Waldhaxen Channel

[AdamZero]

(ooc: I've no idea what to do.)

"Ah what the hell." I sighed and sat down, watching Jamie shoot into the water. Considering most of my necromancy was still tapped, I wasn't up for shooting long range death balls. As for fire magick.... Hmmmm

"Super heated air, compressed, redirected, released, expands... shock waves..." I grinned as I went through my mental calculations. I held up my hands, muttering in a chanty sort of chant. The spell would use heat to gather air into a relatively packed sphere. I say relatively because it's hard to get gas to do anything without excessive amounts of pressure, or lots of beans. Don't ask me why they're a key component in certain air spells. You don't want to know.

The air above my head became dense and grey, then it darkened further into a ball the size of my head. I gazed down at the water, noticing a huge heavy dark shadow, and just barely could I sense life in it, through whatever it was made off.

"HUUUUURGGGH!!!" I grunted, not at all in a proper stance for throwing material objects, the cross legged sitting posture made for a decently stable magick chucking pose. The ball swerved downward toward the shadow, which was quickly leaving our field of vision.

"Ouch..." I swore, rubbing my shoulder. "I think I pulled something.... bleh..."

[Sareth]

"Huh?" I heard Marcus' voice from around the rise, where he had gone after Lucas. He'd sounded briefly distressed, but then like he was complaining about something, so he couldn't have been in too much trouble. "Marcus? Did you say"

*FWABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooosssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhh*

The sudden roar, followed by the largest sounding splash I'd ever heard whipped me around. Staring back down into the canyon, I could see a gout of water that came well past half way up the canyon, and which was beginning to fall back downward. The sound of the blast was reverberating off the walls in repeated echoes that were mind-numbingly stacked upon one another, making it sound as though the entire Channel was roaring in outrage.

The boat thingy, it seemed, had been forced back to the surface, where it was bobbing in a way that made it clear it wasn't going to be bobbing for long, though I couldn't tell if that was by intent, or by flooding. I could tell you this much. Marcus had missed with his whateveritwas, but not by much. I could see signs of damage.

"Daaaaaaaaaaaayuuuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnnnnn." I hissed. I had no idea what exactly Marcus had done, but seriously? I was impressed. I was stunned. I was...

I glanced back over my shoulder. Mother was staring down into the canyon, while Nera was fussing beside her quietly, at last met by a noise too great for her to sleep to. I glanced back to where Marcus had disappeared. Glanced back into the canyon, back at mother, back toward Marcus...

I sucked on my lip, Listened to the rippling sounds below, felt myself shiver...

****

Jasmine finally tore her eyes away from the rippling water and the rapidly listing boat below. "Jamie? What in the world do you think could have... Jamie?" She looked around. "Jamie?" Exasperated, she began casting about in the fading daylight, trying to see where her daughter had gotten off to. She heard a slight scuff of a shoe on rock, and turned to see Jamie disappearing around the corner, a peculiar hitch in her step like someone had pulled her underwear up hard enough to hook it on her shoulderblades.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

"dadadadadadada!" Nera replied, and then... *SPPPPPBBBBBBBT*

Jasmine turned away from staring after her daughter, waving her hand before her nose, and stared down at Nera.

"If this is an attempt to get a little brother or little sister, I'll have you know I consider it a dirty trick..."

[Graybeard]

"Come," Grope motioned to his nephew. "Let us help the weird Small One find his magical skeleton. It fell on top of me back in the trees." And he started walking into the timber, directly away from where he'd emerged.

Scrobian was puzzled. "Uh ... my uncle? Didn't you come out of the trees over there? Which means the skeleton would be ... Oh." Trolls hadn't adopted the human custom of placing a finger on one's lips to call for silence -- trolls' lips are very different from human ones, after all -- but the less economical hand-over-mouth gesture got the job done. As soon as the younger troll got the message and subsided, Grope lied, "I had to go out of my way to avoid deadfall and cliff bands. It's over here somewhere." They continued on into the woods.

As soon as he was sure he was out of earshot of the Small Ones (and the magical skeleton), he continued, "I consulted the Robe some more when I was checking myself for injuries after I fell." Even his nephew was likely to react badly to an admission that he could do any of his deceased mate's healing; now wasn't the time to mention that. "I think I know more about that under-sea-boat. There is a tribe of humans who call themselves 'Sea Eagles' -- that isn't the actual name they use, but it's a good translation of the words in their extinct Small Ones language. I took the Wisdom of men who knew about them." He meant the pirates that he, Zhbrigeeul, Lucas, Keyes and Mr. Stagpoole had fought.

Scrobian settled into the posture of a young troll receiving wisdom from a senior member of the tribe, as indeed Grope was, as his uncle continued, "These 'Sea Eagles' sail on Jobar's Sea and keep some of the Small Ones' ships and cargo safe, while they attack other Small Ones on the water. It's all very strange and complicated, and I can't understand it from the Wisdom in the Robe. But the interesting thing is that the Sea Eagles are rumored to have made alliances with things in the sea that are definitely not human ... and some of them are very powerful magic users." He let the implications of that sink in as another BOOOMMM echoed from Growf's Drainpipe, where Marcus' magical depth charge had just gone off.

[AdamZero]

"Wow..." I looked at my hands, the palms streaked with calluses. Then I caught sight of Jamie running a copse not far from us. I blinked once, twice, then sighed. "Chicks with gu-@*#@(!~" I pinched my nose. "DAMN! No more taters for her!" I shouted down at Jasmine.

Boris ambled out of the woods where he'd fallen with Grope, looking rather pleased with himself, despite failing utterly.

He was on the same plane as Jasmine and Nera, walking over he waved, before casting a glance over the side.

A bullet. Albeit a rather mundane one, caught him in the mandible and set his skull spinning.

"JAMIE!" He called, after stopping his head, which was now facing backwards. "Adjust yourself later! There's shooting to be doing!"

I tossed another expansion blast, aiming to explode it over the ship this time.

[Graybeard]

It looked like the Small Ones were winning; at the very least, the mild aching in Grope's Blood Binding scar had gone away. That meant there was really nothing left here for trolls to stick around to do. Grope decided that he owed the humans a very minor blood-debt for sinking the ship that had shot him and his nephew down. (Of course, they'd had such a debt to him themselves, after the weirdness with the Red Elf, so really, things were about even. Also, if the boat was designed to function under water, could they be sure they'd "sunk" it if they forced it down? But that wasn't his problem, and they'd at least repelled it.) "Let's go find what's left of our tribe," he told Scrobian, and they started to climb the ridge separating them from the next valley ... although he sure wondered where that balloon had gone, and why.

------------

"What's the gig?" Layla asked Ace as soon as she was done nursing Zachary; he'd withdrawn to wash dishes. That was interesting for several reasons.

"I'm not sure," Ace said. "I know that there are a couple of passengers involved, but Peter wouldn't tell me who they were. He just says to get things fitted out for a long trip -- possibly as far as Rinkaiel."

Layla let out a low whistle. "Wow. That's a long trip, all right, and a lot of it is over very wild country that we don't know much about. Except for the coastal regions, the north side of the Waldhaxen Channel is basically unexplored, right?"

Ace nodded. "More or less. There's been some aerial reconnaissance; I had something of a role in that, actually. But that's about all. Nobody has ever been able to find a route across the Channel, although folklore has it that there is one, called the 'Witches' Step' or something like that. It's supposed to be toward the east, on the way to the central lake. We might try to look for that on the way back from the mission."

"'We'?" Layla said, brightening up, as Faye noticed immediately.

"Oh, didn't I tell you that part? It's a long enough trip that I could use two crew members ... and if one of them brought a baby along, not a problem," Ace grinned -- and he could have sworn that not only was Layla grinning back (he'd certainly expected that), so was Zachary.

[OOC: Isn't it nice of Layla to supply these little narrative hooks on occasion? ]

[Sareth]

I swore as I dove for cover, and began trying to look for a new firing vantage point. Some people had no consideration whatsoever for my needs. Like the fact that right now I needed to get laid in the worst way...

I glared down into the canyon, and began to draw a bead on a figure standing on the deck of the rapidly heeling over ship. Just as I squeezed the trigger there was another explosion. The round I fired went who KNOWS where, the person I meant to fire it at scrambled across the deck, and slammed a hatch behind him, and the boat dropped beneath the roiling water, it's dark shape lost in all the foam. It looked to me like it wasn't going to be going under by our actions...

I stared down in the canyon as another set of loud, unhappy echoes roared about the place. I growled as I stared down into the roaring, growling maw...

And then I heard a rumble and a roar as all the noise apparently got into some weekend rock on the walls. Land shifted, rubble fell, and I stared as part of the cliff wall gave way.

"Geeze, Marcus. When you fuck a place up, you really fuck a place u..."

I gaped. The cleared chunk of wall had revealed a previously hidden little niche in the cliff face. And along the inside of that little niche I could see...

"I'll be damned... Stairs!"

[Graybeard]

"I have some bad news," Ace announced as he rejoined the Sorensens for dinner; he'd gone over to the airstrip to start preparing the airship for its long, mysterious voyage. "I talked to Peter about taking you along as crew. Sorry, babe," he addressed Layla; had he ever used that term before? She wasn't sure. "He says that I am absolutely, definitively not to take you along on this trip, flat no, end of discussion." Layla's expression said she didn't like that news one bit, but for that matter, so did Ace's. (For that matter, so did Faye's.)

"I'm ... disappointed," Layla said blandly, pulling herself together and fighting down her initial reaction, definitely one that she didn't want to display to this man at this time. "Did he say why?" She'd never really understood Peter. Of course, the Gewehr capo clearly knew some things that she, despite her access to high places in the Gewehr, did not. He might have some legitimate reason for this edict that he couldn't talk about ... but she was still puzzled.

An uncomfortable look crossed Ace's handsome face. "I asked him that myself. He just said it wouldn't be safe, and that you should stay here and move ahead with your training as a neophyte mage. I'm as confused as you are, and I'm pretty sure he was dodging my question. Why is it safe for me, and for that matter your mother, but not for you? And it's not like you're on a tight academic schedule with Soc." (Is he just a little ... jealous? Layla wondered. He certainly didn't need to be, for any number of reasons, not least of them that Soc seemed to be happily married himself ... yet a corner of her mind felt a bit of thrill at the idea.) She tried not to show it as he continued, "Anyway, he was as clear about it as he's ever been about anything to me, and that's pretty damn clear. So if this trip comes off tomorrow, I'm going to be out of pocket for a while ... but let's eat, drink and be merry tonight."

"Sure, let's," Layla replied, as she applied herself to the roast, but with a distinct lack of enthusiasm; she remembered how the rest of that quote went...

----------

The trolls found it surprisingly hard going as they thrashed through the forest toward the top of the ridge. The forest here was thick enough that a Small One would have had an easier time moving through it, despite their lesser strength; there just wasn't much room to fit a troll through the thick timber, deadfall, and boulder fields. The sun was well on its way to the western horizon by the time Grope and Scrobian crested the ridge. Grope panted, "I am fatigued. That is some of the hardest cross-country travel I have done," getting a nod from his nephew. "But now we should be able to -- Growf's Trousers! What is that?"

The other side of the ridge had trees on it for the top few hundred feet, but below that, it looked like someone had taken a giant scouring pad to the surface of the earth and removed the timber, and everything else, like food scraps from a cooking pot. No, the trees were still there, he realized as he looked at the scene, but they were very, very dead -- blasted out of the ground and stripped of their greenery, trunks now arrayed like arrows pointing downhill. And the entire valley was a bleak gray. The tree trunks were covered with it, it lay on open ground like a plague, even the stream in the valley's bottom was the gray of volcanic ash. Not a living thing stirred.

Our people aren't there, Grope thought as he surveyed the carnage. But if they're not there, then where are they? And none of the answers looked very appealing...

[OOC: Check out the fourth image on this page for a real-life version of what Grope and Scrobian are seeing here. These things are just amazing...]

[AdamZero]

"Yeah, I don't mess around..." I laughed, managing my way to Jamie's side with a few leaps and a sprint. "So... down into the canyon, and loose our superior altitude..." I looked at the forest. "Follow the trolls...." I turned around, where Lucas and Aiyee were rejoining us, Jasmine with Nera also approaching. "Or.... I dunno. Something else."

"I vote we find a way to get south but... the only ways so far seem to be through solid rock and lava flooded volcanos."

[Graybeard]

Grope and Scrobian, for their part, were confronted with decision making very much like that facing Marcus and the humans.

"I'm getting a bad feeling about this," Grope told his nephew. "If our people were in this valley when the volcano went off, they're not there any more. It's that simple."

Scrobian nodded. "This looks bad. What's worse, I'm all but certain that this valley is where the village was. Look up there." He pointed to a cliff upstream in the valley's bottom, where a cascade of disgusting gray water was pouring over the edge to join the grayness below. "We picked this valley to settle in because of that cliff. It meant that we would have natural defenses on that side. After all, there was nothing downstream of any interest to us, because of Growf's Drainpipe. The Matriarch and the Robe Wearer consulted and decided to take advantage. I remember it well."

Grope decided to risk a question that was quite likely to be painful. "Was your mate still in the village?"

"She was." A brief mist formed in the younger troll's eyes, and Grope felt a pang of sympathy for him; after all, it was barely more than a week ago that he'd been in the same position himself. However, Scrobian seemed to be handling it better than he had. The kid (a 200-year-old kid) was made of tough stuff.

"I'm sorry," he said simply, and that was that. "So we both have the same mission now. I had a plan, but Growf's Drainpipe interferes with it. If only we had that balloon back ..."

[Sareth]

"South?" I laughed. "That means heading back home. No, I do believe I will be exploring those stairs." I winked. "In the morning. It's getting late, and I don't think we'll be seeing any more of that boat. Thing." My smile grew. "Just what WAS that you did, anyway?"