Re: Intense Struggle! (Round 3 - The Wasteland)
07-12-2010, 06:24 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by SleepingOrange.
The group carrying Aph moved towards the ruined scientific facility. It was hard work, trudging through the sands; it was harder still to move while carrying the bound nymph. Progress was frequently slowed by a stumble or having to pass the woman from one person to another. At one point, the normally sure-footed Clara got her shoe tangled in some sort of root and had nearly fell onto her face; only her stick caught her, and it took several seconds to disentangle whatever was wrapped around her ankle.
Once she was moving again, she lifted the hem of her habit; a ring of shallow scratches wrapped around her pale ankle, and she pulled a face. Must have been some sort of thorny desert plant. Better her than anyone else, she figured; it's not like she could feel it or really be inconvenienced. A quick glance back revealed that a short length of green had been pulled up by her passage, and it was indeed covered in short, bristly cactus thorns. Clara shrugged and kept moving, attention focused again on the building in front of them.
What she didn't see was the root retracting back into the sand several seconds after she passed; she similarly missed a general shifting of the ground towards a dune that bordered the sunward side of the laboratory they were approaching.
At the top of that dune was a small, cantaloupe-sized succulent, with a single, bright-red flower in the center of its fat green leaves. By all accounts, it appeared to be a boringly-normal cactus up until the moment Clara had stumbled upon her snare; as she struggled to release herself from its grasp, the succulent shuddered slightly and began secreting small drops of clear liquid from the tips of its leaves. A few moments later, a gust of the hot wind that constantly rearranged the desert whistled past, slightly unearthing several unidentifiable rodent skulls.
Another window than the one D'neya had found serviceable was found to be more accommodating to the task of hoisting a helpless nymph through it. The room on the other side was rather similar to its companion; save for a long electrical burn down one wall, however, its contents were largely undamaged. A dusty computer sat on a moldering desk, and an ancient filing cabinet sat forgotten in a corner; there was even a plastic ficus that had appeared at some point in its past to harbor a colony of spiders, but aside from the toll years had taken on the furniture, there was no real damage. The window had even been unbroken, and Larus had managed to lever it open from outside before shutting it again to keep out the sand.
Clara wheeled the chair from behind the desk into the center of the room, and the ex-hero sat Aph somewhat roughly in it. B, who had tagged along silently, was maintaining his taciturn demeanor in a corner, biting his nails and thinking about the research facility he had so recently left. The nun shot Larus a glance. "What do you plan now?"
Larus shrugged. Much of the reason he'd suggested moving to shelter was to stall for time while he organized his own thoughts, and that was far from over. "Well, I mean... I guess the first thing to do..." He trailed off, struggling to assemble his suspicions and ideas into a cogent plan, or even a cogent sentence. He rolled a hand, trying to indicate through the economical gesture all the uncertainty and doubt he was struggling with. Clara bit her lip, and Aph snorted. "Let me guess, you can't interrogate me here either, the decor is just too tacky. Gotta find a better-appointed shelter!"
The elderly sister sighed. This thing that claimed to be Aph was testing her normally-bottomless patience. She'd dealt with people who were sarcastic or abrasive or even deliberately unpleasant before, but the fact that this one had the indecency to pretend to be someone who was so sweet and thoughtful, even if a bit weird, was grating. "Look, I have an idea. Hold this." She shoved her cane into Larus's arms and shifted the weight of her book on her back. A piece of chalk was pulled from a sleeve, and she began drawing a very angular diagram around Aph's chair.
It could feel vibration. Movement. Large things moving. Larger things than the tiny lizards and mice it had gotten for years. It had felt explosions. It had lost limbs, but that was a decent price to pay if there was real game around. In the dim awareness that passed for thought, it wondered why the prey wasn't moving towards it now; it knew it had injected a large dose into whatever had found one of its tendrils, and it knew that anything filled with the poison should be compelled to seek out the scent of its nectar. The succulent wrapped its coils tighter around the hard thing it grew next to, and sent several inside through sharp apertures and narrow cracks.
Watching the nun work was as ever bewildering. Her hands moved with bizarre speed and accuracy, creating apparently from memory intricate designs and patterns. "I'll just be a minute," she trilled, as an overall pattern or rhombuses within rhombuses appeared. At each point of the largest diamond, there was a small circle; they were the only curves in the diagram, which now covered an area of about two feet in every direction from the nymph. "What... What does this thing do? Not something with zombies, I assume?"
"No, it's just a zone of truth. Makes it impossible, or at least hard, to lie while you're in it." Larus grimaced slightly; it seemed too easy, like there had to be some sort of catch, but what did he know from magic? And it's not like he had any better ideas; at the very least this gave him some time to think. "How much longer before you can start it up?" After a short exhalation and a pensive hum, Clara answered "Two, maybe three minutes?" The grey man nodded to himself. "I think I'll see where we are, then. Get a feel for the location." Clara mhmmed vaguely, and Larus stepped out into the hall.
Sitting back on her haunches, the necropolitan looked sadly at Aph. Or "Aph". This was the sort of spell people used on criminals or traitors or heretics, not their friends. Clara hated using magic like this, and she hated the situation that was forcing her to. "Aph..." She sighed. "If this really is you, what's gotten into you?" The nymph simply spat at the nun's feet for her troubles. "You force my hand, dear." There was a snarl in the pink figure's voice as she snapped "Don't call me dear, hag."
Clara sighed heavily as she kneeled again. She ran her fingers around the edge of one of her circles before making a plucking motion and slowly drawing her hand up. A grey taper rose out of the floor as her hand ascended, a wick that hadn't existed a moment before grasped between thumb and forefinger. Though she wouldn't say it to Larus, and was barely admitting it to herself, she had no idea how the spell would interact with a magical being like Aph. Sure, Clara used magic, and used it fairly well for the most part, but she was not a spectacular wizard or even a notably powerful one. Her knowledge of thaumological theory was basic and probably outdated, and for all that she could remember a thousand and one rituals, it was all rote, not the true skill and talent real mages had. This and a million other things worried her as she pulled the last candle out of the floor and summoned a small, hovering flame with a click of her fingers.
It was nearly blind. Well, it was always blind, but its tremorsense was amazingly adapted for this sandy terrain, and it could perceive anything on or in the desert better than any sight ever could. It could "see" for miles in every direction; it existed for miles in every direction. But as its tendrils pressed into the strange, angular thing its prey had moved into, it found a lack of sand and it could barely feel the movement of anything inside. Still, rhythmic motion, one-two, one-two... Yes, there was something. Hard to make out, but there. It moved towards the prey.
Larus gloomily reflected on his situation. Unknown to him, nearly sixty other people had had this moment themselves or would be having it soon, but to him this battle was a personal hell, probably designed just to punish him. He was impotently furious at the madman who had put them all here, bitter at his competitors, and rankled at being forced to work so closely with some senile old bible-thumper.
He'd passed several doors and dodged several holes in the floor, but hadn't felt like doing much exploring beyond heading up and down the hallway. On a whim, he turned into another room, alone with his thoughts and not sure what to believe about anything. The room he entered was an office, much like the one the group had climbed into, but in disarray and with the window broken. Sand poured in through the window, errant gusts of wind sending handfuls of the damned stuff tumbling onto the floor. Nothing much in here but shattered furniture and paper that looked like it would crumble if he breathed near it, much less picked it up. He huffed and turned back around, heading aimlessly into the hallway and picking another door at random; it was across and a couple down from the one he'd just left, and he had to force it to open it.
The hinges went before the knob did, and the door clattered to the floor within. There was a window across from the doorway, its panes smashed in long ago and the sun glaring directly through the hole. Squinting in the sudden brightness, Larus looked around the new room; it seemed to be a server center of some sort, with large, monitorless computers lined up in rows and wires criss-crossing the floor. And, oddly, the walls. Curious, the brigand moved to one of the thick cords that stretched across the wall, one hand shielding his face from the sun. He leaned close to one that didn't seem connected to anything; it languidly reached back.
The last candle was lit and they were burning warmly and with a slight green tint to the edges of the flames. Clara cast a worried glance towards the door, nervous both at the spell she was about to complete and at the fact that Larus had yet to come back. It was probably a simple matter of popping her head into the hall and seeing him approach, but she didn't particularly want to leave Aph or the sigils unwatched.
"B, love, would you be a dear and find Mr. Larus for me?" The boy, who had been mulling things over in his head with a dejected air of sulkiness, started. With a couple of ums and uhs, he nodded and moved quickly out of the room, less to actually look for his grey quarry than simply to duck having to have any sort of conversation right now. He still wasn't sure about what had happened in the swamp, but was sure that he didn't want to be sharing it with anyone right now. Automatically, he closed the door behind him.
Clara turned a wan smile on the scowling nymph before her. She knew she ought to start the spell soon, before the glyphs became smudged or the candles burnt too far or any of a million other little hiccups happened, but... Neither Larus nor B had come back, and the uncertainty bout the results of casting weighed on the cleric's mind. Still, doubt ill became a prophetess, so...
"If you really are Aph, I'm truly sorry."
It spread out slowly. It did everything slowly. Most everything, anyway. Sometimes it could be frighteningly fast, but usually it embodied the torpor of the desert. It reached across surfaces; it could feel its prey, far away, faintly, but there were barriers in the way and things it couldn't see everywhere. And so it spread, slowly and near-aimlessly. When the thudding one-two one-two of one of the biggest morsels began moving towards it, it was happy as it was able to be; when the vibrations moved away again, it stretched towards them, slow as ever. And then they came back.
And then they came closer.
And they they were so close that it could feel the air move as the prey came closer and it reached.
The wire moved slowly towards Larus's face. It was no challenge at all to move slightly back from it, a monochrome eyebrow raised in confusion. As the stretching coil continued to move towards him, he simply took a couple steps back and waited for his eyes to adjust to the brightness. Once they did, it became apparent that the "wire" was a thin vine or tentacle of some sort, covered both in narrow thorns and fine hairs; not one to indulge idle curiosity, especially idle curiosity that was trying to touch his face, Larus moved to leave the room. As he turned, he felt a searing pain down his calf; a glance downward revealed that another such vine had slid its way up his pant leg.
The group carrying Aph moved towards the ruined scientific facility. It was hard work, trudging through the sands; it was harder still to move while carrying the bound nymph. Progress was frequently slowed by a stumble or having to pass the woman from one person to another. At one point, the normally sure-footed Clara got her shoe tangled in some sort of root and had nearly fell onto her face; only her stick caught her, and it took several seconds to disentangle whatever was wrapped around her ankle.
Once she was moving again, she lifted the hem of her habit; a ring of shallow scratches wrapped around her pale ankle, and she pulled a face. Must have been some sort of thorny desert plant. Better her than anyone else, she figured; it's not like she could feel it or really be inconvenienced. A quick glance back revealed that a short length of green had been pulled up by her passage, and it was indeed covered in short, bristly cactus thorns. Clara shrugged and kept moving, attention focused again on the building in front of them.
What she didn't see was the root retracting back into the sand several seconds after she passed; she similarly missed a general shifting of the ground towards a dune that bordered the sunward side of the laboratory they were approaching.
At the top of that dune was a small, cantaloupe-sized succulent, with a single, bright-red flower in the center of its fat green leaves. By all accounts, it appeared to be a boringly-normal cactus up until the moment Clara had stumbled upon her snare; as she struggled to release herself from its grasp, the succulent shuddered slightly and began secreting small drops of clear liquid from the tips of its leaves. A few moments later, a gust of the hot wind that constantly rearranged the desert whistled past, slightly unearthing several unidentifiable rodent skulls.
Another window than the one D'neya had found serviceable was found to be more accommodating to the task of hoisting a helpless nymph through it. The room on the other side was rather similar to its companion; save for a long electrical burn down one wall, however, its contents were largely undamaged. A dusty computer sat on a moldering desk, and an ancient filing cabinet sat forgotten in a corner; there was even a plastic ficus that had appeared at some point in its past to harbor a colony of spiders, but aside from the toll years had taken on the furniture, there was no real damage. The window had even been unbroken, and Larus had managed to lever it open from outside before shutting it again to keep out the sand.
Clara wheeled the chair from behind the desk into the center of the room, and the ex-hero sat Aph somewhat roughly in it. B, who had tagged along silently, was maintaining his taciturn demeanor in a corner, biting his nails and thinking about the research facility he had so recently left. The nun shot Larus a glance. "What do you plan now?"
Larus shrugged. Much of the reason he'd suggested moving to shelter was to stall for time while he organized his own thoughts, and that was far from over. "Well, I mean... I guess the first thing to do..." He trailed off, struggling to assemble his suspicions and ideas into a cogent plan, or even a cogent sentence. He rolled a hand, trying to indicate through the economical gesture all the uncertainty and doubt he was struggling with. Clara bit her lip, and Aph snorted. "Let me guess, you can't interrogate me here either, the decor is just too tacky. Gotta find a better-appointed shelter!"
The elderly sister sighed. This thing that claimed to be Aph was testing her normally-bottomless patience. She'd dealt with people who were sarcastic or abrasive or even deliberately unpleasant before, but the fact that this one had the indecency to pretend to be someone who was so sweet and thoughtful, even if a bit weird, was grating. "Look, I have an idea. Hold this." She shoved her cane into Larus's arms and shifted the weight of her book on her back. A piece of chalk was pulled from a sleeve, and she began drawing a very angular diagram around Aph's chair.
It could feel vibration. Movement. Large things moving. Larger things than the tiny lizards and mice it had gotten for years. It had felt explosions. It had lost limbs, but that was a decent price to pay if there was real game around. In the dim awareness that passed for thought, it wondered why the prey wasn't moving towards it now; it knew it had injected a large dose into whatever had found one of its tendrils, and it knew that anything filled with the poison should be compelled to seek out the scent of its nectar. The succulent wrapped its coils tighter around the hard thing it grew next to, and sent several inside through sharp apertures and narrow cracks.
Watching the nun work was as ever bewildering. Her hands moved with bizarre speed and accuracy, creating apparently from memory intricate designs and patterns. "I'll just be a minute," she trilled, as an overall pattern or rhombuses within rhombuses appeared. At each point of the largest diamond, there was a small circle; they were the only curves in the diagram, which now covered an area of about two feet in every direction from the nymph. "What... What does this thing do? Not something with zombies, I assume?"
"No, it's just a zone of truth. Makes it impossible, or at least hard, to lie while you're in it." Larus grimaced slightly; it seemed too easy, like there had to be some sort of catch, but what did he know from magic? And it's not like he had any better ideas; at the very least this gave him some time to think. "How much longer before you can start it up?" After a short exhalation and a pensive hum, Clara answered "Two, maybe three minutes?" The grey man nodded to himself. "I think I'll see where we are, then. Get a feel for the location." Clara mhmmed vaguely, and Larus stepped out into the hall.
Sitting back on her haunches, the necropolitan looked sadly at Aph. Or "Aph". This was the sort of spell people used on criminals or traitors or heretics, not their friends. Clara hated using magic like this, and she hated the situation that was forcing her to. "Aph..." She sighed. "If this really is you, what's gotten into you?" The nymph simply spat at the nun's feet for her troubles. "You force my hand, dear." There was a snarl in the pink figure's voice as she snapped "Don't call me dear, hag."
Clara sighed heavily as she kneeled again. She ran her fingers around the edge of one of her circles before making a plucking motion and slowly drawing her hand up. A grey taper rose out of the floor as her hand ascended, a wick that hadn't existed a moment before grasped between thumb and forefinger. Though she wouldn't say it to Larus, and was barely admitting it to herself, she had no idea how the spell would interact with a magical being like Aph. Sure, Clara used magic, and used it fairly well for the most part, but she was not a spectacular wizard or even a notably powerful one. Her knowledge of thaumological theory was basic and probably outdated, and for all that she could remember a thousand and one rituals, it was all rote, not the true skill and talent real mages had. This and a million other things worried her as she pulled the last candle out of the floor and summoned a small, hovering flame with a click of her fingers.
It was nearly blind. Well, it was always blind, but its tremorsense was amazingly adapted for this sandy terrain, and it could perceive anything on or in the desert better than any sight ever could. It could "see" for miles in every direction; it existed for miles in every direction. But as its tendrils pressed into the strange, angular thing its prey had moved into, it found a lack of sand and it could barely feel the movement of anything inside. Still, rhythmic motion, one-two, one-two... Yes, there was something. Hard to make out, but there. It moved towards the prey.
Larus gloomily reflected on his situation. Unknown to him, nearly sixty other people had had this moment themselves or would be having it soon, but to him this battle was a personal hell, probably designed just to punish him. He was impotently furious at the madman who had put them all here, bitter at his competitors, and rankled at being forced to work so closely with some senile old bible-thumper.
He'd passed several doors and dodged several holes in the floor, but hadn't felt like doing much exploring beyond heading up and down the hallway. On a whim, he turned into another room, alone with his thoughts and not sure what to believe about anything. The room he entered was an office, much like the one the group had climbed into, but in disarray and with the window broken. Sand poured in through the window, errant gusts of wind sending handfuls of the damned stuff tumbling onto the floor. Nothing much in here but shattered furniture and paper that looked like it would crumble if he breathed near it, much less picked it up. He huffed and turned back around, heading aimlessly into the hallway and picking another door at random; it was across and a couple down from the one he'd just left, and he had to force it to open it.
The hinges went before the knob did, and the door clattered to the floor within. There was a window across from the doorway, its panes smashed in long ago and the sun glaring directly through the hole. Squinting in the sudden brightness, Larus looked around the new room; it seemed to be a server center of some sort, with large, monitorless computers lined up in rows and wires criss-crossing the floor. And, oddly, the walls. Curious, the brigand moved to one of the thick cords that stretched across the wall, one hand shielding his face from the sun. He leaned close to one that didn't seem connected to anything; it languidly reached back.
The last candle was lit and they were burning warmly and with a slight green tint to the edges of the flames. Clara cast a worried glance towards the door, nervous both at the spell she was about to complete and at the fact that Larus had yet to come back. It was probably a simple matter of popping her head into the hall and seeing him approach, but she didn't particularly want to leave Aph or the sigils unwatched.
"B, love, would you be a dear and find Mr. Larus for me?" The boy, who had been mulling things over in his head with a dejected air of sulkiness, started. With a couple of ums and uhs, he nodded and moved quickly out of the room, less to actually look for his grey quarry than simply to duck having to have any sort of conversation right now. He still wasn't sure about what had happened in the swamp, but was sure that he didn't want to be sharing it with anyone right now. Automatically, he closed the door behind him.
Clara turned a wan smile on the scowling nymph before her. She knew she ought to start the spell soon, before the glyphs became smudged or the candles burnt too far or any of a million other little hiccups happened, but... Neither Larus nor B had come back, and the uncertainty bout the results of casting weighed on the cleric's mind. Still, doubt ill became a prophetess, so...
"If you really are Aph, I'm truly sorry."
It spread out slowly. It did everything slowly. Most everything, anyway. Sometimes it could be frighteningly fast, but usually it embodied the torpor of the desert. It reached across surfaces; it could feel its prey, far away, faintly, but there were barriers in the way and things it couldn't see everywhere. And so it spread, slowly and near-aimlessly. When the thudding one-two one-two of one of the biggest morsels began moving towards it, it was happy as it was able to be; when the vibrations moved away again, it stretched towards them, slow as ever. And then they came back.
And then they came closer.
And they they were so close that it could feel the air move as the prey came closer and it reached.
The wire moved slowly towards Larus's face. It was no challenge at all to move slightly back from it, a monochrome eyebrow raised in confusion. As the stretching coil continued to move towards him, he simply took a couple steps back and waited for his eyes to adjust to the brightness. Once they did, it became apparent that the "wire" was a thin vine or tentacle of some sort, covered both in narrow thorns and fine hairs; not one to indulge idle curiosity, especially idle curiosity that was trying to touch his face, Larus moved to leave the room. As he turned, he felt a searing pain down his calf; a glance downward revealed that another such vine had slid its way up his pant leg.