Re: QUIETUS [S!5] [Round 1: Godsworn Valley]
01-26-2013, 05:39 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Jacquerel.
Amaranth hadn't been entirely certain, not even when she set off, what she had expected to find when they reached the source of the detonation that had rocked the Godsworn Valley. Probably the site of some battle or the blazing wreckage of some bombed citadel, somewhere that there were people that needed help. As callous as it might sound, helping someone in need tends to make them more likely to listen to what you have to say than if you're coming to the table empty handed and she was going to need a lot of advantages if she were to make much impact on a region that already had so much entrenched religion (if The Outsider were to be believed anyway).
Regardless, while what they found might have once been a battlefield (it was hard to tell) they were far too late to lend any aid.
The treeline ended abruptly in a jagged fence of exploded trunks, giving way to a blasted plain of blackened earth, charred so thoroughly that it crunched underfoot. Oddly, the circle of death was marred by a twisting corridor of trees that seemed to have survived the wildfire mostly untouched. Some still dripped with water, even, which was odd because there wasn't any nearby and it hadn't been raining. With lack of any other direction Amaranth decided to follow this path as it wound towards the middle of the burnt clearing, if there was going to be anyone at all here it would be that way.
Chaete had returned to the surface with another round of inane questions some time before they approached but gradually quietened the further they travelled, edging her way closer towards the protective presence of the sole Supportive Adult she had met so far with all the subtlety an enormous worm-child could muster.
Beside her clumsy movements and the distant flames still dancing at the other side of the artificial clearing (far in the distance) there was no movement or other signs of life, though the ashes floating heavy in the air suggested that until recently there had been both here in some abundance.
This wasn't what Amaranth had been hoping to find at all, thought she was too busy being unnerved to be particularly disappointed. Nothing remained of the people that had evidently been here before whatever it was that had caused the explosion but a carpet of black dust and while that would still probably produce a passable fertiliser it would be of entirely the wrong kind.
She'd heard stories of war before of course, and people had tried similar slash and burn tactics against The Union in the past (almost too terrible to think about) but at least the soldiers there had been motivated by understandable (misguided, ignorant, tragic but understandable) fear. Obviously these trees weren't special in any way, she hadn't had any qualms about burning some herself to make an escape, but that someone would be prepared to destroy so many at once in a single detonation was a sobering thought. Weren't they going to live in these lands after they had conquered them? What was the point of burning them all?
And what a tremendous waste of life! To dwell on it for too long was actually a little nauseating, though she held it back in order to keep her composure. The ethical ramifications of... Chaete in general were still chasing each other around her head but until she had resolved them she would have to try and act as a proper ambassador for her people. Even though she knew the Space Worm wouldn't have been able to make much of her facial expression anyway, the fact that she was wearing a mask made staying calm a little easier.
Chaete didn't seem to be enjoying the view (or the complete lack of cover and hiding places) a great deal either, having stayed mercifully but uncharacteristically quiet since they had rounded the last hill. The deep silence left her fidgeting with discomfort and scraping lines in the ash with her steel fingers and when the oppressive stillness finally became too much for her to bear any longer she reared up to disappear into safety underground, at which point a fairly unpleasant thought occurred to Amaranth.
“Wait!”, Chaete stopped, “I... don't think you want to be eating that.”
She regarded the black dirt with some degree of suspicion, it wasn't hard to believe that something which tasted so bad couldn't be trusted! “Why not?”
“Well unless I'm wrong”, Amaranth nudged a suspicious off-white lump with one foot, “and I don't think I am, quite a bit of this dirt is made of, well... people.”
As Chaete squealed and rolled over in the ash as a self-defeating attempt to shake it off, she wondered if maybe she should have just kept that detail to herself.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The Ceraceans were fighting a losing battle, that was obvious to everyone, but you had to give them a bit of credit in that they had been losing it for quite a long time and did not plan on giving up any time soon. Life at sea can be tough, but for whaler and pirate alike it is chiefly composed of long stretches of drawn out tedium punctuated by brief periods of frenzied violence. They had experience with living through long periods of hardship and this was just the latest test set to them by their abusive deity.
Ceraceros always believed in rewarding service by withholding his gifts rather than granting boons. You would give him sacrifice to prevent a terrible storm or sudden month-long doldrums, rather than to fill your nets with fish (in fact, any form of whaling at all tended to require some form of appeasement, and he certainly wasn't going to make it any easier for you even after that) so upon learning that his control over the spheres of storm, tide and shoals were all but useless in a windless valley with two rivers his followers could actually take comfort rather than dismay, even if it meant they weren't going to be receiving much in the way of help.
They still had to do what he wanted though if they ever wanted to return to the sea (and what they previously defined as their lives). No matter how long the odds they weren't going to be allowed to turn back, there was too much at stake.
Anyway the key point here is that despite their clear disadvantages, neatly embodying the idiom “fish out of water”, one thing they did not lack was persistence and while it had definitely provided a temporary respite for Chaete and Amaranth, they'd be damned if they let a bit of fire get in their way for long. There wasn't any particular way for them to guess where the other portal led to and there was very little chance they'd be able to douse the blaze now that it had really got going but what they did have were pressure suits and while they were really designed for descending into the ocean, they sufficed for a twenty second dash through a forest fire if they'd been thoroughly soaked beforehand.
Their quarry had been guarded by some form of mad nun (no surprise, as mad nuns were basically all that they'd been fighting for the past several months) which meant that it was even now being taken into the hands of some other faction. Fortunately (or, unfortunately depending on your perspective) Chaete's winding trail was simplicity itself to follow even for the least experienced forest trackers.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The minimum mandated size for an anomalous instrument investigation team was three. Six of the nine battle clergy had volunteered to guard the vehicle as soon as they had entered within the accepted radius of error for the last transmitted position of their tracking device, after they had seen the smoke rising on the horizon. Try as she might the young cleric couldn't find any regulations that forbade this, so she and the two slowest on the uptake were forced to set out almost alone towards the crater.
What was their stolen gear even doing in there? The best she could hope was that it was on some poor corpse and they could take it and get out of there as quickly as possible. One thing you'd never lack for in the halls of Res Rex were charts and maps and while in moments of weakness the young priest might begin to entertain questions about how they could all be true when they were clearly different shapes, one thing they all seemed to agree on was that this little section of the forest was more often than not posted with Obscurans and unless She Herself had been sitting in this explosion at the time, the goddess was going to be mightily pissed.
The younger of her two escorts, the one who'd protested loudest at the “cowardice” of their compatriots and had to be reminded of the proper procedures for submitting a formal complaint, had been ranging ahead and now beckoned them behind a tree, hailing them in a hushed voice.
“Massive burnt clearing up ahead and there's no cover at all. Can't move across it now though either, there's a handful of pirates up ahead who've got here before us. Not really sure what they're after to be honest. Think they're responsible?”
The older one shook his head, the Ceraceans were even less relevant to the Valley's big picture than they were, regardless of the current status of their God, and there was basically no chance they'd be responsible for blasting Obscura's doorstep this late into the engagements.
Their presence did create a bit of a problem though because by the time their frankenstein tankboats had trundled their way into the theatre of war, Res Rex had already been on the way out. The only instruction he'd left with regards to dealing with them were in the form of receipts, trade agreements, lists of debts... and nothing particularly useful outside of peace time.
“Come on, they haven't noticed we're here. The two of us could get the drop on them and that'd be that!”
“No wait! You can't!” the cleric rifled through a battered tome frantically but there didn't seem to be anything there. “It's not in the rules!”
He sighed and tapped his foot against a trunk in agitation, still watching the distant party of sailors through a pair of binoculars. It was clear he wasn't going to hold back all that long.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Thar she blows!” exclaimed a grizzled whaler waving his telescope, his beard fraying in odd directions after being stuffed into the helmet he was now carrying under his other arm. His commanding officer slapped it out of his hand.
“Cut it out Andrews! We're enough of a laughing stock as it is without anyone furthering these bloody stereotypes.”
“Sorry ma'am.”
He was right though, even encumbered by diving costumes (they didn't have time to undress again on the other side, and they were modern enough not to be too restrictive) it hadn't taken them too long to make up for their lost ground. The Captain had seen the lurid red and pink of their target even sooner than her ageing first mate, the only question was how to proceed with capture.
Its ability to eat holes in the air wasn't really an effective escape mechanism because they could just follow it, but they did have to worry about its bodyguard.
Obviously there were more of them than there were the one of her, however this whole detour would have been a waste of time if they killed their quarry in the crossfire of a firefight and whoever's beast this was seemed to think a single escort would be sufficient, so she must be pretty good at her job.
And there was the matter of the greenhorn scout and his two pals that had been tailing them for the past ten minutes, evidently believing that they hadn't been spotted. The fool was going to try and ambush them any minute and that would give them both away. While the wormholes were easily navigable she didn't feel up to leading a team through one in single-file, with who knows what waiting on the other side. Not much she could really do about it for the moment though.
“What is that they're looking at?” asked the battle-minister, mostly to himself, “think it's what we're after?”
His veteran buddy merely shrugged and the cleric was too busy rummaging through her spacious pack of scrolls for something more enlightening to give any meaningful response.
“I'm going to go get a closer look.”
“No, stop! We need to know what it is first! How else do we know what the proper response is?”
Unfortunately, Battle-Priest One was about as undevout as it was possible to get in the religious corps though and was having none of it, stepping forwards through the brush with what he obviously thought was subtlety.
“What the hell is he doing now?”
“He's moving in on our target!”
“Can I take him out?”
The sea captain growled to herself and rolled her eyes, but if they didn't do something he was just going to call attention to himself anyway.
“Yeah, alright. You get him. Quietly.”
They almost managed that second part too, he didn't have time to yell before the harpoon drove itself through his lung and nailed him to a tree as a stark monument to the values of following instructions carefully, and while the muted ”Thunk!” it had made was still loud, it probably was not quite enough for Amaranth to hear. Unfortunately in the slightly overenthusiastic silent celebrations following their success someone accidentally hit the detonator, and the end of the harpoon, the tree and most of the unfortunate scout showered themselves over the nearby area with a cacophanous noise that could even have been heard from underground.
“Andrews you complete pillock!”
All pretence of stealth now abandoned, the glade awoke with the sound of gunfire as the Ceraceans brought their more traditional arms to bear on the followers of Res Rex and the cleric's sole remaining bodyguard shouted into his radio for the rest of his team back with the van to get off their asses and reinforce them. The cleric herself just sort of stood there staring at the ruined, red-spattered pages in her hands until the veteran pushed her out of the way behind a tree.
“You never seen a man die before, girl?”
She shook her head and he sighed, partly with empathy but mostly in annoyance.
“Alright here's what we're going to do. The cavalry will be here in a moment and they've got a battle-wagon. These sailors can't shoot worth a damn and they'll be more interested in firing at the guy shooting at them than a tiny thing like you.
Run along and get our guns back and I'll keep them off you until our ride's here, alright?”
This plan wasn't written in any books and for good reason, frankly it barely made any sense at all and this was mostly because the battle-priest cared less about her safety than he did about getting the untrained almost-civilian who fell apart at the first sign of battle out of his hair so that he could get things done, but she was too shell-shocked to notice or care at the moment. Clutching her GPS for dear life she sprinted across the ash waste barely cognizant of the bullets thudding into the dust under her feet.
She nearly screamed aloud when the “target” arrow suddenly reversed its direction, but by then the shimmering hole Amaranth had disappeared through was within sight and it didn't take a genius to put two and two together. The air on the other side of the portal tasted strangely heavy and she'd caught her foot on the lower rim of the apeture as she'd dived through, sending her sprawling on her face in the grass in a snowstorm of dislodged pages.
When she looked up, someone was pointing a gun at her and her sensor was beeping with joy at finding its mate. The heaviness increased. A monster with 17 eyes was sharpening its claws and rubbing its face against the ground in her peripheral vision but she had the weirdest feeling that everything was going to be ok. She burst into tears.
Amaranth hadn't been entirely certain, not even when she set off, what she had expected to find when they reached the source of the detonation that had rocked the Godsworn Valley. Probably the site of some battle or the blazing wreckage of some bombed citadel, somewhere that there were people that needed help. As callous as it might sound, helping someone in need tends to make them more likely to listen to what you have to say than if you're coming to the table empty handed and she was going to need a lot of advantages if she were to make much impact on a region that already had so much entrenched religion (if The Outsider were to be believed anyway).
Regardless, while what they found might have once been a battlefield (it was hard to tell) they were far too late to lend any aid.
The treeline ended abruptly in a jagged fence of exploded trunks, giving way to a blasted plain of blackened earth, charred so thoroughly that it crunched underfoot. Oddly, the circle of death was marred by a twisting corridor of trees that seemed to have survived the wildfire mostly untouched. Some still dripped with water, even, which was odd because there wasn't any nearby and it hadn't been raining. With lack of any other direction Amaranth decided to follow this path as it wound towards the middle of the burnt clearing, if there was going to be anyone at all here it would be that way.
Chaete had returned to the surface with another round of inane questions some time before they approached but gradually quietened the further they travelled, edging her way closer towards the protective presence of the sole Supportive Adult she had met so far with all the subtlety an enormous worm-child could muster.
Beside her clumsy movements and the distant flames still dancing at the other side of the artificial clearing (far in the distance) there was no movement or other signs of life, though the ashes floating heavy in the air suggested that until recently there had been both here in some abundance.
This wasn't what Amaranth had been hoping to find at all, thought she was too busy being unnerved to be particularly disappointed. Nothing remained of the people that had evidently been here before whatever it was that had caused the explosion but a carpet of black dust and while that would still probably produce a passable fertiliser it would be of entirely the wrong kind.
She'd heard stories of war before of course, and people had tried similar slash and burn tactics against The Union in the past (almost too terrible to think about) but at least the soldiers there had been motivated by understandable (misguided, ignorant, tragic but understandable) fear. Obviously these trees weren't special in any way, she hadn't had any qualms about burning some herself to make an escape, but that someone would be prepared to destroy so many at once in a single detonation was a sobering thought. Weren't they going to live in these lands after they had conquered them? What was the point of burning them all?
And what a tremendous waste of life! To dwell on it for too long was actually a little nauseating, though she held it back in order to keep her composure. The ethical ramifications of... Chaete in general were still chasing each other around her head but until she had resolved them she would have to try and act as a proper ambassador for her people. Even though she knew the Space Worm wouldn't have been able to make much of her facial expression anyway, the fact that she was wearing a mask made staying calm a little easier.
Chaete didn't seem to be enjoying the view (or the complete lack of cover and hiding places) a great deal either, having stayed mercifully but uncharacteristically quiet since they had rounded the last hill. The deep silence left her fidgeting with discomfort and scraping lines in the ash with her steel fingers and when the oppressive stillness finally became too much for her to bear any longer she reared up to disappear into safety underground, at which point a fairly unpleasant thought occurred to Amaranth.
“Wait!”, Chaete stopped, “I... don't think you want to be eating that.”
She regarded the black dirt with some degree of suspicion, it wasn't hard to believe that something which tasted so bad couldn't be trusted! “Why not?”
“Well unless I'm wrong”, Amaranth nudged a suspicious off-white lump with one foot, “and I don't think I am, quite a bit of this dirt is made of, well... people.”
As Chaete squealed and rolled over in the ash as a self-defeating attempt to shake it off, she wondered if maybe she should have just kept that detail to herself.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The Ceraceans were fighting a losing battle, that was obvious to everyone, but you had to give them a bit of credit in that they had been losing it for quite a long time and did not plan on giving up any time soon. Life at sea can be tough, but for whaler and pirate alike it is chiefly composed of long stretches of drawn out tedium punctuated by brief periods of frenzied violence. They had experience with living through long periods of hardship and this was just the latest test set to them by their abusive deity.
Ceraceros always believed in rewarding service by withholding his gifts rather than granting boons. You would give him sacrifice to prevent a terrible storm or sudden month-long doldrums, rather than to fill your nets with fish (in fact, any form of whaling at all tended to require some form of appeasement, and he certainly wasn't going to make it any easier for you even after that) so upon learning that his control over the spheres of storm, tide and shoals were all but useless in a windless valley with two rivers his followers could actually take comfort rather than dismay, even if it meant they weren't going to be receiving much in the way of help.
They still had to do what he wanted though if they ever wanted to return to the sea (and what they previously defined as their lives). No matter how long the odds they weren't going to be allowed to turn back, there was too much at stake.
Anyway the key point here is that despite their clear disadvantages, neatly embodying the idiom “fish out of water”, one thing they did not lack was persistence and while it had definitely provided a temporary respite for Chaete and Amaranth, they'd be damned if they let a bit of fire get in their way for long. There wasn't any particular way for them to guess where the other portal led to and there was very little chance they'd be able to douse the blaze now that it had really got going but what they did have were pressure suits and while they were really designed for descending into the ocean, they sufficed for a twenty second dash through a forest fire if they'd been thoroughly soaked beforehand.
Their quarry had been guarded by some form of mad nun (no surprise, as mad nuns were basically all that they'd been fighting for the past several months) which meant that it was even now being taken into the hands of some other faction. Fortunately (or, unfortunately depending on your perspective) Chaete's winding trail was simplicity itself to follow even for the least experienced forest trackers.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The minimum mandated size for an anomalous instrument investigation team was three. Six of the nine battle clergy had volunteered to guard the vehicle as soon as they had entered within the accepted radius of error for the last transmitted position of their tracking device, after they had seen the smoke rising on the horizon. Try as she might the young cleric couldn't find any regulations that forbade this, so she and the two slowest on the uptake were forced to set out almost alone towards the crater.
What was their stolen gear even doing in there? The best she could hope was that it was on some poor corpse and they could take it and get out of there as quickly as possible. One thing you'd never lack for in the halls of Res Rex were charts and maps and while in moments of weakness the young priest might begin to entertain questions about how they could all be true when they were clearly different shapes, one thing they all seemed to agree on was that this little section of the forest was more often than not posted with Obscurans and unless She Herself had been sitting in this explosion at the time, the goddess was going to be mightily pissed.
The younger of her two escorts, the one who'd protested loudest at the “cowardice” of their compatriots and had to be reminded of the proper procedures for submitting a formal complaint, had been ranging ahead and now beckoned them behind a tree, hailing them in a hushed voice.
“Massive burnt clearing up ahead and there's no cover at all. Can't move across it now though either, there's a handful of pirates up ahead who've got here before us. Not really sure what they're after to be honest. Think they're responsible?”
The older one shook his head, the Ceraceans were even less relevant to the Valley's big picture than they were, regardless of the current status of their God, and there was basically no chance they'd be responsible for blasting Obscura's doorstep this late into the engagements.
Their presence did create a bit of a problem though because by the time their frankenstein tankboats had trundled their way into the theatre of war, Res Rex had already been on the way out. The only instruction he'd left with regards to dealing with them were in the form of receipts, trade agreements, lists of debts... and nothing particularly useful outside of peace time.
“Come on, they haven't noticed we're here. The two of us could get the drop on them and that'd be that!”
“No wait! You can't!” the cleric rifled through a battered tome frantically but there didn't seem to be anything there. “It's not in the rules!”
He sighed and tapped his foot against a trunk in agitation, still watching the distant party of sailors through a pair of binoculars. It was clear he wasn't going to hold back all that long.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Thar she blows!” exclaimed a grizzled whaler waving his telescope, his beard fraying in odd directions after being stuffed into the helmet he was now carrying under his other arm. His commanding officer slapped it out of his hand.
“Cut it out Andrews! We're enough of a laughing stock as it is without anyone furthering these bloody stereotypes.”
“Sorry ma'am.”
He was right though, even encumbered by diving costumes (they didn't have time to undress again on the other side, and they were modern enough not to be too restrictive) it hadn't taken them too long to make up for their lost ground. The Captain had seen the lurid red and pink of their target even sooner than her ageing first mate, the only question was how to proceed with capture.
Its ability to eat holes in the air wasn't really an effective escape mechanism because they could just follow it, but they did have to worry about its bodyguard.
Obviously there were more of them than there were the one of her, however this whole detour would have been a waste of time if they killed their quarry in the crossfire of a firefight and whoever's beast this was seemed to think a single escort would be sufficient, so she must be pretty good at her job.
And there was the matter of the greenhorn scout and his two pals that had been tailing them for the past ten minutes, evidently believing that they hadn't been spotted. The fool was going to try and ambush them any minute and that would give them both away. While the wormholes were easily navigable she didn't feel up to leading a team through one in single-file, with who knows what waiting on the other side. Not much she could really do about it for the moment though.
“What is that they're looking at?” asked the battle-minister, mostly to himself, “think it's what we're after?”
His veteran buddy merely shrugged and the cleric was too busy rummaging through her spacious pack of scrolls for something more enlightening to give any meaningful response.
“I'm going to go get a closer look.”
“No, stop! We need to know what it is first! How else do we know what the proper response is?”
Unfortunately, Battle-Priest One was about as undevout as it was possible to get in the religious corps though and was having none of it, stepping forwards through the brush with what he obviously thought was subtlety.
“What the hell is he doing now?”
“He's moving in on our target!”
“Can I take him out?”
The sea captain growled to herself and rolled her eyes, but if they didn't do something he was just going to call attention to himself anyway.
“Yeah, alright. You get him. Quietly.”
They almost managed that second part too, he didn't have time to yell before the harpoon drove itself through his lung and nailed him to a tree as a stark monument to the values of following instructions carefully, and while the muted ”Thunk!” it had made was still loud, it probably was not quite enough for Amaranth to hear. Unfortunately in the slightly overenthusiastic silent celebrations following their success someone accidentally hit the detonator, and the end of the harpoon, the tree and most of the unfortunate scout showered themselves over the nearby area with a cacophanous noise that could even have been heard from underground.
“Andrews you complete pillock!”
All pretence of stealth now abandoned, the glade awoke with the sound of gunfire as the Ceraceans brought their more traditional arms to bear on the followers of Res Rex and the cleric's sole remaining bodyguard shouted into his radio for the rest of his team back with the van to get off their asses and reinforce them. The cleric herself just sort of stood there staring at the ruined, red-spattered pages in her hands until the veteran pushed her out of the way behind a tree.
“You never seen a man die before, girl?”
She shook her head and he sighed, partly with empathy but mostly in annoyance.
“Alright here's what we're going to do. The cavalry will be here in a moment and they've got a battle-wagon. These sailors can't shoot worth a damn and they'll be more interested in firing at the guy shooting at them than a tiny thing like you.
Run along and get our guns back and I'll keep them off you until our ride's here, alright?”
This plan wasn't written in any books and for good reason, frankly it barely made any sense at all and this was mostly because the battle-priest cared less about her safety than he did about getting the untrained almost-civilian who fell apart at the first sign of battle out of his hair so that he could get things done, but she was too shell-shocked to notice or care at the moment. Clutching her GPS for dear life she sprinted across the ash waste barely cognizant of the bullets thudding into the dust under her feet.
She nearly screamed aloud when the “target” arrow suddenly reversed its direction, but by then the shimmering hole Amaranth had disappeared through was within sight and it didn't take a genius to put two and two together. The air on the other side of the portal tasted strangely heavy and she'd caught her foot on the lower rim of the apeture as she'd dived through, sending her sprawling on her face in the grass in a snowstorm of dislodged pages.
When she looked up, someone was pointing a gun at her and her sensor was beeping with joy at finding its mate. The heaviness increased. A monster with 17 eyes was sharpening its claws and rubbing its face against the ground in her peripheral vision but she had the weirdest feeling that everything was going to be ok. She burst into tears.