TIME August 14th, afternoon (continuing) LOCATION Aboard the buried vessel, then the ziggurat roof
BACKGROUND:
Krusha sat down in a strange chair at the heart of a buried, half-alive vessel and immediately lost control of his own limbs – the ship, whatever it was, clearly had opinions about who sat in its helm.
WHAT HAPPENED
Raven filled four bulbs with the black oil pooled below before climbing out through the ceiling hole on the roots themselves, insects buzzing and something cold and wet dripping across her face as she went.
She came up onto the domed roof of the whole structure – a wooden pole jutting from its apex, roots draping off into darkness overhead – and, finding the surface too slick and wet to climb further, slid down instead onto a narrow veranda below the roof’s lip.
Below, while Raven climbed, Krusha sat down in the chair to see what it would do. Ash watched his body go slack, eyes rolling back, and moments later caught a glimpse of Raven herself, standing outside on the veranda and visible through one of the ship’s own circular crystal windows, still glowing faintly purple – outside and impossibly far away at the same time.
Inside the chair, it didn’t pass quickly.
Krusha’s vision blurred, the sensation of sinking backward into the seat itself rather than simply sitting in it, limbs gone heavy and unresponsive though he could still breathe.
He could feel the ship’s own damage as if it were his. Cold within, wet dark outside, something large moving out there he couldn’t place.
And, distinctly, something small scuttling across his own skin that had nothing to do with his body at all.
It took him a moment, still paralysed, to place it: Raven, somewhere outside, picking her way across the hull, felt through the ship’s own senses as though she were walking on him directly.
A sharp pain flared in his back and settled into a steady throb – something fastened to his spine, or through it, for as long as he sat there.
It passed eventually.
Krusha forced himself out of the chair, groggy but intact – an interesting experience, by his own later account, and not one he was in a hurry to repeat.
The hull cracked again as they climbed. Another tear opening up, spouting a fresh gout of gas and goo, before they made it out through the roof on a rope anchored to one of the ship’s own dangling tentacle-limbs.
Outside at last, the Agents got their first real look at the thing they’d been crawling through – a vessel with a bowsprit at one end and a mass of thick, rope-bound tentacles at the other, wedged into a cave far larger than the temple above had suggested.
The rocky cave floor around the hull was treacherous going. Sharp outcrops that had Ash and Krusha both slipping, Ash nearly going down an unseen hole in the process – and it took two full circuits of the ship before they found what they were looking for.
Twice they reached a sheer drop where the rock ended in an edge too straight and too clean to be natural, cut rather than broken; on the second, they spotted the meteorite’s own shadow far below, and what looked like an alcove in the flat wet wall beside it.
Working their way around the hull to that far side, they lowered a knotted rope – tied off to one of the ship’s own limbs – down to a stone floor some 70′ below, near where the recovered meteorite fragment had been resting.
Raven bravely went first, dispatching a lone grimlock scout on the way down without incident, and the rest followed with the heavy orb in tow.
A 10′ gap split horizontally through the mountainside ahead, sunlight and warm, humid air pouring through it.
Dropping through brought them out into open jungle under a punishing midday sun, a rainbow catching the mist off a distant waterfall to one side and the ziggurat dominating the horizon on the other.
By the time they’d fought their way back through the undergrowth to it, hauling the recovered orb the whole way and the sun already sinking low, a fight was already in progress on its roof – an orc and an elf trading blows above them.
Raven weighed climbing the outer wall to reach the roof directly – a tricky, exposed manoeuvre with a bad drop if it went wrong – while Krusha tried the jammed door instead, unable to find whatever was holding it shut.
A vibrating hum built in the air as he forced the issue, aimed squarely at one hinge, until it broke with a crack loud enough to send metal splinters flying.
The door slid back just far enough to give him a triangular sliver of the room beyond: the smell of a burning fire, and humanoid figures already rushing toward the noise.
The Agents found themselves face to face with an armed, wary party of elves a moment later.
A tense moment made worse when their leader, Dimitri, recognised the eye-marked cloak Ash had taken off the dead huecuva and demanded to know how she’d come by a dead priest’s vestments.
A quick answer – found it on a peg, not off a body – bought enough doubt to stand down weapons, if not outright trust.
Dimitri knew the name DikDik Bonabi, distantly, as something out of his grandfather’s stories.
Which put the Agents’ search on considerably firmer ground than they’d had reason to expect this far from Chuza.
He also had less welcome news: the orcs camped at the treeline weren’t finished, and come nightfall, they’d be back in force.