-born-myth.livejournal.com]

Psyche lunged towards the hole, heedless both of the path of the laser and the dust particles and rivulets of metal starting to drift back towards the door. She wedged her shoulder and half her upper body into the the opening, and they ceased their motion.

Blinking back at the laser, neck craned around and looking fairly absurd in the ungainly half-in-half-out position she'd managed to get herself into in the three-foot diameter opening, she squinted and then asked in a rather strained voice, "Would you mind...?"

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

The Master gaped, head tilting slowly to one side. "What?"

Granted, immortal was immortal, but really.

[late-born-myth.livejournal.com]

"...Switching that off, now? Please?" she finished, grimacing (prettily) and sounding a bit testy. Her skin was starting to tingle, in what she remembered as the way it had in the days she was still capable of getting sunburned.

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

He blinked a few times before hitting the necessary sequence of buttons to shut off the laser.

"That looks..." he struggled for the right word. "Uncomfortable."

[late-born-myth.livejournal.com]

"Thank you. It is, a bit," said the goddess, holding still in her half-back bend, half-clamber, looking like nothing so much as a babysitter who'd tried to climb into the Tunnels O' Fun after a child and gotten stuck in the process. (If babysitters commonly wore chitons and rucked-up dark wool cloaks, and were unreasonably beautiful.) The wing that was half in the darkness had vanished from view, though by its angle it ought to have been visible; she didn't appear to have noticed.

Instead, she was looking down at the puddled metal from the locks, which had begun to send creepers up towards the door in the moments before she'd wedged herself in. They'd stopped, for now, and Psyche said in satisfied tones, "It worked, though."

Above...

[a-lonely-god.livejournal.com]

The Doctor froze in the darkness of the radio booth, and his hands went automatically to the controls for the loudspeakers and Cayce's music system, flicking switches on and off rapidly. Nothing happened, and after a moment he slumped back in the chair with something like shock, turning his eyes upward at the darkness between him and the ceiling.

Master?

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

The Master could hear him, and wasted no time in filling his head with the odd –wrong– images he was presently receiving. But that wasn't the reason the Doctor had reached out, and there was no more time to play games.

Maybe you should come down here.

[a-lonely-god.livejournal.com]

Coming, he whispered, and stumbled in the dark and out of the room and down the stairs.

As creepy as the park could be before, it was twice as eerie now, in the silence and stillness and darkness of everything powered off and dead. -This is what an amusement park looks like after all the amusees go home.-

People were standing in doorways wearing confused or anxious or resigned or a dozen other expressions. He ignored them, but as he neared the door that would lead him down to the others, he belatedly he remembered the communicator, and raised it to his lips.

"Fett, if you can hear me… you can tell anyone who asks that there's a hole in the door."

Even in the dark it wasn't hard to find his way, following the steps the Master had taken earlier and heading toward the presence of more Gallifreyans than he'd felt for years. Or would feel again.

He came into the room just as Psyche finished speaking.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

As the park fell silent, Una stopped just short of pulling the pin on her last grenade and let her hand fall to her side. She held her breath for a moment and closed her eyes, waiting for the jerk sideways through the megaflow...

And nothing happened. She opened her eyes again and turned to Sam.

Who was still a llama. She had half-expected, though she couldn't have said why, that he'd have been changed back now, but no; still shaggy, brown, and quadripedal.

"Well now," she said, and couldn't think of anything else.

[iron-and-latin.livejournal.com]

Sam looked around at the still, silent and dark wreckage they'd created. He didn't know what he had expected, but…

"That's it?" he asked, voice sounding over-loud in the stillness. "Just… oops, we broke it?" His big llama eyes went wide. "What if we're still stuck here, but now with nothing working?"

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

Una smiled thinly, but there wasn't any humour in it. "Well then, we'll really be in trouble, won't we?" She cocked her head, glancing up at one of the nearby speakers. "They're probably offline too, aren't they? And the phones. Otherwise I expect we'd have heard a report from the Doctor by now." She chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip. "Suppose we could go search for him—them. And see what's up below. Or ... we wait." She turned a full 360 degrees, surveying the silence and the wreckage. "It feels like everything is waiting, doesn't it?"

[iron-and-latin.livejournal.com]

"Maybe big SIS just got annoyed with us and left," Sam continued, almost not heeding anything Una had just said. "That would be pretty typical of this place, with its brother from the past who you have to tell that his dad's dead, and its demon played by Johnny Depp who looks like the demon who killed your mom, but oh whoops, he's actually kind of a nice guy, even though he's a damn demon, and it turns out that Holy Water in his Universe is much more powerful so you just crippled him for life- or existence- or whatever, and you better feel guilty about that for a good long time, you stupid kid, and its romances with TV characters, and its, whoops, now your brother's gone and we think he might have turned into a duck of all things, and its actors who are going play Cylons someday and doesn't that just fuck everything all to hell, and its damned homicidal wack-job of a psychic alien whose idea of an interesting afternoon is stealing your blood and then making you relive the worst moments of your life over and over and over while you're still awake, and if this whole thing goes post-apocalyptic and we start eating each other, the llama's going to be the first to go, and I don't want to die a camelid!"

His voice as he spoke got more and more rushed and panicked, and by the end he was practically hyperventilating. There was a sense he would have gone on if he'd had enough breath to keep speaking. And what made it worse, really, was the vaguest sense that if that watchful element of the park was still there somewhere, it was probably just amused at the sight of a llama having a full-blown panic attack.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

Una was so lost in thought that Sam's rant didn't quite register at first, but she started paying attention at demon—

"Sam?"

—and then actors who are going to play Cylons someday—

"Sam..." and a question was forming in her head to which she wasn't sure she wanted an answer, although she could guess—

—and at homicidal wack-job of a psychic alien, the question about Cylons was blown to smithereens, and she reeled as if she'd been slapped across the face.

(As a result, she didn't really hear I don't want to die a camelid, and that was probably just as well; probably one of the last things Sam needed at this point was for her inappropriate-humour instinct to kick in and to have her collapse into a fit of giggles.)

"Sam!" She took a few steps toward him and put her trembling hands on either side of his head. "Sam ... It'll be all right. Somehow. I don't know how, but ... this can't be it. I'm sure of it." At some point she'd started stroking his long neck, just as one would trying to calm an ordinary animal, and it was a sign of how rattled she was that she didn't seem to find anything odd or inappropriate about it at all. She took a deep breath to try and steady herself and said, "What was that you said there? Psychic ... psychic alien?"

As she repeated the phrase, she knew.

[markoftherani]

((Picking up from here.))

The Rani was silent for a moment, and then she started to laugh.

"How," she said ironically, "does the universe function without us?"

He would know her well enough to know that she was speaking on many levels, only one of them rhetorical.

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

Her laughter was contagious in that moment, both the irony and the pressure in his head proving to be too much for him. "I wish I knew," he answered, honestly, but in truth it didn't make sense, it wasn't fair--

–da-da da-da, da-da da-da–

He cringed suddenly, laughter dying out in favour of a rough gasp.

[markoftherani]

She looked at him sharply. "What is it? Has he done something?"

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

He shook his head abruptly at her, swallowing hard and raising the heel of one hand to the side of his head. "No, he's trying to... to leave, he'll be here soon...."

He hadn't really realised just how angry he had gotten, and it was driving him a little--

–"Call me mad one more time, Magnus, I swear to you it will be the last time that–

[caycep]

((Continued from here))

"Just take a look first," Cayce said. "No need to go just yet. But I think ... I have this idea, see, that people from the same worlds will see each other properly, and it'll mean that ... I'm not sure what it'll mean. That it's a way home, maybe. Or something."

[swordandchalice.livejournal.com]

"I get it," Setsuna said with a nod. "It could mean it works the way you think it does if your idea pans out." He stared past Psyche, but kept talking to Cayce. "When should we try it? I'll just stick my head through or something."

[caycep]

"Whenever you guys are ready, I guess." Cayce shoved her hands in her pockets and rocked back on her heels.

[caycep]

Goodbyes said, Cayce took a step back from the door and folded her arms, hugging herself a little. "Good luck," she said to Psyche.

[late-born-myth.livejournal.com]

Psyche nodded in response, not quite trusting her voice, and smiled a you too kind of smile, then faced the door. Taking a deep breath, she held the lamp before her, and carefully climbed through.

The space around her, warm and resonant, felt more like bathwater than air, and she had a moment of almost-panic before she realized that yes, she could breathe perfectly well. There didn't seem to be anything under her feet, but then there didn't seem to not be anything there, either: it was only because she was trying to analyze it all that it seemed strange, and she thought if there hadn't been so much testing going on before that she just would have accepted it the way one accepts the odd rules of a dream.

She'd turned back round as she stepped through, and saw, as Cayce had (http://community.livejournal.com/dizzy_land/317246.html?thread=18311486#t18311486), the outside world hanging like a picture on a wall made of that living darkness, and the watching faces through it. The light of the lamp was stretching round her, through the door, like a golden bubble.

"Come on. It's all right," she told them. She thought there was at least a reasonable chance that this was the truth.

[ruined-mylife.livejournal.com]

Of course it was all right. Aeryn certainly wasn't scared of an unnamed, uncertain darkness. That would be incredibly unprofessional of her.

She switched her pulse pistol back to her better hand and, with a decisive set of her shoulders, ducked through the opening, looking around and down as she did so.

"That's rather... unnerving," she said, half-jokingly, but mostly entirely serious.

[always-confuzed.livejournal.com]

John followed without hesitation because he knew most experiences like this were just like getting into the pool; if you you did it one limb at a time, you would never make it all the way.

Of course, the fact that Aeryn had already dove in ahead of him might have made it just a tad easier to cannonball in after her.

His head twitched to one side, as though someone had dropped an ice cube down the back of his shirt. "Ooo... yeah, this is not my first choice for the family vacation. I think we should get our deposit back, honey."