Holly finds herself amidst a tumble of distorted, dream-like images. She is for a moment only certain that she is clinging to some ridiculously large furry animal - a horse-sized dog, perhaps, for all the sense the rest of this world makes. The momentary disorientation gives her pause, but at last she recovers her senses. Her surroundings are no less obscure, but at least she can focus on the physical sensations that give her an anchor point to some sort of reality.
Trying to ignore the fuzzy surroundings and dizziness from VRtigo, Holly tries to tighten her arms around the furry throat. "Nice try, Inari, but I'm full of bad coffee and in no mood to dream," she growls. "So how about you cough up the gizmos and we'll just go our separate ways?"
Holly hears, echoing from around her, and reverberating through the body, a laugh that is distinctly like the voice that spoke to her earlier at the gazebo. It would seem that this creature doesn't have to move its mouth to communicate, since its jaw is presumably occupied with its prize.
"What power do you have to threaten me so?" the beast taunts Holly. "Are you going to try to throttle me to death with your own hands? You seem to lack a sense of proper scale."
The creature bounds and dashes through an indistinct landscape, only glimpses of which suggest that it might possibly be the park, or some version thereof.
"I can bite your ears too," Holly warns. "And I'm a Link as well." Never mind that I don't know how to use it yet, Holly adds silently in her head.
"A Link without her Augment or Avatar is of no concern to me," the creature says. Holly's ride jolts. She has the feeling that it must be bounding up very steep ground. Or could it be climbing?
Despite the rough ride, Holly tenaciously clings onto the creature, digging hard into its furred hide.
"My Augment, right," Holly grumbles through gritted teeth. It's not like a Guardian so maybe I need a magic phrase or something, she reasons. "Okay, so.. um.. By the Access Code 'Hobbit' and.. the Niflheim Security Level 'Mistletoe', I call upon the power of Hel and the Svartaheim!" she yells out. She really needed to yell anyway.
In the midst of the dream-like forms, which seem to be growing more nightmarish - especially as the beast lands hard on a new surface with a loud thump - a dark circular form comes into being. It begins to unroll itself, suspiciously like a giant roll of semi-ethereal electrical tape. Then, it spins with greater speed, the tendrils launching outward, and encircling the great beast.
"What?!" the beast cries out, bounding and trying to evade, as the shimmering, dreamlike surroundings fade to a more uniform blackness. One "tape" finds its mark - then another. Then, the bands constrict - but carefully avoid entrapping the woman clinging to the beast's back. "What manner of spell is this? What sort of element is this?"
"You're no Augment! You're a - MMFFF!"
"I'm a mother," Holly says. "Don't make me send you to your room!"
The creature wordlessly slams into a stone ground. Stone. Not grass, not earth, not "stone-textured plastic."
Faint ambient light provides what little illumination there is - enough to see the giant fox-creature, bound up in what looks like magical electrical tape, for lack of a better term - electrical tape that is limned by a purplish static glow. In the darkness, there seem to be presences - many of them - cackling, laughing, watching.
"Okay," Holly says, stepping away from the fox. "I take it this isn't a dream, and I'm in the Shadow lands now?" she asks the unseen hecklers.
The hecklers cackle and guffaw, but none of them seem articulate enough to answer - or inclined to, if they can. The floor trembles, and she can hear cracking stone and earth. Overhead comes a cry like ... well, like a dragon's cry from some video game or holo-movie, accompanied by the familiar sound of the spinner-bike's turbines.
"... Three minutes!" can be heard above, above the sound of the turbine - Randall's voice.
The giant fox, meanwhile, looks sideways - balefully - at Holly, with its golden, slit-pupil eyes. Its muzzle and limbs and a great amount of its body - including even the tails - is securely wrapped in bands that continue to work their way, finding better grapple points.
Gathering her nerve, Holly turns back to the fox-creature. "Okay, deal time. I'll unbind your mouth, and you give me the remote controls," she tells it. "Do that, and I'll let you go. Otherwise you can stay tied up here with these guys."
As if they simply cannot resist the dramatic cue to back up her attempt at intimidation, several pairs of gleaming eyes emerge from the shadows, full of hunger and cruelty. The fox's eyes widen with fear, and then turn back to Holly with a complex mixture of hate and disbelief.
The woman reaches for the fox's muzzle, and tries to pull away an exposed tape-end to unwrap the mouth at least.
At her touch, the tape slides away effortlessly. Even though the mouth does not technically move, and is still clamped around the controls, the freeing of the tape seems to allow the creature to communicate again. "Who are you, really?" it growls. Although those teeth are very large and so close, it doesn't snap at Holly ... yet.
"I'm the one that controls your fate, at the moment," Holly replies, and holds a hand out. "Now let go of those, and we can see if Jason is as smart as he thinks he is."
Above, the dragon's cry calls out again. The turbines are closer as well. The fox's visible eye scans the darkness above, and the jaws offer no resistance as Holly extracts the controls.
"Okay," Trudeau says, trying to ignore the glowing eyes around them as she tries the remote-activator for the UV sunlamps.
There's the switch, just where Jason indicated it, while giving his usual "not-quite-in-layman-terms" explanation for how he had so cleverly rigged it together.
A spotlight shines down on the fox and on Holly from above. It would appear that a large, semi-metallic dragon - or wyvern? - is hovering in place, and providing the light source.
"Cross your tails," Holly says, and flips the switch. "Oh.. hey Randall!" she waves up at the wyvern.