TIME August 14th (continuing) LOCATION The laboratory, aboard the buried vessel
BACKGROUND:
A creature straight out of the pictographs on the temple door had just put both Krusha and Raven on the floor with nothing more than a look – and it was still standing.
WHAT HAPPENED
It pressed the advantage while they recovered, closing on Ash and slashing at Krusha before melting into the drifting green mist that hugged the floor – invisible, but not gone.
Raven swung blind at the disturbance in the fog and connected with nothing.
Then the floor itself began to shudder, a crack tearing down one wall and weeping black, silver-flecked fluid – whatever this vessel was, it was coming apart at the seams around them.
The creature reappeared over Ash’s prone body, tentacles reaching for her exposed face – and then, inexplicably, pulled back at the last second and vanished again.
Nobody had an explanation for the mercy.
Krusha found the second illithid still slumped by its tube, pulled it out by the legs more from grim curiosity than anything else.
And it was still alive, in a fashion, rolling over with dull white eyes snapped wide open, staring through them rather than at them, tentacles twitching as it tried and failed to push itself up.
Whatever thousand years of silence in that tube had done to its mind, there was nothing left worth calling awake.
Raven delivered the mercy kill; it didn’t so much as flinch.
Three metal urns sat on the table among the tubes and chests the Agents otherwise left untouched – two already prised open, lids off, each holding a pool of liquid with brain matter floating against the sides.
The third still held a brain.
Raven, with a bulb of Twitch and one of Bumblebee to spare and no better idea what to do with them, emptied both into the third urn and sealed the lid back down.
With the fight seemingly over – for now – the Agents climbed back up to the room they’d entered through, only to find the iris door already open behind them, though Raven was certain she’d shut it.
Someone, or something, had been in the chair at the room’s centre recently – fresh smears of fluid on the armrests that hadn’t been there before.
Investigating the mass of root-like tendrils descending through a hole in the ceiling turned violent fast.
What looked like plant growth was in fact a living creature, a clacking, beaked thing at the tendrils’ source, and it lashed out the moment anyone got close.
Ash severed limbs with scorching rays; Raven, caught and squeezed by one coiling tentacle, cut herself free and kept cutting until the creature withdrew what was left of itself down the hole.
She finished it a moment later with a sword through the base of its beak, dropping into the pool of dark, oily, faintly slagma-scented liquid it had been lurking in to make the kill.
With the threat cleared, Krusha climbed into the chair at the centre of the room – and immediately regretted it.
His vision blurred, his limbs went heavy and unresponsive, and something that felt disturbingly like it was reaching through his spine settled into place.
Whatever this ship actually was, it had just decided he was worth talking to.