Antarctic Termite — Roleplayer Guild

Mess.
Another barrel, a continuing sense of involved urgency, and as Sidwell soon discovered, a considerably flimsy one. The second lid opened with difficulty, unwilling to bare its contents to the world, but he did not relent. The shapes confused him before they settled into the timeless familiarity of a human skull. The man stood still in the rising smell of ancient flesh, softer than cider and subtler than smoke, and more powerfully disorientating than either. He replaced the lid, perhaps out of courtesy.

Oh, but, wait. You're only dead, like the rest of us. Feeling apologetic and rather detached, Sidwell removed the lid again, childlike, and set it aside. It was a kind but pointless gesture. This corpse, unlike himself, did not seem to be feeling very energetic, and clearly hadn't been for quite some time. He raised a hand to see if he could borrow the fellow soul's knife, clearly recalling the overgrown bookshelf and bound stacks of metal balls in his current room, but decided against it. It seemed unlikely that the skeleton would talk back if he asked, and he couldn't possibly take something without permission. This is foolish!

Tuning himself back to his surroundings revealed that the room below was no longer crackling with fire, or not crackling loudly enough to be heard. His eyes were focusing better in the dark. Tracing the outline of the stain of cider on the floor revealed a fox, likely the very same one, backing itself away from a figure he hadn't seen. Tamtam was here, and her stance and voice still read distress. In a perversely refreshing turn of events, however, she knew something, had scratched out valuable information from such a tangled world. Keys on a door, in a mapped-out room. Likely in a room where Tamtam had been before, reachable from the deck above. Keys, of course, which would lead somewhere, beyond the doors at the far end of the mess, and- in an escalating series of assumptions- from there into the burnt room below. It was an oddly phrased instruction, but Innocent was glad to seize upon it. 

"I can try to get them. If the room they're in is charted out, it mustn't be too hard to find." And the children are still above deck in the storm. They had gone out of his mind between the fire and the corpse. It would be easy to continue forgetting them, but a new breed of self-doubt was unkindly informing Sidwell that doing so would be unwise. The closer he walked back to the stairs, the more convinced he was that someone was yelling on the deck (The red-hair girl, it must be), and for the first time in months he bent into a shambling run.

He only paused briefly, when the floor-voice started again. Only one, muffled but audible now that the fiery chaos had died down. "...Is gone, but we have one dead ... Dead and another going ... Don't get help..."

Don't get..? Curse these ears. "We are coming," he answered loudly, unsure if the voice needed help or not but determined to find its owner either way. Thunder echoed through the stairs as he went back upwards, steeling himself for the uneven deck, the swaying ship. The sky was darkening.

Holding himself against the wind, it took him several seconds to find the red- and blue-haired children who stood dwarved by the trees even with their arms up. Sidwell waved in response, beckoning widely with his arm. "Come down here! It is better." He was hesitant to leave in search of the mapped room before they had made their way below deck, but he turned his eye back to the observatory. There is a room under the room with the books- I know that- I can search that. Come, children, hurry!
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