Lyra Portal Challenge: Chapter #2 - Prompt 2, Terra Borealis

The world of Lyra, or at least the world as it featured imminently on the other side of the portal, was everything it was cracked up to be: even in the light of day, the temperatures were below freezing, and Jo was grateful for the gloves and gear that she'd kept since the bad days. The crunching of their feet as they stepped out into the clearing by the portal was musical, almost, the fine-grained crystals that seemed to replace snow giving an odd, glassy sound.

Jo swung her rifle up and aimed down its length before she'd fully cottoned on; a long, white tail flagged the sauntering away of a white, deer-like creature with a glowing tuft on its tail-tip, and rainbow-scintillating antlers. Its body was nearly transparent, like an ice sculpture, and Jo gave a little huff of intrigue as she watched to walk away. "If you're venison," she muttered, "you're probably not gonna taste too good."

She lowered her weapon and looked to Evan. "So, map-man. Where's the cave entrance from here?"

There's like a reflex that happens when someone who was a kid in a snowy landscape steps into a snowbank. They'd stepped through, and the first thing Evan did was scoop up a big handful of the white drifts to try and ball it up in between his gloves. By the time Jo looked his way, he was dropping the loose clump of tiny crystals, giving it a disappointed look.

"Crap snowball snow," he said, and brushed off his gloves to pull out his notebook. There was familiarity and comfort in the way his breath condensed in the air as he came up beside her, holding the map open. "South, looks like, south and then turn south-west when we find a creek. I wish he'd given us a better distance estimate -- I've got no idea whether this is supposed to be a five minute walk or a five hour one."

"Wouldn't be an adventure if someone put a road in," Jo said, but she was broadcasting sarcasm so loudly that Evan would probably have preferred to have ear protection. "Let's go. I don't want to find out if glass deer are edible."

"Might be like glass noodles, who knows," Evan countered, although half to himself, staring at the glowing hoof-marks the thing had left in its way. Jo's snark was strong in the air, and he was still unsettled.

He kept the map easily at hand, book tucked under his arm with a slip of paper marking the map page for easy access, and began to slog through the ostensible snow. The sound it made, the weight of it against his boots, all marked it as nothing like actual snow. The air smelled wonderful, and the expansiveness of the space felt good, but the blue light in the sky was something like eerie, and it kind of turned him around in a strange cycle of comfort-discomfort-comfort. He kept pace with Jo, feeling like he should be in front with the map, but privately conceding the point that... really, the map was only barely useful; still, he kept pace, whether out of ego or uncertainty.

It quickly became apparent that this was going to be more than a five-minute walk. It also became apparent that in this pristine wilderness, like most wildernesses, there was both an abundance of things to look at and very little to see. He tried for a bit to sketch out the strange crystalline structures interspersed amongst the woods, but he'd never been a good artist, much less with gloves on and while walking. 

When they crested the first slog of at hill at least he had a moment of respite: shading his eyes from that blue light with a hand on his forehead, he squinted off across the white-blue-purple landscape. "I think I see the creek," he pointed, "there?"

Jo paused when he did, unease that had been growing as they traveled now cresting inside her as they crested the rise. She went still; _very_ still, still in a way that looked like a prey response if anything. Evan had pointed, and Jo had turned into a statue. After a moment, she loosened up, sighing a gout of water vapour into the crisp air. "Right-- water. I thought I heard something."

She followed the way he was pointing, but the gun on her shoulder was loose on her arm, and she scanned the hill as she went right up until they hit the bank.

The 'snow' continued down below the water, which had iced over except for at the very center where the current was strong. Thanks to the blue light in the air, the ice seemed to glow a little, and little water plants flickered with their own bioluminescence just below the surface. Jo thought she saw fish of some kind lazily fighting against the current, and they didn't scatter as she leaned over the bank to get a better look.

She'd been sipping from a canteen as they walked, and now she cracked some ice to refill it. "Do we follow the water or cross it?" she asked, not liking her chances if they had to jump or ford across.

"Follow it, I think," he said, having judgily watched her just get some of the water to drink, like they weren't on an alien world. "It goes all the way to the cavern that the blacksmith suggested as an entrance point, though I don't know if this map suggests that it comes from the cave or just goes by it. We should probably boil that. Or something."

"I'm not a fucking child," she shot back, voice mild. "You look after yourself and I'll look after me." Though the words themselves were acerbic, she seemed almost pleased, and she slowly loosened up as they began to follow the trail. "Journaling doesn't seem like a bad idea, for work like this." So she had been watching him try to make sketches, it seemed. "Never know what will come in handy, later. Maybe someone will recognize something useful. You could do some work guiding them back to it."

He wrinkled his nose at the notion of her just casually catching some alient protozoa, but then again, the first hour he'd been here she'd poured rainbow goop down his throat and closed wounds that would have needed stitches. Magical anti-pathogenics had to be pretty good.

"If I manage to sketch anything down that's useful to anyone I'll be surprised. I'd already been meaning to annotate distances, at least," he admitted. "That was, what, you'd say maybe an hour or so?"

"Yeah, give or take a few minutes." The crunching of their feet throw drifts of fine crystal snow occupied Jo's attention for a while, and she found it hard to whip up a conversation. It felt wrong, somehow, in the face of the cold and isolation. Or... maybe it was a Canadian thing.

She eventually said, "if this works out, there's another place I think you should come take a visit to." However, she was tentative. This felt fragile, after all. "When you were a kid, did you ever feel like... you know that movie where they ride the dinosaurs and it's like a cowboy flick but also a prehistoric one?" It sounded ridiculous, but she shrugged that off. "It's a worthwhile trek, is all."

"Seriously?" That it's that that throws her to explain is kind of comical, after everything else, after talking about home, after that fucking letter that he still has no clue how to talk to her about -- okay, so maybe it kind of stacks that after all of that, it would be the absurd and humorous that she'd find it hard to square with. It's not without self-aware irony or sincerity that he asks, "Tell me there are actual dinosaurs to ride. I was definitely a dinosaur kid."

"They aren't _called_ dinosaurs, but they're pretty much the same thing." She was grinning, though the effect was somewhat muted by the hair obscuring her face as she watched her step. "Not as good as a solid truck, but it's _fun_ at least."

"I mean I'd argue that dinosaurs are cooler than trucks, by a long shot." It was interesting to see her so jumpy, so squirelly, even if at the moment that wasn't at the forefront. He didn't remember that in her before, but then, their association had never been anything but casual. It made some sense, with what she'd described. With what he'd recently so briefly passed through. That actually put a shiver in him that wasn't about the cold. "Fun, huh."

She cast him a measuring glance, still with that half-grin. "You can tell a truck where you want to go and it's guaranteed to listen," she said, perhaps cryptic or... maybe just hinting at past embarrassment. "Either way, renting them out doesn't come cheap, and the locals usually don't turn up their nose at work like this, either. It's a hell of a living."

She imagined that Evan had to be reeling at the idea of a career change. Whatever had come before, whoever he thought he'd be and whatever he thought he'd do, whoever he thought he'd _knew_... well, he had thought he'd had a future. Jo had not. That was probably going to colour things differently for the both of them.

They were steadily gaining ground, moving south-west as they were, working against the flow of the stream which wound its way sometimes at a trickle and sometimes in deep pools. The sky was steadily gaining a phosphorescent blue hue, when they could see it over the canopy of the alien evergreens. Jo, who had spent a lot of her time adventuring, could feel her pulse in her neck as they fought against the crunch of the snow and the grade of the hills. "How long did he say the portal was gonna last for again?" At this rate, doubling back looked like it was going to take a while.

If Jo was feeling the strain Evan definitely was. The weedy nerd had been known to camp out now and then, even take a bit of a hike occasionally, but this focused, elevation-eating schlep was not doing him any favours. He was sweating in his coat, gloves off to vent heat, breath heavy, feet already tired as he dragged through the weird ubiquitous blue of the place. He was cut out for brain work, not whatever this was.

"Uh? A week." It had taken him a second to parse her words. "I figure, ah, day out, day there, day back, safe margin." He took the opportunity to stop, look at his map, get some breath back. The segment along the stream was longer than the walk to the stream, but if it was proportional that was maybe two hours. Doable in a day. "If it looks like it's going to take more than a day to get there, we... just turn back. I guess." Unsatisfying. Annoying.

Jo was looking up as they paused, rolling one shoulder that looked like it was bothering her. She gave a low, non-committal noise, brows furrowing. Something glimmered in her hair, like dew on grass, or maybe the low glint of spider eyes caught in a sudden light... but she was watching the sky, which had begun to grow a more intense blue. She had to shade her eyes, now. "If we don't get to the cave in more than a day, we look like we might have to hike at night. I don't like what the sky's doing."

Taking a pause like this had enabled him to open up his senses again, in a way that an increasingly unpleasant slog up an eerie mountainside had not, and he followed the indication of her words up into the sky.

It doesn't, at first, look like a threat: in fact at first what it feels like is a lightness in his chest, a kind of variation on the relief-comfort of just being in a beautiful outdoors space. That's a strange reaction, and on a level he does know that. "It's beautiful," he notes, a little guarded, and then sighs, a hiss of exasperation between his teeth, before he frets, "I wish I had had time to do any research essentially at all. Did you? Did anyone have any sort of indication of if the sky turning colours is normal here?" He glances at her; the glitter in her hair is strange, and he wonders what strange bioluminescence she's caught in there.

"I was asking more about the caves than the surface," she admitted. "But everything I heard about this place was that it's peaceful. Cold and peaceful."

She through up her gloved hands, then, frustrated. "Let's just keep going. I don't want to get stuck out overnight. It's already cold, and when that big blue ball sets it's probably going to be a million degrees colder. It'd figure, people "forgot" to mention it's one of _those_ kind of places."

She turned from him, redoubling her pace for a few minutes even though it was ridiculous to try to maintain that kind of momentum. For the rest of the hike, she was in a poor mood indeed, though at least she slowed down enough for Evan to keep apace.

The entrance of the cave came upon them suddenly. Or rather, the end of the treeline ended abruptly with jagged outcroppings of crystals taller than either of them, thrusting up into the sky like some kind of petrified trees in their own right.

Jo stopped in her tracks, gawping at the way they caught the heady glow of the slowly setting sun, prisms casting all the colours of the rainbow almost too bright to look at if she happened to step into just the wrong place.

He almost bumped into her back when she stopped there, having been trudging his way up the slope with his eyes to the ground, tracking next step after next arduous step. It had him on his back foot, when he did finally look up and get blindsided by that light: that very, very weird sunset, with its greenish-to-purplish hues, refracted crazily from those crystals.

He ducked back, covering his eyes. "Sunglasses," he said, "good lord. If we're ever back here, sunglasses. I'm glad I don't get migraines." Pulling out the book, though, he began to jot down a few notes, coming round one more shadowed side of the entrance. "Christ, I don't have a good way to tell elevation gains and all that trudging is going to make the distance-for-time estimate all screwy." But there was new life in him, now that they had reached their apparent destination, and when he sat down on a chunk of fallen crystal to take stock and catch his breath and look around, he was brighter-eyed than he'd been for the last third of the journey. "This has got to be it, right?" he asked, looking down at his notebook. 

"Yeah," Jo said, though in a distracted, breathy kind of way. A wind had picked up at the edge of the trees, and something was making an eerie singing noise. A tinkling of windchimes, even, picking up here and going quiet, picking up again a few moments later. She gripped at her rifle strap, refusing to step out into the clearing until she spotted what was making the worst of it. There, flickering in the wind but tattered in a way that suggested it had been out here for a long, weathered time, were a few flags tied around one of the crystal behemoths near the base, and some smaller chunks of crystal dangling and chiming together.

It was as clear a sign as anything they'd yet seen here of any kind of habitation, and Jo pointed it out, but she was afraid to make a move forward. "Think that's from Leslie?" she asked.

He followed the point of her finger, squinting still, and said, "If we're in the right place? Definitely. He talked about this place opening up every year or so, right? Those look like they've been here a year at least."

Snapping the book open again, he pulled off one glove by way of shoving it into the opposite armpit, and fished out his pencil again. "Hold on, I want to get that down," he told her, working out the quickest, dirtiest sketch of those windchimes and taking in the totality of the yawning entrance as he did. Having his glove off that long made him shiver, though, standing still after a hike: the sweat was cooling under his coat, the ambient temperature's evening drop making that an even more unpleasant proposition now. Baring his teeth, he tucked the book and pencil away. 

"Caves have an ambient temperature all year round, right?" he reasoned, and alert but without fear he beelined for their destination, her own jumpiness passing him by. "I would bet money there's a campsite in there. I'd rather that than out here."

"Evan," Jo said, alarm spiking as he trounced out into the open. She waited, tense, as he yapped and bee-lined into the open... but nothing happened. She shivered too, but not because of the chill. It was a force of will that allowed her to unfreeze from the treeline and follow him to the flags, to the cave entrance and the hypothetical camping space within, and even then, she all but skittered across the frozen snow, unable to make herself move in a straight line. She looked faintly ridiculous, but it fed her brainworms enough that she could make it to the entrance without bolting outright, even if her heart was hammering and her brow was now freezing with a sweat that had managed to break across her scalp and neck.

She gave him such a glare as they came upon the entrance that she hoped he felt lazer holes burning in the side of his face. He seemed busy investigating, though, so she gave him the win. Not far from the entrance of the cave, in a place where some of thoes huge crystals were refracting the sunset into a strange, dual-toned green-and-purple hued light, the ground looked like it had been cleared of the worst of the snow crystals, and there was a little chopped wood left. Not a lot, but enough to show that this place had been used for shelter. A ring of deformed crystals marked a campfire spot, though the contents had long since been brushed out.

Huh.

Jo did not retract her judgement of Evan completely; he was still a dangerously naive dipshit in her mind when it came to assessing threats... but he'd reasoned out exactly what he'd been looking for. That wasn't _all_ bad.

"I guess we don't have to turn back," she said, relief swelling just enough to take the worst of the tension off.

He turned and grinned at her pertly, feeling very smug for his good guess, though the expression faltered a little seeing just how crabbed up she was. "Uh, best of all possible options, honestly. Yeah. Here tonight, and then we have a handy basecamp to go forward from, and it looks like we won't have to share the space." Safety in numbers was something he only really looked for when he knew the rest of said numbers.

It would likely be warmer deeper in the cave, but even this far in, it was already noticably better. The wind was fully cut off here and there was enough of a pinch at the mouth of the cave that the outdoors ambient didn't seem to touch it, though they could still see a small patch of sky from where they were. He went to that circle of crystals and soot, the campfire's corpse, and groaned deeply as he dropped his satchel and pack. 

"Thank god," he said, sitting down hard and immediately rifling in his pack for the shitty little provisions he'd stashed. In the space after the hike, he had more time to think, to digest the landscape, the strangeness of the mountain face they had just entered. His legs hurt, his feet hurt, everything felt heavy. Leaning back against a tall pillar of crystal he closed his eyes for a moment. "Is this... is this kind of thing just what you do with your days now? I am beat. Absolutely beat."

He wasn't alone for too long, though Jo paced a little, looking around the little camp site and then deeper into the cave. Something about that dark space beyond the little patch of odd light had the hairs on the back of her neck prickling fiercely, and she found herself drawn to the darkness in a way that was both terrifying and morbidly compelling. "Tomorrow," she muttered, nearly silent, before she settled down across from Evan and unslung her rifle, and then her pack.

"Depends on the day. If it's been a bad week, I take any work I can find. Sometimes it's a big pay-off though, and I loaf around back around the inn. Not too bad for... for a contractor, I guess. A lot of people show up by the inn, stay for a week or two, then they find a place in town and I don't see much from them again."

As she spoke, she worked steadily to get her gloves off, then to tie her hair back carefully so that she could regard the campfire ring. She gave a huff at the black mark, and brought over one of the branches. It was dry, but it was big, unlikely to light on its own. That didn't seem to deter her. she dropped it into the center of the ring, and said, "sit back. I'm gonna light it up."

"Sure." He obeyed, scooting away from the campfire, but that piqued his interest in a really specific way. Shrugging out of the very outer layer of his hiking wear, he hung some of it up on a crystal, but never took his eyes off of what she was up to. He felt for whatever it was she was doing, felt outward with his esoteric senses, but something about this place -- something here was dampening that set of senses. It gave him pause, so instead he watched.

For her part, Jo settled on her knees, palms coming together on the blackened ground within the circle just shy of the log. She closed her eyes, breathing steadying in a way that looked forced. Grimacing with distaste, she murmured something subvocally, and then leaned forward, almost blowing on the log as though encouraging the kindling that didn't exist below it. Only, it did, or at least it did exist for what seemed like a moment. Something had come out of her mouth, along with her breath, something undefineable that looked and sounded and felt twisty, like a nail on a chalkboard or a sharp whiff of astringency on rot, though the correct sense was hard to match up. Along with that, a jumbled network of fine black lines sprouted up under the log and flashed a searing white, immediately dying down to an angry red where they cut into the log and erupted, moments later, in very normal flame.

She leaned back in a hurry as the rest of the log caught, and glared at it until it proved it was going to stay lit. A bead of sweat rolled down her cheek, and she seemed to swallow back something that didn't sit well with her.

And then she leaned back more naturally, something like relief settling over her. "There, that's done. What do you say about food?"

He held up the canvas-wrapped little package of rations he'd fished out of his bag. "If we didn't end up getting the same stuff, I'll trade you some of mine for some of yours." 

Going about the task of unwrapping, he found heavy bread, dried something that looked vaguely date-shaped, and a palm-sized rectangle of something speckled brown and whitish that smelled like almonds or walnuts. Even as he sorted through the rations, though, he was preoccupied. Her summoning of fire... nothing about that had looked familiar. Nothing like what he knew how to do. "How did you learn to do that?" he asked, as he tried to work the dense loaf into two pieces.

Jo was working out her own food kit while he chatted, and she rolled a shoulder noncommittaly, shrugging. "Sort of happened to me after I got here," she said. "It gets to everyone eventually. I guess it's something about the magic here, and I have no idea what it matches to because I don't know shit about magic, but most people get something sort of..." she paused, thinking about it. "Sort of Captain Planet. It's different for everyone. But about a quarter of the people I met get something with fire, some way or another."

Out came what looked like a package of a little powder, dumped into a pot, which she liberally added alien-nematode water to before pulling out what turned out to be a singled little metal tripod. The pot went on over the log, and she nodded to herself with satisfaction for a job well set up.

Offering her half of the bread loaf (she hadn't agreed to the trade but at this point he was just assuming), he frowned in thought.

"We are talking, um, classic four-elements stuff? That's..." Serendipitous? Telling? What kind of setup would be granting random humans the kind of thing he thought could only be born into? He'd been studying the esoteric before breaching the front, but none of it had been as blatant as whispering out fire. And anyways, it looked different than the innate kind. Very different. He gave her a slightly squint-eyed look along with the bread. " 'Some way or another'?"

She accepted the bread without a thank-you, though she cast a look at her pot, in which the dried stuff was slowly beginning to soak and warm. She brought out a spoon to stir it, looking at him meaningfully; she'd be fair.

"I think it has something to do with the portals?" she said, shrugging again. "I'm no expert, but... shit, what was it I heard? Something about uh, elemental fluctuations or something. Things back around where we were, around the inn, get out of whack without those fluctuations, and people especially seem to get the worst of it. I don't know what I _did_, exactly, but one day _fire_, and now I have to be careful with it." She'd quirked another grin, looking a little ghoulish in the dancing light with her gaunt face and her intense gaze, but she didn't mean anything by it. "So if you ever want to see someone ride a dinosaur and throw a couple of fireballs, you know who to call."

"Sure, Luigi. Something to ask about when we get back, I guess," he deflected slightly, from his own persistent consternation on the subject. "I'll add it to the list."

He didn't ask does it happen to everybody; he didn't want to open that kettle of fish, or give her the idea that he was too invested in the question. It wasn't often he had to dance around things like this, but every part of the current context was fucky and strange and he erred on the side of a slightly mincing caution. He crammed a mouthful of bread down, a utilitarian chew of half-leavened, dry crumb, and was glad of it at least. She had big gremlin energy across the fire, there, which he just chalked up to her general gauntness and looming demeanor, which he was by no means yet used to but nonetheless accepted.

The sky outside had darkened further, except for the weird glow: more diffuse than the shadow-casting sunlight, from what he could tell, but at least they weren't getting full-fledged sunset rainbows cast through crystals. A thought occurred. "Have you looked at the stars on any of these worlds?"

"Yeah, I mean, I'm not blind." She could see where he was leading, though, and she stirred her pot, checking the soup that was beginning to bubble. After a few minutes of idle chatter, it looked like it would be ready to go. Digging out a cup from her pack, she murmured something to herself, seemed to psych herself up before she took the hot pot directly off the tripod, tipping about half into the cup to pass over. "It's hot," she said, setting the pot on the ground and shaking her hand. No blisters, no burn marks, but she still wasn't used to circumventing that hard-wiring.

"You want to go back out after supper?"

It was deeply weird to see another person able to handle something hot like that, openly and without hiding it, who wasn't part of his family. He stared -- tried to stop himself staring -- figured actually it made perfect sense to stare. He wondered if he should pantomime the thing being too hot for him to touch, reached out with half a thought to test the heat.

And pulled back his fingers with a yelp, shaking his fingers. "That is hot." What the fuck. What the actual fuck. It shouldn't have hurt. He'd assumed that the wax burns had been because of the supernatural origin of how they'd happened, but he felt a coldness in his gut, a fear he didn't even want to look at. 

She'd said something. "Sorry, what?"

The look Evan received for his dumb experiment made Jo's earlier scathing glares seem like beautific smiles. "Told you," she said, seizing the opportunity while it was fresh. She shrugged, broke off some shared bread and dipped it in the soup, her exasperation melting away in the face of grim amusement. "You wanted to go look at the stars. We could do that; it's not like anyone's out there waiting to take our stuff when we leave the cave."

"I--" He was shook and rapidly becoming aware that it was not normal to be as shook as he was by something so simple as touching a fucking hot pot and having it hurt. He had to rally. "Right. I did. I did. I thought it might tell us something." Why had it hurt? "Look for any familiar constellations, maybe."

She snorted, seeing his fluster and attributing it to the last few days, and to his general constitution. Nerds could be fucking stupid, she knew, as she was no exception. "If we see any familiar constellations, it's going to be coincidence. We're not in Kansas anymore."

It wasn't entirely uncommon for Evan to have two concurrent trains of thought running at once, and right now both were trying to run full speed. Had the wax burns had a wider effect? Was he suddenly susceptible to all kinds of burns? "That would tell us something too, though. Shit, I wish I had more than just noodled around with astronomy. I'm sure there'd be some way to tell if we're even in the same..." He looked around. What a stupid thought, said aloud, but he refused to back off. "Same galaxy. I don't know."

"Same dimension?" Jo asked, thinking he was reaching for something further. She could understand his consternation. She'd had a solid week of melt-down after she had realized that she didn't have to put her back to the wall every second of every day. She still didn't know how she felt, unmoored from home, even the very _worst_ of home, without any way of going back to 'normal'. She was still figuring out what normal was supposed to be. Maybe it could be checking out the stars and figuring out how to chart them... but her mind was often set on the here and now, on the ground where she could make tangible changes.

"Maybe there's a few astronomers back at the inn," she said. "It wouldn't hurt to do some charting, but don't spend all night at it. We need to be fresh for tomorrow." She tested the pot, found it growing cool enough to handle without pouring magic into it, and began going at her supper in earnest. "We get our feet under us first before we get into the heady stuff, okay?"

"Yeah, no, I know," he said, slow to claim his own cup of soup, but reminded of the bread he went to work on it again. Everything felt off-kilter and had since he'd crossed the front, and he was desperately trying to find some balance. Frustration bubbled in his chest.  He really had nothing but his mind here, and his mind was grasping for anything that might give him an iota of control, or understanding. It was stupid. He could see it. He couldn't stop. "I know, it probably won't even be that useful, not without a reference point. Academic shit. I'm still going to look," he added, a little sullen. Finally he took his soup, drinking the salty rehydrated brew out of the cup with purpose and scraping the inside with his bread crusts when it got low.

They shared the rest of their supper in that same sullen silence, as Jo wasn't going to argue. She'd wondered what Ryan saw in Evan, when they'd talked about it. She hadn't realized _how_ much Ryan had been pining until after... until that stupid note fell into her belonging, but she'd known for a while. He looked good, as far as the category of weedy nerd went, but that wasn't really Jo's type, and she guessed she hadn't really had a chance to see Evan at his brightest. It had to be whatever was going on under the dome. 

She sighed to herself, wishing not for the first time that it was Ryan across the fire from her. Thinking of it, she poured a little of her soup into the hungry flames. "Rest well, buddy," she murmured. She wished she had something to drink, but besides the piss-beer crisis back at the Inn, she wouldn't let herself get drunk while out in the wilderness like this in the first place.

Supper done, she started clearing space for bedrolls. "This isn't one of the worst places to sleep," she said, tone rebalanced, generally calmer than before. "At least while on the road. I think you'll get to liking it, too." Big leap there, but if Evan was gunked up in Academic Shit, he wasn't going to be focusing on the present. That worried her.

Stuck in his own shit, he fully missed her little honouring-of-the-dead. He'd been trying to feel the fire's presence in that deeper way than just the heat and failing, and after that had scrabbled out his notebook again and begun annotating. It was one part travelogue, two parts scientific observations, and one part diary, though at the very least for the personal notes he was using the same cipher he'd made when he was a kid in order to keep Cass from reading his shit. It was hardly foolproof but it'd put off the stupid and the uninvested.

"What?" He looked up. She was dead on, though he didn't know it: gunked up deep with academic bullshit, half because it was a familiar retreat in the face of unpredictability. He was not ready to let go of that retreat. Hell, he was clinging to it like a safety blanket. Parsing her words, he looked around, incredulous. "I mean if you say so. I like camping well enough but I never really got into the backcountry stuff." 

He stood then, train of thought interrupted enough that he just jumped on the next train instead. "I'm going to go check out the stars," he told her, shrugging on his big coat and mittens again, trying to snuggle the heat into himself.

"Yeah," she said, more acknowledgement than agreement. However, it wasn't long before she felt the urge to suit up and follow him.

The entrance of the cave was by no means completely dark by the time they made it back out into the open, but the quality of the light had changed significantly. The sun had set, casting oddly familiar pinks and reds onto the few clouds above in the facr distance, near the horizon. Above them, it was clear, but only a few pointed stars had begun to poke out on the opposite horizon. What really caught the attention was the wending bands of green and pink light that seemed to spark and run along the surface of the crystal snow.

Jo stopped in her tracks, watching with mesmerized terror. It wasn't the light itself, but the way that it moved and faded that scared her. _This_ reminded her of home, of the _bad_ part of her experience with it. This reminded her of similar meandering bands of shadow and ripples of heat that had very nearly killed her, once upon a time.

She hissed to Evan and patted his arm. "Bad," she said, pointing, unable to get anything else out past her frozen jaw and panic.

He had already been out a minute or two before she and her terror rolled up behind him. The light show had derailed his intentions to chart stars, and moreover the light show wasn't the only show: the moon had risen, accounting for some of that light, huge and weirdly indigo with the reflected blue of the sun. It hung in the sky like an omen, like a huge ultraviolet stoplight, and Evan had been stilled in his tracks staring at its unfamiliar face, staring at the winding tracks of light on the ground below.

It was beautiful. It was genuinely incredible to see, and even if it was unsettling he felt light in his chest, in his limbs, like gravity was relaxing. Was that a part of this unknown phenomenon? He was trying to decide, standing just outside the lip of the cave, when Jo came up on him like the thing from the Grudge all hissing and pawing. He started, and then stared at her, her terror momentarily trying to jump to him.

"You know what this is? What is it?"

"Dunno," she breathed, taking a step back. Whatever it was, if it got him instead of her, that would be the trick of it. She hadn't done this to Ryan, but then Ryan was a different case altogether. Still, the guilt that pushed back against her terror kept her from bolting, and so she remained a step behind.

Her voice was hushed. "Doesn't look the same... entirely but..." she paused, back of her mind scrabbling with remembered pain and fear, "the front... the bad side... that."

"Jesus." His mind shuffled this new piece in, tried to make sense of it, even as his heart rate jacked itself right up. He'd been tempted by it. He'd felt a weird pull to step out into it, which suddenly felt like a subtle manipulation rather than the buoying of a curious mind, and that chilled him to the bone.

He backed off, following her lead, back towards their cave camping spot. "It's a whole different world," he spoke low and fast, "that hardly makes sense unless it's connected to the -- whatever the portals are."

Jo, unable to keep from watching the perceived danger, settled into a squat at the entrance of the cave, just in the line of the shadow that fell where the crystal blocked the light of the moon. "Dunno," she said again. She couldn't believe that that Leslie man would be so prosaic about the journey to fetch more crystals unless he had never encountered something as dire as what Jo had. And someone, probably Leslie, had camped here before.

So, unless she was woefully, fatally wrong, these couldn't be the same terrors, could they?

She waited, and watched for a while. The painful, itching tingle that had caught her the last time she had encountered something like this simply _wasn't happening_, and she began to realize this consciously when the worst of her panic had settled. Over her shoulder, she said, "maybe I'm wrong." She was certain, now. Mostly.

Unwilling to dive in when she'd seemed so sure, he'd hunkered down too -- maybe less tight-wound than her but with the same care. That book had come out, though, and he had not wasted the time watching idly. The moon, the strange glowing shifting upward-drawn pillars of neon light, he got them down as well as he could, annotated with Jo's concerns. Or at least as much as she seemed able to say; he was not well-versed in trauma responses but the way she was almost unable to articulate was telling in its own way.

If he had been less shook himself, he might have been clever enough to offer a kind word, some manner of comfort. As it was he was hunting himself for the comfort of knowledge. "How are they the same?" he asked. "How are they different?"

Thinking about the bad ones had her clenching up again, so Jo, eyes rooted on these dancing pillars of light, eventually said, "these don't... _feel_ bad. Don't feel like..." she shivered. "They're not coming after us. They're sort of staying in the same place, I guess."

She shifted a little, relieving the discomfort that was threatening at a cramp from her frozen urge to hide. "They look like northern lights, just... just _low_."

Their breath was puffing in clouds in front of them, and Evan was resisting the urge to try and heat himself up from the inside. He was frowning deeply, staring out and kind of avoiding looking at her. She sounded shook, but more human than when she'd first scuttled out after him. 

"Yeah," he agreed. "Suppose it might be safe if I just don't touch the... ribbons?" Then, "it's a fascinating phenomenon."

"Kind of beautiful," she agreed, voice still low and uncertain. "Maybe..." she hazarded a guess, "maybe this whole place's thing is light. In different ways, I mean." She didn't have her ear down to the local gossip very well, but she'd heard the rudimentary ideas of balance being important to the whole of Paperlandia. And it had been hot back at the inn. Maybe this cold comfort was just the thing, somehow.

She settled into a cross-legged seat to watch the play of the ribbons across the clearing, noting that they didn't seem to do so well in among the trees. She was relaxing, little by little. "What do _you_ think?"

He settled into a kneel, giving her a long look. The bounce-light off of the faux-snow from all of that incandescence made them both strange, made pits of their eyes. What did he think? I think I'm out of my depth. I think I have no fucking clue what's happening and all of this is just desperately trying to scrape together data so I feel like I'm doing something. I think I'm about one bad conversation away from crying at all times. I think guilt is eating my insides but I can't look at it. I think I'm scared.

He looked back out at the ribbons. "I really have no useful point of reference to compare to," he admitted. Looked up at that huge, looming moon. Chewed the inside of his bottom lip, as he had been all day. "If it's some kind of aurora phenomenon, it can't be by way of the same mechanics as the borealis. That much solar radiation not already caught by the atmosphere would have already long since fried us." He paused, mouth thinning. "I wonder if it has somethig to do with all that powdered crystal. There's... I've been seeing bits of bioluminescence all day. Maybe something with one of those, or some interaction between the two." He paused. "I want to look at it more closely." A dumb impulse, but he couldn't help himself.

Jo cast him a serious look, lips thinning. It had been enough time that she wasn't convinced that these things were a terrible danger, but that didn't mean anything. "If you're hurt, there's not a lot we can do from here, but I packed some more of that wax. Be careful."

Wax gave him a jolt, sent a reflexive ache through the burns still healing on his hands and face -- but that's not what she meant, is it, he talked himself down, she meant that awful rainbow nonsense. He nodded, huffing a breath out in a cloud to float away with the breeze, and tucked the book back in his satchel's easy-access front pocket.

The fact that the cave has kept them warmer is apparent even in the small heat gradient between the sheltered mouth of the cave, and the wind as it had gotten dark was bitter and melodious with strange, distant tones. He flipped his hood up and sallied forth, careful to pick a trajectory between a couple of those taller-than-a-person ribbons of light, their shifting thankfully slow enough that he could compensate for their movement. They came and went, flaring high and dying out in places, so very much like northern lights that he found himself hypnotized, the lightness in his chest trickling back. It felt good, it felt like relief, it felt...

He made his way along the rockface, to a few scrubby alien trees, his hand on the stone and then holding tight to the plant. It felt ungrounding. He had turned slightly out of sight of the mouth of the cave in order to stick close to the rock face, and he stopped where he was, taking stock. The air crackled with cold, or maybe with some subperceptual phenomena from the aura itself -- hadn't they found the aurora borealis back home made noise? The nearest streamers were far enough from him that he felt safe leaning in, straining to hear. It was cold, standing still, and without even thinking about it he took a moment to try and summon up his internal fires, the stash of heat that kept him comfortable even in Alberta winters.

Two things happened. One he didn't notice at first. The second was that the fire was not there and he did not get warm and in fact something else seemed to swell where his fire had been, running cool through his veins in that horrible way a cold saline drip would. He gasped, horrified and scrambling to pull harder -- maybe where they were was making it worse? -- and all that did was spring cold sweat to the surface of him, swell his tear ducts, make him dizzy. 

The second thing was that his feet left the ground, and when he did notice that he yelled alarm, clinging hard to the tree.

Jo watched him strike out to investigate, lower lip between her teeth with worry as he got closer to, but thankfully evaded touching the lights. What really alarmed her was that he got slightly out of view of the cave mouth, and she got back up, ready to follow after... though she was loathe to do so. She still felt a primal tug of fear at the thought of getting caught up in those ribbons, even though they weren't the same kind of malicious dangers she'd experienced before.

She regretted dawdling almost immediately as she heard Evan yell, and fear or no, she rushed out to see him beginning to _float away_. "What the fuck!" She yelled, running to grab him. She was having terrible visions of Evan being levitated into the moon, alien abduction style, and that gave her an awful case of the heebie jeebies.

By the time she got him, got ahold of him, whatever it was seemed to be returning him to the grasp of gravity. Reflexively, he had stopped his terrified attempt to find his powers, though he didn't quite put together just then that that's when he stopped getting pulled upwards: at that point he was grabbing back, hands tight around Jo's forearms. His landing was not graceful but thankfully not hard, and scrambled to get his feet back under him.

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck." Feeling like an idiot but moreover a very scared idiot, he was beelining for the cave again, dancing around the edges of licks of aurora that came and went. "Fuck this, fuck all of this, just, fuck."

Jo followed after, heart rabbiting away for the umpteenth time today. She shivered with distress when they reached the thankfully still burbling fire, and she sat with her back to it to keep an eye on the mouth of the cave. "What the fuck happened?" she asked, but only when she'd got her breath back.

"I don't know!" He'd been working so fucking hard today to keep his bearing practical, dispassionate, capable, and it was all coming down around him. His head hurt, there was pressure behind his eyes. He grabbed hold of crystals as he stomped back to their campsite, as if afraid he would start floating again. As if nothing, actually -- he was afraid of that. "I have no idea! Nothing about any of this makes sense, I can't make any fucking sense of it! I don't know, Jo, I floated. For all I know the moon here eats people, or gravity goes upside down at night, because both of those make about as much sense of any of this shit!"

The words were angry but the tone was -- well, angry too, but absolutely torn up. He was no good to anyone if he didn't understand. And he didn't. At all. He threw his satchel to the ground, knowing it looked like a temper tantrum, but deeply shook.

Jo didn't say anything while he ranted, didn't react much when he threw down his supplies. She could understand, and like a child touching a hot stove, maybe Evan got it a little, too. But then again, he'd willingly turned around and tried to get inside the front back home, so her trust in him was still shaky at best.

She waited a few minutes, seeing if he could get out of it himself. In the meantime, watching the cave entrance, she was a little relieved that no dancing lights followed them, and no sudden, awful changes in gravity shifted about. For what it was worth, the cave seemed safe enough for now. "I have your back," she muttered, not willing to go off guard until he was done freaking out.

He seemed done at least the overt part of freaking out. Evan was not naturally a creature of violent tempers, and tended towards the sulk rather than the tantrum; that had been the worst of it, and he'd plonked down by the fire a moment later, covering his face with his hands and trying not to cry.

When he'd taken his palms away from rubbing his eyes, there was a faint, shiny smear of wax on each. Jo spoke before he had time to think about that.

"You don't know what's going on either, though, do you," he asked, plain, subdued.

"Doesn't matter," she said, though she wasn't facing him, had missed the odd residue and his experience of it completely. "Sometimes," she here, she paused, for she was obviously picking her words. "Sometimes _knowing_ is what gets you. Sometimes having to know is worse than having something horrible happen to you, and just trying to survive. And... you're okay. You didn't float away."

This part, she'd done before. Many times. Ryan had often needed talking down and reasoning out, because unlike Evan, Ryan _had_ been prone towards vitriol when he was scared or sad or worse. And Jo was, too. But he'd done the same for her, and it had been a dynamic that had kept them alive up until she'd been wrenched away and force to fend for herself.

So she said, "you're not dead yet. Hold onto that. And we know now don't fucking go out of the caves at night."

"It's a datapoint at least," he acknowledged flatly.

She was being kind. He could recognize that. Maybe it was a pragmatic kindness, but it still reached him as what it was and it still hit him in a place. He picked at the wax, which was cooling opaque white, peeling it off and rolling it compulsively between his fingers. Everything was wrong and he felt paralyzed. Even after almost floating into the sky, the urge to creep out and experiment and figure out the what and the why was still chewing at a part of his soul.

Stupid. Just the epitome of stupidity. He didn't say to her that the only thing he'd ever really been good at was knowing, because he got the sense she was talking about something very specific, and moreover, it was embarrassing. Still, the fact remained: if he didn't know, what good was he?

Pulling the cards out of his satchel, he drew them from their box and began shuffling them nervously. "I assume this is going to continue to be some fantsay novel knockoff where we are trading off keeping watch and sleeping."

"I think..." Jo watched him playing with his cards, the same cards he'd run back for when more crap had come pouring out of their portal, and she wondered about him. He was rattled, even if he wasn't freaking out. She shook her head. "I think we should start back tomorrow. We shouldn't go down into the caves."

That caught him sideways, and he twisted to give her a full-on look, hands stilling. "After hiking all day to get here? Not a chance. We at least have to look."

"What happens if gravity fucks up again? Or if something else happens that we weren't ready for? No," she said, a little angry at his immediate protestation. "The crystals can wait. Pay day can wait. If one of us gets hurt, _really_ hurt, we're completely fucked."

It was logic that was hard to argue with, but Evan was digging his heels in. Stupid, again, but the idea of backtracking without even trying was like sandpaper on his soul. He grimaced, knowing it, and still he said, "so we turn back the moment something looks hinky. We move carefully. I want to at least look."

She turned, finally, stared at him to gauge his sincerity. The fervour in his eyes almost made her double down on dragging them both back to the safety of the other side of the portal, but she took pity. She didn't know _why_ she took pity. Evan's thinking was going to get them both killed, only he didn't know it yet. But... she had her suspicions that if they made it out of this alive, maybe it would give him enough grounding to try something like this again.

So she turned to face him, knees up and arms around them, and she said, "okay, tell me something, and be honest. What happens if one of us falls, or gets knocked unconscious, and the other one has to drag us both out of here? What's your plan for that?"

She put both of her hands up, forestalling an immediate answer. "Don't tell me right now. Sleep on it. I have to think about it, is all, okay?"

Frowning, he'd been about to open his mouth an answer, but when she backed off, so did he. His hands went back to the busy motions of shuffling, and he nodded. "Yeah. No. That's smart. I'll think on it."

A card fell from the deck and he looked at it thoughtfully, put it aside with his journal, went back to shuffling. He was in no mood to sleep yet, but he could feel exhaustion at least trying to battle back against the horrors of adrenaline, and for a moment, in the absence of other things to pick at, he had an up-surge of the desire to ask Jo about that note, that godawful painful love letter. He stared at her, a bit opaque. Opened his mouth. Changed course before the words made it out.

"Do you usually do this alone?"

Jo sighed and nodded, scrubbed strands of hair from her face with both her hands as she nestled her head between her arms. She finished the gesture to look at him again, tired. Just tired. "Yeah."

The silence lingered, and she felt the need to break it. "I don't _like_ it. I never did. It's just what I had to do to get by."

There was a lot wrapped up in that, he thought, with the way she slumped. He tried to put himself in her shoes. It would be better and worse to be alone: like a group project, someone else to share the load, but someone else to compensate for if they can't carry their weight. He did understand the impulse towards going it alone, although hers seemed to come from a different place.

He folded his hands around the deck, tapping it tidy and tucking it back into its box for now. "Well, you don't have to now," was the best thing he could think to offer. "This is all nonsense, but I'll find a way to carry my share." Despite his ignorance. Despite his new and very private handicap. Despite everything.

"It's better than living off of begging," she said, sounding a lot smaller than usual. "But it's dangerous. You know it now." She huffed. "Fuck, I wish I had a drink."

"I wouldn't say no to a drink just now either," he said, finding it was true and feeling a little bleak about it. "And not a bad watered down Molsen, either." The deck put aside, he checks the card that fell, taking a moment on it and making a note in his notebook before returning it to its fellows. His mind is chugging along. He's never had to grapple with the prospect of destitution, either, and he does not love it; it says something that Jo had been ready to turn around, though, rather than carry on into danger. Maybe there was only so far a person could fall in that overworld.

He looked across at her again. "You said people usually go into town after staying at the inn for a while. Would that be cheaper? If we shared the expense?" He's a student; roommates are a matter of course.

She'd started pulling off her boots, considering settling for the night. Now she paused. "I don't know... honestly, it's probably not as good as the inn. That elf guy does it all out of charity. The rest of town, I didn't start asking. It's..." Town was further away from the portal home, adding another couple of hours of walk. Jo hadn't wanted to expend the extra time.

"It's something to think about, though. Let's get through this job first."

"Of course." He rubbed his hand over his face again, feeling the faint waxy residue he absolutely did not want to think about, and then shook his head to rid himself of it. "I mean, whatever works; I haven't had a chance to look around yet."

Get through this first. Get through this first without dying in a cave or getting sucked up into the night sky. And he'd never even gotten to jot down what stars he could see. "Do you want to sleep first? Are we even keeping watches?"

"Yeah, I got it." She was already in her sleeping roll, though, her outermost layers slumped beside her. The truth was, she never slept well. she didn't anticipate sleeping well now, either. Her rifle, he'd note, was close at hand.

It always was -- he had noticed, and was kind of trying not to think too hard about it. A prudent security measure? Sure. He did give the old squint-eye to her climbing into bed, saying, "sure," entirely skeptical.

But he followed suit, pulling out the bag he'd brought, a natty secondhand thing that smelled of someone else's sweat. This was going to be an awful night's sleep.