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

Re-l groaned and stood up slowly, letting go of Gabriel to look around. Her eyes winced against the bright light, but as the glare slowly faded she managed to get a look at their new location.

"We're much higher up than we were before," she said, and felt a wave of cold pass over her as she realised how close they had come to falling. "Almost at the top, I think." She turned to look up along the trail. "There's one more difficult bit. The path narrows again. But it's not for long, and then it widens out hugely. That must be where the cliff ends."

One of her legs buckled, cramping painfully, and she collapsed against the cliff-side, letting herself slide down into a sitting position again so she could massage her calf. As she worked she looked over to Gabriel, and her eyebrows pulled sharply together.

"I shouldn't have let you do all that. We could have found another way."

If he was lucky, the cliff would be jagged enough there to let him sidle his way across without any constructs necessary. He let out an involuntary sigh of relief; if it had been another gap he wasn't sure what they would have done.

The archangel gave her a bright grin, the sort that comes on the last fumes of energy. "I knew you cared." Then he sobered again, shaking his head. "Did you see some of those gaps? There's no other way I could've gotten past those."

Re-l's shoulders drew in slightly, and her mouth twitched down.

"It would be annoying if you collapsed of exhaustion and I had to carry you, that's all." She finished rubbing her leg and stood up again, testing her weight. When she was sure it was firm she offered a hand to Gabriel.

"Stick close to me, in case your dizziness comes back," she said. Her heart was beating quite fast, she noticed. She wished she hadn't looked over the edge. The thought of falling from this height made her very nervous.

"I'd say 'backatcha', but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't mind some part of that," Gabriel said with a smirk. He took Re-l's hand, but used the cliff-side as much as her help to lever himself up. When his head whirled he stopped, leaning against the rock and breathing deeply until the sensation went away.

"No problems there," he muttered, rubbing one temple, and then followed her up the track. Unlike the woman, he very staunchly did not look down over the side.

Re-l looked at him for a moment and then looked away, pointedly rolling her eyes. She didn't say anything, and wondered momentarily if she was actually becoming immune to comments like that.

The sun was right overhead now, brilliantly illuminating the whole canyon, stripping all shadows away and pinning Re-l like a bug to a rock under the intense hammer of its heat. She sidled warily along the cliff, watching her own feet carefully. When the track narrowed, she pressed herself closer to the cliff wall, gripping it tightly. When she had a good hold she moved her other hand over and let herself shuffle along until she was spread out again. It was slow progress, but it worked.

"There are lots of handholds here," she said. "You should be fine. If it gets harder again I'll say."

Re-l was about halfway across when her foot kicked a pebble, and the rattle of stone froze her to the wall. Terror thudded through her veins, totally unreasonable but nonetheless there. She swallowed tightly, trying to force her hands to move.

Gabriel stopped about where the track began to narrow to see how Re-l went and watch where she put her hands, squinting through his goggles and the sun's glare. He should be able to manage, he decided, as long as she was right about the handholds; he was a bit bigger and would stick out more, but if he kept close to the wall it wouldn't be much of a problem.

The pebble clattered over the edge and Gabriel just managed to keep his gaze from following it, jerking his line-of-sight back up. Instead he saw Re-l, and though he couldn't see her face he could see the tension in her back, the quiver in her muscles. Fear.

"So what's the whole thing with 'permission to sleep beside you', anyway?" he asked casually, leaning back against the wall. "I mean, it's not like we were in a bed. It was a freaking rock." He wasn't trying to needle her. Well, he was. But although most angels were created fully-formed, and although they had certainly never been created with a fear of heights, the cupids in particular had tended to get over-emotional about things. And for one or two, that did manifest as fear.

Not recently. That was a long, long time ago; before the Fall, before humanity, back when Creation was new in all the ways that mattered. But that wasn't the point. The point was, in those rare one or two who had tended to cluster in suns instead of flitting about the cosmos taking in their Father's Creation with awe, Gabriel had distracted by talking--as far as angels had 'talked' back then, before language--about everything and nothing until they were too distracted to be afraid.

The memory made something pang in his chest. And so he kept talking, almost as much to distract himself. "Did you get all snarky if someone lay down just a little too close to you on the sand? Dad, I hope you don't have a guy. Most couches really suck with the whole 'damaged springs' thing, and I pity them if they were relegated to that every night."

Re-l's fear vanished as anger boiled up in the pit of her stomach. Her hands, which had been gripping the rock tightly enough to be painful, loosened in preparation for a fight. Only the fact that she was on a very high, very narrow ledge prevented her from trying to punch Gabriel then and there.

"I like space," she said, her teeth clenched. "Something the people I knew before were perfectly capable of respecting." She shuffled a little further, but his final words brought her up short. She looked away, at the canyon, at the sky, anything to hide her face.

A guy? It was obvious what he meant, but Re-l didn't know how to answer. She'd been taken to soon. She had no clarity around Vincent. She knew how she felt about him, and she had a fair instinct for how he felt about her (not that he'd ever been very subtle on that score), but she couldn't make those pieces fit into a description like her "guy".

Still, memories of him flooded her mind. Vincent smiling, Vincent blushing, Vincent, the fights they had had and the moments that they had shared. In the background of all of it was the kiss she had given him, however duplicitous, and behind that the indescribable moment when Ergo had slid his thumb across her mouth.

"The people I'm going back to are no business of yours," she said at last, and her voice was unbearably thick for a moment.

Good. Gabriel was very, very tired of anger, but on this occasion it was better than fear, and as long as she had control of it she'd be able to use it for her.

"Ohh. So there was a guy," Gabriel said with a grin, light-hearted and pretending. She'd given him a name, a few days ago--Vincent. He could guess. Except he didn't press, because the point wasn't to be annoying--well, not too much anyway--but to distract her from her fear. And her tone of voice said volumes.

He had people he'd been missing for centuries.

So he added casually instead, "So how much of that ledge d'you have left, anyway?"

Re-l was still feeling angry, but it didn't interfere with her common sense, and she looked to her left.

"Not much," she said, and began shuffling again. She reached the end of the ledge with a sigh, stand up straight and shaking out her nerveless arms. From here the path climbed gently up, and though she couldn't see over the closest ridge, she was certain they were at the top.

Standing on solid ground, close to her goal drained away a lot of Re-l's anger, at which point it became obvious why Gabriel had been so idiotic. She ran a hand over her face, wiping away the sweat, and if it brushed her eyes, well there had been sweat on her eyelashes too, no doubt.

"That was clever," she said. "I'm not saying I liked it, but it was clever."

And she smiled.

"I've been known for it on occasion," Gabriel said cheekily and with grin in return; but this one was a rare one, with only an edge of faux cheer and an undertone of true warmth. You're welcome, Re-l. He rubbed his hands together, half playfully and half to get rid of the sweat. "Now. My turn. Let's just hope I don't decide to try flying without my wings."

He took a deep breath, let it out, and then pressed himself against the cliff, reaching for the first handhold. He shuffled awkwardly across the ledge, slowly--much more slowly than Re-l had gone--and carefully and feeling ridiculously vulnerable to the open air behind him. The weight of his pack seemed to want to drag him backward. He kept his eyes on Re-l, but even without having looked, his imagination provided.

"So did I ever tell you about the time I got this guy kidnapped by aliens who made him slow-dance with them?" he asked with a strained smirk. Now he was the one who needed a distraction.

Re-l considered that.

"Did you have a reason," she asked, "or was it some kind of twisted idea of fun?"

She scratched her head, and sat down against the cliff to wait for Gabriel.

"I think the oddest situation I ever ended up in was when a Proxy kidnapped me and Pino and put us in glass cages so Vincent would have to play a game show." She pulled a face. "That was a very irritating day."

"Well, he was a dick," Gabriel said with the slightest of slight shrugs. "All disdainful about anyone else's perceptions or opinions, especially if they were even remotely outlandish. So I gave him some perspective."

At least he didn't die. Just got a little ... traumatised.

At that the archangel could only laugh, and had to stop to do so without falling. "It wouldn't happen to have been called 'Nutcracker', would it?" he asked with a smirk. "Ah, throwing people into gameshows. That never gets old. I never needed to sink to the kidnapping route, though. Well, except for kidnapping the guys I threw into it--just not their friends."

"Ah, well there's nothing like being taken away from the world you know to induce perspective. Did it help?"

Re-l took a swig of water and licked her lips.

"No, his name was MCQ. He was even more annoying than Vincent." She laughed. "The whole thing was stupid. I just kept waiting for Vincent to turn into Ergo and get us out of there. I would have got out myself, but I couldn't break the glass."

"Probably. Once he got through a bit of therapy." He was starting to get into a rhythm. Breathe in, breath out, shuffle along a few inches, start all over again.

"That was the proxy. What was the gameshow?" He grinned a little in one of his pauses in response to the laugh. Much better than the doom and gloom ice-queen. "Come on, I'm begging for details, here! Give me the nitty-gritty so I know what to do for my next reality-warp."

"Hmmm. I think it was just called the Nightmare Quiz Show," Re-l said. "The rule was that either the challenger of the host died at the end. Of course, MCQ was a Proxy, so he'd won every show before Vincent showed up." She bit her thumb and thought about it a bit more.

"The questions were all about the world around us. And the proxies. It was in that dome that we first heard about Proxy One. And then they mixed in a lot of Philosophy and Literature. And a song title, for some reason. Vincent did really badly. He was never very bright."

She shaded her eyes and looked back at Gabriel.

"You take altogether too much enjoyment from this, considering how unpleasant it was. Though it fits your character, I must admit."

'I taught you all your tricks.'

Gabriel gave Re-l an innocent grin, one a bit strained by his position and the whisper of Lucifer's voice both. "I was in the business. Though, come on, playing just to kill? What's the point in that? Whenever there was a death involved in one of my tricks it was their own damned fault."

Like with that professor idiot who preached against infidelity and then went and had a run of affairs with his pretty female students. Hey, if he'd backed away and said no, the construct would never have turned on him, especially not once he freaked because he'd been kissing someone suddenly less pretty than he'd thought she was.

"So if your knucklehead was such a knucklehead, how'd you get out of that one?"

Re-l coughed into her hand, definitely not trying to hide a smile.

"Remind me never to get caught in one of your games."

She draped a hand over her forehead to shield against the sun.

"Oh, the quiz was ridiculously easy. Nobody but Vincent would have needed thirty minutes to get to a million points." She flicked her hair back over her shoulder. "I always assumed that proxy had a death wish. I think a lot of them did."

She looked over at Gabriel.

"Did you spend all your time constructing ridiculous and elaborate traps, or were you actually useful on occasion?"

"Hey, my games were fun!" Gabriel paused a moment to breathe and smirked. "Sometimes. Mostly if you were me. Or if you played them. It's not my fault people kept trying to cheat or break the rules."

Not that he'd have played a game on Re-l. Sure, she had attitude, but she wasn't inherently a dick. Not inherently. He didn't think. It was hard to say with so much static between him and her soul.

"If the questions were that easy, how is it the proxy never lost?" Gabriel asked, half bemused and fully intending on ignoring that last question, just because it hit some raw spots he was trying to ignore. He sidled forward and his foot hit a lump or a pebble in the ground, he wasn't sure which. It didn't matter anyway, because either way it made him glance down and after a day of climbing Gabriel finally got his glimpse of the ground.

The sound of the professor hitting the pavement from three stories up rang in his head and the blood drained from his face. This was much, much higher than that. With effort Gabriel tore his gaze away, back up at Re-l, and he smiled weakly. "So y'ever heard of an angel who might be scared of heights?"

"I'm sure you thought they were very fair."

Re-l shifted a little against the cliff. It was warm, and that made her a little sleepy. Her concentration wavered.

"Like I said, I think the proxy had a death wish. He probably made it easy for Vincent on-"

The rattling pebble stopped her in her tracks and her attention snapped back to the cliff. She pushed herself up and hurried to edge of the ledge. Her eyes scanned the situation desperately, but she couldn't move out onto the ledge. She'd just get in the way. Pressing herself against the cliff, she held out her hand towards Gabriel.

"Look at me!" Her eyes focused on him, full of the same determination as her voice. "Take a step. Don't look down. Keep looking at me. I can almost reach you."

She needed to keep his attention and so she began to talk about the first thing that came into her head, just for something to say.

"Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the strangest thing that ever happened to me was - well it was before I came here. I told you about Daedalus. He was the man who raised and created me. The Chief of the Medical Bureau. But in the end he didn't much like how I turned out. So he used cells, from Monad Proxy, to make a clone. I never met her, but I saw her. I admit, it surprised me. I never thought Daedalus would go so far. But then she didn't look very much like me. She had white hair, and gold eyes, and wings. Like a real angel. Daedalus certainly thought so. But then she went off after Vincent. She left Daedalus, just like I had. He never forgave either of us, right to the end." She swallowed, her throat drying out. "Stupid, wasn't it?"

He was looking at her. He was hardly even blinking, he was looking at her so hard. Sweat trickled down his brow as he took a sliding step without his gaze shifting.

"Created, eh?" he said, his voice strained. "You said that the other day. When you say 'created' d'you mean grown in a test-tube or cloned or what?" Then he smirked, and although it was a wan thing, there was a trace of amusement in it. He took another step. "Well, the wings part is right. Most of us have wings. But the majority don't really even look human if you could see us and not have your eyes burn out. Or the case of archangels like me, have your brain explode."

The archangel wasn't going to comment on the stupidity. Wasn't going to comment on the fact that her father cared and it came out all the wrong ways, compared to his, who seemed to stop caring at all. Bad comparisons, there. His third and final step put him in reach of Re-l.

Re-l felt his hand close around hers and gripped as tight as she could, using the angle of the cliff as a counterweight to stop herself moving.

"An artificial womb," she said, her voice shaky with the exertion. "Everyone in Romdeau was. By the time we came along humanity had long since lost the ability to reproduce unaided. Daedalus was in charge of the wombs, and he was given special care of me because I was the Regent's granddaughter."

She was half pulling Gabriel now, to keep him moving.

"That sounds like the old stories. Can you do that here, do you think?"

"That sucks." He gripped her hand tightly and decided to never, ever mention just how tightly he was doing so, how much of that was fear. (In his head, the professor, yet again, went splat.) "I hope you guys could at least still have sex; otherwise I'd just have to feel bad for you."

He submitted to the pull, shuffling along inch by inch. There was no need to think, no need to consider the fear, when there was a force dragging him to the end.

Then for a moment the archangel's gaze actually focused on Re-l, instead of seeing through her to concentrate on the ledge beneath his feet and the cliff against his hand. And that gaze was old and apprehensive in a way only a being who had, suddenly, become something else entirely, become less than what they had been, could be. Then his face closed off and he snorted with affected disdain. "No. I'm human here. I used to be bigger than a skyscraper and now I'm stuffed inside this little bag of meat and bones. Souls are insanely compact, y'know."

"We have the right anatomy, if that's what you're asking," Re-l said, shifting her weight with a grunt. She let him take what he wanted from that, concentrating on the task at hand.

Then he looked at her; not the jittery half glances of the day after the sandstorm but a deep old look that sank into her bones, that laid her open on a table and vivisected her. She felt as though all her secrets, all of the shame and guilt that lay buried in the bottom of her heart were pulled out into the open. She couldn't bear that look. Her eyes dropped to the ground, and for a moment her grip slackened.

Then she remembered herself and pulled again, and with a final heave Gabriel was on wide and solid ground beside her.

"There we go," she said. "The meat and bones are quite good for some things, you'll find."

He saw things. He couldn't help it, with the way her soul responded to the look, even though he hadn't intended it. He saw a woman with white hair and golden eyes. He saw the death of a robot with a cloth head, cursing her, and the overlay of spikes there was so sharp that there was almost no ambiguity as to the context.

It was just as well she looked away then, because Gabriel wasn't sure he wanted to see more. Not now. Not here.

Her sudden yank helped him shake off the reading, and he stumbled thankfully against the cliff, sinking against it and throwing her an ironic smirk that wasn't quite as steady as it should have been. "Yeah, it's good for turning into a pancake after falling fourteen storeys."

Re-l looked him up and down, but he didn't seem hurt. That look he had given her still shadowed her mind.

"You didn't die. Don't complain."

She let go of his hand and moved away a little, just to distance herself from him.

"We should be able to see the city when we climb this ridge. Let's not waste time."

She rolled her shoulders out and set off up the track, ignoring Gabriel solidly.

smaller patch of fading sky [ open ]

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