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

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.

Gabriel opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again. What could he say? 'I know for sure you have a soul because I'm pretty sure I can see it? I used to be able to see them all the time?'

Yeah, that'd go over well.

He dropped to his knees and crawled under the overhang, pulling his legs in as much as he could. "I always wondered what Hell was like," he muttered, pulling the blanket off his shoulders and rolling them. His face felt tender; he touched his cheeks with a wince. Definitely too much sun. But when he went rifling through his pack it was to find that his sunscreen must have dropped out or been left behind during the sandstorm, because it sure as Hell wasn't in his pack.

The archangel turned to Re-l to ask where hers was, saw she had fallen asleep, and huffed. Well, okay then. Instead he leaned over to check her pack's side-pockets in case hers was easily accessible.

Re-l felt him reach across and her hand whipped out catching his wrist. She didn't open her eyes.

"Ask," she said.

She let him go and opened her eyes a little.

"And I don't see what this place has to do with Hell. It's just hot, not painful or scary."

"Figured you were asleep," Gabriel said lightly, covering his surprise. "Gonna need your suncreen. Mine decided to jump ship."

Then he snorted. "Hell is hot. Deserts have got to be a sneak-peek, and what we're walking into? Willing to be it could be classed as a sub-category."

Re-l reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle.

"Suncream. Don't use too much."

She shut her eyes again, enjoying the darkness.

"That doesn't sound so bad," she said. "Heat is unpleasant, but you can endure it. I always imagined Hell being cold. Cold and lonely."

"And here I was going to use it as lubricant." He took it, squeezed some into his hand and handed it back. With the long sleeves and long pants, it was mostly his hands, face and neck which were the problem; he wouldn't need too much for that.

"It's hard to endure never-ending flames," Gabriel pointed out. As hard as it would be to endure the freezing cold, really.

"I suppose it might be," Re-l allowed. "If I ever have to worry about it, I will."

She'd never particularly thought about the afterlife. She'd always assumed she'd just end.

A breeze, quiet and gentle, swept into their hiding place and Re-l's hair fluttered against her cheek.

"Not exactly much you can do to worry about it until after you're already dead," Gabriel muttered, rubbing the last of the sunscreen into his cheek. The breeze made him sigh and lift his head to it. "Now that feels good. Too bad I can't bottle it and take it with me."

"It's remarkable how quickly we start missing the comforts of an easy life," Re-l said. "Even though I've been in much worse situations, right now I can't help wishing I was in a real house, with a real bed and a real bath."

She shifted slightly, and her head dropped onto her shoulder.

"While I'm wishing for the impossible, is there anything you'd like?"

His family, together and alive and not fighting. Dad, actually paying attention and showing He hadn't abandoned them. Lucifer, playful and clever and not trying to gut the planet. Michael, strong and firm but gentle, and no longer bitter with an urge to smite. The Earth, saved, but with Gabriel there to see it. No Hell. No fighting. Just peace, on Earth and in Heaven, and without the destruction of humanity to have it.

"A banana daiquiri," the archangel without missing a beat. "It's a meal and a drink, all in one!"

Re-l clicked her fingers lazily.

"It would be nice if I could actually make one appear," she said, not even bothering to open her eyes and check if one had. "I take it it's some kind of alcohol?"

She didn't have much experience with alcohol herself, and she'd never had a drink with a ridiculous name like that.

Somehow, thinking about comfort made the present situation even less bearable. Re-l opened her eyes to look at the sun. It was still too high for them to continue, no doubt about that.

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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