(Pre-Show) The Library

[Alain the Carnedge]

Alain had entered through the portal and, getting a quick grasp of what was happening, slipped by the reporters with relative ease, as it seemed most of them were occupied with harassing others when he'd arrived. The mercenary kept moving down the hallway, only stopping to check the screen that gave a list of potential participants, but kept walking once he realized that in the few seconds he stood there, about five more names had appeared. Most of the people on there sounded like jackasses anyway. He didn't think he'd see the day when Jason Voorhees was the most normal name on a list, but here he was.

The mercenary took a moment to consider whether he should stay here, as this seemed like the best place to gain allies, but decided against it. Too many reporters that couldn't keep out of other people's business. And besides, something seemed to be happening between a green man and some hooded dude, and he didn't want to be there when they started hurling fireballs.

Alain followed the sign that said Library, assuming that it went to well, a library. With luck, none of the reporters would be there, and he enjoyed the prospect of doing some light reading. It sounded a lot better than wandering the Moors for a few more hours, at least. He'd get something to eat later, it wasn't as if he didn't have time. First looking over his shoulder on the off chance he had a stalker, Alain walked into the library dome once he was sure there wasn't anyone following him.

He did have to admit, whoever ran this event went all out. There were enough books in here that it rivaled his old collection, which used to be big enough to make a lot of people in his world a bit more than jealous. Upon walking up the nearby steps, he realized it probably more than tripled what he thought. The mercenary briefly wondered how they got ahold of all of these books, then rolled his eyes at himself. Omnilium. Right.

Alain kept moving up instead of grabbing something to read, just out of simple curiosity as to how much had been summoned. The stairs kept going on. Each floor appeared to be devoid of life, most likely because everybody remained in the lobby. Though after a minute of stairs, he hit the fifth floor.

Instead of books, there were televisions on the walls and seats across from them. Each one had a remote on a nearby coffee table, with only a few options: play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, stop. It didn't take much effort to figure out what they did. Each television had a number on it: 1, 2, 3, and so on. This floor had fourteen televisions, with a fifteenth displaying the entrants list similar to what was in the lobby. He would've assumed that this was the fifteenth Dante's Abyss, but some of the numbers were replaced by "The Mysteries of Space" or something similar. He didn't bother checking, but it that most of these were records of previous DA's, while some were just other history about the world where these used to take place.

Out of curiosity, he checked if there was any new entrants of note. They had about ten more entrants at this point, including...Alain narrowed his eyes. Samus Aran. In one of his many attempts to amuse himself on the Dataverse while traveling in the Moors, the mercenary came across a bounty list. If he recalled, their name was on said list, and they were quite a high-profile target.

Alain took a few moments to think about this. A wanted individual was somewhere in these domes, even if he didn't know where. He opened his dataverse device and took a look at the list. For one, they were a she. Two, from the description, it didn't seem like it'd be hard to pick her out from the crowd, seeing as well, six foot tall person in power armour. Wasn't exactly difficult to spot someone matching that description. But on the other hand, he was in a good mood, and, in hindsight, he couldn't really be bothered to go look for somebody on what was effectively a break before fighting people anyway.

Deciding that this was his day off, the mercenary decided to ignore everyone with bounties until he'd got a base of operations, or at least got out of Dante's Abyss, and also figured that the reading material stopped here. The rest was most likely more recordings. So, he turned back to the stairs and went the way he came to grab a book or two.