111 – Tour

111 – Tour

I didn’t expect the prehistoric space robot to gasp in surprise or stumble at me having known who he was, but I couldn’t help but be disappointed when he just continued staring at me with those lifeless green eyes of his.

“Curious,” he murmured, speaking in low gothic. He tapped a floating screen in front of him. Annoying tin bucket, you kidnap me then act like I’m just a fancy piece of furniture.

I decided to see how strong his fancy containment field was, so I pulled on some soul energy and pushed. The green energy wobbled, forced back away from my skin before snapping back as I let up.

Humm, hum, that was just a gentle push. I might be able to force my way out of this, making a tiny hole and teleporting through should be more than doable. Though it might just result in me getting thrown back into his pokeball before I could do so.

At least it got his attention. I grinned as he dropped the floating window which turned out to be some glass tablet; he near frantically fiddled with some switches and then I felt the green coiling energy constrict around me and gain in power.

“What is it?” Selene asked my other avatar, which was still happily bouncing around. “What happened?”

“I regained connection to my kidnapped avatar,” I said. “Let’s hope he doesn’t put it back into the box. I shouldn’t scare him too much.”

“What did he do?” she asked. “He isn’t dissecting you or something, is he?”

“Nope,” I said. “... he just has me tied up in a spread eagle like some wall decoration.”

Selene just stared at me, frowning. Then a flush ran up her cheeks.

“Naughty,” I rolled my eyes. “Ah ... I might be a bit distracted for a bit. Feel free to jolt me awake if there is something!”

“Sleep well ... I guess?”

With that said, I flopped over the bed and returned my focus to the avatar in Trazyn’s BDSM dungeon.

“I would appreciate it if you refrained from repeating that,” he said stoically. “I would hate to be forced to return you into the Tesseract Labyrinth after just a few minutes.”

“That would be regrettable indeed,” I nodded, doing away with the empowered voice thing. “You could certainly work on your hospitality though.”

“It is an unfortunate consequence of our circumstances,” he said.

“Hmmm,” I squinted at him. Stupid evasive rust bucket. “Why did you kidnap me?”

“... I have never seen anything quite like you,” he said after a moment of consideration. “It would be a shame if a unique being like yourself was lost to time. Here, you will exist in perpetuity as a part of my ... museum.”

“I know of your Infinite Galleries, Overlord Trazyn,” I said. “No need to dance around the subject.”

“A welcome surprise.” The 60 million-year-old alien murder robot preened like a cat. “I would offer to give you a tour ... alas I have learned not to let dangerous people near my prized exhibits.”

“I don’t suppose I could convince you to reconsider?” I asked. “Believe it or not, I am quite interested in your museum.”

“I’m afraid it would be too much of a risk,” he said, tapping a metal finger on his chin. “I can hardly even figure out what manner of a creature you are. Though if you could enlighten me ... I might be able to craft a containment with which I would be comfortable letting you take a stroll through the less important exhibits?”

“That’s a tough question,” I hummed. “You see, I’m not quite sure myself. Nor am I willing to disclose all of my weaknesses to you. What I will tell you, is what you have here tied up is what I call an ‘avatar’ and I have more than one of them running around.”

“That would complicate things,” he said with a nod. “I suppose, seeing as how agreeable you’ve been so far, you are not hellbent on delivering some misguided revenge on me for having misappropriated your ‘avatar’. Or are you?”

“How nostalgic,” I said. “It reminds me of ancient museums on Ear- *cough* I mean holy Terra.”

“Is that so?” he sounded pleased. “This section is dedicated to early human relics I’ve managed to rescue. Since I myself haven’t been able to see early human architecture, I could only work off of hearsay and ruins to design the decor.”

“I believe you did quite well at it,” I said, only to stop and gape at a particular painting. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be horrified.

Trazyn noticed me stopping and turned to stare at me curiously as I stepped up to the tiny frame and the painting inside. I ignored him in favour of inspecting the painting.

It was frozen in time, I could feel the spatial disturbance of the stasis-field even in this basic human body.

Following a few seconds of stupefaction, I let out a snort. Back when I was a teenager on Earth, I somehow got into a tour that took me on a month-long journey around western Europe with other kids.

Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, London, and Vienna were the main stops and despite only having spent a few days in each capital, I remembered staring at this exact same painting in the Louvre.

This crazy fucker had the Mona Lisa out in the hallway like it was some kid’s scribbles. The hallway expanded into the distance, splitting just a few hundred metres away and I could see at least another fifty paintings and dozens of statues placed with about the same care as the most famous painting on Earth — in my time that is.

Then I remembered a little tidbit from the lore and broke out in cackles.

“How did you get this?” I asked him. “Ah, sorry for being so forward. But I was under the impression that this ... “I pointed at the painting. “Was one of the most prized possessions of Malcador the Sigillite.”

“Ah, I see,” he nodded. “I wasn’t aware of its origins unfortunately, it was part of some imperial governor’s collection along with most of the other paintings you see in this hallway.”

I shook my head ruefully. “I’m not sure if you can check for the authenticity of a painting, or for its age. But if this is the original, then it is more than 40 thousand years old.”

That seemed to stump the old Necron. “Truly?”

He walked up to it, gently motioning for me to move aside, which I did. He then took out a slew of scanners from god knows where and waved them around for a minute. “The stasis field messes with temporal signatures, so I cannot be sure until I run some detailed scans, but it does indeed seem to be around thirty-five to forty millennium old.”

“Do you perhaps have a painting depicting sunflowers that came from the same governor’s museum?”

“Sunflowers?” He asked back distractedly. “I’m afraid I am unaware of that particular species of flora.”

“Well,” I said. “They are large flower-like plants with yellow leaves.” I stopped, realizing how little that narrowed down the options. “The painting I’m curious about supposedly depicted a handful of the flowers in a vase with a somewhat ... eccentric style.”

I could have thrown up an illusory replica of the painting quite easily, but locked in this flimsy body as I was and without drawing on any soul energy, all I could do was use words to describe it and consequently make a fool of myself.

I wasn’t an art girl, alright? Nor did I know how to describe damned plants accurately. You didn’t need to be either to just enjoy art and nature though.

“Perhaps,” he said. “I just might. But if I may, why do you ask?”

“It was the only other piece of art the Sigillite managed to protect from the ravages of time ... aside from this one.” I nodded toward the damned Mona Lisa. “Both of them should be a relic from the second millennium of Holy Terra.”

“I see,” he nodded. “Well, I suppose I will just plan our tour so we walk by all the possible candidates for that painting.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Would you care to share what you know of these two paintings?” he asked after a moment. “I would be loath to not have the original artist’s name under them at the very least.”

“Sure,” I smiled and started to enlighten Trazyn about the Renaissance and the lives of Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh.