Two Women Scorned
Lvl 14 Ms Fortune (132/140), Midna
Word Count: 3427 (+4) (+4 rapport)
After some time off, and some folks getting out, the seekers were on the road again. Or trail. Or really on the spelunking path when you got down to it, because neither the tree itself nor the floodfested were particularly interested in providing a straight forward route into the Qliphoth’s upper reaches.
Case and point were the massive valves in the biological structure, tough as vault doors and always placed at the most inconvenient points, as well as being spots that whatever intelligence controlled the swarm had delighted in setting up ambushes. There were enough heroes on hand to slaughter the Floodfested before they could call for backup, though, so the bigger concern for Ms Fortune was the opened valves’ resemblance to large lamprey-like mouths, which gnawed at her lingering phagophobia.
For the most part the biological mechanisms for opening these blockades provided little challenge, but in one early case, after whipping the floor with the monsters that had tried and failed to crush the Seekers in these choke points, the associated puzzle did not turn out to be located in plain view of the door.
Various tunnels snaked off from the tricky valve’s main chamber, including one that lead into a ruined chunk of some kind of high tech facility, though it was only large enough to roll a
large ball through, rather than crawl in any practically distinguished manner. Well unless you were a child, however Midna, who had found said hole, wasn’t exactly a fan of the idea of sending the koopa kids crawling through no matter how tough they were, because even for Bowser Junior id’d be a squeeze with his hard shell. After a moment she did however come up with a different candidate based on recent interactions with them.
”Miss Fortune?” the princess(who was hanging from the ceiling from her shadow hand to inspect the duct that halfway up the wall)
”Do you think you can get your bits and pieces in here? If you do I can ride your shadow and we can see if the meat buttons have grown into this ruin?”By this point the team had been trekking long enough that even Nadia’s motor mouth was running on empty, so when Midna hung down to say hello the feral didn’t mind turning her attention away from Ace for a bit. “In there?” Nadia hopped up to grab hold of the ledge and inspect the opening. She was no stranger to squeezing through vents when it came to heists, but these days she wasn’t quite as skinny as she’d been in her vagabond era. Her head would fit with room to spare though, and while she would be loathe to dispatch her noggin on a solo mission in a hellish place like this, Midna’s company offered a little more assurance. Plus, Midna coming to her for help felt pretty nice–no doubt their battles had shown just how capable the catgirl was!
“Yeah, sure! Good thing I’m not claw-strophobic, eh?” She swiveled her head around then waved goodbye to the others with her ears. “Be right back. Won’t be a meowment!” Then she rolled her head backward off her shoulders and into the duct upside-down, where she used her ears to walk. Meanwhile her body dropped back down, detached her tail, and began to
dance.
The farther the duo got in the vent, though, the less happy-go-lucky Nadia became–inwardly, at least. As demonstrated by the team’s various encounters throughout the demon tree, the Qliphoth had consumed a great variety of detritus from Redgraccoon City when it first grew. Now, with the city destroyed, the Qliphoth was a literal vertical slice of the Dead Zone itself, housing everything from demons and zombies to ghosts and goblins, with a healthy -or rather, unhealthy- dose of extraterrestrial parasites to boot. Nadia had never seen an area like
this before, though. While it still seemed high-tech from the perspective of these two Seekers, the facility they were infiltrating was a far cry from the clean, sheer, well-lit metallic interior of Alcamoth, or the militaristic utilitarian style of the Avenger. Instead a strange smell filled the air, and deposits of unidentifiable meat grew along the seams and cracks in the duct like mold. When Nadia’s head finally reached an opening, she hopped down into a
hallway of bizarre and macabre design, equal parts ghoulish and alien, all hewn from some unidentifiable material in unmistakably organic shapes.
“Huh. That’s new,” the feral remarked, struggling to think puns that might suit this unsettling environment. The floor in here was tilted, making her wonder if this whole area would be a little off-kilter. The more pressing concern was the fleshy mold. She looked around, raising an eyebrow. “Midna? You can come out now. Mind carrying my head? I’ve got no-’body’ else.”
Like a demon called, the princess appeared, monochrome form stretching up out of the feral’s shadow before the vibrant red and gold was painted across her armor as she solidified fully and her heels clacked against the tilted ground. Claws of purple energy snapped out of them, preventing her from sliding down the corridor as she took it all in.
”Can’t remember dreaming about a place like this, not that they were ever that exact. Blurred nightmares those two, except for the start and the end” Midna said as she crouched down and picked up Nadia’s (living) severed head. It took a few moments for her to figure out how to actually hold her in all her arms, resulting in her placing two hands on either side of the neck and holding her up in front of her chest.
”There, if that works? Or would you prefer the back of the neck like a kitten?” she asked with a light tease as she summoned up her shield in one of her remaining free hands to let her better defend her cargo if need be. The head was a little less than she’d hoped for assistance wise, but the lady’s strikers would be a help if nothing else.
“This is fine. The more stable, the better,” Nadia reported. “If something comes at us, just chuck me at ‘em. I’ll head ‘em off.”
”Will do” princess replied as they set off down the corridor
At one end of the hallway sat a
strange chair festooned by scraps of skin like Spanish moss, wholly unsuitable for any humanoid occupant. At the other end, past what looked to Nadia like a
trough of ground beef, lay a decently-sized
room. The growths in here were extreme, and strange organisms the size of human heads clung to the dangling masses like polyps. Repelled by the disturbing sight, Nadia failed to suppress a shudder, even though the rest of her wasn’t here right now. “Ugh…what’re we looking for, again? Some kinda switch?” Her eyes fell on what looked like a
some kind of console with a number of lit and unlit nodes arranged around a system of rotating connectors. “Uh oh…that looks like a puzzle.” Nadia grimaced. When it came to logic puzzles, Nadia Fortune was the wrong girl to ask.
”I’ll take that over more meat monsters. Maybe it’ll even be fun?” Midna replied, before taking a second glance at all the twisted machinery and revolting growths and making groan that made it clear she had a hard time believing her own statement
”Whoever built this place probably wouldn’t know what that is with all this grey. Still, might open a way forwards or reveal a hidden chest?” she said instead, approaching and using one of her secondary hands to interact with what seemed to be a controller on the right hand of the device
”Let’s see, what do you do” The controls weren’t immediately obvious, but with a little trial and error they turned out to be relatively simple. A button could be pressed to change which of the four nodes was currently active, and around the button were two dials. The outer dial would rotate the rod attached to the currently active node, while the inner dial would rotate the node itself. Once each rod pointed to the correct dial, that node would light up, but any node connected to another would rotate it if it itself was rotated. Nadia stared at the intricate device as the rotation of rods and nodes caused lights to flicker on and off, thoroughly baffled. After about fifteen seconds she lifted her eyebrows and blinked a couple times, shaking her head. “Ahem! Well, seeing as I don’t have any hands to fiddle with, why don’t I just, uh, keep watch? Set me down somewhere reasonably clean, will ya?”
”Hmmm? Oh” Midna replied, the expression of confusion mixed with focus on her face obscured by her helmet being wiped away by a few blinks. She glanced around, saying
”lets see” and finding nowhere that really, truly, counted as clean, before coming up with an Idea.
A moment later she’d summoned up her Darknut, and had it hold its shield out in front of it horizontally like a serving tray, onto which she popped the feral’s head, before saying
”There, that should work. You can even order it to serve you up in whatever direction you’d like” before returning to fiddling with the dials somewhat ineffectually. During her stint of dungeon crawling, she hadn’t exactly been the one figuring out the last step of the puzzles most of the time.
Nadia gave the skeletal juggernaut a dubious glance from her new perch. “A little knight-marish, but I’ll take what I can get.” She took the chance to scope out the room, but there was not much she particularly enjoyed looking at. All the alien meat, much more visceral than the reddish-purple plant matter that constituted the Qliphoth, made her stomach churn despite her stomach being a good hundred feet away. A shame, she thought, that she couldn’t have left her nose behind as well. With nothing else worth seeing, the feral turned her attention back toward the puzzle. “So, Midna. You went to the desert and the city, while I hit the sea and the caves. Haven’t seen much of each other before today, but I guess we’re makin’ up for lost time now, huh?” She wore a friendly smile, as usual. “I hear you’re some kind of princess? Lotta royals in the Seekers. At least you’re not snooty like Toni, buuut I couldn’t say I’d blame ya. Not every day a royal gets to hang around some mangy alley-cat, or vice versa.” Her tone had become somewhat pointed, as if leveling a vague accusation.
”Toni… Sectonia?” Midna, who had been humming to herself tunelessly while failing to crack the puzzle during Nadia’s look around, guessed. Rather than being annoyed at being interrupted from her task, she was rather thankful Nadia was here for conversation instead of to ask why she wasn’t done yet.
”Maybe not a cat, but I owe a lot to a flea bitten mutt. Well, farm boy turned wolf turned hero but still. Not that I was as above it all as the Queen before him but I had my own kind of contempt I needed to deal with” she replied with more honesty than might be necessary, before really losing track of her tongue, first saying
”I wish he was here” more than a hint of wistfulness before catching herself, switching gears much to hard, and promptly thumping the machine and declaring the reason for that desire was
”so he could solve this goddess forsaken puzzle!” even if that obviously wasn’t all of it
Either Midna hadn’t understood Nadia’s subtle provocation, or she’d rather effortlessly deflected it. The feral didn’t mind, though; so far, Midna’s behavior had been much more down-to-earth fashion than the team’s other royals, so much so that Nadia might have never guessed at her status otherwise. If the Twilight Princess did not acknowledge any disparity between the two of them, the cat burglar wasn’t going to draw any more attention to it. Instead, she considered asking about the farm boy wolf hero Midna mentioned, but truth be told, she wasn’t all that interested. It seemed like neither of them was suited to this task, but at least Nadia had the excuse of not having any hands to help with.
She couldn’t help but smile at Midna when she vented her frustration with the alien mechanism. “Hey, if you don’t have any ideas, might as well go ham on the controls. Gotta luck out sooner or later, right?”
The princess paused, thought about this and then grinned under her mask, saying
”You know what, I can do one better” and setting about a quick little magical scheme. She placed the false set of arms on the controles, and then her real ones on top, sinking the fingers of them into the fake ones and then rapidly rearranged the glowing green runes and lines that appeared as a result of this action. Then she pulled the fingers back and smiled as the second set of limbs did indeed start to go ham on the controles, while Minda rested an elbow between them, turning her focus away from the puzzle entirely and moving it over to Nadia.
”There, now they’ll do it for me” she declared smugly, clearly quite pleased with her little automation trick, before trying to pick up the same conversation from where she’d interrupted it.
”So, yes, odd how that worked out. Not even those silly games put us together” she noted, adding more to the pile of coincidences, they really had missed each other at every turn somehow hadn’t they, before she thought about how to further rectify that
”But maybe next time? Or something before we launch ourselves back into the fray? I could go for another spa visit or twelve after this grim grimy place.” Though the spectacle of magical automation stole her attention for a moment, the mere mention of Balan’s Big Top was enough to bring a bright smile to Nadia’s face. “Oh man, those minigames were the cat’s pajamas. We’ve gotta go back some time, or find more stuff like that. I like a good scrap as much as the next gal, but we all need breaks, ‘specially after crap like this, yeah.” She chuckled, her nose wrinkled by the ambient foetor. “I’m sure that angel lady feels bad sittin’ out, but even a live wire like me has her limb-its. After the Maw, all of us on Blue Team spent, like, a whole day on a tropical vacation.” She stared off into the middle distance, the morbid architecture fading away into white sands and crashing surf. A heavy sigh escaped her. “Life’s a beach, eh?”
Just then, the swivels and clacks of the alien machine gave way to a loud click, then silence. When Nadia looked over, she found four yellow lights starting back at her. There came a series of loud, mechanical -or possibly organic- sounds, and after another moment, a door near the hallway began to slide open. The sudden movement disturbed a handful of the head-shaped
parasites, which flew up toward the rafters. Nadia made the mistake of looking too closely at one as it passed by, and despite being elsewhere, her stomach did not thank her for the experience. Green-tinged smoke wafted through the doorway as it revealed a triangular room. One wall, even more bio-engineered than the rest of this alien facility, hosted a row of
canisters in which ghastly homunculi had been grow to fit their containers. The other wall lay in pieces, exposing the familiar Qliphoth matter behind it, and with it the nerve cluster that would open the valve back in the main tunnel. In between lay some sort of workbench, or perhaps operating table, on which a handful of biotech weapons had been fashioned.
“Guns?” Though leery of the freakish tube-babies that were definitely starting back at her, Nadia edged toward the table to satisfy her curiosity. Of the various half-baked projects on the table, only three seemed to be complete: two
pistols of flesh and bone, not quite alike, and a
scoped SMG. Nadia seemed especially interested in the pistols, but with no hands of her own to claim them with, she could only raise an eyebrow at Midna. “Finders keepers?”
”Power is power but, urgh, it's hardly ever pretty in this world” Midna replied as she caught up, having had to pause to set her false limbs back to normal. Unsurprisingly she used those to pick up and carefully examine the weapons rather than her own ones. Doing so also let her avoid looking at or thinking about the tank beings, but she’d have to get round to what to do about them eventually.
”Not exactly an expert with guns even if they can be useful” she said, implicitly asking if the feral was.
If Nadia had her shoulders around, she would’ve shrugged them. “Not really my deal, to be honest. Only got one, and it’s more for…’meating’ people.” Though the Bait Launcher was a pretty unforgettable weapon, she couldn’t remember if she’d used it around Midna so far. “But I wouldn’t mind tryin’ them. Got an itch trigger finger lately, for whatever reason.” Maybe that cowgirl she’d fused with was rubbing off on her, but Nadia couldn’t help but feel like she had some sort of potential that she couldn’t tap into without a gun or two.
”I know the feeling” Midna replied, as she pulled her Nightsky Ripper scimitar out of a portal
”Wouldn’t have known the first thing about using one of these a few weeks ago, and now it just feels…right”She then put the guns down on the table again and opened a portal below them while saying
”Once we get you back to your fingers we’ll see if these fit like a glove. If not, trying to give them to Edward would be funny” before then moving onwards to the nerve cluster and slicing into it with her sword.
With their task complete, there was nothing stopping them from heading back. Nothing except well…
With a sigh, Midna stepped towards the pods with the creatures inside, saying/asking
”OK, can’t avoid it any longer, what are you and are you going to be a problem or burden?” Though the homunculi within tracked her movements with their bloodshot eyes and bared their lipless teeth at her, they couldn't move an inch inside their pods, having been horrifically molded into ovoid shapes by their own steady growth within their cramped confines. Nadia did not like looking at them or thinking about them. “How about we skedaddle before we find out? ‘Uppies’ me!” She hopped her head up and down to signal Midna to pick her up.
Midna glanced down at the feral, up at the trapped creatures that didn’t seem very friendly all things told, and then up at her darknut that was no longer burdened by its body-less cargo before replying
”Sure” and picking Miss Fortune back up in the same manner she had before.
She turned away from the creatures and strode out of the door without looking back, heading for the vent into which she popped Miss Fortune’s head. Right as she did, there came a crash as her darknut ripped the top of one of the pods trapping the homunculi, and prompting the princess to declare it was
”Time to go”.
Whatever the homunculi did with it's freedom now, it wasn't her problem.