28th Cancer, 1645
Isra has been an adventurer for nearly a decade, and in that time she has run the gamut of standard experiences for her line of work. She has fought cults, demons, bandits, monsters, survived in the wilderness with minimal supplies, escorted travelers through dangerous wilds, and paid ship fare with services rendered. She has been stabbed, shocked, sliced, punched, kicked, knocked around, broken ribs, and endured all manner of other not-quite-lethal injury.
This moment marks the first time she has had the tip of a knife pressed so intimately against her throat. She decides immediately that she quite dislikes the experience.
“One sudden move… I’ll cut your throat,” the whisper at her ear rasps and strains, the voice rattling out of its owner’s throat with a concentrated, coarse, and cold choler. Her captor’s other hand wraps around her, fingers in the fabric of Isra’s clothes gripping tight in spite of how badly they shake from the exertion. Even the sound of the knife holder’s breath is pained and laborious, though… oddly steady; not gasping nor shaky, merely difficult. Isra decides she does not wish to test the threat.
Isra rolls her eyes. How unoriginal! she thinks, but what she says, slowly and calmly, is: “Okay. No sudden moves. Yup.”
The alchemist struggles to her feet, eyes and hand fixed on Isra, the fear upon her countenance abated somewhat but still quite apparent. A faint glow emanates from beneath the dirty, clouded glass of her arm, some concoction brewed within its alchemic chambers and ready to be unleashed at a flick of her wrist. Isra’s eyes flick back up to the girl’s face.
“Who are you?” the girl demands, in a soft tone which belies the tension of the circumstances.
“…I think normally that’s the sort of thing you ask before you attack someone,” Isra says, and the person behind her presses the knife a little closer into her flesh, “Ah, alright, okay, point taken! My name is Isra. I’m an adventurer, my party is here to fix the jungle situation.”
“What jungle situation?”
“…You joking?” Press. “Mmp, calm down, the situation where the taraforming is out of control. We’re escorting the lead scientist to his lab.”
“How. Many?” the one with the knife hisses.
“Just three,” Isra says, glad that she is a good liar.
The alchemist’s eyes flick to something behind Isra – presumably meeting the gaze of her companion – and shakes her head. She seems to consider something for a long moment, during which Isra grows increasingly annoyed that the knife is still at her throat, and then just as she opens her mouth to ask another question, Andromeda’s voice rings out through the inside of the tree.
“Hey! What are you doing?!”
The alchemist yelps and lets loose a bright-shining chemical blast which to Isra’s pants-shittingly immense relief just narrowly flies wide of her face, blasting instead a hole through the wall of vine-tree that she will not see for several more moments. The knife at her throat disappears and a half-second later her captor shoves her roughly to the side; she tumbles ass-over end into Andromeda, in turn not fully stood from crawling out of the tunnel. Andromeda nevertheless manages to save the catch and they end up in something not quite so tangled as a heap but not quite so composed as a cradling.
“Nines!” Andromeda grunts as Isra slams into her, and Isra sees stars for a second before realizing, wait, no, that’s just Andromeda’s freckles. “You okay?”
“Keh,” Isra coughs, “I’m fine! Don’t-!”
Isra starts speaking before she registers what unfolded in the few seconds since she was shoved, and then she cuts herself off. She sees the hole the alchemist blasted through the not-tree, smoking slightly with an extra-acrid, vitriolic temperament. The vines ringing the edge of it smolder like burning paper, bark-flesh peeling and curling back under a caustic influence, and at the topmost corner of her vision Isra sees the core of the not-tree swinging and writhing about, accompanied by a sonorous groaning. That smoke is, at first, too thick to see past, but once it clears some of the shapes that resolve beyond the curtain include Da Chief, cane extended before her in the casting of a spell, and two figures suspended upside down by a pair of wriggling and ropey cocoons.
Or, no, that’s not quite right – it is not the cocoons themselves that wriggle, but rather the captives therein, struggling fruitlessly against their bindings. What holds them is more plant matter, roots torn up from the ground to snake after their quarry, splitting off their shells to reveal the supple, pliant, greenly glistening beneath that they may regain the plasticity to pursue and entrap. Two black masses of hair, one significantly shorter than the other, hang towards the ground, swaying in time with the motions of the impromptu prisons.
Isra and Andromeda glance into each other’s eyes and leisurely separate, picking themselves off the ground, dusting themselves off the dust, and strolling themselves out the not-tree’s former interior.
“Chirita, please!” Dr. Yusuf cries out, bustling over to the ex-retiree. “We don’t know how the vegetation might react to manipulation at that scale!”
“Mm, sorry, old friend. I just did the first thing to come to mind.”
“Saints, Chief,” Andromeda whistles low as she eyes up the cocoons, “Where’d you learn that one?”
“From your parents, actually,” Chirita finally lowers her cane, but the bindings stay tight around the two capricae.
And they are both capricae, Isra sees now. In fact, the one that isn’t the alchemist, the one that snuck up behind her and pressed a knife to her neck, looks remarkably similar to the one that is the alchemist. She has the same button nose, the same jawline, same stubby horns, same cut to the bones that sit above (or below, at the moment) her hollow cheeks, the same lilac eyes, hers burning with an impotent contempt for her captors. Unlike the alchemist’s eyes, this one’s pupil sits sideways within the iris, like a goat; more noticeably, she seems to only have the one. The right side of her face is covered by a large, dark patch, with an even larger but not quite so dark patch of scar radiating out from under it, with a few smaller old wounds marking up the rest of her countenance. Her ear and horn on the side with the heavier marring are damaged, not whole like their counterparts. The working eye darts rapidly, alertly, between Isra, Andromeda, and the alchemist, mouth twisted in a scowl.
Sisters, Isra thinks, twins, perhaps.
As Isra studies the angry one, watching her watching them, she’s vaguely aware of Andromeda saying something to Da Chief as she approaches the alchemist. The angry one’s eye focuses in as she does, tracking Andromeda’s movements with a singular intensity, and she redoubles her efforts against the supple vines holding her, grunting with the efforts that make her swing to and fro. Isra follows her gaze, just for a second, to where Andromeda is speaking to the other one, and by the time she looks back it’s almost too late to figure out what’s happening.
“Dee!” she warns, catching Andromeda’s attention just as the angry one carves her way out of her cocoon. The caprican twists in midair, and almost before her feet touch the ground she has the nasty-looking segmentation of a razor-whip flying towards Andromeda.
It is only by the grace of her stellar reflexes, honed by nearly two decades of experience, that Andromeda catches the curling whip with a pained grimace, its sharp edges biting deep into the flesh of her forearm as she wrestles with the caprican on the other end of it. They struggle with bared teeth, the young girl’s breath hissing through in quick, sharp little gasps as her weapon tautens between them. The stalemate lasts until Andromeda shifts onto her front foot, catching the caprican off guard with the sudden slack and using the pulling force to propel herself towards her. Andromeda slams her elbow into the girl’s arm (she yelps and drops the whip) before smoothly pulling the hilt of Weapon up and extending it into a featureless rod that catches her opponent in the gut, knocking her onto her ass. Andromeda half-steps back, raising the rod above her head like a sword, and stops poised to strike.
“I don’t know who you are or what this is about,” Andromeda says, hands gripping tight around Weapon even as blood runs out of the gash in her arm, dripping down from her elbow into the soil, “but it don’t gotta go any further. Matter of fact, I’d really prefer it didn’t. Can I let you off the ground?”
The girl is silent, lone eye wide with naked animosity that stretches out the silent seconds into a tense and volatile stillness. A bead of sweat that has nothing to do with the humidity of the artificed surroundings trickles down Isra’s brow – Andromeda shifts her grip on Weapon apprehensively, as ready to strike as she is hopeful she won’t have to.
“Faye, don’t!” the alchemist cries out from her position still hoisted by Da Chief’s spell. Isra glances quickly to her, then back to the one apparently named Faye, who seems to shimmer slightly before she is abruptly in a slightly different position, one hand holding a knife between her fingers, ready to it send flying at Andromeda.
“…Huh,” Andromeda grunts, “Neat trick.”
“Are you sure?” Faye’s eye flicks over to the alchemist as she calls out to her, her voice coming out almost like a stage whisper from how raspy and ragged it is.
“Yes. Yes, I don’t think they’re… I don’t think they mean us harm. It’s okay.”
“Could be a trick. Get us to lower our guard before they kill us.”
Andromeda groans, “Oh, come on, that don’t make any sense. If I was going to kill you I had you in a pretty ideal position for it a few seconds ago, drawing it out just gives you a chance to escape.”
“She has a point,” the suspended caprican admits.
The girl on the ground’s eye slides back over to Andromeda, Weapon still posed as she awaits her decision. Slowly, with the steady movements of one used to trying not to startle, she lowers the knife and slides it back into a sheath at the small of her back. Andromeda lets out an equally slow breath as she drops from her stance, and she holsters weapon before she offers Faye a hand up.
“So, your sister’s name is Faye – what’s yours?” Da Chief asks the other girl as she carefully flips her over and loosens the viny cocoon holding her.
The girl makes a fruitless attempt to brush her clothes off before realizing that they’re too dirty for it to matter in the slightest. She stammers slightly.
“Um… Iris.”
“Well then, Iris and Faye – why are two young women like yourselves hiding in a fucked up tree in an out-of-control taraforming project?”
“It… seemed like the safest place under the circumstance?”
“Not to put too fine a point on it but that is almost certainly and categorically untrue!” Yusuf, who Isra had forgotten was there, interjects. “I can’t even begin to guess what, specifically, produced that specimen, nor what it might do – and, frankly, it’s a small miracle you two are still alive.”
Faye scoffs.
“I appreciate that,” Iris’ earlier stammering was not a function of nerves – she speaks, it would seem, with a persistent stutter, “which is why I tested the space before we settled there.”
Isra speaks up. “I mean, you blasted through it pretty easily, so it can’t have been that well-fortified.”
Iris’ face falls as she considers this, and Isra privately updates her estimation of just how hard she agrees with the good doctor. “I guess that’s true…”
“We’re going now,” Faye growls, grabbing Iris by the wrist and starting to drag her away from the group – deeper into Ossan, if Isra's sense of direction is accurate, which it always is.
“Wh- I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I must insist you return to the outer ring of the city! I can’t have two unknowns running unsupervised through the jungle while I’m trying to fix my mess! I still don’t know what problem occurred to cause all this, and I don’t need you two potentially creating more.”
“…Your mess?” Faye turns slowly back to Yusuf, attempting not unsuccessfully to project an aura of menace that makes Andromeda half-reach for Weapon.
“Er…” His tongue stumbles a bit at the one-eyed look she gives him, “Well, yes. That is to say I feel somewhat responsible, as the head of the taraforming project here, for any incidents of things gone awry. Not to say, necessarily, that it is my fault, but, well, one way or another it’s my responsibility to fix it.”
“…Hng. And do you plan to stop us from going further?”
Da Chief hastily inserts herself, physically and verbally, between the two of them. “Perhaps we’re taking the wrong approach here. Yusuf, was your main concern the lack of supervision?” A hesitant nod. “Mm. Then here is what I propose: You young ladies accompany us further in, to Doctor Yusuf’s lab at the epicenter, so that he can keep an eye on you and make sure you don’t cause trouble. In return, we can say you assisted us on our quest and compensate you accordingly for your time – no offence meant, but you look like you could use it.”
Faye narrows her one eye, but before she can respond Iris starts to insistently tug at her sleeve. She holds up a finger and a strained smile as they back slightly further from the group, “Give us just a moment, would you?”
The Unioknights! plus Yusuf form their own huddle.
“Are you sure about this, Chirita? I don’t know how dangerous it will be further in and – well, those two don’t exactly look to be in the best fighting shape.”
Andromeda shakes her head. “I think that’s exactly why we should take them. You feel responsible for all this?” A nod. “Well, who knows what happens to those two if they wander off back on their own. We might have to put more work in to protect them, but at least they would be protected.”
Isra’s attention drifts away from the aside, pulled instead to the urchin girls and their audible-yet-indistinct conversation. The angry-seeming one gesticulates aggressively as she hisses, wild and directionless, not really at Iris nor the group. The timid-seeming one, surprisingly, looks to be standing firm against the subdued tirade. Her posture is shrunk, hunched, and quite clearly still nervous, but she meets Faye’s gaze and animation unflinchingly – though she does glance over in their direction once and, after meeting Isra’s eyes, quickly ducks back into her little two-person huddle as though struck.
Isra sighs. She sees them both quite clearly – the anger and the fear, instincts of the hunted which even now recall themselves in her own mind, with a clarity sharp and unshakeable. She can’t, and shouldn’t, even begin to guess at their circumstances, at who might be tracking them or why – yet, she also can’t stop herself from imagining a dozen possibilities, each more horrible than its siblings, and they all tug roughly at the stringy fibers of her heart. She knows, beyond any matter of consideration, that she will not be able to abandon the two twisted little reflections of her past or to allow them to slip away. Though her own face remains blank, Alani tenses up at her side.
“-Isra, do you have any insights to share?”
“Hm? What?” Isra turns back to the group, and the doctor huffs in exasperation but Da Chief gently re-elucidates.
“Andromeda thinks, and I agree, we take the girls with us to the lab. Yusuf disagrees, thinks we should send them back towards the outer town. If you agree with him, we’ll defer to our client, but-“
“We should take them with us. There’s more going on here and I won’t feel safe letting those two out of sight until I know what.”
“Now hold on just a moment-“
“Yusuf, my friend, please,” Da Chief cuts him off as placatingly as it is possible to cut someone off, “Trust we know what we’re doing, just as I trust my companions in turn. Besides,” she heads off one final protestation as it burgeons, “I doubt they’d really go to the outer ring on their own – this is, ultimately, the faster option.”
“Hoh – Very well.”
The girls reach a decision at about the same time.
“How much compensation?” Faye croaks.
“An equivalent of 30 Tryptegerian dinar, translated into a currency of your choosing,” and here Da Chief pauses to let that hang dramatically in the thick, muggy air between the two groups before dropping a follow-up, “each.”
Faye’s singular eyebrow shoots upward, just for a second, though whether it was a look of naked surprise or a singular quirking Isra couldn’t say – what she can say, reasonably confidently, is that the girl did not mean to show that much. She amateurishly forces the eyebrow back down and returns her face to a scowl, as if that’s going to fool anyone. She glances to Iris, who gives a very I-don’t-know-don’t-look-at-me kind of shrug.
“…Fine.”
“Wonderful,” Chirita’s smiles broadly, warmly, like the most dangerous grandma on Nearth. “I suppose introductions are in order then; I am Zhuan Chirita, though many of my compatriots refer to me as ‘Da Chief’.”
“Andromeda,” Andromeda says, inclining her head, “I don’t got a fun nickname or anything, you can just call me that. Aaaand the bored looking one currently rolling her eyes is Isra.”
Isra fights not to actually roll her eyes; she loses. Chirita nudges Yusuf.
“Yes, yes, I was waiting my turn! Mm-hem,” he pushes a stray strand of hair back up past his horns, “Doctor Yusuf al-Ossan, as you may already have gathered.”
“Oh, and there’s one more of us, though she don’t really like to stick with groups – abnormally tall, whiter than Serpenthold after a fresh coat of snow, don’t have much between her ears. Her name’s Vetr. Try not to scream too loud when she shows up at your shoulder.”
“If she shows up at my shoulder she’ll be lucky if I don’t stab her,” growls Faye.
“Hah! Yeah, good luck hittin’ her,” then, ignoring her impending response by striding forward, “C’mon, we’re burnin’ daylight and it’s already plenty dark what with this thick canopy.”
Isra urges her noise-hound to trot up and keep alongside Andromeda and Faye, the latter of whom nearly trips on a stray root from giving her new canine marching partner a wary scan. Not two minutes pass before Da Chief, expectedly, matches pace, leaning over her shoulder to murmur in her ear.
“You picked up on it, yes? They’re running from someone.”
“Glad I’m not the only one. Thanks for going along with my bullshit line about safety.”
“You’re more sentimental than I gave you credit for.”
“Sentiment grows like fungus when you run with Peekie and Hoyden for a while.”
Da Chief chuckles and pats her on the back. “Duly noted. I'm sure I needn't tell you, but keep your eyes peeled.”
“Yeah, no shit,” she rolls her eyes yet again in the process of peeling them. Chirita just chuckles again and falls back a bit.
…Only to be immediately replaced by someone else.
“Hey, sorry about the um… the knife, Faye is… well. Is your throat okay?” Iris asks her question in a gentle voice as sweet and clear as the glass of – well, not her own arm, perhaps, but the arm of an alchemist who has not been slumming it in an artificial jungle. “Oh and the… uh… y’know…”
“Nearly blasting my face off?”
Wince. “Yeah.”
Even now, an intense rancor smolders dually within Isra, at herself for being caught off guard and at the girls for catching her off guard. “It happens.”
“…Does it?”
Isra points wordlessly to her scar and, indirectly, to the teeth thereabouts.
This does not make Iris feel better. “Guess so…”
“Ugh. Stop beating yourself up so much, it’s unsightly.”
Astoundingly, this does not make Iris feel better either. “S-sorry.”
Isra glances towards the alchemist’s protective other half, just to make sure she’s still up with Andromeda and Alani (yes). She says the next part in a lowed tone. “You want to apologize properly, how about you really tell me why you’re out here?”
Between one second and the next, Faye appears to go from the front of the group to the very rear, because when she aggressively forces herself in between Isra and Iris she is pushing forward. She snarls her lip in what might be a mockery of Isra’s disfigurement, and which Isra definitely interprets as such, and actually factually snarls at her – a weird, dry noise that trills along her teeth, almost like the snort of a bull. She takes Iris by the arm and drags her – not hard, for she goes along quite willingly – towards the vanguard once more.
“Dick,” Isra grumbles after them, more expression of sentiment than remark on Faye’s character.
*********
The laboratory at the center of Ossan’s man-made jungle is chiefly defined by two features: One is a thick tower, equivalent in height to three or four stories, sticking up from one end of the otherwise squat single-floor building. In reality, the tower only has two floors, each with unusually high ceilings, a fact which is not apparent to the group from the outside. Yusuf knows it, of course, but it goes without saying what sets him apart from the others in this regard. The others will and do learn it in short order anyhow. Two is a rather pernicious network of plant matter carving through and curling around the walls of the structure, whose size and encompassment of their host bely their age of a scant three days. It is easy to imagine the way they burst forth at the outset of the incident – and the way they radiate and quite literally branch out in any given direction is apparent even in cursory examination.
The inside is, as noted prior, a high ceilinged-room with an abundance of open space; or rather, it would have an abundance of open space if not for the accident two days ago, which has resulted in much of that open space being filled with hanging roots and crawling branches. The scene is much the same as the rest of Ossan-at-present, only more so, being that it is the epicenter. And yet – there is a remarkable stillness to it all, one not present in shallower, more fauna-inhabited parts of the town; a serenity which utterly belies the chaos one must surely know created it, the chaos inherent even to the seemingly motionless worm-tangle of now-calmed verdure.
Not that she’d let any of the others even be able to guess as much, but it makes Isra’s hair stand on end.
“Let’s see then…” the Doctor says once inside, wasting no time bustling through the root-and-vine-and-branch-choked interior of the tower, flitting between work stations and especially thick nodes of growth like a fat-bodied hummingbird. “No, not that… perhaps… hm…” focused rather intently on the work of finally fixing whatever happened, he seems to have forgotten the others.
“Is there anything we can be doing right now, Doctor?” Da Chief asks, calling the man back to his surroundings.
“Oh, ah… Yes, I suppose some of you could head upstairs, scout the place out. I…” He looks about, his mouth twitching slightly underneath his mustache, “I don’t see any of my colleagues in this room, which I find both a relief and a concern. Perhaps you could seek them out?”
Da Chief nods. “Isra, Andromeda, if you would? Perhaps start with the upstairs, then you can check in on your way through to the rest of the building.”
Andromeda nods. “On it.”
“Faye, could you go with them?” Iris asks of her companion, who shoots two dubious looks about, one at Iris and then another at the two Unioknights! halfway to the stairwell.
“You sure?” comes the raspy response.
“I’ll be fine. They could use one more eye on things, especially if it’s keen as yours.”
Isra turns back, exasperated at now having to wait for their foul-dispositioned new companion to catch up to them, and raises an eyebrow at Da Chief, who makes a little shooing motion before turning back to Doctor Yusuf. Isra rolls her eyes – clearly, annoyingly, she is not to be questioned on this.
For the second time today, Isra finds herself travelling through the curving wall of a large round structure, and this time resolves to keep better track of relatively where in the rim she is. It makes for a horribly dull trip to the second floor, and to her annoyance the stairwell lets out in the utterly predictable spot of “directly above the first floor entrance”. Going up-and-around is more interesting than going in a flat-curved line though, so there’s that at least.
The upper half of the tower is, in a word, worse. In several more words, the inelegant weave of unfettered jungle chokes the air of the room as thickly as a seaweed salad gumming up the throat of an unfortunate diner, except significantly less slimy. Isra can hardly see but five feet before the thicket grows so dense as to swallow line of sight completely. Clearing any of it will be an undertaking and a half, and she can’t even tell if there’s anything to find at all past it, much less which direction to start in.
“Well. Shit,” Faye observes. “What now?”
“Give me a moment,” Isra sighs and moves forward as much as she can (which, again, is all of two steps out the stairwell) and kneels before an especially wide segment of vine. Two minutes later, she has scribed a sigil, immaculate, intricate, into its skin with charcoal. She touches three fingers to it in a triangular formation, closes her eyes, and allows her mind to extend through the room.
In the first moment, it is as thought she is looking over her own shoulder, at a grey-clad figure kneeling before a wall of deep greens and browns and red-purples. Neither this nor what comes next are sensations she will ever fully acclimate herself to, she suspects, and what comes next is that her vision drops down and rises simultaneously, two opposing bird’s eye views of the entire donut-shaped space, and then between those two views the world fills in. The amount of information she suddenly feels is mind-bogglingly, overwhelmingly massive, which is precisely why the fine details are muddied, blurred. She sees both inside and outside every single leaf and stem and petal, feels the humidity gathered on jungle-swallowed metal tabletops, tiny bits of glass and metal embedded in vines and roots and branches from what were once lab equipment. She can tell where everything is, but nothing precise about the things themselves. And she sees-
“Hm,” she hears herself say, not really for the benefit of her companions, “That’s odd… there’s… one, two, three – five bodies that way,” she sees herself point, “They’re not – practically the only part of the room not completely grown over, definitely the biggest one.”
“Are they alive? What happened to ‘em?”
“No, no, corpses. Can’t tell, it’s – need a closer look.”
The worst part of this scan sigil is dropping from it, which is not the reverse of its activation, which would be a progressive shrinkage of perception. For three horrible seconds the world is gone entirely to her, and then all at once she is in her own skull again, and it is only the thought of how bad it would fucking suck to barf in front of Andromeda and the asshole newbie that keeps her from doing so. She momentarily misses the days when it was just Peekie, Hoyden, and her, and that pisses her off.
“Isra?”
“Didn’t hear anything you just said, Andi, my everything was off,” says in her usual perfectly bored tone, a perfectly convincing affection of being unphased by the experience.
“I asked how we’re going to get over to that… clearing? Whatever it is. I’m guessing we ain’t got the time or tools to cut through everything ‘tween here and there.”
“Clearing seems right. Don’t worry, gonna burn through. Gimme another sec.”
Isra carves another sigil into another spot of plant, this one much less complex and careful, and thus completed more quickly. She holds out a hand behind her. “Gimme Weapon for a sec?”
“Whatcha need it to be?”
“Mm… can you do a big fork?”
“…Yes,” Andromeda says after a beat, promptly handing Isra fork that is entirely too small to be called a trident.
“Don’t look.”
Isra jabs the not-a-trident straight into the sigil, and the magic contained therein quite literally flares to life, a brilliantly blistering light devouring a wide swath of the overgrowth. It lasts about five seconds, and then there’s a sixteen-meter tunnel between them and the bodies, not even smoking – Isra’s sigil burns clean.
They don’t waste any time. The clearing is small, all things considered, a little less than three meters wide, and the bodies don’t occupy much of it. Four of them wear varying degrees and type of protective gear, and they are all piled, obviously unnaturally, on top of each other. Andromeda gives the top one a cursory examination.
“…Looks like bludgeoning,” she mutters an apologetic prayer to Füti, The Infinite Claimant, as she shifts the body off the pile so she can look at the next one. “Same with them, though there’s some cuts too.”
Something seems to strike her, and she glances quizzically at the ground. “Why’s ain’t there more plants here? I hardly see any.”
“Don’t know. Feels safe to safe to say the accident didn’t kill Doctor Yusuf’s peers here, though.”
Faye cocks her head to one side, as though listening to something, and then she gasps and her eye goes very wide. She whips her head over to a seemingly random spot, right next to the tunnel Isra made, before she sprints back down it and into the stairwell. Isra and Andromeda don’t waste any time following her, instinctively springing to action on her heels, taking the stairs two at a time. Andromeda pulls weapon into a broadsword as she goes, and it’s slightly amazing that she doesn’t stab herself or Isra with it when she slams into the far wall at the bottom of the staircase on the ground floor, Isra only barely avoiding slamming into her a moment later.
Yet another stranger stands in the middle of the room, a tall man wearing asymmetric, full-arm gauntlets complete with pauldrons. Against a far part of the outer wall, Doctor Yusuf presses himself flat as he can – Zhuan has placed herself between the two, cane readied in front of her, glowing and humming with threat. Iris lies prone, glass arm shattered at the newcomer’s feet, slowly and pitifully trying to crawl away from him, and Faye is held off the ground by the throat, kicking impotently at the air, one hand gripping tight at the clawed metal of his glove.
And the man breaks into a festerous smile and says “Ahh, and there’s the other one! Hello again, little abomination.”
