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.
Having come prepared with numerous specimen jars, each individually held within leather bags for safe-keeping and to keep them from jostling and jangling as she moves, Joselyn is kneeling down at the struggling eel and its possibly-more-fortunate-actually kin to purpose. The staff that she has, to date, never once used for any magical purpose is serving now as a leaning post while she rifles in her satchel for the largest of the jars,
which would by no means contain the entirety of either eel, so this is probably about to get worse. Or better, for people who really don't want the eels to be alive so close to them. In a way, actually, Joselyn is really helpful.
“No, this is unusual for an eel.” Prising its jaws open to get a better look at the mouth— “Who's got the biggest knife?”
Hers might not quite do it. Still, she's game to try.
"I prefer 'Fade energy'," Tony is saying. He lines up his jump, swings his arms, and hyup, lands with two feet hitting the river bank at the same time in a neat hop. He roams nearer to the group, not paying an incredible amount of attention to the catch of the day just yet. "To magic. 'Fade-iation'? Is something we're throwing around. And this little accessory can attenuate or focus the output for attack blasts. Hey, I'll hook you up if you get hand lasers too."
The back of his hand bounces a friendly swat off Richard's shoulder as he says so, an easy transition into salesmen while some dorks look at fish. And Vanadi is a here too.
As Joselyn pries into the dead eel's mouth, the jaws give a little resistance from seized muscles, but it's relatively easy to overpower. There, a row of little needle-like teeth as she would expect to find in such a creature gleam back at her. As the jaw cracks open a little wider, she glimpses something else. Inside the mouth itself, and protruding from roof of it inside, is a neat semi-circle of bony protrusions. A second set of teeth, blunt, recognisably humanoid, grow out from within. On the lower, there is a strange fatty, musly swelling between its lower sets of teeth. She would be forgiven for imagining it to be an emerging human tongue, if not all the way grown freed.
The still alive eel continues to thrash. The human eyes in its head roll around.
The stream continues to flow, but perhaps Vanadi has the better vantage point to see some disruption beginning to occur. Almost as if it were following Tony's muddy tracks, an eel suddenly slithers out onto the bank, snapping at the air. And a second. And a third.
He misses the teeth; he'd never dream of getting close enough to confirm an idle speculation. He misses the teeth, he misses what might one day have been a tongue, but he doesn't miss that flutter of motion near the river. His paranoia would never allow it.
He's stepping forward quickly, drawing his rapier with a rasp of metal. They're just eels and this is ridiculous, what is he going to do, make a fresh fish meal of them? -- and yet here he is.
"Tony," comes his word of tight warning, eyes on the slithering bodies. "All of you, keep back from the water."
Richard’s shoulder jolts with the swat; he’s been bumped by social adepts before, but still hoods his brow, looking again to Wysteria for a vibe check. She is busy with the teeth and eyes eel. So is Joselyn.
“Is it common for rifters to develop ‘laser hands?’”
He has a dagger at his hip, but reaches back to draw a larger one from the small of his back, beneath the tail of his coat. It’s long and mean enough to stake a man diaphragm to heart, unadorned save for the smooth-worn trace of a serpent stamped into the leather wrap of the grip. The edge is sharp.
He offers it down to Joselyn as the first of the eels lunges ashore, expression unchanged from his initial assessment of Tony Stark’s offer.
"Oh quite common. Well, relatively common. Not just for Rifters, of course. I believe it to be a mutation significant to the anchor itself rather than to the body it's attached to, so anyone with—"
She is quite capable of chattering along while hovering over Joselyn in an attempt to squint down an eel gullet. And to be fair, it's hardly as if she stops as Vanadi draws his sword in reply to the wet slap of the eels making their evolutionary jump from fully aquatic creatures. She simply changes subject.
Some urgent multitasking happens very quickly, and while it's actually sort of impressive that Joselyn doesn't accidentally fling Richard's knife into the river out of surprise she'd also sort of rather him not notice that, since it was closer than she'd like and he might want his knife back. (He'll get it back, it's fine, but she's doing things right now—)
Mostly, what she's doing is trying to gather up the two eels that they'd done in already in a sort of skewer formation like the worst snack they're definitely not going to eat while scrambling backwards from the oncoming,
“Then we can probably give these a new venery term,” she says, using her staff to push herself back to her feet, eels wiggling from Richard's knife, “I propose we're looking at a fuck off from this river of eels.”
Tony swivels around and backs up as soon as Vanadi calls out, and on reflex raises his shard-embedded hand up for just in casesies, but his expression skews more interested than disturbed.
The eels leading the charge, as it were, muscle and slither their way towards where Joselyn is skewering their friends, snapping, too-human eyes rolling. (At least one of them that catches attention seems to have two tails, split at the centre, which doesn't seem to benefit its ability to slither whatsoever, thrashing a little pointlessly.) More and more follow, swelling from the edges of the river. They move in concert, twisting around each other like tangling snakes, coming together into a while.
It even lifts up in the air by about a foot, like a big tentacle of writhing eel bodies, straining forward.
Tony is not calling a retreat so much as trusting everyone to mind their business, stepping around a little as he says, "Watch yourself, Smythe," as he squints at what is happening, hand still poised.
Mind her own business she does. With certain specimens skewered and everyone looking at the prospect of a tactical withdrawal from the riverbank, Wysteria fetches up her skirts in one fist, chirping "Mr. de Vadarta, if you please," in reference to the gentleman's ready sword, and then dives into the gap between their little coalition and the encroaching, roiling mass of eels.
She has a traveling kit to rescue, and makes about doing that with as much confidence as one might muster when one is acclimated to being rescued or otherwise miraculous preserved in otherwise threatening situations. Maybe Vanadi has to chop a few eels; maybe she just snags the kit by the handle and, squawking at a too-close snap of eel jaws, manages to skitter back to safety. Regardless: things saved, time to go.
This ranks pretty high into extremely gross things Vanadi has had to witness, and now seems like a really great time for some kind of hands-off blast of magic at the whole writing mass of them -- particularly when one snaps a little too closely to Wysteria. His sword's not quite close enough to do the job, so it's a quick bolt of black, crackling energy from his palm that sends the thing flying away instead. The next few get chopped, which is, as predicted, very gross.
But the bag and both persons are safely extracted, Vanadi lingering just enough to make sure any other snapping jaws might pick his retreating ankles over Wysteria's.
"No one else has left anything they're very attached to, have they? I'm entirely in favor of moving on."
With the eels successfully skewered, if any of them turn around to retreat in earnest, it will be to see Richard Dickerson standing and looking back at them from some 60 feet up the bank, well away from the river’s edge already. There are a few loose pebbles still rolling down through dirt and rock, marking the path he scarpered up and away.
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faderift2020-08-04 09:35 pm
no subject
which would by no means contain the entirety of either eel, so this is probably about to get worse. Or better, for people who really don't want the eels to be alive so close to them. In a way, actually, Joselyn is really helpful.
“No, this is unusual for an eel.” Prising its jaws open to get a better look at the mouth— “Who's got the biggest knife?”
Hers might not quite do it. Still, she's game to try.
no subject
The back of his hand bounces a friendly swat off Richard's shoulder as he says so, an easy transition into salesmen while some dorks look at fish. And Vanadi is a here too.
As Joselyn pries into the dead eel's mouth, the jaws give a little resistance from seized muscles, but it's relatively easy to overpower. There, a row of little needle-like teeth as she would expect to find in such a creature gleam back at her. As the jaw cracks open a little wider, she glimpses something else. Inside the mouth itself, and protruding from roof of it inside, is a neat semi-circle of bony protrusions. A second set of teeth, blunt, recognisably humanoid, grow out from within. On the lower, there is a strange fatty, musly swelling between its lower sets of teeth. She would be forgiven for imagining it to be an emerging human tongue, if not all the way grown freed.
The still alive eel continues to thrash. The human eyes in its head roll around.
The stream continues to flow, but perhaps Vanadi has the better vantage point to see some disruption beginning to occur. Almost as if it were following Tony's muddy tracks, an eel suddenly slithers out onto the bank, snapping at the air. And a second. And a third.
no subject
He's stepping forward quickly, drawing his rapier with a rasp of metal. They're just eels and this is ridiculous, what is he going to do, make a fresh fish meal of them? -- and yet here he is.
"Tony," comes his word of tight warning, eyes on the slithering bodies. "All of you, keep back from the water."
no subject
“Is it common for rifters to develop ‘laser hands?’”
He has a dagger at his hip, but reaches back to draw a larger one from the small of his back, beneath the tail of his coat. It’s long and mean enough to stake a man diaphragm to heart, unadorned save for the smooth-worn trace of a serpent stamped into the leather wrap of the grip. The edge is sharp.
He offers it down to Joselyn as the first of the eels lunges ashore, expression unchanged from his initial assessment of Tony Stark’s offer.
“Hm.” HM.
no subject
She is quite capable of chattering along while hovering over Joselyn in an attempt to squint down an eel gullet. And to be fair, it's hardly as if she stops as Vanadi draws his sword in reply to the wet slap of the eels making their evolutionary jump from fully aquatic creatures. She simply changes subject.
"Is this unusual for eels as well?"
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ER_RvM5WkAAGF3x.jpg
no subject
Mostly, what she's doing is trying to gather up the two eels that they'd done in already in a sort of skewer formation like the worst snack they're definitely not going to eat while scrambling backwards from the oncoming,
“Then we can probably give these a new venery term,” she says, using her staff to push herself back to her feet, eels wiggling from Richard's knife, “I propose we're looking at a fuck off from this river of eels.”
no subject
The eels leading the charge, as it were, muscle and slither their way towards where Joselyn is skewering their friends, snapping, too-human eyes rolling. (At least one of them that catches attention seems to have two tails, split at the centre, which doesn't seem to benefit its ability to slither whatsoever, thrashing a little pointlessly.) More and more follow, swelling from the edges of the river. They move in concert, twisting around each other like tangling snakes, coming together into a while.
It even lifts up in the air by about a foot, like a big tentacle of writhing eel bodies, straining forward.
Tony is not calling a retreat so much as trusting everyone to mind their business, stepping around a little as he says, "Watch yourself, Smythe," as he squints at what is happening, hand still poised.
softly punches my notifs
Mind her own business she does. With certain specimens skewered and everyone looking at the prospect of a tactical withdrawal from the riverbank, Wysteria fetches up her skirts in one fist, chirping "Mr. de Vadarta, if you please," in reference to the gentleman's ready sword, and then dives into the gap between their little coalition and the encroaching, roiling mass of eels.
She has a traveling kit to rescue, and makes about doing that with as much confidence as one might muster when one is acclimated to being rescued or otherwise miraculous preserved in otherwise threatening situations. Maybe Vanadi has to chop a few eels; maybe she just snags the kit by the handle and, squawking at a too-close snap of eel jaws, manages to skitter back to safety. Regardless: things saved, time to go.
no subject
But the bag and both persons are safely extracted, Vanadi lingering just enough to make sure any other snapping jaws might pick his retreating ankles over Wysteria's.
"No one else has left anything they're very attached to, have they? I'm entirely in favor of moving on."
no subject
At least he’s stopped to wait for them.