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"Oh, yeah, I've had his cookies before," he comments cheerfully. "Don't think I've had a proper dinner from him yet, though. Or not in a while, for sure."

"We'll make it happen. There's another bigger chamber coming up -"

Their path has intersected with the underground river again, or maybe there's more than one. A waterfall descends from the middle of the high ceiling, and crystals the size of children line the water's edge.

"...whoa..."

Eiffel's about to make a smart comment, but then he sees the room and he's stunned into silence.

"...holy crap..."

It's beautiful, genuinely, in a way Eiffel doesn't really have the elitist background to be able to truly analyse, but he appreciates it in the depths of his shrivelled soul.

He moves towards the waterfall, careful to look down so he doesn't slip near the water, until he can stand by one of the crystals with one hand on it and his torch slack in the other; when he shifts his grip, it twists his wrist in a way where the light refracts through the crystal, sending rainbow lights sparkling through the spray of the waterfall.

Jedao makes a sound that might be called a squeak of delight.

"Eiffel! Do it again!" Jedao skitters over to the edge himself, carefully leaning over some of the less-razor-sharp crystals to get a look at the equally clear water beyond them. Like the main cavern, it has intricate lace-like glass diatoms floating in a delicate surface layer, drifting with the current, in this case revealing a spiral flow around the bottom of the waterfall, with tiny opalescent fish darting in between.

He saw it too, and the way he jumps slightly in surprise makes the light flick away from the crystals, but he can put two and two together as he beams.

"Yeah yeah yeah, hold on-!" He finds a good position to stand him and brace himself, and presses the torch deliberately against the flat part of a crystal.

And it's not just through the one: his torch refracts through the connecting crystals too, on all sorts of angles, and the way the refractions shoot out makes it look like they're in a glittering starscape, even in the shallow parts of the water pooling below the falls. And Arthur gives a breathless little laugh of delight.

"Wow."

For a few seconds Jedao just...takes it in.

"Have you ever seen anything like it before?"

Eiffel just beams, bright and genuine in a way that rarely comes through. In a way that isn't, for five minutes, touched by the deep exhaustion that dwells in his core.

"Never," he breathes, emphatically. "This is incredible."

"I feel like I could watch this for ages," Jedao whispers, shining his own light for the first time, skating across the gently turning face of a giant diatom, fluorescing a soft kaleidoscopic blue.

Edited 2023-05-30 03:01 (UTC)

"One of those once in a lifetime opportunities people always go on about," he mumbles. He glances down at his torch, and twists it gently, turning it in his hand while it's pressed against the crystal, and watches the lights shift in halting patterns in time with his wrist. "Nice that I can cross spelunking off my bucket list."

There's a splash and a fluting whistle, and a little translucent frog hops out of the water and onto the diatom, sitting as if it were a lily pad. Jedao watches it, a little bit entranced, but also scoots along the crystals until he can lean gently against Eiffel's shoulder.

"Thanks for coming with me," Jedao says softly.

Eiffel tracks the frog as well (and fails to hide how the small plib sound of it jumping out of the water makes him jump a little), and when Jedao presses into him he nudges back into him with a warm smile.

"Hey. What are friends for?"

Jedao pulls out his slate and takes a few minutes of video, as the water cascades through the lightshow of the crystal refraction, and the frog's whistling call echoes off the high cavern walls.

"I guess we should keep going for that dust..." Jedao allows, eventually.

"Yeah, I guess."

But this is the nicest waste of time on a mission Eiffel's had in literal years, so he's pretty okay with dawdling a bit longer.

"Which way next, Sonar?"

"Why don't we follow the river? There's enough of a bank for a while."

And that way they can keep enjoying some of the scenery.

"Yeheah, awesome!" He pushes off the crystals carefully, and his trainers are very much not made for wetworks so there's extra care taken, but he'll make sure to leave the path free for Jedao to go first and be his big tough bodyguard. "Think we'll find where the rest of that frog's cousins all went?"

"Some of them are under the water."

They're hard for him to identify, almost exactly the same density as the water around them, ghostly flitting impressions on his mothsense.

"I guess that one just wanted to say hi."

"He's their intrepid hero," he says dryly. "Gonna go back to Frogtopolis and tell everyone about how he met the weird giants with their pink and yellow skin covered in glowing lights, all shaggy like the Iron Snails."

It's an easy thoughtless monologue, just his mouth running as he focuses on his feet. "All the other frogs are never gonna believe him."

Jedao laughs, enjoying the picture Eiffel paints.

"Do you think people have ever been down here before?" Jedao asks, taking the lower branch as their path splits. Ruffles of fungus cluster along the edges of the path or in grooves in the walls, glowing blue-green mushroom caps, shaggy white lion's man puffs, concentric turkey tails glinting copper, and stranger pink and purple shapes, branching like thickets of dry coral.

"Oh, hell no. This place hasn't been turned into a strip mine yet. You think all this cool crap would still be growing if there was someone who could turn a profit on it in the nearby solar system?"

He makes a small hop over a hole and still manages to stumble when he lands - but that's let his own fault and more that when he does land, a gentle rumble rolls through the cave around them, and he freezes instantly.

Jedao also goes still, but it's a coiled, catlike stillness, light on his feet, tense in his shoulderblades, poised to spring. His head turns slowly, eyeing a fissure of darkness slanting away to one side.

You don't need to come this way, Jedao murmurs, through tiny gravitational ripples, in case the huge, elongated creature shifting its weight in the tunnel below can understand him. For a moment, he hopes he's been heard - then he feels it move, horribly fast for something so massive, with a sleek slithering eel-like scrabble through the thin stone passage, moving too fast for Jedao to risk running back and hoping to get past the intersection in time.

"This way," he yells, and springs forward, grabbing Eiffel's wrist as he all but flies farther down the path, toward a mess of branchings up ahead. One of them has to be too small for it.

Edited 2023-06-06 05:43 (UTC)

Eiffel doesn't have any special powers: just an incredibly well honed survival instinct and a good helping of Genre Savvy, and when he sees that very slow turn Jedao does, he is already ready to run, and Jedao grabbing him makes him stumble but he keeps up, more or less, even if he drops one of the flashlights with a loud clatter of broken plastic.

"Holy shit--" he shouldn't look back but he does anyway, trying to get a glimpse of whatever Jedao feels the need to run away from, but he can't see anything yet. "Crap crap crap--"

His head whips around, and he locks in on a tunnel that's a bit shorter than him, it'll be a squeeze but- "Jedao, this one!" And he'll try and yank the clamp around his wrist towards it.

Jedao can feel that it's a dead end - but it is narrow enough to shield them, even from the sinuous eel-like shape of the cave creature. He makes a decision, and follows that tug, veering to the tunnel Eiffel chose.

"You first -" Because if it doesn't get tired of waiting and scrabbling at the small entrance - and Jedao would not want to rely on this thing's impatience - he's going to need to deal with it.

"Don't have to tell me twice-" It all comes out in one quick breath, a sharp exhale as he braces himself, and ducks into the tight cavern - one arm first, outstretched to guide his way through the narrow buttcrack of an entrance, ducking to awkwardly crouch his way through.

It's tight for a few feet, but he manages to squeeze through, and lets out a quick "All clear-!" before he notices. It's a dead end. "Uh..."

"It's okay," Jedao says, a little breathlessly. Jedao squishes himself in after Eiffel, and then they can both hear a horrible scraping and scrabbling of large claws in the narrow chokepoint.

"If it doesn't get get bored and go away, I can deal with it. I just - fuck, it's fast." And it's hissing. "Hard to play offense and defense at the same time with something that fast."

Eiffel can't help a startled wail when there's the sound of claws at the entrance, and he presses himself as far back against the wall as he can.

"How about we just play defence and make it go away as fast as possible?!" rushes out in a high-pitched keen of panic.

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deuceoftears - 2023-06-15 05:11 (UTC) - Expand