7749/The Wall of Dregs

The Wall of Dregs
Date of Scene:
Location:
Synopsis:
Cast of Characters:	Priscilla, Gilgamesh, Starbound Flotilla, 7371, Eryl Fairfax, 7387, Hiromi, 518, Zero Kiryu

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Priscilla has posed:
    It's difficult to anticipate what it means to 'go to the end of the world'. The romantic age of sail would perhaps conjure to mind a place where boundless ocean drops off the knife's edge of the map and pours away forever. The traditionally enlightened may envision a boundary where form and definition gradually dissolve into cosmic potential. The classical thinking might anticipate the mythical aether, or the more scientifically hard-minded might expect to see the void of space in another form, and the most ambitious of abstract comprehension might even await something grander, where space and time might be involved in a physical sense.

    What greets one instead is nothing but descending plains of scoured and colourless gray stone, lifeless crags from one horizon only gradually becoming more plain and unformed all the way to the other. Deep wells of grey dust, dark sand, and pale ash, mingled together and deposited into the cracks woven deeply into the inhospitable ground, until they can be blasted and blown over into rippling dunes in other places, by a lukewarm and directionless wind.

    A deep, queasy sense of disorientation sets in within moments, not only lacking for a clear sense of direction, but quckly realized, even a sense of day or night or even the basics of climate. The air is thin and dry and devoid of any kind of scent. The light is even and dim, undisrupted by the ghosts of leaden clouds that drown the sky, more like staring into a vast expanse of grey ocean from below, eliciting a sense of deep, nauseus vertigo. It is neither early nor late, hot nor cold, with only a dull, muddy yellow-orange glow from a sun that somehow feels too far away to either rise or set.

    This is, undoubtedly, a liminal place where one could wander for all eternity. Whether it ends abruptly, loops in upon itself, or merely goes on forever, one could never say, and there would be no reason nor means to distinguish.

    Even with the fully completed map and decoded cipher, stitched together from fragments seeded throughout the darkest corners of Lordran, which had nearly claimed many lives, getting here was clearly not easy. A full Concord escort, deployed from a sleek, broad, and thin-angled intercontinental air carrier, has fully set up shape on the blank and scarred terrain, bridging where the ground has split apart with minimal engineering, and mantling the higher dunes of ash with crowns of lookouts, deposit yards, power taps, and artificial warpgates. As if even the highly trained Elite assistant personnel fear they might simply up and vanish if they don't prove their existence.

    You're only greeted in stiff and harried fashion by those hurrying to set up a sort of base here, left instead in Priscilla's direct, personal care, evidently returning from a trip in the direction that can only be called 'outwards'. Perhaps 'away'.

    "Well met, all of thee so brave to chase such a tale so far. Though I fear this hunt as but just begun, as we hath merely concluded following old tracks, thou art welcome to mine thanks for thine well-meaning confidence all the same." She turns slowly and points to the way she'd came, across a long track of footprints in the deep, grey dust. "This is our place to returneth to. Without it, I am certain, now, that we wouldst never find out way back. 'Place' is something thou cannot rely upon here; I assure thee as surely as what I feel in mine very bones. What matters is that not far beyond that horizon lies a sole chapel. And beyond that . . . well, thou shalt see for themselves."

Gilgamesh has posed:
     Once upon a time, he had traveled to the ends of the Earth. He, who knew all the countries of the world, the King of Heroes who had no equal, had seen every corner of the globe, every inch of the era of the Age of the Gods. He, Gilgamesh, had seen the ends of the Earth with his own eyes, and turned his gaze to the stars where humanity might yet flourish.

     This is not Earth, and this is not the end of the world he knew.

     It's still in a way that stillness can't be, dead in a way that death can't be. It was never alive, perhaps, or if it was it was never alive in the conventional sense. There had never been green to disrupt these grey plains, never been the fire that forged a world from its potential. If it even had potential it was untouchable by any hand here. It was a truth all its own, and that was unpleasant to look upon, and so the King of Heroes decided not to look upon it.

     There are no treasures here, nor could there be any. Perhaps there was worthy battle, but that wasn't why he had come, not why he followed the carrier on his Vimana.

     He had come for love of her, and that was a strange feeling, as always, to go so far for someone else.

     The Vimana touches down alongside the carrier and vanishes at the snap of his fingers. He looks at her distantly as she speaks to the others of their effort. When she's done, he just smiles at her, a warm smile for a cold woman, and walks forward, uncharacteristically quiet, contemplative.

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    The Starbound Flotilla are here, and their expertise in "setting up a base" means they're practically involved the moment they get on-site. The establishment of tethers, beacons, reliable power, and effective scanners is one thing, of course, which Seft, Moonfin, and Pavo are all hard at work on. But George and Biteblade are at work on something else entirely: Attempts to seed strange alien plant life into the area, Biteblade assuring any who question it that she is "making sure ground doesssn't blow away." It seems a concern mostly focused on introducing an aspect of uninterrupted observation and reality here. Like circular breathing, the plants acknowledge people, and the people acknowledge the plants, and this mutual respiration of reality can make a long-term use of what little World they bring with them on this journey.

    Albert, on the other hand, is loading up a heavy supply and APC vehicle. With deployable ski-type locomotion, perpetual-hover systems, heavy wheels, cliff-ascent spikes, land-sail backups, and other locomotion options, it's not designed for speed, but rather to keep pace with a good march. He squints through a thick, dark pair of goggles, over the horizon. And he grimaces. "George hasn't already visited, has he?" He mutters. "Haven't seen it this bad since Purifications in the Mortis Zones."
    "I would call this worse, in many ways. The dust and ash imply a grander loss than even that, if there were ever anything to be lost." Moonfin speaks grimly. "Let us set out. First of the Concord, we take this task as an honor. Let us hope the map and the chapel will guide us true. Shall we begin?"

    It does seem to be setting-out time, after all. Unless they need more preparation here, the Flotilla will lead up anyone who wants to hop aboard, and set out on the path their copy of the map offers!

Kukuru (7371) has posed:
Does any of this make sense to Kukuru? No. She's seen empty stretches of land before, but those were more along the lines of grassy plains or sun-scorched deserts with no real civilization to speak of. Seeing it in a more literal sense is far more unnerving, but who's she to say no to a member of her (extended) family?

Besides, someone has to make sure they keep their energy up throughout this... "What do you call a place like this? It's so... It's not a tundra or anything, but there's gotta be some kind of word for it." Furrowing her brow, she's soon distracted away from that line of thought as Priscilla gestures the footprints behind her. "Ah, a trail. Good idea. I think I have something that might help out with that, too..."

She digs into one of the pockets on her green-to-brown skirt, and out comes a large-ish container of red pepper flakes. "In case the dirt... Dust... Stuff blows over it, this might help us see where we went already." Kukuru's already sprinkling it gingerly on the ground, too, but she stops herself once she realizes she hasn't actually moved anywhere yet.

She'll leave that for once the group actually begins their move towards the chapel. "Is there anything we're looking for in there? Or is it the place itself that's important?"

Eryl Fairfax has posed:
    Wastelands hold no mystique for Eryl. For 100+ years he has trodden them. Endless dunes with no life, arid winds with no moisture or scent. But all of that is merely superficial, the small volume of the iceberg that juts from the ocean surface. This place is more 'devoid' than just that. As he looks out at the pallid horizon, he suddenly experiences a deep kinship with the first men on the moon. So alien is this place, so hostile to the concept of life, that an atmosphereless ball of rock is the most apt comparison he can draw.

    Those of the Concord might snicker at seeing the Grandmaster kneel down, stick his finger in the ash underfoot, and then lick said finger. Ash and debris imply rocks and structures once, which implies minerals, substance. What exactly is the bedrock of all this nothing?

    Priscilla returns from her initial jaunt. 'Distance' is a hard thing to gauge out here, but Eryl does his best by looking to the pattern of footprints stretching across the dunes. "A chapel? I have difficulty believing that whomever was sent out here would hold much affection for Gwyn. But then again, those reliefs in the mausoleum... perhaps older religions flourished out here. Or..."

    He leaves the theory unsaid. The notion that their true objective out here became a figure of worship is something that could imply great difficulties in trying to extract her. "Let's be off then."

Kaito Kumon (7387) has posed:
For a long while, the 'end of the earth' was what was within sight, and then it was as far as you could walk to, and then it was as far as the bus pass would take you, and then it was as far as the motorcycle would take you, and then-

Kaito's used to 'ends of the earth' expanding. Well, no, that's a lie - not used to it, even if it's happened several times, might never be used to it.

The rest of Team Baron is here as well, integrating with the rest of the Concord entourage, while Kaito takes point as the Designated Elite. "This is... just the start?" he asks. "That makes sense. It's lackluster compared to what we're likely to find, I imagine." Yes. Act as though you know what you're talking about. This is good. Don't let on that you actually have no idea what to be expecting.

"A place to return to - like an island of stability in the middle of an ocean, right?" Is that the right metaphor? He hopes it's the right metaphor. "It's a good spot for it, at least. It feels like nothing changes here."

There's an offer of a ride given - a ride would be really nice. "No thanks," he says. "I've got my own." He pulls a padlock out, opens it, and tosses it on the ground - it expands into a motorcycle, which he mounts up on. The motorcycle's one of like three or four things he's bringing to the table here, he *has* to demonstrate that he's self-sufficient and not just a Fight Idiot.

The APC looks really neat, though. It's a shame.

Hiromi has posed:
    Hiromi, the Archwolf, is here, addressing Priscilla from a legs apart, hands-on-hips pose. She isn't, in fact, usually one to stand this straight, but it gives her a better view over the far expanse of nauseating nothing-really.

     "We're far-hunting. Why wouldn't we brave it? Good fighting in last I hunted here." She means this world, rather than this specific area. "Old one's challenge. Now, we find another, yes? Old things, hidden things, kept away. A hunt for things, that don't want finding, that hide or fight. Always these, yes?" If it wasn't difficult, someone would already have done it. If it's never been done, that's enough to pull some of her interest.

    And those golems had been a good fight. She'd even gone back to hunt for and carry off one of their oversized weapons, though whether there's a point in her carrying around a giant lightning halberd is questionable.

Yuuki Kuran (518) has posed:
A rather sizeable and fully-loaded Concord detachment is seeing to claiming the space from its liminal approach, and among them, with a clipboard, is the short-haired ('First') Yuuki Kuran. She dresses as a modern adventurer, wearing a sweater-esque bodyglove with fuzzy cuffs and collar in white, and a vest in green and black over top to hide/accent a harness that simply gives the impression of utility and is entirely ornamental, save a pocket for her phone like a holster. Besides which, she wears a belted skirt and a pair of sheer black 'leggings' that are actually suit material in broad expectance of walking through some mist/acid fog/lava/slime/endless waves of garbage. 'Adventuring' leggings.

Yuuki Kuran has gained new appreciations for the local level of 'scuz' that Priscilla's world got up to, and how to combat it.

Dusting off her collar of the ambient dust as she approaches Priscilla, Yuuki lifts a pen to her mouth and taps the cap against her bottom lip. "You know, Priscilla, it seems to me your world is very literal when it's not being very cryptic. Is this... Erosion? Of the literal kind? So then, is this place where things go when they have finished their decay?"

She leans forward, having to get up on her tiptoes to accomplish this because Priscilla is Quite Tall. "Do you think you would ever find yourself here? Do you think I would?"

Dropping back to her heels, she carries on past Priscilla and shades her eyes with her clipboard -- a moderately useless gesture, with the local state of 'light', but...

"Well, Captains, lead the way! I think we're all set up here."

Turning back, she smiles at Gilgamesh and Priscilla. "Will you two be coming, or staying here?"

Zero Kiryu has posed:
"The result of purifications is rather different than this," Zero comments towards Albert, a little less dully than his usual resting state. They weren't on the same side of that particular problem, but all the same, the feelings behind the statement are something that Zero can grasp. "So far, anyway... if we encounter one of those creatures, I'll withdraw my assessment."

A moment's pause, then, "Weren't you containing them and shipping them off to some other place? Who even wanted them? Or can you still not recall the details?"

While this conversation carries on, he seeds elements of himself among the plants put forth by Biteblade. This is mostly because he assumes she has the right idea, and partially because the presence of other plant life makes it a bit easier to boot.

A twist of plant life around Yuuki's wrist chimes in with Zero's voice in answer to a question aimed at Priscilla: "When you are done, would you want to linger on palely? This place does not seem to be of a nature for those of our like. I don't think 'change' is an idea with much grip here."

Priscilla has posed:
    Though licking the dirt might look silly, Eryl Fairfax does have precise sensors for exactly this kind of thing. They helpfully conclude, with absolute certainty, that it's a rock alright. The list of possibilities is painted in single digit certainties, with granite and basalt being at the top, followed by quartz, and then weirdly, calcium. The dust is eroded rock. The sand is ground up rock. The ash is, somehow, 'burnt rock', carbonized to some degree, and now without carbon.

    his landscape was probably, once, burned very intensely, but it's as if there had only ever been, at best, an ecosystem of rocks upon rocks next to rocks. The most ancient symbol of unchanging age. It also vaguely seems as if the waves of deep fracture in the stone are roughly like glacial ice stress, from being crunched together and stretched apart seasonally.

    Biteblade's attempts at seeding it aren't wholly pointless; though all the organic material that plants need has to be provided externally along with water, anything capable of 'growing on a boulder' can handle it, but anything that 'grows roots into the ground' seems unable to meaningfully penetrate even the dusty ash. Concord personnel fence the area, set up monitoring cameras, and analyze the information as she works, even while others haul crates of fuel and supplies to the APC between them on Albert's timetable.

    "There is no name to 'nowhere'." Priscilla concludes to Kukuru. "I believeth not long beyond it, in whatever form 'beyond' couldst be said to existeth." She shakes her head slowly to Eryl. "It is no sort of worship that I recognize, and besides, not one that I believeth anyone entertains in this age. Thou shalt see." She says, slightly cryptically, to Kaito, "The trouble with space so empty, amongst other things, is that one cannot quite be so certain whether it is never known to change, or whether it changes at all times."

    Priscilla spares a rare, half open smile when Gilgamesh joins the group, though it seems her intent to ride the APC rather than engage in the ostensibly more practical use of the Vimana for some reason. She confers with Yuuki in oddly half-hushed tones, "Perhaps it is that it was always so literal, and we hath simply lost much of our memory of what it shouldst mean." It's broken by a short, thoughtful pause at Hiromi's addition. "Old, certainly. Older than gods. Older than time. But, at once, having seen its edges with mine own eyes, I believeth a state of 'finishing' wouldst preclude its existence. If I were to search it merely for 'hidden things', such wouldst perhaps be to seek things that hath yet to even be hidden. But I cannot envision it a place even for mineself under any circumstance. It is not . . . mine to claimeth."

    The intended approach absolutely seems to be to use the larger vehicle. Following Priscilla's tracks, the long, silent, and bumpy journey doesn't take more than half an hour at a brisk pace. True to her word, without any particular rhyme or reason but 'because her tracks lead there', from out of the wasteland, as if summoned up from the ground rather than 'navigated to', the bleached bones of the earth rise up into steep, jagged hills, forcing a path up a sharp and grueling incline, at the very top of which can be seen the outline of a modestly sized, but deeply baroquely designed, church steeple.

    One of finely hewn stone facades and slate tiles, its grey windows having sagged away to leave behind only the iron frames that once held coloured glass, and its doors having turned to dust and blown away aeons ago. It is a deeply hollow and empty thing, recognizable only by a curved iron ornament at its peak, and the faded outlines of where pews had once held back some manner of dust. It feels like stumbling across a bleached ram's skull in the desert, not a sign of civilization.

Priscilla has posed:
    And much like stumbling across the grim and vacant remains of some long dead animal, it seems to serve much the same feeling of warning; some indicator of a deeply metaphorical, yet even more lethal, threat of being stricken with heat, passing out for a moment, and never waking up, never being found, again. Because the chapel steps are carved and mortared brick, transplanted along with a wide path onto ill-fitting dusty ground that nobody has ever walked, and that path rambles forward only a little bit more, before dropping off the sharp, miles deep cliff that the entire range of 'hills' reaches the edge of. An acute, deadly angle that drops away into a gorge somehow even more swept away than the wastelands before it. And off that cliff . . .

    A vast chasm. An endless canyon. A gulch that stretches to an even further horizon, where the ground builds up all over again and rises into higher mountains still. Each and every spare inch of it wrought by human hands.

    The chapel is but a taste. A skull from a mass grave. Surmounting the ridge rewards one with the sight that stretches all the way out of existence to their left and right and far ahead away from the sun, built up of ten trillion tons of ancient ruins, all broken up and slammed together and tossed into one endless vista, jumbled together into a single megalithic kaleidoscope of civilization. A crazed monochrome painting born from the fevered imagination of a dying and colourblind artist, woken up in the night from a dire dream in a cold sweat. An acid trip of human industry merged together without beginning or end.

    Towns like scattered atop castles like errant marbles, propped crookedly against fortresses and spanned by twisted and warped bridges. Mills and towers jut out at crooked angles, bending under their own weight, and looming above the crumbled and broken remains of cathedrals and monuments, stitched together by an infinite number of roads like a ragged wound. Sideways, upside down, right side up, torn in half, twisted like cloth, pushed up into heaps like autumn leaves and left to rot. Literal, contiguous miles, up and down, of ramshackle civilization, cracked open and bared to the open air like a horrendously broken bone.

    There's no making sense of it. Not even a chance. No two adjacent buildings look as if they belong together. Crenellated castles of tremendous size lean heavily over thatched mills and keeps of rustic origin and soaring gothic vaults, grown over with the washed out shells of tiered pagodas and crowned with suspended cement aqueducts. It would take a billion architects a thousand years to make all of this, and just as long to throw it all away, and absolutely none of it belongs in this grey and lifeless place. Courtyards, gardens, palaces, mass halls, all filled with nothing but ash and dust and faded remains.

    Within the chapel, a mound of bleached and dusty bones is heaped together and speared through with a twisted iron sword, not unlike a fire tending rod, cold and inert. Beyond it, a sharp drop into the fever dream, unmarked save for swirled piles of ash, and a single spot where a rusted section of pole has been anchored in the dust, with a single strip of faded blue cloth wrapped around it, blowing limply in the invisible breeze. Atop a wildly precarious position, perched on the edge of a stupendously lethal drop, should the few bare bricks holding it in place give way, a decrepit, discarded rocking chair, and a ragged, robe-swathed figure seated within it, a heavy stone shell lashed tightly to their body with braids of rope, like a huge hump, and a gnarled staff in their hand, oriented to stare motionlessly into space.

Gilgamesh has posed:
     If Gilgamesh is upset or offended by Priscilla choosing the APC over his vehicle, he doesn't show it. In all likelihood he agrees that it's probably better not to be distracted in a place like this, and that would certainly be...distracting. Probably for both of them.

     "Wherever she needs me," Gilgamesh says to Yuuki. He knows what she's getting at. He's not ashamed of it, either, if the grin that briefly appears on his face is anything to speak of.

     He spares a glance at Hiromi's lightning axe, a hungry gaze not for the wolf but for the weapon unconcealed and uninterested in being concealed. It is something precious and intriguing; as usual, Gilgamesh is fascinated by the precious and intriguing. Kaito's lock gets the same sort of glance. Unique and intriguing.

     The Vimana flies alongside the APC almost protectively. Sure, literally no one in there needs protecting, but hey. It's nice to have a flying golden throne with the most formidable arsenal imaginable riding alongside.

     The sheer crushing ennui of the church is stunning. As if the thing had simply given up and died like a beast lumbering back to its graveyard. Even looking at it fills the King of Heroes with a measure of disgust. A corpse bleached grey under an unending grey sky.

     If the chapel filled him with disgust, then the mass grave is almost vomit-inducing. He doesn't even bother to hide the look of revulsion on his face at seeing this place, this mockery, this *shell* of civilizations built like coral. The King actually has to look away from the sight before he does something foolish, tempering his disgusted anger with the grey and empty world around him. He produces a goblet of ambrosia that smells so sweet and so pure as to be worthy of the gods, because it is divine nectar in truth, and swallows it in one gulp before dropping the goblet back into the golden ripple that is the Gate.

     The chapel is almost as bad, so he produces another goblet and resumes drinking, because as ever pleasure is the wont of the King and in this grim place so violently opposed to his existence he's going to need something to balance it out. He stops when he notices the blue and the creature. Then,

     "Are you actually living here?"

Kukuru (7371) has posed:
"That might make things trickier, then..." Kukuru concludes after Priscilla identifies the place with no name as exactly that, sighing dramatically before looking over at Eryl as he tastes the ash. She narrows her eyes, approaches him briskly, and promptly shoves a water bottle at him.

"Wash that out when you're done. You don't want to get sick right when we're starting, do you?" Although she's asking a question, it really just sounds like she's scolding him for that. Clearly, she doesn't know that he's more than capable of doing such a thing safely.

It's what Priscilla tells Kaito about change that has her actually taking her claws out of her pockets, one still holding onto that container of red pepper gingerly while she sticks the other into the sand-like ground beneath her. "Just in case it doesn't change, maybe this'll help." Kukuru moves several steps sideways and starts dragging her claw through the ground, scooping out enough to form a fairly wide ring where she stands. She yanks that oversized handful of ash and other such pulverized stone out, then deposits the whole clump of it beside the ring.

"There. If it never changes, this'll be gone later. If it does change, then this should still be here when we get back." With her little exercise finished, Kukuru looks rather pleased with herself while heading into the APC. If there's an open window, she'll sprinkle that red pepper out for most of the ride, pausing every now and then to make sure everyone's hydrated and provided with homemade snacks if needed. Otherwise, she rations the flakes to make their trail a little bit redder and a little bit smellier on the way to...

The cliffside chapel! It's actually somewhat of a relief to finally see something that isn't just nothing and more nothing, and even the canyon that goes who knows how far is still better as it's SOMETHING to look at. There's a lot of something to look at, too, and she doesn't know where to start with how impossibly placed so much of it is.

"That's gonna fall over." Kukuru comments as she eyes those towers and mills, holding one clawed hand over her eyes and squinting as if that'll actually help her. With the chapel being the group's main objective, however, she finally heads inside and comes face to not quite face with that robe-clad figure.

Naturally, Kukuru's just going to approach them without a care in the world. Or maybe she's doing it to minimize the risks to everyone else by getting closer to both the mound and the robed person. "He-llo there. Does that thing hurt to wear? I could take it off if you want." She offers, clicking one of her claws together for emphasis.

Eryl Fairfax has posed:
    It's rock. What kind of rock exactly? Original Face is of no help there, throwing out miniscule percentages of confidence. But that alone can be proof. 'With fire, came disparity.' Beneath his feet is particles of rock, the ur-rock, the idea of rock as a hard, unchanging substance. With fire came light and dark, disparity, differences. Not even immutable stone could resist, becoming separated into strata, into igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. Just as modern man still bears some commonality with ancient man, so too do the rocks in his catalogues bear resemblance to the ancient particles underfoot.

    He is quiet on the drive to the chapel. Pensieve, looking out the window at the passing dunes. "This is nostalgic, in a way," he says aloud. "Most of my life has been vistas like this. Though I never people with me. Or a vehicle. Part of me wishes we didn't have the latter. But part of the fun of a journey like this is feeling the passing of time, and there's no sense of time passing here. Even eons decay."

    The sheer climb he navigates carefully. To fall here would be to fall into... the only words Eryl has for it is 'a mass grave of civilizations.' Original Face is scrubbing the vista for meaning, comparing architecture to what he saw in those forgotten corners before now. How did it all come to be here? Is this what happens when civilisations build atop each other again and again until the earth gives way and lets it all collapse on each other? That's the rational explanation his mind throws out, but this goes so far beyond that.

    His eyes fixate on that scrap of blue cloth. How has this survived? Who put it here? With quick steps, he walks over and takes it gingerly in hand, unfurling it as much as he is able. Is there a design on it, complete or otherwise? What is the fabric? And what of the pole itself? Is it just another piece of rubble, or has another visitor abandoned it here?

    Is it the doing of that shell-clad figure? Or someone else?

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    Zero Kiryu receives a long-belated answer to a scheme that never quite made its results known: "Our alliance with Bloody Revelations was complicated. We armed her with ghosts. She provided us... various assistance." He grasps at his Matter Manipulator, as if checking to make sure something in the inventory is still there.
    Biteblade has no ominousness to deliver, of course, she's just happy to have help! "Thanksss, dead-greenfinger friend!" She hisses happily. Maybe the plants will do something good, and... well, maybe not! Who knows. Mosses and climbing vines will perhaps be enough.

    Priscilla finds the APC to be open-top in enough sections to sit comfortably at full-size. There is no need for shade, but even still, Moonfin props up some draped fabric on several mounted rods to give her a little extended shade from the distant sun.

    And, eventually, the group arrives. The Captains disembark after pulling the APC up close to the chapel, seemingly trying to decide who should lead. Perhaps none of them know well. Almost by chance, they choose a member...

Kaito Kumon (7387) has posed:
"...Ah. More ruins..." says Kaito, mostly to attempt to contribute something.

It's a weak offering, in conversational terms, because he's spending more of his attention looking around. This is... new. Very new. Not what he'd expect from ruins - the scale, and the weird amount of variety. What was here, that got destroyed? It seems impossible.

"Alright then."

A lot of people are going off to go talk to the figure - probably a good idea. Except...

... That cloth catches his attention. Is it a territory marker? A sign someone else laid off?

He revs the motorcycle's engine - and a portal into another dimension opens up, which he drives on through.

In contrast to anyone making the treacherous climb and navigation of the terrain to get to it, Kaito reappears, still astride the motorcycle, coming out of another portal right next to the cloth with no apparent difficulty whatsoever.

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    "Confused. Why does this look... *familiar* to me?" Seft mutters, as she steps up towards the cliff edge. "Confused. It's like I saw this in a dream... But I didn't, did I? What could all this *be*?" She sweeps that blue visor over the skeleton of the chapel, before she finds something to focus on.

    She approaches the man. "Respectful. There was something before fire. And it was... in this direction. Is that right? We're here to look for it. Are these... echoes of the fire? Or echoes of *that*?" She tries to maneuver around her words, like they're dangerous and sharp.

    Why can't she shake this feeling of familiarity? It won't budge.

Hiromi has posed:
    "'Unfinished' things, 'not yet' hidden. This, you mean? Strange thought." Hiromi may not be entirely getting what Priscilla is saying, but has gathered that things, most likely, be weird.

    This assumption proves correct. "Not-city, 'couldn't be' built. Stones wrought, as if by human hands. What human would? None. Even broken men would break, work unfinished. Too many things. Not built. Grown? Placed? Moved?" Hiromi looks out over the something-scape, leaping off the vehicle's roof to run up to the cliff's edge and lean dangerously over it, halberd butt on the ground behind her, with the specific kind of confidence of one who firmly disbelieves in falling damage.

    After several moments, she walks back away from it, goes into the chapel, and prowls low to the ground, tracking likely nonexistent scents for 'things that have moved.' There were pews here, possibly, at some point. Or maybe there's only the impression that they were here. There are bones here, and bones are remains left behind by those who lived -- unless they aren't. She can't entirely discount the possibility that a land like this might have deathly remains of what was never born, and never died.

    Unless she does find something especially interesting, against all odds, this will take little time. Plenty left to go back out again, and to the motionless figure. Is that alive, and was it ever? A question has been asked, and she listens for an answer. Her nose is distracted, unusually, by ambrosia, a thing so different from this place that the first whiff of Gilgamesh's drinking habit clouds out everything else for several moments, but on seeing it's already gone, Hiromi shakes her head to clear it.

    She hasn't needed to drink in years, but now she wishes she'd brought that gourd from the demon's palace. This is a dry, dry land.

    Hiromi will wait exactly long enough to hear whether that figure has anything to say, before she steps off the cliff.

Zero Kiryu has posed:
It's like a garbage dump at the edge of space-time. Zero doesn't even really want to think about it, and he's spent enough time looking at nigh-incomprehensible architecture just getting here, so he ends up just keeping his eyes on the more banal parts of the experience insofar as he can.

The thought that it was a garbage dump comes, and goes-- no, it's more like the end result of a trash compactor, if the pieces weren't quite able to have all features scrubbed out of them at the end. A cubed-together lump sum of everything that ever fell off the edge of the world.

It's nonsense because there is, in fact, no sense to it. It's just how things ended up when they were done falling.

Gilgamesh ends up speaking of his incredulity of something resembling a person being here. The question already being asked, Zero spreads his psychic senses out towards the figure. It is not an invasive probing-- more like a ping. Hello, are you there?

"Bloody Revelations. I see... it makes sense that a being like that would have need of an entity would have use for such a creature," Zero replies to Albert, nodding. In answer to Biteblade's thanks, he says, "Yeah... only, I'm not the kind of vampire that died. It's just a species, where I come from."

//It's like I saw this in a dream...//

"If you don't remember," he says, "it may be best if you don't."

Priscilla has posed:
    Navigating to that sole strip of faded blue in amongst all this grey and ash takes some doing (unless one happens to be Kaito), but it surely isn't going anywhere. It's been simply wrapped in a tight knot around a piece of slightly bent and heavily corroded iron --by wind and time rather than salt or water-- and left to trail out. At best guess, a piece of a flag stand or banner pole, either readily at hand when it broke, or merely seized for its convenience.

    The cloth is much too fine to have blown from it, however. Faded, but velvety, hand-woven, and warm, with a thread count that would make it very, very expensive in any pre-industrial civilization; not something bought in huge sheets to be blown about in the wind and rain from a distance. It's clearly been torn from a larger piece. Probably a garment. Long ago, but infinitely more recently than anything else here. Considering how easy it is to see, it's almost certainly a trail marker. Whether the person who placed it ever came back is impossible to say, as there aren't even footprints leading down. However, the way it gently flutters in the same direction, forward and right and down, at all times, feels strangely purposeful. Like more of a signpost.

    Scraping around, moving a little ash reveals characters --pilgrims marks, scraped in soapstone-- scrawled nearby. They say Take the plunge. You won't die.

    It's a difficult claim to believe. The marker hangs over one of the steepest and most crooked drops of all, eventually tapering to a mere sliver of bricks still glued together and dangling perilously over the hungry fall. There's certainly a clear view, straight down from it, through where several collapses and tectonic shifts have conveniently lined up many gaps and holes, or rather, where someone had searched until they found one by chance. At its bottom, however, one would probably crash straight through the side of a rather grandiose church building, tipped on its side and half-buried. Not exactly a safe fall. Angling for a window would mean not splattering on the stone, but only for about half a second before probably splattering on different stone.

    Eryl's scan seizes upon that one. Because he knows it. Not only does Original Face recognize it; *he* recognizes it. The main building of the infamously renamed 'Undead Parish'. That belltower where he had battled powerful guardian gargoyles years ago, now devoid of its great bell, and, more importantly, a building he had *definitely seen* just a couple of months ago when most of this group had begun excavating the ruins of the burg below it. Seft was there too; she can recognize it with equal ease. It's too unlikely to be an exact reproduction; it's the spitting image of it. In fact, he can see the exact marks on the roof, where his slugs had pierces, where Solaire's lightning had struck, where--

    Ah, but the engraved grotesque that tumbles down the slope in many pieces beneath it matches the debris they'd found deep in those lightless caves as well. How could it possibly be all the way out here? Moved from the very axle of the world to falling off of its rim. And beyond that, to his left, the geometric arches of Oolacile construction, which he'd certainly seen half-buried in the Darkroot Garden this very year, now nakedly exposed to the lack of elements. And yet the vast, overwhelming majority of it is nothing he recognizes at all.%

Yuuki Kuran (518) has posed:
"No. I don't think I'd want to build a home here. But still, somewhere to retire from time to time, if things become difficult, it might be nice to become familiar with what happens after erosion, so that the shift towards it is one we can accept, and not a little defacing, one scrape and nick at a time. I think it'd be nice, to walk the known roads."

Action Yuuki grins at her wrist slowly as she parts from Priscilla, the whole chat pleasing her in a clearly-worn way. "You don't walk the forest to claim it, to find things, or to be found. You walk the forest because it is there to be walked. It's how you live in a place - you learn the wilderness adjacent to it. That's an important feeling, I think."

Yuuki pumps her bicep, before glancing in Hiromi's direction and transitioning awkwardly into a 'haha just kidding' scratch of the back of her head. "It's something I remember without living it, so it's probably important. It's why this expedition we've undergone has been so interesting, because we... really are walking all the wilds, back to here. All the little spaces. Except, we have the Captains to craft through them, and Hiromi to seize them, and Eryl to find the secret things. Maybe it's--"

Yuuki spins on her heel, drawing left hand to right elbow, and right hand below her chin, tapping the edge of her clipboard against her mouth. "--our young greed? I think the world is very literal, and the works on top, the interpretations are the cryptic and confusing part."

Zero sums it up brilliantly. "Right. Maybe it's best to be at home in the garbage, as well."

Priscilla has posed:
    The heap of bones smells to Hiromi as nothing but bones and the iron that roughly pins them together. So old and faded that they'd have petrified and turned to fossils, had there been a drop of water in this air. She can't help but notice the faintest whiff of flame upon them --specifically, the scent of sacrificial burning, familiar to her-- but it's so vague it's more like a hallucination. An impression of a fire, which can't be dated. At any rate, she can certainly determine that the jumbled remains are human, and are made of multiple, incomplete skeletons.

    Priscilla lingers near it for a little while. Her hand hovers over the twisted facsimile of a sword, and then tries gripping and turning it around. She snaps her fingers a couple of times experimentally, and then kneels down near its edge, staring into the cold pit, vexed and slightly indignant, with a tinge of brewing worry. "It shall not light, or it is not within mine power to light it." she thinks out loud. "Perhaps this one has simply wandered too far astray from that to which it couldst be linked. Perhaps there is simply none left who possesseth the spark to tend to it." She settles in to think intensely upon the subject, but replies to Yuuki "Oftentimes, those veiled allusions and twistings of truth and past art intentioned and pleasing illusions, to mask a literality that cannot be accepted. Certainly, there must be some such things, or else Lord Gwyn wouldst not strive so dearly to revise them."

    The still figure in the rocking chair smells very much dead at all. The kind of dead where the process of rot has lost interest and moved on long ago. Just a shell of parched sinews and cracked bones. However, beneath its dusty rags, Hiromi picks up just a hint of another scent. Something somehow almost odourless, and yet unnervingly foul. Distinctly human, without any marker of sweat or blood or breath. Something that is Not Good to eat, or take, or touch.

    However, outrageously dead as that swaddled figure definitely is, Zero feels a sense of distant concentration --reverie, really-- somewhere in it. And when Seft approaches it --her? The staff looks like the remains of a slender cane for light hands, and wisps of long grey hair fall out of the darkness of a bunched up shawl-- the motionless lump definitely answers her, and the questions asked by Gilgamesh and Kukuru. An unrecognizable language, but one that intuitively registers as something from far away and a little outdated, stuffy and rough and rustic, like the heavy Scottish accent of a tough and stubborn old broad.

    "Oh, your heads are square on your shoulders, are they? I thought that clamouring tin can was the last, but here we go again." the ostensibly dead person mumbles. "Living here is a strange thing to ask about, love. Well I'm certainly here, but living? No no, this place is just one I'm too comfortable to leave, love." There's something mostly similar to a laugh when Kukuru prods and inquires. "Well, that came out of nowhere. Strange little lass, you are. No, this old stone-humped hag has no complaints. And she also has nothing for you. Not a smithereen. I just like to sit here, and take in the view." The rocking chair creaks incrementally as it shifts backwards by hairs.

    But there's a weird, almost thoughtful pause to Seft's question. The robed figure doesn't seem even slightly inclined to concern herself with Seft's appearance or style of speech. "Well now, I know this. Any more, I'll not tell you without good reason lass. But . . . at the close of the Age of Fire, all lands meet at the end of the earth. Great kingdoms and anaemic townships, they'll all be one and the same in the end. The great tide of human enterprise . . . all for naught. That's why I'm so taken by this grand sight, love."

    And then, for a moment, the crone evokes the most utterly, shiveringly *raw* tone of voice that can be, drawing deep from the throat that doesn't move at all, to gutturally sigh in rapture:

    "This must be what it's like to be a *god*."

Eryl Fairfax has posed:
    With the cloth gently pinched between thumb and forefinger, Eryl assess it. "Good quality, high thread count. Seems to have been torn from a larger whole. Waypoint, marker. For someone planning to climb out, or to guide people i-"

ANALYSIS COMPLETE.
MATCHES TO PREVIOUSLY SEEN BUILDINGS FOUND.
CONFIDENCE: 98%.

    The words die in Eryl's throat as Original Face completes its scan of the vista. Immediately, he goes to stand at that precipice past the etchings on the ground. Looking out, he spots it. The Undead Parish. Even the ancient pockmarks left by his shots, the burns left by Solaire's divine lightning. And over there, remnants of Oolacile. How can this be? How can it be here? So old, so...

    He turns on his heel and looks out now in the 'direction' they came, for all the meaning that word has. Hands placed on an ancient windowsill, a cold bead of sweat rolls down his face. "Priscilla, where have you taken us?" he asks. His words aren't accusatory, but they are filled with a chilled uncertainty. As the ancient hag speaks, Original Face slides her words in as the final piece of the puzzle.

    "Everyone," Eryl says, a sharp clap of his hands grabbing attention. "A quick lesson on the Big Crunch. Essentially, a hypothesized end of a universe. A point wherein the gravity of objects within an expanding universe counteract the constant expansion, and eventually start causing it to contract, to shrink back down into that infinitesimally small and dense dot." He punctuates the explanation with slowly opening his hand, stopping, and then curling it into a fist.

    "This is it. This is what it looks like for these lands." He gestures out at the wretched pit. "In coming out here, we covered not only distance, but eons. The end of the world, in more ways than one. We had best hope we can make the trip back."

Gilgamesh has posed:
     'This must be what it's like to be a *god*.'

     Gilgamesh's face is hidden behind his goblet. His frown is hidden. Not at blasphemy - oh, no, Gilgamesh is no friend of the gods, after all, and only Priscilla's family is spared his general indignity towards their divinity - but at the idea that something as impassive as observation is akin to godhood. That a lack of power other than watching the world go by is something worthy of divinity.

     That watching the 'great tide of human enterprise' collapse is something pleasant and wonderful.

     The goblet vanishes, and his face is no longer frowning, but that proper, traditional Gilgamesh sneer. "Is it all for nothing? As long as you're here, it's proof that they existed. That their struggle had meaning - if only to be something observed by some old and decrepit thing convinced that godhood is so motionless as this place."

     He gestures with one hand, his other hand on his hip. "Is that really all you aspire to? Only watching the end and imagining that all of it was for nothing because it ends?"

     "What do you seek, old crone? What is it you really want that keeps you here? What wisdom are you looking for -"

     "-or," he says after a moment, pursing his lips, "What wisdom are you *hiding*?"

Kaito Kumon (7387) has posed:
Take the plunge. You won't die.

Kaito stares hard at the words scraped into the stone. Take the plunge, it says. You won't die.

... Someone has been through here before. They tied this scrap of cloth here, and wrote these words, and...

... why? This feels like a trap. This has to be a trap. It's someone else trolling... right?

And yet...

... It does look like the gaps in the wall there, and the window there, and the sideways doorframe there... he could probably make it all the way through it. Probably, and then he'd still hit the ground... it has to be a troll. The fantasy setting equivalent of someone who goes online and posts about how you can totally get a special S-rank Inves lock if you wait at the dog statue next to the train station for five hours at midnight in the middle of a thunderstorm.

... And yet.

"... Henshin."

LOCK ON! COME ON! BANANA ARMS!

"... It's Hachiko all over again," says Baron, to himself, and jumps anyway.

Hiromi has posed:
    "Pups know best," Hiromi says to Yuuki, "'importance,' of that. 'Exploration.'" Useful words, which she chooses to use, though they sound so foreign on her tongue. "Look to sides of home. Learn what lays in darkness. Doors are made-things for opening. Pups know best, but old ones lay roots. Little moving." She moves just her head, gesturing to the not-living woman with her chin. "Nothing grows here. But we grow, yes? You see."

    Whether there is wisdom to be found in wolves is left for others to judge. Hiromi moves on, without waiting long after the mysterious figure has finished speaking. Hiromi hasn't, in fact, seen the soapstone telling her where to jump, and hasn't recognized its importance when Kaito reads it. She simply goes, taking her halberd in both hands. She doesn't jump far, or really jump at all, but step out into freefall, letting gravity take her.

    The weapon was a dangerous thing, something made well enough, long enough ago, that it could hurt her, but that doesn't mean it's invincible, any more than was its wielder, when facing off against her. But in her hands, anything she holds becomes an extension of herself, another limb or claw, here useful for being extended from her reach. There's no possibility of it breaking, now, whether there had been before, when she thrusts it to the side, into the cliff, scraping sparks with the force of its passage, leaving long lines in stone as she controls her descent. Only a little, not slowed enough to be safe, and too impatient, too heedless of the danger that should be inherent to any leap from a cliff, to care for that. It's only to guide her path, to push off one wall and kick-slide off another, that concerns her. Each strike keeps her going, avoiding sideways constructions in her way, banking off angled walls, grabbing spires only long enough to throw herself further from them.

    The challenge, to Hiromi, isn't in reaching the bottom safely, but in continuing to fall with nothing barring her way, continuing on down until she finds something that looks important enough to crash into, speedrunning her path through dusty stone architectural garbage while trusting her instincts, and the specific placement of the chapel, to lead her to something worth finding, even if it's not something that was ever hidden.

    She isn't worried about what happens at the end, because she knows that she's harder than any stone.

Kukuru (7371) has posed:
It speaks! She speaks, even, answering Kukuru's questions and giving her yet more questions to consider asking. The odd language is something to think about, sure, but there's also the mention of the tin can and whether this person is even alive, or the view of the great fuckoscape. Before she asks her anything, however, Eryl gives a lesson on the Big Crunch!

It's not something Kukuru's familiar with, so it's a convenient thing to listen to. "Wait. If we're all the way out here in the... Um. The future, I guess? Does that mean we're super old now? Or..." She trails off, the time issue giving her reason to pause as the implications of such a thing weighs on her mind further.

"... We can go backwards, too, right? Then everyone we know won't be dead from being so far behind us, right?" She actually sounds somewhat anxious while asking that, more likely than not being the first time anyone's ever heard her actively distressed about anything. It takes her some considerable effort to actually calm herself down enough to finally address the crone again, although there's a distinctly focused tone starting to creep into Kukuru's voice at that.

Only starting, of course, because she's starting to revert right back to her more relaxed tone within seconds. "That tin can you talked about earlier... Did they speak to you, too? Where'd they go?" She pauses briefly, looking towards Seft and Gilgamesh while considering what's meant by the 'end of the earth' and 'hidden wisdom'.

That's probably why Eryl spoke of the Big Crunch. "Hmm... Oh! Did they ever come back?" Another pause. "How long ago did you see them?"

Zero Kiryu has posed:
"It's not," Zero says, simply. He walks forward to one side of the dead-but-not figure -- he suspects that the distinction between dead and alive is quite blurred here -- and looks out into the distance. Even so, he didn't need to do that in order to make his decision about what feels like being a god. Maybe, though, he decided that he should at least make sure before he went on running his mouth about it.

"I suppose... it may depend on what you think of as a God."

"There is no difference between an exceedingly powerful person and a God," he carries on, folding his arms over his chest and surveying the thing he described as a cosmic garbage dump. "Most of the world has no means to effect change on you. The things that can... those are like gods, too. I'm a being like that, and I've met quite a few. Some were little more than mighty painters..."

"... and some were sickly children, spreading their wasting to the whole of the reality they crafted. When you've had a hand in putting up all the chairs, and turning off the lights, you get an idea of just how many gods there are out there. Even if some stubborn mules hate the term."

Inclining his head, Zero says, "There is something to being there to witness the door being shut and locked for the last time. Maybe for an ordinary person that is like being a god. If you are an ordinary person, then, well done."

"But if you ask me, the god is the one that turned out the lights," he concludes, taking a couple of steps back.

Priscilla has posed:
    The very, very old lady, responds to Gilgamesh with the total lack of urgency that can only come from someone who has very much lost their marbles a long time ago, or an especially bleak kind of country hick bodhisattva. "Now no need to lose your head so soon young lad. There'll be plenty of time for that later. I'm sure you'll get around to it in your own time, just like all the others. Take a spell to enjoy it, while what's between your ears still works so well, sharp one you are."

    "But the time for aspirations was an awful long time ago, love. Those heady days of chasing dreams are long behind me, but I've no complaints about death mucking about while I wait. A view like this reminds you of how small those little things were. Just how many people with how many dreams were in this big wide world, all this time. All together but separate all the same. No sense in getting ruffled just because it's over, lad. Take the time to appreciate just how much of it you never understood."

    A rough, nearly matronly chuckle echoes out from the shadow covering her face, her chair creaking at Zero's approach. "We've had a lot of gods over all this time. Some of them were real, most of them weren't, and some were just different names for the same ones. But turning out the lights; there's the trick, love. Fires go out on their own eventually. Even a great big log can only catch light so many times before blowing on the coals is useless. Pull up a chair with me and sit a spell on god's throne. Maybe it's not quite the same as standing on top of the world, but it's close enough to get the idea. A little peek of what god might have been thinking all this time. And when you have all this time to think, soon enough, you run out of questions to ask."

    She answers Kukuru as if it were the same grade of question, even. "Oh yes, he passed through here a while ago. Big chatterbox he was. A bold one too. Had his wits about him. Not like the quiet one at all. Spoke to him a time, but once he realized this old hag wasn't brimming with goodies, he struck off on his own. Down there." Glacially, her gnarled cane removes itself from its heap of settled dust, and points past the ruins of the collapsed Parish far below, over a great big hill created by the husk of a toppled circle tower, dotted with ramshackle sheds, and at a depression that can't be seen from the cliff.

    "No no, I'm afraid nobody comes all the way out here just to come back. But if you're going, when you see that tin can, pass the word alone. I'm afraid he's a little too brave for his own good. Far below, there's a deep, dark hole carved out of a tree. From time to time, voices brim from the depths even now. Horrible sounds, of an afflicted thing yet cursing men. It's not the place to be looking for treasure, so don't you run off and die either, love. It's a nicer view with a few people in it."

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    "Curious. Then, is that where I've seen this? It has to be... Like echoes collecting in the accoustics of a room, or smoke gathering at the top of a building." Seft mutters, her voice subtly buzzing. She nods several times to Eryl Fairfax, seeming to agree in some way. This world *does* seem defined by similar cycles. "Theorizing. If this is where those echoes collect... maybe what we're looking for is beyond that?" She walks to where some of the others are headed. "('m') Try jumping", you say? Well, that sounds stupid!

    She thinks back. Far, *far* back, to an exploration of Priscilla's Painted World, and the descent into the Abyss. Is this like that was? Is this strange place, in some way, not unlike the darkness that collected in the bottom of that crevice in that painted world, which gathered there in compressed time and which had welcomed them gently? It has to be, right?

    Hell. Nothing but to try. She jumps, filling her mind with those memories, the murmuring she remembers deep below. George only notices in time to shout out to her and run to the edge to see what happens as she descends.

Priscilla has posed:
    Upon Eryl figuring out the rest, Priscilla replies to him in an intensely thoughtful haze, her brown knitted in intense concentration, her lips moving silently before and after the single sentence reply she gives him. "To the Ringed City." she says, as if that explains all-- no, to be taken to mean that it is *all* that can be explained. This is the only place it can be. This is the only place that was ever marked out here.

    And the old hag hears her. One can tell by the way her chair finally rocks just slightly forwards again, and her cane touches the ground, even without turning to just see her. Gilgamesh's suspicions are given ample reason to blossom, when she says "Why, where did you hear that name, love? Oh, I suppose it doesn't matter." It might be Seft's imagination, but the crone might have just nodded. "It's just what you'd guess. The Ringed City is said to be at world's end. Past this heap of rubbish, as far as one can go. You've come to the right place. But be warned, you'd better think twice. The forsaken Ringed City was walled off by the gods to contain those pygmies in exile."

    There is a long, pregnant pause, punctuated only by the minute splintering, one iota at a time, of that antique rocking chair seesawing faintly with each passing thought. ". . . and the dark soul is better left well alone."

Priscilla has posed:
    Leaping from the cliff is a journey. One has plenty of time to reach terminal velocity and question the wisdom of their choices. Seft and Kaito, following the route laid out for them, thread the needle through a wildly dangerous suicide tunnel of impossibly perched and angled architecture, and just as anticipated, end up crashing straight through the faded glass of the parish's grand sunward window.

    Instead of dashing themselves to pieces on the hard floor behind, though, they land with weightless, disorienting thumps in a shallow clump of ash, which blows up under their weight to reveal the faintly glowing circle of white lines and roughly scrawled soapstone sigils below it, ostensibly responsible for breaking their fall with miraculous power, but invisible for the sea of dust.

    There's little to say about the inside. It is as the Parish was. Despite the advanced age of everything, here, for whatever reason, petrified pews and tarnished braziers at least remain standing in place, as the building has snapped down its middle to let one wall rest horizontally over the coffin of its mostly right-angled insides, spilled in with ash. A few fossilized, empty shelves still clog the corners, between where unrelated debris from higher buildings on the heap has rolled down and collected in this bowl, leading to a sprawling garbage heap on the indoor slopes of ash containing everything from battered shields to blackened globes. There are the faint impression of bodies here, long turned to dust, like snow angels in the older ash, though only guttering wisps of white vapour, and a few twinkling objects, remain in their ditches.

    Nothing particular stands out about it. It seems a perfectly safe way to progress. Their trust certainly hadn't lead them astray, since there's no sign the message-writer had met his end down here.

    Then just when Kaito goes to step ahead, he feels resistance, holding him in place. Looking down, he sees where his own shadow has split open like a butchered carcass and spilled forth a pool of spreading blue-blackness as umbral gore. Cold, inky black water splashes around his ankles, as if draw straight from the abyssal depths without any respect to even this amount of light. Waterlogged hands snag his ankles, pitch black fingers with two too many knuckles curled in tight, iron vice claws around him, and sodden scarecrow arms, long and dislocated, begin dragging him backwards, towards where a suggestion of a human head has risen from beneath him, though even its shape is pinched and crushed and stretched, and its face is hollowed out into a fold of gaping blackness, from which it utters and unearthly, wailing moan. The water feels like it's rising, but in actuality, the thing is somehow trying to pull him into his own shadow; or at least the bloody wound suddenly opened in it.

    Seft is in little better of a position. Almost simultaneously, and certainly before she can do much to help, ice cold water drips onto her shoulder from above, and another too-long, too-thin, too-stretched, crushed and contorted figure, oozes through the shadows in the rafters and falls on her like the next droplet, wrapping its lanky bulk around her, and brandishing what appears to be a crude farming sickle in one hand, grappling with her to dumbly hook it under her throat and try to pull her head off with the vicious and callous leverage of a great ape. The simple iron blade bends with the effort, but its wetness burns to the touch, frigid water turning even solid metal black and pitted and full of holes, smoking as if charred.

Kukuru (7371) has posed:
"There were a couple of them, then? That must have been nice, then. It's pretty.... What's the word... Surreal out here." Kukuru replies, taking a moment to just stare off into the distance as well and really take in what she's seeing. Those twisted buildings, that massive chasm into nothing, all sorts of things that must have combined from everything else...

"I can see why it'd be nice to just sit out here sometimes. Even seeing some people out there... Yeah, people watching can be pretty fun. Learning their stories, coming up with what brought them there if they don't just tell us... Oh. I'll have to take a nap here once our work out... Er." She narrows her eyes as she keeps peering into the broad view before her, eventually just gesturing around at it while clearly not knowing where specifically the investigation will take them next. "... Over there is done, too."

Smooth. Noticing that movement from the crone's cane, she looks from it towards where it's pointing into the distance, squinting again as tries to look through the Parish, the hill, and the tower surrounded by sheds into wherever the cane is pointing. Sadly, Kukuru can't see through walls, so she'll have to settle for knowing a vague direction of where to go.

"We'll let him know, mhm. It shouldn't be too hard to find him if he's outgoing and big, right?" Kukuru commits all that to memory as best she can, then laughs lightly and and gives the robed figure a gentle pat on the arm. Despite the fact that she's still wearing those giant claws on her hands, she still manages to make that contact feel affectionate somehow. "Tha-anks~ And we'll be okay. Making sure everyone gets back home safe is my job, you know? And after that..."

Kukuru reaches into her pockets again, fishing out a giant plastic bottle and a rectangular tupperware container to set beside the rocking chair. The former is filled with fresh water, and latter is stuffed to the brim with homemade meatballs, stuffed eggplants, and scalloped potatoes. "Don't worry about washing them when you're done. I'll just throw them in the dishwasher when I get back home."

Priscilla has posed:
    Hiromi gets to skip all of that by virtue of catching her earlier. The blessed brass and titanite of her godsgrave halberd steers her through even that much solid stone with ease, and has just enough bend to let her launch to a suitably wide and stable platform partway down. It first looks like half the span of a wide and level stone bridge, but when she lands, she can spy around a rocky corner, a system of steps that rise up to several battlements in a pentagonal shape, marking her destination as what used to be a single corner of an immensely thick and incredibly fortified citadel wall.

    The tower corner is covered in pools of black, brackish water, like staring at the aftermath of fresh rain at midnight, though it seems no rain ever falls here. Partway up the stairs, she sees what is unmistakably an ancient pile of crumbled remains barely weighing down the pale blue-green cloak they had once occupied, still clutching some object in one hand, and reaching towards the crumbled edge of the wall, overlooking a much steeper drop, to what seems like natural earth, albeit foggy and poorly visible from his height, as if they'd dried to crawl and toss themselves over the edge, and failed.
    She isn't alone there either. A considerably more mobile pair of humanoid figures lumbers back and forth along the length of severed wall in aimless circuits. Each of them is twice her height, and certainly many times her weight, in part for the layers of leather and plate swaddled over one another as patchwork reinforcement, where some original armour had proved insufficient, but mostly because of the fact that their guts have burst open from the inside, their entrails fallen out, and their empty bellies instead turned to whorled and fibrous knots of root-growth, ashen grey creepers having crawled out in every direction and infested their bodies from neck to toe, clinging to them in thick, parasitic layers.

    And it *is* neck to toe, beecause above the ragged remains of faded red capes, stretched to the fraying point around their grotesquely bloated forms, their neckguards terminate into swirling masses of empty clouds. Ashen mist that coalesces and implodes into a well of utter blackness, like a hovering void in space nestled in a ball of clammy ocean fog. Staring into the pit where a head should be triggers all kinds of primal instincts exactly the wrong way. However, the exquisite, if corroded, curved chopping swords, each as large as Kaito's motorbike, that they drag along with them, are a familiar and obvious threat. She can seen the remnants of gorgeous gold decoration, but the massive weapons look as if they've been worn down as if gnawed by worms.

    She has a straight shot to the hollow the old crone was pointing to. But she is also Hiromi.

Eryl Fairfax has posed:
    "To the Ringed City," Eryl affirms to Priscilla. And the old crone confirms it. It's here, past this enormous mound of refuse. Beyond the end of the world. Gwyn truly wanted this pygmys erased utterly. It raises a single question, which Original Face captures and stores away to be paired with evidence later.

"Why did Gwyn not simply kill them?"

    The sun god was never above genocidal war, as the dragons could attest to. So why give them one of his only daughters and this land, so far away from conceivably anything that they would vanish from memory? Was it a fair deal, or a coerced one? And if it was coerced, who was doing the coercing?

    "Thank you for enlightening us ma'am. Personally, I'd love to stay and watch." He means it too. As one who felt it his duty to remember that which had long since fallen, this waste pile is something he feels a strong desire to record. "But I'm afraid we must press on. Apologies for distracting you from your gazing."

    With a courteous bow, he walks to that edge and tips forward, spreading his arms and legs to maximize air resistance as he plummets, wind whipping at his face and hair. He too, crashes into the remains of the Parish, that whitestone sigil breaking his fall. Immediately, he sees the crawling shadows and horrific figures that assail Kaito and Seft and points his fingers, implants creating a firing solution so he can light them up with precise shots. "Keep moving!" he shouts at the two, wading through the ash to advance.

Zero Kiryu has posed:
"A fire going out, huh..."

Zero nods, but moves on almost immediately. He says, "What 'god' was thinking, well... I think that it must have been all the normal things. I wants, and I hopes. At the least, I don't think there are any gods I've passed by that didn't approach things like that on some level, even if they said otherwise."

"If I'm wrong, I don't need to know. Understanding just one person is hard enough," he decides.

In the end, he's not about to proceed ahead of Yuuki, though. Which means that as others head below, he's still left standing above at least until she sees fit to take the plunge (doubtless shortly after this very thought)-- the only request he hasn't fulfilled through his inaction is pulling up a chair. Really, he might as well have.

"Little enough that was once associated with Gwyn... seems as if it could be described as a coherent enough person still to be called 'exile'. Who are you, to advise that these things go undisturbed? Not the indifferent actor waiting for the embers to die that spoke moments ago," he probes.

Kaito Kumon (7387) has posed:
It's Hachiko. It's Hachiko all over again, and Kaito isn't just getting soaked this time.

Baron falls through the environment, managing to narrowly miss everything on the way down, and crash-lands... softly?

Baron gets up. He dusts himself up - as much as he can here, anyway, and looks around. There's... still nothing here. A surplus of ruins, to be sure, but nothing that would be hidden by a shortcut like this. There's a few sparkly, twinkly things in the ditches, maybe... and a path ahead, which might be more interesting.

The question of which Baron is going to do first turns out to not matter, because when he takes a step forward, he starts getting dragged down by his own shadow.

"Rgh!" He turns as much as he's able, reflexively stabbing out at the ground, trying to hit something vital, something to slow it down. He's getting dragged in further, bit by bit, a wailing moan echoing around him to drive the terror further.

And then, still being dragged, Baron goes for his trump card: He clicks open the lock on his own belt.

The Baron transformation reverts - and for at least a moment, there's no armor for the thing to grip on, giving Kaito *just* enough space to slip through, dive and roll, get a little bit of space and time to himself-

- and he grabs for his improbable backup weapon: a deck of playing cards.

The top card (which turns out to be the jack of diamonds, not that it matters) gets drawn back and flung, launching from Kaito's fingers - on an inerring course for the eyes of the head that just emerged from the ground!

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    Armor goes on, over the surface of Seft's body. Trajectory-adjusting microthrusters shift around it, pulsing softly as she feels less and less certain about this descent. She curls up as she descends through the new gap in the window. She thuds into the ground, her armor going wild, beeping small alerts about unknown gravitational influences. She lights a flare in her hand and waves up to George.

    "Jesus, girl. Just 'cause it works once don't mean..." George mutters as he stands up, heaving a sigh of relief. "Looks like the motorbike guy found the way forward. Seft just confirmed, all's well there. Who wants to go real deep?" The rest of the Flotilla ready to follow...

    Seft drops the flare at her feet, letting it mark the objective. Undoubtedly the others will follow in an APC-supplied descent elevator arrangement, just in case. Seft draws her axe and shield, and moves on... But no, Kaito's under attack! "ALERT! LOOK OUT!" This is dangerous! As she dashes to slam her shield into the limbs, she finds herself the one slammed. Thrown to the ground by the impact, she's pinned hard. "*BZZT!* Stressed! Get off!!" She rolls, struggling to get her arms between her vitals and her assailant. The sickle comes down and slams clean through a durasteel-reinforced shield, inches from her face. And she can see that water sizzling a hole through her shoulder pauldron...

    With a burst of armor-assisted strength, she maneuvers and kicks the shield hard, trying to disarm the assailant of its weapon as it remains lodged in there, before swinging hard to plunge her battleaxe into the monster's side, hopefully hard enough to get it off her! SLAM! KICK! She's struggling to get to her feet, buzzing with pain and grunting with strain, trying to plant a heel on the shield to pin the monster's arm hard enough to bring the axe down on its neck in several heavy, roaring chops.

Hiromi has posed:
    Hiromi lands, somewhere other than the others, though that's no matter. If they're looking for something, then splitting up is the obvious choice. Staying together is for those worried over becoming lost (which they might) or put in danger (which they are). She stands up, takes a few swings through the air with her halberd, feeling for any looseness, but it's perfectly fine. Of course it is.

    Creatures larger than she is. Again, this world is one of giants. Hiromi isn't sure if she prefers it that way or not. On the one hand, it gives her bigger things to strike or throw. On the other, they're too big to fit her teeth around them without tearing them to smaller pieces. In this case, seeing the incredibly unappetizing state of the figures, she decides she'd rather not get her tongue anyway near that, anyway, which means the size is 'good,' after all.

    Just then, she spots the blue-green cloak, what's left of the onewho wore it, and by following that direction with her eyes--earth? Not more courtyards, more stone, buildings as man has wrought them, smashed together at odd angles, but earth? Perhaps not, as she cannot quite see it from here. But perhaps it is. To have earth beneath her feet would be better than this dead place. It's worth taking a leap, on faith.

    But then she'd leave these things alone, with their grotesque bodies and spooky headlessness, their massive, armored forms taunting her, their deathly states begging to put firmly beneath the earth. Can she really leave them alone, when their very existence so demands she end them?

    Hiromi sprints, maintaining balance on the stone with both the pads of her feet and boney claws that only now extend, (literally) tearing her way to the cloak, but in an arcing path that takes her well within range of the closer of the lumbering figures. "Here, here I am!" aren't words she shouts, but the meaning of them, a sound like taunting laughter, "Try and catch me, chase me!" With only the tips of her fingers on the tip of the butt-end, she swings her polearm to clip her opponent, in what would do little without its lightning, and without slowing down at all.

    She's away again, her focus on the remains of whomever had passed through here, before. Almost passed through. Failed to quite make it, rather. "You wished for soft earth? I'll give you that." She doesn't know what the object is. She didn't hear quite everything the crone had said before she leaped. But she sweeps up everything that will remain together within the cloak, these bare remains of some adventurer or pilgrim, and turns to face the thing she'd clipped.

    It's odd, that lack of a head. If she weren't the Archwolf, she expects, that would bother her far more, just looking at it. It's something that should be frightening. A wrongness manifest. A thing that shouldn't be, just like this place. Or is it not death she sees, at all, but some strange life, merely puppeting the consumed man?

    What matters is that it's following her. "Come, come!" she commands it, and then she steps backward, her back to the hope of earth, somewhere foggy and far below.

    A better place for graves.

Priscilla has posed:
    Mysterious robed lady wearing a huge piece of barely chiseled stone, calling herself an 'old hag', responds to Kukuru with a dusty, croaking chuckle, thoroughly amused. "'Surreal'? My, you lot like those fancy words. But isn't that just daft. 'Surreal'. The way I see it, this is about the only real thing I've ever seen. What feels more like a dream is all those years ago when this heap of rubbish was called 'history'."

    She seems to find Zero's conclusion even more amusing. "That's the problem with understanding anything, love. It only really makes sense once it's over. Things that get far away shrink inside your eyes until all of it fits together, and you see where you were wrong. Like this wondrous sight. I'd never understand this much about the world if I travelled it all my life while it was still standing." Her chair then stops creaking at the mention of Gwyn by name.

    "I've no close ties to that name, love. But if you know it, then you'd best keep that close to your heart. There's no telling which things you'll forget first; and once you've forgot, there's no way to know that you've forgotten it. Like knowing that no one should go near that place, but forgetting why that is. You'll know the right time to tell someone, should they have the mind to ask of you." She makes a very recognizable Old Lady Sigh at Eryl. "I suppose you're not willing to reconsider though, are you? Well, that's just fine as well. It's a rare thing, to have a true duty. Don't go and take it for granted, I suppose. Otherwise, you won't do any better than this; not you or that poor tin can."

    When Kukuru lays out packed lunch, the rocking chair resumes its gentle, slightly creepy noise. "Ahh, no need to fuss over this old woman, love. Well, I might've told a fib or two earlier. If you're really going, you can have this. It's only fair you know. Hold out your hands, love." An outrageously ornate and immaculately well-kept ring of white gold is slid from an ash grey finger and plopped into Kukuru's claws. The face depicts a graven image of some sort of priestess on an enamel background. "Keep your marbles intact, love. At least until I lose mine!" She then starts laughing to herself.

%

Gilgamesh has posed:
     'History is surreal.' 'This end is the only real thing that exists.' Gilgamesh's lip curls up in a sneer, but he doesn't protest. Old, insane prophets are something almost as old as he is, present in more legends than he bothers to count. Arguing with old crones is usually a waste of time.

     'The dark soul is better left alone.'

     That, instead, he fixates on. He runs through a brief check of his treasures in his mind - not that he ever could, anymore, not since he started using them as weapons, since now the painstakingly-organized Gate is nothing but a maddened heap - but he's quite certain that he doesn't have such a thing. Slowly, the King's fingers tap against his hip. His eyes meet Priscilla's, confident that she knows what he's thinking upon hearing of something unique better left well alone.

     After all, she hadn't been able to persuade him not to pursue *her*, had she?

     Then he looks forward.

     In his mind, a million, million, million lines, an infinite number of shadows, countless moments of himself across every reality, spread out before him. Quickly they pare down to only this one, to only the future of this time, this Gilgamesh. He looks forward with a single thought, discarding every golden shadow that walks alongside him but splits in different paths.

     'How do I acquire the dark soul.'

Priscilla has posed:
    Down, down, further down, not to the ground if such a thing exists, but at least out of sight of a cliff, Kaito and Seft are in trouble.

    The sensation of sinking into one's own shadow is, all told, so mundane that it's actually scarier. It feels like falling slowly into pitch black, ice cold water, so deep down in some unfathomable depths that the thin skin of reality rendering it two dimensional is all that keeps its immense pressure in check, and it takes the shocking physical strength of the dread entity to pull Kaito against it. Whether he'd drown, freeze, or have the life crushed out of him first, is thankfully an answer that only his primal crisis brain will have to examine, because dematerializing his armour gives him just the time he needs to slip free.

    His shadow is left behind. Well, not really, but a murky blue-black puddle shaped exactly like it is. He sees the upper half of a creature identical to the one attacking Seft, half-submerged, like a perfectly demented horror rendition of the Roadrunner zooming off into the tunnel painted on a wall. His stabbing seems to have been largely useless, only splashing the puddle around, but the card to the face snaps its blank, misshapen blob of a head backwards with relative ease. It shees blood like a midnight sky, with glittering blue stars; the only thing of beauty to contrast the grotesqueness of the sight.

    Seft also quickly finds that it feels like her attacker weighs next to nothing. It's more like fighting a bad dream. Grappling with the arms and legs of ambulatory sleep paralysis. The sickle, of murky and black metal, goes flying out of its hands along with two of its fingers, still gripping the handle. Even after chopping off its head with her axe blow though, it continues to claw and writhe like the severed tentacle of an octopus. It takes a few more dismembering chops to render it still.

    Eryl arrives with much the same lack of difficulty, at that special point, and has just the right time and distance to put a good number of holes through Kaito's attacker while it's still knocked down. The instantaneous loss of 'blood' causes it to deflate, like a lumpy, distorted balloon. The both of them slip back under a bubbling layer of watery nothingness, and disappear.

    And then there are a lot more. Old shattered debris rumbles and stirs and mounds of ash sift aside, where more monsters push themselves up from the floor, some crawling on just their hands, some managing to stand on long, lanky, skeletal legs, and shambling towards the group. Others continue to fall from the ceiling, extruding slowly, and then dropping sharply, from the hanging shadows, like snow melting. The rest are armed too, with jagged sickles, daggers, and one with a long, black walking staff, which seems to have a sickle blade bound to the end by sodden grey cloth.

    They congregate quickly around both exits on the same floor, blocking off two open doorways that would lead outside by numbers. Despite being terribly dangerous, they aren't too hard to kill, lacking any kind of defensive instinct whatsoever; in fact, it almost kind of feels like they *gladly* rush into their own destruction, with those horrid moans and wails. However, each time one of them falls, another simply takes its place, bubbling up out of the deep or dripping from the vaulted ceiling. Only the creature with the staff hangs back from close combat, waving it around in the air as if possessed.

Priscilla has posed:
    Hiromi can tell that she is significantly faster than her current 'playmates'. At her taunting, they turn towards her with stiff, lumbering motions, partly restricted by the petrified growth all over them, but partly as if they don't quite know how to walk anyways. She can also read their posture. Or rather, read a sort of body language off of them. Even derive some kind of meaning in the sound they make. Without any kind of head or throat, all that comes out is a deep, dull, throbbing roar like water crashing into the bottom of a dry well or winter wind violently resonating on a windowpane. But she can feel them flex with aggression. Anger. Hunger.

    They don't respond with pain, though, when she cuts into the side of one. She feels the feedback of hitting something hard and dense like stone, rather than wood or leather, but her weapon overpowers the task easily anyways. Black and white 'smoke' gushes from the wound for a moment, as if pressurized, lukewarm and heavy, and with a sudden scent that reminds her exactly of cold, human sweat. It gives up on trying to track her, when she steals the cloaked remains and runs. Instead, it angles right for the edge and gives chase. At least in a straight line, it, and its companion shortly after, can pick up an impressive amount of charging elephant speed in a second.

    They even chase her far over the edge. They fall the entire way fearlessly. Hiromi lands on top of a bank of silty grey dirt, certainly 'earth', but also certainly wholly sterile. The two monsters land in the soupy, greenish-grey water that fills much of the surrounding area, making for deep pools, shallows, and dry sandbars, shrouded in mist. They disappear into the water completely, as if they'd fallen down a miles deep pit hidden below the surface. As if they never were.

    Given a moment of time, Hiromi finds that all that's left inside the cloak is a collection of dust and metal buckles that was probably once the gear of a traveller, and a mound of human bone ash collected in the hood. Specifically, ash, as if burnt. The mystery object she's seized is clearly some sort of dagger, though it seems impractically thin for any job, set with a large blue crystal; rather, it appears to actually be a blue crystal wrapped like a handle and fixed to a blade. The blade is engraved with writing that, to her sense for these things, appears to be a prayer, meant to ward off danger during travels. There is no power left in that prayer, but there is an old magic still in the weapon.

    About five seconds later, her enemies burst from the water like beaching killer whales, fifteen feet of monstrous being erupting from three inches of soupy water on both sides of her. Their giant curved swords are exactly as heavy as they would appear, and somehow still wickedly sharp despite their corrosion. Far from the sloth and stiffness of their legs, both enemies assault her with a hail of flexible combination strikes, quickly pulverizing her standing to nothing. There is, if nothing else, the instinct of fighting still left in those arms. And they're very, very strong.

Kaito Kumon (7387) has posed:
"Thank you," says Kaito, once he's had a chance to get back up to his feet. "Being attacked by my own shadow..."

He glances at his actual shadow. "Or... something mimicking it, at least, was unpleasant."

He dusts himself off. "Let's take a moment to regroup. It's not likely that there's more dangers nearby, we would have heard or seen them by now."

He doesn't get a moment to regroup. With *impeccable* straight man timing, as soon as he's finished talking, the monsters start emerging. Kaito keeps a straight expression in the face of being instantly wrong.

<J-IC-Scene> Eryl Fairfax says, "Yes, so there's not enough time to waste on clearing them out. Just punch through."

This sounds like a good idea. Kaito does the short mid-episode version of his henshin to get his armor back, and then quickly grabs the bike lock from his belt and tosses it on the ground - it unfolds into his motorcycle, which he quickly gets on, gripping onto the throttle with one hand and wielding his lance in the other.

    The archetype of the knight astride his charger is not fully accurately represented here - the motorcycle instead of a steed and Baron's garish red-and-yellow armor and the lance looking like a peeled banana, all take something away from the gravitas, the visual impact... but the physical impact is every bit the same. The motorcycle's gunned, revved up to full throttle and then kicked into drive, ramming through the horde while Baron swings at anything that doesn't get out of the way of the charging cycle.

Eryl Fairfax has posed:
    "Ma'am, I've had a lot of time to consider and reconsider my life, and my course has yet to change. Though, I'm only just over 100. Maybe things will be different at 1000." He looks out at the dreg heap again and shakes his head. "But even if it were, and even if I knew that for sure, one can only act in the moment. I'll not be rendered helpless by the spectre of the future."

    And with that, Eryl descends, landing in the fallen cathedral and coming face to face with the shadow beings. As they congregate, Original Face analyses their movements. Absolutely no attempts at defence, only rushing forward to overwhelm. Is it a hive mind of some sort, throwing away these like one would a mere fingernail? Or... are they begging for death?

    Kaito conjures his bike and barrels forward, jousting with the amassed shadows to clear a path. Eryl runs after, picking off any of them that rise up and attempt to deseat the banana knight with quick, precise headshots. But at the same time, he points upwards and shoots at the rusted window frames above, precisely picking them apart to create a collapse. The debris can sit upon the thick pile of ash, and hopefully create a path for those who follow to run upon, rather than wading through the muck.

Kukuru (7371) has posed:
"Whoa... You really do see stuff different. Hm... Wonder if I'll ever get to see like that one day." Kukuru comments, not being particularly clear whether she's actually trying to get another answer from the old hag or just musing aloud about her own future. She's content to just squat in place and stare out into the distance for a little bit longer, furrowing her brow as she tries to make sense of the lady's response to Zero.

Eventually, she gets back up onto her feet, looking down at the (relatively) tiny ring in her claw. "Are you sure? It's..." She goes quiet for a moment, then takes off a claw to slip that ring on the appropriately named ring finger. A moment later, and then she swaps it over to her index finger instead. "Thank you. I'll take good care of it, but that doesn't mean you're off the hook taking care of yourself, either."

She pats the lady's hand softly, then slips the claw back on. "I don't know how many marbles I've got left if I'm going down there, but... You know. It's easier to keep them where they belong with everyone else's to hold it all together." A smile and a wave is given, and then Kukuru disappears in a burst of dark magic.

Moments later, she reappears in a similar burst not far from where Eryl, Kaito, and Seft are dealing with that whole mess of strange creatures coming out of ash and debris. Granted, she winds on top of the cathedral rather than inside of it, but that's close enough for what she's looking for. Kukuru teleports again, this time right over that staff-wielding creature so she can get a hold of it and hurl it at the nearest wall in case it's preparing to throw some kind of terribly unpleasant magic around or something. She doesn't linger for long, though, as she starts leaping/claw-flinging herself from spot to spot, clearing a path where she can and teleporting to keep up with the group instead of actually walking.

Walking sucks.

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    As the others establish their elevator, Seft works to give Kaito and Eryl results for their efforts. "Panicked. Give me a path, sir knight! Gotta outrun the shadows here, I think!" The enduring onslaught stresses her out rather a great deal, but Eryl Fairfax has her back. She leaps onto a chunk of the new debris-bridge, bringing out her heavy scanners! They can't just stay here, they have to punch a path out and then find somewhere safe...

    But where could be safe? She struggles to try to remember, and thinks back... Within the chapel, a mound of bleached and dusty bones is heaped together and speared through with a twisted iron sword, not unlike a fire tending rod, cold and inert.

    This is as far from the fire that sustains the world as they can get, but still, something associated with fire marked the boundary between safety and peril. Maybe it'll mark more? She tunes her scanner. Search for heavy chunks of plain iron and bone-associated deposits -- or perhaps even just the layout of the area and any detected sciency energies will be enough. If the others can punch a path out, can Seft guide them with more data in the tactical network?

Hiromi has posed:
    Sterile though it may be, dry as bones and dust, a fall to earth below isn't something that can harm Hiromi. Rather, she greets it like a home to which she's returned, and it gives way to slow the fall below her. She does nothing with the dagger or remains, at first, but leaves them in the oddly shaped crater she's left as she leaps up out of it, and waits for her opponents. She'd felt that hard resistance, and known they would turn to chase her. The bundled cloak, with its buckles and ash, are swallowed up as the hole disappears, now safely buried.

    For a moment, she's disappointed, as nothing rises again from the water. Was it that deep? Did something within it silently take her quarry? If so, she'll have a new target -- but no sooner does she think this, holding herself still and ready to pounce, than the water erupts in a sudden pincer attack.

    Despite facing the wrong way, she still springs forward, dodging under the blows and taking distance. She almost makes it, but that surprising speed catches her, and one curved greatsword catches her trailing leg. It's a worthy blow, bypassing her most basic defense, and crushes her ankle to a useless mess, while turning her leap into a slam into the ground, facefirst.

    Good.

    As one hand strikes barren earth, it shoots upward beneath her, tossing her into the air before settling again, blades crashing beneath her. Throughout, she's kept one hand on her halberd, and now comes down spinning, eyes wide and teeth bared, putting her back and her strength into what becomes a two-handed, downward swing aimed through where the head of one dead-knight-thing should have been. Lightning arcs from the point of impact.

    She hits the ground with her good foot first, then the butt of her halberd, standing it in the ground as she brings both hands together to catch the second blade, driving her standing through the dirt, and toppling her when her crushed foot fails to keep her stable. But the strike was ruined, and as she bends over backward beneath the next blow, when next she springs to her feet, both are full and whole.

    The earth carries the divine lightning weapon back into her hands, and she spins to block with the haft, then drive forward, not allowing the space to aim a full swing into her, and fairly ruining the ground all over again as she uses it to push into a titanically forceful shove back into the water. Leaving her own back open in the process, she takes each blow from her second opponent to her back and legs, but though blood flows, it's like whittling a mountain, and just as visibly impressed with the effort.

    A push turns immediately into a spinning strike, shaft held close to her body, bladed head striking in from the side, then driven in further as she aims a kick just below it, pounding it like a stake to break through the stone-like hardness of her enemy, embedding fully before grasping the weapon with both hands and, though it should be impossible if she's not secretly actually a mountain's mass, she spins and lifts, ignores the objections of Newton, and keeps her feet while slamming one impaled enemy into the other, hard enough to ensure that she either breaks at least one of them, or breaks her weapon free. Free to bring it down into each neck, again and again.

    Only after she's she's fully done with both of them, and tried striking the water a few times, will she go back and retrieve the dagger, leaving the pilgrim's remains buried where they are.

Priscilla has posed:
    The Gilgamesh of the future that possesses 'the dark soul' is something that the Gilgamesh of the present sees for what it is immediately; an abberation, a what-if, a possibility that exists in the chaotic foam of the unformed future.

    This Gilgamesh, he sees standing in a wasteland that brings even this current one to shame. A desolate stretch of shapeless dust that spans every horizon. A harsh, dull orange sun blazes through clouds of smog, rendering everything around him the colour of rust and embers. This Gilgamesh stands on a tiny island of flagstone and crumbling pillars, in a ring of empty thrones of eroded stone. He is surrounded by corpses in faded red robes. Gore drips from his mouth and down his chest like an animal. His skin is mottled grey, and seems to move. Far behind him, in the desolate distance, the citadel of Anor Londo exists all alone in an ocean of ash. Before him, a knight, of no name that comes to him, faceless and clad in a ragged blue surcoat, readies a battered shield on one arm, and holds a silver-black scythe in the other hand. Thunder rumbles in the distance, and the sooty clouds crackle red with forks of lightning.

Gilgamesh has posed:
     An anomaly that should exist, but something to follow. Something informational. Something to learn besides the rambling old woman.

     The burned husk of Anor Londo. The knight with the scythe. The crumbing pillars, the ring of thrones. The dull and dying orange. The crackling red sky. His own grey, mottled(?) skin.

     The King of Heroes turns away from the old woman and snaps his fingers. A flying disc appears over the gap leading downwards. One hand in his pocket, the other hanging loose as he contemplates what he had seen, Gilgamesh descends into the deep and infuriating hellhole that was the end of all civilizations.

     Seeing himself at the end of even that was almost pleasant, in a twisted, destructive sense. It pleased him to know that the old woman was wrong - that there was a deeper nothingness than this, a deeper brokenness than this.

     But, of course, it was not a pleasure he was willing to pursue. A thing he saw, not a thing to experience. Novel, but not worth its cost.

     As if unwilling to touch the ground of this place Gilgamesh simply hangs there in the air. The golden ripples open around him. Here at the end of all civilization, the first of civilization's heroes stands, untouched by the wretched earth, still contemplating what he had seen as the Gate opens to prepare for incoming conflict.

     He moves to join everyone else. The Gate of Babylon does little more than launch a storm of golden swords and spears and all manner of wonders of the highest quality, flinging themselves everywhere, without regard for structural collateral.

Priscilla has posed:
    Kaito burns rubber through the mob without much resistance, but certainly with much danger. Splattering one or two horrors under his tires creates a long slick of pressurized non-water that threatens to topple his control of the bike and send him crashing into a wall, unless he can maintain absolute focus and save his ride from a doom spiral. The standing ones hurl themselves at the front wheel too, eagerly being struck by the vehicle even as they try to crawl over the windshield and cut him open, possibly even after being torn in half.

    Beyond them, his exit of choice leads to an impromptu staircase of giants, where a cluster of once-magnificent steeples has toppled over and cracked into roughly rectangular pieces, forming a long road to a foggy shore with green-grey water, where Hiromi is visually (though in no sense practically) stranded. Partway, the path diverges into a chamber with a faded red carpet and a forest of tarnished candles, with a grave altar suitable for a prince, and a small heap of armoured figures kneeling or slumped. The other way, it goes towards an enormous, cylindrical mill building of some kind, half-submerged in the muck. Its blades are far, far too large to be for grinding grain. Beyond it, and the water, what look like titanic tree roots crest the skyline, gnarled and bare.

    Eryl shooting his way through the crowd has to carefully manage the overlapping reload times of all of his weapons at once to keep the horde at bay, forced to prioritize the runners before the crawlers, but doing so continuously just allows the latter to get closer and try to drag him through the floor and into a place he certainly wouldn't ever return from. The cathedral is already in terrible disrepair, so causing a collapse isn't too difficult; it crushes a number of horrors too, but soon they begin oozing out of the cracks all over again after only a short delay. He can't tell whether there is simply no end of them, or if they're coming back to life, at this point. It also breaks the ceiling, exposing the cathedral to the leaden sky, and without the shadows fostered by the gothic vault, the monsters stop appearing from the ceiling, at least.

    Seft's mineral scan does better than just locate iron; it finds another, *identical* coiled sword-thing as the chapel far above, discarded in a dark corner beneath a heap of rubble. However, the only *bones* are on Hiromi, below her; in fact, the exact same kind of bone ash. Hacking and slashing her way out, she could make it there at full tilt, but it seems these monsters aren't stuck in that cathedral particularly. As she, Kaito, and Eryl escape, they merely begin bubbling up out of the ground along their path, reaching out to try and trip them up and pick them off.

    One even appears right in their way. It'd be a trivial obstacle, all by itself, but rather than charging, its moaning rises to a terrible, ear-rending screech, and its body explodes, tearing itself inside out completely. Where its withered, sodden 'flesh' breaks apart, a volume of starry abyssal water many times the size of its entire body escapes all at once, forming the vague shape of a head, shoulders, and long arms with huge clawed fingers, everything below the chest trailing away into nothing. Ugly, lopsided pulses of alien blue create mismatched 'eyes' in its head. A tremendous roar precedes the apparition barreling at the group at full speed, heavy enough to knock them over, but too 'liquid' to grasp, surging over and around and through them before smashing to pieces on the wall beyond. Just like the murky coating on those blades, it burns to the touch, but also contains its very own crushing pressure and deadening cold.

    Kukuru teleports in and yeets the bladed staff-holder. Shortly thereafter, the cathedral ceases producing new abominations. More are appearing where the Elites ahead are going, but they also stop *reappearing* when killed.

Priscilla has posed:
    Hiromi's weapon of choice is currently the highest grade of armament that the ancient smiths of Anor Londo were able to batch-produce. She finds it is exceptionally well-suited to the abuses of her strength. If anything, it even feels like the golden metal revels in it. It's fortunate, because her blunt strikes barely faze her enemies, even where they're sufficient to knock their entire bulk around, and cleaving slashes --even being completely impaled-- seems to do just as little as well, not ineffective so much as irrelevant to whatever makes the swollen and choked armour move. What matters most is when she thrusts the blade right through the empty neck, into that swirling void.

    Despite the fact that she is striking a dark cloud, insubstantial and containing nothing, she feels a soft, faintly fleshy resistance to it, and having 'cut' something, the singularity sprays an immense, pressurized quantity of monochrome smoke from the impact point, blasting her with a deluge of oddly lukewarm mist. The 'creature' convulses as if electrocuted (well, it *is* being electrocuted too), and ceases fighting back, clearly identifying it as some kind of weak point. However, it's just as dangerous to strike there as well; the arterial spray from nowhere is lethal in of itself, as the white-tinged black smoke burns away at her.

    No, she can sense something particularly off. It hasn't harmed her flesh all that much, but being immersed causes her a great deal of pain and 'damage' all the same, on something like a spiritual level. It has something to do with her 'divinity'. She can feel it. It lingers for a long time, even after crushing the both of them.

    From her position, she can see the group coming down from the cathedral now (and their pursuit), as well as the mill half-sunk across the pond, and the grey roots climbing over it. She tests the water, and--

    Okay, everyone knows what the water is, right? It's always like this. Every single time. Every. Single. Time. It wouldn't kill *Hiromi* to wade through it, but it'd make her thoroughly sick.

    Meanwhile, Gilgamesh is a cheaty golden bastard and hovers his way down. The hail of glimmering shot is enough to continuously wipe out the murky horde with trivial ease, so long as he continues to maintain it, however it makes being anywhere near the architecture terribly dangerous. Priscilla appears by his side as he reaches the lowest level. Landing amidst a group of shambling terrors, she swings her scythe once around through the whole rank, whereupon they-- wetly splatter all over the weapon, and soak it. It looks like there's no reaction. Mere cutting, from *that* weapon. It takes a few seconds to realize that their fluids seem to soak into it with a mind of their own, ignoring gravity and surface tension and running up its length to be absorbed..

Gilgamesh has posed:
     Priscilla shows up next to him, and he grins. It's like travelling with someone he can trust and love absolutely is enjoyable no matter the circumstances.

     Then he notices the fluid soaking up the Lifehunt Scythe.

     He purses his lips thoughtfully. "I've never known your weapon to fail," Gilgamesh says to her as they make their way forward, "Is something wrong?"

     The underlying question is 'is something wrong with you? Are you alright?' Long ago she had told him that the Lifehunt was her, and for Christmas last year he had let her hold Ea, him. They were intimately connected to those weapons, those powers, those things - those things *were* them, in many ways literally.

     So when he sees the Lifehunt Scythe fail, he can't help but be concerned. He even floats downwards enough to reach out and put his hand on her arm, giving it a reassuring, 'I'm here if you need me' squeeze.

     He also makes his attacks much more *precise* now that she's around. When something stumbles upon them it's only one blade that shoots out, or one spear, or one hammer - precisely-aimed for the head or the center of mass or whatever he might be able to find - but enough that he's willing to hold back for her sake, if only so he doesn't collapse the place down around them both.

Kaito Kumon (7387) has posed:
Kaito strikes with his lance, trying to simultaneously keep the foes at bay while also carving an opening for the rest of the party to follow...

... Something has to give, though. He can't focus on fighting, charging, and defending all at the same time, though - so with gritted teeth, he takes a few hits, focusing on offense and movement instead of defending himself, part of which involves one particularly hairy moment when he has to make the Rose Attacker come to a full stop so that he doesn't hit a wall.

Once there's a lull in the fighting - he stops the bike for a second, and gathers himself together. He looks like he's not in a good way - no visible bloody wounds, as toku heroes don't do that unless it's for character development - but he looks like he's having some trouble holding together now.

He glances over at Kukuru for a moment, then away, not saying anything.

Hiromi has posed:
    Hiromi had already seen that pressurized reaction once, but as the first time hadn't touched her, she hadn't thought to be wary of it. Sheer luck carries her out of the way of the second, which means it's the third tearing strike that covers her in some odd, hazardous mist, as her reward for the simple thought of 'aiming for the head' of things that have no heads. After that, she's more careful, but what damage has been done isn't easily undone, her spirit not having the same rapid regenerative ability as her flesh and blood.

    Her enemies slain, her blood flowing, Hiromi now gives the dagger a somewhat more careful examination. Its power is gone, but her power might substitute, as it does for many. She spreads her own, fresh blood over it, dipping it in power without yet choosing what form her blessing will take, that its own nature might be revealed by some natural inclination. If there is none, it will still serve someone as a protective charm, should she find it a new bearer.

    There's no safe water to use to wash off that burning feeling from the dark mist, and so, as soon as she has a moment, Hiromi drops to the bare earth, halberd falling from her hands, suddenly in the form of a four-legged wolf, and rolls around for a dirt bath. It doesn't really help, but doing that, and shaking off again, causing her own cloud of dust, still makes her feel better.

    She picks up the halberd again with her teeth, growing in that moment to the considerable size, not unlike the golems she'd fought, needed to effectively swing it, and then looks around until she spots, off in the distance, Kaito. That orients her on where the rest of the group presently is, and in turning around, she realizes that there isn't much reason to be where she is, outside of the convenient presence of earth.

    In one direction, a mill. Beyond it, water, and beyond that, tree roots. Those interest her, but can wait. In another direction, a princely grave. In another, the place from which Priscilla and her party have just left. That can be scratched from the list, then.

    Bringing up the earth to appear below her feet, pushing aside the 'shallow' water in the process, Hiromi runs on all fours towards the mill. Perhaps there will be some path toward the tree roots, after all. And yet, somehow, she doesn't expect that anything is truly growing, here. For it to be a massive corpse, a ruin, would be in keeping with all else she sees here.

Eryl Fairfax has posed:
    The nonstop onslaught of shadow beings demands Eryl's full attention. The high-skill fast reloads are on full display here, as are the overpenetrating shots to maximize economy. And this is all well and good against these semifluid entities, especially when his debris path begins to crush them and allowing surer footholds. But one screaming and exploding into a purely fluid, vaguely 'human' shade that rushes them is...

    Eryl holds fast regardless, kneeling and sinking his fingers into loose stone to lift it up, a hopeless dam against the onslaught as the figure likely rushes through it. The burning cold and crushes depths ice his metal limbs and render his flesh torso raw, but he holds fast until it passes through.

    Once Kukuru eliminates the one calling the figures forward, they have options. Eryl opts against the disgusting swamp, and instead investigates the forest of candles and the armored kneeling figures. The old woman mentioned a 'tincan.' Perhaps they wound up here? Should those knights still be alive, he greets them with a quiet bow of the head. All the while scanning the alter for information. Who or what is this for? Worship of a god, or mourning of the dead?

Kukuru (7371) has posed:
From Kukuru's perspective, things are looking up even as the group continues to get harassed and slowed down by those abominations that just keep popping out of nowhere. Things not reappearing means there's a hypothetical limit to how many things they need to destroy, so that means she can finally relax a little bit and do her main job here: Actually being a healer.

Kukuru darts from person to person rapidly (on foot, even) to check them out for injuries from having to deal with so many foul things in a row along with signs of illness from contact with that funky water in the distance. The bulk of her efforts are focused on healing, although purging poisons and shadow-thing-inflicted fatigue aren't beyond her thanks to the power of whatever nanites are! It's a good thing she doesn't actually have to know how any of it works to make it work.

Kaito getting banged up and facetanking so many of those hits means he'll get not only a hearty burst of healing, but a mild scolding look. She'll even hoist him (and his bike) upwards to give him a breather if needed, and then she starts clawing her way past some more of the lingering creatures (or corpses, because she's not paying too much attention) to make sure Eryl and Seft get a healthy dose of that good stuff. She can't let the investigators get distracted by things like injuries, after all!

Knowing Hiromi's tendencies in the vaguest sense, she waits until the Archwolf isn't in the middle of rending the earth or creatures alike before teleporting in her running path towards the mill. She pops off a burst of those healing nanites in passing, then teleports right on back to catch up with the post-Cathedral crew.

Priscilla, of course, gets treatment as well that veers on favoritism at least partially based on paychecks. Gilgamesh's question draws some concern from the clawed woman, and After that, she loiters nearby the pair while trying to get a better read on what it is that's ailing the First of the Concord (if there's even anything ailing her at all that she can fix).

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    SNATCH. Seft grabs that twisted, coiled blade. Her eyes flash back and forth, trying to find somewhere to put it to good use. Perhaps a fire would drive these beings back? But then, as if specifically to tell her that's a bad idea, that abyssal, watery beast emerges, drawing a wide-eyed fear. She grits digital teeth as it comes charging, then she slams the coiled thing into the ground tip-first, wraps a shield-bearing arm around it, and crouches behind the ad-hoc cover, screaming as it slams into her body and tears away layers of armor. Once it has slammed and dispersed, she struggles to catch her breath, regain her footing, and yank the coiled blade back into her grip, her chest heaving as air-exchangers struggle to cool her insides. Thankfully, Kukuru's healing works perfectly on a robot, because of the way the Cultivator technology emulates the effects of healing!


She puts away her heavy shield, shaking her head urgently. Come on on, come on! Focus! The enemies from the cathedral may be gone, but there's still plenty ahead, forming. She brings out a heavy battle-axe, and strikes up its elemental fires. Slamming the head of the axe on the blade coiled blade, the sparks turn into a raging inferno at the end of her hilt. She leaves the colder iron over one shoulder, and brandishes her battle-axe. If the coiled blades don't mark them, then where is the next island of safety...

    Maybe something with that mill? With the directionless omni-wind of this place, the only reason it wouldn't be turning is a lack of repair. Maybe its medieval architecture is within Seft's ability to repair? Maybe, in some way, it can provide some protection? She'll head for that, with the intent to restore it, or at least set up a campfire or something in there, something to hopefully keep some of that constant violence back and give the team a break. She'll follow Hiromi's earth-path!

Priscilla has posed:
    Kukuru's bold attempts to try and heal everyone in the middle of combat largely get the Lordran special; the moment she's properly focused on anyone's injuries in particular, something bubbles up from the ground to drag her away, falls from a piece of masonry to grapple her from above, or pops up from around a corner to strike her, making for an absolutely unbreathable amount of pressure until Gilgamesh engages in his primary specialty of inexhaustible wide-range suppressive fire.

    Pushing aside yet another toxic swamp is fairly trivial for Hiromi, though. The process unearths many a withered and peat-bog-mummified corpse, strewn along the bottom like refuse, some tangled in each other's grasps, or having tripped over one another going by their downward facing. The mottled, unhealthily oily sheen of the water seems to partially separate when she pushes it through the dirt, crudely filtered. The poison itself is certainly external, and very much bright, putrid green. Her path towards the mill makes her sure of it; that the toxic pollutant leaks from the collapsed mill silo itself; not that it matters much at this point.

    Seft following specifically in her wake briefly has a more exciting time. Despite the fact that the coiled sword she drags out from the debris appears to be nothing more than a humble rod of pitted cast iron, it briefly catches light as if it were soaked in gasoline when she sets the flame to it, reaching a smouldering hot glow in an instant and casting swirling embers from nowhere every direction she points it. It doesn't last very long however, requiring several applications to keep it hot for more than thirty seconds at a time, at best. Merely touching the horrors with the tip is enough to send them into paroxysms of shrieking agony, clawing and thrashing at their own burning bodies before they melt into inky black soup.

    Hiromi's trail brings Seft right to the crater in which she'd left those remains. The heap of bone ash there crackles and glows when she comes close, resonating feebly with the blazing brand in her hand, as if it longs to reach out and touch it. Planting the coiled iron into the ash causes the thoroughly spent and inert bone-stuff to almost knock her over with a rippling wave of heat and the thrashing roar of crackling flames. Though it should very much have nothing combustible left to burn, a small, eerily slow-moving fire sprouts from the meagre pile anyways, its crackling underlaid by eerie tinkling and echoes. *That* fire, the murky horrors won't approach at all. Her choice is very much whether to plant it on the spot, and block the cathedral, or whether to scoop up the cloak and take it all the way to the mill, which would provide a more advanced safe spot.

    Priscilla is briefly too focused on clearing out the horde, especially where Kaito stops to take a break. Her scythe is, as ever, a perfect weapon for cutting through whole ranks at a time, like terrible weeds, but during a short breather, she does stop to examine the way the starry ink-water soaks into the texture of its blade like sand. Cutting down one more trio of enemies, she uses a dragging draw-cut to do it, and verifies the way it 'absorbs' them the moment it makes contact. "No, I assure thee I am well enough." Priscilla replies to Gilgamesh. "At least, as well as can be. Perhaps this shouldst sayeth more of the nature of our foes. Come, let us be much further than here. If the old woman is to be believed, there art far graver perils ahead still."

Priscilla has posed:
    Eryl diverging from the main route briefly wins him some respite from the onslaught, though he'll need to find his own way back later. Unfortunately, the suits of armour here are but empty shells, filled with meager lumps of charred bone fragments and ash. One is slumped over the flagpole of a royal red banner that Eryl has no record of whatsoever, still holding it upright with all of its joints rusted in place. The 'altar' certainly looks more like a sort of coffin, up close, odd as it would be for one to exist inside a probably once-royal chamber like this at all. Laid on top of it is a thick and dusty tome, with yellowed pages edged in gold leaf. It takes him but a second to realize that it doesn't lack a title, but rather the entire book is written in braille.

    The particular odd treasure Hiromi had taken with her responds to her power instantaneously. The inscriptions regain a bright, aquamarine glow from within, and a long blade of glittering energy springs from the seemingly useless length of too-thin steel. Eddies of magical current swirl around her while it blazes, protective in some arcane nature.

    Her onward charge, though, brings her to the mill itself, and Seft not far behind. On dry ground, Seft can immediately ascertain that the wind here would be simply insufficient for turning it, even were it fully straight and level, because the axle is a massive affair that seems to be connected to huge lengths of coiled chains, supporting what look like iron-shod loading lifts, fit to haul something heavy out of the ground. The interior is a maze of broken stairs, bridges that lead nowhere, and the odd very obvious pressure plate that may still be active. It seems to be sheltered and empty, though it is awash in virulent poison, mostly submerged and leaving little space to actually stand.

    Over the top of it, there is a high, winding, rocky ridge, exposed between two portions of chaotic ruins. Up here, Hiromi first sees that the miserable swamp continues ahead, under a huge earthen archway above, which supports the remains of an exotic, tiered pagoda, and she can see the movement of small scurrying things all around it. Dingy wooden shacks and the hollowed out husks of cottages dot the region, until the bulk of what turns out to be but one singular tree of utterly monolithic size obscures the way entirely. It seems to have, at some point in ancient history, fallen on its side, shattered in half, and its exposed insides have hollowed out, though the main trunk is still far below, and what she sees now are miles and miles of twisting roots, large enough to run across even at their narrowest tips.

    The whole area beyond . . . glitters, strangely though. It's hard to put a finger on it. The air sort of sparkles. Like a visualization of electric charge before a thunderstorm, maybe. That's the best natural comparison she can draw. There appear to be many shiny things in all the muck itself, half-buried or submerged, but it's difficult to tell what they are, or if they're even real.

    Closer, though, is another figure. One seated on a short ledge of rock, under the shadow of the arch, a good many miles from the old crone above, blocked from view by now. A human, obviously, male by the sound of his voice, less than middle-aged, muttering to himself in soft and fairly confused tones. However, he is fully concealed in about thrice the amount of solid steel armour it is practical for a human being to actually wear, to the point even his helmet looks like a heavy metal tea kettle. An even more preposterously sized slab of a shield is set near his side, and across it, something like a leaf-bladed greatsword where the hilt was simply extended into the length of a full spear. He does not, however, appear to be hostile at all.