Athwart History (Closed)

[Obuzeti]

"I'll be there," Elias says, soft but firm, and then he lets the call close, along with his eyes. It was an unnecessary call, even for him. Marie didn't need reminders. Didn't need someone always talking about her gross past shit. But he had felt the need to say it, so he had. Hesitation brings only entropy. Go forward.

Go forward.

Elias exhales again, and lets his eyes open. He walks forward, opens the door, and steps outside to see the reunited Paige family. He still doesn't interrupt the embrace, merely leaning against the wall outside and watching the sky with mild interest until they come back to themselves.

~*~

There is a dinner after all, and if it's mildly awkward that's fine; Jenna is apparently a better cook under pressure than her mother is, and Elias gently guides the conversation to stories from Ronnie's past in the Service - which serves the double purpose of reassuring them that this sort of thing does, in fact, run in the family. They eat what they can, and afterwards, on the sidewalk outside, they reconvene.

"We're first going to see Rowan," Elias says, rolling his shoulders. "He's in Lassan Volcanic National Park in California, stays in pretty much a mansion of his own makign and crafts stuff that he sells at a hell of a markup. You'll see some weird shit anytime we go inside - his power alters the natural properties of rowan wood to his pleasing, and enclosed spaces composed of it can do wild stuff. He's - not handicapped, precisely, but he went the Ent route, pretty much a walking tree at this point."

The hero grimaces. "To be honest, I don't know how he'll react. No one I know of has talked to him since it all went down, so I'm flying blind here. He won't be hostile, but this may turn out to be for nothing. Fair enough?"

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Jenna had always been upbeat and buoyant in the time he had known her-but now there was something extra to that, some spark, some magic bit of something that had champagne bubbles on the air in her vicinity.

A freshly buffed spring coiled up against a solid backboard. She feels great. The world as she had known it was righted, making getting back to business that much more hopeful, encouraging.

"Sounds fair." She agrees. "If nothing else, might just be good to look in on him." She points out. Never knew, and if all he had had were plants for company...

"And uh...hey." Jenna sorts through her words for an awkward moment, but she can't entirely put what she was feeling into anything that feels like -enough-.

"Thanks." A smile.

"Let's make the rounds, hm? I've only run through Cali, and when somethings blinking by like that..." This was mostly a joke. She took in a lot of what she saw while moving.

 

[Obuzeti]

Elias smiles, and says, "Glad to."

Then he pokes the teleporter and it goes off.

~*~

What he'd intended to do was come out on top of the lookout hill near Rowan's cottage. It had a forest ranger tower on top of it, and Rowan had always been the mobile sort, happier on the move through his trees than moldering in place, but clearly things had changed; for one, the hill wasn't there anymore, so they came out about twenty feet straight up in the air. Elias stared at the panorama around for a moment, glimpsing a shaded plain of mist and towering trees, before he snatched Jenna out of the air as they began to fall. They landed with a heavy thud, and he set her back down. "Sorry, didn't want to land on you . . . "

He trails off as he looks around.

They're standing on the roots of a rowan tree.

Normally, rowans stand twenty to thirty feet tall, covered with their distinctive red berries and spreading outward rather than up. Whatever Rowan proper has done changed this; the tree they stand in the shade of is cedar-tall, closer to 150 feet tall, with a crown that spreads out far beyond that, intertwined with other canopies from towering rowan trunks. There's no cloud cover - it's just that the branches are crowding out the sunlight, leaving the forest floor dim. A thick mist coats the gullies and valleys up to what looks like waist height, and faint rustlings in the detritus sound ominous enough that Elias isn't eager to scout it out with his feet. The rowan arbor extends for as far as he can see through the misty hills.

"Alright," Elias admits, glancing around. "This is different."

He looks up. Birds, by the thousands, are nesting in the branches. It's an army of blackbirds, thrushes, and waxwings, other species in their dozens, all quietly chirping to each other and feasting on the berries. He can't see them, but he'd bet that there were raptor species around somewhere to prey on them; Rowan hadn't used this tactic often, but when he had, the results were spectacularly intimidating. Those raptors and hawks are probably the size of horses.

"Yeah, so he's gone full paranoid," the hero says. "Part of Rowan's power allows him to morph the biology of whatever eats the rowan berries, so don't put any of them in your mouth. I'd be hardly surprised if he's got control of half this forest. Also, don't kill anything bigger than an insect. He usually knows."

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

"Awkward, I was going to catch you." His much smaller companion teased, a flattening, brushing hand to her skirt before she turned her gaze upward, eyes widening at the sheer size of the tree they stood at the base of, the dense canopy. They were surrounded by trees just as thick and just as large, dumped in the middle of a lush, apparently cultivated forest.

It was on the one hand awe inspiring, and on the other concerning. She's seen Jurassic Park AND Star Wars. Her overactive imagination summoned up an image of a raptor ewok, which was...way creepy and not appreciated given the gloomy mist.

"...paranoid of what? Just...old enemies?" She almost finds his admonishment kind of silly-she wasn't prone to sampling random fauna or fruits in the wilderness, she was a city girl-but with the rest of the warning that came with it, hot damn-it would have been extremely negligent of him NOT to mention it.

The forest felt oppressive suddenly...they were the invaders, here.

Jenna swallowed, nodding absently. But hey-she can outrun anything. Speaking of... "You guys -are- friends though, right?" She inquired, swinging the small bag off her shoulder, revealing the silver toned, thick soled boots within. She hadn't brought the full costume-figured she could always run home and back-but the boots were just about a must. She liked these shoes, no sense burning them up.

She unbuckled one and slipped the dress shoe off, dropping it into the bag as she pulled on the tall silver boot and adhered the velcro straps. Hopped to the one foot a minute and pulled on the other. The entire action was a blur she performed at speed, but even that made her a little nervous, off guard.

Finished, and now she was ready to tromp through the mist-or scout ahead, if he wanted. Jenna wasn't entirely sure what the plan here was, but she's game.

 

[Obuzeti]

Elias nods. "We get along. Rowan is the oldest parahuman I know. Very - matter of fact. He's hard to describe, but most people he doesn't spend time on or with. I gave him his space, and he gave me a lot of advice that helped me figure out stuff."

He doesn't feel like explaining that Rowan is a true immortal, thanks to his ability to manipulate and repair his own chromosomes, and that they both suspected Adamant was the same. They'd had some long, very difficult talks about the nature of mortality and spirituality; the old man's lassiez-faire philosophy didn't mesh well with his own perspective on goodness, but the conversations had helped firm his own beliefs. He respected Rowan tremendously for that.

In the name of that respect, Elias warns, "Cover your ears, this'll be loud," shakes out his hands, and channels power down both his forearms that turns them alight with starfire. Then, he claps, compressing all the force of a trainwreck into the space of his hands, between two invincible hands. It sounds like someone ripped a hole in the air a mile wide mixed with a sonic boom, and it scares every bird in eyeshot straight out of the trees, fluttering and jumping. A light rain of berries and feathers pelt down from the canopy, which Elias endures with a tired expression.

Perhaps ten seconds of nothing elapse, and then the forest floor groans. Something enormous rears up under the mist, as the floor shifts and falls in, revealing that it was actually just a carpeting of dead leaves and berries almost as deep as Elias is tall, more than doubling the depth of the mist. It resembles a serpent, its scales a deep brown to match the forest floor, almost indistingushable beneath the fog. It blinks amber eyes at the pair, and then slithers just to the edge of their promontory, then holds still.

It's also the size of a bus, with scales as large as dinner plates. The mouth isn't visible with the head so far past them (the size of a bus!) but it could probably swallow either one of them whole, and possibly both.

Elias shrugs and steps on, seating himself behind a ridged row of scales like a collar. "Alright, snake taxi. I can dig it. C'mon."

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

That makes her feel better, a smile. "Oh, good then. I'll try not to mess up his forest any." What was the camping motto? Leave no trace? Something like that.

She gives a nod at his warning, bringing her hands up to her ears-but also becoming a bronze and brown blur as she seemed to either vibrate or take minute side steps back and forth-either way, she was insulated from whatever he was about to do.

It's almost mesmerizing, watching the (in her perspective) slow shift of his skin to starlight. Either due to proximity or just from remembering what it had been to touch him when he was charged, she feels the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up. His hands come together but she stays moving, kinda...not wanting anything to get the drop on them, maybe.

When she stills again, he'd see she's holding several feathers together in a fan shape-one she absently abandoned afterwards, frowning. "Maybe we should-" And then something moves in the mist, and Jenna's flitting a pace or two back, her legs tense and ready for action, ADD impatience cast aside because what the heck was that thing.

It looks at them, then slithers forward in near disinterest. A snake.

A giant...snake...

Elias is nonplussed, stepping up nonchalantly, but Jenna's a lot less sure. The fog was so thick though, she'd be running blind if she opted to just follow alongside-this thing had risen up out of nothing, the ground was lower than she'd first thought.

Least it's not a spider...

WHY did she have to go and consider that?! DID Rowan have giant spiders? Bah-she hopped on as well, a little more gingerly than she would have climbed into an actual bus, oddly worried about hurting the behemoth somehow.

He might not catch it-but Jenna pinched her upper arm, juuuust to make sure this was, in fact, the real deal.

 

[Obuzeti]

The snake slithers for about a minute, then abruptly dives head-down into the leaf-litter and punches into the detritus. Elias pulls Jenna behind him with one hand and hunches his shoulders as he gets dragged through a story of dead leaves and dirt face-first, until the snake emerges in an underlevel of twisted and tangled root, deep as mangroves. Water dews and drips from their gnarled lengths and collects on the underside of the leaf layer, then comes up as mist as it evaporates. What looks like a handful of small, rodentlike creatures are scurrying and chittering as clumps of dirt fall, even poking their heads out of little tunnels in the soil they'd passed through, evidently nesting there in burrows.

It's an entire ecosystem, crafted from the ground up. Elias, though, is too busy spitting out dead leaves and wiping them off to pay any attention to this.

Their serpentine mount slides down and around a particularly thick knot of roots, and then halts beside a pint-sized hole in the damp earth that Jenna could crouch through without much trouble. Elias, still raking soil out of his hair, eyes it dubiously. "I think he's through there, but - ah, fuck it, I'm already a mess."

Elias slides off the snake, lowers a shoulder, and tries to just stomp on through the low opening bodily, and just bounces off. The dirt shakes off a thick, faintly pulsing layer of wood, the lines and whorls of its rings forming rings and circles and knots that mesh and gleam with hot amber beneath the surface. The wood is hot enough that it faintly steams against the cool earth.

" . . . Huh," he says, and grimaces at the little entrance, then gestures at it. "You first. If I get stuck after that, you can kick me in the face until I get loose. Worked for Paul, right?"

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

This was surreal. She'd make a Disney Princess or a Tolkien joke, but she's too busy being awestruck. This place was amazing. She's trying to commit as many details to memory as possible, slides from the scaly creature while he's wiping his face and takes a few steps one way, then the other-ADD in overdrive.

"Oh my gosh, did you see those cute little-" She turns to Elias and stops short, her hands coming up to her lips. "Oh." The leaves and dirt he'd shielded her from. "...next time, you hide behind me." She feels pretty bad, the teasing only half so-she's got that windmilling trick. Better to get her hands dirty than his poor face!

And they weren't done yet, Elias was really going to try for-

!

"Whoa. Are you sure he's...uh..." She's starting to think Elias' standards for 'friendly' are low, considering Ma-Protagonist's brooding temper and the welcome he was currently receiving from Rowan.

She eyes the opening and the amber whirls. It's pretty, but the rising steam is more than a little concerning.

"You first. If I get stuck after that, you can kick me in the face until I get loose. Worked for Paul, right?"

"Jesus, Elias." She says, shaking her head-there's a joke coming, even if she is distractedly eyeing the wood. "He was WAY uglier than you. Little boot surgery could only help him." She's a little hedgy about going in there, but dammit, Elias shouldn't have to do all the heavy lifting.

And somehow, thinking about how frightening that whole thing had been, she can't imagine much worse on the other side.

"If it turns out there's a witch in there brewing a soup-" Jenna stoops to see if she can see anything through the space, a grin cast back at him. "Make sure they don't ruin it with anything gross-like onions or something." And through she goes. It's easy for her-she's got sharp, spatial awareness and natural athleticism going for her.

Relatively, anyway-worse case, she figures if the wood gets too low she can crawl. She feels a little like Alice in Wonderland, here-she's definitely on some kind of adventure, acid trip or not.

 

[Obuzeti]

The other side of the tunnel is a chamber of rowan. The walls pulsate with heat and life, infinitely slower than flesh - fibrous, alive in only the way heartwood breathes, the living core of a tree beneath the dead bark that shields it. Red and healthy, the whorls and rings invariably trail into the far wall, into a human shape sunk into the wood like a bas relief - a carpenter's Han Solo. The back half has merged entirely with the wood, but he looks to have been short, Eastern European, with features that had been weathered even before his skin had been transmuted into actual wood.

Except his eyes are open, and they're looking at Jenna. Wooden, no color but the warm teak of the wood, but mobile, and the iris focuses and shrinks as they approach.

"Elias Halwell," he says, and his voice resonates and rumbles through the heartwood. It's like standing inside an amplifier. "Velocity, daughter of. Welcome."

Elias finally struggles his way through, and glances around. His face crumples, and he turns toward Rowan. "Already?"

The wooden man's eyes roll under his eyelids. Nothing else moves - his features aren't mobile, only his eyes and presumably his tongue and throat, if he can talk. Great gusts of mist bellow up from his mouth with each sentence as they arise from some arboreal root below. "It was necessary."

Elias shakes his head, and then gestures Jenna towards the man-figure. "Shit. Well, anyways, Jenna, this is Rowan. He's -"

Elias grins a little, but the corner of his mouth crumples. "He's had better days."

"They will come again," Rowan says, unbothered. His junior's distress doesn't hold his attention - instead his eyes slide over to regard Velocity. "Know and witness the cost of subservience to your power, young hero. There is a price."

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Jenna curiously touches the wood once the tunnel opens up, withdrawing her warmed fingers to study the whorls and rings, eyes trailing to a rather realistic and very interesting carving of a man. That must have taken someone a very long time to...actually, why would anyone carve into these living trees?

Jenna blinks before her eyes widen, eyebrows practically touching her hairline. The 'carving' was looking at her. It...it wasn't a carving at all.

Her eyes dart to Elias as he finally pushes through, the girl mute but very clearly alarmed. Maybe even horrified. Had he been cursed? Were there witches in this strange and magical seeming forest? Or-

The ensuing exchange makes her feel vaguely miserable. Elias had maybe been fearing this, had hoped otherwise but-

"H-hello, Mr. Rowan. Sir." She wasn't going to be rude. Not to a hero. Not to anyone. Definitely not to an old respected friend of Elias'. Before she can think of what else to say, unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth, the great resonating voice spoke again.

"Know and witness the cost of subservience to your power, young hero. There is a price."

There's no complimenting the forest now, or at least-didn't seem prudent. Her brow furrows and her mind churns. A price...Tectonic had used similar terminology, talking about Miss Laura.

"A poorly understood force- a force that claimed her predecessor-"

Laura had disappeared. Moved out of sync, Elias had theorized. But Jenna had seen her, that first night. When time had stopped, when she ran. She'd been tasked with Benton Harbor, with Velocity's legacy by Laura's echo in the Speed Force. Was what she thought of as Laura's 'echo' in fact a manifestation of her in the Speed Force as she had thought, or...was it what was left of her?

Rowan himself looked 'reclaimed'. Elias had talked about adaptation but...

Her lips part before she really thinks about the words formed, his warning swirling in her brain but fading in the face of her concern. "Is there someway to help you, Rowan?"

Jenna Paige had no poker face-her query was sincere, a visible struggle to resolve what had happened to him in her mind. How she might somehow aide him, lessen this...whatever this was.

He said price. He didn't say he chose this. It was a -cost-.

It all came at a cost.

 

[Obuzeti]

Rowan ignores the greeting, but her question has his wooden eyes sliding back over to her. "I will persist. My ambit is close enough to the reality of flesh that I may survive the pendulum's swing. When I resume mortality, I will be rejuvenated."

Elias rolls his eyes. "He means that each parahuman can overdip into their power, but eventually it overflows the tie between that resource of energy and spills back into the user's body. It's usually bad."

"The usual results are rapid death or physical discorporation," Rowan observes, in the same tone you'd use to read the time off a clock. "Hence, my present state. The body has conceptually corrupted. I will need time to repair the framework. A number of years, most like."

Elias nods and blows out a breath, then without really thinking about it reaches over and loops an arm around Jenna's shoulder and pulls her in, hugging her to his side. His face is pale as he looks around the room, but there's nothing to see in here: just the artistic, confusing whorls of heartring, and the frozen relief of Rowan, caught in wood like a fly in amber. "S'what happened to Laura, I think," he says, gentle. "She's somewhere else, but the - the uh - the body couldn't come with her."

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

"I will persist."

Jenna nods, though she doesn't look very comforted, an added layer of confusion flitting across her concerned features. Before she can parse the words Elias provides a translation, and Jenna frowns.

That sounds awful.

She thinks about the forest and how awestruck she'd been, and then she thinks about what she's seeing now in front of her. He must have 'overdipped' to create all that there was out there, but...why?

Why would he do that? Or was it inevitable, something that just eventually happened due to adaptation? Elias had said he was the oldest parahuman he knew...maybe it had taken a while. It sounded like he might one day recover, but it'd take years. Years of being a tree.

The out of uniform heroine looks a little lost standing there in her clashing silver boots, worried and puzzling this out. Elias loops his arm around her shoulders and pulls her in for a hug. Jenna returns that hug-both because she kind of needed one, and she felt he did too. He loves his friends, his family. She feels so bad for him. For all of them.

"S'what happened to Laura, I think. She's somewhere else, but the - the uh - the body couldn't come with her."

Miss Laura hadn't even been thirty, Jenna suddenly realized. She thinks about the Christmas card on his mantle. She thinks about the personal things she had learned about her from her things, her base. She thinks about how sad she'd been, how worried about her city, her people...the good fight. The little guy.

"...overdipped?" She had seen her. She had seen her, and she had spoken with her. What the hell did that mean? Was that a mirage, an echo like she had speculated, some sort of Speed Force afterimage?

Or was Laura trapped in that place, wherever it had been, forever?

And was she going to end up the same?

 

[Obuzeti]

Elias shrugs. "Pushed too hard. Used too much of their power. I don't know if Cid still teaches it, but one of the first things the League did is establish a strain limit - how hard you could push before you start getting the siren. If you ever hear a high-pitched, clear note from nowhere, like a cornet, or a high trumpet blast: stop running hot. Let your power go for a bit. We don't know why but that's the distinct signal of an incoming Catalysis."

The bigger hero squeezes Jenna gently, and then lets her go. He seats himself on the ground - drops himself, almost, with an audible thud - and offers a half-grin up at Rowan. "Y'know, I was come here and give you some big speech about joining back up, being part of the family, but, uh, you probably ain't going anywhere for a bit."

"Indeed," Rowan replies, glib.

"What happened?" Elias asks. "You said you were getting old, but so quick?"

"I was attacked," Rowan answers, a roll of the eyes standing in for a shrug. "The Wandering Jew. He implanted something in me, but I, and only I, am the master of my flesh. I lost nothing but a few years. Granted, I am uncertain that I cost him anything in return."

Elias's face folds closed. "You know I hear that name a lot recently."

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

A warning bell. Jenna relaxes a little. Ah, good, she's never heard anything like that. Hopefully she never would, either. She's still learning the limits of her abilities, how to do cool stuff other than just...be fast. But she is fast. She's even faster than Rush, a little. But this Catalysis thing...

"Yeah, okay. Thanks."

She too settles on the floor on her knees, sitting neatly on her calves and playing with that smart watch on her wrist, spinning it absently over and over as she listens to the exchange-and the revelation of what had actually happened to him.

This hadn't been hubris at all, it'd been Paul!

"He took a swipe at Elias, too." Jenna adds with a frown. Implanted something...She thinks about the image she had seen of herself in his eyes, the open mouth with...something inside.

And the spider that Elias had coughed up. Blech. "He coughed up a spider, it was awful."

"Paradigm shift. Game's changin'."

Jenna spins the watch faster. "And then when I tangled with him, he told me his name and...well, he wanted me to say it. 'Become putrid', is what he said." She feels a slow chill climbing her spine, a vague feeling of disgust just in repeating the words, in remembering the feeling of...rot and thrumming death so very close, of the spiders closing in on all sides.

She hugs herself.

 

[Obuzeti]

Elias snarls as it clicks, coming up off the floor into a half-kneel. The light burns through his mouth and teeth like an internal spotlight. "He's fucking hunting us. And we're too spread apart and too angsty to pick up on it as a group. And I damn well know he's too much for four out of five of my people. I'm going to fucking bury him."

He glances up at Rowan, coming to his feet in a sinuous motion that sets his heavy coat to clattering. "I'm going to check on Maestro, put the word out with the others. Will you be fine here?"

Rowan's eyes slide over to look at him. The wooden man doesn't even grace him with a response.

Elias clicks his tongue and offers Jenna a hand. "C'mon, we're teleporting again, Jenna. Hang on."

"Kill him without remorse," Rowan says. It sort of counts as a farewell, Elias supposes.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Elias snarl and sudden movement startled Jenna backwards, his face an image of anger, white light beaming within.

His realization and the implications beyond are terrible. And they were all spread out, seemingly living in isolation. Elias had been in his city, Rowan in this forest, Protagonist in her lair-the idea of Paul tracking these scattered, retired heroes down...

She takes his hand and pops to her feet, a serious nod. There's a sense of urgency to this, a hair prickling fear that maybe no one, anywhere, was safe...outside of the Tower, anyway. They had to warn everyone they could, before Paul was on the loose again from...where ever the shady employers of the key man were keeping him.

"Kill him without remorse," Rowan's thrumming voice responds, drawing Jenna's worried gaze. It would never come to that.

She's sure it wouldn't.

 

[Obuzeti]

This time, the teleport successfully puts them on solid ground, on the front porch of their destination. It's a small house nestled back up in the foothills of Amador County, with a vineyard blooming nearby; but a second glance proves the vines are overgrown, spilling over onto the ground, and the grapes have rotted on the vine in the heavy heat of summer. The sickly sweetness of their stench permeates the house. Half of the front door lays in the front room, and the other is nowhere in sight. The grass swells up over the path and has begun to crack the driveway.

"No," Elias grates, and stomps forward, the wooden slats creaking dangerously under his feet. He steps inside - stops. Takes a deep breath.

Where the den would be is a molten, green tunnel, that goes down and down and down into darkness. The fringes of that river-slick soil and rock glows a hot viridian, and scrawled lines ring the entrance and a million little pinholes that froth with alien life. There's no way to discern what it is in the nauseous light - an undulating mass of reflective carapace and frothing legs. There's too much, and it goes down as far as the eye can see.

There are a handful of fingerbones scattered at the bottom of the first drop. Elias stares down at them, wide-eyed and silent.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

At first glance the scene is idyllic, what one thinks about when they think about vineyard country. But the scent is pungent rather than fresh and it's...all just there, overgrown and rotting. The door is broken, torn in half like it had been made of cardboard. Jenna's stomach drops, briefly frozen as Elias charged ahead.

Oh no.

The out of uniform speedster flits to his side, anxious and dreading, to peer down into the hole. Her eyes roam the symbols, the nasty bugs, what she can see of the depth in a nanosecond. The hell. What the hell.

Her chest tightens up-she can't even quite discern what she's looking at, and then she realizes she's looking at bones on a shelf in a hole of a what hell just might look like, if everything were green instead of fiery red.

"He's already been here." Her voice is a whisper, the girl taking a step back from the hole, casting a nervous glance back out the front door, the rest of the house across the hole-and back down. "Elias, I'm so sorry." And she is, her eyes flickering to his face, brow furrowed and a frown on her lips.

She's so very sorry.

This, was awful.

 

[Obuzeti]

Adamant's face is twisted, vicious, and he barely even notices Jenna as he picks up the piece of door lying on the threadbare carpet, holds it between his palms, and then shoves in parallel lines along either side - the friction igniting the door as bits and pieces of wood go flying, fire roaring to life in his bare hands. He snaps it in half again, and hurls one piece of shrapnel down into the bug-pit; the flames catch and sizzle the seething life and send it scattering away from the heat.

"MARRANE!" Adamant bellows, and throws himself down into the crevice, wielding the other half like a torch as he bulls through the swarm with main force and fire. "I'M COMING FOR YOU THIS TIME, YOU GODDAMN INSECT!"

He makes it around the corner when gravity flips with sickening vertigo, throwing him against the wall abruptly as his sense of balance contorts and whirls. The hero hisses violently as the insects clamber onto him, stinging and biting. He staggers upright, and burns from within, starlight punching out every pore and scouring the space clear with pitiless radiance. The corridor begins to turn again, space inverting and whirling, when Adamant comes down to his knees and applies one fist to the ground in an earth-shattering blow.

It bursts away and screeches, radioactive-green blood pouring from the open wound, and then the enormous ant-lion Elias had unwittingly leapt into the open throat of snaps its jaws shut, destroying the floor of the cottage and staring at Jenna with beady eyes nearly the size of her own body. It brays a hideous screech at her, but is too busy thrashing from the mortal wound to do anything to her.

From somewhere nearby, a cackling arises, every pop and hiss of laughter the clatter of bones on chitin.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

He looks murderous. Jenna's deep sense of dread shifted to a tightened ball of panicked anxiety. He wasn't going to go down there, was he?

He was going to go down there.

"Elias, wait-" Too late-he leapt without so much as blinking. Jenna ran a hand through her hair, eyes snapping to the far edge of the hole. If she gets an angle somehow, maybe she can run down along the walls corkscrew style. She can scale and run down buildings, why not? She beyond doesn't want to, but all she can think about are the bones down there, and the image of Rowan melded into a tree, the shaft of light that had lanced Elias through the chest-and the God awful giant spider she had kicked in the eyeball.

She can't leave him to fight alone. She can't call it in either-she doesn't have her communicator. She's not even in costume, save her boots. This is, 100%, looking like a way to fucking die in a hurry-as if to punctuate this, the giant ant lion burst through the floor, an Elias sized hole in it's side.

"Oh hell, Miss Laura." Came the fervent whisper, a near prayer-and she vanishes, reappearing at the fireplace to snag a cast iron poker-and then she moves for the gaping hole at the angle she needs to corkscrew down it.

It doesn't work as well as she hoped it would-she's stomping so many creepy crawling legs, a literal path of glowing bug guts to mark her descent-watching for rocks when something burst from the wall twenty feet from the bottom, blasted forth right beneath her feet, sheer, blind luck on its part.

The firepoker is driven into the dirt packed wall in a bit of quick thinking and reflex, her full weight dangling from her hands, carving a line and slowing what might've been a nasty fall. She's maybe five feet off the ground when it comes to a stop, a bit of bounce that doesn't dislodge it from the wall.

It's stuck.

A LOT of somethings were bursting through the wall now. Half her size but with pincers that could probably lop off a leg, their shells reflecting green.

She swapped hands and turned to face the wall, brought one of her boots up to shove against it, hard. It took two tries but she managed to free her improvised weapon, 'sword' and girl dropping to the floor neatly in a crouch. She brandished the fire poker, the green light too bright and making everything lurch weird, confusing. She doesn't have to kill every bug, just the ones in her way. She's got to get to Adamant and...she doesn't know what, but something. She's got to do something.

 

[Obuzeti]

Adamant bellows something - it's not English - and the high, clear note of a horn sounds like the trumpet of the apocalypse as he bursts again into light and the world fades against his brilliance; the stone burns away and the swarm incinerates, as this rocky crevice Marrane has crawled into melts into molten slush and opens the way for Jenna. Hidden in the rock a dozen feet away, connected to the passage only by the tunnels of ants, a huge, lurking thing like a mantis mounted on a spider hisses as it is revealed. Enormous rings of amber light rise around it as Ahasver concentrates light into a malefic point of light at the tip of one lower leg.

Adamant sidearms a half-ton piece of rock at him. It breaks the sound barrier as it crosses a bare ten feet of air and hits the unholy beast like a fucking bomb, blowing him halfway apart. It sags at what resembles an abdomen, then abruptly splits as the lower half scuttles away, leaving the mortally wounded torso behind as it shudders in the puddles of its spilled blood. Its arcane weapon comes with it, gleaming with foul light.

It whips around - spots the younger hero, out of uniform, unsettled, pale with fear - and launches the dot of energy at her, which expands into a howling sphere of hornets that tear through everything in their way as they scream towards Jenna.

"MOVE!" Adamant shouts, and then the floor collapses under him and a horde of centipedes the size of boa constrictors swarm him under, biting and curling into a ball of hateful death and black chitin.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Jenna hadn't liked the untold number of insects coming for her when she'd had nothing but open sky overhead, a city to run in. She sure as hell didn't like having them zeroing in when she's all but pinned in this hellish green pit.

But at least Elias was here. At the same time-Elias was here . Paul, Ashaver, Wandering Jew-whatever the hell his name was was probably just -thrilled- for a chance to punch another hole in his hero death card.

She needs to find the hero and stick close, keep her head 'on a swivel'. Paul is so far out of her league she needs binoculars to see him, but she's what's here and she didn't sign up frivilously.

Blinding starlight, and the dirt and rock crumble around them, show her the way to the veteran hero she's followed into the dark-and also seems to piss off every ant still pouring in from various side tunnels as some kind of...she doesn't know what it was is revealed with a hiss.

She's busy hacking ants to death and trying to keep her footing, keep a path-when Elias' rock hits Mach 2 and blows the monster apart.

She pauses, stares at the somehow still living creature (should she be surprised? She'd beheaded his last host!) and is caught dead on her feet for a breath of a moment-

"Move!"

Jenna moved. She went from the thing's six o clock to a suddenly appearing blur at his three o clock, standing precariously on the back and head of an angry ant bigger than she was-hurtling her fire poker like a javelin for the creature.

It stabs him through the shell and flesh and pins him to the wall with a sickening crunch-but it's not enough. Elias falls through the floor into-Christ she doesn't know what-and disappears, and as she panickedly processes that the creature tore free of it's own flesh, now a pulsing glowing fleshy thing of light trailing viscera but still somehow moving.

The ant beneath her feet moves also, the girl nearly losing her balance and toppling off, but instead falling to have her knees on either side of the things neck, her left hand a tight fist around one antenna. The ant barrels past the place Elias had fallen through. She has nothing to grab on to, nothing to use to stop it. But she needs to. She must-there's that amber colored light in the corner of her vision, and Elias might be in trouble-Jenna drew her elbow back, flattening her hand near her anxiouslt determined face.

She thinks she's going to throw up.

The speedster fired the hand down at speed, jamming all four of her fingers as she pistoned her arm through the back of the creatures head twenty something times in a fraction of a second.

Ashaver fires just as the ant drops forward and crashes into the wall, Jenna missing another beam of death by a hair.

Webs are going up. He's trying to pin her down, limit the places she can run to.

He can almost smell the kill.

 

[Obuzeti]

The ground quakes - that piercing note again, almost bell-like now, clarion and clear. Adamant blasts through the ground, sending pebbles and stones flying like buckshot in every direction except for Jenna's as he bodily shields her from another one of Ahasver's sizzling arcane blasts. There's a sick, hot flash of light as the front half of Elias's body just melts off in a slurry of liquified flesh, revealing slick bone and light, the bare face of a skull and bits of ligament hanging loose, still bubbling. Adamant's arm comes up, and then he lurches forward in a blurred streak of motion and hits the parasitic sorcerer with a staggering backhand, barely brushing him. The light flares into blinding brightness, and when it fades there's nothing left of the spiderlike host but green paste smeared against the wall.

The walking, skeletal form turns its head towards Jenna. An eye reforms from collating light, glances her over, and then the body turns back towards where another titanic, insectile body is wrenching itself from the hive catacombs below their battle-scarred cave, lurching free from an egg hidden behind a thin layer of camoflauged web smeared with dirt. It unfolds into something much like a tiger beetle; long, flailing legs, thick mandibles, and antenna that burn with hideous light.

Adamant picks up a stone the size of his hand and flicks it at this new host. It smashes through it and three dozen feet of solid rock behind it in a cacophonous collision that collapses the roof on that side of the tunnel.

Another form, a vicious milipede with every leg tipped with venomous spines, has already begun to crawl down the entrance of the tunnel the two heroes came from, curling up so that it blocks the exit and the thin natural light illuminating the rocky disaster zone at the same time. Only the uneasy green bioluminescence of insect blood lights the cave now, spilled from Ahasver's hosts and his hive.

A glance at Adamant shows the mangy flesh left attached to his skull is already burning with light, strips of meat and muscle searing into existence as his inner starlight molds the form that contains it back into shape, forging flesh from sheer energetic radiance.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

The sleeve of her button up shirt was soaked in viscera, her hand and arm, her bare skin coated and dripping with green glowing...goop and maybe grey matter, she has no real idea-but it’s gross. It’s super gross, and it tingles. Jenna shoved hard at the carapice but her hand slides,small smeared glowing handprints as she struggled to get out from under the side of this thing’s head. , She’s vaguely aware there’s more amber charging up in all this godawful green-she’s dead. She’s fucking dead. All around her there’s buzzing and skittering legs, hissing and chattering

It’s so loud.

And then Adamant bursts from the ground like some kind of wrathful golem, taking a blast that would have no doubt killed her. He moves in a blur after the only assurance he’s still alive, the scent of death and charred flesh on the air.

Jenna doesn’t waste time-she twists to get her knee against the spot she’d been shoving, tearing her tights on the captured leg as she does so, drawing blood. She shoves again and slides out, scrambling to her feet in a blur.

Elias has no face. He turns to look at her, a grisly, nightmarish visage that her brain doesn’t, intially, quite make sense of. The heroine is horrified-how was he alive? With a start Jenna realized she’s currently more of a hindrance than a help-he’d taken that hit trying to protect her!

The gore on her arm was starting to burn, and Jenna shook it in a blur to get it off, eyes snapping to the hatching thing. Yet another form, this one worse-Adamant wings another rock and the roof caves in over it. Added to the noise of surging insects is a faint buzzing, hundreds of thousands of wings-she can't quite pinpoint, it sounded everywhere. “Elias, please, I don’t think we can-” The wall to her immediate left blows open, a surging column of -awful hitting the heroine forcefully in the chest, taking the petite speedster off her feet and driving her through the two foot thick dirt wall to her right and into another tunnel, another dark hole. The air had been so thick with them and the area opened up also full that it was clear the cavern was surrounded by the smaller, fist sized insects.

In the exact same instant the junior hero was stolen away, the beast burst through the dirt and rock to barrel into Adamant, mouth agape and ready to consume him. Ants as large as the original lion are coming out of various camouflaged tunnels and holes, pouring into the darkened space in preparation for a feast.

It’s hellish.

”i feast your flesh.

gnaw your bones”

The spittling is acidic and foul.

”i feast her fear.

gnaw her bones.

savor your failure.

 

[Obuzeti]

The trumpet blast sounds again, long and horrible, then soars higher until it's a siren wail like a scream that shakes everything loose in an earthquake tremble, vibrating under the unearthly frequency. Adamant turns towards where Jenna has vanished and beholds the last glimpse of her booted foot as she is driven into a side tunnel.

"I deny you everything!" He bellows, and then throws himself right after his companion, blasting through rock and shell and living obstruction alike with singleminded intensity. His hand blasts through an ant shell (it burns under the touch, chitin sluicing away in a frothy mess) and grabs onto the speedster's shoulder. Light surges through the connection and heats Jenna from within, warm fire that collides with her insides and coils about her bones like a coat of armor beneath her skin.

Adamant pulls her within the half-circle of his enormous armspan and swipes with his other hand in a broad sweep, clearing out the immediate area as it slings insect fragments and gravel around at such high speeds the air combusts in its way.

Standing over Jenna protectively, he snarls. The other eye fills in from a goopy soup of light. Its pupil burns an ivory white.