TBOS R4 - Sanctuary - Part 4

It was impossible to tell morning from night inside Sanctuary; the underground caverns, while not completely closed off from the outside world, didn't allow much in the way of natural light to reach their depths. Battery and gear-powered clocks scrounged from the abandoned ruin of a surface world made sure that no daylight was lost, however, and Ricco had gotten so used to setting it that he didn't realize that it wasn't his team's shift for foraging until after he'd gotten up, dressed, and picked up breakfast.

By then he was too awake to go back to bed, and so he sat down on a rocky ledge near that pretty mechanical deer (which appeared to be dozing, if machines could doze anyhow), arranged his skirt nicely, and watched a widely varied assortment of people wander into the main cavern. Dog-people, cat-people, human-people, elvish-people, dwarvish-people, even someone with goat legs, horns, and a grumpy attitude trotted by, chewing on an empty can and cursing the strength of his own stomach, of all things. Between that and the fact that everyone here seemed perfectly at ease with the idea of other worlds being out there, Ricco felt that his strange appearance had been quite well-accepted.

The dark-haired girl from the previous night emerged from one of the smaller tunnels. She had left behind the brown coat and hood, it seemed, and wore black pants, a tank top, and a blue jacket that hung open at the front. Ricco waved wildly to get her attention. It worked, though she seemed to be debating whether or not to ignore him. In the end she approached, and Ricco noticed both the unchanged field bandage around her forehead and the bags under her red-shot eyes.

"Didn't sleep well?" he asked, perfectly sympathetic.

"Weird dreams," she mumbled, rubbing one eye.

"Oh. Me, too," Ricco offered, though they weren't 'weird' so much as they were 'bad.' There was always that element of randomness, but Bobu kept cropping up in them at one point or another, always screaming accusing words he couldn't quite remember at him before bursting into thousands and thousands of black-shelled Bobus and swarming toward him. That was when he usually woke up.

He glanced down at the half-full can in his hand.

"Peaches?" he offered, holding it out.

Jaya shook her head.

"Thanks, but I'll find my own. Where's the...kitchen, or whatever?"

"Storeroom's just over there. Straight down that passage, and it's another little cave at the end; can't miss it. Stuff's rationed just to be safe, but—"

A hoarse, ragged shout echoed from a distance, and everyone around froze. Chatter ground to a halt, the goat-man stopped cursing, and all attention focused on the side-passage from which the shout had sounded. Rapid footsteps approached, and the young, dark-furred Virulk on Ricco's team – Nocenzo – ran into the room, his blue eyes wide and his fur disheveled.

"Alver's gone," he yelped, "and there's blood everywhere!"

-

Nobody went out that day, or the next. Instead, those hours were spent scouring Sanctuary for anything that might have snuck in somehow, perhaps by following a foraging party, perhaps through one of the previously unexplored side passages which might well lead outside. The search was fruitless, as many had secretly feared; an adult of any sentient species couldn't be consumed so completely in one night by one tiny imp or tsorin, yet the larger varieties shouldn't have been able to follow a party or slip past the tunnel guards without some alarm at the very least.

Everyone slept in the main cavern that night, the adults arranged in a ring around the children like a wolf pack, with plenty of guards taking shifts. Clovis was even more grim than usual, and Antisa was on bad terms with him yet again; few had missed the argument between them concerning just whose fault this was. As Antisa's foraging group had returned very late the night of Alver's loss, Clovis felt sure that whatever attacked must have followed them in.

Antisa resented the accusation, and made this fact very well known.

Ricco wasn't sure whose side he was supposed to take, and so he simply kept quiet on the matter and helped search, clutching a solid length of wood and hoping he wouldn't have to use it. When the second night came, everything had been searched, and nothing had been found, he dropped the glorified stick he had been given as a weapon and let his optimism take over.

"Maybe it's run off," he suggested, sitting on his blankets on the floor in the main cavern. "All our banging about the last couple of days might've scared it away for good."

"If an Utsuyan has a way in and out, it'll come back," Jaya countered. "Or perhaps it's just invisible or something like that. Koroki."

She dropped a worn playing card face-up on the ground, revealing a blue heart framed by ornate grey vines. The small Vyltian boy scowled at his hand and grumbled something in a language Ricco couldn't understand. Jaya replied, more slowly and deliberately, but still indecipherable from the shark-man's perspective.

The kid had latched firmly onto Jaya at some point during the first day of searching. Ricco hadn't been there to see it, but he could only guess that it involved a lot of speech he wouldn't have caught; Timur could only speak his mother-tongue, Vyltian, and Jaya had at least studied it enough to get by.

It was, Ricco reflected, pretty good to see the kid relax a little. As far as the bard had seen, Timur was a jumpy, traumatized little thing. Ricco couldn't blame him – between wandering who-knew-how-long in a dead, monster-infested city and then suddenly waking up to the bloody disappearance of Alver, who had very quickly adopted himself as a friend to the boy that first night, Timur had been through a pretty awful time.

But then, that was true for everyone in Sanctuary.

"What's he saying?" Ricco asked, as Timur kept scowling at the ever-increasing number of cards in his hand.

"Just complaints. He doesn't have a card to trump or match mine, so now he has to draw until he finds one."

Ricco watched the game in silence for a while, though his mind wasn't following the rules of play. Instead, he found himself thinking further over their situation. No Utsuyan so big could hide so well, and they had been thorough in their search. In addition, according to Clovis and other resident experts, the monsters weren't likely to hide with such intelligence anyhow. The ambush hunters generally leapt out the moment prey came into reach, no matter how well-fed or even how out-numbered they were. Utsuyan lived to kill by instinct, in short, but there hadn't been so much as a sign of this one since Alver's strange vanishing.

It had to be gone.

They had to be safe now.

Ricco stood up, clapping his big hands together and delivering a toothy smile.

"Well, I'm up for some supper. Who's with me?"

-

The dream came back, but not all of it at first. Fuzzy pieces as she fell asleep, like someone flipping through the pages of a book, trying to find their lost place and glimpsing familiar passages as they did so. Skimming the scenes of a movie, flicking through chapters until, finally, it came close enough to accept. Traveling lonely roads, questioning innkeepers and villagers, fighting until she was streaked with blood and sweat, adrenaline rushing and the mark on her arm thrumming with a sensation of power...

The dream she could not quite remember resumed in her sleeping mind, and once again, she was no longer herself. Instead, she was he again, and he was becoming swiftly impatient with the jabbering of the oily sneak thief, until finally...

Enough talk.

Isamu was on Kuzuri before the other could take a new breath, sweeping his legs out and pinning him to the ground with a knee against his chest, spear point settled alongside the man's neck. The lantern fell to the ground, the tiny flame inside snuffing out into curling grey smoke, and the knife spun away into the darkness.

His left forearm was burning, an intense thrum under his skin which was less unpleasant than compelling. Intoxicating. Like adrenaline during a fight, rushing in a heady pulse with clashing steel and dancing, flickering forms...

(No, my arm. He cannot feel it; it is mine...my...)

"That scroll was not yours to sell, thief, nor yours to take! Who has it?"

His eyes were wide, no longer crafty, but panicked.

"I...don't know! Don't remember!"

"Then I suggest you remember quickly; I have been searching for you five months now. I have little patience left, and less mercy."

"No! No, I remember, sir, it was...it..."

The world changed without logic or transition. One moment, Isamu threatened a thief at night on a forested mountainside; the next, he sat cross-legged beside a narrow stream under bright sunlight, a pack on one side and the spear on the other. He was untroubled by the leap of time and location; there was no leap at all. There was a natural progression of events between them, as evidenced by the long scroll of thin paper in his hands. He knew this—

(But...she...didn't, because this was a drea...)

—just as well as he knew that he was older. Stronger. Perhaps even, at long last...

A true Warrior.

(her arm twinged and she knew it was hers because he didn't even notice but she was him and there was no her and it didn't even make sense anymore even as a dream...)

He unrolled the scroll and began to read, absorbing the meaning behind the ornate picture-words and syllables with an ease which had been forced into him during his youth at the monastery. It was long, and would take many hours to complete. And as he read, he came to realize that it would go deeper than that: he might finish reading the scroll once in perhaps a day's time, but to truly understand the message, the philosophy, and the technique would take weeks. Months. Years.

But it was his Way, and he was determined to follow it until the very end.

And then the End finally came, and Jaya once again woke with little more than a vague impression of an unsettling dream and a pulsing tingle in her left arm.

Later that morning, they found half of a Corian woman in a side tunnel, a great distance away from the main cavern and the sleeping bag she had fallen asleep in the previous night.

And once again, none of those on guard duty had seen a thing, nor could a trace be found of the killer...whatever it was.

-

Three more days passed, and they couldn't remain locked down in the main cavern much longer. It was not because of food stores or other supplies – a dedicated hoarding had ensured that they could last under virtual siege for at least three more weeks – but because of the people themselves. Restlessness had been growing in some, driven by fear and uncertainty and seasoned with a measure of cabin fever. Fights had begun to break out, little scuffles over a misunderstood word or an object borrowed without permission. Ricco's attempts to keep spirits high had little success, except with some of the children, and had in fact earned him several harsh words out of annoyance and frustration from the older crowd.

It was only after a fantastic three-way shouting match and minor brawl between Clovis, Antissa, and Jaya that the de-facto leaders of Sanctuary decided enough was enough. The most highly-strung individuals packed up one morning and took the vehicles out to the city to turn their energy to something useful – such as finding supplies or, even better, a new Sanctuary they could move into – while those remaining guarded the children as they played outside in the sun.

Ricco had been one of those assigned to glorified babysitting duties. If he discounted his obvious skill with children and the fact that he wasn't part of the adult crowd which had been getting increasingly stir-crazy, he could almost suspect that this assignment was meant as a form of revenge for being an, in the goat-man's memorable words, "infernal ear-bleeding tone-deaf nuisance of a freak show on high heels" over those last few days.

Though in that case, he wondered if it counted as revenge when the recipient honestly didn't mind the task he had been assigned. After all, Ricco loved kids. And they, once they got past the whole shark-toothed man-in-a-dress bit, seemed to love him...for the most part, at any rate. Long story short, he managed to keep his crowd of overly-energetic munchkins happily entertained (and blessedly forgetful of the rising terror of the caverns) for hours on end, thanks to a clever combination of bardic skill, a fair level of energy of his own, and well-applied grown-up wiles when that energy started to drop. Ricco was feeling pretty good about his care-taking capabilities until he did a quick head-count around lunchtime.

He'd started out the day with thirteen kids under his care.

He now had twelve.

Ricco re-counted, this time affixing names to as many as he possibly could, and the result dropped his stomach to his toes like a falling anvil.

Timur was gone.

-

The first time she stumbled across a nest of sleeping Utsuyan, it had been entirely by accident.

Jaya had opened a cupboard in unenthusiastic search of something well-preserved and edible to stuff into the flour sack she carried. Instead, she had discovered six little imps, fast asleep with their long turquoise limbs tangled together and their sharp-toothed mouths agape in soundless snores.

She had frozen, not quite sure what to do at first. Then one of the imps stirred, opened bright yellow eyes, and released a hissing shriek which woke his nestmates up in quick order.

Jaya had been forced by the narrow confines of the kitchen to use a knife rather than her accustomed spear or halberd, and the fight had lasted longer than she might have wished due to the small, quick forms of her opponents, but she had been the last one standing. Standing victorious over the dissolving bodies of her enemies, fresh scratches and little crescent-shaped bite wounds marring her clothing and body, her left forearm thrumming in time with her adrenaline-fueled heart, Jaya felt...

Alive.

And angry.

They were Utsuyan. Monsters. Demons that didn't belong in this world – her world. Things that had destroyed her family, and more besides.

Her fingers tightened on the grooved steel shaft of her knife, and she realized something: there was nothing she wanted more than to destroy them in turn.

Her arm twitched as a burning pulse of power swept up its length, into her chest, and through her body.

In that moment, she forgot Sanctuary. She forgot about finding food, or shelter, or medicine or any of the other necessary things she had been sent for. The flour sack fell to the cracked linoleum floor, and she was out the front door of the suburban house before a single loose can had rolled to a stop.

The silver hart stood outside, waiting for her as he had waited by the cavern entrance that morning, as he had waited outside every building they had visited thus far. She didn't stop to fashion herself a harness or to explain her thoughts to the strangely intelligent machine. Jaya simply threw herself up onto its back, unconsciously molding a portion of the metal skin into a makeshift saddle, and leaned forward.

"Go!" she urged.

As always, the hart obeyed.