Arrival: Helping Hands (#74: It's dangerous to go alone!)

He dreamed that night, as he had been for the last couple, of his time behind the front. It had been so brief and strange that his conscious mind had not cleaved to the details as well as his unconscious.

They were strange, disconnected things, the dreams. The candles of his circle would melt upwards in their branching fingers to burn his face, and he would watch; the side of his parents’ house would cave in, slow-motion, and he would watch; the landscape’s sense would disintegrate into shards that pierced his flesh and he would watch. The replay was slow, stretching out detail into luscious, fervid orchestras of minutiae to be dispassionately observed and greedily gulped down all at once.

They weren’t disturbing until he woke and thought about them, at which point they were very disturbing. The impression left in him by the twisted landscape of the front should have felt horrifying. Instead the dreams painted him hungry to know more. That had to be a control thing, right? He had lost all control and now some terribly stupid segment of his psyche was obsessing, as if knowing more would defuse the horror. Maybe Jo just hadn’t had the right approach, something whispered from that part of him. Maybe knowing was key.

All in all it did not make a good waking experience, much less at the ass-end of the morning when Jo shook him awake for watch. Watch, it turned out, was pretty much built-in rumination time: hours, pre-dawn and then the slow cold (especially cold, given that blue sun) vista of sunrise throwing reflected and refracted light into their hidey-hole, waiting and watching and trying to keep his attention on the world around him. That was shockingly difficult, at least until he gave up on sitting and got up to poke around the campsite, investigating the crystals, gathering more firewood, gazing into the cave, whatever came to mind. Even then it was hard to keep his attention both broad and focused enough to feel as if he was doing a good job of it. By the time the sun had been risen for an hour or two he was sitting again, just trying to keep himself awake and occupied by working with the cards again.

By the time Jo stirred Evan was antsy, ready to go. He’d put together a cold breakfast from the second half of his dinner provisions, divided halfway again the same as last night, half of the fruit and the protein cube tidily split off for Jo when she was ready. “From what I can tell, it begins to descend fairly quickly, so I can’t see far. I haven’t heard a thing from the cavern side all morning, I think we have the place to ourselves.” He hoped.

“I don’t have a lantern.” He hadn’t been able to afford one at the market. “Do you, or were you going to be relying on your — uh, new skills?”

Jo grunted a monosyllable, shaking her head. She looked like a wraith, rising from her sleeping roll with spidered hands and spidered hair. Most notably, the place that Evan had left Jo had not been the place he'd found her when he'd returned from his firewood gathering mission: she had been curled up near the fire when he'd gone, and something had happened in the intervening time, where she was now pressed up against the cracks in the wall where the crystals met the ground. Her sleeping roll had only partially come with her, and she looked pallid, sickly almost.

Waking didn't seem to improve things much. She refused to answer any questions until she'd dug in her pack, at which point she'd put together a little pouch of something dried and ground that smelled an awful lot like coffee. She dunked it in her scrubbed out pot, filled with more water, and only when it was steaming and the prospect of caffeine was nigh did she finally perk up a little.

"I brought a couple of torches," she said, groggily, "but some fire magic probably wouldn't hurt."

Pretty much every element of the morning's events had its own particular strain of unpleasantness, and Evan was compartmentalizing as hard as he could. Jo did not look okay and he had nearly turned around and left again when he'd spotted her like a spider at the wall; it had taken some force of will to just go to the firepit and stir it up again. Even that was annoying: instead of being able to pantomime some fire stoking and just tell it to burn, he had to actually do the fiddly work of getting the stupid thing to take. At least it had distracted him long enough that the necessity of asking Jo what in the hell she was doing and if she was okay died down.

Now they sat uncomfortably, mutually ignoring Jo's very weird behaviour, Evan nervously examining the map in the journal yet again.

"Torches. Great." They would have been fantastic cover if he'd been able to access his own skillset. That absence had him on the edge of panic, on top of everything else. He shoved it down hard. "I imagine so. How long can you sustain it?"

She held a hand up, for all intents and purposes ignoring him. Pouring herself a cup-- or, no, pouring Evan a cup, it looked like, given she was passing him the mug before she drank straight from the pot, she finally relaxed a little more. "I'd rather not. Leaves me as hungry as all fucking get-out and I didn't trust there'd be food here to deal with it."

She gave him a sleepy look, but she was beginning to look more like herself. "What about you? Any stirrings last night? Didn't take long to get something, not for me at least."

He accepted the cup, glad for a hot drink and frankly for the extra wake-up. He was tense, nervous, but awake not so much. Her question stopped the cup before it reached his lips, though.

"No." Not totally flatly. Materially, he wasn't sure if a sudden absence where there had been a skillset counted. There was a kind of anticipatory dread in his tone. "Does it happen to everybody?"

Jo let that settle for a moment or two, and then took another sip of coffee. "Yeah. Eventually. Everyone I ever met. It happens so much you can find food and shit at the market to help bring it out. There's whole fighting styles where people team up to use it." _It_... magic, elemental affinity... whatever it was. Jo gave him a considering look. "Figured you'd be pretty thrilled. You're not?"

For a flash he wondered if he would have been thrilled, if he had been just a plain-brand human, to acquire a supernatural aspect. But that wasn't a question he could answer, and a lifetime of reflexive dissembling had him grabbing the closest excuse for his dread that was at hand.

"To be changed without my consent or consultation? No, not especially."

"What, like puberty?" Jo took a long sip. "I don't think anyone's doing it to us on purpose."

Thankfully, she didn't seem interested in badgering him about it, whether because she had other things to think about, or because she wasn't awake enough to have caught the scent of a good argument. Instead, she considered breakfast while she said, "how far into the cave did you get?"

"I wasn't thrilled about puberty, either," he straight up grumbled, just under his breath, and hearing himself almost rolled his eyes. He was so on edge: he had to get a handle on himself before they sallied forth. "Maybe twenty metres. It turns, and it's not a sharp grade at this point but I can imagine it must get more uneven later." He paused, lips thinning. "I mean, this part's clearly been used before, I think the same goes for the first traverse. I expect we'll be stuck trying to make a choice between following the beaten path literally, or risking less traveled sections that might be less picked-over."

"Yeah," Jo agreed, leaving the banter now that they were both at least awake enough for the day. "And chances are at this point, the picked over path is going to be exactly that." She scoffed a little, thinking as she nursed her coffee. "I wonder if it takes a couple of years for the crystals to grow back, while the portal's closed?"

Still, she was beginning to think it through, and the prospect of chancing a riskier trek was growing more enticing as she thought upon it. She was tired, sure, but she was always tired. And she was cold, too, and a little hungry, but she was in the company of someone from home, and he seemed to be ready to hash it out, and that meant a lot to her. "We only get one shot. If no one else is here, it means the best's been picked over, and we <i>know</i> there's not a lot of time left. Let's see if there's any side-paths. You have the book, you can help map it out. I've done a lot of climbing, so I can set up some lines. That's got to be worth a lot to someone like Leslie if he's coming back here every couple of years."

Remembering the brew, he imitated her and took a long pull of it. It didn't taste quite right, but it did well enough, even if he could have gone for some milk.

Talking about the practicalities was the other piece that he needed in order to force his brain into work mode. Never mind that this was far from his usual problem-solving wheelhouse, it was something to focus on and he was a bit desperate for that focus.

"Building goodwill is never a bad idea," he agreed. "If I'm keeping the map detailed and up-to-date -- which should at least be a thing to bargain with when we get back, even if we come back otherwise empty-handed -- you'll have to take point." He sipped his coffee with diligent intent to caffeinate. Their conversation the night before was on his mind -- her reticence, her concerns. "What are our safety protocols?"

"Keep the rope on at all times, even when we're not on a sharp angle, for starters." She patted her pack, its long coil of rope close at hand. "I don't trust we're not in a place where you could slip on a piece of powder on crystal, and once you go, you don't know what's at the bottom of a tumble. Could be nothing, could be a bunch of pointy daggers, especially if we're going somewhere tougher to get to."

She went through a few other pointers: how far apart to travel, when to speak up, when to be quiet, and the conventional hand gestures she had for just those reasons. They didn't seem in the least bit trained via military background... but never the less, she seemed very sure of their utility. Practiced, even. "Most of all, I need you to keep a sense of time. I..." she frowned, "I don't track it really all that good."

"I can handle that," agreed Evan without fuss; whatever else he was good at or bad at, his internal chronometer was alright. It might be a bit fucky having gotten up so early, if he was going by time of day, but -- he'd compensate.

What he was increasingly sure of was that he did not remember Jo being this -- competent wasn't quite the right word, even if it ended up applying, which they would see. Sure wasn't either. Serious, maybe? Well-equipped, prepared? She'd always been Ryan's shithead friend -- and there he bounced right back out of that thought like he'd been shot out of a cannon, unwilling, unable.

He frowned back without realizing it. "Half a day in, half a day out, and then we start back to the portal," he reiterated.That should give him enough time even if time dilated some underground. "I have never before wished to be one of those douches who insist upon analogue watches, but damn if that wouldn't have been more useful than coming through with my phone." The stupid thing had bricked itself in transit, because of course.

"Mm, better than a sun dial," Jo observed, quirking her lips in that shitty way that she had when she didn't feel like going complete dumbass on a person. She began cleaning up the camp. "Let's do this. If we're lucky, we get a whole fairy-shop worth of crystals and get our asses out of here without anything worse than sore feet. If we're smart, we'll get a repeat customer, or at least someone who can point us towards a few useful people back in town."

As she was finishing up, she said, "did you know that guy's a fucking master weaponsmith? I would've thought he was cool as hell even before getting stuck in a place where people look at my rifle like it's a wizard staff."

"He was so understated." Evan had done a little double-take, squaring the notion of Everlake with the notion of that kind of mastery. Competence, sure; he'd clearly been in his element.

He shook his head, not disbelieving but impressed, and finished his coffee. The 'snow' wasn't the sort where one could use it to scrub out a dish, so he didn't. "Maybe he'll be able to help when that thing runs out of ammo." He nodded at her gun.

But up and moving, Evan was less inclined towards conversation. He packed his kit away, tucking everything as tidily into his pack and satchel as he had packed it yesterday, one thing and then another fastidiously stacked so he knew where everything was. At Jo's direction and with the use of the coil he'd brought along, he secured the rope to his own waist, through his beltloops and around, offering the end to her; it was plenty of slack and it was frankly both a good idea and kind of a scary one. If she went, he wasn't certain if he'd be enough weight to hold, or the other way around; she was a tall bag of sticks and he was shorter, and... it would be what it would be, hell. Still, there was a kind of absurdity to it, pretending like he had any sort of physicality. He did not know what he was doing. He did not know how much he didn't know.

He kept his book out as they started forward, book and pencil, relying on the light from her torch to keep record of the tunnel they started off through. It was wide at first, and clearly used, trailing downwards in connected caverns of varying sizes. There was a soothing quality: rock seemed to be rock everywhere, and without that blue light in the sky, this could be anywhere underground on Earth. It was a lie, sure, but some hindbrain part of him took comfort.

The first branch off of the pathway was after moving some distance down, and ironically, it was a tight squeeze in an upward direction. Evan stopped at it, looking dubiously at the black, forbidding crack. "Worth it?" he asked Jo.

"No," Jo said, giving it a solid, thoughtful glance. "If the best stuff is deeper down, and this is the first branch, even if nobody explored it we're probably not going to find jack shit that we couldn't get from outside. Unless..."

She frowned, approaching the squeeze, giving it a look over more thoroughly. "There's always the chance that it opens up past here." She backed up carefully, holding her torch low to the ground, looking for signs of other trespass here. Her own boots were beginning to lose their tread something fiercely, but were still distinct against the rest of the cave.

They stood both peering into and around the crack critically, and eventually Evan shook his head. There was some small scuffing around it, but nothing to indicate consistent wear and tear; nothing to suggest that anyone who had tried it once had ever gone back in, although the drifts of dry dust on the floor of the cavern didn't show enough forensic detail to tell whether such ingresses were recent or in the distant past.

"Part of me thinks it looks like something that would get overlooked and then might have something worth finding, but," he shrugged, "it's also the first one, so we're probably not the first who've had the thought."

"Well, you're no help," Jo said, a droll look on her face. "We'll never get another chance. Might as well find out for ourselves. Here. I'll go in first."

She had already double-checked her rope was secure, and did the same for Evan. There were a few things that were crucial in the event that she slipped and fell, but mostly, he'd have the crystals to brace himself on, and she had a sort of 'one tug yes, two tugs no, three or more tugs get me the hell out of there' system that would be... interesting to test.

He could keep himself from rolling his eyes or he could bite his tongue but not both, and so opted for the former. "No help and no fun, I'm sure."

His short and bare-bones introduction to two-person climbing fresh in his mind, Evan eyeballed the crack. It'd never really appealed to him, the idea of ascending rockfaces like a spider with a complicated web of ropes the only thing between him and a gristly death; was the notion of doing the same in an enclosed space better, or worse? The mystery of a depth more intimidating or less than the clarity of a visible long drop?

She'd go first, she'd take the slack and hopefully find something to anchor to. He'd brace. "Go for it, Kirk, but if you find a devil in the dark I'm advising beating a hasty retreat."

"Well, I'm not going to be Bones, he's the least interesting of the three," he shot back as he watched her disappear into the crack, like a spider flattening itself behind the fridge. She had such an unnervingly spider-like conformation overall, actually, after this morning; had she always been like that? No wonder she'd been in to climbing.

Jo's laugh echoed off the flat planes of the crystals around her. "Too bad; we could use someone sensible."

After not too long, she found herself at a sharp drop lined with jutting crystals. Some were big, some were small, all of them looked like they'd be dangerous to slam against if she were to lose her footing. She considered for a moment, then picked a loose chunk of crystalline rock up, gave it a focused moment, trying to press some light into it. It guttered out in her hand, over and over again, until finally the tiniest glimmer showed. Jo, deeply annoyed, threw it down the dark hole.

It fell for a good sixty feet before clinking to the ground, rolling down an embankment of simalarly loose, reflective shale, and beyond sight. She looked up, saw that there had once been a cluster of some kind overhead, but a great chunk of it had been dislodged, probably what was shattered in the hole below. Well, that was unnerving. Either someone had harvested good crystal here, or something had bashed into a growth and caused it all to come down.

Either way, she didn't know that she trusted herself on a sharp descent where Evan wasn't present. She turned back, calling again, "sharp drop here, at least one rope length. Lots of smashed crystal at the bottom. The walls look scaleable, but I imagine some of them are loose from the stuff that hit them on the way down. I don't trust it for a day run."

And then, closer. "I'm coming back."

"Shit," Evan exclaimed in quiet, earnest disappointment. Bracing the rope for her return was a little easier, since it hadn't been an intense traverse and all he really has to do is pull slack back in. "We can mark it, at least. What do you think we'd need for a proper traverse? Longer rope? Uh, more experience?" on his part, at least. If this was a valuable resource -- Evan didn't plan on staying for a year to see this world again, but it was information they could barter with. Maybe.

"Yeah," Jo said, catching her breath. "Mark it and... and if somehow we get back here, we'll know to bring more supplies. If we can get the money for the supplies."

That in mind, she didn't want to dawdle. "Let's go."

The moment Evan was ready, she led the way again. It was strangely bright in the main tunnel path the moment their torches hit it, as the reflective planes of the unpowdered crystals threw back the torchlight right at them... it was easy enough to step over the dark gaps, the places where it was obvious that one could twist an ankle or (Jo kept imagining) slip through a crack and fall forever.

A few times the tunnel curved suddenly, almost at an angle synonymous with the plane of a massive crystal, and indeed, one wall seemed smooth and flat (mostly, though scratched and dinged here and there) all along their walk. It also dipped sharply here and there, with clearly cracked off smaller crystals showing where looters had come and gone.

When Evan reached out to put a hand on that one flat wall, it would feel cool-- comfortably so, invigoratingly so. If he was thinking about his own powers, about reaching for them, it was almost as if his rippling reflection began to glow, taunting, a clear, cool light at the tip of his hand where it touched the reflection's wall. Subtle at first, but clearer as they descended. Jo, ranging ahead, was completely unaware, but something began to tug on Evan's mind.

The upcoming path branched again, one branch continuing along the slowly spiraling path, the other but a small gap between the huge crystal and a gap just wide enough to be comfortable descending. When Joy passed it, she barely took note. When Evan reached it, it looked as though a lattice-work of crystals were ranged against the wall, easy handholds to descend. If he peered more closely, a faint aqua light seemed to bounce back up, clear instructions to see what lay at the bottom.

It caught him out of his reverie. He pulled his hand from the surface of the crystal, breaking the strange glow almost reflexively. Some part of him was glad of that; the ways the crystals reacted to him felt strange, an overlapping Venn diagram of natural and unnatural, a discomfiting ambivalence that whispered to the back of his brain of things he yet needed to learn.

"Jo," he called her back, glad for the grounding of his own voice, "come back here and take a look at this?"

She was quick to hear him, and quick to retrace her steps. When she shone the torch down the hole, she whistled in deep surprise. "How did I miss this?" she asked, wondering at its unusually regular lattice-work. A perfect ladder.

A perfect trap.

She looked at Evan. "Good work," she said, a little dubious, and a little eager. "You want to do the honours? This looks like an easy one."

He shrugged off the praise: running his fingers over the wall, maybe, had given him the chance to notice the crack, and he was not that interested in looking too hard at why that was. In the same vein her ask makes him nervous in a way he hadn't expected -- but that was subsequently, easily subsumed by a much more reasonable set of fears.

He peered down the hole, at its regular handholds -- at the depth, its fearfulness interrupted by those regular spires of crystal. "It can't be as easy as all that, can it?" he asked, skeptical, though he can feel himself being drawn towards the endeavour inexorably. "They'll break under human weight, won't they?"

"Let's find out," Jo said, giving a half grin. If they were going to find anything, they might as well do it now. "I'll take it first."

She triple-checked their rope, gave Evan the torch, and began gently testing the lattice.

"Of course." There was some relief in him at her volunteering to step forward first, and some disappointment. He wanted to prove his usefulness, amongst all the other concerns of the moment, but Jo jumped forward past any notion of hesitation. Still, she was the experienced climber; this was wiser, wasn't it? Regardless, he took the torch, found a place to anchor and brace, and watched her progress carefully.

The crystals ranged in size, from ones he was surprised to see still intact to huge suckers that would have taken a team to haul out of here even if someone had had the force at hand to break them off. Someone else had to have found this crack at some point -- unless it was newly opened? Unless this mountain range was prone to tectonic upsets that opened new cracks? Boy, new fear unlocked.

"How deep is it?" he called. The shaft bent as it went, obscuring vision from the top except for that unnerving, calling aqua light. "Are you deep enough to see the bottom?"

"Not yet," Jo calls up, taking a moment to push hair from over her shoulder so that she can look. "I can see a ledge, though." She goes silent for a moment, that awful calm before something happens. "Hold on!"

The rope goes loose for a moment, Jo leaping from the lattice to to the ledge and scrambling for support. She waits for three solid breaths for anything to happen... but it's quiet, mostly dark. Everything feels watery down here, though that can't be quite right.

She sees this area isn't pure and new: there are a few matrixes that have been chipped away at in a very obvious way. But still, there are more crystals at the back that look awfully like long daggers. Jo gives a whistle, heading over to them and then, setting her pack down, pulling out a hammer.

<i>Twang! Tang! Tunk! Crack!</i>

The first of the crystals comes away with a jagged crack along its base. The second, too. The third shatters in Jo's hands and she gives a cry of surprise, echoing strangely in this place. "Shit!"

The sound of the crystals cracking had already had him on alert: that was reflex, not rational thought, his mind on notions of crystal handholds and footholds shattering, nevermind she was on a ledge by then. But a shatter followed by a curse --

He suffered a fizzy shot of adrenaline, clamping his hands harder around the rope end that he was responsible for, nevermind that most of the support would come from the stalactite he'd attached to. His voice was clenched just as tight. "What happened? Are you okay?"

One heart-hammering delay, then a second one, and then Jo's echoing voice, "I'm fine, just broke one of the guy we're trying to sell."

She ventured a little further back, but there wasn't much else for her to find on this ledge. It wasn't a proper cave in its own right, after all. "I'm coming back!" she yelled, having packed up her meager finds. She gathered some of the rope with her as she came so that it wouldn't drag, letting Evan take up the slack in his own right. "Ready?"

"Wait," he called, feeling his pulse in his ears. "Wait."

Some confluence of curiosity and shame, some terrible cocktail of interest and nascent, stupid bravado, must have come together in him then. "Is there anything for you to anchor to on that ledge?" Why was he asking this? "If you think you could get secure, I could try going down further."

That light called to him.

Jo, already on the ledge and considering jumping across to the lattice, managed to catch just a bit of a look up to the torch light wavering down. It seemed to be struggling, that light, along with Evan's tone. "You sure?"

But she decided to look. If he slipped, they'd both be done for. So she went a little further back, looking for a really solid cluster. The rope went around and around, and then she knotted it, and she tugged from her end to Evan's. "Alright bud, give it a try. I'm secure."

"If I put out the torch, can you relight it when I get near you?" The torch was an issue, honestly would have been even if he had still had his natural skills; no way to carry it hands-free without getting singed, or having to pretend he was getting singed. "I think I can navigate just by that blue light. I watched where you went."

"Yeah," Jo agreed. "Just toss it down, I'll catch it." And if she didn't, well, maybe they'd see how far down this shaft went.

"Right. Great." It was a relief to put it out, rolling it on the ground till there wasn't a hint of smoke left, and if it was lightly nerve-wracking to toss it down the hole -- it clattered against crystals as it went, making a melodic and noisy series of pings and tings -- it was good to have both his hands back. "Okay," he added a little meaninglessly, feeling his nerves surge.

But he'd agreed to this. Hell. He'd suggested this. And it had looked easier than he had worried, though he hoped that wasn't the ease of the competent fooling the uninitiated. He shrugged his pack off, stashing it diligently to one side of the crack, under the great huge crystal wall. Recalling how Jo had lowered herself down first, he got handholds on a couple of the higher-up juts of crystal, got his grip there firm before starting to lower himself down, down. The change in the light made it feel like descending into water, and he felt a similar kind of strangeness in his limbs, like a dream or like swimming. But his body was working, and so he used it.

It was horrible. It was interesting. He didn't have a lot of time to think about how terrifying it was to worm his way through the crystal forest that came at him from increasingly all angles -- realizing that part of the challenge was not getting caught funny on the wall or in such a way that he'd end up snagging on an edge or a point, as much as it was not to fall. He moved slow, more slowly than Jo had, and was too preoccupied with the task to apologize for himself.

In too short a time, or maybe too long a time, he was on the level with the little ledge Jo had leapt to. His forearms were shockingly tired, but not shaking, and he had to take that as a good sign; he took a moment to pause there and look across at her. "You, you do this for fun, huh."

"Well, not this," Jo said, cracking a grin in the dark. She'd fumbled and ultimately missed the torch, thinking it was going to still be alight. when he threw it down. Now, somewhere below, she had no idea how deep the tunnel went. She was still feeling beefed about it, but yelling at Evan wasn't going to solve that.

"You ready to explore where no man's gone before?" she asks, instead, a tint of that vitriol making its way into her voice, goading.

The fact that he was all nerves seemed to help against that, surprising him; he grinned back with fervour similarly as questionable in its friendliness content. "Get with the times, it's where no one has gone before."

Then he and his fast-pumping heart and quick-breathing lungs continuted downwards, towards mystery (and probably also towards that torch). The crack twisted a little ways further down than the ledge, dipping in under it, and for a time the climb became easier: rather than a hinky near-vertical, the plane from which the crystals sprung was some ways more horizontal, and let Evan clambour down with a little more support from gravity.

Taking a rest, he took another look down, feeling the lurch of falling-fear to which he was not exactly growing accustomed so much as turning the significant powers of his brain on wilfully ignoring. His brows furrowed; he squinted; huh.

"I can see the bottom," pause, "I think. There's water." And from under the water, the glow they had been seeing, and a further profusion of crystals, trending huge. "Torch's floating in it."

"No shit!" Jo's voice echoed from above. Down here, it seemed to to bounce off of the crystals around, but was dampened from the water's edge, squelched by the gently rippling surface.

How long since it had last been disturbed?

"It's not frozen?" Jo called down, and then, belated, "be careful, water caving's it's own whole can of shit!"

"I'm certainly not planning on taking a dive." The notion made him shudder; he had no especial horror of water under a normal circumstance, but all he could imagine at that point was the crushing horror of all the earth above them, the way that would be amplified by being submerged, too. What an interesting and awful way that would be to die.

"No, it's not frozen. It's..." Even after the auroras last night this felt stupid to say, "it's glowing?"

"Any good crystals?" Jo called, real interest growing in her voice, warring with her concern.

From below, Evan could see the glow  grow and soften with the ripples in the water. They were mesmerizing. They shifted subtly, shifting and whirling together around the torch until, inexplicably, for a passing moment they formed the shape of a great pupil, a great iris. It glowed an aqua hue and rippled with tiny flickers of gold, for one second, two seconds. An intense force stared up ant Evan, unmoving and unmoved.

Then it vanished, a flicker of brighter gold catching Evan's eye. A single small, sinuous shape twisted under the surface, perhaps drawn to the torch. It looked like a cross between a cave fish and an eel, yet it glittered with little flecks of radiant gold and aqua, little frills propelling it under the surface.

He was struck still by a weird calm, incongruous and absurd and, later, probably unsettling. It lingered after the eye, and he followed that fish with his own.

"Uhh." Jo had said something. "Uh. Yeah. Lots. There's, um." He imagined the eye. He must have. That congruence of ripples, plus the glitter of the creature. "Fish, too? I'm going to get a closer look."

Down the rest of that slope, then, which flattened some but not completely to a standable surface. He felt like a spider himself, a slightly shaky spider, and he crept to a larger, jutting crystal where it converged with one of its neighbors: a big enough construction that he could perch on it without too much fuss, a foot above the water's rippling surface.

He didn't want to catch the fish, but he also did. It would be a shame to kill something that beautiful. He wanted to know more. He sighed impatiently with the impulse; who was he thinking he was, bare-hands fish-catching? And at almost the same time he swept a hand down and into that weird glowing water, his thoughts almost a distraction to  keep him from aborting the foolish motion before he could think too much about it.

The strangest thing happened, then. The water rippled under his touch, but it felt warm, airy, and quickly adjusted to his touch until it felt as though Evan's hand was pushing through thicker air. The water was still there, but it was indistinguishable in temperature from his touch, even where he grazed it and caused it to stir.

The water glittered brighter, and the creature that he'd seen gave a quicker twist of its body and quickly dispersed... but not before its light caught on some truly brilliant crystals below the surface of the water. The lower level of this pool wasn't more than maybe a few feet, though it was hard to tell with the ripples and the angular diffraction of the water. It wasn't flat, but seemed to continue down into further cascades of crystals both untouched by air and intruders.

A few of the branches of crystals growing below held perfect spiraling qualities, mindboggling in their fractal patterns. Others held a simple beauty, much like the sword that Leslie had been working with in another world, another time from now.

The draw was still there, curiosity mixed with an edge.

Jo broke it, her voice a ragged sound that didn't belong here. "You still good?"

"Yeah," he called back up automatically. Pulling his fingers back, they dripped, and he didn't look too hard at it because they were dripping light. "Yeah, no, there's some really good ones down there. You're still secure up there, right? I'm not going to take off the rope but I think if I go just a little ways in we can get some really good stuff."

This was not asking permission. Evan was already untying his shoes and retying their laces together, hooking them around his neck like he'd seen in movies for safekeeping while he waded. He rolled up his pants legs -- probably futile -- and with care, lowered himself in.

He couldn't think too hard about it. He couldn't think too hard about why he wanted to do this. "I can get the torch, too,"  he added, a bit of justification. He'd get to that in a second.

The strange feel of the water wigged a part of him badly, but greater than that was a growing, sick excitement, one he didn't understand or condone, but one he was in the grips of nonetheless. The crystals below the surface were slick, and the movement strange, so he went as slowly as he could bear, making his way around the periphery of the crack towards those fractal things that had so grabbed him, chewing on the notion of how he was going to  break them off. He could leverage body weight, maybe, shove with his feet to get some of the thinner ones to crack -- there was in his scrabbled-together kit, too, a knife, but he was less certain about using that in the slippery wet. He kept his mind on this as he waded through this airy, strange water, held tight to it as he made it to a crystal  he had his eye on. The rope was a faint comfort, but a steady one, and he put a hand to it as he braced against the crystal spur he would try his weight against first, and shoved.

The crystal resisted his efforts at first, but as he stood and efforted in the water, the light pulsed around him, and with it came a sound that was impossible to really describe. Singing? Theramin? The ringing of a crystal bowl?

Whatever it was, it grew in intensity until, concentrated, the strange perfectly body-temperature water began to fizz and thrum, and then, just like that, the crystal came away in Evan's hands.

"Ha!" The exclamation jolted itself right from his diaphram, and he clutched his prize, pulling it dripping from the water. "Got one!" The singing was still echoing in his bones, in his teeth.

He'd left his pack up top. For the best, really, but it left him without a place to easily stash it. So his prize got unceremoniously shoved down his shirt, with the promise to himself that he would give in to the impulse to examine it later.

"I'm going to get another!" He'd already chosen his mark when he yelled that up to Jo, moving deeper -- another foot or so of water deeper, but that weird excitement assured him that it was fine, it was okay. Bracing, he reached his successful, victorious fingers down into the strange water again and wrapped his hands around a longer, thinner, perfect crystal spur. Leverage would be on his side for this one...

Later, once he understood the flip-turn his elemental skills had taken, it would make more sense. In the moment, it was like he slipped, but he had been sure, sure that he had been braced, and it had felt like being pulled -- either way, he plunged. One second he was pulling, the next he was falling through water that felt like thick air, and he was screaming bubbles, sliding further into the gloom. The crystal he was holding broke off in his hand and he clung to it, stupidly, as the water took him and held him. In that moment the rope and its comfort was forgotten in the terror of falling into water that not only descended into night-black depths but felt wrong.

From the surface, Jo's voice was impossible to hear, but she felt the rope go, slipping suddenly in her loose hands. She braced, shocked and cursing up a storm. "Evan!"

Nightmare visions of dredging up a bloated, frozen corpse took her with sudden certainty, and she began to tug, pulling as hard as she could to retrieve Evan from that resounding splash.

The tug was rescue from the heavens: the tug reminded him which way was up, beacuse something terrible and strange had happened, where he lost entirely the sense of which way is up, he could not sort out the gravity versus the pressure or where the light is coming from. The rope pulled, and he went with it, lighter than he should be: with him came a great bubble of water, pulling from the surface around him, a hellish sphere inside which his panic was busy emptying his lungs.

He breathed in. He felt the water go down his throat and the certainty of death by drowning. He did not relent to it: his limbs flailed and pushed, trying to swim, but despair surrounded the remainder of his mind like the water surrounded him. He did not want to die. He did not want to die in water.

And then the water fell from around him, in a strange patter of gravity-defying fluidics, out from him, his clothes, his nose, his mouth, his eyes like tears and snot and puke and that horrible invading wax. It wrung him out.

His weight reasserted itself, outside of the water. He thumped against the crystal wall, unable to understand or parse what had happened except to cling hard to the jagged surface. He was still clutching his prize. He was shaking.

"I'm," he tried to call up to Jo, expecting to sound like hell. He should be coughing, he should be choking on all the water in his lungs, except he didn't feel it there anymore. "I'm okay. I fell in. I'm okay though."

Even if he wasn't choking, his voice sounded faint, panicked maybe. Jo kept the line tight. "Get up here!" she called. "That's enough, we head back now!" If they could. If Evan could make it out. Jo was thinking now of carrying him, somehow, of the worst contingency (or nearly so) of having to haul Evan's body up a sharp drop.

"Just a second, Jo, give me a second," he shot back, shaking his hands out as if that will, in turn, banish their shakiness. The second crystal he stashed with the first -- his boots, he went to put back on, feeling hideously upset by the fact that his socks aren't wet. There's a first, he thought.

That couldn't have been water. It couldn't have been. Nothing about that was anything like how water was supposed to feel, behave, anything. That had to be it. He had a canteen: now he opened it, and at a loss chugged the contents rather than pour them into the not-pond: then, dipping it under the surface with great trepidation, took a sample for later. That would have to suffice. There was a part of him screaming to remain, to go back and get more of those crystals, to dive under again -- and after his shock, what that meant was Evan was climbing up the wall post-haste. He would not kill himself investigating. He would fucking not be that stupid.

Jo reeled in the rope as he came, relief mounting to feel his return. Still, it felt like it took forever. "The torch," she said, when she finally caught sight of him.

That stopped him on the wall dead, feeling his heart sink into his stomach.

"I..." Forgot. Well, he'd been distracted. "I didn't manage to get it." Stupid.

"Shit," Jo said, simply and effectively popping any remaining bubble. The thought of traversing back through the pitch black darkness was tough. It wasn't impossible; she could hold a sustained flame these days for... a while at least. And they were on the way back, so it's not like they were chancing things any further. If they could get out of this crack, at least.

"Just keep going. I have an idea. You're not hurt, are you?"

"No," he said in the tone of one who really felt like they should be.

That's a hell of a thought; he swallowed, flexed his fingers (now aching with the sustained climb up and down), and nodded, starting his slow way up the wall again.

"Good," Jo said. There was something in Evan's face, though it was mostly in shadow against the dull glow of the crystal, that spoke about fear and unprocessed fuckery. She knew that look pretty well, and she wasn't going to touch on it here, not until they were somewhere they could squat safely and hash out.

"Keep moving. The rest's going to be easy, alright? Don't think about anything, just climb."

"Umm," he responded: a distracted noise, more than a dismissive one, Evan already focused on that as squarely as he could be.

By the time he made it to the lip and hauled himself over he was shaking head to toe, some from strain, some from stress. If he sat down, he knew he was going to stay sat, so instead he went to immediately secure around the same stalagmite he had made use of before.

"Secure," he called down.

"Test it again!" Jo called. She didn't want to slip and fall into hell-water because Evan was feeling haunted, though... a part of her niggled that she was being too harsh. But no, this was survival. She could have been biting his head off, and she wasn't.

She waited until he'd given her that second confirmation, and then finally spidered her way up. Unlike him, she'd had time to rest, and all she carried extra was a couple of dagger-long lengths of crystal, already stowed in her backpack. The cave up here was much darker than the odd tunnel, and it took time for her eyes to adjust.

Still, everything was is the dimmest shades of aqua and deep shadows. She grimaced. "Let's untie and go." And then, clapping him on the shoulder, "you're not dead yet," she awarded him, "good work."

From here, it was a matter of sweating and straining to produce a wavering little flame in the palm of her hand. With nothing to burn, it went out constantly, or else singed her, but there was little other choice, wasn't there? Jo took point on the slow spiral up and out of the cave, assuming Evan would need time to process.

"Not just not dead." The crystals down his shirt had gone from necessary weight to nuisance: he'd pulled them out the moment she was up enough to secure herself, and he showed them to her on the way from shirt to stashing them in his pack. "I did, I didn't manage to lose these."

One was arm-long and thin, had been an awkward carry, but aside from the break at the bottom was pristine. The other was shorter, thicker, and spiraled in horrendously interesting fractal patterns. He couldn't look at that one too long, and stuffed it away first before hoisting his pack on.

It was pure smokescreen bravado: maybe if she cawed at the crystals she'd be too busy being pleased about those to notice how rattled he still was. He shouldered his pack with shaky focus and gratefully let her take point.

It managed to raise her spirits perfectly, at the least, enough so that when she cursed and the light went out and she had to suck on her fingers to soothe the burn, Jo didn't fly into a rage or an ultimately meltdowny cursing fit. She knew she couldn't afford one of those to begin with... but it would feel so good.

The money, though, that kept her mind occupied. "How are you with haggling?" she asked, part-ways up the long tunnel.

"Garbage." He was shook enough not to try and dissemble about it, or cover his ass, or save face. "I think I tried once. Not good."

He'd been watching her work the fire and cursing that his own skills seemed to be just absolutely wiped out by this place: he was sure, sure that he would have been able to help stabilize, help maintain, without her catching on. But wishes and horses and all that, and a fucking torch at the bottom of a glowing blue drop.

"You still good with a 60/40?" Jo asked, not being subtle at all. If Leslie was a man of his word, chances were good that that little crystal cauliflower would be worth a nice sum. She had to expect it had some kind of magical doodad properties.

It would be so easy right now to just sort of crumble and shrug because good lord, how little money seemed to matter right now. But her snide tone was clear and inflammatory and made it easy to summon up at least a little spark.

"Only if I'm getting the 60 on the ones I retrieved," he told her, picking his way through the flickering dark and its weird blue reflections. "I almost sort of drowned for those."

Jo looked over her shoulder, then stopped. "I warned you it was going to be dangerous, going in. What the fuck?"

His face closed up again, just sort of shut down. "The water was weird. I don't want to... I want to get out of here, okay?"