WHO: Tony Stark, Joselyn Smythe, Richard Dickerson, Wysteria Poppell, Vanadi de Vadarta WHAT: A group of nerds and one cool elf investigate some strange reports coming out of a Free Marches village. WHEN: Second week of August. WHERE: Free Marches NOTES: TBA.
The journey is two days on horseback, normally, from Ansburg to Bierstagg. That is how many days it took the initial would-be team of explorers to decide to turn back, having slowed down immensely with the onset of illness of one of their fellows, and the wild and tangled nature of the path. Following their advice, horses and wagon have been left to the care of the nearest homestead, taking with them only what provisions they were willing to carry to make the journey onward.
Food. Water. Paper. Ink.
There is, first, a morning of easy travel on a well-trod road through grasslands, which eventually become crowded with tree life, initially cultivated by locals, before giving in to wilderness proper. It seems almost to happen suddenly. One moment, you are walking through the over-warm midday on packed dirt, with only the occasional shadow of a tree, and then you find yourself stepping over roots that disrupt the normal path, climbing over logs, and pushing through bramble. The sky becomes glimpses through a denser canopy than before, and sunlight comes down in shafts of rainbow-hued illumination. Dragonflies hum through the air in hovering zigzags, and birds fill branches with choruses of chirping. 'Overgrown', while certainly true, does not quite capture the feeling that the environment is altered from what it should be.
By the time they are well into their first afternoon, certain aberrations have been identified. The first were the flowering trees, in which multiple colours and shapes and diverse patterns of leaves grow from the same plant. The slightest jostle sees sudden clouds of pollen, and even through the masks recommended by Joselyn, their perfumes are powerful, and strange. Occasionally, in amongst expected floral smells, there is a scent that is more sugary, and then another with a distinct metallic tinge, and another that is borderline putrescent in the blood and guts sense, although who knows, maybe something died nearby.
Then there's the stream, which can be navigated by moving on slick rocks that crest above the flow, or across where a nearby slanting log is felled, or by just wading in. The log is encrusted in colourful fungi of multitudes of shades, which simply snaps dry if pressure is applied. As crossing commences, there is movement in the water in the form of a school of long, dense eels, shining black, sharp toothed. As one slithers nearby, you can't help but feel there is something odd about them.
As you press on in the last dwindling hours of the evening, there is a shuffle of movement up ahead, and four rabbits suddenly bound from the brambles, and stop maybe forty feet ahead, only barely visible. They rise on their hidelegs to peer at the group of you, as if assessing threat. And then, the sound of snapping branches, and a bigger blur of movement crashes into that same space, something animal, four-legged, large. There's a crack of flesh and bone breaking and in the same motion, whatever appeared is gone as fast as it appeared. Ahead, you catch a glimpse of two rabbits darting out of sight.
Vanadi has never much cared for nature; there's a joke somewhere in there, back in his own world. The elf who preferred cities over nature, ha-ha. So his curiosity and wariness of this strange wilderness is tempered by a healthy disgust: no interest in touching the strange fungi, thank you, and anything with more than four legs is given a wide berth.
But he does tramp gamely onward regardless, their darkly-clad, generally taciturn Scouting division traveling companion. He prefers to duck wayward nature over slashing at it — there's a sense he can't shake of not wanting to touch, not wanting to interact, and of fearing whatever may come of trying. That is, until he makes it to the stream.
The eels have snared his attention. He crouches on a half-submerged rock a few steps out from the bank, arms leaned on his knees and eyes on the water. Eyes on the animals in the water, specifically. He's seen eels before, but there's something about these ...
To anyone passing by, he voices a distracted and idle thought, "I don't suppose you brought a fishing rod?"
Standing very upright some ten or fifteen paces back on the shore, Richard Dickerson pauses partway through turning to a fresh page in his journal. He is in a mask, his eye sharp over the wrap of it, fingers poised around the chalk he’d been sketching with while he watches the nearest eel twist past with the current.
“They might be drawn to meat.”
He puts the prickle at the back of his neck on do not disturb and sets chalk to paper to start a new drawing.
From a third point, closer to Richard than to Vanadi, comes the cheerful remark of, "Really now, Mr. Dickerson. That seems a rather grim assessment."
Wysteria is not focused on the contents of the water at all. Rather, all her attention is focused on the fungi encrusted log crossing over it. She has a little working knife to hand and is presently scraping pieces of the brittle stuff off into a jar which had come out of the little traveling case she's been hauling around. It's no doubt meant to join a similar jar that she'd earlier filled with poisonous berries the moment they'd found a growth of them matching the description provided by the earlier band of would-be investigators.
"Though blood or no blood - I still wouldn't eat them, Mr. de Vadarta."
The thought of offering up blood to these strange fish has Vanadi's lip curling in distaste, and Wysteria's input doesn't make the mental images much better.
"Rest assured," he mutters, "I'm not hungry."
But he still doesn't want to just give up on this curiosity. Figuring it a small sacrifice, he dips a hand into a pack at his side and comes out with a small handful of dried fruits, packed back in safety.
"I haven't any meat and I'm not willing to part with blood, but maybe they'll consider a fruit diet," he says, leaning to experimentally toss a few small pieces to the water.
“I’ve never known an eel to feed on vegetation,” Richard counters, unruffled in his assessment of Wysteria’s assessment, “or prunes.” His familiarity with slithering teeth tubes is matter-of-fact. But he does look up when the fruit plops in, too curious to risk missing a snap of the jaws or a clear flip of the tail.
He knows that Wysteria is scraping fungi into a jar with a knife in his periphery. If he doesn’t turn his head to see, it’s kind of like it isn’t happening, which means he doesn’t have to worry about it.
It's a rainbow twilight. Very pretty, if it didn't kind of also feel nasty, bad voodoo hanging around this place like a hangover. They're all in the process of bunkering down for the night, Tony finding a perch on a long-cleaved tree stump, careful to avoid the sharp-edged growth of multicoloured fungi scaled up one side of it.
He is consulting some notes, manic shorthand smudged across loose leaf pages that he will surely pass to Poppell to parse at some point. For now, he extracts a device from a leather carrying bag. Copper and silver, handheld, covered in dials. He turns a few of them, and holds it up in the air like he's trying to catch a signal.
He doesn't really need to before its mechanics begin to click and spin. Multitasking, Tony holds it aloft as he plasters a page over a knee, using a pencil to pen in some notes, before consulting the device--
"Ahhh!" he says, although it doesn't sound very urgent. More pointed; "Aa-ahhhh?"
Currently engaged in the business of labeling some of her finds from earlier in the day, Joselyn nearly snaps charcoal in her hand out of sheer ambient stress before parsing the tone with which Tony has interrupted her thinking—
“What are you doing?”
Oh, no, she has snapped it. And now there's charcoal all over her hand. She might as well get up, so she does, unfolding all five foot three of herself to come and see what he's looking at.
Tony is sitting ramrod straight and holding the thaumoscope out at full arm's length, his notes having fallen to the wayside. A few dials are still turning, but one of the finer needles is forced to a stop beneath the very slight weight of the animal that has landed there.
It's a frog. A bright yellow-green hide reflects oily rainbow colours, which is not the strangest thing about it. The strangest thing is that between its bulbous eyes is a third bulbous eye, and it blinks slightly out of rhythm with the other two while being otherwise identical.
"It's looking at me," Tony says, instead of answering her question, "I think."
The night time proves as strange as the daytime -- and likely more so. The moonlight that peters through the canopy seems to catch very brightly on every surface, every upturned leaf and puddle of water. Swarming insects give off a gentle luminescence and they all seem to move together in eerily coordinated configurations, which has now been observed in a number of creatures.
But it's been quiet. Some shifts have gone by, the team doing their best to ensure at least two of five people are awake for the majority of time spent while they struggle to get some sleep. There's a fire burning, difficult to maintain in all the dampness, occasionally seeming to give off rainbow light when the wind shifts before normalising. It's Vanadi's turn to sleep, rising to go and fetch Richard, the other member of their team who can see in the dark. Huddled and watchful nearby is Joselyn, who has some time left on the clock to peer into the depths of darkness around her and watch for danger. Whatever that might look like.
What it looks like are two distinct eye gleams in the shadows, but oddly placed, far apart.
Two creatures, then, and they emerge together from the treeline, the fire casting meagre enough light for Joselyn to see two wolf faces peering from the shadows. One is lower, one is taller, but both are missing one eye each where their fur gives way to skin, and skin gives way to bone, and bone gives way to empty shadowed eye sockets that must see nothing. They take another step, and now she sees that it's not two wolves at all, but two wolf heads, grown out from a single body, its shoulders as high as four feet. The space where their heads connect gleams gorily in the low light, and one of the heads, the one hanging lower, drips a constant ribbon of ichor from its parted fangs.
The wind rustles the campfire, and brings with it an organic smell. Dry blood, plant decay, sweet and sour and dense.
The time between Vanadi departing and Richard joining her can't be half so long as it feels, squinting into the dark through the moonlight and the firesmoke and the eyes. She sees one, first, and then the other; thinks it must be two creatures, and is half right. The stink of it feels thick in the air that she doesn't like breathing, and her scarf seems only to trap it as she braces her staff in the dirt and edges—
“Dickerson,” she hisses, not looking behind her to see if he's there yet. Taking her eyes off the wolf...ves seems unwise, but she wants very badly for at least the campfire to be between it (them?) and her.
Not for the first time, she thinks if she had to make up a name in a strange new world, she'd have picked something else. Dickerson. Isn't that what all men are, actually. This is the panic talking, she knows, so at least she isn't saying any of it out loud and providing the half-blind thing more of a way to locate her in the shadows.
“Are you there.” Are you armed.
This seems like something everyone might well need to be woken up for, but doing so in immediate chaos seems—bad. Maybe they can panic strategically.
“I’m here.” Dick’s voice murmurs low across the rattle and snap of the campfire; he’s walked up silently, and stands stock still in the campfire’s glow, less kempt than he was when he bedded down, but otherwise hale and alert.
“I see it.”
He’s holding eye contact with it, as best he can, given the sightless cavern yawning in between.
“Can you fight?” Plainly asked, as he stoops (slowly) to wrap his off hand around the base of one of a very few boughs long and sturdy enough to withstand being swung up from the fire. Flame licks through a few clinging twigs, but most of the burning is limited to a vein of ember orange creeping beneath ash-white bark. Sparks spiral free of the thicker logs that topple over after he’s twisted it free.
Sparks that leap orange, but wink out with glimmers of other colours; red, green, violet.
The creature stalks a little closer, but does seem to pause when the fire jumps beneath Richard pulling the bough free. The lower head bows aside in a tip and rotation of its skull that looks more serpentine than canine, and its parted mouth slacks open wider, the running stream of black liquid coming thicker, coating down its patchily furred breast.
The remaining eyes the two heads have are marble-white, now visible as the creature stops some several feet away. But ears are upright, and the head that is held higher, and drooling less, now bares yellow fangs that seem longer than they should be, protruding from grey, spotted gums, glistening saliva beginning to drip.
From where Vanadi is about to retire to his tent, the smell of forest rot and curdle will draw his attention, if the urgent whispers near the fire don't.
Vanadi does hear those murmurs — easily mistaken for greeting and organizational whispers, if not for the undercurrent of tension he catches from even here. And then of course, to cement it, the unsettling smell that creeps alongside those whispers. Something is here.
A glance over his shoulder is enough to tell him this is nothing he wants anyone sleeping through. He sinks to a crouch next to the nearest sleeping form, reaching easily through the darkness to shake a shoulder — Wysteria's, and Tony's shortly after.
His whisper is the first thing to greet them, low but steady: "Quietly, quietly. We have company."
In half sleeping reply, Wysteria draws tighter into her blanket and bedroll. She buries her face, groggy stubborn, into the crooked of her elbow and mumbles some sound that must mean 'Five minutes more, Mr. de Vadarta' even if it doesn't say so with as many words.
But it's a child's impulse, and she has been with Riftwatch long enough now to be familiar with being gently shaken awake in tents, and so doesn't survive past the few fumbling moments it takes for her to translate the meaning of his greeting. She uncurls, blinking slowly up at his shape in the dark. The loose sleeping plait of her hair is coming undone and it makes her seem even more disordered than is characteristic.
He'd been kind enough not to question it when Richard made his offer initially, to help Vanadi and his dark-seeing eyes with the night watch. The man had been vague, and surely that was for a reason; he'd left it alone willingly enough.
But his watch has been long, and he's had plenty to think about. Why not the mechanics behind Richard's ability? So when it's time to change shift, Vanadi moves whisper-silent toward the man's sleeping roll, conversation on his mind -- and pauses to see a shape on him he hadn't expected to. A ... snake? He barely knows anything about snakes, but he's fairly certain they're diurnal creatures. Something about being cold all the time. Does that mean there's something wrong with this one? It's coiled so peacefully on its sleeping mount, though, Vanadi can't quite bring himself to be alarmed.
Still, with an abundance of caution, Vanadi clears his throat and nudges a foot at the furthest-from-snake end of Richard. "It's time," he murmurs.
The Snake is small, as snakes go, black scales ribboned with pinstripes of pale gold from collar to tail. Her head lifts to the soundless impact of Vinadi’s footfalls on the approach, her little doll eyes polished bright, unseeing in the dark. Her tongue flicks, testing the air as she snuggles back down into her coil.
She’s balled on his chest, soaking up the warmth from his breastbone as she would from a stone. Vanadi isn’t a threat.
Currently.
“Good morning, Mr. Vadarta,” Richard murmurs back -- dry, passive protest in the absence of any immediate stir to divest himself of his bedroll. He is still for a long moment before he sighs, and shifts a hand to feel down his person -- checking talisman, dagger, dagger, pouch.
“Have you seen anything?” Quiet, among their sleeping friends, as he levers up onto his elbow.
The snake weaves up over his shoulder to slither herself up under his collar. He doesn't seem to notice.
His eyes leave the snake only to track the progress of Richard's hands. It's interesting, if nothing else, to see what things a person checks on first.
"No, it's been mercifully dull," he answers, and sinks to a crouch where he'd stood, the better to keep voices between the two of them. His eyes flick back to the snake again as it moves, his brow quirks very slightly. "I hope that's yours," he says, with no indication made at all of which that he means.
The talisman is of a rounded design -- an eye framed by an open scroll carved into red clay, and suspended around his neck by a rough leather cord. It’s symbology that belongs to Oghma -- in his particular universe, anyway. Dick tucks it away on his way to sitting upright, as a matter of course.
Closer to eye level, he sweeps his combover back out of his eyes and scuffs under his nose at news of no news. Working to sharpen up out of his hasn’t-missed-sleeping-on-a-bedroll torpor.
“You hope what’s mine?”
He has a jacket, somewhere -- thrown over his satchel. He reaches for it.
That's precisely the answer Vanadi had been hoping not to hear, and his brows draw together as he regards the man. Does everyone else have a snake somewhere on them? Is this going to become a thing? He flicks a quick glance around, but — no snakes so far as he can see.
"There's a snake in your sleeve," he says, "Which I don't mean flirtatiously, for the time being."
His shoulder has gone from bloody, to on the mend, to forgettable, to -- well, impossible to forget. It itches. Should it be itching? Vanadi isn't much a fan.
It started as absent scratching as they walked, and it's only when he begins to feel a sharp pain under his fingers that he realizes how long he's really been at it -- and the concern kicks in. He steps out of the exploration line with some word of mumbled reassurance, seeking the cover of at least a few layers of brush. There he unlaces a few of his several layers, shrugging things around until he's got a shoulder bared for self-inspection.
A low, strangled noise might make it back to at least some of the rest of the group as concern rapidly turns to distress. Leaves. Green fern fronds sprout like the cheerful first sign of spring from where they should very much not be sprouting: his own healing flesh.
He'll be tearing at them in a moment, just -- a few seconds for horrified processing are in order first.
Joselyn is there, having turned at the not very reassuring mumbling and having only become more concerned at his progressing distress. As much as she isn't the expert on rifters (besides that spending enough time around them is bound to make anyone start questioning their life choices), she is fairly confident that even foreign elves aren't meant to sprout leaves out of wounds.
Particularly not in a place where questionable growths are becoming a real issue. If they have to leave Vanadi behind, it will be extremely difficult to explain to their superiors later, so,
“Hold still—you can't do anything one-handed—” seems like a more immediately compelling argument than something like don't yank those. Especially since she is going to yank them, she's just also trying to decide if preparing a specimen jar first is going to complicate matters unnecessarily. Where's that knife.
He nearly jumps out of his skin at the sound of Joselyn's voice, having almost entirely forgotten the crew he's left not really very far behind him. Jeez, can't a guy panic about greenery creeping up from under his skin in peace?
"I think I very much can -- " That's a hiss, out before he can remind himself that these people probably don't have any reason to want to make things worse for Vanadi. Hopefully. He relents, dropping the opposite hand.
A little more plaintively, he adds, "Have you seen anything like this before?" Please tell him you know what to do with it.
Almost certainly there is nothing comforting about the way that Joselyn looks flatly back at him, and then meaningfully around the scenery they're trudging through.
“You can't effectively,” is all she settles on saying. “Let me get a good grip on it, and we'll just,”
A gentler woman might have given him a countdown. Joselyn, who is fairly certain anticipation here will help approximately nothing, yanks on just.
The hike into the village had been fascinating. Even the strange growths in Mr. de Vadarta's wound had been more compelling than disturbing (from, of course, the privileged perspective of a young lady lucky enough to observe the phenomena as opposed to experiencing it first hand). But the village itself, for all its promise in terms of scholarship, is--
Undeniably grim.
She doesn't think much on it while they are in Bierstagg - taking samples, closing rifts, sorting how best to pitch potentially poisonous corpses onto pyres -, but as darkness falls on their hike out of the village, the specter of the work is summoned there to their little encampment and suddenly it seems very important to catalog every clipping and scraping she's collected over the course of the trip. Wysteria sits now on a stone at the edge of the firelight with her traveling case open beside her, taking careful notes on a clipping taken from one of the corpses and preserved now in a little glass vial.
"Do you suppose the growth is poisonous, or that the flesh was?"
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faderift2020-08-04 09:35 pm
travel to bierstagg.
Food. Water. Paper. Ink.
There is, first, a morning of easy travel on a well-trod road through grasslands, which eventually become crowded with tree life, initially cultivated by locals, before giving in to wilderness proper. It seems almost to happen suddenly. One moment, you are walking through the over-warm midday on packed dirt, with only the occasional shadow of a tree, and then you find yourself stepping over roots that disrupt the normal path, climbing over logs, and pushing through bramble. The sky becomes glimpses through a denser canopy than before, and sunlight comes down in shafts of rainbow-hued illumination. Dragonflies hum through the air in hovering zigzags, and birds fill branches with choruses of chirping. 'Overgrown', while certainly true, does not quite capture the feeling that the environment is altered from what it should be.
By the time they are well into their first afternoon, certain aberrations have been identified. The first were the flowering trees, in which multiple colours and shapes and diverse patterns of leaves grow from the same plant. The slightest jostle sees sudden clouds of pollen, and even through the masks recommended by Joselyn, their perfumes are powerful, and strange. Occasionally, in amongst expected floral smells, there is a scent that is more sugary, and then another with a distinct metallic tinge, and another that is borderline putrescent in the blood and guts sense, although who knows, maybe something died nearby.
Then there's the stream, which can be navigated by moving on slick rocks that crest above the flow, or across where a nearby slanting log is felled, or by just wading in. The log is encrusted in colourful fungi of multitudes of shades, which simply snaps dry if pressure is applied. As crossing commences, there is movement in the water in the form of a school of long, dense eels, shining black, sharp toothed. As one slithers nearby, you can't help but feel there is something odd about them.
As you press on in the last dwindling hours of the evening, there is a shuffle of movement up ahead, and four rabbits suddenly bound from the brambles, and stop maybe forty feet ahead, only barely visible. They rise on their hidelegs to peer at the group of you, as if assessing threat. And then, the sound of snapping branches, and a bigger blur of movement crashes into that same space, something animal, four-legged, large. There's a crack of flesh and bone breaking and in the same motion, whatever appeared is gone as fast as it appeared. Ahead, you catch a glimpse of two rabbits darting out of sight.
And then it will be time to camp.
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But he does tramp gamely onward regardless, their darkly-clad, generally taciturn Scouting division traveling companion. He prefers to duck wayward nature over slashing at it — there's a sense he can't shake of not wanting to touch, not wanting to interact, and of fearing whatever may come of trying. That is, until he makes it to the stream.
The eels have snared his attention. He crouches on a half-submerged rock a few steps out from the bank, arms leaned on his knees and eyes on the water. Eyes on the animals in the water, specifically. He's seen eels before, but there's something about these ...
To anyone passing by, he voices a distracted and idle thought, "I don't suppose you brought a fishing rod?"
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“They might be drawn to meat.”
He puts the prickle at the back of his neck on do not disturb and sets chalk to paper to start a new drawing.
“Or blood.”
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Wysteria is not focused on the contents of the water at all. Rather, all her attention is focused on the fungi encrusted log crossing over it. She has a little working knife to hand and is presently scraping pieces of the brittle stuff off into a jar which had come out of the little traveling case she's been hauling around. It's no doubt meant to join a similar jar that she'd earlier filled with poisonous berries the moment they'd found a growth of them matching the description provided by the earlier band of would-be investigators.
"Though blood or no blood - I still wouldn't eat them, Mr. de Vadarta."
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"Rest assured," he mutters, "I'm not hungry."
But he still doesn't want to just give up on this curiosity. Figuring it a small sacrifice, he dips a hand into a pack at his side and comes out with a small handful of dried fruits, packed back in safety.
"I haven't any meat and I'm not willing to part with blood, but maybe they'll consider a fruit diet," he says, leaning to experimentally toss a few small pieces to the water.
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He knows that Wysteria is scraping fungi into a jar with a knife in his periphery. If he doesn’t turn his head to see, it’s kind of like it isn’t happening, which means he doesn’t have to worry about it.
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https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ER_RvM5WkAAGF3x.jpg
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softly punches my notifs
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frogs are friends not foes. closed to joselyn.
He is consulting some notes, manic shorthand smudged across loose leaf pages that he will surely pass to Poppell to parse at some point. For now, he extracts a device from a leather carrying bag. Copper and silver, handheld, covered in dials. He turns a few of them, and holds it up in the air like he's trying to catch a signal.
He doesn't really need to before its mechanics begin to click and spin. Multitasking, Tony holds it aloft as he plasters a page over a knee, using a pencil to pen in some notes, before consulting the device--
"Ahhh!" he says, although it doesn't sound very urgent. More pointed; "Aa-ahhhh?"
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“What are you doing?”
Oh, no, she has snapped it. And now there's charcoal all over her hand. She might as well get up, so she does, unfolding all five foot three of herself to come and see what he's looking at.
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It's a frog. A bright yellow-green hide reflects oily rainbow colours, which is not the strangest thing about it. The strangest thing is that between its bulbous eyes is a third bulbous eye, and it blinks slightly out of rhythm with the other two while being otherwise identical.
"It's looking at me," Tony says, instead of answering her question, "I think."
first night camping.
But it's been quiet. Some shifts have gone by, the team doing their best to ensure at least two of five people are awake for the majority of time spent while they struggle to get some sleep. There's a fire burning, difficult to maintain in all the dampness, occasionally seeming to give off rainbow light when the wind shifts before normalising. It's Vanadi's turn to sleep, rising to go and fetch Richard, the other member of their team who can see in the dark. Huddled and watchful nearby is Joselyn, who has some time left on the clock to peer into the depths of darkness around her and watch for danger. Whatever that might look like.
What it looks like are two distinct eye gleams in the shadows, but oddly placed, far apart.
Two creatures, then, and they emerge together from the treeline, the fire casting meagre enough light for Joselyn to see two wolf faces peering from the shadows. One is lower, one is taller, but both are missing one eye each where their fur gives way to skin, and skin gives way to bone, and bone gives way to empty shadowed eye sockets that must see nothing. They take another step, and now she sees that it's not two wolves at all, but two wolf heads, grown out from a single body, its shoulders as high as four feet. The space where their heads connect gleams gorily in the low light, and one of the heads, the one hanging lower, drips a constant ribbon of ichor from its parted fangs.
The wind rustles the campfire, and brings with it an organic smell. Dry blood, plant decay, sweet and sour and dense.
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The time between Vanadi departing and Richard joining her can't be half so long as it feels, squinting into the dark through the moonlight and the firesmoke and the eyes. She sees one, first, and then the other; thinks it must be two creatures, and is half right. The stink of it feels thick in the air that she doesn't like breathing, and her scarf seems only to trap it as she braces her staff in the dirt and edges—
“Dickerson,” she hisses, not looking behind her to see if he's there yet. Taking her eyes off the wolf...ves seems unwise, but she wants very badly for at least the campfire to be between it (them?) and her.
Not for the first time, she thinks if she had to make up a name in a strange new world, she'd have picked something else. Dickerson. Isn't that what all men are, actually. This is the panic talking, she knows, so at least she isn't saying any of it out loud and providing the half-blind thing more of a way to locate her in the shadows.
“Are you there.” Are you armed.
This seems like something everyone might well need to be woken up for, but doing so in immediate chaos seems—bad. Maybe they can panic strategically.
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“I see it.”
He’s holding eye contact with it, as best he can, given the sightless cavern yawning in between.
“Can you fight?” Plainly asked, as he stoops (slowly) to wrap his off hand around the base of one of a very few boughs long and sturdy enough to withstand being swung up from the fire. Flame licks through a few clinging twigs, but most of the burning is limited to a vein of ember orange creeping beneath ash-white bark. Sparks spiral free of the thicker logs that topple over after he’s twisted it free.
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The creature stalks a little closer, but does seem to pause when the fire jumps beneath Richard pulling the bough free. The lower head bows aside in a tip and rotation of its skull that looks more serpentine than canine, and its parted mouth slacks open wider, the running stream of black liquid coming thicker, coating down its patchily furred breast.
The remaining eyes the two heads have are marble-white, now visible as the creature stops some several feet away. But ears are upright, and the head that is held higher, and drooling less, now bares yellow fangs that seem longer than they should be, protruding from grey, spotted gums, glistening saliva beginning to drip.
From where Vanadi is about to retire to his tent, the smell of forest rot and curdle will draw his attention, if the urgent whispers near the fire don't.
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A glance over his shoulder is enough to tell him this is nothing he wants anyone sleeping through. He sinks to a crouch next to the nearest sleeping form, reaching easily through the darkness to shake a shoulder — Wysteria's, and Tony's shortly after.
His whisper is the first thing to greet them, low but steady: "Quietly, quietly. We have company."
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But it's a child's impulse, and she has been with Riftwatch long enough now to be familiar with being gently shaken awake in tents, and so doesn't survive past the few fumbling moments it takes for her to translate the meaning of his greeting. She uncurls, blinking slowly up at his shape in the dark. The loose sleeping plait of her hair is coming undone and it makes her seem even more disordered than is characteristic.
"Who is it?"
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coopting this for MORE THREADS -- @richard
But his watch has been long, and he's had plenty to think about. Why not the mechanics behind Richard's ability? So when it's time to change shift, Vanadi moves whisper-silent toward the man's sleeping roll, conversation on his mind -- and pauses to see a shape on him he hadn't expected to. A ... snake? He barely knows anything about snakes, but he's fairly certain they're diurnal creatures. Something about being cold all the time. Does that mean there's something wrong with this one? It's coiled so peacefully on its sleeping mount, though, Vanadi can't quite bring himself to be alarmed.
Still, with an abundance of caution, Vanadi clears his throat and nudges a foot at the furthest-from-snake end of Richard. "It's time," he murmurs.
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She’s balled on his chest, soaking up the warmth from his breastbone as she would from a stone. Vanadi isn’t a threat.
Currently.
“Good morning, Mr. Vadarta,” Richard murmurs back -- dry, passive protest in the absence of any immediate stir to divest himself of his bedroll. He is still for a long moment before he sighs, and shifts a hand to feel down his person -- checking talisman, dagger, dagger, pouch.
“Have you seen anything?” Quiet, among their sleeping friends, as he levers up onto his elbow.
The snake weaves up over his shoulder to slither herself up under his collar. He doesn't seem to notice.
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"No, it's been mercifully dull," he answers, and sinks to a crouch where he'd stood, the better to keep voices between the two of them. His eyes flick back to the snake again as it moves, his brow quirks very slightly. "I hope that's yours," he says, with no indication made at all of which that he means.
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Closer to eye level, he sweeps his combover back out of his eyes and scuffs under his nose at news of no news. Working to sharpen up out of his hasn’t-missed-sleeping-on-a-bedroll torpor.
“You hope what’s mine?”
He has a jacket, somewhere -- thrown over his satchel. He reaches for it.
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"There's a snake in your sleeve," he says, "Which I don't mean flirtatiously, for the time being."
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and again! -- @joselyn
It started as absent scratching as they walked, and it's only when he begins to feel a sharp pain under his fingers that he realizes how long he's really been at it -- and the concern kicks in. He steps out of the exploration line with some word of mumbled reassurance, seeking the cover of at least a few layers of brush. There he unlaces a few of his several layers, shrugging things around until he's got a shoulder bared for self-inspection.
A low, strangled noise might make it back to at least some of the rest of the group as concern rapidly turns to distress. Leaves. Green fern fronds sprout like the cheerful first sign of spring from where they should very much not be sprouting: his own healing flesh.
He'll be tearing at them in a moment, just -- a few seconds for horrified processing are in order first.
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Joselyn is there, having turned at the not very reassuring mumbling and having only become more concerned at his progressing distress. As much as she isn't the expert on rifters (besides that spending enough time around them is bound to make anyone start questioning their life choices), she is fairly confident that even foreign elves aren't meant to sprout leaves out of wounds.
Particularly not in a place where questionable growths are becoming a real issue. If they have to leave Vanadi behind, it will be extremely difficult to explain to their superiors later, so,
“Hold still—you can't do anything one-handed—” seems like a more immediately compelling argument than something like don't yank those. Especially since she is going to yank them, she's just also trying to decide if preparing a specimen jar first is going to complicate matters unnecessarily. Where's that knife.
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"I think I very much can -- " That's a hiss, out before he can remind himself that these people probably don't have any reason to want to make things worse for Vanadi. Hopefully. He relents, dropping the opposite hand.
A little more plaintively, he adds, "Have you seen anything like this before?" Please tell him you know what to do with it.
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“You can't effectively,” is all she settles on saying. “Let me get a good grip on it, and we'll just,”
A gentler woman might have given him a countdown. Joselyn, who is fairly certain anticipation here will help approximately nothing, yanks on just.
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joselyn & wysteria's poison club
Undeniably grim.
She doesn't think much on it while they are in Bierstagg - taking samples, closing rifts, sorting how best to pitch potentially poisonous corpses onto pyres -, but as darkness falls on their hike out of the village, the specter of the work is summoned there to their little encampment and suddenly it seems very important to catalog every clipping and scraping she's collected over the course of the trip. Wysteria sits now on a stone at the edge of the firelight with her traveling case open beside her, taking careful notes on a clipping taken from one of the corpses and preserved now in a little glass vial.
"Do you suppose the growth is poisonous, or that the flesh was?"