caveofsapphires | smaller patch of fading sky [ open ]

smaller patch of fading sky [ open ]

WHO: EVERYONE. All PCs thus far will be in this log, through active tagging or implication.
WHAT: THRILLS. SPILLS. Hiking trip toward the Diamond City.
WHERE: The Overworld.
WHEN: Forward-dated to May 1st (Tuesday) through May 7th (Monday).
WARNINGS: May contain violence or other mentions of physical harm. This is not summer camp.
NOTES: More information can be found on the OOC post here. Please read it!

Gathered in the morning haze, Sleepers were brought to the mouth of the Cave with plenty of supplies and equipment. Compasses that would point them toward the City. Backpacks full of clothes and food, medical kits, tents and even weapons. Stun rifles and knives — to fight off any unwanted company, they said. ("Watch out for their bite," Ryan had commented. "Those fuckers are downright feral.") The straight and narrow path would get them there in six days if they kept a good clip. They were sent off just like that. Refusals to leave were met with a wall of guard force officers blocking the entrance back into the cave city. No way to go but forward, unless someone was particularly stalwart about remaining.

From the exterminator's station near the mouth, leaving the Cave was as simple as a short hike upward into the fresh air of the Overworld. Dust and an uncomfortable sort of heat pervaded the atmosphere, light winds stirring up the sand and teasing the meager bits of vegetation that had grown. No matter what direction you looked... it was all wasteland, cracked ground and desolate emptiness. Jutting up from scarred ground were boulders and small spires made entirely of glass and patches of stone; instead of reflecting the harsh sunlight, they seemed to absorb it and only add to the muted loneliness of the atmosphere. As far as the eye could see, there was no life to be found.

With no other option, the Sleepers eventually made their way onward.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The stars had whirled and changed by the time Re-l found a handy crevasse to tuck herself into. She was pale and tired, but at least she'd made up for lost distance. And the marks around her suggested other pilgrims had also made it this far.

She wondered if she should erase her tracks. It would be sensible, but then who was going to follow her, out here? She couldn't imagine any interest the supposed-angel would have in tagging after her.

Re-l shrugged the warm blanket over her shoulders, closed her eyes, and fell asleep.

Despite being so unused to these circumstances, Gabriel didn't do too badly at tracking. It was just a matter of noticing the right things, and he'd done that for a long time. So he at least didn't get lost, especially since the storm had swept everything clean and Re-l's tracks were one of the few things to see.

Dawn was on the horizon by the time he made it to where it began to get rocky again, dusty and tired. He was looking for a place to sit down and rest himself when he spotted sky-blue on red-grey stone, and grinned. The blanket was coming in handy for more reason than one after all.

He plopped himself down nearby, shrugged off his pack to get some food and water, and kicked some stones into Re-l's little nook, pretending at being far less tired than he felt. "Wakey-wakey!"

The cheery tone intruded on Re-l's consciousness, pulling her out of sleep and back into the brutal reality of the desert.

She sat up and glared at everything in general and the man next to her in particular.

"Tell me," she said, "do angels feed on annoyance? Because that is the only possible reason I can fathom for following me across a desert and waking me so rudely."

"Yep," Gabriel said cheerfully, breaking open one of his ration packs. "It's one of the perks in small writing. We get to heckle anyone we damn well please."

He pointed at her. "Besides, there's the other reason of going in the same direction to begin with. And that other other reason of it being stupid to wander around a place like this alone."

"I can see that you consider it a perk, certainly."

She was tired, she had been woken up and she felt off-balance. It was a poor combination. When she spoke, her voice was level and flat and cold, with absolutely no warmth in it at all.

"It didn't occur to you then, that I might have left for the express purpose of being on my own, and that company might be completely undesirable to me?"

Gabriel pretending to think that over for a moment and then gave her a sunny smile. "Nope!"

Hell, if she was going to be stupid he may as well annoy the shit out of her. No one alone. Hadn't they said that at the beginning of this farce of a trek?

He indicated where the sun was rising. "Besides, you had to've had a few hours. We should keep moving while it's cooler and bunk down when it gets too hot. Or try and meet up with some of the others."

"I don't think I need to be lectured about safety by you," Re-l said. "Mr. Idiot who can't take care of himself."

She sat cross-legged and looked at him, drawing on every reserve of strength and patience she had.

"I know the risks and dangers of this situation much better than you do. I'm strong, I'm fast, I'm an incredibly good shot with a weapon. I will be fine. I'll even check in with you later if you are so desperately worried about me." The last bit was a lie, but he didn't need to know that. "So now will you," she swallowed, "will you please leave me alone? I need to think?"

She'd never had to work this hard to get someone to leave her before. Most people didn't want to be there in the first place. Or, like Iggy, could have their functions turned off.

Part of it, the part that Gabriel was staunchly not admitting to himself, was that he didn't want to be alone. The sandstorm had separated them from the others, so he couldn't even pester his brothers, and after even a month of having them he'd realised--he was tired of being alone.

And Re-l was better than no one at all.

Except that she specifically wanted to be alone. Gabriel let out a long 'hmmmmmm', rolling his eyes upward in exaggerated thought. It was a cover, all a cover, while he thought seriously to weigh up his desire not to be alone and his good will toward giving her what she wanted. If not for the utter, exhausted sincerity of her plea, it wouldn't be nearly so difficult.

Finally he sighed and gave her a crooked smile. "What the Hell; I'm lousy at resisting a pretty lady. But I do think we should stick together, for my sake if not yours. So I'll just be over there, out of sight until you're ready to move on." He jerked his head toward another bunch of rocks at least a hundred feet away.

Re-l paused. She was aware that it would be easy to walk away now - to simply leave, and hurt him if he tried to follow. It would make her life much more uncomplicated.

What stopped her was partially the feeling that offending someone who could make objects out of nothing was stupid, but mostly it was guilt. Iggy, Deadalus, she'd failed them both. She wanted not to be the person they accused her of being.

She hunched over herself and pulled out her diary. This wasn't privacy: she could feel Gabriel hovering, but it was the best she was going to get.

She took about three quarters of an hour to get down everything she thought crucial. She focused mostly on the revelation of Gabriel's power, with a little on his world and less on the man himself. That strayed close to territory she found difficult, even in writing.

When she found that her words had moved off topic, dwelling more on her fears for Vincent than her present predicament, she shut her notebook with a snap, tucked it away, and stood up. The sun was climbing, but the tracks of the group still lay clear in the sand.

"Come on," she said, walking over to her unwanted companion. "Let's go find your real friends."

Gabriel had stretched out, lying against his pack, and was dozing a bit while. In this kind of place sound carried well, and he kept himself just uncomfortable enough that he wouldn't fall too deeply asleep, so he'd hear her if she got ready to move.

So when she crunched up toward him Gabriel snapped awake, stretched with a yawn, and pushed himself to his feet.

"So you write in that every day, huh?" he asked, just to make conversation, as he hauled his pack up onto his back. When he glanced over at her, she looked ... prickly. There was no other way to describe it. Sorta like a cactus. The image was gone in his next blink.

He was looking at her weirdly. More weirdly than normal, at any rate. Re-l found it vaguely uncomfortable that she could tell the difference. She'd clearly spent too much time in his company already.

He looked away, and Re-l shook her head slightly. It didn't matter how he looked at her, in the end. It had no bearing on her goal.

"Yes. It helps to keep things clear."

She didn't add that it was a link to her old life. If he couldn't figure that out, he didn't deserve to know.

"What, there's some things here you actually want to remember?" Gabriel said sardonically, glancing back at her and feeling both relieved and disappointed when neither the prickliness or the metallic sheen from last night reappeared.

It couldn't be what he was thinking. (What he was hoping.) It couldn't be. And yet he had been able to make successful constructs ...

He shook off the thought and turned toward the tracks belonging to the rest of the group. "Let's blow this joint."

"There are things I want to understand," Re-l said.

The trail led them on across the desert. It was particularly bleak her, with not even birds to break the monotonous silence. Re-l found herself both unnerved and comforted by the silence, which was so much like the wastes outside Romdeau.

She ignored Gabriel steadily, though he didn't stop looking at her, and concentrated on the motion of walking. It wasn't long before she entered a half-daze, thinking mostly of the old days, before she'd met Vincent, before her life had changed. She couldn't say now, whether the memories made her happy or sad.

Once or twice she thought she saw a hint of the larger group, moving across the sand ahead of them. A glint of metal, an odd dust plume. She couldn't be sure, and so she said nothing.

"Haven't I heard that before," Gabriel murmured with a yawn. "Something to be said for not bothering with that, y'know. Just trust that sometimes, that's just how things work."

Except that it never worked. Not properly, and not in the long-run. He'd questioned. Just never ... explicitly. So he'd never understood.

The archangel couldn't help but keep glancing sidelong at Re-l as they walked, half fascinated and half hopeful. It at least passed the time, especially when he let himself assume, for a while, that what he'd seen really was what he thought--her soul--and tried to figure out what the glimpses meant.

It was kind of obvious, really. Prickliness and armour. Geez, no wonder the chick was so icy. Obviously, he had a challenge ahead of himself. He needed to keep himself sharp and entertained somehow.

Re-l didn't dignify that with an answer. She just looked at him. If he didn't know by now how unacceptable that option was to her, he was never going to understand.

Her throat was parched, and she swallowed uneasily. She'd used up most of her water cleaning their wounds last night. If she didn't find more soon, she would be in trouble.

Her eyes scanned the desert, and spotted what might be a copse of stunted trees, far in the distance. It wasn't too far off their route.

"Would you object to a slight detour?" she asked, the the crack in her voice made her wince. Her throat was closing off.

This time when Gabriel looked at her, he wasn't looking for anything around her. It still took him a few minutes to understand what the problem was, and it was only the crack in her voice which made it register.

"And you say I can't take care of myself," he muttered, finding his water canteen and pushing it into her hands while nodding toward the maybe-trees. Hey, no reason to wait until they got there for a maybe. He didn't want to have to drag her ass back. "Let's go check it out."

"I know my limits," Re-l said thickly, "that's why I'm allowed to push them."

Still, she took the water canister greedily, gulping it down. She was careful, but a little trickle spilled down her throat.

"Thank you," she said, more clearly.

The copse grew larger slowly. The water had revived Re-l, and she felt herself to be thinking more clearly.

"How's your arm?" she said. "No infection?"

"I'd just have hated to have to carry you if you fainted," Gabriel said with a smirk as he took the canteen back. Somehow he doubted this woman would have ever let that happen--the fainting or the carrying.

His hand automatically came up to ghost over where his wound was under his jacket, and he shook his head. "Don't think so. It doesn't feel as bad as it did, anyway."

"Good. Foreign infections can be deadly." Re-l paused and then snapped her fingers. "I must add that to my list of questions. We must have at least residual resistance to the anti-bodies in the air, otherwise we'd be dead by now. But how did we get them? Are they built into our bodies?"

Her mind ran down a hundred possible avenues of thought at once, and she had no time to consider any of them. They had finally reached the oasis, and there was indeed a pool of water. There was no connecting stream, but there was no algae either. The water looked as clean as it was possible for desert water to look.

"A year ago, I would never have thought to drink water straight from the ground, but we can't be picky." She dunked her canteen under the surface, and watched the bubbles rise. When it was finished she took a drink herself, ignoring the flicker of embarrassment in her stomach as she raised her cupped hands to her face and drank greedily. When her thirst was quenched she splashed more water over her face, soaking her hair and her throat. It would evaporate soon, but it was a blessing while it lasted.

"It's not that hard to engineer a human body," Gabriel said dismissively, and then stopped. "Well, it is, but only in comparison to other things. It didn't used to be hard, in itself. Point is, they could've done it. They've got the gadgets."

Gabriel sank down in the shade with a sigh, debating whether or not to take off his pack before deciding against it. He let his canteen fill and unloaded the whole lot over his head before filling it again. Then he drank until he wasn't thirsty at all and filled the bottle a third and final time.

"That only leads to more questions," Re-l said. "Why create human bodies in the shape and memory of people from other worlds? Why create me, and not just Masa? There are a thousand questions, and all the answers are in the city."

Re-l stood up and brushed the sand from her coat.

"Speaking of which, we'd better keep moving. You have people to find, and I have a city to get to."

She swung her pack on her back and waited for him to get up.

Gabriel raised a finger. "I said human bodies are relatively easy to engineer. Human souls? Forget it. Can't be manufactured. It would be easier for them to just build a body and then yank a soul in from somewhere else, even another universe, than trying to build a working human soul."

The memories, now, that was more difficult. Could they be manufactured? At the detail he'd been seeing, it was unlikely. But they could've been ... edited. Belonged to anyone, then appropriated for them.

The archangel capped off his canteen, slid his arms into the pack's straps and stood up with all of it at once, groaning a little. "Right. I have a couple of brothers I'm sure are overdue for being heckled."

"I'm not sure I have a soul," Re-l said. "Maybe our universes differ on that point. I certainly have a will, but it's an embodied one. I'm my body, my body is me." She considered trying to explain the cogito to him, or Swan, or Doppelganger, or even Amnesia, but then decided it was all futile. There was no way for her to put across those experiences in words.

The trek did not get any easier, even when they rejoined the trail, and they were still several hours, at best, behind the main group. Re-l let herself fall once more into the half-dazed rhythm of walking, her thoughts blurring into the horizon itself. The wind echoed around her, making its own kind of silence.

"If you're human, you have a soul," Gabriel said simply. "Even if you're not human, chances are you still have a soul." Even the supernatural beasties had had souls. They just hadn't gone to Heaven or Hell.

And he was halfway sure he'd been seeing hers. But he decided not to tell her that. It probably wouldn't go over well.

Gabriel kept his head down as he walked, a few paces behind and panting. He kept the blanket over his head; it was hot as anything, but it cut down on the wind and sun. In time, though, he looked up to see the sand baking with heat-mirages. "We should stop for a while," he croaked. "Find some shade."

Walking in this heat was lunacy.

Re-l shrugged.

"Suit yourself. I can't see a soul, or touch it, or even know that it's there. It's not a truth that matters to me."

It really was oppressively hot now, and though Re-l didn't want to lose any more time, she had to concede that walking further in the heat was likely to kill them both.

There was a large pile of rocks nearby, spilt in some disaster who knew how many years previously. Re-l thought she could see the shadow of an ancient building in their shape, but then it shimmered and faded and her certainty vanished.

There was an overhang on one side, small but providing just enough shade to keep them cool. Re-l slid into it, scooting over as much as she could. Her legs stuck out a little, but she ignored that.

The shade was extremely pleasant after the pitiless sun, and without even thinking about it Re-l leant her head back and closed her eyes, letting her breathing become deeper and slower.

smaller patch of fading sky [ open ]

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you know, this could be why they missed the fourth day stuff. XD

That... actually makes a lot of sense XD

yay for surprise continuity!

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