Meteora
Title: The Blacksmith Underground
Word Count: 1664
Author's Note: In Meteora, the Blacksmith Underground is a mining compound / operation about 20 miles outside of Medius. It was originally inhabited by human overseers and a host of first generation biomechanical entities that were responsible for doing all of the work. When the biomechs became self-aware and attacked the overseers, the operation was abandoned and shut down, and the mechs sealed inside the compound. Adventurers, scavengers, and the occasional mercenary team will work their way into the Underground in search of gem deposits and the valuable bioengineering equipment used to repair and upgrade the mechs, but they're taking their lives in their hands in the process. Monstrous excavators - the size of a truck and sporting razor-sharp segmented legs like spiders - can dice a living creature with little effort. Miners, like oversized humans in suits of armor, will beat you to a pulp with massive sledgehammers. But the most deadly are the reapers, hound-shaped beasts that served as crystal and gem cutters, with nanotechnical cables like tentacles sprouting from their backs. These cables are individually sentient and kill by squeezing their victims like constrictors, or by drilling into their bodies and bleeding them to death. We learned very quickly, on our first mission here, that WE HATE THIS PLACE MORE THAN ANYTHING. Speaking as the group healer, the Blacksmith Underground was just... ugh. UGH. (Also, first post of 2014 whooooooo)
The ringing in his ears started to fade as the dust began to clear, the echo of concrete on metal fading down the long corridors. Coughing and rubbing his hands across his dirt-streaked face, Azazel stepped over one of the excavator's many legs and retrieved Sketch's sword from the debris-covered floor. Chunks of the ceiling still fell around him, and he sidestepped when he heard the tortured groan of rebar, avoiding a chunk of concrete the size of a basketball that hit the ground just a foot from where he stood. Heading into the back of the room, he spotted Jaedyn leaning over with her hands on her knees, gasping for breath. She was little more than a silhouette in the dust, her robe so caked with oil and dirt that he wouldn't have believed it was red unless he'd seen it earlier.
"You okay?" he asked, placing a hand on her back. Though she was visibly shaken and obviously battered, she nodded breathlessly and gave him a thumbs up. He patted her back as he passed by, squinting into the debris haze that hung heavy at the back of the room. "Guys?" he called. "Everyone alive back here?" He heard scuffling to his right, and found Sketch picking himself out from under one of the miners, wings ragged and his shirt torn and bloody, his upper lip split wide open where the excavator had struck him.
"Remind me to take these gems and shove them up Avey's ass when we get back," he wheezed, bracing himself against the downed mech with one arm wrapped gingerly around his ribs.
"Gonna make it, Pet?" Azazel asked with a grin, holding out the sword. Sketch seemed surprised to see it, and laughed dryly as he took it back.
"I'll be fine," he said. "Be picking shards of bone out of my lungs for a week, but I'll be fine." He looked around the room, twisting his head from side to side to crack his neck. "Where the hell is Taesa?" he asked.
"Thought she was with you?" When Sketch shrugged at him, Azazel turned back to Jaedyn. "You see Princess anywhere?" he asked. When she shook her head, he did a quick three-sixty scan of the room. "Taesa!" he yelled. "Let's go, Princess, time to split!"
"They didn't drag her off, did they?" Jaedyn asked, her eyes wide behind her dusty glasses.
"Nothing that came in here left," Sketch affirmed, looking around at the bodies of the mechs and drones. "And I just saw her, right before the roof caved in, I don't know how -"
"Guys, shut up," Azazel ordered. He was pacing along the back of the room, hovering over the corpse of a reaper, one hand skimming across the battered metal wall. Leaning down, he pressed his ear to the wall and clearly heard what had caught his attention - the faint, shuddering sound of crying. Confused, he leaned his shoulder into the reaper and shoved as hard as he could, and after budging it a few inches from the wall he saw the entrance of an access shaft hidden behind its body. "Ah, there you are," he said. It took a few more violent shoves, but he soon had enough room that he could wriggle between the reaper and the wall and climb into the shaft.
There was barely any light - just what filtered down through the grates - and he paused for several moments to allow his vision to adjust. The enclosed space was just wide enough for him to move without feeling terribly claustrophobic, even if it did involve moving in an uncomfortable crawl. Several of the reaper's tentacle-cables extended into the shaft, though all but one of terminated just a few feet inside, the ends seared and fragmented as if they'd been shot off. The last continued down the shaft, into the darkness.
"Taesa?" he called, his ears pricking in all directions as he tried to follow the echoing sound of her crying.
"Anything?" Sketch called behind him.
"Nothing yet," Azazel replied as he moved forward. There was a T-shaped intersection a dozen or so feet ahead, and the closer he got to it the more he noticed the heavy, wet scent of blood in the air. By the time he reached the junction, his hands had already slipped in several small puddles of it, tacky and still warm. "Taesa?" he called again. "Kid, if you're in here, you gotta say -" The length of hot cable twitched beside him, a spastic quiver that made him curse violently in shock and throw himself against the wall of the shaft, curling into a ball so he could pin the thing against the wall with the heels of his boots before he realized there was no way the thing could still be alive, not when the reaper at the mouth of the shaft was very much dead. Leaning into the junction, he peered warily up the shaft and spotted Taesa huddled against the dead end of the corridor not six feet away, the cable wrapped around her leg.
"I hate to rush you," came Sketch's voice, "but we're picking up a lot of movement out here."
"Yeah, I have her, give me a sec." He moved slowly, fully aware of the pools of blood on the metal and that the noises he'd taken for crying no longer sounded quite right, now that he'd reached the source. "Hey, Princess," he said, reaching out to touch one of her bare feet. She was cold and shivering, a sure sign of shock, and he pursed his lips in annoyance. "Are you..." The cable beside him twitched again, and he growled and tugged at it out of spite, intending to pull it away from her to make the trip back out easier.
It wouldn't budge, though, and when he peered closer he realized that the cable hadn't wrapped around her leg but through it - it had split into three snake-like tendrils that had tunneled into and through her leg, looping around and around like a twisted vine until the exited in her upper thigh and vanished into her abdomen. Her pants and jacket were soaked with blood, and when he leaned over her to further assess the damage he found her eyes wide open and her lips a pale blue - the quiet sobs he thought he'd heard were actually the pained hitches of her breath.
"Oh no," he breathed. "No, no no no..." He screamed for Jaedyn as he twisted and shoved himself through the narrow passage, and it was only when he managed to squeeze himself into the corner behind her that he realized her eyes were following him, peering up at him from the upside-down perspective as he crouched over her. She blinked once, twice, her eyes wide and dazed, and she whispered his name so quietly it was hard to tell if it was just a trick of his ears. "It's gonna be okay," he told her, smoothing her sweat-soaked bangs away from her face. "You hang on for me, Princess, alright? Hang on." Her skin was cold and clammy, even in the uncomfortably warm confines of their close quarters. He yelled for Jaedyn again, just as the elf rounded the corner with a trio of glowing sprites swirling around her shoulders to cast a faint blue glow off the metal walls. Her eyes widened when she saw the damage done, and a series of foreign curses rolled off her tongue as she shoved the sleeves of her robe away from her hands. For a moment she seemed to not know where to start, then pressed her palms to Taesa's stomach on both sides of the three cables, where her skin lit a brilliant ruby red.
"Az," she whispered as the red light surged up her arms and across her chest. "This is -"
"I know what it is," he hissed, taking Taesa's trembling hands when she feebly reached for him. "Just fix her."
"But I'm not sure I -"
"Fix her, Jaedyn."
For a moment they simply glared at each toher before Jaedyn nodded and returned to her task, alternating between forcing energy into Taesa's skin and gingerly pulling out the cables. Through most of it, Taesa barely flinched - every few seconds her fingers would tighten against Azazel's hands, but she had fallen so deeply into shock it was a wonder she was even conscious. Occasionally her pupils would flare so wide the gold around them all but vanished, and she would tremble and whisper for her father, or for other names unfamiliar to Azazel, and he could do nothing more than grit his teeth in frustration and hold her, repeat assurances that felt so meaningless and silently will Jaedyn to work faster. And from the samples room outside, Sketch called in every minute or two that they were in desperate need of moving.
"Won't... leave me?" Taesa whimpered, staring up into his face.
"No, no we're not going anywhere without you." He squeezed her hands tightly. "Told you, kid, team effort, remember?"
"Wanna go home..." Her eyes were searching, either trying to read him or simply staring through him. "Why can't... go?"
"Because your bones are crumbled and I'm pretty sure this thing wants to keep an artery as a souvenir," Jaedyn muttered, entirely unapologetic even when Azazel glared murderously at her.
"Not long," he assured, releasing one of her hands so he could rub his thumb across the tears that leaked from the corners of her eyes. "Almost there. You're doing great."
"Funny," Jaedyn started, "because I would say she's -"
"Jaedyn, I swear to Christ I will -"
His threat was drowned out by the sudden grinding wail of rusted metal from outside the shaft, followed by the unmistakable hum of a reaper's burrowing cables.
"Sorry to interrupt," Sketch yelled, "but if anybody doesn't feel like dying, we need to fucking move!"
Word Count: 1664
Author's Note: In Meteora, the Blacksmith Underground is a mining compound / operation about 20 miles outside of Medius. It was originally inhabited by human overseers and a host of first generation biomechanical entities that were responsible for doing all of the work. When the biomechs became self-aware and attacked the overseers, the operation was abandoned and shut down, and the mechs sealed inside the compound. Adventurers, scavengers, and the occasional mercenary team will work their way into the Underground in search of gem deposits and the valuable bioengineering equipment used to repair and upgrade the mechs, but they're taking their lives in their hands in the process. Monstrous excavators - the size of a truck and sporting razor-sharp segmented legs like spiders - can dice a living creature with little effort. Miners, like oversized humans in suits of armor, will beat you to a pulp with massive sledgehammers. But the most deadly are the reapers, hound-shaped beasts that served as crystal and gem cutters, with nanotechnical cables like tentacles sprouting from their backs. These cables are individually sentient and kill by squeezing their victims like constrictors, or by drilling into their bodies and bleeding them to death. We learned very quickly, on our first mission here, that WE HATE THIS PLACE MORE THAN ANYTHING. Speaking as the group healer, the Blacksmith Underground was just... ugh. UGH. (Also, first post of 2014 whooooooo)
The ringing in his ears started to fade as the dust began to clear, the echo of concrete on metal fading down the long corridors. Coughing and rubbing his hands across his dirt-streaked face, Azazel stepped over one of the excavator's many legs and retrieved Sketch's sword from the debris-covered floor. Chunks of the ceiling still fell around him, and he sidestepped when he heard the tortured groan of rebar, avoiding a chunk of concrete the size of a basketball that hit the ground just a foot from where he stood. Heading into the back of the room, he spotted Jaedyn leaning over with her hands on her knees, gasping for breath. She was little more than a silhouette in the dust, her robe so caked with oil and dirt that he wouldn't have believed it was red unless he'd seen it earlier.
"You okay?" he asked, placing a hand on her back. Though she was visibly shaken and obviously battered, she nodded breathlessly and gave him a thumbs up. He patted her back as he passed by, squinting into the debris haze that hung heavy at the back of the room. "Guys?" he called. "Everyone alive back here?" He heard scuffling to his right, and found Sketch picking himself out from under one of the miners, wings ragged and his shirt torn and bloody, his upper lip split wide open where the excavator had struck him.
"Remind me to take these gems and shove them up Avey's ass when we get back," he wheezed, bracing himself against the downed mech with one arm wrapped gingerly around his ribs.
"Gonna make it, Pet?" Azazel asked with a grin, holding out the sword. Sketch seemed surprised to see it, and laughed dryly as he took it back.
"I'll be fine," he said. "Be picking shards of bone out of my lungs for a week, but I'll be fine." He looked around the room, twisting his head from side to side to crack his neck. "Where the hell is Taesa?" he asked.
"Thought she was with you?" When Sketch shrugged at him, Azazel turned back to Jaedyn. "You see Princess anywhere?" he asked. When she shook her head, he did a quick three-sixty scan of the room. "Taesa!" he yelled. "Let's go, Princess, time to split!"
"They didn't drag her off, did they?" Jaedyn asked, her eyes wide behind her dusty glasses.
"Nothing that came in here left," Sketch affirmed, looking around at the bodies of the mechs and drones. "And I just saw her, right before the roof caved in, I don't know how -"
"Guys, shut up," Azazel ordered. He was pacing along the back of the room, hovering over the corpse of a reaper, one hand skimming across the battered metal wall. Leaning down, he pressed his ear to the wall and clearly heard what had caught his attention - the faint, shuddering sound of crying. Confused, he leaned his shoulder into the reaper and shoved as hard as he could, and after budging it a few inches from the wall he saw the entrance of an access shaft hidden behind its body. "Ah, there you are," he said. It took a few more violent shoves, but he soon had enough room that he could wriggle between the reaper and the wall and climb into the shaft.
There was barely any light - just what filtered down through the grates - and he paused for several moments to allow his vision to adjust. The enclosed space was just wide enough for him to move without feeling terribly claustrophobic, even if it did involve moving in an uncomfortable crawl. Several of the reaper's tentacle-cables extended into the shaft, though all but one of terminated just a few feet inside, the ends seared and fragmented as if they'd been shot off. The last continued down the shaft, into the darkness.
"Taesa?" he called, his ears pricking in all directions as he tried to follow the echoing sound of her crying.
"Anything?" Sketch called behind him.
"Nothing yet," Azazel replied as he moved forward. There was a T-shaped intersection a dozen or so feet ahead, and the closer he got to it the more he noticed the heavy, wet scent of blood in the air. By the time he reached the junction, his hands had already slipped in several small puddles of it, tacky and still warm. "Taesa?" he called again. "Kid, if you're in here, you gotta say -" The length of hot cable twitched beside him, a spastic quiver that made him curse violently in shock and throw himself against the wall of the shaft, curling into a ball so he could pin the thing against the wall with the heels of his boots before he realized there was no way the thing could still be alive, not when the reaper at the mouth of the shaft was very much dead. Leaning into the junction, he peered warily up the shaft and spotted Taesa huddled against the dead end of the corridor not six feet away, the cable wrapped around her leg.
"I hate to rush you," came Sketch's voice, "but we're picking up a lot of movement out here."
"Yeah, I have her, give me a sec." He moved slowly, fully aware of the pools of blood on the metal and that the noises he'd taken for crying no longer sounded quite right, now that he'd reached the source. "Hey, Princess," he said, reaching out to touch one of her bare feet. She was cold and shivering, a sure sign of shock, and he pursed his lips in annoyance. "Are you..." The cable beside him twitched again, and he growled and tugged at it out of spite, intending to pull it away from her to make the trip back out easier.
It wouldn't budge, though, and when he peered closer he realized that the cable hadn't wrapped around her leg but through it - it had split into three snake-like tendrils that had tunneled into and through her leg, looping around and around like a twisted vine until the exited in her upper thigh and vanished into her abdomen. Her pants and jacket were soaked with blood, and when he leaned over her to further assess the damage he found her eyes wide open and her lips a pale blue - the quiet sobs he thought he'd heard were actually the pained hitches of her breath.
"Oh no," he breathed. "No, no no no..." He screamed for Jaedyn as he twisted and shoved himself through the narrow passage, and it was only when he managed to squeeze himself into the corner behind her that he realized her eyes were following him, peering up at him from the upside-down perspective as he crouched over her. She blinked once, twice, her eyes wide and dazed, and she whispered his name so quietly it was hard to tell if it was just a trick of his ears. "It's gonna be okay," he told her, smoothing her sweat-soaked bangs away from her face. "You hang on for me, Princess, alright? Hang on." Her skin was cold and clammy, even in the uncomfortably warm confines of their close quarters. He yelled for Jaedyn again, just as the elf rounded the corner with a trio of glowing sprites swirling around her shoulders to cast a faint blue glow off the metal walls. Her eyes widened when she saw the damage done, and a series of foreign curses rolled off her tongue as she shoved the sleeves of her robe away from her hands. For a moment she seemed to not know where to start, then pressed her palms to Taesa's stomach on both sides of the three cables, where her skin lit a brilliant ruby red.
"Az," she whispered as the red light surged up her arms and across her chest. "This is -"
"I know what it is," he hissed, taking Taesa's trembling hands when she feebly reached for him. "Just fix her."
"But I'm not sure I -"
"Fix her, Jaedyn."
For a moment they simply glared at each toher before Jaedyn nodded and returned to her task, alternating between forcing energy into Taesa's skin and gingerly pulling out the cables. Through most of it, Taesa barely flinched - every few seconds her fingers would tighten against Azazel's hands, but she had fallen so deeply into shock it was a wonder she was even conscious. Occasionally her pupils would flare so wide the gold around them all but vanished, and she would tremble and whisper for her father, or for other names unfamiliar to Azazel, and he could do nothing more than grit his teeth in frustration and hold her, repeat assurances that felt so meaningless and silently will Jaedyn to work faster. And from the samples room outside, Sketch called in every minute or two that they were in desperate need of moving.
"Won't... leave me?" Taesa whimpered, staring up into his face.
"No, no we're not going anywhere without you." He squeezed her hands tightly. "Told you, kid, team effort, remember?"
"Wanna go home..." Her eyes were searching, either trying to read him or simply staring through him. "Why can't... go?"
"Because your bones are crumbled and I'm pretty sure this thing wants to keep an artery as a souvenir," Jaedyn muttered, entirely unapologetic even when Azazel glared murderously at her.
"Not long," he assured, releasing one of her hands so he could rub his thumb across the tears that leaked from the corners of her eyes. "Almost there. You're doing great."
"Funny," Jaedyn started, "because I would say she's -"
"Jaedyn, I swear to Christ I will -"
His threat was drowned out by the sudden grinding wail of rusted metal from outside the shaft, followed by the unmistakable hum of a reaper's burrowing cables.
"Sorry to interrupt," Sketch yelled, "but if anybody doesn't feel like dying, we need to fucking move!"