=> PHERES: Abscond.

[refiningspacetime]

=> 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

Comments

[obstructedantiquity]

If it was anyone else, OA would leave them. It's too late in the day to be awake, and the punchline to this sort of self-made disaster tends to be hilarious as fuck: the way that kids always come in carnival limping after a day of festivities, their burnt black faces and peeling horns a testament to their own stupidity, is one of the highlights of service.

But it's Pheres, and the way that Sipara's going to get her bulge in a knot over the idea of a Mirthful saving her moirail is a chance too delicious to pass by. OA can practically taste the outrage on their tongue: it's going to be wicked, and the warm, vindictive satisfaction of that thought is what finally gets them out the door.

The heat of the day hangs heavy on their shoulders as they make their way to Pheres's destination, but the sunlight can't permeate the oiled cotton of the suncloak. The huskphone rattles off directions through the earphones in their auralsponge as they walk, the programmed rasp of Liyiji's voice reading off each step with his familiar flavor of contempt: cross the street. Follow the block on straight. Go left.

There's not many trolls out: a few uncovered greenbloods, their skin damp with perspiration, some bluebloods huddled under a shared suncloak, a rust ducked awkwardly into the shadow of their lusus, their skin already reddening in the light. The city is quiet, all reasonable trolls locked away tight in their hives, and this walk - meant to be a quick jaunt, no more than twenty or thirty minutes - feels like it's taking forever.

They're just considering turning around and going home, PC's ensuing snitfit be damned, when the green spire of the communal hivestem comes into view.

It's not as shitty as they had expected. The surface of the hive is by no means new, but it's durable, the skin of the fleshwalls mottled and light in places where the chrysalis has been renewed. All the ports have their glass, tinted midblood dark, and the front stoop actually has an awning. It's nothing compared to their hiveblock, but it's very thoroughly midblood.

Not exactly the slum they'd been expecting. The walls aren't even lathered in olive paint: it's all jade and teal, the upper crust of midbloods that can almost be considered acceptable.

There's a muddy shape on the front stoop, a long splash of languid monochrome against the hive's green stonework. It's hard to tell at first if it's a troll or trash - but then the sun shifts and the lump shifts with it, a careful sprawl that keeps them under the awning's shifting shade, and there's no mistaking the curly yellow horns.

The right thing to do would be to yell out, make sure he knows they've arrived. But exactly how wasted he is remains a question, so OA walks up instead, steps light on the ground. All of his attention is on his huskphone, his voice a low murmur of words, and OA lets their shadow settle above them, and waits to see when they'll notice.

[refiningspacetime]

When push comes to shove, Sipara is probably Pheres's favorite person on the entire planet.

He doesn't normally tell her that: when pushed, he'll express the opposite, his tone pointedly droll. She's crass and spiteful and she's as aggressive as an fertile male slinkbeast. When they were seven, she started a fight with an indigo to see if they'd bleed paint, and she's spent more time missing teeth than with them.

Her aggression would be appalling in a seadweller, and when someone gave her flowers, she ate them just for the reaction. She's terrible and appalling and cullbait in flaming red, and sometimes it's enough to make him hate her.

But the fact she's so easily detestable is why he pities her instead, and why she's his favorite, and sprawled across the cement, still smarting from his fuck-up with HH, it seems like an excellent time to tell her.

"Dude," she laughs, her voice staticky and rough through his huskphone's speakers, "you are so drunk. So, so, drunk. Holy shit. How many drinks did you have?"

He shrugs. "Only a few," he says, and it's not untrue: his glass was only empty a handful of times, and everyone knows refills don't count. "Not - not more than usual."

"Shit, man, that's like, not helpful at all?" She clucks, shaking her head. She looks exhausted, but true to her word, she's stayed up, even despite the threads of light shining in past her tattered curtains. "Whatever. Look, it's been like, two hours since this sparking shit started."

"And I thi~ink," she drawls, squinting, "it's hit the peak."

He can't feel the sparks: only a few unfortunate fellows actually can feel the affects of their psionics, and luckily, he's not one of them. But if he holds a hand under his bottom horns, as he does now, he can see the liquid drop of light fall onto his skin and scatter.

A few seconds after the first drop hits, a second falls. That's.. a little more than before.

"You see it." It's a statement, not a question, and Sipara doesn't wait for him to answer. "Okay, so, according to Troogle, and my own fine-ass library of medical feeds -"

So he interrupts instead. With anyone else, it'd be rude, but it's just a neccessary part of conversation with Sipara. "Your library?" he protests. "I found them for you, didn't I? I think - they should be - it's only fair to call them our library, don't you think?"

"No, that's why I said mine, duh," she says, crushingly. "Now hush. Okay, so, it looks like some asshole probs slipped you a honeypill. Now, those things are mostly sopor. Like, at least ninety percent?"

"But there's honey, too, which's causing your little lightshow. Shit's fine with flatscans, just makes us all compliant, but with psionics -"

She pauses, dramatically. It takes him a moment to realise she won't continue until he says something, and obligingly, he opens his mouth -

And she barrels on over him. He shuts it with a click of his teeth, wrinkling his nose, and she laughs. "It makes you all, you know, sparky," she says, snapping her fingers. "It should only last another hour or two, though. Some fuckers were saying it took six, but like..."

She shrugs, leans in close to the camera - too close, and for a moment, the screen is filled with the sight of her curled lip and filed sharp teeth. "That was just sparkplugs talking," she says, her voice drab and contemptuous. "Practically fucking flatscans. You burn faster than that."

She's close enough to the microphone that he can hear the rasp of her breath through the speakers. If he closed his eyes, he could pretend she was sitting next to him, claws working through the tangles in his hair, and they were talking about some mutual acquaintances, instead of faceless names on a screen.

"I think you've got an hour, maybe two." She straightens up, her voice lightening, and the illusion is shattered. He's long since moved away from the railing, which has gone ember-hot with the sun's light, and he's sprawled across the pavement instead. The cold, craggy stone under him is not her rough wooden floors, and the only thing in his hair is a particularly obtuse ladybug.

"Pheres? You still with me?"

"Yeah," he says, breathing out. "An hour. Okay. That's - haah - fine. I can do an hour. That's sixty minutes. Not very long at all."

"Right. So, like, don't fall asleep." Her voice is sharp. "C'mon, dude, you look like you're drowsing right now. Sit the fuck up."

With a huff, he obliges, pulling himself up on an elbow, and then pushing himself up the rest of the way. Or at least, he starts to: halfway up, still slouched, his head cants to the side, and his horns strike something that definitely wasn't there a moment ago.

[obstructedantiquity]

They can only catch snippets of conversation: the huskphone's volume is dialled low, and the maroonblood's voice is only just above a whisper. It doesn't matter. The bits that are coherent aren't interesting at all, and neither is standing here, waiting to be noticed.

They do enough of that at fucking church.

The conversation is low enough that RS's movement comes as a surprise. He straightens up, and there's no where to step as his head sweeps out, and those oversized rostal horns club straight into their knees.

They don't buckle. For one, the railing's right there, and he's not moving that fast: the sheer size is what makes their knees shake, not the impact. Still, it's instinct that one hand snatches hold of the railing, and the other grabs one of the offending horns and yanks.

They're big horns, and even crumpled on the ground, RS looks small as fuck. Snatching him straight up seems viable - and if not, well, OA's going to fucking try.

"Sup, chump."

[activatingaggro]

Pheres is sitting up, and then the next thing she knows, there's an oomph - and a black-gloved hand hauling him up by a horn.

Sipara snarls, but the camera screen won't move. The huskphone is still propped up on the ground, and she can't see, but she doesn't need to in order to recognise the dry rasp of OA's voice, even distorted by the speakers.

Goddamnit. Where the fuck is Marduk?

"Pheres," she hisses, "Pheres, don't you leave your fucking phone!"

[refiningspacetime]

Whatever he hits is soft, and that's about all he has time to think before there's fingers wrapping around his horn and hauling him up. It's not hard: he is a fairly small troll, even by redblood standards, and although even the ribbed edges of his horns don't allow for enough grip to take him off the ground, it's easy to jerk him to his feet.

He can't feel the grip on his horn as anything more than an irritant: only the red velvet at the base has real sensation, and their grip is firmly on the yellow-orange border. The sense of panic bubbling up in his chest has nothing to do with the discomfort of being man-handled, though, and more with the pulsing fear of why.

Their back is to the sun, and he lost his glasses, along with his lense and cloak, somewhere inside. Still.. when he squints, pale eyes reduced to slivers, he can make out the oversized swoop of their horns, and it triggers a flash of recognition. They gave him a picture, hadn't they? OA. This is OA.

Heavens above, he hopes he's right.

Sipara's saying something, her voice a hiss of static and rage, but he ignores it for now. "Hello," he says with a nervous laugh. His hands are up, grasping the air in front of him, but he can't bring himself to try and wrest them off of his horn: instead, he ducks his head, twists it gently to try and twist it free from their grip. "OA, right? It's, ahhh... good to see you?"

—forgottenSebayt [FS] began trolling postalPrestidigitation [MP]-

[postalprestidigitation]

FS: 1. [POLITE] hello, pp.
FS: 2. [INQUIRING] are you perhaps still awake?

FS: 1. [REGRETFUL] if you are not, of course, that is entirely acceptable, and of course the expected response: when speaking in regards to acceptability, being awake at this hour is somewhat abnormal.

PP: ( - Yo + wHaSsUp bOo - )
PP: ( - nO NeEd tO ApOlTeRgHeIsT + YoU KnOw mE GiRl + oNlY GeT ShUtEyE WhEn i'm dEaD-EyEd - 0*v*0 - )
PP: ( - hOoHoOhOo - )

FS: 1. [RELIEVED AMUSEMENT] ha ha ha.
FS: 2. [EVIDENT RELIEF] i didn't wish to wake you, but i am glad you are awake.
FS: 3. [CURIOUSITY] are you perhaps out on one of your delivery routes?

PP: ( - YaH + JuSt gHoUlInG AbOuT On mY RoUtE + LeTtInG ThE SpOoKs dO ThEiR ThAnG + WhY - )
PP: ( - YoU WaNnA HaNg? -)
PP: (- cOs i fOuNd sOmE RoPe iN ThE TrAsH-HeAp oThEr dAy + hOoHoOhOo! - )
PP: ( - 0*v*0 - )

FS: 1. [WRY AMUSEMENT] you are a very funny grub. whomever would think to intermix the literal and colloquial definitions of two similar words in such a way, but you?
FS: 2. [INFORMATIVE] i do wish to "hang", as you put it, using of course the colloquial definition, and not the literal.
FS: 3. [INFORMATIVE] aa has asked me to do her a favor. have you checked fleetbound as of late?

PP: ( - YaH + I SeEn tHe fRaIl + bOy iS CrUnK As fUcK - )
PP: ( - GoNnA GeT ShAnKeD - )
PP: ( - bUt i bEt hE'Ll lEaVe a rEaL SwEeT GhOsT BeHiNd! + SpArKpLuGs aLwAyS Do + 0*v*0 - )

FS: 1. [HESITANT] ...
FS: 2. [INFORMATIVE] i'm afraid that the purpose of aa's favor is to, in fact, ensure that he does not get shanked, or killed, or otherwise end up as a ghost for your collection.

PP: ( - UgH + ArE YoU SeRiOuS - )
PP: ( - GiRl iS A DrAg + sHe's aLwAyS CaStInG ShAdE On mY FuN + 0*n*0 - )

FS: 4. [SINCERE] my apologies.

FS: 1. [HESITANT] but to digress, i was wondering if you would like to accompany me.
FS: 2. [HESITANT] since you are already awake at this hour and venturing around the city, i thought perhaps it could be a fun engagement, and the presence of two trolls would make us both slightly less likely to engage negative attention of which we are unprepared to handle.

PP: ( - HmMm + bOo i gOt wOrK - )

FS: 1. [APOLOGETIC] i know. i was hoping that perhaps you could delay some of your activities, but now i see that this was an unkind and indeed unfeasible thing to proposition, given the importance of your work.

PP: ( - IdGaF + LeTs dO It - )

FS: 2. [APOLOGETIC] your help is, of course, entirely unncecessary, and i was largely asking out of the selfish desire for company during this jaunt: as a jadeblood wearing imperial colours, the likelihood of gaining negative attention is statistically marginal to the point that any actual confrontation would fall entirely out of the norm.

FS: 3. [APOLOGETIC] and third of all--

PP: ( - HeY - )
PP: ( - HeY - )
PP: ( - HeY - )
PP: ( - )-(EY - )

FS: 1. [APOLOGETIC] ???

PP: ( - BoO + LeTs dO ThIs sHiT - )

=> MARDUK: Do a favor for AA.

[forgottensebayt]

Picture this: two kids, frolicking through the streets of Capitol City.

It's a nice image. Hold it in your mind. The streets are clean, the sun high in the sky: one of the children is swathed in ratty oiled cotton that must be older than they are, but the other is bare-skinned, her gray skin flushed with a healthy green. Their lusii are playing behind them. They're probably laughing.

Unfortunately, that's not what's actually happening. But it's a wonderful thought, and Marduk clings to it. Maybe if she pictures it for long enough, it'll become real.

The reality, of course, is that she's currently sludging through the sewers. If she had ever contemplated going through the underground waste transportation system before, then perhaps this wouldn't be so terrible: she would've had expectations that would've been flouted and surpassed in turn.

But she's never thought about it much. Perhaps the sewers were metal! Perhaps all their waste was carried away by trolly, or by drones, or by the fervent wishes of those involved: it was all equally likely, as far as she was concerned, and so every new thing has come as an unpleasant surprise. It took her awhile to realise that she needed to keep her skirt hiked up around her knees, although at least she had the wisdom to immediately hide her sash in her sylladex, but there's damp on her shoes, and things keep dripping in her hair. She tries not to think about what they are.

The walls reek of mold and sewage and fluids, and her eyes are watering as she progresses. Not that it matters much: she can't see a damn thing, anyway. Trolls are built to see in all levels of the dark, and so there's no lights built into the walls, no light at all but the occasional streamers from the sewer grates far above. Unfortunately, jades are the exception. Everything around her is black and smelly and damp, and if it weren't for the hand she keeps clamped on Hinnom's shoulder, she'd have already fallen into the water and died. The rushing of water to her left is the only way she can tell it's even there.

If she did, she reflects glumly, Hinnom would probably be delighted to have another ghost for zir collection.

"Hinnom," she says, trying her best not to breathe between words, "I don't ask as a discourtesy, but -- are we there yet?"

[postalprestidigitation]

Normally, at this time of day, Hinnom would be trawling the neighborhoods, letting zir spectre and ghouls stretch their leashes as far as they needed. Each one would take a letter, and off they'd go, depositing them into the little niches and holes of each hiveblock apartment, and the occasional single or duplex.

It was boring. The ghosts did all the work, really: all ze ever did was stand there with their light-deflecting device open and the mailbag cocked on a hip, and wait. Sometimes a ghost would tug too far on the leash and ze'd have to wind them back in, and sometimes a lusus would come huffing over to investigate, and ze would have to pull zir specibus... but that happened so rarely, and most beasts only needed a solid thwack across the snout to send them packing.

But this was different. Marduk had asked zir for a favor, and that never happened. Hopefully it'd start happening more, though. Hinnom was going to prove how great ze was for favors, and then people would stop treating zim as such a wriggler, and ask zim to do things for them all the time.

It was going to be great!

"Almost, boo," ze calls, sing-song, over zir shoulder. "Chillax!"

It'd been such a hassle to convince Marduk to enter the sewers, but she hadn't known how to get to the coordinates she'd been given, and ze had refused outright to take her over the roads. The streets were built for lusii and transportation engines, not trolls: they were filled with all sorts of roadblocks that made travel difficult, whether they were fences or hives.

Underground, so long as you stayed in the outer districts, there wasn't any of that: just the clean lines of the sewer system, running in seamless parallel to the streets above.

(If you ventured too far into the inner city, of course, then you started hitting the old ruins, where the city had been built on top of itself for centuries and centuries, and the dead still roamed freely. Ze had ended up heading down there, once or twice, trying to figure out why the air was thick with ghosts and the smell of decay, but that'd been on purpose, just to explore. It'd be shorter to just cut straight through there, but ze wasn't about to lead Marduk down there.

She'd probably cry.)

The coordinates hadn't been too from Marduk's academy, but it had taken forever to walk, with Marduk's hand on zir shoulder. The numbers along the wall were steadily shifting higher, though, and there was an ancient climbing device up ahead, mounted to the stone wall with rusted old screws.

Ze pauses, politely ignoring the way Marduk stomps on zir heel as she comes to a stop, and peers at the numbers nearest to them. 612314. Close enough! "We're here," ze announces. "Gimme a hot sec and lemme send one of my ghouls up to scope this out, 'kay?"

[forgottensebayt]

It's a good thing Marduk is behind zim, because she can't quite hide the way her smile fades as they bring up ghosts.

"Okay," she says uneasily. There's no legal precedent for ghosts, and privately, she's always felt they were some kind of an elaborate lowblood joke at her expense. Perhaps they are real, and it's just life that no one above yellow has ever seen them, but... it seems unlikely.

But if Hinnom wants to make a joke at her expense, well.. it's not like they'd be the first. She pats zir shoulder, and then, releasing it, carefully takes a step back. She's never actually seen someone use psionics before, but the gamegrubs always make it seem like a hectic affair.

"Do I need to move back farther?" she asks, bracing a hand on the wall. She resolutely does not think about how damp it is under her skin. "Or, ah.. is this distance sufficient?"

[postalprestidigitation]

Marduk is so weird!

She pats zir shoulder and steps back, and when ze turns zir head to peer at her, she's braced herself against the wall instead. "Is this distance sufficient?" she asks, and ze blinks.

"Umm.. it's aight," ze says, dubious. What is she doing? It must be a greenblood thing, some sort of manners bullshit: Marduk does that sort of thing, occasionally, getting all stiff and polite over weird shit. "You gonna have to scoot back on up in a min, though."

Ze turns back to the ladder, and gets to work.

As far as Hinnom's concerned, any troll could probably see ghosts, if they just tried. Most already do, as little flickers in the corners of their eye, and making them clear it up past that isn't exactly hard. It's just a matter of unfocusing your ganderbulbs, and letting them see what they want to see.

The room blurs, and what's left is the coloured blurs of trollish forms. Ze sent most of zir ghosts on hive when Marduk first pestered zir, but ze kept one leashed, just in case. The death rate in the city is high, and there's always ghosts around to wrangle if ze needs it, but it's easier to work with the ones ze knows.

Most of them are immaterial, barely more than blood-coloured blurs against the wall. They're barely more than imprints, remnants that've forgotten their names and forgotten their shapes, and the only real ghost is the big, hornless blue one, currently leashed to zim. He's frowning at them, arms folded, big fangy teeth working overtime on his bottom lip. "- can't believe you brought a jadeblood into the sewers," he says, as his voice fizzles and sizzles into zir hearing range.

(Ze can always hear ghosts, if ze wants: it's not like looking, where ze's gotta focus. It's like hearing two trolls muttering on the street corner as ze walks by: it's just a matter of paying attention.)

(For the most part, ze doesn't bother. If the ghosts want to get zir attention, then they'll holler. But for the most part, all they want to do is whine, whine, whine.)

"Cry more," ze jeers. Castor's the first ghost ze ever leashed, and he's just a big whiny grub, always acting like he's trying to be zir moirail -- or, worse yet, zir lusus. He was pleased as punch when ze and Mardie started getting friendly, but if he had things his way, he'd have Hinnom as stiff-laced as one of her academy pals. "Buck up and bounce, dude? I don't wanna get jumped."

He sighs and gives zim a look, the sort that means ze'll be hearing shit later. Whatevs: when Castor's not complaining, that's when there's a problem. He disappears up the ladder, balancing each foot and pulling with his arms like he still needs to do that shit, and a moment later, ze hears his voice call down:

"All clear."

Ze bounces. "Okay," ze chirps, spinning on their heel to snatch Marduk's hand. She's looking at zim like ze's speaking tongues, but she gets that face a lot. Hinnom tugs her towards the ladder: they'll climb up first, of course, but poor Mardie's blind as a bat, and ze doesn't trust she won't go falling into the pipes as soon as ze turns zir back. "Let's bail!"

=> HINNOM: Lead him home.

[postalprestidigitation]

Smell comes back before zir vision does. The air is warm and humid, with the familiar stench of waste water and sewage permeating the air, strong enough that Hinnom can taste it in the back of their throat. Usually, it's not too bad: there's time to adjust, from the fresh air outside to the cramped, stagnant air of the sewers.

Not today. And worse yet is the smell of bile. The smell is so bad, it makes zim want to heave.

It sounds like Pheres is already in the process.

There's spots in zir vision, but ze's used to the transition of light and dark: already Hinnom's vision is clearing, and ze can make out Pheres's outline in front of zim. He's hunched over, wheezing, and - oh, gross, he's the cause of the smell.

He's puking all over the ground, and his nice, white shoes.

"BLUH," Hinnom says, scampering back.

[refiningspacetime]

Jumping is generally a horrible experience. Short hops, Pheres can tolerate: five feet or less is no worse than walking, really. Long hops make him ill, but he can still do it.

Huge jumps, like this, are awful, and it turns out being drunk doesn't make it any better.

The world is spinning violently behind him, and it feels like his stomach arrives seconds after the rest of him. He's puking before his vision even clears, doubled over nearly in half like the added pressure will stop the nauseating pain.

(It just makes it worse. It always makes it worse.)

Hinnom is saying something, but Pheres is having difficulty just staying upright: listening is a little beyond him, right now.

[postalprestidigitation]

Pheres is still puking, although he's moved past liquid and just into dry, raspy heaving. Hinnom's stomach is churning just being near him, so ze takes one or two more steps back, and then - when it becomes obvious the maroonblood won't notice - ze turns tail and flees.

Whatever issue Pheres is having, it hasn't rubbed off. Hinnom feels foggy and gross from crying, but elation has won out over that. They're in the sewers, and the numbers on the walls mean they're well over a dozen blocks away, in a different district entirely. The drones are far, far away, and their hive is nearby.

It's just a matter of figuring out how ze'll haul Pheres there. The quickest way would be cutting down into the catacombs, and up the pipeline that leads directly into their nestblock, but ze isn't sure Pheres would be able to shimmy up the pipe. There's no ladder, and Hinnom always just uses their back and feet, but Pheres is probably a little big: in the last sweep or so, it's gotten tight, even for zim.

The other way is going through the catacombs, and following the path through. There's only a little bit of climbing there, but they'd need Castor, to tell them where the dead are, and when they could go.

Where was Castor?

Ze gives the leash a hard tug, but there's no response.

[refiningspacetime]

Finally, his digestion sack completely empty, and no matter how much his foodchute constricts with distress, there's simply nothing else to up-end. Straightening up is finally a possibility, and he does so, swiping at his face with the back of a hand in the process. The resulting mess is disgusting.

He feels disgusting. His mouth tastes repulsive, his snout is bleeding, his orbs are leaking, and with the way his pan is aching, he wouldn't be surprised if it was dripping straight out of his soundclots. The dim lights of the sewer feel entirely too bright and too dim, all at once, and he is never going to drink again.

Or jump again. Or ever come into a city: he never gets into these sort of situations, when he just sticks to the countryside, and the trolls are much nicer out there, anyway. A country troll has never threatened to pluck out his eyes.

Oh. Wait. Wasn't he with someone?

"Hinnom," he calls, and opening his mouth was a mistake, because he can practically taste the odor in the air. He gags, pinching his nose, and gingerly starts to walk. He just saw the little troll. He couldn't have gone far.

[postalprestidigitation]

Castor isn't responding, and Hinnom's starting to worry. Pheres was able to jump both of them, but they're flesh. What if he left Castor?

Ze isn't even sure how far the leash stretches. What if it broke? What if --

The leash tugs back. Castor's too far to hear, too far to see, but he tugged back, and Hinnom can sense the direction. Up.

Oh! He's at the hive already.

=> OOC TIMELINE REFERENCE

[refiningspacetime]

-> 11:00PM, SATURDAY
Pheres is drunk and gets on Fleetbound. [POST 1]

-> 2:00PM, SATURDAY
Riccin comes to retrieve Pheres.

-> 3:00PM, SATURDAY
Riccin and Pheres leave the hivestem and are intercepted by Hinnom and Marduk. They argue for ~20 minutes before agreeing to go as a group, and Hinnom and Pheres abscond the scene by 3:30PM.

->3:40PM, SATURDAY
Hinnom and Pheres end up in the sewers, and Hinnom and Castor haul him back to their hive, where both of them promptly go to sleep.

->5:00PM, SATURDAY
Sipara starts the six hour drive back to Capitol City.


->12:00AM, SUNDAY
Sipara arrives in Capitol City, and after tracking down Pheres's mobile hive and finding it unoccupied, posts on FB.

->1:00AM, SUNDAY
Sipara and Marduk head into the sewers to travel to Hinnom's house. [THREAD]

->1:00AM, SUNDAY
After nine hours of sleep, Pheres wakes up in Hinnom's hive, the pill out of his system and completely confused as to wtf happened.

->2:00AM, SUNDAY
The two threads intersect! Sipara and Marduk finally come across Hinnom's hive, sleep-deprived and harried by the zombies. THIS HELLISHLY LONG POST FINALLY WRAPS UP. \o/

=> SIPARA: PICK UP THE KID.

[activatingaggro]

Whoa, wait, fuck, that sounds weird. REPHRASE.

=> SIPARA: Find your stupid moirail.
That's more like it.

[activatingaggro]

Man, you are so fucking tired.

Staying up all day isn't new shit to you. Kids don't want surgeries during the night: lately, it seems like whenever you're trying to excise a lightshow gland or picking up a corpse, they always want to creep in during the middle of the day, like that makes their shit less suspicious.

And how many times has Boopis gotten pissed with you, and set up matches back to back on opposite coasts? She likes to give you just enough time to leave the ring and get on the road, so by the time you arrive, daystruck and exhausted, it's time to get right back in the ring.

(It's a good thing she's a great lay, or she'd be so fired. Fucking teals, man.)

But just because you're used to it doesn't make sleep deprivation any easier. You're yawning and scrubbing at your eyes as you pull up to the sidewalk, a foot tapping impatiently on the pedals. People are looking at you, and you resist the urge to flip them the bird.

You're a rust in highblood territory, right now. You're not going to give them a reason to pull out the rope.

Capitol City hasn't been the Empire's capitol since adults left the planet, and for the most part, it's a decent place to hang out. The outskirts are all new builds, formed by carpenter drones and industrious kids over the last few centuries, and they're mostly lowbloods. The scene can be kind of wild, but it's fun, and it's safe: stick to the suburbs and you can walk for miles without encountering a single shade above saffron.

Unfortunately, that's just the outskirts. The city proper is still built the same as it was back when the Empress lived here, all canals and high streets and buildings that stretch as high as the eye can go, and this is where all the highbloods live. Kids, mostly, but once you get into the core..

Well. Not all the adults were banned from Alternia.

The amount you know about the Imperial Education Programs could fill a shotglass. You're a rustblood, and you're not a psionic: trying to even sign up for one of their entrance exams would just mean the ink they'd use would be red. They've got a helmsman division that you know Pheres's been eyeing, where they install wetware and shit early so the kids are all revved up and ready come conscription, and you know that the entire thing is run by elderly finfaces - but that's about it.

There's never been a reason to learn anything about it, and you've always had more important shit to focus on. You're not regretting it, precisely, as you idle here on your motorbike, and avoid eye contact with the curious bluebloods.. but you kind of wish you knew more. There's a set of tall, white hivestem clusters off in the distance, separated from you by a gate, and the sign on it says LEGISLACERATOR DIVISION, #8.

Hopefully this is the spot Marduk meant, because - welp. You're not about to go in there to retrieve her.

[forgottensebayt]

"You're doing what?"

Sappho is not sympathetic to your plight. You don't even know why you told her.

(Because she asked, and you thought maybe it was a sort of starter, an invitation for the two of you to become hate-friends. You've lived together for six perigees, after all. It'd be about time.)

"This is absurd, even by your ususal standards," she says, propping herself up on the lip of her coon. Her hair is dripping sopor all over the side, and her face is streaked with green. Sappho takes a special pride in the fact she can sleep submerged. "When I said you need to stop being such a drab little wallflower, I didn't mean you should go trouncing through the sewers."

Some students have quadrants outside of the academy, where Proctor Sungazer can't enforce the three caste rule. But you're hlad of the fact that both you and Sappho are students, because you don't have to fret about any coloured undertones with her. You can just take the easy contempt at face value.

Lucky you.

"Catacombs," you correct her quietly, finishing your make-up. Cosmetic facepaint like this is highblood frippery, but you like the way the undereye concealer hides the black smudges under your eyes. With the rest of your paint on, it doesn't look like you've spent the day guarding your phone and vomitting from anxiety. You just look tired.

"Whatever. Who are you even meeting?" Her neckfrills lift, and she glubs out a wet pop of a laugh. Your lusus perks a scaled ear, but otherwise, he pays her no mind: he's used to looking the other way with highbloods. "Have you finally catch yourself some fronds?"

She keeps up her commentary while you get dressed in your shabbiest clothes, the ones that you won't mind getting ruined, and then when you leave the room, she follows, throwing on her robe as an afterthought. You want to tell her to go away, but she's indigo: the only thing you can do is try to control the spikes of anxiety brewing in your digestion sack, and hope that she gets bored.

She's still trailing you when you reach the gate, and spot Sipara idling at the other side. The light is too dim for you to see well outside of the grub-lit halls of the academy, and you're mostly being led by your leached lusus, but even in the gloom, it's impossible to mistake the red and white streaked figure amongst the purple and blue crowds.

"Oh, no," Sappho says, delighted, and you can't help the way you tuck your chin in as you open up the gate.

[activatingaggro]

People are looking at you, and you count the fucking seconds until Marduk appears.

The little comments are easy enough to ignore, and you can deal with the looks, although it makes you want to put your thumb through someone's eye. But the boredom is what's getting to you, more than anything else. You've been over in this side of town before, running the occasional pick-up for one of your moirail's bullshit orders. So long as people assume you're someone's pick-up, shit's fine: it's when you start acting like you're here for anything other than business by breaking out your phone or fucking with your bike that the highbloods get shitty.

Case in point. You're not even doing shit, but there's a finhead peering at you, her painted lips pulled into a careful frown. Judging by the set of her horns, you'll give it twenty, thirty seconds before she flounces over to see why the hell you're idling here.

Maybe you'll just tell her to fuck off. You're still amped up from dealing with OA and PC's bullshit, and right now, the idea of getting to sink your claws in someone's throat sounds great.

But you know the fight wouldn't go like that: bubbleblowers don't believe in playing fair, and bluebloods are always willing to play family when it comes to beating down the lower castes. You'd get culled, painfully and publicly, and the thought makes you force a thin, toothless smile at the seadweller until she looks away.

Thank god that Marduk appears at that point, because you feel like you're about to start biting yourself, in lieu of shit else to do.

She's being led by her lusus, all set up on a little leash-rig, and.. for some reason, there's a lanky-ass seadweller tailing her, a fuzzy black robe trailing her like a cape. She's got to be one of those in-betweenies: girl looks purple as a churchmouse, all legs and frizzy curls, but those are definite fronds on her neck. Shame: she'd be almost cute, for a blueblood.

"Sup, kid," you call out. You're glad you cleared out the sidecar: Marduk's barely seven, but she's not exactly tiny, and neither is her lusus. Even empty, it might make for a tight fit. "You ready?"

[forgottensebayt]

Sappho is laughing: real brays of amusement, not the whistle-pop of her glubbed pastiches. "Oh my glubbing cod. I mean, I knew you were slumming, but.. with a redblood?"

You ignore her, stepping forward: Sipara's asking if you're ready, and you give a brisk nod, easier than chancing any irritation in your voice right now. Your roommate is an incorrigible irritation, but it's not your place to respond to it.

But ignoring her evidently isn't an option, either, because she claps a hand on your shoulder, her grip feather-light like she never even thinks you would shrug her off.

You'd like to say you considered it, but sweeps spent in the Academy have taught you that only one response is allowed. You freeze, your lusus stopping mid-step beside you, and she laughs.

"You minnow, I thought you were crazy, but now I get it."

"Um."

"Warmbloods are fun," she says appreciatively, showing her teeth. "You know what they say about a red sky at night?"

Sappho never seemed the sort to like lowbloods: certainly, she doesn't like you. You squint at her, but it's too dark to really see her expression, or much beside the amused press of her eyes and the sharp, white daggers of her teeth. "No? Well, you'll learn."

"I'll cover for you," she adds, "if get me her number."

You're. not entirely sure what just happened. "Okay," you say carefully. Agreeing is usually the best route. "Well. Goodbye."

Sappho is laughing as you open the gate, walk over to the bike, and climb into the sidecar. Your lusus hops in after you, doing a quick spin and then settling in your lap with ease.

"I'm ready," you tell Sipara. Your roommate is still watching you, a blur of pale gray against the muddy backdrop of your home. "Oh - and, um, Sappho wanted me to let you know that she said hello."

=> PHERES: Wake up.

[refiningspacetime]

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?

[refiningspacetime]

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.

[postalprestidigitation]

"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.

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

[refiningspacetime]

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.