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]

“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.