multiversallogs | then the riddle gets solved and you push me up to this

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then the riddle gets solved and you push me up to this

Who: ~~Bruce~~ Tom & Seoraj.
What: Camping, completely free of ulterior ~~alibi~~ motive.
Where: North of Flag Hill.
When: Beginning roughly on the 30th.
Warnings: Weirdness, violence, sexuality.

They leave early, because that's the tradition of camping - before dawn, as they have to make it up to the northern edge of the city proper first ("'Morning-") - the provisional shops built into the cliff face that hosts the treacherous ways up into the forests are helpful, the proprietors less so; that they generally profit off fools isn't anything they keep quiet. Bruce isn't bothered. Cold morning air and physical exertion with dirt under his hands makes some far-off part of him feel at peace.

It's just starting to become properly bright out when they reach the summit that'll lead them into the woods, and he takes a moment to stop and look out over the view of the city. Up here it's quiet, but not silent - it's not an absence of sound, but an absence of people, and looking down on Baedal from the vantage point of the highest natural point in the only landscape they have available makes it feel like another world.

Remarkable.

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"There's that famed Baedal variety for you, then," Seoraj observes, not having yet actually straightened from his quick duck sideways, hands resting on his thighs. "Knew if we went far enough there'd be something out there what appreciates your unique charm."

For as much as he is just casually and reflexively as he tosses off that line in much the same way as someone else might feel the need to check they've still got all their fingers and toes, given the worrying possibility of alarming the monster (even just startling-- he doesn't fancy seeing what happens if it jumps up unexpectedly), his voice is pitched deliberately nonthreatening, like someone not unaccustomed to dealing with unruly wild animals.

(Bruce and the cowdragon.)

"So you're not coming to my Vault show after all?"

This, of course, is the perfect time to make that crack.

Bruce stays where he is, right in the dragon's immediate field of vision, and keeps his body language easy. No sudden movements, no abrupt changes in his demeanor. Just the nice weird thing that had some apples. ... While they figure this out. He takes the opportunity of being so close to the beast's head to really get a close look at the metal ring - something about it bothers him, unsettling in the same way an embedded collar in a dog would be, but he can't see how this works at all.

Something makes a soft, rusted 'click' kind of noise. He can't see what.

"I'm telling her you said that," Seoraj says, reflexively, which doesn't count as hiding behind Hasi's skirts when a) she probably won't be wearing any and b) he'd only be back there to look at her arse. Taking the time to make sure Bruce understands that he's going to be held to that and that he can anticipate a repeat performance of Seoraj and Hasi ganging up on him doesn't stop him from catching that click and reacting physically, an easy step back from the dragon and it isn't a threatening stance that he falls into but it's-- ready, loosely coiled rather than tense, prepared to move in whichever direction he's going to need to in the next few moments.

Sod's law is multiversal.

Bruce actually steps closer to the dragon, who begins to make something like a grumbling noise. Hm.

"That's fine, you'd be the only ones seeing it."

There's an ease to the way he does this sort of banter - maybe that should be alarming, him being so comfortable in situations like this. Whatever the hell 'like this' even is. There's a metallic hum emanating from the great spoke-rung collar, now, getting louder. The dragon stands up and makes a noise that sounds like it's pained, and otherwise seems to be ignoring them. The humming noise evens out, and a soft beeping begins - one in pitch and pattern Bruce recognizes instinctively. When the dragon begins backing away from the edges of the field where he noticed the most inexplicably trails, Bruce follows.

"It's an alarm system," he says, muted, nearly hissed and plainly irritated, and if Seoraj isn't picking up the pace here Bruce will grab his dang arm and crouch down, moving still but keeping under cover of the grass, walking in the imprints of the dragon's steps. Something begins to chitter in the distance, and tops of the grass begin to stir before strange, pale figures begin to rise up, walking on spindly, spider-like legs towards them.

Something about the notion of using the animal in this way is intensely unsettling in a way that Seoraj has trouble putting his finger on, and will reexamine later because right now he has the more immediate and pressing concern of how fast he can move and how quickly he thinks he can get to the knives he's carrying failing the advantage of speed.

Something about the fact Bruce sounds more irritated than concerned is more pleasantly familiar; he's heard that tone before, in equally dangerous situations that were less like something he'd previously only imagined experiencing on hallucinogens.

"You sure following it is smart?"

Note how he is not hesitating to do so.

Bruce just makes a noise that's probably akin to Yeah sure, but also a bit like There is no time to argue with me, so deal - the truth of it is, his logic here is that whatever has need of an alarm system expects the dragon to be in the field. If they only see the dragon, there's going to be less need for making a big show of things and searching. When the house-sized animal stops walking in the center of the clearing, resigned to its predicament, Bruce half-turns and looks at Seoraj - not for long. He ushers him (as ungently as he needs to) underneath the dragon itself and then follows, crouched, so that the both of them are as obscured by both the grass and the monster as they're going to be.

While being underneath a giant, old, warm and breathing animal is not the most pleasant experience (at least the grass smells nice?), it soon becomes apparent that it's preferable to dealing with whatever is coming to investigate the alarm. Oddly-shaped and unnatural limbs begin to appear through the grass, carrying bodies that can't be fully seen from their hiding place. The dragon shifts and moves every so often, and Bruce keeps moving with it, turning, dead silent and clearly aware in a keen way of exactly where everything around them is; every so often he wordlessly nudges Seoraj a bit, and if the younger man can catch what he's doing, it's adjusting their positions so that they fall at all times into the slimmest of angles where they can't be seen.

The things looking around don't seem terribly adept at tracking, and none of them appear confined to one form, so Bruce can't begin to guess what they even are, but the sounds they make at each other have the harsh tone of hostility. One of them, spider-like, marches around the dragon, then further away, circling.

Ducking under the belly of the beast is a memorable experience; Seoraj is pretty sure that he's going to be smelling dragon balls for the next two days (which he assesses a moment later as optimism, given that they're still on the first leg of the journey and if this is setting the tone then goddamn), but on the other hand, at least it's warm. He could be under a dragon, stalked by patchwork monsters, and freezing his nipples into engraving tools-- it can always be worse.

For instance, he could be slower on the uptake about move in this direction and one of those wrong-limbed things could be better at tracking. They're blind, he thinks from the glimpses he catches, but that raises the worrying question of which senses they're relying on instead; times like these you're grateful for an overpowering stench. He doesn't relax, quite, as their circling search begins to spiral outward from the dragon and further away - he's not stupid - but he keeps it in mind, the limitations of those nightmares.

It's not practically useful information; contextualizing them turns that instinctive fear of the too wrong and too strange into something manageable.

That these things aren't seeing very well occurs to Bruce as well, judging on how they're moving about - almost nervously, a lot of careful poking and listening; as unpleasant as their vantage point is, the great animal is obscuring the scent and sound of them. Once they get far away enough, he risks dropping down lower, so that he can watch them better.

'Patchwork' is a good word. He's taken aback, for a moment, not quite sure what he's looking at - all of them are different, none of them formed the same way, as if melded together by accident. But they're already too far away for him to make any solid decisions about - at least it seems like they've decided it was a false alarm or something that got eaten by their pet alarm dragon, because they're all heading back the way they came, uncannily leaving little in the way of a trail, picking too carefully through the grass on tall spike-ended legs.

Just as they're nearly out of sight, Bruce makes ready to bolt again - he remembers in the nick of time to make sure Seoraj is paying attention, and the fact that he isn't used to working with anyone else is probably painfully obvious by now - and then does, staying low, moving quick and quiet after them. They're all heading in the direction they were going to begin with.

Which certainly bodes well.

If Seoraj had still been harboring any suspicions of a military background on Bruce's part - he's not - the way he's visibly reminding himself of two instead of one would've put paid to it. Seoraj, though, falls easily into working in tandem; playing well with others is what he's trained to do, he's the dead opposite in that he has more difficulty when he doesn't have someone else to account for and rely on. Trust is key, which is the part of this exercise that makes him more immediately uneasy than spiderwalking stitched-together horrors; it isn't that he doesn't trust Bruce (he does), but that he recognizes the distance the other man has for (almost) what it is and if they need to rely on each other out here, will he?

The way Seoraj figures it, moving towards the ravine, there's only one way to find out.

Fortunately for the both of them, Bruce is a fast learner.

The light is beginning to fade, and this far back into the wilds, it'll probably be going fast. Bruce doesn't want them to be stuck out in the open when night falls and sticks - if those things can't see to begin with, then they don't have the handicap that the two humans will in the dark. He drops back down when they near the edge of the ravine, so that he can get to the edge and look over without being so obvious. There's no trace of their patchwork friends, which leaves him faintly annoyed. So they live down there, and can move with much more efficiency in their rocky homes. That just figures.

"Can you rock climb?"

... What, they weren't already doing that? Bruce sits up and starts pulling a few things out of his pack, eying the ravine, sketching out a plan in his head already.

"Haven't broke my neck yet." Necessity is the mother of not only invention but also new skills, where 'skill' means 'capability sufficient to avoid the breaking of one's neck'; the sort of things you practise while someone is firing arrows at you are the sort of things you get the hang of quickly, or not. Seoraj is mentally applying much the same principle to the dangers of Baedal-- you adjust or you don't, and it's on you, champ.

He squints down the ravine, crouched, to get a better estimate of just how difficult this is going to be (not impossible but not pleasant, either, scaling up for the addition of spindly things from Tim Burton's acid-trip love affair with M.C. Escher).

Bruce sets up the rappel chord easily, and anchors it as best he can, while giving the ravine below them the closest look he can manage. It's got 'bad idea' written all over it, but at least it's just a general bad idea and not 'immediately fatal idea'. He'll deal. He clips the line to his belt and looks at Seoraj.

"You're spotting me. Keep an eye out."

It's a good thing Bruce is actually a goddamn ninja.

Wasting no time, he slides down the side, and begins to figure out if they're going to be able to swing this. (No pun intended.)

"Right."

This man.

That's all he has to say on the subject, even in his head. The ambiguity conveniently covers nearly everything he might otherwise remark on, without wasting any of the time he could be spending keeping a sharp eye out for their less visually talented friends from earlier. Or anything else, given where they are and what they're doing and the fact they seem to be working on a 'good news, bad news' existence today.

He doesn't see any of them; he still isn't comforted.

Investigating the cliff face, even with the motivation of fading light, is not a job Bruce can do in a few minutes - he can hurry his ass up, yes, but it's still careful work. Especially in the dark. Forty-five minutes into it, Seoraj will receive a text that says Fine still. You? and Bruce has to wonder what, exactly, powers the cohort network; reception is only partially obscured so far out.

It's an hour and a half before he resurfaces, appearing back over the edge with almost alarming speed - jeez he's good at that - and whether or not he's roughed up is hard to tell, because he's half-soaked.

"Hi." ... Yes, hello. His voice is hushed, a good habit. "There are a lot of caves half a click down that are shallow enough to get light with dawn. They're uninhabited. Though there's a stream that runs through the cliff deeper in." Which is good for many reasons of practicality and hygiene alike.

The concern of what might come along through that stream - Seoraj suspects he's beginning to get paranoid about every possible bad ending, but on the other hand that seems eminently sensible about now - is one that occurs to him promptly, but weighed against the upsides of having it there, worth taking the risk. Mind, he's not sure anyone else should ever take their word on risk assessment, collectively.

(He flatters himself that he's better at it when he's not following Bruce out of some morbid desire to see what happens next.)

“How far down're we going?” Not tonight, he presumes; they'll camp, it's about that time. But it might be worth getting a more detailed version of the plan, given what's happened already and the version he remembers getting before they left the city--

"Pretty far," which sounds a lot like I don't actually know, though at least Bruce has the decency to sound passingly sheepish - it's hard to tell if it's genuine, given his... given himself, but it's true they don't have a map or detailed instructions. That much, Seoraj knew before they set out. "Hopefully we'll end up going in a direction no one's living in."

Yeah, that's likely.

Bruce explains where they'll need to go, exactly how far down everything is - Seoraj will have to shimmy down first, so Bruce can pull the rope down with him as he goes after. It'll probably take them fifteen minutes to get down to the cliff shelf they can use to camp in, so all in all, not bad.

And then he waits; sitting back, looking up.

Even though the sky is only a deep blue, not quite pitch-black with total sundown, the sky is shining with unfamiliar stars, not even grazed with anything close to light pollution.

“There's where we all see the same thing,” Seoraj says, reflectively, beside him. “That's nobody's sky.”

Something about it is oddly satisfying to him; he looks up at those strange stars and what he feels is something unifying, an experience shared no matter what internal context they bring with them from their own worlds. Those stars are different for everybody in their cohort, and he likes that.

In the cohort, anyway. There are all kinds of books and maps about astrology, astronomy, guesses and lore - "Until someone builds a space ship."

(Shut up, Bruce.)

The flippant tone of his voice is an obvious put-on; he doesn't have anything helpful or poignant to say, but it doesn't seem right to not say anything. It makes a strange sort of sense that this man communicates better when he's in situations that are closer to high-octane, as if that's how he's built, and at all other times he's merely coasting, waiting to be used properly.

He glances at Seoraj. "Better get a move on. Can you get down there in your skirt?"

“Figured I was going first so you wouldn't get distracted,” Seoraj returns, so very mild in a way that comes all the way back around to insouciant. These manly thighs are Integra Hellsing approved, Bruce, don't even play.

"Well I'd hate to have something happen to you if you went over unsupervised," he says. "Then what would I do?"

Shoo, Seoraj. This is supposed to be a serious mission, fraught with peril.

By the time Seoraj is lowering himself down into the ravine - it's slow, careful going, because he can do this but he's not extremely well-practised and he's aiming for that happy medium between 'not so fast I cock it up' and 'not so slow I cock it up either' - he's still chuckling, under his breath, which is better than going down thinking really hard about things that want to eat him and psyching himself out.

So there's that.

Bruce is calm, at least, sharp-eyed - once he directs Seoraj in a quiet but clear voice to navigate a certain way - though part of him is, privately, wondering just how he's going to deal with the consequences of this banter. It's not that he's nervous, but it's ... well, different, and Bruce doesn't like not having a plan.

Now, though, he has other priorities. And when Seoraj is safely into the cave ledge, Bruce begins his descent, pinning and pulling his way down, though honestly relying more on his own ability to climb over the rocks. It would be safer, yes, to leave the rope anchored at the top, but then they'd be leaving a flag to anyone watching. When they leave he'll do things the hard way. That's fine.

When Bruce drops down into the cave without incident, he has the decency to look a bit worn-out, at least.

“You'd be bloody irritating if I were of a competitive mind,” Seoraj remarks, quiet, from where he's been getting the layout of the cave they're in while Bruce was coming down to join him.

Bruce just smiles at him, lopsided and only barely not fleeting. He tidies up the ropes and pegs and pulls out a small cylinder to use as a light, a tiny thing that casts a surprisingly warm glow once he clicks it on. (Even without advanced science, Bruce has still managed to find an innumerable amount of gadgets. It's a gift.)

"It's been quiet?"

“Quiet enough.” No movement, nothing unexpected; it doesn't relax him, not when they've got a suggestion of what they can expect going deeper, but maybe they'll keep on having a quiet night before they continue in the morning.

then the riddle gets solved and you push me up to this

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