faderift | CLOSED.

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CLOSED.

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."

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“It would be unusual for demons to have wandered much further than the threshold of this cavern.”

The simmer of the rift dances lurid green against the polish of his breastplate, licks at the edges of gauntlets and greaves. He’s been watching it while Jim works, reluctant to lay his hands on even the foundations of mechanical terrors the Provost has cooked up without oversight. Silas is light with his touch even when handling locked cases, as he might be in the handling of a batch of nitroglycerin. It’s the kind of bone-deep distrust that prickles his neck hairs and stiffens his posture at nearness alone.

If some assembly is required, he’s made it clear that Jim Holden will be doing the assembling.

Thot’s eyes reflect light back at them like green opals from where she’s emerged from a side passage, slinking in and out of the stonework to case for creepies and crawlies lying in wait. All clear.

Some ten to twelve feet behind her at the passage’s ceiling, a pair of glass orbs the size of dinner plates flash less like opals and more like puddles of oil slick. Beneath them, six more eyes glitter red to green. The great, taloned mitt of a tarsus feels its way gingerly out into the light, taking hold on a patch of ceiling that is white with -- not fungi, as Dick Dickerson had earlier supposed -- but webbing.

“Hm,” he says to himself.

Thot carries on with her slinking, utterly unawares.

"Unusual," he sighs, "isn't impossible."

And what does impossible mean anyway, particularly in Thedas? He glances upwards, again: crumbling stone lit up in green. The interplay of otherworldly light and harsh shadow brings details out in sharp relief, places where slabs had been carefully fitted together, a place where something might've once hung from the ceiling. A narrow hole affords a glimpse of thickly-clustered stars, some constellation that'd still be strange to him after all this time.

In his reverie, in the absence of loud, alarming noises, he doesn't immediately notice Silas's distraction. Then he brings his attention back down, likely drawn by the salient issue of the rift, and does.

He follows Dick's gaze.

Even spiders of unusual size do not understand the implications of eye contact, it seems. The rhythmic stretch and feel and grasp of her flattening herself out onto the chamber ceiling is agonizingly slow -- one long, bristly leg at a time and the blackened, oozing stump of a limb severed at the femur. It moves in mechanical time with the others; hydraulic pressure seeps into a dribble through the stump’s end every third rotation or so.

Hemolymph spatters to the floor like vomit.

Thot turns to see. She looks up after the source. She hisses like a viper ten times her size, her back bristling into an arch, her tail swished alert. Very helpful. 10/10 lookout.

Silas strikes the torch he’s twisted silently from his pack alight, painting all eight of the spider's eyes in shades of sunset crimson and orange, highlighting the hungry work of chitinous fangs.

“We should close the rift.”

Edited (welcome to edit hell) 2021-09-27 20:10 (UTC)

The grenade, earlier considered idly, is now clenched in a fist. He's practiced with one or two of these before; it'd be easy to give it a twist and throw. There's a moment, too, where he ferociously misses the ability to just empty a goddamn clip into the creature and be done with it; and then remembers he can, actually, or something like it.

(In theory, the spider isn't bothering them. Yet. In practice, that thing sure doesn't look like it survives on flies.)

It's the spark of the torch that draws his attention away from the great, dark mass of spider, in time for him to ask, incredulous,

"That's the thing you're worried about right now?"

“We have it outnumbered.”

He keeps his voice low, the beak of his nose turned aside to Holden, the bones in his face sharp in the firelight. If demons start pouring through --

But he’s making a case, not giving an order.

The spider finds a gap in the ceiling with one paw, crumbling stonework knocked loose, clods of rock sent tumbling. Thot skitters into full retreat at the crack of stone on stone around her; the looming, seven-legged shadow splayed across the ceiling goes far too still to blend convincingly into the ripple of competing light between torch and rift. Nevermind the undead glimmer of her eyes.

This is a large chamber. At this rate, they will have a little time to debate before she’s within reach.

Just kidding -- she launches herself at them from the ceiling like a junked car from a catapult, pieces and parts scarred and blackened rolling over in midair pursuit.

Despite his alarm, it's clear he's about to agree. Flickers in his eyes, across his face, in the way he nods before turning on reflex at the echoes of falling stonework. The potential dangers posed by the spider are more of a known quantity than what might burst out of the rift at any moment.

(Spirits, demons, maybe even a rifter if some poor soul is really unlucky.)

He's more considered the action of lifting his shard hand than started to do it, however, when there is a huge goddamned spider barreling at them.

He hisses an oath, too lowly to be heard in the sudden commotion, as he moves out of the way — kneejerk animal instinct more than anything else — likely in the opposite direction as Silas is forced to move, if he does, and further from the rift than anything else.

Silas springs away like a spooked lizard, visceral terror firing him off the balls of his feet only for him to be swept under the knee by a jointed claw. He stays upright by virtue of dexterity alone, balance caught and transferred into a pivot that sees him palming a spectral shield up into the pierce of fist-thick fangs scissoring down for him.

Both fangs glance off a sizzle of green light across his fingertips, the flash of the barrier there and gone again in the time it takes Dick to scramble himself away under the belly and out between another pair of legs. Flaring torchlight marks his safe progress through to the spider’s far side.

It’s heinously fast for something so massive: legs whip thin at their tapers, tangling after them for purchase, scraping and lashing, the body lighter than it looks. The whine of fluid through its exoskeleton pitches into an overlay of insectoid shrieks with every jitter and lunge. Its confusion amidst their scrambling sees a thwop of webbing stamped thick to the floor under its abdomen, and two things happen in rapid succession:

1. The grasping motor of the skull swivels to Holden.

2. A lithe feline shape sails out of the dark to land square in the ballpit nest of its eyeballs.

Edited (wat) 2021-10-06 20:30 (UTC)

The problem is distance.

And that isn't an unfamiliar problem, to a man who's spent about half his life in space. Instead of klicks across the void, the question is 20 feet. About 6 or 7 meters. That's the impact radius of the grenade in his hand, how far clear of the spider he and Silas both need to be before he can use it.

The problem is also time: the shimmering, otherworldly green light overhead isn't getting any smaller. He really should've prioritized closing the rift sooner. At least Dick will have the chance for an I-told-you-so, assuming neither of them die in the next few minutes.

The real problem, Amos would probably correct him, is the fucking spider. And, yeah. Speaking of which —

it takes something of a juggle to move the grenade and draw his sword, but he unquestionably feels better with something sharp between himself and the set of eyes turning his way. His aim is to back away, carefully — there'll be plenty of time for stabbing when the goddamned thing is paralyzed, when Thot is clear.

Thot’s scrambling amidst the eyes sees them clawed and caved in all to jelly, the tearing of her claws broadcast in the staccato slap of her goblin hands through the gore even as she’s pulled down by the pedipalps and --

She’s gone.

A puff of smoke oils through the fangs, spider claws and a loop of silk groped blind after what should have been a bony little snack. Some of the eyes are still left to twitch and shutter instead to the draw of Holden’s sword. The spider takes a step back, one bristly foot lifted and reset at a time.

Recalculating.

“What's the plan?” Silas’ voice rebounds around the chamber, thin in the strange light.

Edited (look) 2021-10-27 03:04 (UTC)

There's a moment where Thot's disappearance is alarming; but no, it doesn't look as if the spider's killed her. And even if it had, she's far more retrievable than either of them would under the same circumstances.

"Immobilize first," he says, hazards another step back while the thing thinks. Despite everything, the spark of malice in what's left of its eyes doesn't scare him as bad as the unnatural blue glow of another monster's, in another time. "And then I was thinking stab the shit out of it, or something like that."

If Silas has that crossbow of his, for instance, or a particularly useful spell. Jim isn't picky on the details, here. If he weren't on the wrong side of the spider as the gun, that'd be an option too.

“...Okay.”

There’s a thready lift in there, not quite a question. Immobilize (that’s what the grenade is for, isn’t it?) and destroy. The echo makes his position difficult to pinpoint. There are crevices, columns, stalagmites of rubble reaching for the ceiling. Okay.

He’s dropped the torch -- it’s there on the cavern floor, struggling against the damp.

“I can stun it,” he decides. “Briefly. I’ll come to you.”

How brief is ‘briefly?’ Convention and military order dictate he should pause to wait for confirmation. Instead, there is a guttering, flashbulb pop of acid green light and the pelting of Dick’s boots over his dropped torch and past the twitching overpass of the spider. It’s fighting not to fold in on itself in the spasm of an electric shock that strobes the cavern and prickles the air sharp with ozone.

And a spasm really is all that it is -- lock, fizzle, and release. Two seconds, three seconds --

Edited (i hope nobody has this tracked and its just u and me and a bunch of edits) 2021-10-27 05:14 (UTC)

It's a truism about James Holden that his plans tend to range from fairly sophisticated naval strategy to are your plans always this vague? It's a kill-the-monster-and-get-out kind of day.

Confirmation or no — and he's poised to offer one when the spell's already been cast, though he's less accustomed to rigid military discipline than Bobbie, an admittedly high bar — he keeps a wary eye on the spider, and then on Silas, and then

sees a suggestion of movement from the spider as the magic fades as if to strike the other man, or shoot webbing, or something equally nefarious, and then,

makes a split-second decision to give the grenade a twist. It takes less time than that for the device to detonate, slamming him and anything (or anyone) in range to the ground before he even knows what happened. Thirty seconds, Tony had told him, and he'd told Silas in turn. When they work correctly, anyway, which may make the so-called standard specs harder to trust.

Edited 2021-10-27 16:02 (UTC)

The clang of Richard Dickerson hitting the ground is more dignified than the cymbal crash of a kicked trash can, but only just. He’s face down, one of the spider’s legs folded down across his back like a chitinous tentacle, mechanical joints cracked all the wrong way, seeping fluid.

They’re both seeping fluids, Silas through the nose and a split in his brow. It’s hard to see until he sneezes himself awake, a spray of crimson rendered black by the Rift’s lurid light. He twists his jaw around degree by degree to find Holden. Labored, scraping, smearing.

Behind him, the spider is also stapled to the floor, but only by the pin of two and a half of its legs contorted into the grenade’s radius.

The rest of it is a panicked flail of shrieking and struggling leggies jigging helter skelter for purchase to pull itself free. A fresh snap of light from the open rift throws its shadow into sharper relief across the cavern ceiling, blending legs and darkness into a lovecraftian bustle that it’s probably for the best Silas can’t currently see.

Edited 2021-10-27 18:49 (UTC)

It's not even the first time he's been kicked in the chest with — at a guess — something like 3 g's of pressure. The Roci's had harder braking burns, to say nothing of maneuvers in battle, of the 15 g's they were pushing during the Eros incident. Of course, all of those times he also had the benefit of crash couches stuffed full of gel to support his body, and a drug cocktail carefully formulated to keep him alert and less likely to stroke out.

Right now he has a cold stone floor.

It doesn't register, immediately, the way he got lucky. What he notices first, as he comes to, is the bloom of pain in his head where it cracked against the floor, the push against his lungs like the hand of a giant who hasn't made up its mind about crushing him or not. It takes longer for his eyes to focus on the ceiling above. And it's about then that he realizes that he landed on his back; and that if he'd landed face-first, he'd probably be dead. The sword had fallen out of his hand at the impact, pommel now crushed hard enough into his shoulder to leave what's sure to be a hell of a bruise. But if he'd fallen forward, onto the blade —

well, there's a good chance Richard Dickerson would've returned to the Gallows alone.

Long habit and training mean he doesn't make any effort to move until the grenade's magic starts to fade, felt first in an easier time breathing. Then he hazards a look towards Silas for any sign of injury, manages to stay on that task for a solid few seconds before he's distracted by the boiling dark mass of spider, enraged by its brief captivity.

The sanctuary offered by gravity is short-lived. Flight has failed and there is only one other way out mapped into the lobes of the spider’s little brain.

It proceeds to bite, wet fangs carving at the air, punching into the thick of its own twisting legs, and finally: snapping against the floor just shy Dick Dickerson. The rest of the spider’s face crunches into cold stone after them, gravity slammed into its own eye glop and venom with force enough to crack the carapace and pop a pedipalp clear off at the root.

Now only the ass and a few legs are free, dragging feverishly backwards against the grenade’s fading hold.

Worse yet for the spider, Silas has finished gritting a spell out into the blood slick under his chin.

Hemolymph erupts from fresh wounds torn along the lines of old scars in the exoskeleton, rippling back from the leg pinned across his shoulders to rupture the thorax and pulse grey through the fresh split in the noggin.

The scrabbling doesn’t cease, but it does slow. The abdomen sags.

It really is a shame that the only ranged weapons Holden had brought with him are the magic gun, set up far enough away that it may as well be on another planet, and the grenades, which he's sure as hell not trying again. And there's the danger, too, of how close Silas still is to the creature. Twofold: hurting him on accident, in attacking it, and that it may hurt or kill him before Holden gets the chance to do anything about it.

The spell is a good move, at least, and it would probably be more terrifying to know he can do that if Jim hadn't been introduced to the idea of his magic through dream treason.

He's halfway through thinking up a plan that involves dragging himself to his feet and doing something, never mind the wave of nausea at the thought, the thudding pain his head and everywhere else, when a peculiar sensation in the palm of his hand starts to resolve. A weird, uncomfortable, faintly pulling sort of feeling, and when he lifts his hand a flash of green light erupts from the anchor. For a second, he thinks his shard has somehow connected to the rift above them; but the light becomes a bolt, slams directly into the spider's thorax.

The sound Silas makes upon clocking that swell of green light swirling at Holden’s palm is the stifled growl of a cat swaddled in a lead blanket, tension flinched through his neck with just enough force to bury his face under his shoulder. He’s been ragdolled enough by this particular force to know.

The sound the spider makes is that of a rotten ostrich egg being struck with a hammer.

A deep cracking, a wet pop.

Splattering guts spill blue to grey from the crater Jim’s rocked through the crown of the thorax, split wide open along existing cracks. The spider’s remaining legs crumple in, the pump of liquid pressure against the carapace let off entirely.

A howl pierces the veil from the rift’s far side.

Edited 2021-10-30 20:54 (UTC)

Well, that was new!

Not that there's time to dwell, the spider's death coinciding nearly exactly with the sound of that otherworldly shriek. Which: fuck that, actually.

"The rift!" he shouts, raises his hand again to seal it, and hopes Silas is up for doing the same.

Yes, the rift.

Silas has struggled to one knee, his left hand raised out blind to lock in a crackling bolt from palm to Fade. He’s greasy with his own blood, clots of spider goo falling through the plates of his raised gauntlet.

Swiftly between the pair of them, the rift chews itself shut, sizzling a terror demon all to glowing dust just as it’s forced its way through. Quiet descends, and with it darkness -- the barely-there lap of Dick’s torch rocking in a pitch of wind through the ceiling.

He spits.

All told, if this was the only way they were going to get lucky today, it's not the worst. The only thing worse than fighting a giant spider is fighting a giant spider and a terror demon.

He'll take it.

And lowers himself back down to the ground with the closing of the rift, breathes out heavily. He'll get back up, but like, in a minute.

In the meantime, he offers, "I'm sorry. How hurt are you?"

“Minor injuries.” Probably.

He reaches up with one sticky glove to feel up under his breastplate once he’s stilted to his feet and in so doing coaxes a grunt out of sore ribs. He’s filthy more than anything, worn ragged and damp. The details are difficult to make out in the dark.

“Are you alright?”

"Fine." Probably.

He sighs, then levers himself upright with a groan, favors the shard hand. It feels more normal than he'd have expected, given the shooting magic phenomenon, and better than the one attached to the fucked shoulder.

"Hit my head," and his everything else, obviously, "but it's not a concussion." His eyes catch on the shell of the used grenade, abandoned on the ground and wet with spider viscera; and he adds, wry, "That'll be something to put in the report."

Faulty lag time on at least one. He's not going to try the rest to find out how prevalent the issue is.

Silas comes to the same conclusion after a protracted study of Jim in the dark. Double-checking in silent standoff, the angle of his silhouette inclined to the gauge pain in the anchor, wooziness, lack of balance.

A muttered spell, a turn at his wrists, and he turns in pursuit of his torch, healing himself as he goes.

“That device could easily have been the end of us.”

He's torn between a reflexive impulse to suggest he shouldn't have risked them both in the grenade testing, and the fact that it probably would've gone worse if he were alone. Torn, too, between a kneejerk desire to defend Tony's work and the objective reality that, yeah, they're lucky it didn't kill them.

"I'll make sure he knows it's not safe to use."

— is where he lands, and moves to stand after making that promise.

A banged knee puts a small hitch in Silas' progress -- something he can walk off while he stifles a sigh to himself. He stoops to collect the torch and gives it an experimental swish to clear a crust of dirt and kick the flame back up across damp tar.

“Is your anchor painful?”

This plague of rifters firing blasts out of their hands.

He considers the question as he, moving carefully, goes to pick up the inert grenade casing. Under no circumstances can they afford to leave experimental tech laying around where any Venatori or Tevene sympathizer can find it. Not difficult to imagine, though, what's likely to be on Silas's mind; the same thought had crossed his.

"No, not really." Twinging a little, but not much worse than after any rift-closing. A pause as he considers it, green dull in the darkness, before going back for his sword. "I'm going to have to remember it can do that."

Accidentally shooting a spider is one thing, accidentally shooting, say, a wall of the Gallows would just be terrible.

“Please.”

His resignation is distinctly that of a man who has already been somehow betrayed by an unexpected flash of green light. So is the distance he’s maintaining with his torch, though that could just as easily be due to the grenade recovery process Jim has volunteered himself for.

The light is, at least, enough to find the casing by.

“If the pain worsens I trust you will report it.”

The torchlight may or may not be sufficient to illuminate the faint smile that pulls at his mouth. The casing is picked up, the sword sheathed, and then there's the question of taking apart the magic gun. He doesn't yet move to do that, promises,

"I will. If anything else changes, I'll make sure someone knows."

Which really isn't an unfair concern with him.

’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.

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.

Edited 2021-11-07 21:06 (UTC)

“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.”

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