2399/Lost between worlds.

Lost between worlds.
Date of Scene:	24 January 2017
Location:	Earth Court Frat House
Synopsis:	Ami decides to take a shortcut through time and space. Maze decides to make that less shortcut and more long haul.
Cast of Characters:	Ami Mizuno, Sakura Kinomoto

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Ami Mizuno has posed:
Ami runs from Takashi's home, nearly three full blocks before she slows and pants. She leans up against a lightpole, catching her breath, then opens her eyes again. "Right," she mumbles. "Kunzite."

Shaking her head, Ami heads towards the apartment complex that Mamoru has mostly taken ownership of for himself. It's a long walk, but she uses the time to clear her head in the brisk cold winter weather.

Once there, Ami finds the note on the refridgerator. A grimace, and she leaves another note tacked atop it, then one additional note tacked to Kunzite's personal refridgerator.

But there's other people here, and right now Ami wants to be alone. So rather than stay while they're all busy getting ready to leave, or consoling the ten-year-old, Ami just makes her exit as quietly as possible.

Raising her hand while standing in Makoto's favourite kitchen, Ami summons a bead of subspace into her palm. A moment later, that bead expands outwards into a portal big enough for her to step through into the subspace portal. The long tunnel stretches from Mamoru's apartment towards infinity. But it's always been deceptive; with just a short walk, she should emerge on a rooftop near the Game Center Crown.

Sakura Kinomoto has posed:
She should. Instead, as she steps through, the long portal... disappears. She soon finds herself inside a wide covering tunnel, made of some green stone. There were walls and a floor, all completely solid. And the hallway was long, of course. But it had dozens of branching paths.

She was in a maze. The walls were over a dozen feet tall, too tall to jump up normally and, if she tried to henshin to jump, they'd grow to match her height. There was light, at least.

Ami Mizuno has posed:
Ami stops walking immediately when the landscape changes around her. She blinks in surprise, then looks back over her shoulder, as if prepared to go back the way she's come. But that's just the same.

Hesitating, she turns around once, twice, then frowns. "Alright," she mumbles quietly to herself. For a long moment she remains transfixed, analyzing the problem from all angles. Eventually, she realizes several very important things: "There's light. I'm not cold. I'm not hungry. I am probably still in a subspace pocket. I can probably exist here eternally, if I don't go insane from boredom, first. There is probably a way out."

A pause, then Ami sets off in a direction, randomly following the hallways for several moments. After a few minutes of this, she backtracks to her starting place, then starts over: except this time, she keeps her left hand on the wall to the same side, following it slowly. "A maze," she mumbles to herself.

Sakura Kinomoto has posed:
Definitely a maze. It was a long, long maze and, after about an hour of walking... she'd find she was right back where she started. EXACTLY right where she started. Which was impressive because she came out from the right side, instead of the left. So this this was obviously just messing with her.

Ami Mizuno has posed:
The bluenette pauses when she realises she's back where she started. A faint frown, then she reaches up to squeeze her ear. A visor, crystal blue, appears on her face. Ami stands still as the visor analyzes everything around her.

And everything around her tells her she's still in the same subspace tunnel she created.

A frown, and Ami takes a deep breath. "Right," she mumbles, then reaches up to rub at the bridge of her nose, banishing the visor once again.

Raising her wrist to her mouth she opens the communicator and calls, "Luna? Usagi-chan? Mamoru-kun?"

Sakura Kinomoto has posed:
No signal. Which, all things considered, was pretty impressive. It probably took a LOT of magic to do something like that. And there was a LOT of magic here.

Almost like, say, it was something created by the most powerful mage in all of history.

The card just waited, the maze stretching off forever. She hadn't done anything too bad yet, though, so it wasn't... mad.

Ami Mizuno has posed:
No response. Ami stares at the watch for a moment, then sighs and looks up at the sky. The empty sky. The same sky that subspace always holds.

A long moment of pause as she stares at it, then reaches up to rub at her face. "Okay," she whispers, then closes her eyes and concentrates.

Manipulation of subspace is dangerous, in and around Earth. It's the kind of thing best left not done. In fact, it's so dangerous that the Arthra--a Midchildan subspace cruiser--was lost in subspace, and slowly tearing apart.

Somehow, though, Ami Mizuno has had a connection with subspace since becoming Sailor Mercury again. It wasn't the knowledge of the Silver Millenium that gave it to her; she didn't have her notes on the topic when she first discovered the talent. It was something else.

Maybe it was sheer bullish determination, or intellect, but Ami knows that she understands subspace on a fundamental level that many other mages still struggle with; even those Midchildan mages who developed drives capable of taking whole ships through that dimension.

So, dangerous though it is, Ami concentrates, and raises her hand. A bead of subspace magic forms there yet again, only this time when Ami allows that bead to expand her intention is not to open a gateway: it is to forcibly rearrange this space back into the intended, straight walkway she had started with. After all, this is almost assuredly just a consequence of her own magic gone awry. She can fix this.

Sakura Kinomoto has posed:
And it works. For all of a second.

Then maze gets mad. The walls begin to shift and mold themselves into all kinds of different forms and, before she knows it, she's now in a weird 3d maze. Also, she was pretty sure she was standing horizontally. She could see the exit, far above... but... gravity and space had been altered now. The entire region torn apart and reshifted. Up was no longer necessarily up, neither was down down.

Her computer likely did not like this.

Ami Mizuno has posed:
Ami startles when the maze reacts to her so violently. She staggers backwards and falls sideways?! She's sitting on her bottom, staring out at the reshaped maze. "What?" she asks, confusedly. "Escher?"

For several long moments, Ami just gapes at the maze. "Did I really mess up this bad?" she asks, confused.

The answer comes to her almost immediately. "No, I didn't. I couldn't have. This is something else. Maybe someone else."

Takashi's name comes to mind, only briefly. She then ignores that thought straight away. He wouldn't. Not to her.

Mercury touches her stomach uncomfortably, then pushes herself along the ground until her back is to the wall.

"What do I do?" she asks, uncertainly.