CLOSED.

[acreage]

WHO: James Holden, Dick Dickerson
WHAT: Hijinks with field testing
WHEN: Time is fake
WHERE: Creepy old ruins, somewhere
NOTES: cw: SPIDERS

The rift isn't actually visible from beyond the ruins, but easy enough to find once inside — illuminates much of the cavernous space with its green glow from overhead, a rip positioned to look like a hole in the stonework, and not the Veil. Maybe surprisingly, it's quiet. None of the usual suspects seem to be clustered around it, demons hurling ice or fire; though wraiths flicker, in the corners of the space, and beyond into further corridors. A local townsman, whom they'd run into on the way up the hill, had warned of rumors of bloodthirsty creatures. He probably didn't mean these. It's not clear, as of yet, what he meant.

Closing the rift is an easier job to get done than setting up the magic gun, truthfully, in hopes of something wandering across their path in here. Tony's gravity grenades are, at least, easier to carry and transport and more likely, Jim thinks, to see use. He's pulled one out, at the pause in their work, runs a thumb over its surface carefully.

"I'd say there's probably nothing else here, but I don't think either of us are that lucky."

Comments

[nonvenomous]

’Someone’ with the spine to bend Captain Holden into doing something about it, he hopes.

His disapproval at the lack of specificity there is fleeting; it would be unusual for Jim to outright lie.

More imminently pressing is the spider’s oversized corpse crumpled in the cavern with them. With the torch flared back to full strength, he tilts it to the spider.

“Will you hold this for me so that I can take samples?”

If those samples seem to consist primarily of giant fangs and venom sacs, there is surely some scientific reason.

[acreage]

No, he isn't much of a liar. He imagines he'd tell Tony, probably, or maybe even Silas himself — a benefit to being in the research division has to be the Venn diagram overlap between friends, and coworkers, and people you'd need to tell about idiosyncratic rifter/anchor-shard issues.

He takes the torch on an instinct while still, frankly, processing that request. What he feels about it is writ pretty clearly across his face.

"Why?"

It's important to note that even as he asks that, he holds the torch closer, to shed more light on the carcass.

[nonvenomous]

“She’s outsized, even for a ’giant’ spider. Prolonged exposure to the Fade might have granted the venom unusual properties.”

He’s waited until he’s slotted his dagger in at the base of the chelicerae to say so, cracking through connective tissue with a wrench of his shoulder. Fluid dribbles through the gap like vanilla pudding. Thick.

“Potentially useful,” he further explains while he works, “for medicine, or for applying to weapons with fewer moving parts.”