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thejusticelounge2014-03-25 07:09 pm
bossymarmalade) wrote in thejusticelounge2014-03-25 07:09 pm
through water and tall grass
Kyle returns after his talk with Bruce and Mar’i, to stare at the pool. He walks the perimeter, eyes on the clear blue water and the golden CACHE logo, as if trying to glean something about it.
Mia walks up to the longhouse glancing over at Kyle by the pool and quietly makes her way up behind him. “What are you doing?”
Kyle smiles down at the water. For some reason he felt Mia would eventually show up. He toes off his shoes and reaches behind him, grabbing the tshirt off his back and pulling it off. His back and torso are still mottled with bruises, but Kyle doesn’t notice them anymore. He turns to grin at her. “I’m at a pool. What do you think I’m doing?” Kyle braces himself off the edge and then dives into the pool. The cool water hits his skin and immerses him completely. It’s incredibly cool, for water that’s been in the sun all day. It feels heavy, like it’s trying to keep him down. Still, Kyle swims his way underwater to the other edge and then resurfaces, spewing water from his mouth as he focuses on Mia. “The water’s fine!”
Mia watches him jump in the pool and squints a bit, crossing her arms over her chest. “Connor told me to stay out of the pool.” And now that Kyle was in it she wasn’t sure she wanted in anymore.
Kyle dog paddles around, having to hold the edge of the pool when he gets to the deeper end. It’s because he’s still so weakened, he tells himself. Not because of how we woke up here, a few weeks ago. “You tried to get Connor in the pool? I think he probably had enough of being water immersed. He came out of the lake, after all. That’s how we found him.”
"Really, I thought he just dropped out of the sky." She says sarcastically and watches Kyle. "He almost died you know. Yesterday. He wasn’t breathing, and smoke was coming out of his mouth. So, he didn’t seem so water logged to me."
"He what?" Kyle ends up on her side, his arms crossed on the edge as he looks up at her. He is half-kneeling, half-paddling slowly in the pool, the weight of his jeans heavy and flat against his legs. Maybe that is why the water feels so heavy all-round. "What do you mean, smoke? Like he was a dragon?"
Mia crouches down at the edge of the pool and shrugs her shoulders, “What? I don’t know… I guess? His sheets looked like they had been on fire. And I gave him CPR and he started coughing up smoke and then… he was ok.”
"Ohthankgod," Kyle rests his chin on his crossed arms, ducking a bit to push the hair from his forehead. "Between you and me, I think he’s a key of some sort, like. A way out…" Kyle smiles up at her, squinting from the glint of sun off the water drops. "Or maybe I’ve just read too many sci fi and fantasy, haha." Kyle motions to the sling he’d made which stores his water and food. "Mushroom collecting for hours, and all I could think was - I’m like Hermione in book seven."
Mia stares down at him like she doesn’t understand for a moment then shakes her head, “You wish you were Hermione.”
"Well duh. I think everyone wanted to be Hermione by the end of the series. Hell, even her kids have more dignified names. Rose and Hugo. So much better than Albus Severus like seriously Harry, were you trolling that kid and setting him up for misery or something." Kyle pushes back a bit, skimming his fingers on the meniscus feel of the water’s surface. "Anyway my point being that everything about this place is like set up like some kind of…Frankenstein sci-fi-fan world, like. Earth fantasy, not alien."
"Lily Luna isn’t a bad name Or…" There was another kid she thought but she couldn’t remember what his name was… Whatever, it didn’t matter. "It’s not fantasy here, Kyle. It’s obviously horror."
"I’ve always been fond of horror as a genre myself." Ollie comes up next to Mia, giving her a quick kiss on the top of her head before taking off the Birkenstock sandals he found in one of the bungalows — he’s already only wearing green-and-white Hawaiian print swimming trunks that he found in the same place — and drops into the shallow end of the pool.
"James Sirius. He’s gonna grow up to be an ass." Kyle grins approvingly, because he’s scoured deviantart for fanart of the HP series, almost got in a flamewar once too. He always liked the Marauders. "Well maybe it’s fantasy horror like…like Stephen King or. Or George Martin, heh." Kyle looks up when he hears Queen’s voice and looks from Mia to Ollie for an alarmed moment, before paddling backwards.
Oliver bobs in the water, careful not to splash it on his face. “Oh, calm down, Looney. I’m not gonna hurt you.”
"I never found myself caring about their kids, honestly." She turns a bit and smiles up at Ollie when he kisses her and glances back at Kyle. "Or a sci-fi horror. Like Aliens… Or invasion of the body snatchers…"
”Maybe this is like some kind of survivalist game meant to entertain alien masses, is that what you’re saying? Like in comic books.”
"Oh that’s a good one. Or Tremors. Graboids coming up from under the earth and chomping on us. Or maybe in this world it’s graboids from the sky…" Kyle looks up at the sky again, as if searching for something. he only looks down to scowl at Queen. "Mar’i said I wasn’t crazy," and he immediately regrets saying that, because it seems oh-so childish and petulant. He dunks himself in the water, opening his eyes and looking at the blue view.
Oliver nods, sinking down till he’s in the water to his shoulders, fanning his arms out in slow measured swoops. “She said I’m not crazy either,” he admits, “so I’m inclined to take her word for it.” He looks up at Mia, squinting into the sun that’s haloing her blonde hair. “Not coming in, sweetpea?”
Mia nods, “Like some twisted reality tv show.” She shrugs her shoulders a bit when Ollie asks if she’s coming in. She looks into the water for a moment and then reaches behind her undoing the zipper of her dress, letting it fall to the ground as she kicks off her sandals and slides into the pool not at all be jarred by the sudden coolness of the water.
Oliver gives a low, pleased laugh when Mia comes into the water, holding out his arms for her. “C’mere, little mermaid,” he coaxes. “I’ll throw you over in the deep end and you can swamp Rayner. He’s not crazy, he’ll survive the wave.”
Kyle stays underwater long enough to see another pair of legs join Ollie’s. He suddenly chokes, swallowing chlorine tang as he resurfaces coughing. His eyes water and the water is in his nose. “Achhk. Ah - ahhhck—” He’s making noises like how he heard Zee before, her little warbles as he pulled the red membrane from her eyes. His eyes were probably red right now, Kyle thinks. From the chlorine.
Mia dips her head into the water briefly to push her hair back out of her eyes and swims into Ollie’s arms giving him an amused and disbelieving look when he says Kyle isn’t crazy. “What does him being crazy have anything to do with him surviving?”
Oliver turns Mia’s back towards him and wraps his arms around her, lowering his chin to her head as he grins in Kyle’s direction. “I’m just repeating Mar’i’s diagnosis. Although, you’re right — being crazy helped him survive this place so far. Maybe not being crazy will prove a detriment to him more than anything.” His grin gets wider, both Ollie and Mia looking at Kyle across the length of the pool, gazes steady and unsettling.
Kyle refocuses on their blond hair, that looks matte in the glare of the sun. He hasn’t been hearing what they’re saying but their voices sound too similar, too…Something else. Kyle crowds against the deep end of the pool and coughs a bit. “What? What??”
Oliver laughs again, spinning Mia in the water so her legs float up. “I think we’re freaking him out,” he murmurs against her water-darkened hair.
Mia leans back in the water and shakes her head laughing a little, “Just a little bit. I think he did just almost drowned on his own.” Throws a look in Kyle’s direction. “You’re not dying over there are you?”
"No," Kyle gurgles, watery. He feels like he is though. His lungs are burning with water, and he wonders if this is how Bruce felt. That thought is too alarming to contemplate so he just wipes his mouth on his shoulder and clutches the edge of the pool. He can’t look at Queen and Mia. Or more like, he doesn’t want to. He gulps at the air, once and hard and then asks, "Why’d you think you were loco, guero?"
Oliver adjusts his hold on Mia, turning her onto her tummy so he can swoop her through the water, under and through and out. “Like a flying fish,” he tells his daughter, as if it’s their own private joke, before he looks over at Kyle. “Oh, y’know. Because I’ve been seeing Kate. Although compared to the other stuff, throwing up needles and finding those rats all re-formed and tied together at the tail, then sewing together my own eyelids in my sleep —” he blinks, eyelashes still dotted with blood beads along the lashline, “—that kinda stuff can make a man question his grasp on reality.” He laughs after saying this, a big booming laugh, like this is the funniest thing imaginable.
Mia closes her eyes against the water when Ollie starts to spin her through it and doesn’t catch half of what he says when he speaks but she raises her head after a moment out of the water, “Aren’t we all honestly a little bit crazy in the first place?” She shrugs her shoulders and wiggles out of Ollie’s grip and swims around him climbing up on his back. “Except me. I haven’t done anything crazy here.”
"Kate? The needles…rah-rah-rat…." Kyle repeats words stupidly and hauls himself out of the pool, sitting at the edge. His legs continue to dangle in the water and he looks down, his reflection wobbling into view in the water. Except it’s not just a reflection. It looks like there is another Kyle under the water, sitting in the same position and looking back up at him. His brain spikes with alertness that cuts through the fog - the blond fog - and Kyle squints looking over at Mia and Queen, slowly filling with dread. Seeing his own doppleganger in the water doesn’t frighten him at all. But when he sees the same thing - Queen and Mia, and then Queen and Mia same pose, same everything except Mia’s eyes are blacked out and Queen’s eyes are struck through in red. Kyle kicks his legs, spraying water up as he tries to scream and get away. Only his throat is locked too tightly to make any noise.
"Jesus christ, Rayner — what the fuck’s wrong with you?" There’s nothing around that could have elicited such a reaction; Ollie spans his big hands around Mia’s calves to keep her steady on his back as he looks around for what Kyle’s jumping at. "There’s nothing here, man!"
Mia also looks around blinking a bit and shaking her head stage whispering in Ollie’s ear, “He -is- crazy!”
Kyle sploshes over to his belongings, snatching up his shoes and tshirt and his makeshift sling. “It’s all here!” He waves his arms, yelling at them, anything to expend all his pent-up energy, his drumming heart and adrenalin coursing in his veins right now. “This is where it started! I’m not just crazy, Mia. I’m looney. I am looney! I am Looney Rayner!” Kyle bellows at the sky and stalks away from them, dripping wet. He heads for the forest.
Oliver jostles Mia a little bit. “Wow, that escalated fast,” he remarks, although not with much concern. “Just you and me left in here now, girlie-girl, all the crazy has exited the pool.”
Mia can’t help but laugh a little bit because… that was just so funny. “What a weirdo.” She says and leans her head against the crook of Ollie’s neck. “Hey.” Looks up at him for a moment, “You still have my prism.”
Oliver slings Mia around to his front. He can easily support her with just his arms around her, she’s so tiny and he’s so strong, but she can wrap her legs around him if she wants. It’s easier for talking like this. “I do,” he acknowledges. “Haven’t had much of a chance to use it yet, but we’re gonna be going on expedition teams and I was thinking I could haul it along, see if it zaps any mountain lions or smoke monsters for me.” He smiles at her. “Why, you missing it? Among all the other assorted goodies you tote around in that bag…”
Mia bends her legs and rests her knees on either side of his waist sitting a bit in the water, “What if I get attacked by mountain lions or smoke monsters?” She asks and pouts slightly but sighs and shrugs her shoulders, “You can keep it if you want. And nothing I have is that good. Half a box of rat poison whoohoo. I suppose that’ll have to protect me if Cacheena comes to kill me in the middle of the night…”
"What’s with that doll, anyhow?" Ollie shakes his head. The water looks good, cool, and the sun beating down on them makes him long to duck underneath its surface, let it swish through his hair and soothe his shoulders. But the chlorine would wreak havoc on his healing eyelids. He’d better not chance it, no matter how tempting. "Rat poison may come in handy yet. Although…" Ollie looks down at Mia, hoisting her up a little more. "What if we smash it? The prism, I mean. What if we destroy it? You think that might do something?"
"Other then to creep everyone out? I don’t know. Lian’s creeping me out too. Just so you know." She slides against Ollie when he hoists her up a little and grabs onto his shoulders giving him a reproachful look. "Why would that do anything? The prism saved us before. Why would we want to destroy it?"
"Just to DO something!" He winds his fingers in her ponytail, stroking through the wet strands. "Come on, you’re the one who keeps complaining that we’re all too complacent, and we just let you do a bunch of the work and take initiative, and we’re not trying to get out of here. So let’s try something that seems totally illogical, and see what happens. If Cachement lets us do it, or rewards us, or punishes us. Whatever the outcome is, at least it’s trying something new and interesting, right?"
Mia squints at him for a moment debating his words then shrugging her shoulders. “I don’t know. You have to convince me…”
Oliver fixes her with a look. “What was I just doing? I thought I was being very convincing indeed.”
Mia laughs and leans her head against his shoulder. “Alright…. Ok. I.. Yeah, ok. But what if we break it and the smoke monster thing comes back and attacks everyone again. You weren’t there Ollie, it was scary.”
Oliver shrugs, pressing his cheek against Mia’s head. The warm weight of her is pleasant and he sinks down into the pool with a slight hiss as the water covers his shoulders; they’re probably burnt already. “What /isn’t/ scary here? Creepass shit buried in the ground, people growing extra teeth and vines, smoke monsters and weird forest fires, some kind of torture chamber in the Raven … I can’t see what a broken prism can throw at us that would be worse than any of those. And the smoke monster probably has other weak spots, I’ll bet. Provoking it might not be the worst move we could make.”
Mia she debates this for a few moments in silence then sighs, “Alright, but later. And you’ll owe me a second favor for letting you break it.” She says with a small amused sort of grin.
—- —- —-
Oliver whistles to himself as he stands in the longhouse, packing the leather messenger bag he’d found (one with fringe, as predicted, and a big cheerful daisy appliqued on it) with a water bottle, some granola and crackers, a chef knife, a small medical kit and last of all, Mia’s prism. He also has a belt quiver bristling with arrows and his personal bow slung over his shoulder.
Mia wanders into the longhouse letting out a laugh at the sight of Ollie, “Cute purse.” She says and goes to the sink filling up her water bottle and turning back around towards him.
Oliver grins at Mia. “You like? I told you I was getting one and so I did. Now let’s do the other thing I promised we would. Go get your bow and arrows and we’re gonna find that supply warehouse.”
Mia shrugs her shoulders and gives a half-assed salute, “Alright. I’ll meet you outside.” With that she bounces out the door and to her bungalow grabbing her bow, made by Ollie, and makeshift quiver full of arrows, a couple of them made by her. She looks through her bag not that she thinks she’s really missing anything and then heads back outside waving towards Ollie. “What was are we going to go? The way we haven’t gone yet?”
Oliver comes out with her, holding his hand up over his eyes and squinting in the sunlight. “That-a-ways,” he says, pointing out towards the air raid siren. “There’s a road leading from there and I dunno, maybe it’s just an alternate route to the Raven, but something tells me it’s not. Something tells me it’s different, and we need it.”
Mia nods her head slowly looking up at him and turning the way he indicates. “Well, all right then. Sounds like fun.” She reaches up and grabs his arm grinning as they start making there way along the path towards the air raid siren. “Off to see the wizard…”
Oliver laughs and does a bit of the skipping step that the Wizard of Oz bunch does, but he stops soon enough because Mia’s shortness would mean that he was dragging her along. “This better not be some fool fuck behind a curtain, though, or I’ll be upset,” he says direly. They’re past the air raid siren and into the high grass beyond when Ollie says, “I suppose I should mention now that we’re going this way because Kate told me to.”
Mia heaves a sigh at his last statement and shakes her head, “Well she is how we found medical bunker I guess. It’d be great if she was here to do some of this leg work though.” Rolls her eyes a bit. “Does she actually talk to you, or do you just see her like… like…” She tries to reach for some sort of reference but doesn’t come up with one so she trails off a bit, “Or do you just see her?”
Oliver pauses and opens his bag, taking out a big flashlight. “She gave me this,” he says, although that doesn’t really answer Mia’s question. “I guess it might come in handy?” Ollie turns the flashlight around in his hands, although he doesn’t seem to notice that the red rim of the bulb area has some dried blood and short dark hair in it. He drops the flashlight back in his bag and starts walking again, reaching out to clasp Mia’s hand in his. “Sometimes I just see her. And she doesn’t say anything.”
Mia looks at the flashlight for a moment until he drops it back into his bag and then looks up at him, “Does she just stare at you? Creepy. I hate when people hover over me and like watch me and don’t say anything. Hint hint.” She glanced at Ollie and smirked a little then continued on. “Or is it like… y’know. She doesn’t have to say anything because she’s just looking at you like…” Gives him one of Kate’s judgmental looks and laughs a little.
"Jesus, you’re freaky good at that! Don’t do that again, I’ll start thinking you’re actually Kate." Ollie squeezes her hand as they walk along, the grasses getting taller and taller until they’re about shoulder-height on Ollie. The yellow gravel road has narrowed, choked in by the grasses, so they’re practically brushing against each other as they go. "You wanna use up one of your favours and ride on my shoulders, babygirl?" Ollie inquires.
Mia smirks a little and holds her free hand up making sure she doesn’t start getting smacked in the face by any of the grass. “Man, someone needs to mow this grass and keep this shit under control or something…” She mutters mostly to herself, then looks up at Ollie and thinks it over before nodding her head a little bit. “Alright. Don’t drop me!”
Oliver stops walking and takes off his bow, leaning it against his leg as he hoists Mia onto his shoulders before picking it up again and starting to walk, using his bow to push the grass aside. “See? Now you can’t complain anymore about me being tall, when you can use me like a saddle! Just don’t put on any spurs or anything and we’ll be all good.” He jogs her a little bit, jovially, before setting off at a brisk trot. Mia is getting a much better view from up there on Ollie’s shoulders, and off in the distance she sees something like a cleared circle in the tall grass. As she watches, she can make out a person standing in the circle, holding a sign. In clear black lettering, it reads, “THE DEMON YOU RIDE IS NAMED ORAY”.
It takes a moment, but as the person turns towards Mia, she can see that it’s her mother.
She’s a little wobbly on his shoulders for a moment taking grasp of his hair. “Hey…” She says faintly but stops and stays silent as she looks at the scene in front of her and she tilts her head to the side reading the sign, and re-reading the sign, and she’s rereading it for probably the seventh or eighth time when she realizes the person holding it turned towards her. And it takes a bit to recognize her, because she hadn’t seen her mother in like ten years and so much had happened since then. So when it finally comes to her she thinks she maybe… is wrong or… not. “O— Mom?” She shifts on Ollie’s shoulders quickly enough to throw him off balance while she hops off neatly shouting over her shoulder, “Ollie Come on!” And she starts running through the grass towards the circle. “Mom!”
Oliver flings his arms up in the air to — just barely — keep his balance as Mia’s weight comes down from atop his shoulders. He lurches sideways into the grass and it’s so thick it gives him the moment’s purchase he needs to come back upright and follow Mia. Or at least the sound of her voice, because she’s so low down in the grass that once she passes, like a deer, the tall swaying plants close up around her. He could get lost in this grass, Ollie realizes suddenly, heart thumping. “Mia?” he calls, holding his bow up in front of him to mow the grasses aside. “Mia, where are you?”
The sound of Ollie calling for her gets fainter behind Mia as she runs through the grass; it seems like it’s getting thicker and thicker and she almost has to wade through before suddenly she pops through one last ridge of it, and she’s in the open circle. It’s flattened down in an intricate weave, and her mother is standing there, holding that sign. She smiles at Mia, but there’s something strange in her eyes; she blinks, and when she opens her eyes again, one is black and one is red. She holds a finger to her lips like the sun in the Raven nursery, and then vanishes down into the ground with a slick knife-sound.
She realizes as she is running that it’s probably not her mom. Like that isn’t even a possibility because her mother was dead. But… But this was obviously something important. And there was tons of crazy shit that was horrible why couldn’t her mom be here in some sort of… corporeal form and have it not be horrible? Right? That wasn’t crazy… When she finally makes it to the circle, that kind of reminds her of some sort of crop circle she opens her mouth to speak but falls silent and just stares at her, and then… she’s gone. Mia hesitates before taking a few steps into the circle looking around the ground then up again wondering where Ollie was. “Ollie!” She hollers jumping as high as she can waving her arms. “Ollie I’m over here! There’s a weird circle thing…” She looks around again and frowns walking the circle towards the center wondering what that was… what the sign meant. What this was at all.
After a silence that seems to stretch too long (and too long means that the grasses start whispering to him, saying “slow motion” over and over), Ollie nearly gives a gasp of relief when Mia’s raspy little voice rises above them, calling for him. He follows the sound until he, too, bursts into the circle clearing. “What the hell is this?” Ollie asks, panting, even though it’s clear that Mia wouldn’t know any more than he would. “Why did you run off like that??”
"I…" She hesitates a moment and looks down where her mom had been and then disappeared. "I saw someone… I think it was…" She doesn’t finish and instead turns her head back to look at Ollie and frowns a bit stepping closer to him. "I don’t know. This is weird."
Oliver can feel how unsettled Mia is, and it’s catching, so he says, “You know what? I know what we can do!” He opens his messenger bag and pulls out the prism, which instantly starts casting rainbows everywhere. “Eh? Eh? We can break this little baby!”
Mia eyes the prism for a few moments and frowns up at him for a few moments and reaches out to take the prism herself. “Let me do it.”
Oliver licks his lips and lets Mia take the prism. He almost takes a step back, too, but instead just sways where he is, watching her. “Here goes nothing, babygirl,” Ollie says, lowly.
Mia takes the prism and holds it for a moment looking up at Ollie. “Ok…” but she hesitates slightly looking at the prism in a sad sort of way and letting out a small sigh. Then she feigns throwing at the ground, but it just drops and bounces a bit and she gives a shrug, “I guess it’s too strong to break. Oh well.”
Oliver holds up a finger and opens his bag again, taking out the heavy chef’s knife. “Give it a good smash with the handle,” he says encouragingly, holding onto the long, wedged blade and presenting the sturdy wooden end to her. “You’re strong, won’t take you much effort.”
Mia squints at him for a moment taking the knife, “Thanks.” She says holding it in her hand a moment and dropping to her knees in front of the prism, then she looks up at Ollie again. “Do you know what I went through to get this thing back after Kyle threw it into the forest? I mean seriously… And I have to break it now?” She just wasting time, dragging things out and maybe the longer she does that… who even knew. Mia had never been good at parting with her belongings.
"If it’s important, Mia, it’ll come back to you. That seems to be how things work in this place. That’s the premise I’m going on when it comes to Kate. She’ll come back. If your prism is important, it’ll come back. If not…" Ollie spreads his arms out. "Who KNOWS what breaking it’ll do. C’mon, give it a whack."
She thinks about it and… he wasn’t wrong. She thought the prism had been lost when Kyle threw it into the forest, because despite what she had said he -had- thrown it in pretty far. And it did come back to her. But lately this prism was the only thing she even cared about in this stupid place… But Ollie really does seem like he thought something would happen and like he really wanted her to do this… “Ok. I’ll do it.” She says with a small nod looking back down at the prism and shifting the knife in her hand so she could it it with the handle. She lifts up the handle of the knife holding it still for a moment and taking a deep breath bringing it down onto the prism.
For a moment, it seems almost as if nothing has happened. It’s like the handle of the knife almost jars to one side when it should be meeting the point of the prism, like the artifact itself is deflecting destruction. But then that moment skips, a jolt in a record, and the wood smashes down into the crystal with a sound that multiplies out and gets louder and louder, sweeping through the grass, crash after crash after crash. A deer screams and then falls silent. The sky turns darker, thunderous, and as the ringing in their ears gradually subsides, Mia and Ollie realize that something is falling on them. It’s snowing.
Mia falls back a bit as the reverberations from the knife travel back to her hands, but she takes it by the handle. She looks around as the sky changes, and something starts coming down. “Ollie?” She says standing up turning her head and looking around the circle, though nothing is there except them. Hopefully. She holds her arm above her head to shield herself from whatever is falling but realizes it’s just snow and blinks a few times. “What?…”
Oliver huffs experimentally, but his breath doesn’t puff out cold; the temperature has remained the same, balmy warmth. The snow is making little cold spots on their skin, and as they look around, a stripe of coloured light comes into view, leading out of the circle they’re in. “Well,” Ollie says, pointing at it, “I guess that’s what we should be following, huh?” He grins widely at Mia, excitement in his eyes despite their puffy discolouration. “Let’s get on the trail! You wanna ride on my shoulders again?” He holds out his hand for the knife back, too.
Mia crouches back down to pick up some of the bigger pieces of the prism because… safety first, or more like because she still wanted to have it. She hesitates at the question handing Ollie the knife back and handing him her bag as well, “Yeah, I mean we wouldn’t have found this circle if it wasn’t for me the last time. Hold all my stuff though.” He might as well.
Oliver hoists Mia up again and then slings himself all over with various bags and bows. “You can see the light?” he makes sure — there’s no need to, really, since the light path seems to be getting stronger as the snow falls, alighting on it gently — and sets off through the grass. As they walk, the tall grasses evolve into a long patch of the same grass but with high feathery flowering arrows atop them that brush Mia’s chin (she has to guide Ollie through this area completely, since he can’t see a thing) until finally Mia sees beyond the arrowtop grasses. There’s a building there, a big red-bricked thing half overgrown with greenery, that nobody would ever have seen from the choked gravel path. And yet there’s the path curving up, yellow stones alongside the brick storehouse, about twenty feet to their left. They’ve come up upon the back of the building.
She grabs a hold of Ollie’s hair again so she doesn’t tumble off and looks around carefully so she doesn’t miss anything. Even though with all this grass there really isn’t much else out there to miss. “Ollie! Building ho! Go a little… left. Just a little though. Like… North west? Is that north?” She wasn’t good at those directions so she just takes to pointing in the direction of the building and using ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ directions instead. As they make it to the building Mia hops down from Ollie’s shoulders and looks back around wondering if they were all going to need to start coming this way, and if so how. “Lets go look at whats inside!”
"All right. Go easy though, we don’t know what could be in there." More mountain lions or a different smoke monster or something, if they were unlucky. Ollie unshoulders his bow and hands Mia her owl bag as they approach the big doors of the building. On either side of the front entrance is the familiar Cache logo, except in the middle space it depicts a sickle moon and star, like the caduceus of the Raven Terminal. The sturdy wooden doors swing open easily when the archers test them, and lights flicker on the same way they had in the Raven.
It’s clear right away what this place is: a huge warehouse of food, toiletries, tools. All sorts of supplies for everyday living — clothing and cloth, too. There are no weapons and no medicine, but apart from that there’s tons of other stuff along the same lines as what they have in the camp warehouse.
Mia takes her bag back and makes sure her bow is ready just in case, though it’s not needed as Ollie turns the lights on and she looks around the large room. “Hey there’s more clothes!” She says and smiles ignoring the food and most of the essential supplies and walks towards the shelves looking through everything.
Oliver gives a long, impressed whistle as he looks around. “Well, I guess that solves the food shortage,” he says. “And the just about everything else shortage. There’s enough here to keep us stocked for ten years at the very least. Not that I think we’ll need it!” he hurries to add, although Mia seems more interested in sorting through the clothes than in anything else. “But it’s always better to have surplus than to be—” He’s cut off there by a sound from outside, and he stops talking so they can listen for it again. The sound comes once more, and it’s obvious what it is this time. It’s a goat bleating.
Mia turns around towards the door as she hears the sound too and walks towards Ollie glancing at him with a raised eyebrow. “It sounds like a goat. I don’t think you have to be afraid of it.” And she moves towards the door sticking her head out and looking round wondering what a goat was doing here. Or maybe it was a mountain goat or something.
Oliver twists his mouth at Mia and goes out the big doors, circling around the warehouse. “Mia!!” she hears him hollering back. “There’s a garden here! And goats, two of ‘em! In a pen!”
Mia walks around to the back and coos a little, “Awww.” She says going over to the goat pen. “They’re so cute. Little goaties…” She tears some grass out of the ground and feeds it to one looking around more then over to Ollie looking serious. “Who else is here, Ollie?”
Oliver scratches his beard with the tip of his bow, which he hasn’t yet put down. “I don’t know,” he says slowly, because clearly, /clearly/ the goats have been cared for. There’s a water trough in their pen and they’re waxing fat and happy, one nanny and one billy, and… “Here, hold my bow,” Ollie says, handing it over to Mia. He hops over the wire of the pen and goes to a little shelter area tucked away in the back corner of it, returning with two little kids, one black and one golden. “That’s why the nanny’s producing milk,” he says, bringing the babies over to Mia to pet. The goats watch peacefully, chewing away at the grass Mia’s given them.
Mia takes Ollie’s bow and looks around suspiciously until he comes back. Then she squeals at the baby goats. “Awww little babies!” She pets them and smiles but looks up at Ollie. “I don’t know if we should take any of this stuff, Ollie. Some crazy red neck hill billies probably live here and are going to come hunt us down and brutally murder us if we take some of their stuff…”
Oliver snorts. “As if we can’t handle some horror movie redneck hillbillies! Look, I know it goes against everything we do back in the real world, honeybunch, but we’re not there anymore. It’s all new rules in Cachement. The stuff that’s here is all here for a reason, and we might as well make the most of it and deal with the consequences IF they come up. But that’s an IF and not a WHEN, and I’m sure as hell not gonna neglect the food in there and out here—” he sweeps his arm at the extensive, well-tended garden, “—just out of fear that something /might/ maybe happen!”
Mia sends him a look and shakes her head, “No. You’re wrong. It’s -when- they come up. Because everything here has consequences, Ollie. Even simple things like… eating vegetables. If you haven’t noticed.” She stands on her tippy toes and looks around attempting to peer over the tall grass and see if there are any more buildings around. “We should at least see if we can find any signs of people…”
Oliver sighs, rubbing at his face. He rubs over his eyes too and then winces, having forgotten the state of his eyelids. “All right,” he says, with poor grace. “Split up, then. You wanna take the inside or the outside?” He squints around at the building. It’s big, was probably some kind of small fort outpost before being used as a warehouse, but there’s no other buildings nearby. Just garden, the goat pen, and one other small hutlike structure, only big enough to serve as another animal shelter.
Mia ponders that for a moment tilting her head as she weighed her options and nodded, “I’ll take the inside. And check out more of the clothes.” She pets the goats on their heads one last time smiling at them before going back to the big doors heading inside the large warehouse. “Watchout for crazy rednecks!” She calls back at Ollie.
Oliver leaves Mia to investigate the vast innards of the warehouse while he skirts around the building. It’s a big red brick fort, baked dry by the sun in some places and smelling of dampness where the vines have climbed up over the back, but it’s still mostly intact. They could probably climb up into the ramparts if they want, and they probably should, when they get more people back here. Get a good view of the environment. In addition to the goat pen, the other little hut structure turns out to be a chicken coop; there’s easily twenty of them and Ollie’s mouth starts watering when he thinks of what this’ll do for their food supplies.
He trots back inside feeling very good about the place, running his fingers along shelves with salad dressing and more records and stacks of jeans. “Where you at, baby girl?” he hollers, and some birds fly up from the ceiling and out through some of the high glass windows, where the panes have been busted. “You won’t believe what I found!”
Mia wanders past the shelves of food and medical supplies eyeing them with an almost annoyed sort of look and pulls out the inventory list she has from back at the camp, of course this would fill out what she had been slowly been… depleting and that sucked… But if she could also— Her thought gets broken into when she hears Ollie and she looks up. “I’m coming.” She says and follows his voice to where he’s standing. “What did you find?”
Oliver tears his gaze away from the bottles of liquor — Cache branded, of course, but they’d do in a pinch — and grins at her, pointing outside with his bow. “Chickens!” he declares. “So we don’t just get fresh milk from nannygoat, we also get fresh eggs and the occasional roast chicken dinner! Isn’t that exciting? God, I didn’t even realize how tired I was of powdered eggs till I heard those babies clucking away in there.” A thought occurs and he says, “It might be nice for the kids, especially. Having animals to take care of. Hey?” Ollie rumples Mia’s ponytail to underline the idea.
Mia raises up a bit on her tip toes and looks out the window nodding her head. “Awesome. Yeah, and I’ve already named the Goats. Molly and Arthur. And the babies are Bill and Charlie, so far…” Because it was, who didn’t like chickens? But she was seeing a problem with this, “How exactly are we going to get the chickens from here, back to the camp? Like goats yeah that wouldn’t be that hard. But chickens?”
Oliver shrugs. “Chickens can stay here. It’s not that far from camp if you know the way, and after all, we’ll be conveying supplies back and forth too. I saw a little cart and a wheelbarrow or two out there, we can use those since we shouldn’t use the Westfalia. Anyhow, if we’re gonna be slaughtering, we should do it out here too and not in the camp. That just seems like bad luck, dontchafind?”
"How are we supposed to get through the grass? I didn’t see any lawn mowers or anything…" She guessed they could use some gardening supplies. And by ‘they’ she didn’t mean herself.
Oliver points over at the section of the warehouse that’s stocked with tools. “Probably some stuff over there. A scythe would be neat.” Ollie has a suspicion that once they leave and start heading back, the path won’t be half as treacherous as it was on the way here, but he keeps that theory to himself. “Mia! C’mon, why aren’t you more excited about this? We found all this stuff!!” Ollie waves around wildly at their bounty. “We won’t have to worry about food supplies and running out of soap anymore!”
She nodded her head a little bit because they had found all this stuff and she was so happy to have more shampoo because the stuff they had back at the camp was running out and she didn’t want to have greasy hair. And the razors sucked already so now that they were beginning to get dull she’d look like she had just gotten out of a fight with a cat once she exited the shower for how cut up her legs were starting to get. “I am excited!” She said, “I’m just playing devils advocate.”
Oliver smooths both his hands over her hair and hugs her, swinging her slightly. “This is gonna be a turning point, you’ll see,” he promises. “Now that we don’t have necessities to worry about, we can concentrate on … on getting out of here. Or figuring out why we’re here in the first place.”
Mia puts her arms around him when he hugs her and pulls back a little looking up at him, “I don’t think that was what was keeping people from concentrating on other things.” She says with a small shrug of her shoulders and pulls away going over to where the tools are. “I guess it’s good we have Clark here. He can take down all this grass, I mean he used to live on a farm, right?” She looks through the shelves spinning a pair of sheers in her hands. “And we’re not killing the goats. Just to make that clear…” She adds tossing a serious look over her shoulder at Ollie. “But just because we have more food doesn’t mean any of this is safer to eat then what we have at our camp.”
Oliver follows her over to the tools, hefting the wicked-looking scythe. “Handy in case we need to fight foppish French vampires,” he remarks, then adds, “no, not killing the goats. They’re too valuable alive. Besides, I think one of the adjoining rooms is a walk-in freezer, tons of meat in there.” Ollie snickers when Mia gives him a highly doubtful look. “I know, I know. But nothing we’ve eaten so far has been rotten or rancid. One single incident with Damian isn’t enough to condemn the rest of it, Mia. Maybe — who knows, maybe the point is that we shouldn’t try to set up shit in camp? Gardens and medical facilities. Maybe Cachement’s pissed that we’re not using what’s already established. Who knows.”
Mia looks around when Ollie talks about Cachement like it’s some living place or something. “It’d be helpful if it would clearly show us what it already has established.” She says in annoyed voice and shakes her head. She leans over and picks up a large heavy sledge hammer from the floor and looks back over at Ollie. “Maybe someone should stay here. Not just like one person, but a group. To look after the animals and… maybe look out for more people.”
"We can discuss that with the others. Frankly, I don’t think we should be splitting up any more than we already do, with people ranging all over the damn place getting themselves in trouble. But who knows, maybe you might get some other nuts volunteering to come stay in this place. It’s probably creepy at night, y’know. We haven’t even explored the entire place … which, y’know, we should be getting back to the camp." Ollie eyes the sledgehammer she’s holding. He’s not nervous about it, not exactly, but seeing her heft it like that is the tiniest bit goosebump-making.
Mia gives a small shrug and turns back around looking through the shelves swinging the hammer back and forth like a pendulum. But a moment later she lets out a small hiss when part of the old wood from the handle gives her a splinter making her drop the hammer down on to her sandaled foot. “Shit! Ow! God dammit.” Mia said leaning against the wall to steady herself on one foot as she inspects the other one as she brings her now splintered finger up to her mouth. It didn’t look too bad, not mangled or anything, but she could already see the bruise forming. “I hate this place…”
Oliver gives a shout of alarm when Mia drops the hammer, loping forward to swing her up into his arms and hold her foot by the ankle, bringing it up into the light to inspect. “Jesus, you banged it good, sweetie, it’s starting to bleed, you scraped away the skin and you’re gonna have a helluva bruise….” He notices her fussing with her finger. “Did you hurt your hand too?”
Mia huffs and pouts a little nodding her head, “Yeah. I have a splinter.” She says holding up her finger to his face. But she pulls it away again. “I’m fine. Lets just… patch it up and go back to camp and you can tell everyone about this place and everyone can come and help carry things that we need there away.” She pulls her foot away from him and holds her arms out. “You have to carry me though.”
Mia walks up to the longhouse glancing over at Kyle by the pool and quietly makes her way up behind him. “What are you doing?”
Kyle smiles down at the water. For some reason he felt Mia would eventually show up. He toes off his shoes and reaches behind him, grabbing the tshirt off his back and pulling it off. His back and torso are still mottled with bruises, but Kyle doesn’t notice them anymore. He turns to grin at her. “I’m at a pool. What do you think I’m doing?” Kyle braces himself off the edge and then dives into the pool. The cool water hits his skin and immerses him completely. It’s incredibly cool, for water that’s been in the sun all day. It feels heavy, like it’s trying to keep him down. Still, Kyle swims his way underwater to the other edge and then resurfaces, spewing water from his mouth as he focuses on Mia. “The water’s fine!”
Mia watches him jump in the pool and squints a bit, crossing her arms over her chest. “Connor told me to stay out of the pool.” And now that Kyle was in it she wasn’t sure she wanted in anymore.
Kyle dog paddles around, having to hold the edge of the pool when he gets to the deeper end. It’s because he’s still so weakened, he tells himself. Not because of how we woke up here, a few weeks ago. “You tried to get Connor in the pool? I think he probably had enough of being water immersed. He came out of the lake, after all. That’s how we found him.”
"Really, I thought he just dropped out of the sky." She says sarcastically and watches Kyle. "He almost died you know. Yesterday. He wasn’t breathing, and smoke was coming out of his mouth. So, he didn’t seem so water logged to me."
"He what?" Kyle ends up on her side, his arms crossed on the edge as he looks up at her. He is half-kneeling, half-paddling slowly in the pool, the weight of his jeans heavy and flat against his legs. Maybe that is why the water feels so heavy all-round. "What do you mean, smoke? Like he was a dragon?"
Mia crouches down at the edge of the pool and shrugs her shoulders, “What? I don’t know… I guess? His sheets looked like they had been on fire. And I gave him CPR and he started coughing up smoke and then… he was ok.”
"Ohthankgod," Kyle rests his chin on his crossed arms, ducking a bit to push the hair from his forehead. "Between you and me, I think he’s a key of some sort, like. A way out…" Kyle smiles up at her, squinting from the glint of sun off the water drops. "Or maybe I’ve just read too many sci fi and fantasy, haha." Kyle motions to the sling he’d made which stores his water and food. "Mushroom collecting for hours, and all I could think was - I’m like Hermione in book seven."
Mia stares down at him like she doesn’t understand for a moment then shakes her head, “You wish you were Hermione.”
"Well duh. I think everyone wanted to be Hermione by the end of the series. Hell, even her kids have more dignified names. Rose and Hugo. So much better than Albus Severus like seriously Harry, were you trolling that kid and setting him up for misery or something." Kyle pushes back a bit, skimming his fingers on the meniscus feel of the water’s surface. "Anyway my point being that everything about this place is like set up like some kind of…Frankenstein sci-fi-fan world, like. Earth fantasy, not alien."
"Lily Luna isn’t a bad name Or…" There was another kid she thought but she couldn’t remember what his name was… Whatever, it didn’t matter. "It’s not fantasy here, Kyle. It’s obviously horror."
"I’ve always been fond of horror as a genre myself." Ollie comes up next to Mia, giving her a quick kiss on the top of her head before taking off the Birkenstock sandals he found in one of the bungalows — he’s already only wearing green-and-white Hawaiian print swimming trunks that he found in the same place — and drops into the shallow end of the pool.
"James Sirius. He’s gonna grow up to be an ass." Kyle grins approvingly, because he’s scoured deviantart for fanart of the HP series, almost got in a flamewar once too. He always liked the Marauders. "Well maybe it’s fantasy horror like…like Stephen King or. Or George Martin, heh." Kyle looks up when he hears Queen’s voice and looks from Mia to Ollie for an alarmed moment, before paddling backwards.
Oliver bobs in the water, careful not to splash it on his face. “Oh, calm down, Looney. I’m not gonna hurt you.”
"I never found myself caring about their kids, honestly." She turns a bit and smiles up at Ollie when he kisses her and glances back at Kyle. "Or a sci-fi horror. Like Aliens… Or invasion of the body snatchers…"
”Maybe this is like some kind of survivalist game meant to entertain alien masses, is that what you’re saying? Like in comic books.”
"Oh that’s a good one. Or Tremors. Graboids coming up from under the earth and chomping on us. Or maybe in this world it’s graboids from the sky…" Kyle looks up at the sky again, as if searching for something. he only looks down to scowl at Queen. "Mar’i said I wasn’t crazy," and he immediately regrets saying that, because it seems oh-so childish and petulant. He dunks himself in the water, opening his eyes and looking at the blue view.
Oliver nods, sinking down till he’s in the water to his shoulders, fanning his arms out in slow measured swoops. “She said I’m not crazy either,” he admits, “so I’m inclined to take her word for it.” He looks up at Mia, squinting into the sun that’s haloing her blonde hair. “Not coming in, sweetpea?”
Mia nods, “Like some twisted reality tv show.” She shrugs her shoulders a bit when Ollie asks if she’s coming in. She looks into the water for a moment and then reaches behind her undoing the zipper of her dress, letting it fall to the ground as she kicks off her sandals and slides into the pool not at all be jarred by the sudden coolness of the water.
Oliver gives a low, pleased laugh when Mia comes into the water, holding out his arms for her. “C’mere, little mermaid,” he coaxes. “I’ll throw you over in the deep end and you can swamp Rayner. He’s not crazy, he’ll survive the wave.”
Kyle stays underwater long enough to see another pair of legs join Ollie’s. He suddenly chokes, swallowing chlorine tang as he resurfaces coughing. His eyes water and the water is in his nose. “Achhk. Ah - ahhhck—” He’s making noises like how he heard Zee before, her little warbles as he pulled the red membrane from her eyes. His eyes were probably red right now, Kyle thinks. From the chlorine.
Mia dips her head into the water briefly to push her hair back out of her eyes and swims into Ollie’s arms giving him an amused and disbelieving look when he says Kyle isn’t crazy. “What does him being crazy have anything to do with him surviving?”
Oliver turns Mia’s back towards him and wraps his arms around her, lowering his chin to her head as he grins in Kyle’s direction. “I’m just repeating Mar’i’s diagnosis. Although, you’re right — being crazy helped him survive this place so far. Maybe not being crazy will prove a detriment to him more than anything.” His grin gets wider, both Ollie and Mia looking at Kyle across the length of the pool, gazes steady and unsettling.
Kyle refocuses on their blond hair, that looks matte in the glare of the sun. He hasn’t been hearing what they’re saying but their voices sound too similar, too…Something else. Kyle crowds against the deep end of the pool and coughs a bit. “What? What??”
Oliver laughs again, spinning Mia in the water so her legs float up. “I think we’re freaking him out,” he murmurs against her water-darkened hair.
Mia leans back in the water and shakes her head laughing a little, “Just a little bit. I think he did just almost drowned on his own.” Throws a look in Kyle’s direction. “You’re not dying over there are you?”
"No," Kyle gurgles, watery. He feels like he is though. His lungs are burning with water, and he wonders if this is how Bruce felt. That thought is too alarming to contemplate so he just wipes his mouth on his shoulder and clutches the edge of the pool. He can’t look at Queen and Mia. Or more like, he doesn’t want to. He gulps at the air, once and hard and then asks, "Why’d you think you were loco, guero?"
Oliver adjusts his hold on Mia, turning her onto her tummy so he can swoop her through the water, under and through and out. “Like a flying fish,” he tells his daughter, as if it’s their own private joke, before he looks over at Kyle. “Oh, y’know. Because I’ve been seeing Kate. Although compared to the other stuff, throwing up needles and finding those rats all re-formed and tied together at the tail, then sewing together my own eyelids in my sleep —” he blinks, eyelashes still dotted with blood beads along the lashline, “—that kinda stuff can make a man question his grasp on reality.” He laughs after saying this, a big booming laugh, like this is the funniest thing imaginable.
Mia closes her eyes against the water when Ollie starts to spin her through it and doesn’t catch half of what he says when he speaks but she raises her head after a moment out of the water, “Aren’t we all honestly a little bit crazy in the first place?” She shrugs her shoulders and wiggles out of Ollie’s grip and swims around him climbing up on his back. “Except me. I haven’t done anything crazy here.”
"Kate? The needles…rah-rah-rat…." Kyle repeats words stupidly and hauls himself out of the pool, sitting at the edge. His legs continue to dangle in the water and he looks down, his reflection wobbling into view in the water. Except it’s not just a reflection. It looks like there is another Kyle under the water, sitting in the same position and looking back up at him. His brain spikes with alertness that cuts through the fog - the blond fog - and Kyle squints looking over at Mia and Queen, slowly filling with dread. Seeing his own doppleganger in the water doesn’t frighten him at all. But when he sees the same thing - Queen and Mia, and then Queen and Mia same pose, same everything except Mia’s eyes are blacked out and Queen’s eyes are struck through in red. Kyle kicks his legs, spraying water up as he tries to scream and get away. Only his throat is locked too tightly to make any noise.
"Jesus christ, Rayner — what the fuck’s wrong with you?" There’s nothing around that could have elicited such a reaction; Ollie spans his big hands around Mia’s calves to keep her steady on his back as he looks around for what Kyle’s jumping at. "There’s nothing here, man!"
Mia also looks around blinking a bit and shaking her head stage whispering in Ollie’s ear, “He -is- crazy!”
Kyle sploshes over to his belongings, snatching up his shoes and tshirt and his makeshift sling. “It’s all here!” He waves his arms, yelling at them, anything to expend all his pent-up energy, his drumming heart and adrenalin coursing in his veins right now. “This is where it started! I’m not just crazy, Mia. I’m looney. I am looney! I am Looney Rayner!” Kyle bellows at the sky and stalks away from them, dripping wet. He heads for the forest.
Oliver jostles Mia a little bit. “Wow, that escalated fast,” he remarks, although not with much concern. “Just you and me left in here now, girlie-girl, all the crazy has exited the pool.”
Mia can’t help but laugh a little bit because… that was just so funny. “What a weirdo.” She says and leans her head against the crook of Ollie’s neck. “Hey.” Looks up at him for a moment, “You still have my prism.”
Oliver slings Mia around to his front. He can easily support her with just his arms around her, she’s so tiny and he’s so strong, but she can wrap her legs around him if she wants. It’s easier for talking like this. “I do,” he acknowledges. “Haven’t had much of a chance to use it yet, but we’re gonna be going on expedition teams and I was thinking I could haul it along, see if it zaps any mountain lions or smoke monsters for me.” He smiles at her. “Why, you missing it? Among all the other assorted goodies you tote around in that bag…”
Mia bends her legs and rests her knees on either side of his waist sitting a bit in the water, “What if I get attacked by mountain lions or smoke monsters?” She asks and pouts slightly but sighs and shrugs her shoulders, “You can keep it if you want. And nothing I have is that good. Half a box of rat poison whoohoo. I suppose that’ll have to protect me if Cacheena comes to kill me in the middle of the night…”
"What’s with that doll, anyhow?" Ollie shakes his head. The water looks good, cool, and the sun beating down on them makes him long to duck underneath its surface, let it swish through his hair and soothe his shoulders. But the chlorine would wreak havoc on his healing eyelids. He’d better not chance it, no matter how tempting. "Rat poison may come in handy yet. Although…" Ollie looks down at Mia, hoisting her up a little more. "What if we smash it? The prism, I mean. What if we destroy it? You think that might do something?"
"Other then to creep everyone out? I don’t know. Lian’s creeping me out too. Just so you know." She slides against Ollie when he hoists her up a little and grabs onto his shoulders giving him a reproachful look. "Why would that do anything? The prism saved us before. Why would we want to destroy it?"
"Just to DO something!" He winds his fingers in her ponytail, stroking through the wet strands. "Come on, you’re the one who keeps complaining that we’re all too complacent, and we just let you do a bunch of the work and take initiative, and we’re not trying to get out of here. So let’s try something that seems totally illogical, and see what happens. If Cachement lets us do it, or rewards us, or punishes us. Whatever the outcome is, at least it’s trying something new and interesting, right?"
Mia squints at him for a moment debating his words then shrugging her shoulders. “I don’t know. You have to convince me…”
Oliver fixes her with a look. “What was I just doing? I thought I was being very convincing indeed.”
Mia laughs and leans her head against his shoulder. “Alright…. Ok. I.. Yeah, ok. But what if we break it and the smoke monster thing comes back and attacks everyone again. You weren’t there Ollie, it was scary.”
Oliver shrugs, pressing his cheek against Mia’s head. The warm weight of her is pleasant and he sinks down into the pool with a slight hiss as the water covers his shoulders; they’re probably burnt already. “What /isn’t/ scary here? Creepass shit buried in the ground, people growing extra teeth and vines, smoke monsters and weird forest fires, some kind of torture chamber in the Raven … I can’t see what a broken prism can throw at us that would be worse than any of those. And the smoke monster probably has other weak spots, I’ll bet. Provoking it might not be the worst move we could make.”
Mia she debates this for a few moments in silence then sighs, “Alright, but later. And you’ll owe me a second favor for letting you break it.” She says with a small amused sort of grin.
—- —- —-
Oliver whistles to himself as he stands in the longhouse, packing the leather messenger bag he’d found (one with fringe, as predicted, and a big cheerful daisy appliqued on it) with a water bottle, some granola and crackers, a chef knife, a small medical kit and last of all, Mia’s prism. He also has a belt quiver bristling with arrows and his personal bow slung over his shoulder.
Mia wanders into the longhouse letting out a laugh at the sight of Ollie, “Cute purse.” She says and goes to the sink filling up her water bottle and turning back around towards him.
Oliver grins at Mia. “You like? I told you I was getting one and so I did. Now let’s do the other thing I promised we would. Go get your bow and arrows and we’re gonna find that supply warehouse.”
Mia shrugs her shoulders and gives a half-assed salute, “Alright. I’ll meet you outside.” With that she bounces out the door and to her bungalow grabbing her bow, made by Ollie, and makeshift quiver full of arrows, a couple of them made by her. She looks through her bag not that she thinks she’s really missing anything and then heads back outside waving towards Ollie. “What was are we going to go? The way we haven’t gone yet?”
Oliver comes out with her, holding his hand up over his eyes and squinting in the sunlight. “That-a-ways,” he says, pointing out towards the air raid siren. “There’s a road leading from there and I dunno, maybe it’s just an alternate route to the Raven, but something tells me it’s not. Something tells me it’s different, and we need it.”
Mia nods her head slowly looking up at him and turning the way he indicates. “Well, all right then. Sounds like fun.” She reaches up and grabs his arm grinning as they start making there way along the path towards the air raid siren. “Off to see the wizard…”
Oliver laughs and does a bit of the skipping step that the Wizard of Oz bunch does, but he stops soon enough because Mia’s shortness would mean that he was dragging her along. “This better not be some fool fuck behind a curtain, though, or I’ll be upset,” he says direly. They’re past the air raid siren and into the high grass beyond when Ollie says, “I suppose I should mention now that we’re going this way because Kate told me to.”
Mia heaves a sigh at his last statement and shakes her head, “Well she is how we found medical bunker I guess. It’d be great if she was here to do some of this leg work though.” Rolls her eyes a bit. “Does she actually talk to you, or do you just see her like… like…” She tries to reach for some sort of reference but doesn’t come up with one so she trails off a bit, “Or do you just see her?”
Oliver pauses and opens his bag, taking out a big flashlight. “She gave me this,” he says, although that doesn’t really answer Mia’s question. “I guess it might come in handy?” Ollie turns the flashlight around in his hands, although he doesn’t seem to notice that the red rim of the bulb area has some dried blood and short dark hair in it. He drops the flashlight back in his bag and starts walking again, reaching out to clasp Mia’s hand in his. “Sometimes I just see her. And she doesn’t say anything.”
Mia looks at the flashlight for a moment until he drops it back into his bag and then looks up at him, “Does she just stare at you? Creepy. I hate when people hover over me and like watch me and don’t say anything. Hint hint.” She glanced at Ollie and smirked a little then continued on. “Or is it like… y’know. She doesn’t have to say anything because she’s just looking at you like…” Gives him one of Kate’s judgmental looks and laughs a little.
"Jesus, you’re freaky good at that! Don’t do that again, I’ll start thinking you’re actually Kate." Ollie squeezes her hand as they walk along, the grasses getting taller and taller until they’re about shoulder-height on Ollie. The yellow gravel road has narrowed, choked in by the grasses, so they’re practically brushing against each other as they go. "You wanna use up one of your favours and ride on my shoulders, babygirl?" Ollie inquires.
Mia smirks a little and holds her free hand up making sure she doesn’t start getting smacked in the face by any of the grass. “Man, someone needs to mow this grass and keep this shit under control or something…” She mutters mostly to herself, then looks up at Ollie and thinks it over before nodding her head a little bit. “Alright. Don’t drop me!”
Oliver stops walking and takes off his bow, leaning it against his leg as he hoists Mia onto his shoulders before picking it up again and starting to walk, using his bow to push the grass aside. “See? Now you can’t complain anymore about me being tall, when you can use me like a saddle! Just don’t put on any spurs or anything and we’ll be all good.” He jogs her a little bit, jovially, before setting off at a brisk trot. Mia is getting a much better view from up there on Ollie’s shoulders, and off in the distance she sees something like a cleared circle in the tall grass. As she watches, she can make out a person standing in the circle, holding a sign. In clear black lettering, it reads, “THE DEMON YOU RIDE IS NAMED ORAY”.
It takes a moment, but as the person turns towards Mia, she can see that it’s her mother.
She’s a little wobbly on his shoulders for a moment taking grasp of his hair. “Hey…” She says faintly but stops and stays silent as she looks at the scene in front of her and she tilts her head to the side reading the sign, and re-reading the sign, and she’s rereading it for probably the seventh or eighth time when she realizes the person holding it turned towards her. And it takes a bit to recognize her, because she hadn’t seen her mother in like ten years and so much had happened since then. So when it finally comes to her she thinks she maybe… is wrong or… not. “O— Mom?” She shifts on Ollie’s shoulders quickly enough to throw him off balance while she hops off neatly shouting over her shoulder, “Ollie Come on!” And she starts running through the grass towards the circle. “Mom!”
Oliver flings his arms up in the air to — just barely — keep his balance as Mia’s weight comes down from atop his shoulders. He lurches sideways into the grass and it’s so thick it gives him the moment’s purchase he needs to come back upright and follow Mia. Or at least the sound of her voice, because she’s so low down in the grass that once she passes, like a deer, the tall swaying plants close up around her. He could get lost in this grass, Ollie realizes suddenly, heart thumping. “Mia?” he calls, holding his bow up in front of him to mow the grasses aside. “Mia, where are you?”
The sound of Ollie calling for her gets fainter behind Mia as she runs through the grass; it seems like it’s getting thicker and thicker and she almost has to wade through before suddenly she pops through one last ridge of it, and she’s in the open circle. It’s flattened down in an intricate weave, and her mother is standing there, holding that sign. She smiles at Mia, but there’s something strange in her eyes; she blinks, and when she opens her eyes again, one is black and one is red. She holds a finger to her lips like the sun in the Raven nursery, and then vanishes down into the ground with a slick knife-sound.
She realizes as she is running that it’s probably not her mom. Like that isn’t even a possibility because her mother was dead. But… But this was obviously something important. And there was tons of crazy shit that was horrible why couldn’t her mom be here in some sort of… corporeal form and have it not be horrible? Right? That wasn’t crazy… When she finally makes it to the circle, that kind of reminds her of some sort of crop circle she opens her mouth to speak but falls silent and just stares at her, and then… she’s gone. Mia hesitates before taking a few steps into the circle looking around the ground then up again wondering where Ollie was. “Ollie!” She hollers jumping as high as she can waving her arms. “Ollie I’m over here! There’s a weird circle thing…” She looks around again and frowns walking the circle towards the center wondering what that was… what the sign meant. What this was at all.
After a silence that seems to stretch too long (and too long means that the grasses start whispering to him, saying “slow motion” over and over), Ollie nearly gives a gasp of relief when Mia’s raspy little voice rises above them, calling for him. He follows the sound until he, too, bursts into the circle clearing. “What the hell is this?” Ollie asks, panting, even though it’s clear that Mia wouldn’t know any more than he would. “Why did you run off like that??”
"I…" She hesitates a moment and looks down where her mom had been and then disappeared. "I saw someone… I think it was…" She doesn’t finish and instead turns her head back to look at Ollie and frowns a bit stepping closer to him. "I don’t know. This is weird."
Oliver can feel how unsettled Mia is, and it’s catching, so he says, “You know what? I know what we can do!” He opens his messenger bag and pulls out the prism, which instantly starts casting rainbows everywhere. “Eh? Eh? We can break this little baby!”
Mia eyes the prism for a few moments and frowns up at him for a few moments and reaches out to take the prism herself. “Let me do it.”
Oliver licks his lips and lets Mia take the prism. He almost takes a step back, too, but instead just sways where he is, watching her. “Here goes nothing, babygirl,” Ollie says, lowly.
Mia takes the prism and holds it for a moment looking up at Ollie. “Ok…” but she hesitates slightly looking at the prism in a sad sort of way and letting out a small sigh. Then she feigns throwing at the ground, but it just drops and bounces a bit and she gives a shrug, “I guess it’s too strong to break. Oh well.”
Oliver holds up a finger and opens his bag again, taking out the heavy chef’s knife. “Give it a good smash with the handle,” he says encouragingly, holding onto the long, wedged blade and presenting the sturdy wooden end to her. “You’re strong, won’t take you much effort.”
Mia squints at him for a moment taking the knife, “Thanks.” She says holding it in her hand a moment and dropping to her knees in front of the prism, then she looks up at Ollie again. “Do you know what I went through to get this thing back after Kyle threw it into the forest? I mean seriously… And I have to break it now?” She just wasting time, dragging things out and maybe the longer she does that… who even knew. Mia had never been good at parting with her belongings.
"If it’s important, Mia, it’ll come back to you. That seems to be how things work in this place. That’s the premise I’m going on when it comes to Kate. She’ll come back. If your prism is important, it’ll come back. If not…" Ollie spreads his arms out. "Who KNOWS what breaking it’ll do. C’mon, give it a whack."
She thinks about it and… he wasn’t wrong. She thought the prism had been lost when Kyle threw it into the forest, because despite what she had said he -had- thrown it in pretty far. And it did come back to her. But lately this prism was the only thing she even cared about in this stupid place… But Ollie really does seem like he thought something would happen and like he really wanted her to do this… “Ok. I’ll do it.” She says with a small nod looking back down at the prism and shifting the knife in her hand so she could it it with the handle. She lifts up the handle of the knife holding it still for a moment and taking a deep breath bringing it down onto the prism.
For a moment, it seems almost as if nothing has happened. It’s like the handle of the knife almost jars to one side when it should be meeting the point of the prism, like the artifact itself is deflecting destruction. But then that moment skips, a jolt in a record, and the wood smashes down into the crystal with a sound that multiplies out and gets louder and louder, sweeping through the grass, crash after crash after crash. A deer screams and then falls silent. The sky turns darker, thunderous, and as the ringing in their ears gradually subsides, Mia and Ollie realize that something is falling on them. It’s snowing.
Mia falls back a bit as the reverberations from the knife travel back to her hands, but she takes it by the handle. She looks around as the sky changes, and something starts coming down. “Ollie?” She says standing up turning her head and looking around the circle, though nothing is there except them. Hopefully. She holds her arm above her head to shield herself from whatever is falling but realizes it’s just snow and blinks a few times. “What?…”
Oliver huffs experimentally, but his breath doesn’t puff out cold; the temperature has remained the same, balmy warmth. The snow is making little cold spots on their skin, and as they look around, a stripe of coloured light comes into view, leading out of the circle they’re in. “Well,” Ollie says, pointing at it, “I guess that’s what we should be following, huh?” He grins widely at Mia, excitement in his eyes despite their puffy discolouration. “Let’s get on the trail! You wanna ride on my shoulders again?” He holds out his hand for the knife back, too.
Mia crouches back down to pick up some of the bigger pieces of the prism because… safety first, or more like because she still wanted to have it. She hesitates at the question handing Ollie the knife back and handing him her bag as well, “Yeah, I mean we wouldn’t have found this circle if it wasn’t for me the last time. Hold all my stuff though.” He might as well.
Oliver hoists Mia up again and then slings himself all over with various bags and bows. “You can see the light?” he makes sure — there’s no need to, really, since the light path seems to be getting stronger as the snow falls, alighting on it gently — and sets off through the grass. As they walk, the tall grasses evolve into a long patch of the same grass but with high feathery flowering arrows atop them that brush Mia’s chin (she has to guide Ollie through this area completely, since he can’t see a thing) until finally Mia sees beyond the arrowtop grasses. There’s a building there, a big red-bricked thing half overgrown with greenery, that nobody would ever have seen from the choked gravel path. And yet there’s the path curving up, yellow stones alongside the brick storehouse, about twenty feet to their left. They’ve come up upon the back of the building.
She grabs a hold of Ollie’s hair again so she doesn’t tumble off and looks around carefully so she doesn’t miss anything. Even though with all this grass there really isn’t much else out there to miss. “Ollie! Building ho! Go a little… left. Just a little though. Like… North west? Is that north?” She wasn’t good at those directions so she just takes to pointing in the direction of the building and using ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ directions instead. As they make it to the building Mia hops down from Ollie’s shoulders and looks back around wondering if they were all going to need to start coming this way, and if so how. “Lets go look at whats inside!”
"All right. Go easy though, we don’t know what could be in there." More mountain lions or a different smoke monster or something, if they were unlucky. Ollie unshoulders his bow and hands Mia her owl bag as they approach the big doors of the building. On either side of the front entrance is the familiar Cache logo, except in the middle space it depicts a sickle moon and star, like the caduceus of the Raven Terminal. The sturdy wooden doors swing open easily when the archers test them, and lights flicker on the same way they had in the Raven.
It’s clear right away what this place is: a huge warehouse of food, toiletries, tools. All sorts of supplies for everyday living — clothing and cloth, too. There are no weapons and no medicine, but apart from that there’s tons of other stuff along the same lines as what they have in the camp warehouse.
Mia takes her bag back and makes sure her bow is ready just in case, though it’s not needed as Ollie turns the lights on and she looks around the large room. “Hey there’s more clothes!” She says and smiles ignoring the food and most of the essential supplies and walks towards the shelves looking through everything.
Oliver gives a long, impressed whistle as he looks around. “Well, I guess that solves the food shortage,” he says. “And the just about everything else shortage. There’s enough here to keep us stocked for ten years at the very least. Not that I think we’ll need it!” he hurries to add, although Mia seems more interested in sorting through the clothes than in anything else. “But it’s always better to have surplus than to be—” He’s cut off there by a sound from outside, and he stops talking so they can listen for it again. The sound comes once more, and it’s obvious what it is this time. It’s a goat bleating.
Mia turns around towards the door as she hears the sound too and walks towards Ollie glancing at him with a raised eyebrow. “It sounds like a goat. I don’t think you have to be afraid of it.” And she moves towards the door sticking her head out and looking round wondering what a goat was doing here. Or maybe it was a mountain goat or something.
Oliver twists his mouth at Mia and goes out the big doors, circling around the warehouse. “Mia!!” she hears him hollering back. “There’s a garden here! And goats, two of ‘em! In a pen!”
Mia walks around to the back and coos a little, “Awww.” She says going over to the goat pen. “They’re so cute. Little goaties…” She tears some grass out of the ground and feeds it to one looking around more then over to Ollie looking serious. “Who else is here, Ollie?”
Oliver scratches his beard with the tip of his bow, which he hasn’t yet put down. “I don’t know,” he says slowly, because clearly, /clearly/ the goats have been cared for. There’s a water trough in their pen and they’re waxing fat and happy, one nanny and one billy, and… “Here, hold my bow,” Ollie says, handing it over to Mia. He hops over the wire of the pen and goes to a little shelter area tucked away in the back corner of it, returning with two little kids, one black and one golden. “That’s why the nanny’s producing milk,” he says, bringing the babies over to Mia to pet. The goats watch peacefully, chewing away at the grass Mia’s given them.
Mia takes Ollie’s bow and looks around suspiciously until he comes back. Then she squeals at the baby goats. “Awww little babies!” She pets them and smiles but looks up at Ollie. “I don’t know if we should take any of this stuff, Ollie. Some crazy red neck hill billies probably live here and are going to come hunt us down and brutally murder us if we take some of their stuff…”
Oliver snorts. “As if we can’t handle some horror movie redneck hillbillies! Look, I know it goes against everything we do back in the real world, honeybunch, but we’re not there anymore. It’s all new rules in Cachement. The stuff that’s here is all here for a reason, and we might as well make the most of it and deal with the consequences IF they come up. But that’s an IF and not a WHEN, and I’m sure as hell not gonna neglect the food in there and out here—” he sweeps his arm at the extensive, well-tended garden, “—just out of fear that something /might/ maybe happen!”
Mia sends him a look and shakes her head, “No. You’re wrong. It’s -when- they come up. Because everything here has consequences, Ollie. Even simple things like… eating vegetables. If you haven’t noticed.” She stands on her tippy toes and looks around attempting to peer over the tall grass and see if there are any more buildings around. “We should at least see if we can find any signs of people…”
Oliver sighs, rubbing at his face. He rubs over his eyes too and then winces, having forgotten the state of his eyelids. “All right,” he says, with poor grace. “Split up, then. You wanna take the inside or the outside?” He squints around at the building. It’s big, was probably some kind of small fort outpost before being used as a warehouse, but there’s no other buildings nearby. Just garden, the goat pen, and one other small hutlike structure, only big enough to serve as another animal shelter.
Mia ponders that for a moment tilting her head as she weighed her options and nodded, “I’ll take the inside. And check out more of the clothes.” She pets the goats on their heads one last time smiling at them before going back to the big doors heading inside the large warehouse. “Watchout for crazy rednecks!” She calls back at Ollie.
Oliver leaves Mia to investigate the vast innards of the warehouse while he skirts around the building. It’s a big red brick fort, baked dry by the sun in some places and smelling of dampness where the vines have climbed up over the back, but it’s still mostly intact. They could probably climb up into the ramparts if they want, and they probably should, when they get more people back here. Get a good view of the environment. In addition to the goat pen, the other little hut structure turns out to be a chicken coop; there’s easily twenty of them and Ollie’s mouth starts watering when he thinks of what this’ll do for their food supplies.
He trots back inside feeling very good about the place, running his fingers along shelves with salad dressing and more records and stacks of jeans. “Where you at, baby girl?” he hollers, and some birds fly up from the ceiling and out through some of the high glass windows, where the panes have been busted. “You won’t believe what I found!”
Mia wanders past the shelves of food and medical supplies eyeing them with an almost annoyed sort of look and pulls out the inventory list she has from back at the camp, of course this would fill out what she had been slowly been… depleting and that sucked… But if she could also— Her thought gets broken into when she hears Ollie and she looks up. “I’m coming.” She says and follows his voice to where he’s standing. “What did you find?”
Oliver tears his gaze away from the bottles of liquor — Cache branded, of course, but they’d do in a pinch — and grins at her, pointing outside with his bow. “Chickens!” he declares. “So we don’t just get fresh milk from nannygoat, we also get fresh eggs and the occasional roast chicken dinner! Isn’t that exciting? God, I didn’t even realize how tired I was of powdered eggs till I heard those babies clucking away in there.” A thought occurs and he says, “It might be nice for the kids, especially. Having animals to take care of. Hey?” Ollie rumples Mia’s ponytail to underline the idea.
Mia raises up a bit on her tip toes and looks out the window nodding her head. “Awesome. Yeah, and I’ve already named the Goats. Molly and Arthur. And the babies are Bill and Charlie, so far…” Because it was, who didn’t like chickens? But she was seeing a problem with this, “How exactly are we going to get the chickens from here, back to the camp? Like goats yeah that wouldn’t be that hard. But chickens?”
Oliver shrugs. “Chickens can stay here. It’s not that far from camp if you know the way, and after all, we’ll be conveying supplies back and forth too. I saw a little cart and a wheelbarrow or two out there, we can use those since we shouldn’t use the Westfalia. Anyhow, if we’re gonna be slaughtering, we should do it out here too and not in the camp. That just seems like bad luck, dontchafind?”
"How are we supposed to get through the grass? I didn’t see any lawn mowers or anything…" She guessed they could use some gardening supplies. And by ‘they’ she didn’t mean herself.
Oliver points over at the section of the warehouse that’s stocked with tools. “Probably some stuff over there. A scythe would be neat.” Ollie has a suspicion that once they leave and start heading back, the path won’t be half as treacherous as it was on the way here, but he keeps that theory to himself. “Mia! C’mon, why aren’t you more excited about this? We found all this stuff!!” Ollie waves around wildly at their bounty. “We won’t have to worry about food supplies and running out of soap anymore!”
She nodded her head a little bit because they had found all this stuff and she was so happy to have more shampoo because the stuff they had back at the camp was running out and she didn’t want to have greasy hair. And the razors sucked already so now that they were beginning to get dull she’d look like she had just gotten out of a fight with a cat once she exited the shower for how cut up her legs were starting to get. “I am excited!” She said, “I’m just playing devils advocate.”
Oliver smooths both his hands over her hair and hugs her, swinging her slightly. “This is gonna be a turning point, you’ll see,” he promises. “Now that we don’t have necessities to worry about, we can concentrate on … on getting out of here. Or figuring out why we’re here in the first place.”
Mia puts her arms around him when he hugs her and pulls back a little looking up at him, “I don’t think that was what was keeping people from concentrating on other things.” She says with a small shrug of her shoulders and pulls away going over to where the tools are. “I guess it’s good we have Clark here. He can take down all this grass, I mean he used to live on a farm, right?” She looks through the shelves spinning a pair of sheers in her hands. “And we’re not killing the goats. Just to make that clear…” She adds tossing a serious look over her shoulder at Ollie. “But just because we have more food doesn’t mean any of this is safer to eat then what we have at our camp.”
Oliver follows her over to the tools, hefting the wicked-looking scythe. “Handy in case we need to fight foppish French vampires,” he remarks, then adds, “no, not killing the goats. They’re too valuable alive. Besides, I think one of the adjoining rooms is a walk-in freezer, tons of meat in there.” Ollie snickers when Mia gives him a highly doubtful look. “I know, I know. But nothing we’ve eaten so far has been rotten or rancid. One single incident with Damian isn’t enough to condemn the rest of it, Mia. Maybe — who knows, maybe the point is that we shouldn’t try to set up shit in camp? Gardens and medical facilities. Maybe Cachement’s pissed that we’re not using what’s already established. Who knows.”
Mia looks around when Ollie talks about Cachement like it’s some living place or something. “It’d be helpful if it would clearly show us what it already has established.” She says in annoyed voice and shakes her head. She leans over and picks up a large heavy sledge hammer from the floor and looks back over at Ollie. “Maybe someone should stay here. Not just like one person, but a group. To look after the animals and… maybe look out for more people.”
"We can discuss that with the others. Frankly, I don’t think we should be splitting up any more than we already do, with people ranging all over the damn place getting themselves in trouble. But who knows, maybe you might get some other nuts volunteering to come stay in this place. It’s probably creepy at night, y’know. We haven’t even explored the entire place … which, y’know, we should be getting back to the camp." Ollie eyes the sledgehammer she’s holding. He’s not nervous about it, not exactly, but seeing her heft it like that is the tiniest bit goosebump-making.
Mia gives a small shrug and turns back around looking through the shelves swinging the hammer back and forth like a pendulum. But a moment later she lets out a small hiss when part of the old wood from the handle gives her a splinter making her drop the hammer down on to her sandaled foot. “Shit! Ow! God dammit.” Mia said leaning against the wall to steady herself on one foot as she inspects the other one as she brings her now splintered finger up to her mouth. It didn’t look too bad, not mangled or anything, but she could already see the bruise forming. “I hate this place…”
Oliver gives a shout of alarm when Mia drops the hammer, loping forward to swing her up into his arms and hold her foot by the ankle, bringing it up into the light to inspect. “Jesus, you banged it good, sweetie, it’s starting to bleed, you scraped away the skin and you’re gonna have a helluva bruise….” He notices her fussing with her finger. “Did you hurt your hand too?”
Mia huffs and pouts a little nodding her head, “Yeah. I have a splinter.” She says holding up her finger to his face. But she pulls it away again. “I’m fine. Lets just… patch it up and go back to camp and you can tell everyone about this place and everyone can come and help carry things that we need there away.” She pulls her foot away from him and holds her arms out. “You have to carry me though.”