1900 words off of idea points 17 and 18, making their way to the vault, and combining their heist plans. I also wrote Pontifex talks about mythology stuff today, but didn't finish it. Still, getting there.
Having trouble with exact word count still. I added today's wordcount to the NaNoWriMo website, but there's word count that I've already done but don't have recorded as having done, and so, heck I'm gonna have to figure that out.
"nopingly"
The sun was setting low on the horizon, setting the sky on fire, the scarlets and violets of sunset complementing the greens and yellows of the aurora visible in the sky in these primeval times. The grand ballroom and event hall was miles above the surface; from one of the porticos Moone could see the earth curve off gently at the horizon, fading in the dimming light.
"I was halfway expecting the earth here to be flat," he said to Unwin, as the other man came up beside him.
"Nope," said Unwin, nopingly.
The two then proceeded to have a fairly serious conversation about their next steps.
accessing the building plans
The building had more floors than that of the tallest building in the present, but the majority of rooms were either miles above the surface or down deep into the settlement. The rooms the guests stayed in were stately, below ground. Everything here was white, or yellow or an offputting gray; it looked about the closest you could get to the room at the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey while looking nothing like the room at the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey and instead just looking like an overambitious motel room from the 1940s.
"We're going to dig down," said Unwin gruffly as he pulled out a steelmetal rucksack. He unfurled it open; inside of it, sewn into the lining, was dental equipment.
"You've got to be kidding me," said Moone. "With those? This isn't exactly the Great Escape here, we can do better than flood away the tooth dust with a water pick. We have less time and better technology than just, tunnel our way out. You are joking, right?"
"Well yeah I mean we're not drilling all the way there," said Unwin, crossing over next to Moone, to a panel in the wall behind him. The panel had been hidden behind a painting hanging on the wall, over a now-slid-aside stand; the furniture here was mercifully not made out of teeth. Moone leaned over and turned the painting, which had been placed artside down with very deliberate care, over, looking at it. The painting was sad clown art rendered in a paleolithic style. Not the most bizarre visual art Moone had seen in his life, but probably the most authentically bizarre. He set the art back down, smothering the clown face into the lush sofa where the painting had been resting.
Vern Magico got out his drill and a stethoscope, leaning against the wall next to the panel and grinding into the wall with that terrible breaking sound that dental drills make when carving away at your teeth, listening to his progress through the drum as if measuring out the progress in drilling into a money vault. After a few minutes of this, Magico seemed satisfied, stood straight up, packed his equipment all away, and tapped gently against the panel with the bare knuckle of his three-fingered left hand. It clanked open, tooth dust spilling to the floor around the edges; Magico had drilled through the toothy tumbler lock of the room's AC service hatch.
"Right. What are we going to-" Unwin extended a single finger, signaling to wait. He unzipped the bag proper and pulled out of it an honest-to-goodness non-magical high-end RC car, complete with non-magical controller. He handed the remote over to Tor Orson, the blue haired stocky one with the high cheekbones, who turned both the controller and the car itself over, flipping both of their switches to on and making sure they were paired to the same radio frequency.
As he worked, setting up the RC vehicle with the needed equipment, Orson explained that here was a laser tripwire grid guarding the air duct, kind of. The geometry of the floors acted as warding circles creating a supernatural equivalent of an invisible system of tripwires, through which no living thing would be able to pass. Orson was smart enough not to point out the obvious shortsightedness of this defensive system, and he finished snapping the camera into place and setting the car into the ventway. It fit perfectly.
Orson drove the RC car through the ventilation system, guided by the car's camera with display transmitting back to a small television screen on the front of the wide remote control. The camera had several different modes, including night vision and infrared (this isn't going to become important later or anything, but maybe saying that constitutes a spoiler because it had been going to.) The camera here used electromagnetic imaging to trace the electricity flowing through wires beyond the sheet of teeth.
When the car arrived at a junction point where many of the wires met, it was Miracle's turn. Miracle, the beady-eyed one with the extravagant taste in cufflinks, was the team's hacker; he guided an arm extending out the front of the car to the correct terminal wire, gaining access to the Tower of Babel's OS, dental_flOS. I wish I were making that up. While most of the Tower of Babel's security and secrets were air gapped by the natural air gap of the fact that they were magic and not computers at all, the Tower of Babel did have onsite computer towers and modern technology; and the homebrew operating system they ran was called dental_flOS.
And of course it was based heavily on Perl.
Miracle declared, with a wonky shameless grin on his face, his absolute hatred of these people, a tint of solemn admiration in his voice. Miracle made his way through the system, while Pontifex mixed everyone drinks.
Tor Orson had driven. Vern Magico had safecracked. Michael J Miracle was now hacking. See Michael hack. Hack! Hack! Hack!
Larry did nothing. Larry was a sniper. And nothing needed sniping. Art Rose also did nothing, as nothing needed its shins broken.
Larry could make a relatively mean egg ranchero, but the kitchen area of the open-air studio accommodation space was distressingly out of red chilis, and Larry dare not call up for any from the kitchen because he didn't want to draw any undue attention to the group. Larry was very wise.
through the maze
There was a labyrinth underneath the tower of babel, enamel-made catacombs and treasure vaults, hiding the secrets of those who had died to construct the still-escalating edifice scraping its way up till the astral plane and the dome of heaven, like the bodies concealed in the concrete of the Hoover dam.
They make their way through the maze, guided by Unwin's clew. The clew was named after the ball of yarn gifted by Ariadne that guided Perseus through the labyrinth, and served a similar function here. The string could only act as a guide to where in the maze he had already been (Unwin's men broke off at select junctions to serve a similar purpose,) but this clew, being tied to the fortunes of the tooth fairy as it was, sought out and guided the way to the vast wealth.
They pressed forward through the darkness, guided by the clew deeper into the maze, Pontifex's voice softly lilting through the black about the inevitability that such a tower would have a maze associated with it, about how mazes are symbolic of caves, and caves are connected to mountains, and other axis mundi symbols swirled around as well, this connection between heaven and earth, but gently explaining it was all damnably artificial and heretical, and moving on to explaining the significance of the etiological myth of the scattering of languages.
Once in a while they would come across a guard patrolling the corridors, not a minotaur at all (and Moone was reminded of The House of Asterion by Luis Borges, and thought about that, maybe they're like me,) and they avoided the guards through the use of the clew, still shifted to show the tooth fairy's fortune, giving them reason to be down in the vaults.
when two plans go to war
There was salt in the air and there were cold iron floors, pressure sensitive due to just magic. Normal pressure sensitivity is mechanically simple; weigh the plate and complete a circuit. The sensitivity of the plates in the Tooth Fairy's vault were even simpler: magic. Threshold magic, to be specific. The floors and walls of the vault itself acted as a threshold; those with proper access would make it through, but those without would find themselves... the polite way to put it would be trapped; the lack of permission to cross the threshold combined with the hex placed upon it as punishment would put the trespasser essentially in a state of limbo.
To top it all off, the entire vault was under a 24/7 state of total psychic surveillance.
But there was a way around each of these.
The easiest access point to the security system shutdown was through a cooling system, much like the air vents that Magico had driven the RC car through, guarded by the same grid system, only much, much colder, and with a cold iron spinny death blade at the very point that would allow access, blowing hot air out of the servers and cold air in. Both teams realized that this was essential to get to; Unwin's team had been going to RC in again, stopping the fan and magic-hacking the servers and just being very quick about it before they overheated. They went with Team Punch's plan of just having Gef go in.Riding on top of the car to avoid the cold iron, Gef detecting the edges and shimmying his way around the grids in place, slowing the blades down enough using the RC car. Rather than just the original plan there of "he's a mongoose those guys are quick"ing through the fan, and avoiding direct contact with the floor by using adorable knit mongoose booties.
Getting in itself was another problem. The threshold magic meant that it was Nimrod himself who needed to provide permission to vault access. Unwin had managed to fool the guards with his spoofed clew version of the Tooth Fairy's boon, but he wasn't sure if it would work for initial access into the vault. He was reasonably sure that it should have worked in theory, which was the best that they had, but now the entire idea of entrance and the pressure sensitive floor could be avoided, with the shapeshifter shapeshifter shapeshifting its aura to perfectly spoof the tooth fairy's.
The salt would be coating the floor, acting as another natural barrier to entrance from supernatural creatures. The system down, the teams would get past the salt by sending Moone or Lovecraft through, who have no inherent weakness to antimagical measures. With the shapeshifter thus shifted, it would be neither of them doing so now, now that the teams had Moone's demonic possession ability among the both of them. They would require a powerful host. [MAKE THAT MAKE SENSE SOMEHOW IDK]
As for the surveillance: to save on effort and cost, the psychic surveillance was fairy magic surveillance, closed time loop time travel surveillance. Team Punch's plan was to spoof the psychic reading using Lovecraft's power, the other side's plan was to create a parallel time loop using Unwin's power, and slipping by under that. Either team's method could have worked, but with Gef working at the security access point, they decided it would be best for her to stay as a rendezvous with him, and Unwin would be the one to psych the psychic.
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