Session 14 - Adventure Holes & Springy Forests

Previously, across the Horizon… The ruined capital of Alterna lay in the distance, hiding an airship holding the Truth somewhere amid its abandoned streets. It would take a particular sort of person to take a journey there — someone particularly brave, or particularly foolish.
Orrey's little sister Cassiat and her friend-who-is-a-boy Galley took the party with them, aboard Galley's converted fishing boat the Slim Reaper, trusting the energetic airship to speed them along to a land of lost wonder.
The trip there proved to be more than anyone expected, and definitely more than the ship's lookout, Linnet, saw coming, though there were a great many interesting birds to be seen instead.
A ship nearly ran the Slim Reaper down, a ship of shining steel and roaring engines, the Seventh Dawn. It left the smaller ship in its dust, right up until Yves helped the engines a great deal.
A large figure wrapped in a tattered cloak landed on the Slim Reaper when the smaller ship drew even, though the party's luck kicked in just as the ship's luck ran out, pitching the intruder overboard (and fortunately never pitching Orrey off at all, it turned out).
With who knows what else in need of repairs from earlier, non-engineering repairs, the party has elected to bring the ship in to land and work on securing the Slim Reaper for a safe exit, should the need arise.
We join our heroes aboard the ship soon after landing…
Bast prods Yves out onto the deck. "No one — no one — is allowed down here for the next thirty minutes," the moogle grouses, glaring at everyone but mostly Yves. "I need to figure out where the engine went."
The door slams shut, and there is the sound of something being dragged and shoved up against it.
Yves looks a little baffled, and a little more offended. "Don't touch the switch with the—" But the door is shut. He sighs, and tugs on an ear. "Well, if they undo the improvements, it's not my fault now."
“Thirty minutes,” Isa says. “Enough time to survey the rest of the damage. Hull, rigging, and rudder. Volunteers?” Isa’s tone clearly communicates that she will find volunteers if needed.
Orrey asks "What's a hull?"
Yves glances upward, and says, "Dibs on whatever's closest to the ground."
“That’d be the rudders. Check behind the ship and make sure they’re in one piece. We won’t be able to check the steering linkages until Bast lets us back in.”
"Linkages…Isa, this all might be way beyond my level of knowledge. How about I scout around us to see what's nearby?"
The Alternan Empire covered the entirely of the known Ducorde, but since the Shattering, the term is used only to refer to the city of the same name. When the Great Crystal broke and ended the war, the city broke alongside it. The city was built across the Gap of Termina, forcibly restructuring and conquering the dormant volcanic island and the rushing river and waterfall that raged around it, just as Empress Alterna did find the Twelve generations before. When the Crystal broke, the Gap quickly set about reclaiming the city for itself.
The approach showed an island wreathed in fog, a fog that shifted between gray, green, and blue, depending on the angle and the height of the sun. Galley's approach focused on a small piece on the south-eastern edge, only a hundred feet above the water, where the wreckage of a building toppled onto its side stretched out of the fog to form a very precarious dock. A larger, heavier ship would certainly see the crumbling building finish its drop into the water. As it is, the ground flexes under your feet, the hull still gently rising and falling as if it were cutting through the waves.
"Yeah, we're going to need to do that too, if we want to leave the ship here without a guard. Be careful, though, alright?" Isa says.
Yves makes a sort of wave that's not at all like a salute, and slouches off to take a look at the rudder, boring though that is compared to the insides of the ship. "I'll be careful," he says vaguely.
A bit of the fog pulses between yellow, red, blue, yellow, red, blue, yellow, red… blue… and then stops.
"You don't think I need, like, a weapon or anything, do you?" Orrey scans the horizon ominously.
"If something tried to hurt you, do you have a way to make it stop?"
"Uh…maybe…no, not at all." Orrey looks a little embarrassed. "I can only slow things down so far…"
Isa sighs. "Then you need a weapon." She looks around for Galley and Cassiat, waves them over as well. "Alright, everyone come here for a minute." She doesn't recall Yves, though.
Galley is down below deck with Bast. Linnet is on the bridge, further investigating the map. Cassiat is looking out at everything from the deck, and only pulls herself away from the railing reluctantly.
"…Well, the both of you at least." Isa looks at Cassiat, and holds out a hand. "Do you have any more of those crystals?"
"I have the two I bought, yeah."
"Let me see them."
Cassiat reaches into one of her eleven pockets and brings two shining blue crystals out. "Don't drop them," she says, as if that is the only thing to be concerned about, as she hands them to Isa.
Isa takes the crystals, carefully. "Which one's which, now?"
"Oh! Um, I put a bit of red tape on the Red Mage one. That one there," she says, pointing. "The other's the Sniper crystal."
"Anybody else weirded out by the fog colors?" Orrey watches for more color changes.
Isa pockets the crystals. "Right. If I throw it at you, use it. If I'm dead, take it off my corpse and use it. Other than that you pretend you never saw these." She hears Orrey, and looks off in the direction of his gaze.
"What?!" Cassiat storms forward, index finger at the ready. "I spent a lot of gil on those! Give them back!"
Isa grabs Cassiat's finger in a steel hand. No pressure is applied, but wow it could be. "You'll probably get them back. But not until we're done here. They're too dangerous."
Cassiat immediately knows when she's beaten. "You better get me my crystals back," she says to Orrey instead. She then returns to the railing.
Orrey's eyes widen, and he looks at Isa questioningly. "I'll, uh, see what I can do? Later. Much later."
Isa looks at a patch of very nondescript gray fog. For a little bit.
Yves, meanwhile, is looking at a rudder. He's pretty sure that bit of the ship is the rudder, anyway. "Huh. Yeah, that's definitely a rudder." Yves nods at it, and turns around to slouch back towards where he last saw Isa directing other people at things.
On Yves's way back, Yves finds a book on the ground. It's a little beat up, spine cracked, shoved against the wall.
Yves crouches down to pick up the book, shifting his satchel around with the intention of popping that sucker right in. Never say no to Free Books found under mysterious circumstances.
Finding the fog currently unthreatening, Isa picks up the thread again. "Anyway. You two need some way to defend yourselves. Galley, too, unless he's hiding more of those crystals. And then, after I take them, he'll need a way."
The book is the Captain's Ledger for the Seventh Dawn, Yves notes.
Yves flips through the book toward the most recent entry as he walks back to the deck, having a lifetime of practice in reading while walking. If, admittedly, usually while not on a weird downed building in the midst of possibly magical fog. Still. The basic principle remains.
The ledger is heavily damaged, though from what is inconclusive. The last page is ripped in half, though Yves is a talented enough reader to piece together some basic facts about a regular trip to Alterna from a port in the Triad. The few items gained were nondescript — a book, a dagger, boxes of plates, nothing tremendous.
Orrey looks over at Cassiat and stage whispers, "I think Isa might be a pirate."
Cassiat sticks her tongue out at the world in general, not exactly at Isa. "I have a staff. AND, I know how to use it, some. Orrey, have you ever even held a weapon?"
Isa nods, approving. "Good. Sticks are good. They're simple, and they work."
Orrey shakes his head. "I have not ever really done more than hold a weapon. Except as a kid, and those were mostly imaginary."
Yves waves the book in the air as he gets near to the others again. "Rudder's fine," he calls. "Found a free book."
Orrey goes wide eyed as excitement sets in. "Really?! What kind? Who's the author? Is it readable or in another language or what?"
Isa exhales, and looks at Cassiat. "Alright, let's make sure you can keep your brother from getting his guts spilled if we run into something. Get your stick and show me what you know."
Cassiat unhooks a small silver cylinder from her belt, drops it point-first on the deck, and then catches the telescoping quarterstaff as it easily springs up into her hand. She then looks REALLY PROUD of doing that, but only for a moment.
"Hm," Isa says, not unimpressed. She tucks her left hand up behind her back, and holds her right hand out in the universal gesture for "bring it on"
"It's just the captain's ledger from the Seventh Dawn," Yves explains to Orrey, offering him the book. "So, uh, informative, I guess, if you're into that sort of thing, and…" He's distracted by the training montage starting up.
"Whoa, really? Let me see that…" Orrey starts skimming like crazy looking for any indication who was on that ship and what they're doing in Alterna.
Cassiat's approach is simple and straightforward, definitely following a technique she was taught — left foot forward, half step, a sweeping strike aimed at the midsection. She moves with the grace of someone who knows what she's doing, and what she's doing is reciting a form she learned within the last few months. It is easily blocked, but there is promise there.
Isa nods, reading the attack as it comes in. She takes the hit on the back of her forearm, metal ringing on metal, but then she steps past the staff and twists her elbow, bringing the back of her fist around towards Cassiat's shoulder. At, maybe, half-strength.
Yves watches the combat interplay. "I looked at the last entry, but anything nefarious must've been on the missing bit. Still, you might see more? I haven't looked at a lot of ledgers. Maybe there's a standard, like, code or something."
Orrey shakes his head "no" as he half mumbles words out loud while skimming. "Never seen one of these before. But I'm sure we're smart enough to figure it out given enough time…"
The Seventh Dawn has been taking the same trip into Alterna for the last four months, once every ten days or so. There does not appear to be much rhyme or reason to what they are bringing back, but the items do not seem to warrant a ship of that size.
Cassiat's block is better than her attack, the staff whipping around to partially deflect Isa's fist with a crack against the forearm, a dip and a spin back out of the way handling the rest. Her guard is down for a split second, her eyebrows somewhere up among the rigging, but then she has the staff back up in neutral.
"This is either the most boring ship in the world or this ledger is a fake. Or coded or something. No one would waste the money it takes to maintain a ship to just grab a few trinkets. Right?" Orrey continues to read, suspicious.
"You know, that looks so exciting," Yves says absently to Orrey, "but it's a lot less fun when it's coming at your face. You would /think/ people would stop coming at you if you hit them in the face with a lot of lightning, but it turns out not everyone does." He glances back toward the book. "Maybe that's a fake logbook and they're actually smugglers? Or, I don't know, passing around information? Carrying secret passengers?"
"Good. Don't be so quick to break off after you defend; you should be ready to move right into your next strike. Defense creates opportunities, it doesn't win fights."
Orrey's second trip through the ledger is a little more measured. The items being brought back are peculiar and nondescript enough that yes, this definitely does seem like there's something hidden in that ship's movement.
The logbook is definitely genuine, though. You don't have a reason to doubt that the book has been falsified.
What it's doing here, on the other hand, that's far more peculiar. The pages look purposefully ripped, especially near the back, not like it happened by accident.
Cassiat looks over at Yves and Orrey. "Aren't you two supposed to be learning?" she shouts.
Orrey taps his lip as he hands the book back to Yves. "I've got a dozen scenarios that could have ended up with this logbook landing HERE of all places. Most of them involve shady business deals, cloak and dagger stuff, and the hands of the gods tipping the scales in our favor. Do you think the Seventh Dawn could have been hijacked by someone who wants whatever is listed on these last ripped pages? I think that's the most sane idea out of the ones I keep coming up with."
"Hijacked?" Yves thinks this over. "I suppose that could be why the book would go overboard, if someone was trying to keep the info out of someone else's hands. But in that case you would expect just the ripped-out pages to go, not the whole book. It's weird."
"No, see they need the ripped out pages to guide them to wherever the Seventh Dawn went before. That's why they're here, to grab something that these poor Alternan explorers found."
While Cassiat's still shouting, Isa closes the distance in two long strides, and yanks the staff out of her hands with a twist. She brings her left hand back into play to grab the end, and brings the staff to a whistling halt inches from Cassiat's skull. "And never take your eyes off the fight."
Orrey looks over at the training. "You're doing great, sis! Keep it up!"
Cassiat's attempt to turn that to her advantage fail miserably, but she can't help but laugh. "Okay, you did what I wanted to do, but way, way better!"
"I don't quite know how treasure hunting airshipjackers work," Yves says, "except for the ones in the novels, and I think those have a lot more… uh… you know, it's probably not like those stories in real life? But that's plausible."
Isa grounds the staff, and lets Cassiat reclaim it. "I have the unfair advantage of eight years of training. But you're off to a good start. Just keep your head in the fight and don't hesitate to press the attack when it comes down to it."
Cassiat spins the staff once and taps one end on the deck, collapsing it. "I will. Thanks! Did you two find something good?" she calls out.
Yves hesitates, not sure what definition of 'good' is at hand. "…maybe?"
Orrey shrugs. "It's only a clue with no clear explanation." He brightens at a new thought: "I bet we can find all sorts of clues out there, though!"
A scraping comes at the door to below deck, followed by a bit of grousing, then the door opening. "Hey, can one of you go looking for some kind of building material?" Bast says, sticking his head out. "Wood would be best, but I'll take whatever you can find. We need to reinforce the support beams under the engine, a few of them got charred for reasons I cannot begin to understand."
"Oh, the explanation for that is very simple," Yves begins.
"On it!" Orrey exclaims in return.
Isa tips her head for Cassiat to go with Orrey, and then sets off to inspect the rigging.
Orrey immediately heads over to the "dock" and starts looking around, definitely not for wood, though.
Something thumps behind him, and Bast makes a face. "Yeah, good idea. Why don't you go outside? Go out there. See if they need any help. Yes. Thank you."
The sparkly green rabbit creature with the ruby in its forehead hops out eagerly.
Bast closes the door behind it.
Yves waves to the green bunny with enthusiasm. "You're back!"
Cassiat stares. "Where did this little guy come from?"
The rabbit bounds over to Yves, running around him in tight circles, before hopping off to see Orrey and Cassiat, then two laps around Isa.
"I'm not sure. Maybe out of a weird cracked mask that some other people whacked off the face of some sort of oppressed falling star mysterious yet ominous figure?" Yves shrugs. "Sometimes weird stuff happens in life. It's a neat little critter, though."
The ground is gravelly under Orrey's feet, each step sending imagined tremors through the precarious toppled building the ship rests on. The stones are large and strong, masonry that has stood the test of time but lost a pitched battle with very rapid erosion.
The rabbit bounds up to the railing, then back around to Yves, expressive ears twitching as it spins around the viera.
Orrey is looking around him at a perfect time to see something that will interest him greatly.
The fog lifting, and for the first time in his life, an unobstructed view of Alterna.
A smile lights up his face as he sees what he's only read about in books.
Yves solemnly offers the rabbit a hand to sniff. That's what small fuzzy animals like, right? Or was that children?
Buildings stretching dozens of stories up into the sky, overgrown with moss, bridges snapped off at the edges, gaps that once let citizens walk from one to another easily. The city was once built on multiple tiers, at least five core landmasses visible to Orrey from this juncture, leading further up the Gap. Water pours through ancient streets, streams bisecting old buildings. The lower half of a once-white tower dominates the view, looking further into the heart of the city — the makeshift dock the Slim Reaper rests on, that building's top half.
None of the paths from here look particularly safe, but every path out of here looks incredibly promising. Northwest, toward the city's center, goes to the lower half of the building that crashed here, atop which they stand. West heads inland, domed buildings and cracked rooftops dotting the path. North heads into what may have once been a city park, now a warped grove of trees and columns choked by moss.
Orrey unconsciously starts heading northwest towards the city center, unable to stop looking around at everything long enough to check his footing.
"I think it's very unreasonable to keep us out of engineering," Yves tells the rabbisn't. "Want to go exploring a little, as long as we've already looked over the rudder? I mean, I did that, but I expect you've been useful in there too. Sometimes people are very unreasonable."
The rigging is… manageable in a pinch, though also repairable. Most of the ropes were put under a great deal of strain, and while they'll survive a simple journey just fine, any further stress could lead to a failure.
The rabbit bounds out toward the ramp, as if exploration is the greatest idea anyone's ever had.
Meanwhile, Orrey falls in a hole.
"Whaaaa…HEY!!!"
The thing about a building being on its side is that what once were windows become potholes, many of which are large enough to fit one distracted historian.
Yves follows the rabbit, hands in his hoody's deep dark pockets. He whistles a chipper little dirge as he goes, aiming somewhat towards the shout of despair/surprise.
Orrey doesn't see the opening below his feet as he stares off at the white building in the distance, and can't react in time to do anything but fall straight downwards with a shocked look on his face, landing hard and rolling his left ankle as he collapses into a pile of pain.
Fortunately, the seven-lined sphere broke your fall. Also fortunately, it doesn't appear to have broken your ankle.
Isa stops splicing a brace line, and yells out, “ANYONE DYING?”
"NOT ME," Yves shouts back.
Very distant shouting, Orrey.
Isa goes back to working on ropes.
Orrey manages a faint "….no…."
Cassiat's head pokes down through the window/floor. "Are you okay?"
He dusts himself off and looks around at the room he fell into. "Fine. Nothing broken. Somebody put a hole right there."
Yves is wandering sort of in the direction of the shout, but, really, there haven't been any subsequent screams, and there were two people together, so probably everything is fine. Mostly he's just looking to see what there is to see.
Orrey has landed on a support wall, stripped red and gold paint now sticking to his clothes. A recessed spot in the wall holds a large bronze sphere crossed with seven lines, a podium in the center of the floor-now-wall snapped off at the bottom. His sleeve is caught in the edge of a broken candelabra on the wall beneath him.
The creak underneath him isn't a great sound to hear.
"Uh-oh…" Orrey extricates himself from the candelabra gingerly, and then resumes the search for more CLUES!
Yves is seeing the same things Orrey saw, though with the company of a shiny rabbit and a better eye for the potential pratfalls. Cassiat is lying down, flat on her stomach, looking down into a window off to your right. The rabbit looks very interested in the park. It's fairly nice weather out, all things considered, with that fog now being completely gone.
The wall he's lying on, Orrey notes, ends before reaching the edges of the room — there are open doorways heading further in-slash-down.
"There's a whole lot more rooms below us here! I'm going to go see what's in them…maybe a little more carefully. Hey, do you still have that 50 feet of rope, Cass?"
On the ship, Linnet drifts out and assists with ropes, once she's sure she can do so without somehow flubbing it.
"I do!" Cassiat chirps happily. "What I don't have is something good to tie it to."
"You can just hold it, can't you?"
Yves heads toward the park, fishing around in his satchel along the way. Where's that—no, not that, the—oh, definitely not that, maybe the—ah, yes. He finally comes out with a grubby, squishy ball which has definitely been chewed on by something, or someone, in its time. "Want to play fetch?" he asks the rabbit, waving the ball around.
The rabbit's ears flick about, perplexed.
Cassiat looks at Orrey. "How much do you weigh, again?"
"What's that supposed to mean? Jeez." Orrey has not been eating all that well and is actually looking a little frail these days.
"It means if you fall and I'm holding onto this end of the rope, I don't know that I'm not just coming down with you." She still tosses an end of it down.
"Okay, maybe not that." Yves stuffs the ball back into the satchel. "Probably not into chew rings, either… This one was mine when I was little. Um. Just a walk, then? We can walk. We can look at all the exciting…" He takes another glance around. "…trees."
The rabbit perks up, and then springs off happily directly into a tree.
It runs around the trunk, sits down next to it, and then bumps the ruby gem on its head against the bark.
The trees — the trees look a little weird.
Yves hurries over. "Hey, what's that there, uh, damn, do you have a name? Bunny? Greenie? Sir?"
Orrey tugs experimentally on the rope. "Any idea how to climb a rope?"
"Yep! Please don't fall!" she replies.
Aboard the ship, the rigging looks fairly well repaired. It's been at least five minutes since Isa heard from anyone else in the group, which probably means they're in trouble.
Isa puts her hands on her hips and looks out across the distance. "If I don't let them fail, they'll never learn. But we also need wood for the ship. Shit."
Orrey readies himself. "Ok, I'm going to put all my weight on the rope. Holler if it feels like you're going to fall over, ok?"
There are a great many varieties of tree in Ducorde. Yves has read about a lot of them, seen at least a few of them, and knew someone who smoked the bark of a particular sort of birch in Cardia (which did not seem fun for them). Yves is confident that he's never come across this particular sort of tree, a thick, sinewy tree that was once brown but since faded out to gray, coiled around two other trees just like it, twisting up into the air. Other, similar trees are growing around the edges of buildings, hugging edges almost like they were vines.
In fact, it's definitely strange that all of the trees here are braced against north- or west-facing walls.
In the adventure hole, the rope holds.
Yves turns around in a slow circle, contemplative. And then he crouches down beside the Unnamed Bun to prod the tree with his finger. For science.
The tree is a little springy. A bit warm to the touch. Not unpleasant.
Yves runs fingers along the ground nearby, searching for anything like a seed. Or fruit? Or maybe a sprout, that could be removed with some root. "Knew I should've paid more attention in that botany lecture. But, seriously, it was first thing in the morning."
"I think we're going to need a plan B on getting me out of here. I can't seem to get myself going up this thing…I'm going to look around down here a bit in the meantime." Orrey smiles and waves, and then wanders off to look through the nearest doorway-floor holes.
Yves is unable to find anything resembling a seed or fruit. A few broken branches and larger bits of wood. Those are cooler and firmer to the touch.
"Isa's going to see through that!" Cassiat calls after him, appealing to the closest thing they have to parental authority.
"You're welcome to join me! Then we won't have to explain it to her." Orrey continues hunting around. "As much."
Yves tucks some bits of wood in his satchel, then starts working on uncovering a bit of root down at the base of the trunk, to see exactly what kind of root system this seems to have. "You know, where I come from," he tells the rabbit, "most trees aren't exothermic."
Cassiat lands on the wall next to Orrey, nimbly avoiding the seven-lined sphere. "Deal."
The ground here is very hard — harder than the tree, which seems peculiar. It's difficult to tell, but the roots seem like they're getting wider, the further along Yves goes?
Orrey grins. "How many times did we play Turian Fins, Alternan Archaeologist Extraordinaire? And now we're doing it for real! I wish it was under better circumstances, but I still can't help but get excited about this."
"That… is not normal," Yves says, and has to stop and grab one of those larger pieces of wood to use for easier prodding purposes as he clears away what he can to follow the roots further away.
Aboard the ship, a yellowish-green cloud system looks to be sliding through Alterna from the north.
The rabbit hops along after Yves, its nose wiggling.
Cassiat ties the rope around the floor-now-wall-mounted altar, tugs on it once, and then tosses it down one of the hallways-now-holes. "Well, you always were the best at setting off traps. You first!"
Isa looks up at the sky. "That's not great," she says. "Time to round up the kids, I think."
"Should we leave a trail of bread crumbs?" Orrey asks.
"I have," Cassiat pauses to bite the top of a marker off, "just the thing." She draws an arrow on a small white card, tapes it to the edge of the podium pointing in the direction of the rope, and caps it back.
"Nice move. What about outside the window we fell into?" Orrey looks up at the opening dubiously.
"I did have…" she trails off, looking up. "The rope WAS up there… whoops."
Yves continues to follow the roots. "If I wrote to the university about this, and sent sketches and wood samples, and lots of notes, do you think they'd re-admit me?" He prods a bit of root with his boot. "…probably not. Who needs a degree, anyway? Experience is much more important."
Isa climbs down from the Slim Reaper, and starts walking in the direction the "Scouting Party" set off. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she yells out "STORM'S COMING!" from time to time.
Isa's shout is too far away for Yves to hear, as Yves heads further into the root system. It is close enough for Cassiat and Orrey to hear it.
Cassiat looks at Orrey. "Do we go back?" she asks.
Adventure awaits below.
Orrey looks around for a piece of rubble about the size of his fist. "We can wrap one of your cards around a stone and throw it up through the window."
The rubble is a small stone, a perfect size to accommodate a card.
Orrey gets a card from Cass and draws a quick cartoonish picture of the two of them stuck in a hole, then attempts to toss the wrapped stone up through the window.
The rock sails through the window, out into the rest of Alterna.
"There! Now they can find us." Orrey sounds VERY confident.
"Great! Off we go!" Cassiat says, clapping to emphasize her eagerness.
Yves continues to be very interested in botanical field work.
As Isa explores, easily avoiding open potholes of windows, a stone sails up out of the ground about 50 feet away and lands in a small crunch.
Isa heads for the stone, looking up from time to time to track the incoming clouds.
The clouds are rolling closer and closer still, the left and right edges of this storm system undulating in rhythm.
Orrey grabs the rope and looks down into the hallway. "Alright, here goes!" He attempts to "rappel" down, where rappel means clutching as tightly as he can to the rope while spinning in circles and sliding down an inch at a time.
Isa picks her way to the rock fairly easily, though it's broken into a lot of smaller rocks, a few of them pinning down a small white card. The card has a very simple rendition of a skinny human with outlandish hair and a shorter human with equally outlandish hair, yet somehow has been drawn to be noticeably less cool than the first human.
It's by an open window-slash-hole, leading into the collapsed building serving as the Slim Reaper's dock.
"Oh, for…" mutters Isa, and heads for the Adventure Hole.
The air around Isa thickens. The soft blues of the sky to her east rust into corroded yellows and damaged greens. The hairs at the end of her braid separate, just a little bit, a sort of energy crackling around her. The crackling energy grows, and then a bolt of lightning shears the sky, illuminating an outline of featureless wings somewhere up above her, this happening in the fraction of a second between the bolt's creation and the bolt's detonation in front of Isa. The flash sends everything white. A voice - female, alto, slightly accented, formal - “Brave warrior, can you free us from this torment? Free us from— Silence, a calm in the middle of the storm.

Inside the Adventure Hole, Orrey falls down another hole. This landing is considerably wetter, though that still doesn't prevent him from having the air ejected from his lungs when he thuds down onto his back. "OW. This is SO MUCH HARDER THAN IT LOOKS." Orrey rubs his sore everything. "Maybe we should put knots in the rope to use to climb down?" He takes in a room on its side from his back, a terraced pool drained onto the wall-now-floor in the center of the room, ringed by more candelabras, ringed by small stone benches, half of which are still intact. A sphere, just like the last one, at the end of the pathway leading out of that terraced pool. This sphere is larger than the one that nearly sprained your ankle, but it looks almost the same. Seven lines — three water, three wind, with one deeper line connecting the other six. Orrey has landed in an ancient temple to the Goddess of Wind and Waves, Thalatte. Only, there's something that doesn't quite seem right about that sphere. The seventh line, the one connecting all the other lines, looks different from the simple line Orrey is used to seeing. It doesn't normally look like it's supposed to represent something on its own. Something with a serpentlike body, with folded wings, with a long, whiplike tail. With oddly sad eyes.

The park has gone weird. For one, it's a forest now. A forest full of those gray trees, winding around each other, twisting around the pathway Yves has been walking, hooked over lampposts, tucked around buildings, branches clutching eaves and overhangs. The rabbit, for reasons known only to its adorable self, isn't worried. It hops along the path, stopping to sniff the ground every now and then. It often bumps its head against tree trunks, though, Yves has noticed, never against the same one twice. The trees have steadily been getting thicker, the foliage around the path denser, until finally the path ends, with a wall of bark and branches meshed and molded together in front of Yves. The rabbit sits down. Silence descends. "Well, ," Yves says into the silence. Each individual trunk, coiled around each other like snakes in the winter, turns in place slowly, bark shearing, dead branches snapping, every tree in the forest stopping and turning its full attention to Yves.
End session.