04-22-2016, 12:15 AM
Impenetrable white streaks of salted blue and frigid, weeping green crept towards the homey cavern that Solomon Grundy had excavated for the expedition party. Outside, lofty tiers of ice that looked to have been shaped by some malignant force’s hand curved into wickedly jagged peaks all across the frost-shadowed beyond, seeming almost otherworldly in appearance.
Jade shivered somewhat despite the many fluff-accented layers she wore, busying herself with dabbing at her cheeks and eyes as the tiny pearls of frost that clung to them melted. The fire was pleasant and warm, though— she sure was glad Tartaros has been so quick to get one crackling for the group to share, and it wasn’t long before the peppery-sweet aroma of sizzling foodstuffs encircled the stony chamber.
The pot was gently stirred, red velvets and soft milky-whites gradually spun into a nutty brown revolving and bubbling nearer to its top. The scent was ecstatic and faint, flaring like burning timber and sizzling pleasingly with gelatinous warmth, all the while dispersing its calming trail similar to the breeze-traveling seeds of a flower.
Wondrously conjured dishes, cups and bronzy saucers were passed around where the merry company sat upon crumbled boulders and stone seats, generous platefuls of spiced maple-nut pudding paired with thin slices of crispy bread serving as the main course. Melted droplets of sparkling snow, carefully simmered atop the rootless, wandering flames of the fire pit, swilled and gurgled within glasses as the few gathered individuals shared mystic legends and stories from their pasts, some tales having been whispered upon deaf ears for fleeting millennia.
"Settle down, and let me tell you a story." Tartaros began over the suppertime ruckus, and everyone minded and went quiet so that he could be heard over the heavy snowfall pitter-pattering outside.
"It was the... hrm...", he paused, "Ah. We were on Arton Extremis. A frontier mining world. It had been silent for almost a decade, and the scout escorts reported unknown patrols around the edge of the system, so we were sent to check it out. Turns out the governor had seceded, and carved out his own little empire around the sub-sector..."
The rusty marine paused again, feeling to a certain degree encouraged by the multitude of eyes glimmering wonderingly at him in the firelight. He continued, the voice emanating from within his helm ringing with knowledge that had taken several thousand years to fully solidify.
"We'd taken one of the major foundries in the north, but my company and a dreadnought talon had been left on garrison duty."
"Bastards swept in from the west. Managed to get past our auspex somehow. We had a militia of ex-miners and hired guns barreling down on the walls in minutes. Insane sods even tried fitting weapons onto their mining loaders." The marine remarked, sounding wry.
"They weren't worth half a toss each honestly, but there were thousands of them. I was forced back into the refinery with half a destroyer squad and a wrecked dreadnought."
"Just as they were overwhelming us, we heard someone breaking in from the outside. The Emperor-damned Justaerin with Torgaddon and Sejanus themselves leading at the front... Beautiful bastards. We managed to catch the militia at both sides and swept up the survivors, just in time to rejoin the rest of the company."
"After that, the rest of the expedition fleet arrived, and the system was taken inside a week. Now, who wants to hear the story of the time Loken managed to break some preening gak's nose in? Ah, I'll never forget that day…"
After that rousing tale, Valerie had a story to tell of his own. A smile twisted upon the plant mage’s lips as he leaned musingly into one upturned palm, his green skin seeming nearly effervescent in the soft orangey-yellow glow of the fire.
“I had once met a boy who had kicked his ball into a bush of Stinging Jasper; a nasty plant covered in needle-thin barbs. The child had rushed forth into the bush and was painfully stung many times over. He had trampled in foolishly, refusing to take the proper time to truly absorb his surroundings,” he sighed then, suddenly wistful. “A fallen branch or a well-thrown stone would have been all it took to knock his precious ball free. Alas, the poor miscreant blamed the Jasper for his misfortune, rather than his lack of patience. Truly a shame.”
The dark-haired Witch hummed softly at that, reaching down to give Bec a quick head rub. At some point the enormous canine had decided to splay himself across her legs, all of his fluffy warmth seeping into her and roasting the wintry chill into nonexistence. Jade didn’t mind.
Rebecca sat a short distance away, singing a discordant song under her breath as she played with a few grains of granite rubble. She hadn’t touched her food at all, declaring that she needed to be able to eat as much candy as possible when the time was right, but happily fed it to Becquerel. Her glowing yellow eyes crinkled up at the corners when she smiled, looking up in anticipation just as Grundy began to speak.
"ONCE UPON A TIME, GRUNDY WANT GOLD. SO GRUNDY BREAK INTO GOTHAM NATIONAL BANK. THEN, BATMAN SHOW UP AND PUNCH GRUNDY UNTIL GRUNDY GET BORED. SO GRUNDY GO BACK TO SWAMP. THE END.”
The undead man grinned a yellow-toothed grin. Most everyone else couldn’t help but grin along with him. You just had to.
“There was this really gruesome fight broadcast across the Dataverse,” Rock mentioned with all the unruffled composure of a professional news anchor, prodding at the questionable lump of sugary pudding in his cup. “A fiery skeleton curb stomped a couple of primes.”
“Brutal,” those gathered murmured in agreement, nodding along and eating light spoonfuls of pudding even as the news of a few— apparently unbelievably violent—deaths sank in. Those who perished were primes, after all; surely they would all return within three days’ time.
Howling gales continued to tear across the windswept ice just outside of the cave entrance, the sky having grown impossibly dark mere hours before. Truly, this place was a stomping ground for ice spirits. At a distance, through the whistling blues and greys that swirled all around, the light that stemmed from within their little campsite flickered only faintly, seeming much like a firefly caught in the worst of the terrible storm.
As dinner waned into nothing but drowsy, heavy-lidded conversation, Jade’s gaze singled out Karkat from all the rest. He had hardly touched his meal, the still-full cup settled beside his shoes as he glowered severely into the smoke-spitting flames, and unlike Rebecca he actually needed to eat. Overcome with concern, Jade drifted around several who were seated with a few murmured excuses so that she could flounce down beside him, a heartening smile lighting up her green eyes.
“What’s eating at you, hmmm?” she asked, looking over at the others as she spoke. This was, in all probability, the happiest she had been in years.
Karkat looked at her, considering the prospective benefits and drawbacks of telling her that it felt as if someone was trying to carve out a jagged hole in his chest cavity. Instead of spilling his guts in a despicably grotesque display of trust, however, the troll wrapped his arms around his knees and grumbled something nigh incomprehensible.
Jade’s soft-tipped ears twitched. “Uhm, what?”
“I said,” Vantas sighed, wincing as a headache twitched behind his right eyelid. “That you should probably be more up in arms about what’s going on with these jokers, not me. Did you even hear the kind of nonsense they were spewing earlier? Hired guns? Flaming skeletons with a penchant for ass-kicking? Batman?”
Shaking her head, the Witch laughed incredulously. “Quit redirecting my attention! I’m not going to give up until you’ve told me about what’s bothering you, okay Karkat? Maybe I can help you figure some stuff out.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I know so.”
“No, you don’t. Unless you’ve somehow miraculously turned out to be a Seer, which I highly fucking doubt.”
“Hah, well, you’ve got me there!” Jade twittered, kicking her feet up on a sloping pile of stones. Things descended into a slightly less than companionable silence, the starry-eyed Witch occasionally stealing quick glances at her nubby-horned troll friend out of the corner of her eye. Good-natured chitchat continued to proceed among the other members of the crew, with Jade being content to simply watch and let the time fly by.
It was really only a matter of time until something weird happened at that point. One minute they were all having a grand old time, and the next there were strange cyan green growths climbing along the cave walls. Valerie, in a moment of seeming inconsequentiality, had leaned back and lightly touched the rocky wall with the very tips of his fingers.
Faster than one could bat an eyelid, brilliant plumes of vibrant color erupted along the artificial cavern’s insides, gleaming such a wondrously luminescent blue mottled with iridescent green that it was nearly impossible to tell if what their eyes were seeing was real.
Yet there was a method in the madness; the sharp, crisp lines of color formed a noticeable pattern. They spiraled out in exquisitely meticulous frond-like extensions, countless circling fractals and signs of plant matter made readily apparent. There were bones, too— the scattered remains of several alien species none of them had ever seen before, their structures nicely illumined and cut in smooth relief from the earthen wall. Dotted loosely throughout it all, little stipples of sapphire gleamed like glowworms against the dark stone layer above, each shining with their own personal light.
“Oh,” Valerie breathed, running his hands across the ancient stone. “Oh my.”
The group staggered in a vaguely inward direction, the untended embers of their fire sputtering at their backs, each personally taken aback. This was strange, unusual, intriguing— beautiful.
“What is it?” Jade asked of their little gathering at large, a completely enamored smile tugging at her lips. In all honesty, she didn’t expect an answer, but the verdant mage pleasantly surprised her with one.
“Plants,” Valerie said, the enunciated pace of his words quickening as his excitement grew and flourished like the flora he so loved. “Old ones. I daresay that I have never seen anything quite like these before— they are unknown to me, but very, very ancient!”
One of his hands traced loosely along the wall, following a particularly angular streak of winding root systems older than time itself. The mage paced and bit his lip, clearly onto something. A creased line of confusion appearing between his brows, Valerie began to trail after the line along the wall, his every footstep and murmured word taken note of by the bewildered primes and secondaries keeping step behind him.
Valerie arrived at an abrupt standstill. His head slowly, measuredly, tilted to the side, as if he were listening for something that not many could hear.
All eyes were on the green-skinned magician as he delicately placed one hand upon the damp, ceaselessly glowing cavern wall, upon which a vaguely round pattern with radiantly shining petals circling all around rested.
Nothing happened.
“Well that was anticlimactic.” Rock said, echoing the exact sentiment of many in the room.
Crrck! Unexpectedly, a hairline fracture in the shape of a lightning bolt pierced directly through the engraved flower, causing its glow to fade with alarming quickness. An identical crack mirrored it not even a foot away, and another, until the faintest rectangular outline was impressed into the wall. One by one, every previously luminescent line of color faded seamlessly back into the granite surface, as if nothing had ever changed.
Only the door-like carving remained. Valerie removed his hand, retreating a step.
Jade was practically buzzing with excitement as her sense of Space expanded outside of the little personal sphere she had narrowed it down to. “It’s— it’s hollow.”
Turning his ceramite-plated helm to peer at the slightly taller Solomon Grundy, Tartaros gave a short nod. “It’s all yours, friend.”
Obviously delighted by the opportunity to smash more things, Grundy punched the hollow sheet of rock separating them from assured adventure.
Adventure, and a long, winding darkness.
Jade shivered somewhat despite the many fluff-accented layers she wore, busying herself with dabbing at her cheeks and eyes as the tiny pearls of frost that clung to them melted. The fire was pleasant and warm, though— she sure was glad Tartaros has been so quick to get one crackling for the group to share, and it wasn’t long before the peppery-sweet aroma of sizzling foodstuffs encircled the stony chamber.
The pot was gently stirred, red velvets and soft milky-whites gradually spun into a nutty brown revolving and bubbling nearer to its top. The scent was ecstatic and faint, flaring like burning timber and sizzling pleasingly with gelatinous warmth, all the while dispersing its calming trail similar to the breeze-traveling seeds of a flower.
Wondrously conjured dishes, cups and bronzy saucers were passed around where the merry company sat upon crumbled boulders and stone seats, generous platefuls of spiced maple-nut pudding paired with thin slices of crispy bread serving as the main course. Melted droplets of sparkling snow, carefully simmered atop the rootless, wandering flames of the fire pit, swilled and gurgled within glasses as the few gathered individuals shared mystic legends and stories from their pasts, some tales having been whispered upon deaf ears for fleeting millennia.
"Settle down, and let me tell you a story." Tartaros began over the suppertime ruckus, and everyone minded and went quiet so that he could be heard over the heavy snowfall pitter-pattering outside.
"It was the... hrm...", he paused, "Ah. We were on Arton Extremis. A frontier mining world. It had been silent for almost a decade, and the scout escorts reported unknown patrols around the edge of the system, so we were sent to check it out. Turns out the governor had seceded, and carved out his own little empire around the sub-sector..."
The rusty marine paused again, feeling to a certain degree encouraged by the multitude of eyes glimmering wonderingly at him in the firelight. He continued, the voice emanating from within his helm ringing with knowledge that had taken several thousand years to fully solidify.
"We'd taken one of the major foundries in the north, but my company and a dreadnought talon had been left on garrison duty."
"Bastards swept in from the west. Managed to get past our auspex somehow. We had a militia of ex-miners and hired guns barreling down on the walls in minutes. Insane sods even tried fitting weapons onto their mining loaders." The marine remarked, sounding wry.
"They weren't worth half a toss each honestly, but there were thousands of them. I was forced back into the refinery with half a destroyer squad and a wrecked dreadnought."
"Just as they were overwhelming us, we heard someone breaking in from the outside. The Emperor-damned Justaerin with Torgaddon and Sejanus themselves leading at the front... Beautiful bastards. We managed to catch the militia at both sides and swept up the survivors, just in time to rejoin the rest of the company."
"After that, the rest of the expedition fleet arrived, and the system was taken inside a week. Now, who wants to hear the story of the time Loken managed to break some preening gak's nose in? Ah, I'll never forget that day…"
After that rousing tale, Valerie had a story to tell of his own. A smile twisted upon the plant mage’s lips as he leaned musingly into one upturned palm, his green skin seeming nearly effervescent in the soft orangey-yellow glow of the fire.
“I had once met a boy who had kicked his ball into a bush of Stinging Jasper; a nasty plant covered in needle-thin barbs. The child had rushed forth into the bush and was painfully stung many times over. He had trampled in foolishly, refusing to take the proper time to truly absorb his surroundings,” he sighed then, suddenly wistful. “A fallen branch or a well-thrown stone would have been all it took to knock his precious ball free. Alas, the poor miscreant blamed the Jasper for his misfortune, rather than his lack of patience. Truly a shame.”
The dark-haired Witch hummed softly at that, reaching down to give Bec a quick head rub. At some point the enormous canine had decided to splay himself across her legs, all of his fluffy warmth seeping into her and roasting the wintry chill into nonexistence. Jade didn’t mind.
Rebecca sat a short distance away, singing a discordant song under her breath as she played with a few grains of granite rubble. She hadn’t touched her food at all, declaring that she needed to be able to eat as much candy as possible when the time was right, but happily fed it to Becquerel. Her glowing yellow eyes crinkled up at the corners when she smiled, looking up in anticipation just as Grundy began to speak.
"ONCE UPON A TIME, GRUNDY WANT GOLD. SO GRUNDY BREAK INTO GOTHAM NATIONAL BANK. THEN, BATMAN SHOW UP AND PUNCH GRUNDY UNTIL GRUNDY GET BORED. SO GRUNDY GO BACK TO SWAMP. THE END.”
The undead man grinned a yellow-toothed grin. Most everyone else couldn’t help but grin along with him. You just had to.
“There was this really gruesome fight broadcast across the Dataverse,” Rock mentioned with all the unruffled composure of a professional news anchor, prodding at the questionable lump of sugary pudding in his cup. “A fiery skeleton curb stomped a couple of primes.”
“Brutal,” those gathered murmured in agreement, nodding along and eating light spoonfuls of pudding even as the news of a few— apparently unbelievably violent—deaths sank in. Those who perished were primes, after all; surely they would all return within three days’ time.
Howling gales continued to tear across the windswept ice just outside of the cave entrance, the sky having grown impossibly dark mere hours before. Truly, this place was a stomping ground for ice spirits. At a distance, through the whistling blues and greys that swirled all around, the light that stemmed from within their little campsite flickered only faintly, seeming much like a firefly caught in the worst of the terrible storm.
As dinner waned into nothing but drowsy, heavy-lidded conversation, Jade’s gaze singled out Karkat from all the rest. He had hardly touched his meal, the still-full cup settled beside his shoes as he glowered severely into the smoke-spitting flames, and unlike Rebecca he actually needed to eat. Overcome with concern, Jade drifted around several who were seated with a few murmured excuses so that she could flounce down beside him, a heartening smile lighting up her green eyes.
“What’s eating at you, hmmm?” she asked, looking over at the others as she spoke. This was, in all probability, the happiest she had been in years.
Karkat looked at her, considering the prospective benefits and drawbacks of telling her that it felt as if someone was trying to carve out a jagged hole in his chest cavity. Instead of spilling his guts in a despicably grotesque display of trust, however, the troll wrapped his arms around his knees and grumbled something nigh incomprehensible.
Jade’s soft-tipped ears twitched. “Uhm, what?”
“I said,” Vantas sighed, wincing as a headache twitched behind his right eyelid. “That you should probably be more up in arms about what’s going on with these jokers, not me. Did you even hear the kind of nonsense they were spewing earlier? Hired guns? Flaming skeletons with a penchant for ass-kicking? Batman?”
Shaking her head, the Witch laughed incredulously. “Quit redirecting my attention! I’m not going to give up until you’ve told me about what’s bothering you, okay Karkat? Maybe I can help you figure some stuff out.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I know so.”
“No, you don’t. Unless you’ve somehow miraculously turned out to be a Seer, which I highly fucking doubt.”
“Hah, well, you’ve got me there!” Jade twittered, kicking her feet up on a sloping pile of stones. Things descended into a slightly less than companionable silence, the starry-eyed Witch occasionally stealing quick glances at her nubby-horned troll friend out of the corner of her eye. Good-natured chitchat continued to proceed among the other members of the crew, with Jade being content to simply watch and let the time fly by.
It was really only a matter of time until something weird happened at that point. One minute they were all having a grand old time, and the next there were strange cyan green growths climbing along the cave walls. Valerie, in a moment of seeming inconsequentiality, had leaned back and lightly touched the rocky wall with the very tips of his fingers.
Faster than one could bat an eyelid, brilliant plumes of vibrant color erupted along the artificial cavern’s insides, gleaming such a wondrously luminescent blue mottled with iridescent green that it was nearly impossible to tell if what their eyes were seeing was real.
Yet there was a method in the madness; the sharp, crisp lines of color formed a noticeable pattern. They spiraled out in exquisitely meticulous frond-like extensions, countless circling fractals and signs of plant matter made readily apparent. There were bones, too— the scattered remains of several alien species none of them had ever seen before, their structures nicely illumined and cut in smooth relief from the earthen wall. Dotted loosely throughout it all, little stipples of sapphire gleamed like glowworms against the dark stone layer above, each shining with their own personal light.
“Oh,” Valerie breathed, running his hands across the ancient stone. “Oh my.”
The group staggered in a vaguely inward direction, the untended embers of their fire sputtering at their backs, each personally taken aback. This was strange, unusual, intriguing— beautiful.
“What is it?” Jade asked of their little gathering at large, a completely enamored smile tugging at her lips. In all honesty, she didn’t expect an answer, but the verdant mage pleasantly surprised her with one.
“Plants,” Valerie said, the enunciated pace of his words quickening as his excitement grew and flourished like the flora he so loved. “Old ones. I daresay that I have never seen anything quite like these before— they are unknown to me, but very, very ancient!”
One of his hands traced loosely along the wall, following a particularly angular streak of winding root systems older than time itself. The mage paced and bit his lip, clearly onto something. A creased line of confusion appearing between his brows, Valerie began to trail after the line along the wall, his every footstep and murmured word taken note of by the bewildered primes and secondaries keeping step behind him.
Valerie arrived at an abrupt standstill. His head slowly, measuredly, tilted to the side, as if he were listening for something that not many could hear.
All eyes were on the green-skinned magician as he delicately placed one hand upon the damp, ceaselessly glowing cavern wall, upon which a vaguely round pattern with radiantly shining petals circling all around rested.
Nothing happened.
“Well that was anticlimactic.” Rock said, echoing the exact sentiment of many in the room.
Crrck! Unexpectedly, a hairline fracture in the shape of a lightning bolt pierced directly through the engraved flower, causing its glow to fade with alarming quickness. An identical crack mirrored it not even a foot away, and another, until the faintest rectangular outline was impressed into the wall. One by one, every previously luminescent line of color faded seamlessly back into the granite surface, as if nothing had ever changed.
Only the door-like carving remained. Valerie removed his hand, retreating a step.
Jade was practically buzzing with excitement as her sense of Space expanded outside of the little personal sphere she had narrowed it down to. “It’s— it’s hollow.”
Turning his ceramite-plated helm to peer at the slightly taller Solomon Grundy, Tartaros gave a short nod. “It’s all yours, friend.”
Obviously delighted by the opportunity to smash more things, Grundy punched the hollow sheet of rock separating them from assured adventure.
Adventure, and a long, winding darkness.
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Gamzee Makara Wrote:S’aight. After all, dogs have a tendency to motherfuckin’ bite.