The Secondary Saga

[Gildarts]

Group 1: Abner, Christa, Urg, Bucky

Flaming embers leaked on her hand, smoldering hot as it sprinkled on her skin. The cold, cavelike climate sent a shiver down her spine, while the patterns on the walls traced into a much larger image. A simple raise of her torch revealed a large picture on the wall, it looked like a mundane drawing of the orc people, Picasso-style. Quickly, she dismissed the earthy clay picture and resolved to scope out her location, using her light as a net for the darkness.

The first thing Christa noticed was the thick air she drank in, maybe it was because of the whole "orc strangling" close call, or maybe it was because the breaths she did drag in were humid and dense with dew, overall, she certainly had found a new appreciation for the condition of her lungs.

Against the abrasive darkness, Christa raised the torch, only to reveal a somber and weary face. The lines of aggression wrote her expression as one of anger, however for a moment she seemed almost relieved.

"Isaac?" She still called out to the tunneled and corroded depths, only to get a hollow echo in return. It was no use and somehow in the shuffled night the awol-soldier had been relocated. The whites of her eyes flashed with a fleeting bit of concern, hopefully her one comrade wasn't dead, for the ex-soldier certainly couldn't trust anyone who had never known the evils of the empire. Oh right, I forgot. A ferocious glance over to the droid reminded her that she was surrounded not just by the enclosure of thick stone, but by enemies. There was something oddly imperial about the other guy too – no, not him, the live one next to him – and while her eyes held snarling tones of suspicion, Christa remained quiet. Simply because they inhabited the same space, or raised arms against carnivorous orcs did not mean that a zombie wasn't a monster and that the droid wasn't just a robot of the storming capital.

The more pressing matter was probably the undead, if she had to choose her priorities. His lifeless eyes followed her torch and then lingered on the freshly engraved lines on her neck.

"Hey, if you even think about taking a bite, you'll get a nice piece of mister steel. You got me?" Christa raised her Beretta, fully realizing that she couldn't use it in here. A bullet fired in this confined space could ricochet off the walls and add another bleeding wound to her prized collection... The battle was a little hazy in her mind, she assumed from the oxygen deprivation and she tried to replay the events in her mind while she traded out a sharpened knife for her now holstered pistol. Her body had taken a minimal beating and it was numb – all of it – so she couldn't exactly feel which bruised joints or scarred body parts to be ginger with.

Her mind had wandered away, if only for a fraction of a second before her eyes crept to her body below, not entirely covered in blood, yet she was sure it wasn't all hers. After checking her vitals and patting round the roughed up edges and corners of her skin, she dismissed the notion of serious injury yet, annoyingly enough, still found the impaled freak staring at her neck.

"You got a problem, pal? Cause I swear if you..."

A feather flashed in the corner of her eye, a hand brushed over her skin, only to discover a dart protruding from her clavicle. Her eyes narrowed with seething malice as she yanked it out and threw the useless dart to the ground. Through exchanged eye contact in the flickering light, they "agreed" he wouldn't say anything on the subject, especially considering how she had just hauled his ass out of hell, herself.

The woman's snarky attitude proved not to be an "act" at least, as the others may have discovered they now found themselves down to a menagerie of four and had been bundled close together in a teeny crawl space. If there had been any less of a "live" audience, she'd consider herself on a formal date with her matching pistol buddy who had seemingly forgotten to say hello. So the strong and overbearing personality resorted to her best "get shit done" face and before Abner could even take a greeting step in her direction, her muscles constricted on instinct and she tackled both the zombie and the trooper to the ground.