revivalproject | [closed] A-MAZE-ING

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[closed] A-MAZE-ING

WHO: turtle bros
WHERE: the Warrens
WHAT: maze time!
WHEN: maze time!
WARNINGS: maze time!

If Leo's being honest, he doesn't have the best track record with mazes.

And he and Donnie haven't exactly been... okay, lately. And Leo is still worried about Donnie's leg.

So all things considered, maybe they weren't the best choice to volunteer to trek down one of the routes that opened after Keith's group went ahead.

But the thing is, Leo doesn't know if either of them would have been happy sitting around waiting for something to happen. Donnie always wants to fix things. And he would have gotten too anxious the longer they sat there.

So here they are, in the maze. Leo supposes, in good news, that nothing scary has happened yet. The maze isn't full of monsters or deadly traps. It's just big and confusing. The most dangerous hazard so far is the threat of running out of food, but at least they thought ahead on that front.

So they're exploring, and trying not to have to double back too much. This has been going on for awhile now. Leo hasn't been paying attention to how long, but he's sure Donnie knows. At least tech works down here.

"I wonder who built all this?" he asks. "Was it just for... a-maze... usment?"

This is hardly his first maze pun since they came in here, but now he's really stretching for what even counts as a pun.

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"-ulp!"

Donnie flails at the sudden manhandling, pressing a hand to Leo's face once they've stopped spinning.

"We...we did it..." he blinks, like everything is just now catching up with him. "We did it!"

The hand in his face just makes Leo laugh, though he does put Donnie back down on his feet.

"We did! You did!" He giggles, a little high on very narrowly escaping a very hot and melty death, and offers Donnie a fist to bump.

He did, didn't he? A bright grin tugs at his face as it all settles in, a different sort of warmth settling in his chest.

"Yeah I did!" Donnie laughs, bumping his fist against Leo's. "And without playing any stupid alien games! Suck it, Atroma! Or...whoever's responsible for this..!"

It doesn't matter who set it up, they got through it. Leo's happy to see that grin on Donnie's face, a little bit of who he used to be slipping through. Much better than all the sadness he's seen from his brother the last few weeks.

"We've totally got this maze whipped. Nothing can stop us."

"You said it! If they thought they could pull one over on us they'd better think again!"

Whatever secrets lie within this place, they'd definitely unearth them.

Donnie fishes out his crystal to replace in his goggles again, looking Leo over while he does so, just to make sure his brother's really okay. That had still been pretty scary earlier.

"You good? Should we take five or keep going?"

"Yeah, I'm good," he promises. "It was just a little hot."

Much longer and he might have burnt his feet, but thankfully he made it away unscathed. Though...

"Maybe we should take that five, though. Eat a snack and see if anyone's managed to get a message through while we've been gone."

Yet more reasons to be wearing shoes over going barefoot... Although Donnie knows even a good pair of boots would've helped against heat like that.

He nods, thankful to be out of there and away from anything volcano-related. It's still kind of troubling that there had been anything of the sort and so close... Not to mention suspicious.

"Yeah, let's do that," Donnie agrees, pulling his thoughts away from that track so he can do a quick scan of the hallway they're in, just to make sure there isn't anything else they might accidentally trigger. Better safe than sorry! "Okay, looks like it's all clear."

Not all of us have someone making them custom shoes.

“Sweet,” says Leo, settling down against the wall and hunting through his pack for snacks. “We’ll just chill out here.”

He'd share that much..!

Donnie rubs at his eyes, stepping over to sit beside Leo then. His battle shell thunks against the wall as he leans back, sighing. He's not sure he can completely relax around a place like this but sitting is a good start.

"Wonder how much farther this thing goes."

It’s good for Donnie to sit. He’s seemed okay, but Leo is still a little worried about his leg.

“I dunno… Knowing our luck, probably a long way.”

He sighs and lets his head hit the wall behind him.

“It’s gotta be worth it, though.”

It would not have been nearly as fun going through things back there if his leg had still hurt as much as when they'd first headed down. They've been walking a pretty long time though, and sitting down seems to finally remind the rest of him that it's still not quite at one hundred percent.

Some rest should do them both some good though. A pizza to split between them would be even better.

"There has to be," Donnie says, lifting his arm to tap at his computer. "No one's been down here in ages. We wouldn't have been able to get through those barriers in the first place if we hadn't found something that could disarm them, back at that spaceport. So anything we find out about this place is progress."

Don’t even remind him of pizza right now. It would be so much better than the traveling snacks they have…

He passes some to Donnie, shifting closer.

“Good. I wouldn’t want to go all that way for nothing.”

He munches, drifting closer to Donnie’s shoulder.

Snacks are something at least. Donnie doesn't take long to start shoveling things into his mouth. Hopefully this doesn't just make them feel hungrier.

"Yeah. That'd really be bummer," he says with a brief laugh. He pretends not to notice as Leo leans more and more into his space, but it's not like he's complained much about it lately.

There is a chance it could. The curse of being a teenage mutant.

If Donnie won’t complain, he’ll stay in the bubble. It feels better this way.

“I wonder if anyone else has made it to the end.”

Donnie will just reason that it's warmer sitting closer together. Yeah. That's totally it.

"There's how many of us so I'm sure there has to be. And if it really is a giant spaceship like we've been thinking, then....okay so that doesn't quite explain the room back there, but still! -it can't go on forever."

Then Leo will scooch in until their arms are pressed against each other. Nice.

"A giant spaceship? Like, one we could leave on?"

If the Agrii will ever let them go anywhere else.

"I...don't know," Donnie has to admit, always hating when that's the only answer he has to give. "It's a wonder that it's functioning at all. It's got to have been doing so for even longer than the Agrii had ever been established here."

He pulls up the rough map he's been making, swiping the screen back to the area of the Warrens that they started in before zooming it out some. If one didn't know better, at a glance the way the rooms and corridors were set could have been mistaken as some kind of circuit board.

"This is all we'd seen and mapped of it previously. There's various machinery that's blocked from tampering, there's pipes that carry water... I think it's been running at its lowest levels of functionality, but even then it'd have to be powered and charged by something..."

Donnie's eyes flicker back down the hall and the door they'd just come through. "...a geothermic source is pretty viable..." He frowns.

"But with how deep we've even had to travel to get here, I don't know if it'd be so simple to unearth the ship. And even if we did manage, the damage to the terrain would probably be catastrophic, especially if it's somehow tapped into magma flows. It'd probably trigger another volcanic event or worse, and we can't do that. This may not be our homeworld, or even the Agrii's, but it's the plantkin's..."

Leo listens to this explanation quietly, munching on his snacks. The map doesn't mean much to him; he may have learned some programming, but not enough to recognize that.

"Yeah, we don't want to destroy the whole planet," he agrees. He may think the Agrii would be better off finding somewhere else, but the plantkin are happy here; would probably be happier if they left and stopped incentivizing whoever was messing with the place to mess with the place. "Even if it can't work as a spaceship, maybe we can use it for something else?"

He doesn't really mind living underground again. As long as he can go up without getting eaten by a zombie.

Donnie blinks, slowly picking at what of the snacks he's been given to try making it last longer.

"I mean, I guess? We just have to deactivate any trap-programming but I think we can manage that much. But we'd have to find a central computer."

Maybe it had some actual facilities instead of having to open up some pipes for a shower...

"-unless...this is the ship the drones came from..." he wonders as the thought comes to mind.

They'll get more food when they get back... which Leo hopes will be not be too far in the future.

Finding a central computer and then letting Donnie disarm any traps sounds simple enough. Leo nods along, cramming the last of his snack into his mouth, then pulling out a bottle of water.

"The drones?"

Water's probably a good idea after getting nearly cooked. Donnie fishes out his own water bottle.

"Oh. The Wanderer plantkin? I got to talk with them about how things had been before the Agrii had come. The cities... It sounded like they had been built by an automated process. I'm guessing some kind of building drones since prior to the Agrii or the Graq, no 'animals' had been there to establish anything."

“Huh.” Leo hadn’t talked to that guy, so this is some new info. “It’d be nice if we found ‘em down here and could use them for the Agrii.”

Then they could use the drones, and everyone else could go home.

"Yeah... It'd make a lot of things easier. Well, this thing seems huge so who knows what all is around here. But that's a problem that can at least be addressed once we get into a computer."

Donnie takes a couple gulps of water, leaning his head back against the wall with a sigh.

"Yeah. We'll find a computer and you'll know exactly what to do."

He has faith. Donnie is the smartest guy Leo knows, and he doesn't care that his experience is limited. None of the smart guys on this planet have impressed him much.

"I just hope we have enough food to get us where we're going."

That coaxes another grin from Donnie. "Of course," he says, tipping his nose upward.

He refuses to let anyone down on that, especially not his brother.

"That...is a valid concern. Too bad we can't order delivery. We'll just have to make do." At least he's used to skipping meals..?

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