IceAndWave/HospitalityDeclined
Hospitality Declined
In which curiosity singes the cat, a new player is revealed, and the Dead are toyed with...
The 15th Day of Descending Wood, Realm Year 763
Cassia endures the addition of the soldiers to her little exploration with good grace, thanking General Otori for the troops and then heading off down the passageway, eyes and ears peeled.
The passageway leads down at a steep angle, before ending in a large open underground space, a narrow ledge along one wall. A short away the ledge ends at a wall and continues further down, although there is a large room cut out of the stone.
The room appears to have once been used as an office or workspace of some sort, although everything has been torn up, burned or otherwise destroyed - presumably when the Realm legionnaires attacked.
"Can you three watch, I'd like to have a look through here..." As Cassia starts to delicately sift through the torn and burnt papers, looking for anything of value or fragments that might still be readable... they seem to have done a through job but...
The devastation appears quite thorough, a small pit of pyreflame accounting for the majority of the burned documents, and what scraps remain are covered in fragmentary scrawl, at best. Cassia does note that it looks as if someone were here fairly recently, doing much the same thing as she is - and they paid particular attention to the desk (incidentally formed from fused and reshaped bone).
Cassia focuses closer on the desk, trying the drawers.
They are empty and filled with scraps of what Cassia realises is actually human skin, treated somehow to behave like paper, although the presence of a tattoo fragment on one scrap gives their secret away.
"Eeew..." she shivers slightly and closes the drawer, before looking around the room once more, sighing softly, then she heads out of it and down the passageway, after gesturing for the soldiers to follow.
The ledge leading away from the cave heads down for some way before ending at a large shelf. Peering over the edge reveals a yawning, apparently infinite blackness, while the wall opposite has another tunnel. This one better crafted than the others and with a pair of bone-white statues at the mouth. Bone-white is an apt description, because they appear to have been made in the same fashion as the desk.
"What is this?" a deep, sepulchral voice suddenly echoes from the tunnel, "A visitor?" Fading into visibility from absolute blackness, a large figure in armour and robes speaks from behind a helmet cut into the frightful visage of some Underworld creature, and flanked by a large number of baying, howling ghosts.
Cassia looks briefly down over the ledge before she shivers just briefly. She leaps back up as she takes conscious note of the figure, her knife appearing from nowhere with a brief flick of her hair. "Yes, and who might you be?" she asks, dropping into a loose defencive crouch, studying him and the ghosts.
She gestures for the men to start to back away behind her, not wanting to risk their lives for her fun.
"Your host in this bleak and terrible land," a mocking tone bleeds into his voice, "As you are my guest I must insist that you come with me, that I may show you further hospitality." He gestures and the ghosts move forward like a wave of translucent blue light.
The soldiers, mindful of their orders, ignore Cassia's gesture and step forwards to fend off the ghosts, spears low. In scant seconds they are cut down by the savage claws of their undead attackers, and the ghosts continue to close in on the Dragon-Blood. "Come peacefully," the armoured figure says, "You have no choice."
Cassia regards the ghosts circling warily. She is inwardly hurt by the deaths of the soldiers... she hadn't meant for them to die for her explorations... it wasn't supposed to happen like that... She looks up at the figure, her eyes smouldering. "I thank you kindly for your offer, but I have a prior engagement!" and then she gathers herself into a crouch, leaping away from the cold earth in a burts of brilliant flame. Her dagger glows with the fire within as she tries to stab the robed figure
"Oh dear, how impulsive," he steps back from Cassia's streaking assault, his robes snapping out to wrap around her arms and face, pulling the young Dragon-Blood off-course. "You need to learn the rules of hospitality, little one."
The robes pull Cassia off course so thoroughly that she is slammed face-down into the dry, grey stone of the shelf. "Now, have we learned anything from that?" He looks down on the small girl, before gesturing to the ghosts, "Take her!" The undead horde swarms in on top of her.
Cassia ignites her anima as the ghosts swarm down on her, trying to roll aside. Despite being vastly outnumbered, Cassia manages to get out from under the horde of the undead, which just leaves her with the problem of what to do next.
Cassia spins up to her feet with another burst of flame, "Not so easy." She grins as the flames surround her. It is starting to occur to her that perhaps this wasn't the most sensible thing to do... She looks at the ghosts around her, then turns and starts to cut her way towards the tunnel, whirling in a spinning dance to keep the ghosts from her.
Ghosts collapse into piles of ruptured corpus at the slightest touch of Cassia's jade knife, the red blade gleaming in the darkness as, against overwhelming odds, she begins to cut her way through. Just then, ropes of pure darkness snake out from beneath the armoured figure's robes, wrapping themselves around the girl's arms and legs and binding her tightly. "I had hoped you would come peacefully, but I see that was not to be," he sighs theatrically.
Cassia squirms and twists in the shadow bindings, trying to break free "Well... perhaps if your choice of companions," she nods her head to indicate the ghosts around her "were more peaceable..." she tries to twist again.
"True, but we must make do with the materials available," standing over the bound girl, a graveyard chill spilling out from under the robes, he kneels down beside Cassia and extended his gauntleted hand over her face, "I think it is best if you don't see what happens next." Blackness passes in front of her eyes and unconsciousness takes her.
An indeterminate time later, Cassia wakes - her surroundings considerably different from before. A room, small and constructed from pale wood, with a simple cot and straw mat that she is lying on when consciousness returns.
One thing is immediately apparent - the whole room seems to be moving, swaying slowly.
Cassia tenses slightly as she wakes, then closes her eyes again. A boat. She listens carefully for any noises, or sounds of conversation, subtly running her hands over her body as she does, to see what she is missing.
Soft creaking sounds dominate the aural landscape, and the occasional sound of water lapping against wood merely confirms her initial guess. The occasional shuffling footstep can he heard from above, but no voices.
Cassia quietly rolls off the bed, and after a cursary search of the room, she pads over to the door, and very carefully tries the handle. The door, while rickety and not particularly well-fitting, is resolutely locked.
Cassia sighs softly, and searches the room again, for a thin sliver of metal, a loose nail, anything... She eventually finds what she is looking for, a loose nail providing the means to prize a stiff wire - the remains of some charm from an old occupant? - from the walls, twisting it quickly into shape and then applying it silently to the lock, working the crude tumblers by ear as she does.
The lock pops open in a matter of seconds, the door opening smoothly and silently and revealing a small passageway that ends in a flight of stairs. An open door shines light into the passage from the side, though, and the movement of shadows suggests a presence within.
Cassia carefully shuts the door behind herself, half locking it so that while it wont be hard to pick in a hurry, it wont drift open either. Cassia holds the stiff wire in one hand as she creeps forward, stopping just short of the door and listening carefully.
Two voices come from the doorway, one old and dusty, like a book from a thousand-year-old library given voice, while the other is horribly liquid, with gurgling sounds intermixed as if the speaker were eternally drowning. Neither voices says anything in a language Cassia can understand, however.
Cassia reaches her hands out to either side of the passageway and slowly and silently walks her way up the corridor. When her back is to the ceiling, she starts to edge past the door. Creeping slowly past the doorway, back to the ceiling, Cassia moves almost without sound, until a board creaks under her hand. The voices from the room stop and one figure, something that was probably alive many years ago emerges. It looks around, stepping towards the door that Cassia was, until recently incarcerated behind.
Cassia holds her breath and remains pressed to the shadows of the ceiling. Carefully pulling out the nail she used before, she throws it down the corridoor towards the room. It lands with a suprising *ting*. Hopefully the other one should hear it...
A gurgling sound comes from the room this time, and another head, this one far more rotten and, well, wet pokes out, saying something in the same horrible voice to the one who left earlier.
Cassia almost whispers "Go on, go and look..."
Walking wetly down the passageway, the second guard leaves the room and heads towards his (her? its?) companion, gurgling something in that strange language.
Cassia waits until he almost reaches his companion, then swings her way down into the room, landing in a silent crouch. The room is small, cramped even, containing a rickety table and a pair of chairs in just as terrible shape (one of them has wet patches and... bits on it). More importantly, on a shelf on the far side of the room are Cassia's things, the items that were taken from her when she was unconscious.
Very quickly, she rearms herself and returns the necklace and everything else to its proper place. Then she pads to the door, listening and carefully pressing herself up behind it, dagger drawn.
The two guards return to the small room, seperating to go around the table and return to their seats.
Cassia folds herself down to the floor, and twists round the door, slowly backing out, keeping the one guards body between the other who is facing the door, and then pads away from the doors. She carefully ascends the stairs that end in a ship-style hatch, closed but currently unlocked.
Cassia listens through the hatch, for any sounds above, before lifting the hatch up a hairsbreadth, bending her neck at an angle that for all others would be uncomfortable, if not impossible, scanning around the hatch. She sees a number of walking dead, more than can be easily counted, apparently walking aimlessly around, almost as if waiting for something. Or someone.
He of the too-mobile robes and shadow tentacles, no doubt, Cassia thinks.
Cassia silently lets the hatch back down and pads back down. Again she flips herself up onto the ceiling, creeping past the room, very careful this time to avoid the creeky board, dropping silently on the other side, and padding along the corridor.
Back in "her" room aboard the strange ship, somewhere in the depths of the Underworld, Cassia ponders her next move.
<Cassia> Well, the main problem was that she really didn't want to get deeper into the shadowland. But, all the passageways went down when she'd left the others..so, all she had to do was get off the ship, and then find her way up. Which meant getting onto deck. Without being spotted straight away. Maybe she could find a cabin on the edge of a ship with a porthole...
Cassia slips back out of her room, this time heading deeper into the ship, away from the hatch near to the room. As she walks she listens carefully for more shuffling... Mercifully, except for the sounds from guardroom and the shuffling sounds from the deck there are no further noises from the passage ways deeper inside the ship.
She creeps along, listening for the sound of water, trying to find an unoccupied cabin on the side of the ship. After a few minutes she finds one, small and with a case against one wall containing various... things in glass jars, but unoccupied and with a porthole.
"...interesting things.", she shudders, before carefully pushing the porthole open, then worming her way out, hanging over the side of the ship. She looks down into the water. It, or rather something in it, looks back - two pale, luminous circles hover some distance below the rippling surface of the water, before suddenly flicking and disappearing, the eyes markings on the back of an Abyssal ray of some kind, living in this underground sea.
Not swimming then. Too much noise. She looks up onto the deck and listens; then, if nothing seems to be up there immediately, a quick haul of her arms propels her up and onto the deck, behind a small pile crates. From her vantage point on the deck, she tries to look back the way they came or to where they are going...
The ship that Cassia has found herself on appears to be at anchor somewhere in a vast underground lake. Distant lights move here and there, although there is no way of accurately judging distance or scale. The ship itself is huge, approximately the same size as the Realm war galleys anchored near Broken Back.
Its deck is almost literally covered with what looks like almost a full dragon of the undead, currently shuffling around absently and the giving voice to the occasional moan or sigh.
So intent is Cassia on observing the deck before her that she fails to notice the clutch of dead emerging from behind the crates that she has used herself for shelter. The sudden increase in horrific stench that permeates the air warns her of their arrival, however...
Cassia almost gags then whirls around, dagger drawn, slashing their knees out and leaping backwards instinctively... right into full view of the deck.
A hush spreads out from Cassia almost like a wave, circles of once-living heads turning to face the interloper and the slack faces animating with a parody of hatred as, as one, the horde closes in on the girl.
Cassia drops into a defensive pose, her anima lighting around her, blade held out to slice at any who approach her, her whole body wired to twist away from any attack.
The shambling mass of the undead moves in on Cassia, clawed fingers and rusty weapons being brought to bear against the girl. She watches the first of them approach, the knife in her hand flickering in the fire that engulfs her, the sweeping cuts opening dead ribcages and snapping rusty blades.
Twelve of the vicious undead fall beneath the flame of Cassia's blade, their bodies roasting as her Charms funnel powerful Essence into their unliving flesh. Unheeding of their losses, however, the Dead press their assault, claws tearing at the young girls skin.
Cassia leaps up and out of the press, illuminating the whole deck with her flames as she twists aside, landing in a comparatively empty section.
Her gyrations are, unfortunately, not entirely enough and while she avoids the majority of her attackers, a few get close enough to rake her.
Cassia cries out as the blades rake her flesh, the old weapons opening shallow but painful wounds. She spins to drives them back again, blade smoking now, glowing white as it parts flesh and bone, filling the air with an acrid stench. She backflips over one group of the undead, landing in a roll, then twisting out into another leap, avoiding the slicing blades and claws.
The mass of the Dead turns to keep up with their fiery tormentor, her flashing blade cutting deeply into rotting flesh and brittle bone. Despite the flaring of her anima, which at full strength is visible for miles and scorches the deck of the boat she is on, they continue to press their assault.
Unfortunately, Cassia is as slippery as a greased eel, and avoids every single attack with a grace that would bring tears to the eyes of a Lookshy gymnastics instructor, as she twists out of their way this time, the twist continuing, blade outstretched to sever heads and arms and blades, a pair of dragons twisting round her body as she does, biting as her dagger does, guiding her as she leaps away once more, landing in another spill of flame, driving the dead back before she regains her poise.
The assault of the Dead continues, although their numbers have been greatly lessened by the fiery tempest of devastation in their midst. The deck of the ship littered with smouldering bodyparts, the horde closes in heedless of casualties, claws raking and rusty swords slicing at the small girl.
Cassia explodes up from her crouch, flames rolling off her as she leaps up and over the knives and claws seeking her flesh, glowing like a small star as the twin dragons orbit her, then she falls, spinning as she does, landing gracefully to the side of deck, all the dead arrayed in front of her.
Once more, the young Fire-aspect avoids the claws and blades of her assailants, the lines of blood that leak from her few wounds now glowing with an inner fire as she dances between and amongst the Dead. Just then, a familiar voice calls out from below the side of the boat, "Come on already!" It is Venia, and she calls and waves at her young student.
Cassia waves at her attackers, then leaps up and backwards spinning in the air, cutting the flames surrounding her the instant before she lands lightly in the boat. "What kept you?" she says with a grin.
"We needed to find a ride," Venia looks up at the large ship with it's small army of the Dead, "Are you done playing with your new friends?"
Cassia looks up at them. Then she nods "They weren't that much fun anyway."
"Then I suggest we leave before they press for an encore." Orders are barked to the soldiers and the banks of oars begin rowing back, pushing the smaller ship away from the behemoth.
