2017-05-07: The Place Where Physics Goes To Die
- Log: The Place Where Physics Goes To Die
- Cast: Cassidy Cain, Noah Hawthorne
- Where: The Otherworldly Hollow, Port Timney
- Date: May 7, 2017
- Summary: Two troublemakers inevitably meet up again after their last disastrous encounter on a riverboat casino. Curiosity and a few cryptic obligations have Noah Hawthorne and Cassidy Cain crossing paths once more at the entrance of the Batical Grotto. Crazy shenanigans ensue, and while the two ultimately fail in breaching the heart of the strange construct, there are other catastrophes on the horizon that warrant discussion. Cassidy may not have found a connection to whatever it is she's seeking, but she has, at least, managed to secure the relic hunter's cooperation in her endeavors.
Type:
Info: Once known as the Batical Grotto, this system of caves is situated to the west of Port Timney, carved into the rocky outcroppings of the coast. These caverns are intricate deep; many a person has been lost within the depths, yet for its natural beauty it had been, at one point, something of a tourist attraction to those who could afford such simple luxuries. Now? These caverns are dark and dank and twisted, reaching down to the depths where no light can reach and permeating with a sense of dread that reaches even the most mundane of spiritual senses. Something in this place is not right. Something in this place has been warped. And from the creatures that have come from far and wide around southern Adlehyde to make this place their lair, to the way things grow more anomalous the deeper the caverns go, one thing is clear: something in this hollow is very, very wrong.
NOTE: this place has been infested with Malevolence. Those without properly developed spiritual sense cannot see anything denoted as such within the Grotto. Time to get some hands-on training with developing your bad juju sense!
---
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
Overhead the sky is a broad ache of deep blue, creamed at the horizon by the relentless sun, darkening down into an almost malicious likeness to bottomless waters as though taunting the parched world below. Port Timney strives for something like verdure and has greater success than most other places on Ignas, fields of grass rippling in the winds that chase one another across its more open plains, waves of gold flashing against the green. There are places here where it's possible to almost forget the open wounds of desert not far to the north and west, suppurations of sand that seem unlikely ever to heal. Here along the crinkling coastline of jagged cliff that illusion is especially persuasive: there is brine on the air that scrubs it clean of cloying dust, the rushing hiss-boom of waves slamming into and through coastal snarls of rock satisfying on some primal level difficult to describe. The movement of the sea churns through those breakwaters and creates foam that lingers thickly, like milk.
For Noah, seated on a rough stone some twenty yards from the crevice in the rock that leads down into what was once known as the Batical Grotto, the idyllic landscape presents a sharp contrast with what he knows to be true of what it contains. The Grotto was dangerous even before rumors of bizarrely hostile wildlife began to circulate, filled with winding corridors quick to disappear from easy view and leave its explorers stranded and confused, there to wander until they died. Like all of the throats of the earth, it swallowed more than its fair share of unprepared petitioners.
Now, if talk is to be believed, something nasty has come to settle within its depths, a noxious wickedness he knows nothing about. All of this shining sun, green grass and blue sea, all of this clean and shining air running its fingers through his hair, and less than one hundred feet from where he's sitting on a rough stone amidst a tumble of the same, there's a dark heart buried in the land.
Hazel eyes narrowed into the brilliance of the day, trained on that dark hole in the stone, he spits the hull of a seed he cracked between his teeth and sets to work on the next one, offering a second seed to the creature perched on his shoulder. Beside him, no doubt ecstatic with the weather and the opportunity to graze, the massive paint horse stands cropping grass contentedly, drowsy in the sun. On his other side, sitting on the ground, there's a substantial coil of rope. The rest of him is kitted out in equipment he always brings when he's delving: bandolier, holsters, the cuff containing the light-giving stone, a different cuff on the other wrist containing an old ARM of some sort, round-faced -- a watch, a compass, or something similar. A device on his belt meant for firing one of the grappling hooks hanging from one side of his belt.
"Well," he says at length, "I guess we oughta get on with it."
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
"Should have known you'd find your way around these parts eventually."
The wry, good-humored brogue comes from somewhere behind and to the side of him, right in his blind spot - though that could be a coincidence - and should he turn, he'd find a slender figure with blonde hair and long-legged strides taking her up the rest of the hill, fingers tucked into the pockets of her jacket and a thin stream of cigarette smoke curling upwards from a half-burnt stick, brushing against the brim of her hat. Even with the shadows eclipsing her face, the accent alone would be unmistakeable, though whatever the hell she is doing here is an open question that he might ask about in a few moments. For all of her earlier professed disinterest in all things related to digging up dead things, she at the very least looks prepared: leather breeches, chaps, boots and her own kit slung across her back, strap cutting diagonally over her chest, pistols on her hip, a familiar revolver tucked in the dip of her spine, and a coil of rope. Her own surprise would be evident enough once she tilts her head up, pale face and viridian eyes finding the sun, splinters of the day setting the gold motes within on fire. Lips curl up in an easy smile, brows lifting as fingers lift, to clamp over the top of her hat, doffing it off and anchoring it down the nearest place she could. No sense going in a place where she could lose it.
Taking a few steps forward, Cassidy squints at the darkness beckoning at them from the ground. Her nose crinkles along the bridge, a small noise at the back of her throat hinting at her displeasure.
"Ach, my giddy aunt. Fook me and my poor impulse control. You heard about what they're saying about this place, ay? I think a few teams already tried tae go down there, thought I could press on tae what they might've found so I can talk myself out of this ridiculous enterprise, but they returned either scared or traumatized." Looking up, her faint smile tugs slightly wider, enough to bare hints of her teeth. "In other words, I like our odds, dinnae you?"
Dropping her own coil of rope, she plucks her cigarette out from her mouth, tossing it on the ground and stubbing it with her bootheel.
"So when did you get tae Adlehyde, luv? Were you here for the Exhibit after all, or more business with your ceramic d-- "
The rest of the word is drowned out by a sudden roar, echoing from the deep; distant enough to imply that whatever made the sound is, at the very least, not directly underneath where they're about to drop. After a long, considering pause, eyes return to the hole as she tastes the associated fear and exhilaration that often accompany her urges to do something completely foolhardy - it sets her blood on fire, ratchets up the pace of her heart.
"Cute," she tells him gamely, mouth blossoming into a reckless smile. "I think it just welcomed us tae its humble abode. No sense keeping it waiting, ay?"
Is she going with him?
She is.
She's already slinging a rope around a standing rock, tightening it with a tug, one of her expert knots holding. Picking up a sturdy piece of wood, she wraps a strip of cloth around the end before soaking it in some of the fluid from her lighter, though she doesn't set it on fire yet. Clamping the thing between her teeth, with a firm grasp on her end of the rope, she starts rapelling herself down through the hole.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
The change in Noah's expression the moment he hears that voice -- and he'd know it anywhere; he absolutely does not have to turn around and look -- is complicated, to say the least, torn between flat-faced resignation of the 'of course she would turn up right now' type and the helpless twitch of a very small smile, because there are parts of him that relish the potential chaos, and they're not even the parts that most people who know him would assume by default.
When he does turn his head to angle one eye over a broad shoulder at her, though, he's ditched the smile everywhere save in his eyes -- it still dances there, cosseted in warmth he forbids the rest of his face -- and chosen to furnish her with the flat look instead. "I'm good at finding my way around parts," he agrees, amicably following through with the obligatory sally. He watches her ascend the hill and gives her equipment a brief once-over, though it doesn't need to linger: one look tells him enough that he has no need to ask her why she's there, though she explains -- sort of -- in her own peculiar way. Insufficiently with regard to her motive; his brows skew inward, skepticism painted eloquently on his face. "And here I thought the way you said 'scrabbling around in the dirt' when we met implied a disinterest in the fine Filgaian pasttime of scrabbling around in the dirt." It's a speculative drawl, lazy in its delivery, but it nudges her toward a more detailed accounting of her reasons for taking an interest.
He's perfectly transparent about his own. Once the roar in the distance below subsides into mere echoes and then silence he picks up answering her question as though it had never happened: "I've been here since our little boating adventure." Straightening, he dusts his hands, reaches for the little cloth bag containing the roasted seeds and folds it closed, tucking it into the small satchel hung from one shoulder 'holster.' "Here and there. It's a nice change of pace from Aveh. But if you mean this part of Adlehyde..." He tilts his chin at the crevice in the stone. "Why else?"
He's still sitting there, in no apparent rush to descend, when she begins making preparations to do so herself. One of his brows makes a very slow but very determined bid for his hairline. It's not clear what he's thinking as he watches her do that, but he is definitely thinking, and hard. Whatever wheels were turning, they produce the following remark: "Okay, Cassie, I'm game to have you along, but look -- grenades. I know you love grenades, but let's just establish before we even get started that grenades and holes in the ground are a pretty bad combination, unless you wanna spend the rest of your life down there. Can we agree on that? I feel like we can probably agree on that."
He pushes himself up off of the rock, half-heartedly dusts grit off of the ass of his pants, then stoops to hoist the fairly heavy coil of rope, dropping it cross-wise over his chest like his bandolier.
<CARD DRAW>
++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Otherworldly Hollow *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Collateral Damage *>++++++++++++++++++++++
Type: Entry
Dungeon Ability: Brute
Challenge Rating: 1
While few might be truly brave enough to test the depths of the Otherworldly Hollow, that doesn't mean no one has set foot here since the Hellions made it into their lair. Signs of recent battle mark the Hollow's entrance in a plethora of ways, but maybe the most noteworthy one is the sign of fresh rubble blocking the entrance. Whoops. Welp. Best get crackin'.
+Dungeon Conditions: Bad Luck+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DG: Cassidy Cain has contributed a Brute Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Collateral Damage.
DG: Noah Hawthorne has contributed a Brute Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Collateral Damage.
DG: You fail the challenge, and take 16 Exhaustion! You have 16 total Exhaustion.
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has failed this challenge! The party gained 0 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeondraw.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
"Ay, one meeting was enough for me tae know that verra well about you, luv, with you and your panache in finding your way around parts." Her lips part this time, that full cleaver's grin putting the sun above them to shame, liable to blind the unwary. "Dinnae think these parts in particular had enough curves for your liking, though."
Bracing a boot on the edge of the hole, and leaning back to ensure that the length of rope tugs taut over the taper of her waist, eyes lift towards where he takes his time making his preparations. "That's nae changed," she tells him, fingers hooking into sturdy, twisted fiber. "Still bloody disinterested in scrabbling in the dirt, but whatever's going on down there may be related tae a thing I'm looking into. It may, ay. But it may nae, also. Equal odds, dinnae see any way around it tae cover my bases considering how cryptic the job is. Tell you what, though. If we live through this, I'll tell you about it."
With a jaunty salute, she loosens her grip, her body spinning free into the depths below.
"Got it, nae grenades, oh ye of little faith," she manages to say around the improvised torch clamped between her teeth. "What makes you think I brought them anyway? For all you know, I've run out given my perpetual insistence tae the very liberal use of it? I like explosions. Dinnae you like explosions? Because you seem tae be the type that likes explosions."
Her words echo as she descends, floating up and lingering in dank, dusty air as the grotto's craggy walls loom above her. Booted feet land on the ground in short order, disengaging herself from the coil. Lighter spinning into her knuckles, she flicks at it, the resulting flame brushing over the coiled, fluid-soaked strips attached to the end; fragments of shadow banish at the sudden spit and flare of red-gold light. Lifting it over her head, her eyes scan over the surrounding nooks and crannies, rocks and crevices, only to end towards the actual entrance to the rest of the Hollow and the debris left behind by past exploration teams. She heaves a sigh, rolling her head back, stare directed upward in a futile bid for saintly patience.
"WELL," she calls out from down below. "SINCE I CANNAE USE MY GRENADES, WE'RE GONNA HAVE TAE FIND ANOTHER WAY AROUND BECAUSE THE ENTRANCE IS BLOCKED. TYPICAL DRIFTERS, AY? LEAVING A MESS WHEREVER WE GO, SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED IT'D INCONVENIENCE US FOR A CHANGE."
Walking forward, she takes a knee, green eyes squinting at the collapse. A hand reaches out, to test the rocks underneath. Standing back up, she pokes, prods and kicks at a few, but to no avail; the weight of the rocks on top pin the bottom ones securely. It might as well be a wall, and it will take hours if they attempt to go from the top down.
And really, she's exhausted thinking about it already. "Nae exactly changing my mind about Filgaia's favorite bloody pasttime," she mutters.
She swings her torch around, then. in an effort to find an alternate route. Under the blazing, crimson-and-gold glow, her eyes track upwards at a contraption at the end and after taking a few steps forward...
...her expression flattens.
"You've got tae be bloody kidding me. What is this shite?"
<CARD DRAW>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Otherworldly Hollow *>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Ascend the Shaft *>+++++++++++++++++++++++
Type: Exploration
Dungeon Ability: Brute
Challenge Rating: 1
People once used the Hollow, before it was ultimately abandoned; their presence still lingers, here and there, mostly in rudimentary ways. Ways like the manual rope-and-pulley lift that leads up, further into the caverns. Hopefully you've got some people with great upper body strength with you, because it's sure as hell a long way up.
+Dungeon Conditions: Tire+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DG: Noah Hawthorne has contributed a Brute Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Ascend the Shaft.
DG: Cassidy Cain has contributed a Brute Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Ascend the Shaft.
DG: You fail the challenge, and take 18 Exhaustion! You have 34 total Exhaustion.
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has failed this challenge! The party gained 0 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeondraw.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
"You brought grenades with you on a boat, Cassie," Noah says flatly, clipping himself to the line she's descending with a small mechanical device. He stands at the edge and watches her sink into the gloom until she's difficult to see and then plunges into the cool shadows himself on a controlled descent that attests to plenty of practice. "On a boat. You just had them with you. Nobody does that, okay? What the hell are you going to use grenades for on a boat? I know what you did use them for, but I gathered from the things you were shrieking at the sky that it wasn't your first plan of action, so my point stands. And I like explosions just fine when they're not going to bury me alive, yeah. The burying alive part sort of takes some of the shine off of it. I know it's hard to believe, but when you're underground it's pretty difficult to get alcohol, food, or p--"
That's when her yell cuts up like a blade from the dark, and he halts briefly in his descent, exhaling as he sinks the small remaining distance, plants his feet on the ground, unclips from the rope, and does something with the cuff on his left wrist. Brilliant light stabs outward into the dark, shredding it back to reveal the rubble she mentioned and winning a tight little frown from him. There's no guarantee that the rock fall isn't more serious than just an entrance-blocking obstacle, and all he can do is hope that it hasn't clogged every available route into the interior, rendered impassable by indelicate explorers before them.
Turning, he follows the sound of her hollow voice in the darkness, bootfalls gritting quietly on the stone floor. There are scorch marks and other signs of combat here, telltale leavings of scenes of violence that he reads like a book on his way to draw up beside her. He stops, thumb hooked beneath the rope coils hung on a slant from his shoulder, and looks up at their remaining obvious option.
He plants one hand on the outer wall of the shaft, leans into it as a brace and cranes his head cautiously to look up along the vertical height of it. Hazel eyes find little to no purchase on the inside -- not really enough for him to climb with any ease, certainly.
Pushing himself upright again, he says, "It looks like a bad idea to me," and then steps forward to test the elevator floor anyway, obviously intent on continuing.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
You brought grenades with you on a boat, Cassie.
The rant that follows earns him a sidelong glance across her shoulder, amusement simmering within those green-and-gold eyes. The fact that she brought incendiary devices to a boat, where sinking is probably one of its worst case scenarios, doesn't generate even a single bat of her lashes, the look on her face reflective of a foregone conclusion that she has managed to form while being what she is for the last ten years:
"Better tae have them than not, luv," she says with a blithe little smile. "I never leave home without them. Besides, with enough foresight, I'm sure you can convince one of the Baskar Shamans tae raise you back from the dead in some form in the event the dark of the afterlife bores you. Dinnae know if they can guarantee the shape of it, mind, but I s'pose anything would be better than a corpse. Even mollusks have a better time in the deep, doing nothing but burrowing and eating and escaping predators by farting a stream of bubbles..."
His taller shadow falls next to her own, and the two of them slowly look up the mechanical lift. There's a curious glance at him. "Nae gonna try, ay?" she wonders, eyeballing the way he squints up the shaft in an assessing fashion.
It looks like a bad idea to me.
That earns him another laugh, the sound echoing strangely in the stone chamber's accoustics. "Really? What gave it away?" she wonders. "The disturbing rumors? The ominous bloodcurdling animal sound we just heard when we were still up there? The fact that the rubble blocking our problems might actually tae keep something in instead of bloody, reckless, foolhardy idiots like us out? The fact that this rig..." She knocks her boot against the side of it, vibrations from the impact causing a fine film of pebbles and stone to cascade over them in a cloud. "...has probably nae seen any working hands in however long?"
And despite everything she just said, she gets on the elevator anyway. That broad grin returns, flashing him a wink.
"Ach, well. Could be fun."
With that, she reaches for the rope and pulley mechanism.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
"I'm not saying not to be prepared. You just asked me what made me think you brought them, and that's what. Bringing them on a boat. That's what some of us would call 'a tell.'"
As he tests his footing inside of the elevator shaft, head bowed and eyes on the creaking, ancient platform, she queries him about whether or not he's going to try to ascend it another way, and only his eyes lift to meet hers, brows cocked. "Not if I don't have to. Those walls look slicker than a hooker in a hothouse and I'd like to delay dying until after we're at least inside. Though, can we just take a moment to appreciate that we're trying to go down into a cave and the first thing we have to do, for some reason, is go up?"
He makes room for her on the cramped platform and once she has hold of the rope he places his own grip on it so that their hands are staggered: his, hers, his, hers, the better to walk them upward in sequence and in theory split the burden of their ascent. In theory.
He has his suspicions about who it is that's going to wind up doing most of the work, well-founded by a lifetime of being shamelessly used by abbreviated people to retrieve things off of high shelves and move furniture around.
He leans into the weight of it, and in spite of the way the tension makes the tendons and sinews in his forearms stand out and the muscles of his shoulders bunch, he invests some effort in trying to make it look easy, at least. It isn't. It is not easy at all and his internal monologue consists of a great deal of silent bad language, but at least for the time being he seems indefatigable.
His response to her litany of enjoyable perils is a sharp half-smile that catches the light from the device on his wrist, and words only traced around the edges with their efforts. "Thing about rumors is that there's always some truth there, but it's usually more complicated than people think, so we're definitely going to run into some surprises. Like an underground cave with a lift that goes up, for instance. So we'll learn something new, probably." Light tone, good humor, a little bit on the dry side. "We might get eaten by whatever made that sound, but chances are nobody else has seen it yet if it's far enough inside, so...maybe we'll have the privilege of being eaten by something nobody else has ever been eaten by. There is a chance -- I'm not actually counting on this but it is possible -- that the rubble is there to keep us out because what's in here is actually..." He tightens his jaw a moment and gives the rope a huge pull, hoisting them up a fair distance, "...beautiful people wearing very little, armed with bottles of almond oil for massages, lounging around hot springs, handing out..." PULL. "Cold drinks. Cold drinks and...I don't know...little fancy...cakes, or something..." PULL. "And this lift is, so far, exceeding expectations by remaining intact, but even if the worst happened and it did fall apart, it would be a really exciting five seconds or so before we hit the ground. The falling is always fun..." PULL. "It's just that one last second that's not so great."
His sentence is punctuated with a sudden, sharp CRACK! from the floorboards beneath them. All movement from Noah ceases save the ever-so-slow downward tilt of his head, eyes rolled downward too, to watch the floor beginning to disintegrate.
After a long pause -- it feels long, anyway, with the boards beginning to fall apart -- he sighs.
"Yep," he says. To himself, by the sound of it.
The lift virtually explodes the moment the word is out of his mouth. Hands with a solid grip on the rope bear down on it, calluses built up over years of climbing helping to keep his fingers from slipping uselessly along the worn surface when he lifts his legs and wraps them around her low ribs, ankles crossed behind her. It's probably likely to squeeze her lungs, but it's a precaution against her sudden plummet downward into the darkness, where the shattered remains of the lift will land in jagged shards and spines of broken wood. He does it without thinking or planning, a reflex not unlike the reflexes that have kept him alive in spite of a lifestyle that just begs for this kind of thing to happen.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate that we're trying to go down into a cave and the first thing we have to do, for some reason, is go up?
She carefully sets aside the torch, wedging it on the edge of the platform before she maneuvers herself to the center, with Noah's taller form functioning as some kind of ballast to keep it from tilting one way or another.
"What? Is this nae a regular occurrence tae you cave diving types?" Cassidy wonders, groaning as she tightens her grip on the ropes with leather-clad fingers, using his time and beat to assist him with jerking their rickety platform up the shaft, the pulley's tortured pleas echoing through the cavern like nails on a chalkboard. "Heading one way only tae go up the other way? Though I s'pose it's easy tae assume something as old as dirt would have had the centuries necessary tae be able tae make its god." Squeak. "Damn." Squeeeaaaaaal. "Mind." Squashed on the other side of the lift, slender form tucked against his lean, she takes a deep breath, angling a look at him sidelong. "...by now." But in spite of her complaints, she can't help but grin.
"Your hobby sucks," she points out, oh-so-helpfully.
He outlines, through the lens of his presumably years of experience doing this very thing, the things they could expect as the lift slowly squeaks and lifts them up the shaft, the underglow of exertion and the beginnings of well-earned perspiration pushing up from underneath her skin, though as usual it falls into fanciful tangents that hitches another peal of laughter, presently trapped within the cage of her ribs as they grunt and struggle their way up the shaft. And the more he goes on, the more that outpouring of mirth comes loose. It does not help their present predicament, as she needs the breaths she just lost to assist him with pulling them up and up and up the long passageway upwards.
"Oh, ay, normally I would be..." Gasp. Puff. She really needs to cut down on those bloody cigarettes. "...all about...scantily clad beautiful people and..." Wheeze. "Cold drinks. Especially those, right about now. Cubes of ice swimming in some sweet multicolored cocktail made out of liquor and pulped fruit I would nae be ashamed drinking in front of our rougher, tougher brethren..." Breathe. "But I've been around, luv. You know what that tells me? This paradise with mostly-nude pretties and frosty libations hiding behind a pile of rocks and guarded by some scary-sounding sommat?"
Turning her face to look at him, right at his words about falling, her lips split in another one of those reckless grins. "It's a-- "
CRACK!!!
Her expression drains into absolute neutrality. He would be able to glimpse it just before the platform just vanishes underneath them in a pile of splinters, finally giving way to both their combined weights. There's a sudden yelp, the blonde's cry bouncing off the walls as she starts plummeting down the shaft, and would have continued were it not for his quick thinking. Having latched onto the rope, she would have slid lower but for the brace of his legs, banding around her tightly until ankles lock and his bootheel digs into the center of her spine. Her breath leaves her lungs in a jagged burst, the sudden stop leaving her legs dangling free somewhere below them, swinging lazily over darkness that becomes more profound when her torch vanishes. The sound of its clatter punctuates the ghostly throes of her reflected exclamation, before it is snuffed out by the silty film descending to the ground, shaken free by their close call.
"...trap..."
She sighs, tilting her head back to try and find Noah's eyes, the side of his face blanketed with the green-white glow of the crystal attached to his bracelet. "So..." she ventures slowly. "What? A barehanded climb hundreds of feet in the air was nae enough for you? I thought you'd have your fill the last time we saw each other. Is this an addiction, lad? Do we have tae talk about this? Is your absolute love for climbing impossible things your version of my gren-- "
Cassidy suddenly falls silent, lifting a finger. "...you hear that?"
Rustling, almost, pulsing through the craggy surfaces surrounding them, hidden veins webbing outward from the grotto's secret heart. She tilts her head in an angle, before fishing for her lighter. Deft fingers lift it up, striking the flint and letting it burn, its warm glow caressing rock, angles and contours brought to sudden, sharp relief. Her wandering gaze catches another hole, only wide enough to be able to fit their bodies, if they manage to get up there and do so one at a time.
She taps his legs, to signal him to ease their bind from around her, and once he obliges her, she dangles free of the rope again. "Alright, we'll need tae climb up a little higher and then reach for it. I'll go first." Twining a leg around the rest of the length underneath her, she takes another breath as she starts to do so, carefully maneuvering around his body so she doesn't accidentally dislodge him, moving on up, and up, and up, following the sway of the rope as she goes...
A hand reaches out, to grasp the end of the opening. Gritting her teeth, she claws her bootheel into the rock, arms straining, spine bowing as she rubber-bands herself into it, managing to get a leg in. Scrambling up and bending one knee, she slips half of herself inside. The lighter has vanished; both sets of fingers attempt to draw the rope closer to the wall...
....gravity does not cooperate. Green eyes widen as she realizes the tunnel she's slipped herself into is a steep incline.
"Ah, sh-- "
The rope suddenly goes slack. There's another cry as she slides uncontrollably down the way, vanishing in the deep dark. But not without a loud, exclaimed:
"IT'S A BLOODY GOD DAMN SLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDEEEEEEEE-- !!!"
She's helping.
The tail end of the shriek ends in an abrupt silence. It lasts for a few long moments.
"....NOAH. I THINK YOU BETTER COME TAKE A LOOK AT THIS."
<CARD DRAW>
++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Otherworldly Hollow *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Color-Coded for Your Convenience *>++++++++++++++
Type: Exploration
Dungeon Ability: Wits
Challenge Rating: 1
Torrential waters run through the Hollow; you've stumbled upon one such location, a gap between dry land and the raging river carving through the Hollow that will most assuredly sweep you away somewhere unpleasant if you're not careful. The only way to cross? A series of natural stepping stones. Easy enough, right? For those that can sense such thing, though, the presence of Malevolence permeates even through rock, and several of these natural outcroppings reek of the violet-colored spiritual blight; stepping on those infested with it will make them crumble away within an instant. Best hope you're very careful -- or have someone who can see them to guide you.
+Dungeon Conditions: Tire+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DG: Noah Hawthorne has used his Tool Personal Journal toward his party's challenge, Color-Coded for Your Convenience.
DG: Cassidy Cain has used her Tool Pocket Lighter toward her party's challenge, Color-Coded for Your Convenience.
DG: You pass the challenge, and take 6 Exhaustion! You have 40 total Exhaustion.
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has passed this challenge! The party gained 22 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeondraw.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
After the unholy din caused by the lift's spectacular failure and its subsequent crash to the bottom, there they hang for some moments with only the quiet creak of the rope. And the first thing anyone says is: ...trap...
And then she tilts her head back, looks up at him, and--
"Cassie not to cramp your style or anything but maybe you could save the monologue for when I'm not having to hold you up with my--"
She shushes him though, and he does actually drop into immediate silence, tilting his head to listen for whatever it is that she's heard. Occasionally survival instincts mean being quiet, and contrary to all appearances Noah's survival instincts are very, very good.
He hears it, though it's faint. With her weight in addition to his he doesn't dare lift his hand to sweep the light source around them in search of the source, but Cassidy obliges them both, spilling warm light over cold stone so smooth and featureless that he closes his eyes and broadcasts a silent prayer of gratitude that the rope held when the platform did not.
He opens them again when he feels her tap his leg, and with no small relief allows his ankles to uncross and the smaller figure slightly lower than himself to take the majority of her own weight again. He can't yet wind his legs around the rope -- she's occupying most of it -- but he buckles into the quiet burn of lactic acid in weary muscles to wait for her to ascend up and around him, head ducked down into the space between his arms to avoid catching any grit from the bottom of her boots as she navigates up over the cliff of his shoulders. When he's able, he finally gets the rope between his legs and lets them take half of his weight, and the exhale that leaves him is distilled relief. Not quite as good as beautiful people with massage oil, hot springs and cold drinks, but almost as good. Suffering has a way of altering perspectives.
Speaking of which: "Oh it'd definitely be a trap," he finally says, head tilted, gaze lanced sidelong up toward the place that gold-orange light limns the pieces of her exposed to the naked flame, everything else cut in shades of black. "But I might just go for it anyway."
The rope suddenly wobbles as her grip on it breaks, and he snaps his head up to look up complete when the pale dove of her hand disappears. His heart skips a beat, fatigue suddenly forgotten in his swift, long-limbed ascent to the place he saw her disappear into the stone face, the hole easily big enough for her. It's a more challenging fit for Noah, and it's only her informative outcry as her voice dwindles rapidly away down the tube that spares him an ungainly effort to jam himself down into it.
Then silence.
"Cassie?" He calls her name within the half-circle of a cupped hand, directing the noise down the hole. "Are you--?"
I THINK YOU BETTER COME TAKE A LOOK AT THIS.
Thoughtful hazel eyes regard the blank darkness of the hole. It's something incredible or something terrible, and given what he knows about Cassidy Cain -- which is not much, in the grand scheme of things, but enough for him to hazard this guess -- he's going to assume it's terrible.
It's definitely not attractive naked people with alcohol and a deep-seated cultural need to massage adventurers. It definitely is not.
He swings the rope back and forth enough to get his boots on the lip of the hole, walking himself down into it and keeping hold of the rope until enough of him is inside that he can let go. There's no hesitation: she made it, so can he. Plus: slide.
He sounds like he enjoys it way too much on the way down, unrestrained glee in the laughter that follows, even after his momentum spits him out into a chamber choked with a thick miasma of bad energy. For some moments he just lays there on the ground with the breadth of his chest rising and falling, chill from the stone bleeding through the thin material of his shirt, cooling skin heated by their incomplete athletic ascent and muscles beginning to warm to all he's asking of them. "See, why couldn't we have had a slide in the beginning? Right?"
Breath caught, he curls himself upright to sit, drawing his knees up and draping his forearms over them, and the sight that greets him is cause to dampen his cavalier mood of humor.
Eyes like absinthe and whiskey wander the furious movement of the water passing through the cave, and in spite of the ugliness that radiates from some of the stones that seem to lead across it, it's the water that makes his skin crawl.
"We...do not want to fall in that," he says, and his voice drifts down into baritone registers, subdued. "Cave waters that move like this...we might never surface anywhere. There are watery mazes under most of these coastal places."
He watches the furious torrent of water for a moment more, then reaches into one of the pockets on the bandolier, withdrawing...a journal. Leather-bound and well worn, pages stuffed with all sorts of things, the light from the light-giving ARM on his wrist splashes the vellum to illuminate various things as he scrolls past them: scraps of fabric (one textile, one somewhat suggestive bit of lace); leaves not common to this part of Filgaia; letters in handwriting unlike the block-letter print on most of the pages -- all sorts of things.
And sketches.
His handwriting is nothing special, really, but the sketches are something else. There are several on the page he lands on: one of dots in a pattern, then text, and then another of what appears to be part of a woman. Nude, laying on pillows in a bolt of light near a window, it depicts her from the throat down to one hip, brilliant splashes of light erasing some contours of her form -- left blank -- with shadows delicately cross-hatched into dips both subtle and deep. It's not lurid, particularly -- more like a study, though there's an innately affectionate warmth to the rendering's execution: an airy, intimate moment frozen in time.
"I met someone in Adlehyde who came in here. She didn't mention a slide, so she must have gotten here some other way, but she did mention an underground river."
Planting one hand, he splays the journal with the other and rises, glancing between the page and the stones, trying to see if the patterns match. "Some of these stones are bad. And I think I'd usually be able to tell, but the water's so high..." Silence. "Yeah...I think this is the stretch. Here. Look." One finger traces the safe route across the page. "I think we're going to need your lighter again. This one's too bright on the water, it's just going to make it more difficult to see where we're stepping."
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
But I just might go for it anyway.
The comment gets a snap-point towards his direction, silent agreement there just before everything else happens and the two of them eventually make it down the slide. Echoes of mirth and pure, unbridled enjoyment has her quirking her lips upwards just as the end spits him back out a few feet away from her. Just a few distance away, she's surveying her surroundings with a curious, but guarded light; there is something about this part of the caverns that makes her hackles rise uncomfortably, gooseflesh spilling over pale skin despite the slick sheen of sweat glistening on her cheeks and the visible slope of her neck, where high-quality pearls and that thin red-brown streak marring some of them gleam dully under the supernatural violet light pouring from darker crevices, of which she can't quite make the details. The pliant line of her mouth is neutral in its expression, before she finally turns towards her companion when he gets up.
"Well, I s'pose it would nae be an expedition worth writing about if getting tae a place is too easy." The blonde moves towards where he stands, flipping through the leather-bound notebook in his grip, unabashedly leaning in to take a peek at what's scribbled on the pages. Eyes that look more evergreen than emerald sweep over the sheets; the drawing earns an appreciative tilt of her head, though she doesn't ask. Rocking back on her heels, she reclaims some distance again, a boot props on top of slight indentation on the ground, glimpsing the stepping stones.
"Speaking of traps," she tells him. She is in no way a veteran spelunker, her preferred haunts are in cities and above-ground wilds, but the woman makes a living as a thief, and she knows them when she sees them. His remark about his friend has her inclining her head over her shoulder to look at him. "Could have been one of the lucky sods who managed tae get through the actual entrance then, maybe," she tells him.
He confirms her suspicions, the trace of his finger catching her attention as she commits the sketch to memory after a lean from the waist; in the faint, indigo glow, she can barely make out hints of the symbols he refers to. Fishing out the lighter from her pocket, she deposits the pretty, engraved silver thing in his palm. It is a plain, but elegant thing, boasting no design save for the lovingly wrought depiction of a snake eating its own tail at the very front, eyes inlaid by tiny sapphires.
"You better lead the way, then," she tells him. "You're taller and you've got better reach. I'll want that back, though."
She furrows her brows at the violet glow, gesture towards the emanations with a flick of a wrist. "Nae seen anything like this before. Have you? Dinnae know what it is, but it's making my skin crawl, also." The water goes without saying, giving the turbulent depths a glance, but otherwise the sight of it ellicits no outward reaction.
"However we do this, we better not fall, then," she murmurs. Gesturing forward with a flourish, her smile returns.
"After you." So magnanimous.
Whenever he picks up his feet, she follows behind him, following her lighter's flame, and Noah's taller, broader form, their shadows twisting into the surrounding abyss, wraiths returning to its yawning embrace. Her heart maintains its rapid pace against her bones; whatever exhilaration she feels is largely drowned out by the underlying sense of dread sleeping within this network of tunnels.
"Wonder what happened here that made all of this...feel this way. It tastes like..." She searches for the word.
"Hate."
<CARD DRAW>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Otherworldly Hollow *>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - One Big Push *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Type: Exploration
Dungeon Ability: Brute
Challenge Rating: 1
Oh hey look, it's a giant boulder. How'd that boulder get there? What was this boulder's life like, until it got here, resting on that lonely slope, blocking your way further down into the depths of the Hollow? Oh, what adventures this boulder must have had! Epics of scales one could scarcely imagine! Adventure! Intrigue! Romance!(?) A true hero, this boulder very well could be. But right now it's in your way so maybe you should try to just push it down that path so it stops continuing to be in your way. Alas, poor boulder. You were the best of us.
+Dungeon Conditions: Weaken+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DG: Cassidy Cain has used her Tool Heavy Grenade toward her party's challenge, One Big Push.
DG: Noah Hawthorne has contributed a Brute Basic Action toward his party's challenge, One Big Push.
DG: You pass the challenge, and take 17 Exhaustion! You have 57 total Exhaustion.
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has failed this challenge! The party gained 2 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeondraw.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
Yes...'friend.'
She was a friend. Definitely. Because he would never take somebody to bed just to find out what they knew about an entirely different hole he was interested in. Only a terrible person would do something like that and Noah is the best person.
Snapping the journal closed like a clamshell, he tucks it securely into the pocket he removed it from and holds his hand out when she extends the lighter his way. What follows is probably no surprise even after spending a minimum of time with him on board the train to Adlehyde after their first misadventure: he spends a moment silently examining it, turning it over in hands that seem to require experiencing everything new that falls into them, the tip of his thumb slid over the tiny gemstone eyes and the endless ouroboros ring of the engraving.
His gaze is openly curious when he lifts it to her, but he doesn't ask any questions about the design, only switches off the light at his wrist and turns to face the bank of the rushing waters. Perhaps he ought to make some dry remark about her oh-so-gracious offer to let him go first, but there's no complaining from Noah. This is what he does. As much as the thought of getting vented into a horrible underwater maze to drown is less than thrilling, and the thought of getting closer to those wicked, fel-lit stones turns his stomach...his dominating feeling is exhilaration, heart beating quickly, skin sensitively alive to every last air current and texture, every sublime shadow, every traded quip and unexpected evolution of their goal burned into his prodigious memory.
He lives for this.
Has he ever seen anything like this, she asks, and wonders what could have happened to cause it. His slow head-shake is not so much bewildered as it is an expression of wonder. "No. No idea what it is, or how it happened. They said the wildlife was getting aggressive. Maybe it doesn't just affect stone."
A chilling thought, really. He glances sidelong and down at her. "Watch your step." It's an unnecessary warning, but it doesn't sound like a warning or an instruction. It sounds like a way to express concern for her.
Flipping the borrowed lighter open, he strikes the light and holds it low. The ruddy quality of it casts less light than his wrist device but pulls the view of the stones from the mess of the water with far better clarity, allowing them to traverse. There's a tense moment when he's standing with one foot on a small stone, no room for the other one, and he has to check the journal -- one of the stones on his sketch is missing, probably destroyed in the time since he spoke to the woman in Adlehyde -- and he needs to double check they haven't gone off-course.
No one dies, though, and after so many setbacks he seems buoyed up by their uneventful crossing; he lingers near the edge until she's safely across, then clicks the lighter closed, reactivates his wrist light, and hands the silver lighter back into her keeping.
"Finally," he opines, as they travel down a short length of sloping cave corridor. "Maybe we're finally past all of the stupid bull--" He stops. What had looked like a round, dark continuation into the pitch blackness is not in fact anything like that. It is, instead, a massive boulder, tightly wedged into the passage, and it comes into view the moment the lights they're carrying penetrate the dark.
He says nothing after that, only sighs. It seems like enough.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Spending those hours with him in the past have enabled Cassidy to determine certain aspects of Noah Hawthorne that would be easily missed if one was less perceptive; the fact that he is a person finely attuned to his more tactile senses is one of them. As his thumb rolls over the engraving, when those hazel eyes look up to pose those silent questions, she doesn't answer them, if not just because she doesn't see them in the first place - her stare, too, falls on the well-loved surface of the silver token, taking in the scratches, hints left behind by time and travel, a torn piece of the road map of her tumultuous life weighed in his hand. He'd find something rare on her expression as she looks at it through her lidded stare, pale features softened by remembered affection underscored by something else, buried deep.
When her gaze finally lifts, Cassidy flashes him a wink, turning on her heel to start on their undoubtedly perilous traverse through those staggering stone steps. Even without the light, however, she would be convinced that she'd be able to track him by the restless emanations she senses from him, felt more in the air and glimpsed in the way he moves. It mirrors her own wild energy, in the tasks and circumstances she lives for, and really, she can't begrudge anyone for loving the experience of exploration. In his company, she finds it infectious, a small smirk curling on the corners of her mouth as she follows his flickering shadow.
She is surprisingly light-footed, for one who revels in casting as wide a net as she possibly can with her often-disastrous intentions, at least from Noah's own experiences with her. Fleet, agile despite her height, she hops from one stone to the next, barely skipping a beat in each one, twisting on her heel before leaping for another. The surprisingly small one has her teteering on one foot, nearly slipping from the moisture. But her answer to that is so immediate it's practically second nature, the effortless rocking back of her weight, a leg extended and toes pointed on the side, arms spread out to hold her balance; a dancer could not have done better in executing a life-saving arabesque.
A few more taps of her feet and she finishes her traverse with a hop on the ledge where he is, one arm bent behind her back, slightly stooped, the other hand sweeping out, palm cupped upward in time for him to deposit the lighter within it. The puckish bent to her smile returns.
Dust and debris fall off the narrow passage, to be swallowed up by the water as they meander away from it.
Maybe we're finally past all the stupid bull--
He stops. He sighs.
"...what now?" she wonders dryly, tilting her body sideways, following the narrow point of her waist to peer past his side and shoulder at the latest obstacle in their path. Surprise registers in her expression, but only briefly - it soon blossoms in a worrisome, shit-eating grin, angled up to the side of him.
"Dinnae s'pose you've got any objections now tae me using my grenades, then?" she wonders, before she gleefully skitters forward, like a child on the hunt for candy. Removing one of the three in the bandolier she carries, she crouches on the ground, sharp eyes wandering over the base in an attempt to find the best way to position her incendiary - and she only intends to use one. She has to make this count.
Finally, she finds a pressure point, in which she wedges it against the boulder and the ground, twisting the metal top to arm it. She moves away quickly, a hand reaching out in an effort to snag the cuff of his long-sleeve shirt in an effort to tug him just beyond the anticipated blast radius, tucking herself in a rocky corner. It doesn't take long for the low rumbling roar to fill the cavern, the shudder rippling from the epicenter of the controlled explosion. Rocks and other bits spray from the darkness.
There is a low groan of movement.
"Well," she says, looking up at her taller companion. "Compared tae the other bloody trouble we took tae get here, maybe it's smooth sailing from here."
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
It's a shame that Noah wasn't watching when she executed that balletic maneuver to regain her balance. He might have had a new nickname for her.
As it is he's focused on making it to the other side -- there's probably a story somewhere in there about his paranoia concerning drowning deaths -- and by the time he reaches it she's practically there herself, far more graceful in her agility than he. His balance is excellent, but utilitarian...and he is tall.
He feels the air quality change behind him as she draws up and leans to look at the boulder. The air quality cannot possibly be responsible for the way he knows -- he knows, without ever having to turn to look -- that she's smiling like a fiend at the opportunity to do the very thing he forbade her to do at the outset, because of course she is. And to look at him -- even in profile -- is to know that she's won before she ever asks the question, because both of them know that grenades are the most expeditious means forward.
He takes up a one-shouldered lean against the rough, damp sidewall of the hall they're standing in and folds cabled arms low over his chest, one boot crossing the other foot, propped toe-down in a posture of absolute ease. Watching, of course. Always watching. And in spite of his exasperation with the cruel caprices of fate that have led to a situation in which he's being forced to stand around under thousands of tonnes of rock while Cassidy Cain prepares to detonate high explosives, it's not in his nature to fail to be curious about how she chooses to go about her business.
Once she pulls the cap she dashes back the way they came and his slacker's lean comes apart in a strangely graceful stumble, slender fingers somehow sufficient to drag him around, as though they were infinitely stronger than they are. They round the wall into the hall. Noah lifts his hands and clamps his palms over his ears, opening his mouth to guard against the pressure shockwave -- a good indication that he's been around his share of explosions in contained spaces -- and even though he knows it's coming, he still cringes and turns away, shoulders hunched up defensively, at the sheer power of the detonation. His ears are ringing in spite of his precaution as he lowers his hands, and the sound of stone moving on stone is distinct. "Looks like I have to eat crow on this one," he says, mood improved enough by that success that he's willing to walk back his no-grenades mandate. "But I still think it's an emergencies-only thi--"
He blinks at the corridor entrance. The boulder, massive, is rolling out of it, toward the river, at a sedate, controlled pace. "...Amazing."
He watches it creep sloooooowly toward the river's edge, then glances at her cuts a wry look and wags his brows upward once and starts for the corridor, slipping around the corner to continue onward.
"Anybody coming through here after us is gonna have it so much easier," he drawls as she joins him. "No disintegrating lift, a big fat rock to climb over in the middle of the river..."
There is a sudden rush of sound behind them, a massive splashing sort of sound. "Seriously. They oughta pay us."
But the splashing doesn't end. It goes on, and on, and Noah slows his pace, brows knitting. He stops, quarter-turns to look back...
And is given a clear view of the boulder being VIOLENTLY DISLODGED by the river and SHOT down the corridor again, rolling thunderously toward them and slinging droplets of water as it comes.
To his credit, his first instinct is to turn and run at a dead sprint, and the yelling only comes after he's already moving.
"WHAT. WHAT?! ARE YOU SERIOUS, THAT DOESN'T EVEN MAKE SENSE, THE PHYSICS ARE -- WHAT!!"
<CARD DRAW>
++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Otherworldly Hollow *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Beneath the Waves *>++++++++++++++++++++++
Type: Exploration
Dungeon Ability: Wits
Challenge Rating: 1
There's a large body of water before you, and several rocky bridges between it and the rest of the cave. And then you see it: a large, lidless eye peaking out of the waters, staring at you with its hideously unblinking stare before dipping beneath the waves. One could swear they could see large, slick tentacles squirming underneath those churning waters. Maybe depths, waiting for your guard to drop before dragging you into the abyss where no light can reach you. Maybe. But maybe you should try to find a clever and quiet way around, too. Just in case.
+Dungeon Conditions: Slow+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DG: Noah Hawthorne has contributed a Wits Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Beneath the Waves.
DG: Cassidy Cain has used her Tool Pocket Lighter toward her party's challenge, Beneath the Waves.
DG: You pass the challenge, and take 2 Exhaustion! You have 59 total Exhaustion.
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has passed this challenge! The party gained 17 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeondraw.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
The victory his profile implies has that smile only growing wider and sharper, and Cassidy is almost never happier than winning.
With the boulder dislodged from its perch, sent rolling into the brackish waters of the underground river, she takes a leisurely stride - almost a strut really - next to him as they venture into the avenue that the boulder had just cleared. With his drawling comments, she simply lifts a hand first, the universal gesture of a comradely high-five, lowering to smack it in the low after the initial contact as she passes him, taking the first few steps on an incline down to the lower areas of the network.
"I don't know, maybe they'll just use grenades in the front entrance straight away, though I'm still nae convinced that there's nae something there that the last teams dinnae want coming out," she tells him in a conversational fashion. "Not that it matters now. Besides, you know what they say, ay? The scenic route is the more interesting one, and here I thought this was going tae be boring, and that all this trip would earn me is a bunch of dead an-- "
The ruckus behind her, splashing water and growing all the more violent, has her frowning visibly, exchanging a look with him, before she turns...
Only to watch the boulder tilt on its axis, buoyed by the wild currents. Emerald irises widen when it just shoots out of the river and back towards where it was cemented before.
Where they presently are. Like him, armed with the survival instincts that she listens to on occasion - and this is one of those moments - she turns sharply on her heel and adopts a dead sprint down the dark tunnel, her frustrated shrieks joining his own incredulous exclamations, culminating in a cacophony of nonsensical cries. The acoustics of the stone chamber surrounding them does not make the noise level any better, and if they knew what was waiting for them at the end of the line, they would have maybe, probably, resisted the urge to unleash their frustrations to the air and the walls.
From Cassidy, this takes the form of a rant.
She hurdles over a rocky outcropping, the steep angle of the incline before them. Digging her heels, she twists her body sideways to skid down it, grooves cut into dust and debris. And no matter how fast she goes, its shadow is still on top of them. Surging into the darker parts of the tunnel, the sound of more running water and pebbles falling from on high reach their ears.
"WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED?" she cries as the boulder rumbles behind them. "WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED? WAS THAT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN? I'M PRETTY SURE THAT'S NAE SUPPOSED TAE HAPPEN. UNDERGROUND RIVERS ARE SUPPOSED TAE DROWN YOU AND PULL YOU UNDER, NOT SLINGSHOT GIANT FOOKIN BOULDERS BACK TAE THE ARSEHOLE IT CAME FROM TAE KILL A BUNCH OF DRIFTERS. IS THIS SUPPOSED TAE BE FUNNY? BECAUSE THIS IS NAE FOOKIN FUNNY. YOUR GODS HAVE A SHITE SENSE OF HUMOR, VIN BARRETT! I REFUSE TAE TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THIS!!!"
Once again, like a curse, like a spell, it may very well be that one of the gods that Cassidy just insulted stirs into wakefulness. Before them, in the churning currents of the large underground lake, something rises from the deep. The sphere rises first, rolling on its base, rubbery flaps pulling up and from underneath, catching the violet miasma wreathing nearby stones. The light reflects off a slitted iris, the baleful, gigantic one-eyed glare catching their fast incoming reflections as more appendages start to rise from the depths....
"OH MY GOD ARE YOU FOOKIN KIDDING ME?!"
Her hand whips back around, snapping her lighter forward. A desperate thumb strikes up a flame, her arm waving wildly. It is a stupid plan. A foolhardy plan. A plan forged out of the reckless frantic panic of the moment, and really, she has no choice but to take the opportunity presented before her, because it's all she's got.
"AY, COME AND GET US, YOU GOD DAMN MUTANT CALAMARI!"
It does.
Or at least, it tries to.
The challenge does not go unanswered. Water rises in a violent lunge as whatever it is hiding in the depths surges forward to meet the incoming bodies, unheeding of the giant boulder of death rolling behind them and only picking up speed. She hopes Noah knows where she's going with this, because she does not have the time to explain, and her breath has been handily expended by the hotheaded rush of frenzied frustration left echoing, still, in their rocky trap.
Three...
Two...
One.
She leaps sideways, twisting her body to tackle Noah, savagely throwing herself and him out of the massive object's path as it crashes at the bottom of the tunnel and bounces, rocketing towards the single open eye with the force of a relentless cannonball.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
"WHO THE HELL IS VIN BARRETT?!" Noah's baffled cry rattles off of the sides of the tunnel as they pelt downward, legs blurring, and he chances a look behind him only once, finding that the boulder is a whole lot closer than he expected. He pours the gas on then, making the most of long legs, arms pumping as though he could somehow defeat physics -- why not, right? IT'S OBVIOUSLY POSSIBLE -- and somehow break past the barriers imposed by muscle and air to increase his speed beyond the absolute limit. "BECAUSE IF HE'S RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS I--"
Whatever threat he'd been preparing, he never has the opportunity to say it out loud. They burst from the end of the tunnel into another chamber with a chasm in it, and the edge of that chasm seems to spring out of nowhere for Noah, who leans back hard to keep from skidding right over the edge of it. His boots slide perilously close to doing just that -- close enough that small pieces of gravel dribble over the edge, tumble down the face of the rock wall and bloop into the water that is suddenly alive with--
"Vin Barrett is a dead man!"
You know, once he figures out how to come back as a ghost, because they are definitely going to die. Boulder coming, check. Rubbery hell-beast with tentacles, check. CASSIDY CAIN WAVING HER LIGHTER AROUND TO GET ITS ATTENTION, DOUBLE-CHECK.
He stares at her with wide eyes and parted lips. "Look, I deserve some say in whether I prefer a crushing death or a maiming dea--" Through the high of his adrenaline he processes what she actually said, and glances to either side of the tunnel containing the speeding boulder.
The ledges are very...thin.
Very thin. Very...small.
His eyes aren't wide anymore when he turns his head to look back at her, and his expression is flat, striving for stern. "No. No, Cassie. Don't even think about it." She's definitely thinking about it. His eyes start to widen again. "Cassie I'm too big, there's no room oh my GOD CASSIE STOP DON'T DO--"
It.
She does it.
He takes all of her lesser weight to the solar plexus and topples backward, heart jammed into his ribs and a shock of ice-cold, searing hot adrenaline spiking through him at the terror of being sent over the edge.
For some few precious moments, even with most of his upper back hanging over the edge, it seems as though he -- they -- might actually not fall.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
They land in a tangle of limbs, dangerously on the rim of the ledge where a short fall is waiting for them, the cold, yawning black of the lake as if stretching out for them. Sprawled across his taller, leaner frame, the blonde conwoman is able to get a very good look of certain death where she's perched, eyes wide and adrenaline razing pathways through her veins, sending white-hot spikes into her heart and cranking up its reckless engines to its highest gears. She holds her breath, every part of her stilling....
...but they don't fall, balanced precariously as they are. Exhaling a breath, a palm flattening on solid ground, fingers reach out for a secure grip on the front of Noah's shirt, dragging him off the edge as she crawls backwards. In the darkness, caught in the throes of her most recent near-death experience, those eyes burn like emerald coals, as luminous as a cat's.
"Dinnae worry, luv," she tells him, breathless. "Nae one tae speak about you, mind, but I know for a fact that I'm lucky."
Behind her head, sitting up as he is, Noah will have a very good view of what happens behind the blonde.
The rushing boulder impacts the surfaced eyeball with the force of a shot. It explodes in a gout of vitreous fluid, fountaining up and spraying everywhere and the cavern shakes with a resounding, furious roar. The good news is, whatever the hell that monster is, it is now blind.
The bad news is it's very angry at being blinded, and its tentacles flail wildly, smashing into water, curling upwards before smashing on the shore. It starts taking out those rocky bridges, shattering them on impact, sending chunks into glassy black water to sink.
It is taking out everything.
The look on Cassidy's face suggests that at the moment, that wild, crazy imagination is busily picturing what is going on behind her with glaring accuracy. Her head turns slowly to one of the only bridges left standing. And it will not be standing for long.
She takes off like a shot. Once again, she's running in a dead sprint, in an effort to reach the stone bridge nearest them, its rough edges and wet surface stretching acrosss the lake of doom. She doesn't seem to be paying heed to the tentacles waving above her head, coming down in intermittent patterns, and always with brutal, flailing, crushing force. She does not look back, only forward. Somewhere within her sternum, her heart crashes and over again against it in a helpless, desperate bid to escape.
"JUST PRETEND THIS IS AN OBSTACLE COURSE AND THERE'S A VOLUPTUOUS NAKED REDHEAD WAITING TAE MAKE ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE AT THE VERY END OF THE RUN!!"
It's her turn to be encouraging.
NEVERMIND THAT THIS LATEST COMPLICATION IS ALL HER FAULT.
<CARD DRAW>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Otherworldly Hollow *>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Bestial Bearcat *>++++++++++++++++++++++++
Type: Exploration
Dungeon Ability: Combat
Challenge Rating: 2
Take a bear. Add a cat. Multiply by the fury of having an inexplicable blue star gem on its chest. Square by the twisted process of being warped by Malevolence into a howling berserker. Congratulations! You now have one (1) Hellion Bearcat. May god help you.
tinyurl.com/kt2uwrj
+Dungeon Conditions: Tire+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DG: Cassidy Cain has contributed a Combat Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Bestial Bearcat.
DG: Noah Hawthorne has used his Tool Clever Traps toward his party's challenge, Bestial Bearcat.
DG: You fail the challenge, and take 17 Exhaustion! You have 76 total Exhaustion.
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has failed this challenge! The party gained 4 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeondraw.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
He doesn't dare to move. He hardly dares to breathe, though his lungs are baskets of embers in his chest and cramping around the need for oxygen. When she's finally able to slide backward and pull him with her and he feels terra firma underneath his shoulders again, he sucks a gasp of a breath and exhales, curling forward and up onto his elbows, torso a hammock of telescoping flat planes. He tilts just enough onto one hip to give him the altitude to watch what happens, and if Cassidy's imagination weren't so vivid, she could have looked at the expression on his face and gotten a good idea of just what kind of scene is playing out behind her:
A really, really gross one.
Liquid fountains up into the ceiling and then falls on them both like warm, gentle spring rain, and he just doesn't have the heart to tell her that it isn't from the lake, though it's difficult to conceal his revulsion when he feels a big, fat drop of the stuff burst on the back of his head and run down into his collar. He closes his eyes and lifts one hand to press his thumb into one and his middle finger into the other, striving for composure, when what he wants to do is throw a leg-kicking, torso twisting tantrum about it.
Life intervenes in that struggle by escalating things from bad to worse. He hears the first tentacle land, then the second, and he realizes then that the boulder didn't strike a killing blow, it only served to deeply agitate the thing in the pit. And the thing in the pit, in turn, is agitating the interior of the cavern.
He's on his feet so quickly that it seems as though he passes from prone to sprinting without traversing any of the intervening distance, but it's something quickly moderated by the presence of slippery, viscous eye fluid, liberally puddled over the stone floor. He skids once in it and his heart almost stops, but everything goes from worse to worst when he reaches the bridge, because tentacles lash out and slam down on either side of him in random, terrifying patterns with enough force to reduce him to his component atoms should one of them happy to land. He attempts to cross twice and nearly gets torn in half for the trouble, and once only with a remarkably high bunny-hop avoids being swept off of the ledge altogether. And then he just...goes right over the edge. Disappears.
How he managed to assemble and fire the grappling hook gun so swiftly is a question for the ages, but he did. He fired it at his feet while he was still standing on the stone arch and then dropped deliberately over the side, keeping his slack short enough to leave minimal amounts of himself hanging out in the open to be nailed by tentacles. It buys him time to think about how to remedy his situation, and minimizes his risk of being hammered into paste while he does it.
"I HAVE AN IDEA," he shouts over the chaos and din. Seconds afterward, there's a loud POP sound as something is shot up toward the ceiling with pinpoint precision -- something bizarre. Spherical and attached to a number of sticky, adhesive discs, one of which is securing it to the ceiling directly above the stone arch, it looks faintly yellow from a distance.
"I'M GONNA GLUE THIS F--"
WHAM! One of the tentacles smashes down into the stone with a deafening boom.
"--THING TO THE BRIDGE!"
He has to time it right. He needs to time it so that the tentacle doesn't simply swat the glue bomb away as it's falling, once he releases the adhesive pins keeping it stuck to the ceiling. He stares upward, a thin filament of wire twined through his fingers, watching, waiting. Timing. Patient.
NOW.
It begins to fall.
He watches. Holds his breath and hopes. Doesn't pray, but thinks about it. Maybe he should've prayed, though.
He will never be able to tell anyone who asks where the bearcat came from, later. One minute the world is lashing tentacles tearing the interior of the chamber to bits and the next minute there's a gigantic angry mutant bearcat standing over him, eclipsing all light from her lighter. He watches it bend down, eyes glowing like embers, with a massive claw tipped in sword-like claws, and even if it doesn't tear his head off it would be child's play for it to snap the line keeping him secured to the bridge. It leans closer, closer--
The glue bomb lands on its back, exploding with a quiet, sticky squelch sound. Powerful alchemy takes place: instant adhesive splashes all over the animal's fur, soaks it down to the skin.
A tentacle rises, almost in slow motion, and descends on a gloriously perfect arc. Noah can see it coming above the angry bearcat and hope kindles in his chest. "Yes," he says, a word lost in the absolute racket. "YES."
The tentacle whips downward, dead on target to crush the bearcat into oblivion. "YES!"
It hits the bearcat, ensuring that Noah will be one of few people on Filgaia able to say he knows what a bearcat looks like when it is very, very surprised. It momentarily flattens on the stone arch and that puts its head horrifyingly close to Noah's -- close enough that he can smell its carrion breath.
And then the tentacle lifts again, and the bearcat isn't dead. The bearcat is stuck to the tentacle, and the bearcat, when it recovers from being dazed -- it does this quickly -- is very, very angry.
The tentacle monster from hell now has a weaponized bearcat and proceeds to make the most of it and the bearcat, quick to adjust to these unexpected but potentially advantageous circumstances, also embraces its newfound role and turns into a massive, five-pointed star of carnivorous death, flailing and slashing whenever it comes close to one or the other of the humans in the room, which it does with alarming frequency.
"NO," Noah yells, changing his mind. "NO!"
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
If she was grossed out because of the mess, she doesn't show it. Viscous giant-eye fluid clings to her hair in sticky webs, a glob clinging to her cheek and staining her collar. Save for a dismissive swipe of her knuckles across her face to dislodge some of it, she is still running and she doesn't stop.
The two of them make a mad dash across the remaining bridge, each step pounding in time with her wildly beating heart as she tears a pale-gold streak across the slippery surface of the rock strip that may very well be their only line to salvation, at this point. She does not bother to reach for her guns, holding her lighter with a death grip as the cave seems to come down from all around them. Her peripheral vision keeps track of his shadow, lean, long and loping, which suddenly vanishes when he slips and falls off the edge of the bridge.
Cassidy's bootheel digs hard into the rock, twisting to stare at the empty space behind her. Eyes round to dinner plates, her jaw growing slack. "NOAH!" The cry is largely swallowed up by the tentacled monster her reckless plan had just angered and blinded. Is he dead?!
Flailing tentacles cull a cascade of rocks from what seems to be all directions, and somewhere behind her, she can hear the relic hunter ragged breathing and taste his panic; the way of his grappling hook enables her to see a long arm and leg dangling off the side of the bridge and relief fills her lungs at the sight of him alive. She has every intention of reaching the very end, and her situation is bad enough that the urge to ditch him is nigh near overwhelming. But Noah's words manage to cleave through all the noise:
I HAVE AN IDEA.
"GREAT!!! GET TAE IT THEN!!" she yells over her shoulder as she moves. The plan communicated hurriedly, she leaves Noah to his traps.
I'M GONNA GLUE THIS--
"WAIT WHAT?" Suddenly, she's not so willing to leave it to him, turning her head and staring at him wide-eyed. "WILL THAT EVEN HOLD? I DINNAE THINK IT WILL HOLD, IT'S FOOKIN HU--"
The rest of her words choke into the back of her throat, because there's SUDDENLY A BEARCAT. THERE IS A BEARCAT ON THE BRIDGE, FACING HER AND DIRECTLY ABOVE NOAH.
"ARE YOU-- NAE. NAE. FOOK THIS, THIS IS JUST RIDICULOUS NOW!" Her hand reaches around her, pulling the beautifully engraved revolver that has become a permanent part of her usual kit after the riverboat casino job, its high-powered muzzle aimed for the bearcat's chest, only for the shadow of another tentacle to come sweeping for her. Her breath squeezed tight into her throat, she is forced to twist around, and throw herself on her front, the wildly flailing appendage swiping the air above her, inches from her head as it curls upwards yet again and descending into the waters below. The resulting splash might as well be a tidal wave, soaking into her hair and drenching her clothes; at the very least it washes away the eye goo.
Sputtering, she pushes herself back up, twisting on the ground and lurching up, just in time to see Noah execute his plan...
Yes. YES. YES!
The tentacle comes down over the bearcat. It lifts. THE BEARCAT IS NOT DEAD. Before her wide disbelieving eyes, she watches as Noah Hawthorne, through a series of utterly, incredibly ridiculous circumstances, manages to arm a blind, wildly flailing kraken with a monstrous furry that is all blades, claws and pointy things in five ends out of its total six.
NO. NO!!
There it is. She feels it. She has finally hit that point where things have become so utterly, chaotically, woefully nonsensical that her sanity hits that magic limit. She collapses on her knees, arms banding over her middle. And she laughs. She absolutely, utterly loses her shit, their present situation hitting all the buttons in her until the clarion calls of internal alarms tell her overloaded brain that it is time to trigger some much needed defense mechanisms and all of her, as per usual, picks laughter, suddenly reminded of the time Jude stood in front of her with a half-rusted grappling hook and a length of very old rope, trapped in a train with her reckless self and careening in deadly speeds towards a ravine. This is one of those situations.
"Ach, fook me running," she says breathlessly, through the sensation of fire and lightning braiding up her sides. She's still on her knees when the tentacle and its furry, giant ball of death come streaking for her. Reaching into her bandolier, she clutches the adhesive back with her teeth, ripping off the strip. Twisting it to arm it, she suddenly lurches off her feet and charges forward. As she does this, the world seems to slow; time and air move like molasses, each step echoing underneath her feet, the rest of the cacophonous noise fading slowly in the background as the world condenses into a single, intense moment of clear, crystal focus.
She hurls the grenade towards the star plastered on the bearcat's chest, the back of it adhering right into the surface. She drops sideways under the unfurling curl of the tentacle, expended fluid from the burst eye enabling her to skid and slide just underneath the wildly twisting appendage, bearing down for where Noah is dangling. Snagging fingers on the embedded hook, feeling metal dig and draw blood through her leather glove, she reaches down in an effort to grab at whatever part of the relic hunter she can reach.
"C'mon, luv! We're nae dead yet!"
<CARD DRAW>
++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Otherworldly Hollow *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Waterworld *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Type: Exploration
Dungeon Ability: Agility
Challenge Rating: 1
Water rolls through the entirety of the Hollow in rivers and subterranean lakes and other forms. The deeper and more profoundly touched by Malevolence it gets, though, the stranger its nature becomes. Take, for instance, this narrow passage you find yourself climbing up. You hear a rush of water. Perhaps some flowing down from above, one might imagine, gravity taking its toll. Except... it's not flowing down. It's flowing up. A torrential waterfall rising up instead of falling down, right beneath your feet. Would that make it a waterrise, instead? Questions to wonder later; for now, it might be better to try to get the hell out of this passage before you're swept up into the waterfall. Rise. Whichever.
+Dungeon Conditions: Weaken+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DG: Cassidy Cain has contributed a Agility Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Waterworld.
DG: Noah Hawthorne has contributed a Agility Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Waterworld.
DG: You fail the challenge, and take 8 Exhaustion! You have 84 total Exhaustion.
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has failed this challenge! The party gained 2 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeondraw.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
Hanging from the bridge, twisting himself out of the way at the end of a very short rope whenever a gigantic, blind, tentacled hell-beast whips a very angry bearcat in his direction, Noah is treated to the sound of Cassidy Cain laughing her goddamn ass off. "COULD YOU MAYBE--"
And then he stops to think about it, and is forced to choke back a sudden, dizzy laugh, his expression dancing back and forth between the kind of dagger-browed look he wears when he's ranting about something and an almost-smile that he's trying very hard not to allow purchase on his face, because if he starts laughing now he's going to die. Very literally going to die, because he may never be able to stop.
"COULD YOU MAYBE--" *SNK* "JUST...DO SOMETHING HELPFUL??"
The helpful thing that she does is arm the bearcat with an explosive. Noah watches that happen and somewhere underneath his initial reaction -- which is to notch a brow upward, impressed in spite of himself by not only the courage required to charge at the menace they're dealing with but also the maneuver she employs to do so -- he has a thought, and this thought overrides everything else.
"DID YOU JUST GIVE IT A BOMB? SO NOW THERE'S A KRAKEN ARMED WITH A BEARCAT THAT'S ARMED WITH A BOMB?"
Her pale, flushed features appear in the space over his dangling position, bright hazel eyes meeting her greener set, head tipped back. "What," he says, voice stretched thin and weak across the absurdity of what he just said. It's a very solemn 'what,' standing in for countless others of its ilk. 'What is even happening right now,' 'what is going on with my life,' 'what the hell did we do to deserve this,' etcetera.
She reaches down, he reaches up, but he's reluctant to grasp her, weighing considerably more than she does through height and musculature, and so he hauls upward enough that she can hopefully get her fingers curled in the shoulder of his shirt for the second time -- third? -- since they descended into this pit of insanity. The stone makes it difficult for his bare hands to gain traction and the bearcatkrakenbomb makes it difficult to focus on climbing why is it always always climbing, but he does work hard at it.
"Not dead," he confirms through two breaths, "But are we HIGH? Is this whole thing a bizarre hallucination brought on by bad rye or too much absinthe or what??"
He asks as a joke, but that explanation strikes him with sudden clarity, and it makes a shocking amount of sense. She'll see it in his face as he briefly pauses: the blink, the sidelong look at her, speculative. It was weird that she just showed up all of a sudden, of all people. And the last time he saw her, there was a lot of terrible nonsense with water, and angry animals, too. She made him climb. Hell, she made him climb a rock face to get to a stone arch like the one he's trying to ascend right now. She didn't seem keen on using Marza's revolver, but this Cassidy Cain has it in her possession and even drew it mere moments ago. She's being nice to him for the most part. She's digging around underground, and she'd said she HATES that. The boulder, that's probably something to do with Carillo, that fat guy she said would kill them for sinking his boat, and the kraken with the eye that shot a fountain of liquid into the cavern is...
He frowns. ...Better not think about that one too hard, actually.
"Well, that settles it," he says, expression clearing. "This is definitely a dream."
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
DID YOU JUST GIVE IT A BOMB?
"AY AND IT'S GONNA BLOW!" Cassidy cries, reaching down with both hands as she attempts to yank him up, even as he helplessly poses her that one word question. "SO BRACE YOURSELF BECAUSE AT THE RATE WE'RE GOING, I'M NAE SURE WHAT'S GONNA TAE HAPPEN NOW."
With Noah hauled back up on the bridge, the blonde turns her head to stare at the wildly whipping tentacle. So concentrated she is in staring at the results of her next gambit that she completely misses the look her companion angles towards her. But she senses it on the side of her face eventually, and she turns a quizzical look in his direction. Utterly devoid of anything resembling magical gifts, she takes in his expression, the unspoken question on her features. Now what?
Are we HIGH? ...this is definitely a dream.
Her smile slices through the shadows between them. "Must be a good one then, luv," she tells him. "After all, I'm in it."
Because yes. They're not dead yet.
Yet.
With two people so inordinately gifted in tempting Fate with their words, it probably is downright expected, at this point, that the moment Cassidy manages to pull Noah back on the ledge, they would be treated to the sight of two things: one, the bearcat explodes, sending a black shower of blood and viscera spouting in the air like a geyser, the blast containing enough yield to also sever the tentacle that is menacing their last remaining bridge; two, the tentacle spins in the air, heavy and real, before it's inevitably seized by gravity's well and sent plunging...
...down into the middle of the bridge.
Rocks explode on impact, shattering the middle and sending rapidly widening fissures all over their last road to salvation, cracking apart and before they can even react, they fall. The drop is relatively short, merely a few feet before dangerous, black waters rise up to meet them, hitting them with wet and cold as their bodies submerge, visibility absolutely null once their heads vanish in the water. The currents continue to churn, the flailing beast in the middle as if keyed to be some kind of biological drainage mechanism that just spins on its axis, sending them uncontrollably towards another one of the subterranean passages, which quickly floods at every flail. The massive beast chases after them, tentacles stretching out, the movements of the water pushing it closer to where they're desperately trying to get out of this latest complication, surging towards the passage...
...only it's too fat to follow them all the way in, its globulous body contracting at the very end and sealing them, for the moment, in complete and utter darkness.
Cassidy sees nothing, disoriented in the dark. She has managed to keep a grip on her lighter and revolver, rendered useless now by the rush of water soaking into her chamber and ammo. Her flame has sputtered out, and it is difficult to know which way is up. She swims up, guided by the light emanating from Noah's bracelet, surfacing, finally, in the narrow tunnel and the cascade of water that is carrying them...
....to....
Disbelieving emerald eyes follow the flow of water as it tracks up, and up, and up to possible oblivion, sheets of it pulling up instead of down, currents taking them in a collision course right at the very edge where the world starts to tilt.
"....that's not a traditional waterfall," she informs Noah, her expression utterly flat, just before she's seized by the rolling tide and jerked upwards. Her litany of curses, garbled and uttered in a variety of languages, gets lost under the flood as her body is jerked up by the waterrise and vanishes, a split-second before the same fate befalls Noah, ropes of water banding around his limbs before he, too, is sent upwards.
To god knows where.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
All of the trauma in the world couldn't keep Noah from taking an opening like that one. Must be a good one, she says, smiling in spite of leaving the door wide open. I'm in it.
He turns his head slightly away from her, the better to look down at her on an angle out of the corners of his eyes, lips caught by something that seems to want to be a coy smile, though he never lets it bloom. "Oh, I dunno," he muses. "It could be better. I've got sugg--"
-- estions.
And he does, but they are instantly about something entirely other than what he'd been about to say, which is fine, because nobody involved needed him to elaborate, anyway. Down they go as the bridge collapses, pieces of stone churning up the water below them just seconds before they splash down themselves, and for once Noah isn't particularly upset about getting wet. He's not upset because three seconds earlier, a bearcat exploded and covered him in things he would prefer not to be covered in, so there's a definite silver lining to that soaking, slender and paltry though it may be. At this point, he will take what he can get.
That appreciation doesn't last long. They're swiftly carried along in a sudden blender of tentacles and water, shunted off into another passage, and that would have been fine if the thing with the tentacles hadn't decided to follow them. He surfaces just in time to see it get wedged in the tunnel, and then they're plunged into inky darkness, the bite of subterrane water cutting through his clothing to sink its teeth into his flesh.
Off in the distance he can hear a faint roar, and he knows what that is. He can feel the thundering of it in his chest. "Oh. No."
"Of course there's a waterfall. Why wouldn't there be a waterfall? It's probably going to dump us down into a pit full of bearcat cucco hybrids armed with ferret cannons and--and--"
And then he gets his first glimpse of the waterfall and tilts his head back, staring.
"THIS IS NOT BETTER," he says, slapping the surface of the water in a fit of pique. "THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF BETTER!"
As he's sucked into the nonsensical upward vortex he thrashes against it to keep from going down -- UP -- head-first.
"WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH PHYSICS TODA--" The rest is lost as he's consumed with whitewater and blasted upward with all of the furious power of a waterfall in reverse.
<CARD DRAW>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Otherworldly Hollow *>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Geyser Groove *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Type: Exploration
Dungeon Ability: Agility
Challenge Rating: 1
The presence of Malevolence in this cave system has made the landscape unstable. Things don't quite behave as they should, or are much more volatile and intense than usual. One newer addition is the series of geysers throughout this wide, open cavern, each of them shooting up columns of boiling water of various heights; some of them seem to be holding aloft crumbling platforms of rock, too, which is fortunate, considering the path leading onward is at the top of a very steep ledge that is conveniently accessible by the highest platform when it reaches its apex. Convenient! Now all you have to do is get the timing of the leaps between platforms perfectly right so you can reach the ledge before the water dies off again. Easy, right? ... Right??
+Dungeon Conditions: Stupify++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DG: Noah Hawthorne has contributed a Agility Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Geyser Groove.
DG: Cassidy Cain has contributed a Agility Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Geyser Groove.
DG: You pass the challenge, and take 3 Exhaustion! You have 87 total Exhaustion.
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has passed this challenge! The party gained 12 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeondraw.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
There is light in the end of the waterrise, and for all of Physics clearly demonstrated caprice today, seeing it through the haze and dizzying tilt of water fills her with some semblance of relief just before the rush expels them violently in the air, their bodies tossed like rag dolls as the connected geyser to the flooded subterranean tunnels sends them upwards. This will not be a soft landing.
Cassidy hits her side, teeth rattling behind closed lips and bones jarring into dirt and stone when she finally hits the ground to this next level of this increasingly foolhardy enterprise. She will bruise tomorrow, pain exploding through her open senses, numb to its true severity by the copious amounts of adrenaline and endorphins in the wild rush of her heart through her extremities. She groans, slowly rolling on her back, pale-gold hair darkened to amber honey and leaving spools of it glinting against the pitch-black ground underneath her. For a while, she says absolutely nothing, chest rising and falling underneath her jacket and shirt. She hurts too much to move immediately.
But survival instincts win out - it's simply too dangerous to remain as she is. Picking herself up slowly, her spine concaves upward until she's in a sitting position, fingers pulling through her hair to brush the wet tresses out of her face. "Well," she says. "At least it cannae be worse. Nae anything can be worse than what just happened." And all started by the fact that the river spat on the laws of the natural world and pitched a fucking boulder at them while they were trying to make their way through the passage.
As she twists to lever her exhausted body off the ground, eyes wander over to this area of the network; her stare takes in spouts of water as they reach upwards towards the ceiling in various heights, as well as what appears to be flimsy platforms of rock suspended by some of them. Steam rises from each in defeaning hisses, blanketing the area with the unmistakeable weight and damp of expended humidity. This is definitely something they do not need.
And when she realizes what she is actually looking at, her expression flattens. Bracing her hands against her hips, she tilts her head back and sighs.
"Well," she says, voice tired and resigned as she starts moving at the very edge of the ledge, eyeballing the way platforms rise and fall at the whims of boiling water. "This should nae be so bad. I've done something like this before." When she was younger, and when her agility, grace and flexibility were at their prime. She is extremely cognizant of the fact that she is almost thirty. The passage of time has done absolutely nothing to lubricate those remembered cogs and gears.
"C'mon, luv. Step lively, ay?"
She sprints as if she hasn't just come from running away from a boulder, hasn't rushed across a slippery bridge, hasn't been tossed a few feet in the air by a body of water that makes no god damn sense. Determination, frustration, and the lingering eddies of laughter and battle-high fuel every cell in her as she makes that mad dash towards the ledge. Because now that it's definitely too late to turn back, there is no other way to go but forward, and the sheer insanity of what she's about to do, coupled with the uncertainty of being able to pull off yet another performance from her traveling circus days, has her lips parting and peals of laughter drifting in the half-dark. Reaching the very edge, she leaps, landing on a rocky platform just as it rises, buoyed underneath by a twisting pillar of steaming water.
She does not stay there for long. Twisting on her heel, she leaps for the next one, and the next, reflexes and perception working in tandem to push her in finding the patterns the moment they surface. It doesn't take her long to reach the other side, landing on both feet, and leaning forward to rest palms against bent knees, breathing hard. Sweat mingled with water pours down the sides of her face, slipping in rivulets around her neck and dripping from her pearls and the array of silver charms around her neck.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
Physics have had quite enough of Noah's criticism. In any other world where physics made sense, Cassidy would fly upward the highest out of the two of them, more easily lifted upward because of her less substantial weight. That isn't what happens, because of course not; the laws of physics are presently wired to treat anyone in that jetstream of water as though they're plunging downward, and factored in that way, Noah's additional weight does nothing but ensure that he's propelled as high and as far as possible by the waterfall-turned-geyser. In fact, he shoots straight up to where the ledge is, but because he decided it might not be wise to go head-first in the direction of water behaving unnaturally, he is upside down when he gets to it, and his mad scrabble to find purchase on it before the water drops out from under him and he falls the entire distance is almost impossible to describe. He fights the torrent of water, sputtering and striving to grasp the stone overhang like a man adrift in rapids. For those few heart-stopping moments, fighting to find some traction, get a hold on the underside of the ledge sufficient to take his weight when the geyser collapses again, his heart goes on strike, picketing his reckless lifestyle.
The geyser falls away. His weight returns, with interest -- he's soaking wet, his clothes are heavy -- and he...
Slips.
One hand loses purchase. He sucks a breath, grits his teeth and reaches out desperately, eyes bonfires of focus, but it's not enough. Time seems to stop for him as he loses his other handhold...and falls.
He sees her vault across the last of the ledges above him as gravity claims him, no doubt rubbing its proverbial hands together, eager to finally claim someone who has so determinedly flouted its primacy for so long. His life does not flash before his eyes. There's no time.
It claims a partial victory. As he plummets, another geyser gets upward, a slab of rock rising on its boiling surge. He hits it halfway down with a wet SMACK that stings every bit as much as it sounds like it does, but the burn gets him moving, at least, rolling over with a sputtering cough and then finding, somehow, his feet.
It's a long jump, but he isn't sticking around this time for the ride down. He leaps, catches the lip, swings from it -- his boots connect once with the underside of the ledge he was so recently ousted from -- and then he's hoisting himself up and over, onto his hands and knees, and that's how he stays for some moments. Water rills out of his hair as he hangs his head and closes his eyes. The entire back half of his body feels like he's just gotten a spanking from god, but he is alive, and if his ribs are creaking uncomfortably when he takes a deep breath, well...he's just grateful they can still draw breath at all.
At length he leans back onto his heels, lifts his hands and splays them, pushes them back through his hair. They leave faint streaks of mud behind. There, and on the thighs of his pants, and on his sleeves when he finally lifts them and wipes them off on each opposite arm, getting to his feet.
His boots are filled with water.
"Okay," he says, voice rough. "Okay. You okay? You look okay. I'm okay. We're fine. This is fine. Let's..." He pushes his elbows back, stretches his spine, and winces. "Let's...keep moving. We've got to be getting close."
<CARD DRAW>
++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Otherworldly Hollow *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - The Fast and the Furywolves *>+++++++++++++++++
Type: Exploration
Dungeon Ability: Combat
Challenge Rating: 1
All manner of beasts from the Adlehyde region have made a home of this Hollow, as if called here. One such is roaming packs of wolves, perverted by the hatred of Malevolence into twisted Hellions known as Fury Wolves. While to most they may look like standard, if vicious, canines, those with the spiritual sight to see perceive something much different: blue horns, glowing eyes, and furious, unnatural strength, all bedecked by sweltering corruption. They're certainly furious, enough that it seems to poison the air around them, enough that it almost feels infectious. Maybe you should do something about that.
tinyurl.com//mhhuwfq
+Dungeon Conditions: Wound++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DG: You fail the challenge, and take 14 Exhaustion! You have 101 total Exhaustion. You can't carry on and must retreat!
DG: Cassidy Cain is too exhausted to continue!
DG: Noah Hawthorne is too exhausted to continue!
DG: The party has failed this challenge! All party members are now Exhausted. Your party can no longer continue and is forced to retreat!
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has been fully Exhausted by Otherworldly Hollow!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
The urge to keep moving has Cassidy flashing him an angled look. "Well, you can thank you're lucky stars now, luv, since I'm thoroughly invested intae seeing this thr-- "
From the yawning abyss before them, where another series of tunnels await, ripples of multiple growls emanate in a growing crescendo several feet before them. The blonde slowly turns her head to where the noises are coming from. Emerald eyes squint faintly at the growing darkness.
Two by two, pinpoints of luminous, glowing red cut through the pitch; the presence of animals that sound like wolves is unmistakeable now, and a pale hand reaches back for her pistols, only to realize they have done plenty of swimming and she isn't sure whether her bullets would work even if they do manage to shoot them all. She takes a few steps back, ears pricking at the sound of shuffling steps. Large paws and blue horns slowly emerge from the shadowed maw before them, lips peeling back to bare rows of glinting, white teeth.
"....these dinnae look like traditional wolves, either," the thief says faintly, making a quick and deliberate accounting of her gear. She knows even without checking that she only has one grenade left.
Their guns might not work. The one grenade might not be enough, and if she wastes it here, there is absolutely no guarantee that they'll be able to blast their way out of the next set of roadblocks that they might encounter on the road to safety.
"Dinnae want tae sound like a quitter, luv," she tells him as she takes slow, inching steps back. "But maybe we oughtae decide tae live tae fight another day, here."
To the pack of Malevolence-tainted wolves before them, saliva dripping from rippling jowls, the words even sound like a retreat. And they are not having it. As the alpha bays its command to the rest of its compatriots, several rear back on their haunches before launching themselves towards the human interlopers that managed to find their abode. Cassidy, at this point, does not bother to try and kill the creatures. She does not like the look of them, and she would rather run than risk using a waterlogged gun - in this situations, seconds can mean the difference between life and death.
She pulls at Noah as she turns tail and runs, launching herself on the first platform that she finds. Heat from the adjacent geyser stings the side of her left cheek as she makes her retreat. Boots slick with water rush over the rise and fall of the unusual steps before her, reaching for the end as quickly as she can.
The last step to safety is where things go wrong. She launches herself off too early, and her mistake becomes apparent to her too late. Fingers find the edge of the other side, away from the pack, but certainly close to a bone-breaking, deadly fall, her body slamming lengthwise into the cliff-face as digits scrabble in an attempt to find purchase. One hand disengages at the wake of a gout of steam searing over her glove, forcing her hand to dangle down as she looks up with wide eyes. Her heart leaps to her throat.
Her grip tightens, finding it within herself, somehow, to reach with her burned hand to clutch at the edge. One leg bends at the knee, to attempt to find a foothold.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
Noah is made of sterner stuff than one might imagine, given his predilection for disappearing when things get tense, and nowhere is that on greater display than when he's doing what he does best. What he loves to do. What he lives for.
But Noah is still alive to do these things because he's able to assess a threat and knows when it's beyond him, and with the pair of them having already taken a beating just trying to get this far...
One pair of eyes like embers in the darkness, one growl, and he would have liked their odds. Two would have his attention, but he trusts her competence enough after everything they've been through -- she has nerves of steel at the very least -- to stand her ground with him and make quick work of that.
Three is edging into real danger. Even odds. Maybe slightly less than even.
Everything after that is full-on Nope territory. As she takes inventory of her remaining armaments his hands to move with slow, careful certainty toward the grips of the ARMs to either side of his hips. His thumbs find the catches that secure them in their holsters without having to glance downward, as much a part of him as any part of his body, and he stares into the depths of the forward corridor as the growls swell in volume and number into a veritable symphony of death threats. Whatever the nature of those arms, water holds no horrors for them.
"Sticking around to die would be quitting," he answers, a murmur that barely moves his lips.
Then the sleek shapes in the darkness launch themselves forward in a coordinated flurry of movement and Cassidy is wheeling around, yanking at him (that's four), and he follows, leaving his ARMs holstered. They race down the uneven terrain, spring from one platform to another, and he's so accustomed to her light-footed, seemingly effortless bounding ahead of him that when she mistimes her leap it nearly causes him to do the same, awkwardly arresting his own jump insufficiently to prevent his forward momentum, having to make a last-minute leap that nearly comes up short, itself. It doesn't -- lucky for them both. Heart a purring engine in his chest, he flicks a glance back the way they came to see if they've been followed across the floating platforms, then drops to the steam-slicked floor and leans to look over the edge.
It's the first time he can recall seeing that look on her face: eyes wide and bright, heavy as small green stars with -- what? Fear? Pain? He's sure she's felt both even across the span of two meetings -- two ludicrous, improbable meetings -- but it's the only time he's caught her wearing it where he can see it. She was right about him when she said what she did on the train, just before they parted ways last time they met: he has a conscience, and it is potentially lethal. To him, anyway; the look on her face tightens something in his chest.
He sets his jaw and leans down, reaches as far as he can to grasp her arms as high up toward the shoulders as he's able, expecting all the while to feel a flesh-melting plume of steam jet directly into both arms, damaging him and possibly dooming her. The words are taut and colored by the strain of what he does next, hauling her upward with all of the strength in a frame that is, when pressed, as unyielding as a concrete piling. "I've got you."
Back onto his knees, then back further still, until the bulk of her weight is above the cliff edge, and he angles his eyes over the soaking wet tousle of her golden head of hair toward the far side, unable to trust that creatures like those are incapable of making short work of the crossing.
Harried eyes drop from their vigil to her face, his head dipping, eyes assessing, momentarily serious. It seems as though it ought to be an uneasy look for him, given how rarely he wears that expression, but his face appears more practiced at it than it should be. "Can you walk? Run? Are you good?" Even as he's asking, he's starting to get up and pull her with him.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
She never feels more alive than when she's about to die.
And it shows on that pale mien when Noah peers over the edge to look down at her, to assess how far she's fallen; emerald fields scattered with gold fragments stare up at him, her pupils dilated with that same, heady mix of exhilaration and fear, the leavings of pain stitched over her expression. He can practically hear her heartbeat pound a heavy staccato against her ribs, the rasping breath from her tired lungs; the flush of grueling, physical exertion paints the hollow of her throat and the angles just underneath those high cheekbones. Against cold, black stone, she burns like gold and green embers, the determined crunch of rock and the squeak of wet leather audible with the way she grips the craggy edifice as hard as she can, even as gravity conspires to snake around her ankles and tug, to pull her into the depths below, never to be seen again.
Tae the last drop, Cassie.
Though she could survive it. Maybe. This isn't the first time she has fallen from an impossible height, though those memories were a blur, her vision wreathed with red and blistering, white-hot pain spreading over her back and over her chest...
Thankfully, she wouldn't have to test her twisted Luck. Broad hands reach for her, with fingers so long they curl around her slender limbs easily, her more negligible weight hauled bodily upwards, the surfaces of her wet leather breeches scraping and dislodging more of that pitch-black debris and sending trailing echoes of skittering stone downward. Her knees hit the ground, chest heaving, that curious mix of overpowering relief and that touch of disappointment fountaining up in her chest. She sags in his grip, bones suddenly adopting the consistency of rubber, though she isn't so addled by her turn of good fortune that she isn't paying attention; her head is tilted sideways, angled up a touch - one ear to listen for whether the wolves have followed across the platforms.
They have not.
Darkness falls over her face at his lean, and she looks up to catch the rare serious expression on his face; it fits its angles and contours, there is nothing about it that seems out of place, but it surprises her all the same. That bleeds over the jumbled mess of impulses lurking in those virid, gold-spangled depths, becoming more overt and evident the longer she looks at him; she had suspected privately that despite their very obvious similarities that their differences are bound to run deep. Even through the exhaustion that marked the aftermath of their very first encounter, part of her is gratified to have been proven right. To be what she is, after all, requires a certain amount of skill in the art of taking the measure of a person upon meeting them.
His assessing eyes would be answered with dimples, as cheeks round into apples to make room for her smile. Laughter imprints in her brogue. "Ay, I can certainly do that today," she tells him gamely, as she's pulled up with him when he stands. "Tomorrow is a wee bit more uncertain, once the high wears off and there's nae anything left but the agony of bruises and soreness." There's a peek over her shoulder at the pack of red eyes at the distance; to her credit, she manages to quell a shudder.
"C'mon, luv," she says, taking a step sideways once he's loosened his grip. "Let's find a way out of here." A pause. "....definitely nae that way though." She jabs a thumb over the geyser in which they've made their entrance. "There's got tae be another way."
And they do, eventually. Thankfully without any additional incident.
They manage to find a narrow passageway that cuts through a familiar set of tunnels after a few moments of searching, leading to another crevice and another, the two of them following the veins and arteries of the network's twisting, troubling system, part left aglow by that same violet wash that greeted them after their steep slide from the entrance. It eventually leads them into a set of unfamiliar ones punctuated with the occasional sharp whistle, indicative of wind blowing through tiny holes burrowed in rock. After that, they manage to find enough light that brings them to the outside world, on the other side of the grotto and around from where Noah's destrier and her hat are waiting for them.
By the time they manage to do this, the bloated sun hangs low over the horizon, splashes of crimson and gold staining the heavenly canvas underneath its encroaching layers of indigo and violet. She takes a deep breath of the fresh air, rolling a single sore shoulder and groans.
"Next time," she tells him. "I'm bringing an entire bag full of grenades." She strips off her sodden jacket, watching water drip from its edges, white shirt and vest plastered to her, but considering the last room felt like a sauna, the afternoon breeze brushing over damp clothing is a welcome respite. "Nae exactly what I was expecting, but that was a lot more exciting than I thought."
Her lips tug downwards in the faintest frown. "Dinnae look like whatever's going on down there is connected tae what I'm after, though," she mutters.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
Her smile as she stands instantly clears his expression, all of that temporary intensity dissipating like dew in the hot sun. More familiar things replace it, hints of wryness as he lets her go to stand on her own power, following her thumb's gesture over her shoulder and tacking a short, needless nod onto his answer, a repeat of her own words: "Not that way."
The journey out is arduous, but so uneventful that he wonders aloud at least twice why they didn't just go in this way to begin with, vaguely incensed every time they emerge from one corridor into another to find that nothing outrageous is going to happen to them. As though the cave were able to alter itself in accordance with their intentions: barring the way in at every step, but ushering them out and back into the day where they belong.
Fresh salt air and distance from the nasty undercurrents of energy in the Grotto arrive as a relief so intense that for a moment after they're well and truly free all he does is stand there with his eyes squinted and head tilted back, breathing and listening to various pieces of his body kick up vociferous complaints. Slowly he hoists the heavy coil of rope over his head, then carries it over to drop it into the grass at the base of the rock he'd been sitting on when she arrived. The horse's head lifts, ears quirked around to the sound, its thick arch of a neck bending to swing the large head around, one warm brown eye fixed on Noah. The ferret is nowhere to be seen -- probably curled up in a saddle bag.
'Next time,' she says, and he laughs. It hurts his bruised ribs, every last note of it, but he suffers through it anyway, grin a sharp, Puckish slash, startlingly white against skin smudged with rock dust, mud in sweat, and god only knows what else. "Next time, she says. We'll turn you into a connoisseur of dirt before you know it."
He turns from running a hand over the horse's flank, attention drawn by the frown audible in her voice. "What are you after?"
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
"Well, after all of that, I'm nae ruling anything out." Cassidy drops on the grass, palms flat upon it as she eases back to take a look upward at the sunset. "If there was a sign that anything can happen nae matter how ridiculous, what just happened down there is evidence enough. That one's gonna go right intae the books."
His appreciative laughter earns him a slanted look, and an equally angled smile. It fades, however, when he poses his question, and she is reminded of what she said to him before she descended down the hole. A deal was a deal.
Cassidy eases further down until her back is on the ground, both arms curling up by the elbows to tuck her palms underneath her wet hair, uncaring of her bedraggled state. Emerald eyes stare up at the glowing expanse above her head. She falls silent, for such a lengthy amount of time that it may be that she has elected not to tell him after all, but she eventually parts her lips to speak:
"Was asked tae keep a bead on weird shite, part of an agreement I have with a line I have that may lead tae one of the biggest scores of my life." In a tone that suggests that it is the challenge that beguiles her, and not the take. Rolling her head sideways, she focuses on his tilted form by the horse. "Said line gave me a head's up about Adlehyde being subjected tae some sort of cataclysm, some point soon. Would nae identify his source, but the way he was speaking, sounds like a magic type." Winking at him, she waves a hand sideways. "Since we've been in the shite twice now, I thought you should know, from one trouble magnet tae another. You may nae want tae be around when it happens."
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
Right into the books.
Right into some books, certainly, and probably at least one that she knows about now: that overstuffed journal with its outpourings of thoughts, notes on the impossible and mementos of moments come and gone. A bath, a meal, and a drink are necessary before he can apply himself to the task, but before he allows himself to sleep he'll sit at the desk in his rented room in Adlehyde and put down on those pages every miraculous thing he can remember about what they've been through -- and there are plenty of those to keep the oil burning late into the night. By the time he finishes his hand will be as sore as the rest of him, if not worse off, but he'll have breathed life into a dozen pages with words and partially rendered images, capturing whatever he found most compelling about what he saw with a handful of efficient penstrokes. She'll no doubt join the gallery, sketched in medias res -- if she hasn't already, following all of the uproar to do with the Mamma Mia.
He's roving backward over these fresh memories as he stands beside the horse and adjusts the girth to tighten it again, opening saddle bags and going about the unhurried business of sorting his things. He hangs the rope from the outside of one of them, retrieves dry socks from inside of it, and two pieces of fruit. Strange, prickly fruit, though he's removed the spines: not local. From Aveh.
One of these he tosses down into the grass roughly beside her, then he lowers himself to sit and begins to unlace his boots. Leaning forward does him no favors. That last fall onto the geyser's floating platform did a number on his ribs, and they feel as though they've been stitched together with hot barbed wire to either side of his spine.
He inverts his boots and lets the water pour out of them. He's in the middle of changing his socks when she says the words 'cataclysm' and 'magic type,' and his gestures slow, then stop. Hazel eyes trace her expression, but all that's there is the typical cavalier humor. After a handful of heartbeats that way, he reanimates, finishing the business of putting on dry socks -- blisters are more than just an inconvenience in his line of work, they can be life-threatening injuries -- and pulling his boots back on. His brow cocks as he begins to lace the first one, contemplative eyes ticked back over to her slim silhouette against the greenery. "Are you planning to leave?"
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
That isn't a bad idea, though she only has the bare bones of her kit with her. Lifting a leg and bending a knee, dexterous fingers make quick work on the laces of her boots, pulling it off by the heel and turning it over with a flick of her wrist to let the cascade of water spill onto the grass. She tosses it haphazardly to the side, and starts with the other; the gestures are girlish, too youthful, almost, for the likes of her, digits tangling into her other set so she could do the same with the other half of the pair, throwing it where it lies. Bare toes squish into the grass, letting them tickle the pale appendages. Otherwise, she makes no move to change, allowing herself a break before she starts heading back to the capital.
The sound of another thump has her eyes wandering over to the de-spined fruit that looks familiar, though it has been a few years since she's been to Aveh. Reaching out, she plucks it off the ground, turning it over her hands and lips quirking in a faint smile. A small, curved blade manifests between her fingers as if by magic, setting the wicked edge against its circumference and starts to peel. "It's been a while since I've had this," she tells him in a conversational fashion. "Nae exactly rife with plenty of opportunities to eat fresh produce out in the wild, though Adlehyde's better than most." Just yet another disadvantage of living in a dying world that more functions as a tomb for lost secrets than anything truly inhabitable. The peel works around the knife in a neat, careful spiral.
The c-word will always give someone pause, she finds, no matter how casually one puts it. She remembers Jude's expression when she told him, the pause before the low whistle. Noah makes no such sound but the silence itself is telling. Discarding the peel, she cuts into the flesh, working off a single, sweet-tart crescent before putting it between her lips; the juice enlivens her tastebuds, draws out a hint of pain at the hinge of her jaw, typical when one has not tasted anything sweet or sour for a while. Lashes shutter over her eyes as she savors it.
Are you planning to leave?
"I should," she tells him, opening her eyes again and turning her head to look at him. "And I could, if I wanted tae be an arsehole, and despite my overwhelmingly generous self, I'm nae above it. Dealing with a widescale disaster is as far from my wheelhouse as it comes. Nae exactly the sort for heroics or any kind of ridiculous nonsense. That's for the young who're too enamored of the suffering that comes with the hard knowledge that you cannae save everybody from sommat like that." She even looks rather irritated by the prospect, judging by the dent between her brows where they knit. For once since he's met her, the smile is completely gone from her face.
But she heaves a sigh, exasperation evident. She cuts another piece of fruit to chew on. "But I cannae," she murmurs. "I stay tae help deal with what's coming. That was part of the arrangement. Figured it's just as well, if I had nae thought tae wheel and deal like I usually do, I wouldnae have found out what was coming. So I s'pose I'm stuck with it. I hate it. Would rather nae. But it's done and I'll lose out on some of the other shite I live for if I do."
After a pause, she continues. "Me and someone I know who's covering the Exhibit in Adlehyde got tae thinking it will probably occur during the big festival surrounding it. Nae a better opportunity, when people are happy and oblivious."
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
He finishes tying the first boot and switches to its opposite, lips quirked at the small talk. "There are pockets of life even in Aveh if you know where to look. Life on Filgaia is increasingly a paradox. Fragile and durable at the same time. Have to be durable to grow and thrive here, but even durable only gets you so far. One unexpected sandstorm, and..." He finishes tying the second boot, sits up and snaps his fingers as he does. "Gone. Just like that."
A fitting segue to talk of mysterious catastrophes on the horizon.
He has other things to do to prepare the horse and himself, but he lets himself remain seated for now, leaning forward into the elbows on his knees and letting the sunset bake across wet, stained clothes, drying him out and kneading its fingers into the shroud of chill that hung on him for their entire tedious retreat to the surface. Tight, weary muscles loosen by minute increments with time, easing some of the ache in his ribs.
So he's able to meet her eyes, when she opens them to look at him and gives him a dissertation on the merits of running away. The mirth it inspires limits itself to his eyes, the rest of his expression neutral, speculative if anything.
"Hm," he says, as she mentions the festival. His gaze drops down to one of his hands, and he splays his fingers and turns that hand over palm down, then palm-up, examining various abrasions, but thinking about other things clearly: "Maybe it's something to do with one of the artifacts."
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
"Thought that, too," Cassidy tells him. "But as prior conversations with you can probably attest, nae exactly my expertise, also. Was taken on because I came highly recommended, though dinnae know by who, but I'm rather convinced that whoever it was clearly wanted tae make my life miserable pointing that outfit in my direction. Heard from the source that it's possibly connected tae the King of Lacour's disappearance." Coincidence or serendipity, remembering their conversation on the train heading back to Adlehyde after the sinking of the Mamma Mia. "Other than that...was just asked tae keep an eye out on strange happenings, tae which that..." She gestures vaguely towards the hole they used to enter the grotto. "Certainly counts."
After another exhale, her blade drags over the fruit's revealed flesh, taking another sliver of it into her mouth and chewing on it thoughtfully. "Though if you want tae do me a solid, you can come with me and poke around the Exhibit, see what's there that can generate that kind of interest or disaster. Nae got the brains for it, we talked about this in some length in the train ride. The more I know, the more I'll able tae keep my head above water."
She pauses, and angles a look at him sidelong, a brow inching upwards. "Yours, too, if you're just as crazy as me tae want tae stick around after what I just told you. Would nae recommend it, though, sticking around. That kind of thing's as unpredictable as it comes."
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
The King of Lacour's disappearance. He remembers that conversation on the train. Rather, that fragment of a conversation, clipped off because of a face he'd made that made it plain he had no interest in the subject.
She tugs another short laugh out of his chest as she waves her hand at the Grotto and calls it a strange happening, his lofted brow a remark on the depth of understatement in play.
If she hadn't asked him to accompany her he'd have offered, and that's clear from the way he flicks a glance at her and nods, no remark necessary. It's worth investigating. If she'd not been interested at all, he'd likely have gone on his own, brought Ambrose with him -- Ambrose and his peculiar monocle. "Might bring Brose along."
Yours, too, she says. If he wants to stick around.
His eyes tighten into a hard squint that cuts through the glare of the sun's outlandishly colorful departure from the sky, allowing hazel eyes to take in the landscape around them: the green of growing things, the blue of the sea on his other side, ink-stroke cliffs in deep shadow as the dusk approaches on the other side of this golden hour. The air is damp and sweet. At length his attention roves toward the city behind him, a puddle of hazy shapes flecked with warm light, the sparks of windows that will push back against the onset of evening. Dark smudges rise into the air above it -- smoke from fires -- but they smell like wood stoves and dinner up close, as he knows from spending more than one recent evening wandering its streets and alleys with no destination in mind, sheerly for the pleasure of taking it all in. Eventually, those eyes find the spot between his boots, trained on sand and tangled shoots of new growth, tiny shining points of mica orange with the sunset, his head bowed, leaned into the splay of one hand that rifles lazily through his hair, elbow on knee.
These are all long, silent moments. He doesn't rush toward a decision or an answer.
"I'm no hero," he says, finally, lifting his head again, "But Adlehyde's worth the trouble of trying to save, don't you think? There aren't many places like this left. Trust me -- I've been around. I know." That accent of his makes the claim unnecessary, in all probability.
Just a beat or two later, and the corner of his mouth quirks. "Your track record when it comes to getting my head above water is pretty good. I'm surprised you're offering, but maybe I shouldn't be. I remember--" He pauses. "I...dimly, sort of remember," is the amendment, "How that went down last time." Her life-saving liplock, of course. There are a lot of things about Noah that aren't predictable, but his inability to keep from doing this, running his mouth, playing up this facet of himself, isn't one of those things. It's like clockwork. "Would you believe me if I told you it's even better when I'm not losing consciousness?"
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Cassidy's eyes are turned directly upwards; he wouldn't be faulted if he thinks she's still attempting to find some divine inspiration in her present set of circumstances. The fruit whittled down to the pit - she must've been hungry - she sets it on the ground before leaning back on both her palms, a contemplative expression directed to the hole in the ground, and the length of rope that is still attached to the nearby rock. Noah's destrier waits patiently for his master, big brown eyes and sleek coat catching the red-gold rays of sun, illumination rippling over impressive musculature. Horses, she knows, are valuable commodities in Filgaia, but it's rare that she actually finds a specimen as impressive as the one Noah rides. The stallion can't have been inexpensive.
Then again, considering the trouble the man gets up to, he probably needs a very sturdy horse that can withstand a hefty amount of punishment.
He'd find that she's just as comfortable with silence as she is in conversation, nevermind that words are her weapon of choice, and she tends to use them as such even in the most basic of human conversations. Everything and anything to engage the other, in hopes of finding something interesting underneath daily niceties, though it's rare that she finds anyone who gives it as good as they get it. The relic hunter is one of the handful who can, in her most recently-cobbled circle of acquaintances; for that reason alone, he warrants the warning, if not just to do Filgaia the tremenduous favor in making sure that it stays interesting for people who don't find any sort of thrill in excavating its long-buried secrets. Cassidy's attachment to life is almost entirely focused on the present and the human element. That is, after all, how she makes a living.
When he speaks, however, his statements are the last things she expects from him. She knew without his confirmation that she had been right on the train, that the man had a conscience and that one day, that'll probably be his undoing.
But Adlehyde's worth the trouble of trying to save, don't you think?
It isn't as if she can find any fault in the assertion that there aren't a lot of places like it anymore - like him, she has been around, though she does not offer up that piece of herself to the table. But the words cause a visible grimace on her pale features; the acknowledgment is there, but so is the reluctance to admit much of anything.
"Certain there's others more qualified in that than me," she says finally, turning her head towards him, the corner of her mouth lifting in a half-smile. "Dinnae know if you noticed, luv, but my expertise is in causing disaster and nae the other way around." There is absolutely nothing self-deprecating about the statement, as factual as the conwoman can ever be. "It sure is pretty in the right angles, though."
His next set of remarks brings back that usual levity; the reminder of the life-giving breath she had administered to him before he drowned underwater, the pun and the subsequent aside draws a laugh. "Oh, ay, if I'm involved, I can believe it," she tells him, returning the shot with one of her own.
"Anyway, you're right. You should nae be. Not much interesting tae me in a dead world but its people and what they get up tae. I'm doing life here a favor in keeping you alive. If nothing else, I'd do it just tae keep the heat off me, since we operate so similarly." She finally reaches for her boots, tugging one up her leg and lacing it up. "Methinks, though, that you do that just fine without my assistance. Those people from June City still gunning for your arse?"
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
As usual, Noah seems to find the flirtatious exchange satisfying in and of itself; there's no evident disappointment when she parries and ripostes. Not even any surprise, really, suggesting that by now he expects this rhythm when the two of them trade quips in that vein. The only thing that enters his lid-eyed look of contentment is a grace note of amusement, and underneath that something almost rueful. "I don't know if you noticed, but nobody's out screening and hiring heroes. Whether you're qualified or not matters about as much as tits on a bull. That's not how it works. Nobody ever turns up at the last second when things are falling apart, going, 'Yeah, hi, I'm the local hero, I brought my rate list with me.'" Glittering hazel eyes watch her slide her boot up over her calf, and after a moment he takes that cue to push himself back to his feet, once again halfheartedly dusting the seat of his pants as he returns his attention to his horse. "Heroes aren't special. They're just regular idiots like you and me who step it up for some reason, and the reason isn't even necessarily noble -- sometimes it's just selfishness that aligns with the needs of the majority. Sometimes heroism is a side-effect."
It's all just conversational in tone, lacking any suggestion that he's trying to convince her to try heroism on as a lifestyle choice. He lacks any desire to do that, himself, and his desire to coerce others into it is even less than none, but these are facts he's accumulated over the period of his wandering, watching people -- sometimes himself -- vaulted into positions of significance, somehow in the right place at the right time to know something or do something important, and he 'knows' there isn't any rhyme or reason to that.
The crook at the corner of his mouth is absent but lingering as she explains why she'd go to the trouble to keep him alive. "That sounds dangerously like admitting you like my company, Cassie Cain." He slides the stirrup on his side down from its tucked position high on the looping strap, underneath one leather layer of the saddle, and then pauses when she asks her question. She'll have to look at his back for some seconds before he glances over his shoulder. "Yeah, well. You've got your fans and I've got mine," he drawls, and puts on a half-smile for her that doesn't quite make it all the way up into his eyes. He doesn't seem irritated that she asked; it seems more like an effect of the subject matter. He turns back to the saddle, hauling on straps, fastening buckles. "Marza and Kissinger are no problem. They're just hired help."
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Heroes aren't special. They're just regular idiots like you and me.
"Speak for yourself," Cassidy says, angling him a wry look, amusement crystal clear in those gold-spangled eyes. "Nae anything regular about me, y'ken. I thought you'd have a higher opinion of yourself than that, luv. Do you need me tae talk you up? Might be a verra dangerous enterprise, that, but the last thing I need tae see is you deep in your cups at some point, lamenting your lot in life as a regular joe. Always remember that you're a peacock, Noah Hawthorne - you just got tae spread your wings and fly."
Nevermind that peacocks don't fly, but by the look of her, he would know that she knows that rather well.
She knows all of that is true, but she doesn't address any of it; the idea of touching that label anywhere makes her recoil internally, memories littered with shattered emotional fragments and a slew of bodies. She recalls, sharply, the last time her selfishness had aligned with the needs of the majority and elected to do something about it....and it cost her almost everything. A hand reches out to take another boot into her grip, to start pulling it over on her other leg. There isn't much she can do save strip off her wet socks, which she has already done, but it's a long road back to Adlehyde and she better hop to it before it gets dark. What they found in the underbellies of the hollow was already strange, beautiful in a dark and terrible way most secrets are, but that does not mean she wants to be caught around its vicinity when the lights go out and the shadows reign supreme.
Easing up in a standing position, she moves to where her rope still lies dangling in the hole they entered through, unlooping it from the rocks and coiling it up. His quip has her turning her attention back to him, lifting a brow.
That sounds dangerously like admitting you like my company, Cassie Cain.
"Ay," she says, brazen and shameless as ever, laughter stitched over that single word, slinging the coil of rope over her shoulder and planting a hand on her hip. "Was I s'pose tae say otherwise? Stammer and declare you an idiot in another language while you called me out, turning my face away and blushing like some slip of a pretty sommat in those one gella Rough Rider novels? Dinnae I tell you already, luv? Or if I dinnae, I thought you would've come tae that conclusion yourself by now." Emerald irises glitter under dark-honey lashes. "I like living dangerously."
The remarks about Marza and Kissinger tempers that brilliant flash of mirth, but only slightly. "Well, easy pickings, then," she tells him; that might not be true, but she has confidence to spare. "Take it the real problem's the one who hired them? Always is."
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
"I don't need you to," Noah says amicably, of talking him up, "But if you feel like doing that, I'm not going to stop you."
Most people would hesitate to give her that kind of latitude with their reputation, and for good reason...but Noah is not most people, and he's also absolutely sure that she doesn't need his permission and wouldn't ask for it if she felt like stirring up trouble, anyway, so it's effectively a meaningless gesture.
He's starting to lift one foot with every intention of rising up and settling into the saddle when she says something that prematurely ends thoughts of doing that, buckling him into a full laugh instead -- the kind that temporarily grips him right down to the core, forcing him to wrap a forearm over his middle. It's short but intense, the wide smile he turns on her tempered by something quizzical. "Did you-- sorry. Did you just ask me if I expected you to blush over criticism?" He can't shed the smile and doesn't care to take his manufactured look of injury that far, but he puts on hurt eyes and knits his brows. "I know I don't come off as that dumb."
The toe of his boot lodges in the stirrup then, the rest of him swinging up and over easily, settling into the saddle as the animal beneath him shifts its weight restlessly between hooves the size of dinner plates. He leaves the reins hanging on the wither for the time being, making last-minute adjustments to his holsters.
"Always is," he agrees at the last. There's nothing else forthcoming about that, though. He doesn't look as though he's trying to be evasive, so it's just as likely that it's too long a conversation to have before they part ways as it is that he doesn't want to get into the details.
The speculative weight of his gaze may be tangible in the moment just before he poses the inevitable question: "Need a ride back?"
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
The short, but full laugh earns him the consequence of sharpening Cassidy's own smile further, burning underneath the encroaching twilight. "All I was asking was whether I was s'posed tae," she says in mock-defense, hands lifting up in a gesture of surrender that she clearly does not mean. "You'll find that those associated blood vessels are verra, verra dormant as far as anything demure is concerned. Downright dead, really. Tragic childhood accident. I'll tell you all about it sometime."
She watches him mount his horse, the fingers on her hips slipping up to tuck into her pockets instead. The offer has her smiling once more, easy and languid - one that touches her eyes. There is mischief there, and curiosity also - though whether it is drawn by his weighty stare or something else is hard to discern.
"Nae," she tells him. "It's a nice evening out for a walk, and there's sommat in Port Timney tomorrow that I've got tae check out, so I'm sticking around here for the time being. "But I'll be back in Adlehyde right after that so whenever you're up for taking a crack at the Exhibit, let me know." She rattles off the name of the hotel she is staying in.
Reaching out to pluck her hat off from where she has anchored it, she rests it on her head. "You be careful now, luv. Would say it's because of Life getting a wee bit too interesting out here. But there's no such thing, s'far as I'm concerned." She winks at him. "Methinks it's the same for you."
With that, she turns her heel and starts on the long road back to the port town, beckoning at her from a distance and easily glimpsed from the top of the hill.