OPEN TO ALL

[skeletonenigma]

Characters: Skulduggery Pleasant and YOU (but specific starters for Captain Amelia, fellow turtle-parents Hawke and Akito, and Monet)
Date: Catch-all for April before the bombings and console crash events
Location: Throughout Keeliai
Situation: Various! These will include futzing with unused consoles, discovering the turtle baby, and also intercepting kedan informants. But Skulduggery’s going to be all over the Shell throughout the month, so feel free to chime in with your own.
Warnings/Rating: None for the moment. Well, there’s some lock-picking.

I usually start with prose, but I’ll adapt to any style. If you want a specific starter, PM me at Amaraq!

Comments

[skeletonenigma]

"The kedan," said Skulduggery, "have laws against whistling on Sundays. If they frown on what I'm about to try doing, I honestly don't care."

He'd read up on the legal systems in Keeliai the first chance he got. Or tried to; three or four books were enough to tell him the kedan were a very strange group of creatures and trying to learn what they considered worthy of a fine was only going to be a waste of time.

Skulduggery caught the lock pick with one hand and reinserted it into the lock. A moment later, that lock clicked, and the door opened. "Thank you."

The suite, with one glance, followed the same basic layout as Skulduggery's own. That was enough to bring him right to where the console was in the living room, and with a swipe of the screen he turned it on. Skulduggery ignored the blinking cursor asking for a password and instead knelt down to look for any kind of a control panel.

[loquaciouslyfeline]

Amelia followed the skeleton into the suite. It was similar to her own, as she arrived into it; true, she'd taken the time to perform some rearrangements, but the idea was the same. While Skulduggery made a bee-line to the console, she approached a table, swiping a finger along the top. No dust; the suite was clearly well-maintained in the absence of a tenant.

She turned back to Skulduggery, curiosity still quite high. He had turned the console on, but was now crouched beside it, apparently investigating the system itself. Amelia moved over to watch; her knowledge of the workings of the consoles was very limited, after all, and she wouldn't mind herself seeing how they looked internally.

[skeletonenigma]

There was a control panel, as it turned out. It was held in by what looked like screws. Rather than get up and look for some form of screwdriver that he probably wouldn't find, Skulduggery worked the air behind the panel to slowly pry it off the column of the console.

He glanced up when Amelia moved over, which was evident only in the slight tilt of his skull. As the air he was manipulating finally started to catch, Skulduggery belatedly realised that a warning was probably in order. "You might want to stay back. I've been told that - "

The panel came off. Half of the console came off with it. The hole Skulduggery made exploded with a viscous black liquid that coated the entire front of his suit before he managed to get to his feet and leap away, and the rest of the console very quickly followed it, melting into a bubbling pile of very ominous-looking black goo.

"Well," Skulduggery managed after a moment while the bubbling continued, "that it would do that."

[loquaciouslyfeline]

One did not reach the rank of captain without being able to react to situations with speed, and despite her dislike of comparisons being drawn Amelia did indeed possess certain, dare it be said, cat-like reflexes. So, light of that, when Skulduggery's very brief warning came, she was able to spring back un-slimed when the console, for lack of a better description, exploded into a gooey, bubbling mess. Well, that also had to do with the fact that Skulduggery himself took most of the machine's spray.

For a moment the only noise in the suite was the sound of the bubbling remnants of what had once been a communication terminal, until the skeleton man belatedly finished his warning. For her part, Amelia simply stared in stunned silence at the mess - what manner of defense mechanism was that? - until her eyes moved over to her hapless companion's condition.

A few seconds longer of mere bubbling still, then, in a voice clearly holding back laughter at the man's plight, she responded, "You look a right mess."

[skeletonenigma]

"I'm sure I do," Skulduggery agreed. There was a certain note of lament in his tone. The suit he was wearing was the only one he had, and now it was dripping with black goo. Unless he could find some equivalent of a dry cleaner's in the city, he no longer had anything to wear.

Well, not until the kedan seamstress he'd met finished his order. But even then, none of the new ones would be Bespoke-tailored. None of them would be bullet-proof, or weather-proof, or fit quite as snugly as Ghastly's suits always seemed to manage.

Skulduggery allowed himself a few more moments of pointless self-pity, and then he knelt down to inspect the goo more closely. It wasn't oil, that much was certain. It wasn't any sort of chemical or fluid he'd ever seen before, in fact. "You don't happen to recognise this, Amelia, do you?"

[loquaciouslyfeline]

"Cheer up, I'm sure it'll come out." Amelia moved back closer to the mess to inspect it, now that the immediate danger of being covered in goo had passed. But on closer inspection, her face set into a frown.

"Unfortunately, I have seen something similar before, and it was far from benign." The slime was eerily reminiscent of the corruption that had afflicted Han, back in the bottle world of Kithika, and her experience there guided her to keep her distance, lest this bile also create monstrosities to fight.

And if it was the same, then Skulduggery needed to know. "I'd step back from it, if I were you. If this... liquid is the same as what I've encountered before, we'll have a bit of a scuffle on our hands in a moment's time."

[skeletonenigma]

"In my experience," said Skulduggery flatly, "no, it doesn't."

Not without so many parts of the suit being replaced that he might as well have ordered a new one to begin with.

Fortunately, Skulduggery's attention was caught less than a moment later. "A scuffle?" He didn't get up, and instead peered closer at the voluminous black goo. "Did the liquid itself attack you?"