Mertropolis

Coral finally realizes something, looking down at the white circle on the floor. "So that's why I can't use my magic..."

"Battle of the bands? Nice! I'd love to come along." Col remarks, smiling. "Hey, you alright Coral? What're you looking at?"

"Great," smiles the dragonnel. "Drop by my place by eleven at night in three days and I'll take you there." She then looks at what Coral is pointing out. "Are we looking at the circle here? You know what it is, don't you Col? You saw Heather draw it."

"Awesome, sounds like a plan." Col smiles back. "And yeah, I know what it is, but Coral seems interested in it again."

"I may not know exactly what it does, but it absorbed Floe's shadow and sucked up its magic, so its probably sucking up the magic from my body. What does it do?" Coral says, not looking up from the circle.

"Oh, it just redirects your mana to focus on healing you. Nothing major," replies Floe...

"'Mana,' huh. Never heard that term before. Then again, I largely had to teach myself how to use magic, as the only unicorn in Port Whinny who had more than an elementary understanding of magic hated foals. Anyway, thanks for letting me know that. Now I know not to let it get smudged or anything. Not that there's much I can do right now to stop such things from happening. Anyway, I've been too busy trying to get a job recently that I haven't had the chance to really try to learn any technical stuff about magic that might help me." Coral finally looks up from the circle, though now she's trying to look at the bookshelves, since whoever lives here surely must have some textbooks on such things.

"Well, the more you know," comments Floe as she wriggles around tries to make the sofa more comfortable...

Coral gives up trying to read the book titles, or even discern one book from the next. "I'm assuming my glasses didn't survive the building collapse?"

Col sighs. "Even if they did we couldn't go back to get them. Things didn't exactly go well down there..."

"I really have no idea, though we didn't really attack them. We did escape though, so who knows?" He replies.

Golden spends an inordinately long amount of time just looking at hotel before remembering that she came here for a reason. She then dashes for the stairs in whatever direction that may lead her to the desired room.

Golden goes down a couple stories and then spots that it becomes much wider and is filled with water continuing down.

Golden in a very rare moment of full insight stops in her tracks above the water and turns around heading back up to the lobby to look for a employee to ask for help.

Golden finds herself having to wait in a line for a few minutes. After explaining her issue, getting so far as explaining she wishes to go down, she is interrupted by being informed that they could send someone down with a message or she could pay 5 bits to borrow a breathing mask and air tank for an hour.

"Well... What do you want to hear more about? I imagine Floe already told you most of it." Col shrugs.

Golden ponders for a moment briefly considering a prank involving a ransom note before deciding to rent the stuff.

Golden is again told, specifically this time, that there is only an hour of air in the tank. The deer, as it happens to be, leans in conspiratorially and notes that the hotel does not require the tank setup to be returned in the hour, simply before one leaves and that sometimes guests keep their own oxygen supplies in their rooms to account for this.

"Ah, well... Turns out I was over-eager in starting a fight, since they weren't really hostile... Of course we found this out after we encountered a huge Aligator-thing called Hunter, and we ended up having to run away even after talking about the misunderstanding. Oh, and turns out that breaking-and-entering we did to get in wasn't unnoticed as we hoped, so that's why we ran into the police. We managed to escape because of darkness and Floe's skills with it, and that's about all." Col explains, shrugging. "Oh, and Gear ended up distracting the lizard-ponies in a stupid and suicidal plan that managed to work. At least he got out of it."

Coral takes this all in with wide eyes, then gives Floe a look. "The way you put it made it seem comparatively boring. How did you even do that?" While she was listening, though, she seemed to relax a touch, and she finally realizes that she is, in fact, still tired.