"Master Kensu!" Sarah cries out as she sees the old wizard crumple to the ground. She rushes forwards to save Kensu, giving a loud cry as she swings her sword. However, she gets caught off-guard by the man throwing a yelping Pip at her, knocking her onto her ass. She grunts in surprise, but she quickly gets up, putting Pip aside.
"Stay here!" she orders the dog. She charges her sword with lightning and fires it at the stranger once she has a clear shot. Once she has his attention again, she resumes taking a fighting stance.
"Leave Master Thunderfist alone," Sarah demands. "Who are you, and what do you want? And why did that monster attack the villagers?! They've done nothing!"
To her surprise, Master Thunderfist appears and used a hammer to create a bolt of lightning, attacking the stranger. The stranger's response was no less startling; he lifts a small tree and tries to crush Thunderfist under it.
Pip needs no invitation, and is already charging the stranger, shooting a bolt of lightning at him. Finding no other option, Sarah raises her sword and moves in to join the fray. She tries to cover Pip so he doesn't get crushed under the stranger's attacks.
Sarah manages to run into the village, and stops to take a breather. At her heels, Pip barks at her in encouragement, then turns around, growling at... something. Sarah braces herself, wondering if the dragon had flown away; she can't hear its wings, and something that big would make a lot of noise stomping around, right?
To her surprise, she sees a man in a hooded cloak, carrying an oversize scythe that was almost rippling with dark energies. A chill shoots up her spine, though she doesn't understand why. Besides her, Pip seems to have gotten even more agitated, actively snarling at the man. Sparks were forming around the electric dog, as though he's charging up for an attack.
"Uh, s-sir?" she says cautiously. "I don't know how to put this, but... there's a flying monster around here somewhere. You might want to take cover someplace before it comes back..."
Sarah is glad the villagers are all alright, and helps them leave the cave as quickly and orderly as possible, reassuring them along the way. She wants nothing more than a bath and a rest, but she's certain these people have had a worse day, being kidnapped by monsters and webbed up, exposed to nightmare-inducing miasma and almost made monster food.
"Special?" she says softly to herself, as though trying to get a feel of the word. "I don't even know who I really am."
When she gets out into the sunlight, she stops. It feels like years since she's been out in the sun; the dank, dark caves full of foul mist almost made her forget how the sun feels so nice and warm. She's just glad to be outside.
That's when she sees something in the sky, descending towards them. At first she thinks it's a bird... but then realizes it's far too big and moving far too fast to be a bird. In fact, she realizes it's some sort of monster, heading straight for them.
At first she feels a burst of panic and anxiety; she's barely recovered from the fight with the spiderlings, and she's still a bit shaky from the effects of the miasma. Then she realizes to her horror that the villagers are still in danger. It's the thought of the poor people escaping one threat only to face an even monstrous one galvanizes her into action.
"Run!" she calls out to the village folk. "Run! Head for the forest! Take cover! Hurry! Please!"
The ensuing panic feels like it's going to break her heart, what with the villagers running amok and pushing and hurting each other in their blind terror. However, the torrent of rocks rolling down from above where the monster struck the mountain drives her to try and get them away from danger, trying to help people who fell or got knocked over in the commotion. She tries to make sure everyone gets to cover as quickly as possible, all the while trying to shield the people from the falling rocks.
The villagers were still streaming out of the cave. Right now, Sarah is trying to figure whether the beast is going to keep attacking them, or if it was just passing by. Either way, she can't ignore it; if it comes around for another pass...
She grabs one of the more lucid villagers.
"Please, listen to me, we don't have much time," she implores him. "Tell everyone to stay hidden in the forest and nearby caves. Please stay hidden until Master Thunderfist finds you and tells you it's safe to come out. Tell Master Thunderfist... tell him it was an honor to meet him, and I had to distract the monster before it hurt or killed anyone.
"Tell him I'll be back, I promise..."
The villager nods, and starts helping by herding his fellows to safety. Part of her wonders if she'll ever fulfill that promise.
She prepares herself, and pulls out the sword. Taking measure, she then aims the sword and focuses her energy through it. A bolt of lightning fires from the tip, flying through the air, passing right in front of the flying beast to get its attention.
"Hey!" she calls out to the beast, running south towards the beach. "Over here! This way!"
She prepares to fire more bolts from the sword if the beast ignores her, trying to force it to follow her and away from the poor townsfolk. Once it follows her, she runs. She runs as fast as she can, wind rushing in her face, feeling her heart pound away in her chest.
The final blow leaves Sarah breathless and gasping for air amid the ever-present miasma and the acrid smell of roasted spider-monster, fully aware that she's covered in the gunk, and might have even gotten some of it in her mouth. She feels very sick right now, and retches and coughs in disgust. She slumps back against a wall, relieved that the fight is over and the surviving spiderlings had run for cover, hopefully never to return.
She notices Pip running up to a pedestal with a button on it, and watches with curiosity as he activates... something. Not long after, the miasma begins to recede, allowing Sarah the taste of wondrous fresh air. Soon, the hallucinatory effects would stop, and Sarah is glad for that. She picks up Pip when he gets back to her and she strokes his fur lovingly. She's not sure what happened, but if she is to venture a guess, there might be some old machinery in this cave, and that may be the source of the miasma. She'd need to make sure it's destroyed or disabled so nobody else could use it.
Once she's recovered enough from the miasma and the fight, she gets up, and tries to find a way to help the villagers. She starts with the poor girl the spiderling queen was feasting on, trying to heal her with her powers, and praying she's alright. Once she's sure the girl's recovering, she tries to cut down the villagers from the spiderwebs - while not hurting any of them, of course.
She soon hears steps coming from the cave, so she cautiously pulls out the sword, worried if it's more trouble, but to her relief it's Master Thunderfist coming in.
"Oh, Master Thunderfist," she says with a bow. "I've found the sword - and more importantly, I found where the villagers disappeared to. I hope they're all alright... And Pip was a great help, I couldn't have done it without him..."
She kneels down to stroke Pip's ears, who barks back in gratitude.
"Well, we didn't exactly crash," Penny says, looking outside. "We're a lot lower than we used to be, but still high enough off the ground. Do airships do this all the time, or did Nichole jinx us by mentioning an airship crash?"
When Vanna called her name, Penny turns to her, and nearly fumbles catching the glasses.
"Hey, you caught them, thanks Vanna," she says. "Not even scratched."
She puts them on, glad to be able to see normally again.
"I'd try and look for emergency kits," Penny says, looking for the nearest emergency cupboard. "I'd rather have a flashlight than try to find a non-smashed lightbulb to hold, and trying to see with bursts of sparks is giving me a headache."
She notices Dana's smile in the dim light.
"You're smiling despite all this?" Penny asks incredulously. She then breaks into a smirk. "Well, at least nobody can accuse you of bringing down the mood.
"I'm with you girls on this," she says regarding the plan. "No sense sitting around waiting for someone to help. Besides, even though we're supposed to be able to process Nox better than most people, I'm not gonna sit around soaking it in, trying to find how long it takes me to cough up a lung or something. They give Surgeon General's warnings about this stuff, you know.
"And yeah, now that you mention it, Ms. Wings of Justice seemed to have gotten some news right around the time the turbulence started."
She looks around in the cabin, but to no avail.
"Shit, no emergency kits," she sighs. "These guys really need to work on their prep. Let's get going, then."
Penny resumes lighting up sparks to light the way, though she realizes it's neither as elegant or as reliable as Dana's light.
Sarah continues cutting away at the spiderling horde attacking her, managing to cut another in half when she saw something dance in her peripheral vision. She's half-tempted to ignore it as yet another hallucination, but something makes her turn around and notice in horror as the spiderling queen is coming down hard - and aiming for Pip, who is too busy snarling and snapping at a couple spiderlings to notice. For a second, it seems as though everything was floating in water, a moment suspended in time. It takes every inch of will and strength for Sarah to force her whole body to move, trying to cover Pip before he gets fatally skewered.
"NO!"
By some miracle, she manages to block the tip of the spiky foreleg with the flat of her sword, placing herself between an angry spiderling queen and a surprised Pip who yelps and jumps back. However, by doing so, she left her back exposed, and one spiderling stabs her in the calf with a claw. Giving a pained grunt, Sarah tries to push back, but is slowly driven to her knees by the force of the queen's push, spiderleg scratching against unbreakable ancient steel.
Pip, mortified that his carelessness caused New Master to get hurt, turns around in a snarl and goes after the spiderling that just hurt New Master's leg. He bites but misses, the spiderlings falling back to avoid his wrath. This time, Pip doesn't pursue, trying to cover Sarah's back while she struggles with the queen.
For a moment, Sarah feels as though she'll be smacked down the ground, unable to keep up the effort against the queen's pressing leg. However, she takes a deep breath, and takes a gamble by changing the sword grip, causing the leg to slip off to the side, allowing Sarah to force the queen off balance with a twist of the sword. With the sword free, Sarah takes her moment to strike. She charges the sword with the biogenic power of lightning, lighting the cave around her with a brilliant azure flash, and swung as hard as she can at the queen in an upwards stroke.
Urgrapth looked up from her meal before she had finished killing her prey. There was a person there, with pink hair! The Intruder!! Urgrapth hissed from her position and jumped from her web onto the wall, a wave of her spiderlings began to cascade down the cave wall near to where the pink haired intruder was to get her.
What Sarah sees before her is nothing short of a monster out of a nightmare. A large, human-sized spiderling with eyes sparkling malevolently in the shadows and mist, a girl's upper body grafted to a large spider's abdomen, the girl would be considered pretty were it not for monstrous features betraying her nature. To Sarah's horror, the spiderling queen seems to be eating a villager, a young girl struggling weakly to escape her grasp, gasping for breath as her struggles weakened.
Upon seeing Sarah, the spiderling queen hisses and jumps backwards, letting Sarah rush forwards and check on the girl. The villager girl is still alive, Sarah notes with a sigh of relief, but she seems badly drained and weakened.
Pip notes it's one of the washing-girls from the village, and whines sadly as he tries to wake her up by nudging her hand and licking her face. The big spiderling had hurt her, and he could smell its scent on her, especially around the bite-marks on her neck.
However, Sarah realizes she has no time to tend to the girl; many spiderlings were coming her way, and she doubts they'll wait politely to put the girl safely away to fight properly. She instead stands over the girl's body, sword in hand, Pip growling besides her. If she's going to fight, might as well make a stand. This time, she's ready.
Pip opens up by blasting one of the spiderlings to a cinder with a bolt of thunder, the spiderlings bunching up meaning he manages to injure a couple others. Sarah grips her sword, and starts swinging at the incoming horde. The sword is a much better weapon than a stolen claw, far better than her bare fists, as it feels natural in her hands. She swings and cleaves a spiderling in twain, catching another with the backswing and severing one of its claws. This time, she has a longer reach and better weaponry, allowing her a desperately needed advantage. Furthermore, thanks to the sword's purging of the worst of the miasma's effects, she's far more lucid and in control in this fight. She glares at the spiderlings, as though daring them to take another step.
Penny was about to answer when the latest in a series of bumps rocks the airship. She ignored the previous bumps because the crew seemed to be handling it well, but now it really is getting worrisome. She's about to ask how things are when suddenly the clouds part to reveal a massive goddamn eye from hell. Penny guesses that's not something you see on an airship trip, and the sight fills her with dread. The eye disappears after a bit, but the sense of dread it inspires stays with Penny.
Then all hell breaks loose. The sound of breaking glass and shearing metal causes Penny's heart to sink; she's only ever heard that sound in a particularly bad accident downtown back in Siscia, where she happened to pass by. She's guessing that being in an airship, suspended miles above the ground, would be the absolute last place you ever wanted to be when an accident like that happens.
She's immediately proven right, as the airship suddenly starts plummeting. The girls and crew, Penny included, get tossed around like a child's toy inside an industrial mixer, slamming into furniture and surfaces. Penny cries out in pain as she feels her shoulder slam into what felt like a doorknob, before getting thrown into a bench and tossed around.
'Well, this whole thing went right into the shitter faster than a mess hall bean taco,' Penny thinks, considering it an entirely appropriate time to use her mother's military-grade vocabulary. 'This whole thing's gone FUBAR; tea party one minute, then Satan's eyeball shows up from hell, then the goddamn bird folds like an old geezer with a rebar up his ass.'
She forces herself out of the pity party and tries to grab onto something when the airship recovers. She reaches for her glasses, realizing she lost them somewhere in the ride, and feels a throbbing pain in her temple. Must have hit her head again on something during the fall. Despite her lack of vision, she's aware that the power's going out all aboard the airship, and the sound of magitech weaponry being fired.
"Well, shit," she mutters aloud. She snaps her fingers a few times to summon electric sparks, trying to see everyone in the glimpses of brightness. "This might ding the flight review a bit, girls, but right now I just wanna know if everyone's okay? Also, I lost my glasses, so I'd really appreciate it if anyone finds it."
Just as she turns to leave, Sarah is aware of something... happening. She pauses, looking around, but then it happens...
"Sarah.." a familiar, singsong voice chimes into existence, "Sarah, are you there?" An image of Asra appears in Sarah's peripheral vision. "I'm back, oh good, I'm back!" The Fairy giggled in happiness.
Sarah is half-tempted to consider this yet another miasma-induced mirage, but at this point she's just glad to get some extra information about who and what she is... and why did she wake up in a capsule in a cave?
"You must've found the sword then, good, that is so good. I was worried the Wizards had failed. There is so much to tell you, so many things have happened. Where do I start? From the beginning I suppose. I'm going to run out of time, so I'll tell you everything I can before my power runs out, you had better sit down."
Sarah pauses, but takes a seat, if only to rest her legs. She didn't have much time either, but she supposes a few answers would be worth it.
What followed was a long, confusing tale about a lost civilization, a Dr. Drake Logan, and the keys to uplifting and advancing a civilization, only for it to collapse when the very key to its salvation became the instrument of its doom - Harbinger. Seems like whatever ancestors she had, they had chosen... poorly.
"Before I went offline I was part of a protocol knows as the Oracle program. You see, for Dr. Logan's science to work perfectly the human body needed to be perfected, just like having a clean circuit within a computer. Oh, you don't know what a computer is, well, that's okay, believe me when I tell you, human's have bodies full of dirtiness. You, however, you were made perfect, in the image of a god. You were grown to channel Biogenic energy through your body without resistance, so what you channel is pure."
"You need the circuits to aid you, until you learn for yourself. The circuits are the Swords. They were designed to link to your body and allow you to channel your internal life energy into matter. This sword will allow you to channel your energy into lightning, as you can already feel. Every sword has two boosters that you can find, a battery which will double the amount of power you can focus into the weapon, and a bracelet, which will allow you to pull from Harbinger itself and release destruction 100 fold of what you could normally. Your kind alone are made to be trusted with this power.
She was... created...? Created to be perfect? Was she just some craftsman's creation, made to fulfill a purpose? The possibilities left Sarah a little uneasy, and she almost missed the bits about the biogenic energy within herself and the use of the sword as a... focus? Yes, focus seems like the best term for it.
It still feels weird for Sarah to have a fully developed vocabulary without the lifetime experience of developing and improving it.
Still, the idea of having woken up with only a name, no memory of herself, and now a destiny to fulfill was a tad intimidating for the girl. She certainly didn't feel like some perfect being. If anything, she imagined this is what a scared little girl would feel.
Though she felt it was unnecessary for Asra to insult her creators by calling the humans 'dirty'. For if Sarah is supposed to be some pure, biogenic-channeling superhuman, what did that make her creators, one who could not channel that energy nearly so well? Sarah wanted to have words with them, but somehow Asra unintentionally insulting them was mildly amusing.
"I've run out of time, find others like yourself Sarah, find others, and find more of the swords. Learn to use their power. The wizards will help you, they...." *SCHZITZ* "...an evil has reached out to Harbinger..." *S@CT!$ZCH*... "deeper in the caves you will find... "!SK$#ZTCH@%$. . ...
As suddenly as she appeared, Asra was gone, and Sarah was once again left alone in the caves with her companion Pip.
Sarah has learned about the history of the Oracles and the swords. Now she has an understanding of how to use the sword and why it works. She also has a hint as to the fact that she was created in the pod to be a perfect, god-like creature. Also, Our lady spider is chomping down on some poor towns person, I recommend you hurry, you may be able to save the little person from their death, maybe. Good luck!!
Sarah wants to call out to Asra, to tell her to keep explaining more. However, Asra had made it clear her time was short, so Sarah glumly accepts the fairy's hurried farewell, and hopes to see her again so she could ask more questions.
For now, she has to get out of the cave, and figure out what this Harbinger business is.
"Come along, Pip," she tells her companion. "We need to get going. The sooner we leave this cave, the better. And we need to warn Master Thunderfist about these creatures..."
Pip barks in agreement, and hurries along besides her, wagging his tail. It's good to see New Master in good spirits like this.
However, Sarah quickly realizes that while going into the cave was easy with the sense of the sword leading the way, going out was going to rely on memory and careful backtracking. To her chagrin, she had misread a path and found herself someplace... unpleasant. It looks and feels unpleasant, like a home for all those creepy little spiderlings she ran into earlier.
It's then she hears something, like something biting down, and a weak struggle and moan. She feels a shiver down her spine, but something was telling her to hurry, to find the source of the sound. It wasn't going to be pleasant, but she needs to be there.
Pip looks up at Sarah and whines anxious. He can smell... many things. He can smell the spiderlings, thicker on the ground and more in number. He can smell their foul nest, the home where there'll be much more of them. He can smell something even worse, like a bigger and meaner version of them. But then he realizes he can smell... the villagers! He sniffs the ground a few times to make sure. Yes! It's faint, but he's sure. The villagers were here! Maybe the spiderlings took them? He looks up at Sarah and barks, then looks in the direction of the nest, alternatively growling in apprehension and whining uncertainly.
Sarah, coughing on the miasma, notes Pip's behavior; he seems both anxious to go ahead and afraid of something. Part of her is afraid of what she'll find there, but Pip wants to go, or part of him does, anyways. She grips her sword, and feels the biogenic energy flow from her into it. She is at least better armed this time. Better to move ahead with caution.
What she finds horrifies her; people suspended in thick, sticky webs, dazed and moaning when they can be heard, or limp and apparently lifeless. Were these the people from the village? Did the spiderlings do this? And if so, why? Or was there something else in here? She reaches out to feel a hand to make sure it's not another hallucination - and to her surprise, it isn't. The people are out cold, but not dead.
She goes in deeper, motioning to Pip to stop growling as they hurry along, trying to find where this cavern of horrors ends...
...and then she sees something that could be described as a nightmare made flesh...
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