trans_9 | Through the looking glass [bendytimed to some time when s!@% isn't getting real]

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Through the looking glass [bendytimed to some time when s!@% isn't getting real]

Welcome to Nanda Parbat, the hidden city. Squirreled away in the mountains of Tibet, an ancient temple preserving spiritual teachings that would otherwise have been lost centuries ago, takes refuge from the world under a wing of cliff face and blizzard. There are flowers here that grow nowhere else on Earth, flowers that can only grow here. Few know of its existence, fewer still of its location.

Batman could find it for you.

Of course, when your canvas is the sensoriums, the only place that he need look for it is inside his own head. A little paradoxically, the very purpose of Nanda Parbat is to aid those who traverse the depths of the mind. Of the soul, if you're the type who believes in that sort of thing.

One wall of the great stone temple fortress is built into the mountainside itself, and into the wall, passages to the many ice caverns - nature's halls of mirrors - within the rock. One of these caverns harbours a demon, black as the enshrouding darkness of the mountain tunnels, black as pitch. He's not expecting company.

Bruce doesn't remember when he had extinguished the sole candle that lit his passage into the cavern or what how his visage had seemed when refracted through the misty looking glasses of ice that covers the innermost chamber, but neither are important.

Who's curious enough to find out what is?

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She was busy.

Well, she was always busy, planning the attack, potentially attacks on GLaDOS, working in Neuropathy, or a multitude of other things. But one thing the Major is not, no matter her schedule, is unobservant.

So, when the AI bitch let go of her memory and the fact that Batman was the person who should have been occupying the missing places in her recall became apparent... Naturally, she went looking for him. The nice thing about having a wireless load-in to the Omnicomm network was that it made triangulating on individual signals as simple as knowing which direction gravity was pulling in.

The fact that he's the only large heat-source in a cavern coated in ice doesn't hurt, either. The joys of in-built infrared vision.

Of course, she doesn't speak, once she knows he's seen her. That would be making it too easy. She only stares at him in the dark and waits: they are neither of them so blind as seeming.

Seen her? No. He could have brought the cowl and all its fancy gadgets, but that would have defied the point of the exercise, now, wouldn't it?

Actually, it's the reverberation of the ground under her feet that identifies her first. With an obsessive fervour that is truely Holmesian, he collects the sounds that would betray a particular member of the crew. As one of the few members of the crew with a drastically nonhuman weight class, hers was not the most difficult riddle to crack.

"You're spoiling it," he mutters from his lotus position on the floor.

"If I could find a cyborg who'd achieved enlightenment, I'd download it off their cyberbrain to save time," she replied, acidly. 'Ruining it' was her major past-time, on any given day. Double for weekends and days when her coworkers disappeared without a trace.

Not friend, goddammit. Shut up.

Curiosity had once killed this cat. Well, kind of.

Nura's a curious girl. When something interests her, she goes towards it. It was what had lead her towards many things in her young life. And when she passes the sensoriums, curiosity leads her into entering. A hint from her precogging? Or that natural something interesting is beyond that door occurring to her?

Whatever the case, she enters, and finds herself standing at a very different location than that of the halls of Stacy. She moves her high-heeled feet forwards, eyes taking in the scenery with delighted awe.

She really needs to invest more time in her curiosity if it's what lead her to a place as beautiful as this.

"No, you wouldn't," he objects. You reel off so many philosophy soundbites that you're occasionally mistaken for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Major. He's not buying your snark.

"Did you want something in particular or are you just here to stomp on sandcastles?"

"You've been the subject of a particularly clumsy hack for the last four months of retrograde memory," She informed him, in a voice that verged on robotic for it's even, polite tone. She was worried, and her way of expressing it, as ever, was to become colder, more cruel, and to hold people at arm's length.

"I've confirmed everything I needed to. Good day." She'll just be leaving now, if you don't stop her, Bruce. Staying, right now, without a better reason, would constitute an admission of more investment than she was willing to give up.

The scene seems to spill out from her feet. The huge stone temple, clearly of Eastern and ancient design, encloses the whole city, set against the cliff faces as if it were hewn from the mountain itself.

The fresh prints in the snow might shed some light on whose mind this particular view is a product of...

If Nura was paying attention to her talent for nuance and detail, she would very well have noticed those fresh prints in the snow. But she's too caught up in the sights. She climbs a pair of steps to the top, where she gets an even better view of where exactly she is.

She opens her mouth to let out a silent, "Wow..." It's even more breath-taking from this view...

Of Glados' sins, Bruce is well aware. Not of the exact depth, perhaps, but at least of the potential. Still, he's Batman, and Batman gets curious.

"You were concerned?" he replies, quickly but unmoving.

"Call it professional courtesy," She replied, only fractionally too smoothly to call it unplanned, "For future reference, the memory-loss wil no longer be an issue."

Her host even put the effort into populating it. Sparsely, he'll admit, but nonetheless the odd monk or pilgrim can be seen toing and froing about the retreat. Even so, it's deadly quiet, the atmosphere palpitating with a hushed reverence.

Nura moves around. High-heels making clack clack sounds on the stones as she weaves around the monks and pilgrims, a look of intrigue upon her face. Occasionally, she brushes shoulders with the people, turning here and there, but she barely notices the feeling...or is it no feeling? She grasps her hands in her skirt, going up and then down steps.

One may think she's following a few monks like a child trained on something interesting.

Bruce doesn't say anything for some moments, choosing to listen to her whirring while he processed a few scraps of data that didn't fit so neatly. She wasn't the only computer in the room. Cave. Ship. Whichever.

"I wasn't aware that I counted as a professional."

That much got her to turn around, a brief rustle of fabric in the silence. Combat cyborgs don't whirr, unless they're gearing up the heavy-duty servos for a large jump. The hesitation was palpable.

"My mistake. Is there anything else you want?"

He considers another lengthy pause, but very much doubts she'd be there when he eventually responds. The inquiry follows closely behind her own, "Is there something that I'm keeping you from, Major?"

She could explain the strike team, but he wouldn't approve. She could explain Lex, but he might not approve of that, either. What she can't explain why his approval should matter on either count. Or rather, she won't.

"No," there wasn't anything she could tell him was honestly more pressing that making certain he was alive. Motoko had lost two lieutenants on this ship. Three is enough for dead partners. Let us have at least one who refuses to be taken unawares.

She sighed audibly and externally, which was as good as admitting she wanted to stay, "I should leave you to your meditations."

The sigh doesn't go unnoticed. He affords her a cluck of half-hearted frustration in response.

"I think they've been sufficiently disrupted for me to continue. Tell me about the mission."

"Fairly straightforward demo run," Motoko replied, giving in, and flicked her main view back to the visual spectrum. She left a sub-window running on the thermal, for orientation, but payed it little mind.

"We went in blind, but gained a few hostages. Planted the charges and left. Standby processors came online in tandem, and those will keep the system running, regardless, but it's incapable of memory-modification, considering the damage," It left out a few key details, and really, all of the combat, but it had been brief and well-handled. Not worth mentioning, "I lost my second. She took him early, and there was no recovery possible."

Dick has never been to this place. He knows of it, of course. He was once Batman's protege, with all the knowledge that comes with it. But Nanda Parbat would never have been the right place for him to learn.

Knowing where he is as he steps into the Sensorium, Dick pauses, knowing there aren't that many people who could bring this to mind and only one he can honestly think of that would. He steps in, letting the doors close behind him, then moves through the snow.

To the west of the complex, away from the shadow of mountain where the light lingers longest and the winds blow mildest, are the greeneries. An odd term, given that the flowerbeds are hardly verdant. Everything is lush scarlet and vibrant ivory.

Several of the monks take up work serenely pruning the flowers.

The Nanda Parbat experience is the caped crusading equivalent of a spa retreat, the detox for men whose poisons are fighting evildoers and getting into all sorts of trouble. It had been essential to Batman's initial training, and again after his paranoid nervous breakdown in the wake of the Justice League's disintergration. Perhaps the trauma his 'death' by Darkseid was bound to have induced could benefit from it too.

Having finished his exercise, though perhaps not entirely to his satisfaction, Bruce paces out of the ice caverns and back into the city itself. Oblivious to his guest, he betrays the slightest hint of lackadaisy, something he wouldn't be caught dead doing if he were in the tights.

He takes a large gulp of frosty Tibetan air and expels it audibly. His purposeful stare into the darkness finally breaks as his eyes shift towards the sound of her voice.

"I'm sorry."

That may be one reason why Dick eventually put away the actual cape. Well, that and it getting in the way. He preferred to be in motion and didn't need the win drag.

When Bruce emerges, Dick stays back and to the few shadows, watching the man who has been his mentor and father longer than his biological one had been. It's nice to see Bruce actually relaxed, given the man hasn't really done it since...well, before Jason. And frankly, he'd rather not push Bruce out of that mindset right now. But since leaving would give him away, staying is the option he takes. And for a man who prefers to be in motion, Dick is very good at staying still when he wants to.

Nura crouches by a flowerbed, running the tips of her fingers across the dirt, and cupping a couple blooms tenderly in her hands. She'd never seen anything like these flora in her entire life. She bends down and brings one to her face, feeling the texture of the petals brush against the tip of her nose and tickle her olfactory senses.

"Mmmm," she murmurs.

The cool air circulates well, and Motoko's processors speed forward cheerfully in the improved heat-transfer, but she cannot smell the ice in the air, except as a read-out of water content. She didn't make the mistake of thinking of it as Tibetan- but if the ever-present paranoia that had been drummed into her from the day she first learned she could access outside networks was too strong to even allow the thought of carelessness.

After a millisecond of thought, she knelt, legs folding under her with a grace he could not have seen, and chose deliberately to take him literally, "You wouldn't have been on that squad, regardless. It isn't your fault."

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Through the looking glass [bendytimed to some time when s!@% isn't getting real]

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the entire Nanda Parbat? or just the ice caverns?

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All of it. He's very thorough.

oh awesome.

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