fleetlogs | => PHERES: Abscond.

=> PHERES: Abscond.

=> PHERES: Abscond.

=> FLEETBOUND POST. [refiningSpacetime - FIN]
=> MARDUK: Call your guide. [FIN]
=> RICCIN: Retrieve the damsel in distress. [FIN]
=> HINNOM: Lead him home. [FIN]
=> FLEETBOUND POST. [activatingAggro- FIN]
=> SIPARA: Fetch your dumb moirail. [FIN]
=> PHERES: Wake up. [FIN]

SUMMARY: Taking drinks from strangers is generally a bad idea. Pheres needs to be picked up from a party, but life is hard when your moirail is out of town and all of your friends are terrible. Luckily, there's always Fleetbound!

WARNINGS: None! Except for Pheres being thoroughly depressing in Lead him home.

THIS HAS BEEN FINALLY EDITED. For like the third time. Due to POV-switching shenanigans, you may occasionally encounter weird shifts / incorrect verb pluralisation at points that I missed in switching from 3rd person to 2nd person POV. Sorry! :c

For the most part, though, typoes should be fixed and continuity is now more accurate!

ALSO: Follow the story through the links above to ensure you're reading the correct, edited threads, please and thank youu

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's the slime tickling at your nose that finally does it.

You always sleep dry. It's easier to just take a sopor pill and slip onto your couch for the day than face the hassle of getting inside your old, outdated recuperacoon. It's smarter, too! When you sleep in a 'coon, you have to wash the sopor off your skin afterwards, and when you're in a van, sometimes miles from the nearest source of water and with only a ten gallon tank to your name..

Well. Peeling sopor skim off of your skin takes entirely too much time, dry.

The only time you use your recuperacoon is when you're ill, and right now, you feel perfectly fine. Maybe your mouth is a little dry from too much sopor, but your pan is clear, and you feel like you've had an entire days worth of sleep.

The only other time is when you're in someone else's 'coon, and the only time that happens is when --

You weren't that drunk, yesterday. Were you?

You're relieved to find you're alone in the recuperacoon when you open your eyes, but the room around you is dim and unfamiliar. Everything is stone: the short ceiling above you, only ten or eight feet, the walls around you, and when you lean forward and peek - yes, even the floors underneath. Worse yet, it's all damp, the light of your eyes catching on the shiny streaks of what you hope is water residue on every surface.

When you move to climb out, you relaise you're damp, and sticky. Whoever dumped you into the recuperacoon didn't strip you, and the temporary relief that inspires is overset by the surge of disgust as you try to move, and the clothing clings like a shroud to your skin in response.

Your shirt is green. Your pants are green, and not even a good shade: it's the same neon green as the sopor, just diluted. There's guides online for removing food, and dirt, and blood from fabric, but you've never seen one on removing sopor. How are you even going to get that out?

Still, you remind yourself, peeling carefully out of the cocoon, it's better than the alternative. There's only been one or two times that you've overestimated your metabolism, and drank enough that even your psionics couldn't compensate. Waking up in some strangers hive, undressed and sore and with no idea where you were - you haven't done that since you were seven, but you still remember how terrifyingly unpleasant the entire experience was.

You're in a strange hive, certainly, but you're dressed, and you feel fine. When you take a careful step, stretching out your legs, there's no worrisome aches or pains, and the tension in your thoracic cage unwinds. Maybe you did over-drink, but there's obviously nothing sinister going on here: you just made a new friend. Probably.

Right?

Edited 2014-12-07 12:29 (UTC)

The walls are covered with cloth, every direction you turn. You're no connoseuir of fabric: you know enough to tell the difference in the types that you wear, so no one can rip you off, and you know what sort of fabric ought to go in certain clothing. You've never bought a suncloak made of chiffon, unlike some trolls.

But you find you aren't sure what some of them are made out of, which is strange. What you do know is that they're old. Some of it is obvious: the threads are worn or loose in many places, the stains are long-set, the burn-marks on many, the places where bugs must have feasted. But some of it is less so. Most of them are decorated like burial shrouds, and the styles used on them look ancient.

Not centuries old, but millenia - which might be a mere wrinkle in the vast cloth of the Empire's history, but it's certainly old to you. A seadweller looks down at you from the tapestry nearest to the recuperacoon, her sickles crossed and her horns chipped and carved with the designs common prior to the adult's evacuation, and it's appalling to see it just hanging on the wall.

Selling even one of these would set you up for perigees.

There's more, as you progress slowly down the corridor. (It's set up like a room, but it's narrow enough that you could stretch your fingers and touch both walls.) One tapestry shows a trolls quadrants, and a bust of their face in the symbol: another shows two moirails embracing, an ancient lowblood and his seadweller partner. A third is of a hive, and that one must be older than the rest, because the cloth is rough, obviously hand-woven, and you don't recognise the style at all.

There's more than just tapestries, of course. The hall is crowded with shelves, and junk that's been accumulated along them. Most of it's too dim to see, the illumination cast by your psionics ending a few, scarce inches from your nose: old knives and shields, a sword, two sticks connected by a chain. Masks, all mounted above a desk, and prosthetic horns, sanded and glossed.

You passed by a boarded up door, but you tried not to pay attention to that. There's no other exit, that you can see: just pipes, over in the corner, but there must've been a way for you to have been brought in. There's no holes in the ceilings, but there are niches in the wall, indentations that you mistook as part of a shelf.

There's one right beside you, actually, and you lean in, reaching in with a hand to feel for a knob. The light from your eyes catches a glimpse of something white, and you grab it, hopeful: maybe it's a knob!

It turns in your hand, because, as it turns out, it's not attached to anything at all. You pull it out to examine it, holding it close to see, and...

Oh, god.

It's a fucking skull.

"Someone's screaming," Castor reports.

You hiss at him. You know, of course you know, and so does every dead thing in the entire catacombs! The revenant you were creeping past perks up as the echoes of the sound rings through the room, turning its dead, rheumy eyes up towards the ceiling, and it chatters.

Revenants aren't like normal zombies, who were taken by the fungus while their pan was still warm and their blood had yet to congeal. The mushrooms might still be trying to push and pull at their pumpbiscuit, make them seem alive, but revenants are dead, dead, long dead by the time the fungus came for them. They're just bone-puppets, their air-dried muscles powered by its flesh.

Normal zombies chirp and hiss and croon, whatever they think'll work to lure you in, and you don't mind those noises: like you told Mardie once, it's almost like having neighbours. But revenants have got no instincts left in their pan to make noise, 'cause they don't have pans. The only thing the fungus can make them do is click their jawbones together and clatter, and it's got to be the most annoying, fucking noise you've ever heard.

You want to bash in the stupid skull and make it stop, but that'd require losing your grip on your filtration mask, and besides, it'd just attract more over. Instead, you suck it up, your ears pinning back with agitation, and you grab the burial shroud you were examining and yank.

"Be careful -"

It catches on a bone spur, and the rip of fabric is loud enough to catch the revenant's attention. It turns towards you, the mycellium pulsing with each movement, and then it opens its seedblister and screams, loud enough that you can only just hear the wet pop of the mushrooms contracting around its voicebox below it all, and - goddamnit, now you're going to have to bail.

You abscond. At times like this, you're grateful that you've kept Castor leashed for so long: he doesn't need to physically grab you to anticipate your moves, and adjust your telekinesis to accommodate. You dart around the revenant, fling yourself against a wall and bounce, twisting your legs to land flat on the accompanying one.

The revenant swipes at you as you hurtle over its head, bone claws razor sharp from sweeps and sweeps of scraping at the water on the walls and rats and anything it senses moving, but it's too sharp to grab: it just slices straight through the thin fabric of your cape and skin as you hit the next wall, and then launch yourself at the pipe and scramble in.

Climbing up the pipe is easy-peasy, but between that and the flying skitterbeast act, you're winded by the time you get out of it. "It cut you," Castor says, peering at your back. "Let me see -"

You wrest back control of your psionics before he can start poking and prodding. "It's nothing, don't be such a lusus!" Castor would just worry, worry, worry, if you let him. You'd think he could still die, the way he goes on. "'sides, we gotta scamper if you wanna see why boo's yowling, right?"

The scream sounded like it was practically on top of you, but that's just the tunnels, always catching noises and carrying it like it's some sorta game. But your hive isn't that far from here: six floors up and four blocks over, and then you'll be at your little pipeline entrance.

Hopefully he'll have stopped screaming by then.

The skull does not shatter when you drop it to the ground: it thumps, and rolls, and touches your naked foot, and that's the point that you scream.

You just touched a fucking skull. Holy shit.

After finding the skull, all you really want to do is abscond, but there's no way out of here, as far as you can tell. You could try slipping down the pipes, but you don't know how far they go - and if you got stuck..

No, no. You decide to sit and wait for the grub you're starting to recall to reappear instead.

The sitting part turns out to be metaphorical, because morbid curiousity wins out in the end over your growing nausea. (All the niches are filled with bones. Why are they filled with bones?)

You explore, and you steadfastly ignore the wall niches as you do, and the way it feels like the bones are staring at you. There's so much stuff in here, easily four rooms worth of things crammed into this tiny space carved between the walls, and you're grimly curious to find out if all of it is as old as the wall-hangings and the bones hidden away in the walls.

At first, it goes well: you decide to play it safe, and examine the weapons. Most blades made in West Alternia prior to the evacuation had a design and microchip carved into the bottom of their handles, for easy, tamper-proof identification. Older ones, prior to the intrastellar colonisation movement, just have stamps. There's plenty of the prior, but several examples of the earlier.

(If you had your books, and your husktop, you might be able to discover more - but your knowledge of weapons, without references, only extends to that rule of thumb. You'll have to try and fix that. These look old, but stamps can be forged, as you well know.)

Curiosity has you backtrack to the masks, where you studiously ignore the prosthetic horns. (They're perfectly normal - you even have an set made from your docked horn clippings, on Sipara's insistence - but you have a sour suspicion as to their origins. The skull you touched was hornless.) They're like theater masks, big and garish and exaggerated in their features, with eyebrows more akin to fuzzgrubs and fangs that take up the majority of the face.

They look new, unlike everything else: the paint is vibrant in the way of acrylics, not worn or faded at all, and you can see the brush strokes across some of the surface. Mostly, they're made of plaster and clay, but one looks different, with a surface more smooth and shiny than the rest. You unhook it carefully and pull it down to see.

The texture feels strange. It warms under your curious hands, accepting the heat with ease, but it's definitely not plaster. Leather, maybe, but no sort you've ever seen, and it's soft as velvet. You drag your thumb across it, the sensation reminding you of something, and on a whim, you hold it close and sniff.

It smells like skin.

Holy shit, the mask is made of skin.

Edited 2014-12-08 13:30 (UTC)

On the way home, you encounter another ghoul on the way, this one less dessicated than the revenant, and much faster. It managed to actually catch you with a horn when you were hurtling above it, hard enough to rip flesh, and your leg is bleeding sluggishly as you scramble out of the pipe.

Castor's pissed at you, and he's mostly dematerialised: even when you squint and tighten the leash, he refuses to become anything firmer than a cloud of blue around you. He took off the ghoul's head right at the brainstem when you screamed, and he hates doing that.

You think the blood makes him queasy, which is fucking crazy. It's not like it's his blood! But whatever, being a big, whiny cry-baby is just his thing.

"Pheres," you call as you pop out of the pipe. You're not sure what to expect: the hive looks fine, but he was screaming, earlier. "Pheres! You still here?"

You had put back the mask, carefully, and with no screaming, and then you'd backtracked to the recuperacoon, and hid your face.

You just touched tanned and dried troll skin. You're going to catch all the diseases, and die.

To distract yourself, you go through your sylladex. Opening up the wardrobe inventory is easy, now that you're not drunk, and you look at the face in the mirror unhappily.

Your hair is a mess. There's twists missing, where you chewed them off in a fit of anxiety yesterday, and the rest of them are in various states of unravelling. And the plastic beads that you used, while they look nice enough in the bright lights of the day, just look cheap and terrible in the dim light.

Combined with the fact you lost your contacts yesterday and your bottle green, sopor-laden clothes, you look terrible.

There's nothing you can do about your hair, unfortunately, without making it look worse, and your clothes are a lost cause. But you do keep spare eyecovers in your wardrobe, catalogued in a pair of sneakers you've never worn, and once you've put them in and normal, yolk-yellow eyes are blinking back at you in the mirror, you feel a little better.

When you've got your glasses on over them, your hair tied back and up, and a cheap cloak over the hot mess that is your outfit, you feel almost normal.

It's sheer luck that's when Hinnom pops back up. You hear the high, reedy voice calling your name, and you have just enough time to close your sylladex before the grub pops into sight.

"Hello there," you say weakly. They're tiny, adorable, and saved your hide, and you really should be grateful for that. You should say thank you, or something nice and pleasant --

"I like your decorating."

Damn it.

Edited 2014-12-08 14:44 (UTC)

Pheres looks different tonight than he did when you left. For one, he's wearing glasses, and it looks like he's actually got normal eyes behind them, all yellow along the edges and pink-gray in the center.

Maybe he got drunk and died, and now he's alive again? You've never heard about that happening, but you don't know shit about drinking, 'cept you know folks are always saying it makes you sleep like the dead.

You always thought it was a joke! But maybe they meant it literally.

"Thanks!" You bounce over. Telekinesis is off-limits, with Castor in his snit, but Pheres isn't that much bigger than you: four, five inches, maybe, which is hilarious, 'cause he looks old as fuck, white eyes or no. You do a quick horn bump, chattering away all the while: "I dug up all this shit myself!"

"Well," you amend, "not all of it. Like, hauling bones would take foreeeever. And if you move bones, then you gotta apoltergheist to their spirits, and that's boring. Super boring! Super duper boring."

"You ever try to make sorry with a ghost? 'cause, like, it sucks!"

You didn't realise, earlier, exactly how large this kid was.

(They're small enough to fit under your chin, so only six inches or so smaller than you. But six inches is still a lot, when you're nine and they're six at the oldest.)

They bounce straight up into your personal space, and you back up until the recuperacoon is against your back. They don't seem to notice, though, and once they're in close, they duck their chin, tapping each of their horns against yours: one tap to the left, one to the right, while they chatter away all the while.

You forgot that's what lowbloods do to greet each other in this city. You'd prefer a handshake, but awkwardly, you return the gesture, and Hinnom seems satisfied. They've been rattling away this entire time, and you have to struggle to remember what they were saying.

They're talking about ghosts.

"I can't say I have," you say, laughing a little. A lot of lowbloods believe in ghosts, but you're not one of them. The idea of living after your body has died is far too depressing. "But, ah.. I'll take your word for it."

They didn't move the bones here. That's good, you suppose, and a little less unsettling. People die all the time, and there's no point in getting upset over it, but the idea of people handling the bodies afterwards leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

The skin mask is probably something they just grabbed, then. You're almost tempted to ask - but, no, this is where Hinnom was assigned to live, and there's no point in potentially upsetting them by bringing it up. "You found all of the rest, though? If you don't mind me asking.. where?"

Pheres has so many questions.

He asks you about the tapestries on the walls, mostly. You can't answer even half of them! They're just things you've ganked over the sweeps, the sort of cloth that's too pretty to just let molder on a corpse. You don't know the age of them, or the dates they were used, and you definitely don't know anything about how they were made.

"I can show you where I got 'em, though," you offer, and he blanches, stammers out a quick refusal. "You sure? 'cause, like, I got books 'n shit to keep track.."

No, he doesn't want to go into the catacombs. He's got the same issue as Castor, you guess: the ghouls and revenants and walkers don't bother you none, but Pheres seems antsy at the mere mention of the real dead filling up the crypts. He'd probs shit his pants if you mentioned the fact they kept getting up.

(Especially in the areas he's so curious about. Once you get far enough in the tomb, you start hitting the flooded areas, and there isn't a single thing down in those levels that isn't infected by fungus, alive or dead. Sometimes you overdose on antifungals and head down there, on account of the fact you've found some of the best shit, but even the squeakbeasts'll try to infect you down there.)

Once he establishes you don't know jack about the tapestries, and no, you're not going to sell them, the hell would you do that for - he moves onto everything else. The weapons on your wall, the few books above your coon, the masks and clothes and prosthetic horns you've got piled all around...

Half of it, he doesn't want to buy. (Not that you'd let him. What use do you have for caegars, when you've got water and food galore down here?) He just wants to talk about it, and it's baffling, but you roll with it. You never get to talk to people aside from Marduk, though you've been trying to play nice and make friends on Fleetbound. Conversation of any sort is new and exciting.

Eventually, your digestion sack starts to rumble, and you have to get up to eat. There's a box of jerky that you stole last time you were on your route, and you start chewing on strips. Your pan is saying it's time to go to bed, so you'll be awake right and proper for the deliveries today.. but you don't want to sleep!

Any moment now, Pheres is going to realise it's about time he turned tail, and leave. You don't want to waste the time he's here sleeping, so. You won't.

Eating makes for a lull in the conversation. You put out a strip of jerky for your mom, who scrambles down your arm and onto the ground to devour it, and then you offer one to Pheres.

"No, thank you," you say politely. The jerky looks old as hell, and Hinnom's hands are dirty, streaked with blue that you hope is just dust and dirt from the tombs. You're liable to catch something just from being near them while they eat: you'd probably just die if you actually ate it yourself.

Hinnom shrugs, and shoves the entire strip in their mouth instead.

Living down here must be lonely, because they seem desperate for conversation. Half of the questions you asked, it was clear they had no idea what you were talking about, but they tried to answer them anyway, in any manner that they could.

("I dunno the age," they said, wrinkling their nose at you, "but, like, we could go down there and check!")

It's a shame you're going to have to leave soon. Usually, you don't interact with wrigglers, apart from selling to them, and occasionally buying: while they have to survive as much as anyone else, and there's a large number of them in the AHRC, their immaturity tends to grate on you.

Especially with the higherblooded ones, who wouldn't know manners if it bit them on the knee, and have yet to realise that treating a vendor disrespectfully is an excellent way to get sold faulty goods.

Hinnom has the same frantic immaturity as the rest, but the fact they saved your life, and they seem so happy to have your attention, makes it a little more tolerable. And if they realise that they're two castes above you, well. They're not showing it. They're treating you with what amounts, with lowbloods, to respect.

Maybe you'll check in on them, next time you're in Capitol City. It's not like you can ever have too many contacts.

The conversation lulls into a comfortable silence. You're going to have to leave, in a moment, but for right now, you'll let them eat.

Or, at least, you were going to.

"What's that noise?" There's a rat-tatatat coming from below, but there's no downstairs: you checked.

Edited 2014-12-08 15:19 (UTC)

You stop chewing, and oh, you can hear it. Someone's knocking at the door.

Wait, what?

"Um," you say, and then again: "Um! Castor?"

He's still dematerialised, but you can get a sense of his emotions: grumpy, tired. Do ghosts sleep? It strikes you that you've never asked, and you make a note to see, later today. Maybe they do, because although he stirs at your words, the materialisation process is slow and hazy, like he's trying to wake up fully.

Whatever. You don't have time to wait!

"That's someone at the door," you tell Pheres, and scrambling to your feet, you hurtle down the hall. You can hear the pounding of footsteps behind you that you take to mean Pheres is following, and you race to the end of the hallway, turn and duck.

There's only four feet or so of clearance under the deck, and with your latest hornspurt, slipping under to get to the staircase below has turned into something of a hassle. You have to practically bend in half to get under, but after that, the stairs are easy to get down, as long as you keep your head down.

You hear a thump behind you, and glance over your shoulder. Pheres followed you under, but he tried to straighten up, and the way he's cursing, hitting his horns on the wood must've hurt. You titter but don't stop, and race down to the far door.

Castor's behind you, still a hazy outline in the corner of your vision. "I'll go check," he says, words stretched by a definite yawn, and he slides into the crack between the wall and the door like smoke.

A moment later, he pops back in, looking surprised, but not alarmed.

"It's Mardu-"

You slam the button. It flickers, and then the door slides up just as you unhook the chain from the ground. Marduk stumbles in, ducking under the plank of wood across the front, and a small rustblood, tiny and covered in scars, follows.

The rustblood doesn't even notice you: all of her attention is on Pheres, who has perked up at the sight of her.

Edited 2014-12-08 15:26 (UTC)

Hinnom's having a conversation with the air. If you focus, you can almost imagine you can hear something responding - but that's silly. The little grub's crazy, and it's probably starting to rub off.

None-the-less, the conversation must have served its purpose, because after a moment, they jam the heat-recognition button, and the door snaps open to reveal Sipara and Marduk.

"Pheres, you fetid little fishhead," Sipara snaps, as soon as she sees you, and she steps in close like she's going to grab you. Instead, she cracks you across the face with the back of her hand. It's a hard hit, knuckles crooked to bruise, hard enough to make you stumble and the room spin.

It tastes like there's blood in your mouth, and you touch it gingerly - or maybe that's just the sour tang of shame, because Sipara looks like she's ready to burst from exhaustion and fury and the sheer relief of seeing you alive.

"Are you feral? Do you think this is just, like, what people do - get wasted as a fucking bubbleblower and take off into the day? Because it's not! I'm going to break both your walkstubs and tie you to your stupid motorcart, if you ever, ever do this again --"

"Um," Marduk says. She's staring at the ceiling like she's praying it'll descend and rescue her from witnessing this torrid pale spat, and right now, you can't blame her.

You gingerly touch your face, but there's no blood on the skin or on your lips, thank heavens. If you have a bruise later, you'll throttle her. "Shoosh!" You pap her on the head, and then, on second thought, you grab her hands, claws digging in to keep her from pulling away. "Shoosh, you big baby," you tell her sternly. "I'm not dead! I'm perfectly fine, and if you do that again, I'll bite off your hand."

It's a hollow threat, but the way Pheres is staring at you, eyebrows down and disapproving like you're a barkbeast that just shit the bed forces you to calm down. That, and the way he's holding your hands hurts. Your clawtips are basically nubs, constantly worn or broken off through frequent use, but his are long, pointy strips of polished lacquer that he keeps filed sharp, and they're digging right into your flesh, tip-first.

You huff through your nose, trying to pull away, but his grasp is firm. "Sorry," you acquiesce. Marduk's lusus pushes past you, and you shift, but pay it no mind. "No hitting. I'm a stupid bulgemunch. Sorry."

He does look fine, and that's a relief. Riccin wasn't lying: there's no bruises on his face, save for the slight darkness where your hand struck, and his clothes are sopor-green and damp, like he slept in them, but it doesn't look like he was rough-handled at all.

The ball of tension in your chest unwinds, a little.

"I'm still going to tie you to the fucking truck if you ever do this again, though." Pheres is alright, and now that you know that - you can see it - exhaustion is starting to set in. You are so tired. You drove all through the day, and you fought a fucking zombie, and all you want to do is go to bed.

Edited 2014-12-08 15:27 (UTC)

Marduk's lusus is adorable and you love it and you want ten of them. It shoved past the rustblood and went straight to you, eyes on the jerky in your hand.

"Mrph," it tells you, fixing you with its big, sad eyes as it licks its lips, and how are you supposed to say no to that? The grateful way the little scaled meowbeast scarfs down the meat and licks your hand afterwards is worth it.

You love it so much.

"I think he loves me the best," you tell Marduk and Castor, but they're both ignoring you in favor of gawking at the palespat over in the corner. Castor's smirking, but Marduk just looks incredibly awkward: her eyes keep drifting up towards the ceiling whenever she thinks anyone is looking, but she's watching just as much as Castor. Weird. It's not that funny.

"You do love me the best, don't you?" Marduk's lusus purrs at you and butts its head aganist your hand, and oh, you have got to find more food in here.

What do lusii eat? Your isopod colony is just about ready to harvest...

Edited 2014-12-08 15:29 (UTC)

Sipara and Pheres are apparently through with their little spat, much to your relief. You've never seen a moirail slap their palepartner before: on the telly, they're always kind to each other, often to the point of being simpering. Is this sort of behaviour normal?

(You hope it's normal, because you have no idea what you're supposed to do, if it's not.)

The leash tugs in your fronds, and you turn to find Hinnom is kneeling on the ground, feeding a piece of jerky to your lusus. Maybe it is normal, if ze didn't even notice. "Hinnom," you say politely, "this is Sipara. ActivatingAggro on the forums? She's Pheres's moirail."

"Yeah, remember, the one you called lame as fu-"

Pheres's claws dig into your palm, and you pout. It's true: helped him or not, you haven't forgotten the fact they jumped you when you warned them away from OA. Inappropriately pale, what a fucking load of shit. Little blighter.

Whatever. They're - no, wait, shit, ze's over there chilling with Marduk's lusus, trying to feed it tidbits from zir hand, and they didn't even hear your little spiel. You clear your throat until they look up, and then you smile, toothily, and try again. "Nice to meet you, kiddo. You got any wake-up beans down here?"

You want to sleep, but you can't, not until you get back to the surface. You hope that ze has coffee: if he doesn't, you might sleep on zir floor instead.

Oh. Sipara's asking you something.

"Nope!" You're not even sure what wake-up beans are, to be honest. "Sorry, boo. You can crash here, though!"

You say it casually, but the idea is exciting. Trolls sleeping over is a thing that people do: you've seen it, when you watch the telly with Marduk, although she's always refused to stay over at your hive before. It seems fun!

(Real, living people in your hive at all has been fun. AA is still a downer, but if she's here, then that means Pheres'll be here, and maybe Marduk, too, and that's worth it.)

"If you want," you add, peering at them hopefully. "Like, I got feed and sopor and all sorts of stuff down here. It's cool."

You are not especially keen on staying down here. You've already been here for.. what, six, seven hours, sleeping in the stale sopor dreamlessly, and you've already occidentally fondled enough artifacts of the dead to last you a lifetime.

But you can see the way Sipara's swaying on her feet, and even if your face is still stinging, you're not in a quadrant where the idea of her driving off the side of the road is appealing. She could use the rest.

So you answer for her. "That would be excellent," you say, beaming at Hinnom, and the grub grins back, clearly pleased. "I need to make some apologies.. and Sipara could use the sleep."

You loosen your grip on her hands, and start tugging her towards the stairwell, ducking your horns pre-emptively. You're not about to make that mistake again. "It'll do wonders for your temperment," you tell her, and you're not joking. If she's wound up enough to actually hit you, then that means she needs to sleep, stale sopor or not.

Oh. Wait. You have no issues making decisions for Sipara - she's always doing it for you, after all. But Marduk is another matter. You hesitate, peering back over your shoulder. "Ah.. unless - Marduk, do you need to get back somewhere? I can escort you, if you want."

Edited 2014-12-08 15:38 (UTC)

It looks like everyone is getting ready to settle in for the night.

Sappho said she'd cover for you, didn't she? Although you don't believe this was the situation she was anticipating. (In fact - it strikes you she had entirely different beliefs about you and Sipara. Well. That's a thoroughly unappealing thought, and one you'll have to clear up as soon as you get hive.)

(It's the dry period, though, and your instructors always get tired this time of year, when the humidity is low and the sun is hot. All of your classes are scheduled late in the night, to give them the most time to sleep submerged, and it's early yet.)

"I'll stay," you decide. "I will go up when the two of you do. A larger group should make for a safer journey, should it not?"

"And besides..." You remove your husktop from your sylladex, and move to follow them up the stairs. "I have some apologies of my own to put forth."

Edited 2014-12-08 15:41 (UTC)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

=> PHERES: Abscond.

=> PHERES: Wake up.

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[pheres's internal dialogue at this point is just FUCK :( FUCK FUCK FUCK] [fuck!!!]

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[pheres "this kid was a racist brat to me so i sold him faulty armor so he'll DIE" dysseu]

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[FIIIIIIIIN \o/]