Pain settled into warmth, for even in a land far beyond the sun, Sláine could still feel the flowers grow.

If she’d felt up to checking her status screen, she was certain she’d see the uptick of numbers that represented her physical health. But this was more familiar, shallow breaths and the sound of her heartbeat, so she fell back on old comforts and the worn edge of past familiarity.

…And perhaps she wanted to put off the verbal dressing down she was certain to receive from Aria. While she didn’t understand why a being like them would be concerned over her health — after all, if the sum of Sláine existence could be boiled down into numbers, then shouldn’t it be clear how fruitless of a pursuit that was? — she also didn’t feel like being yelled at any more than necessary.

There would be yelling, she knew. Even though she could only hear Red’s side of the conversation, she could tell that the presence inside of her head wasn’t happy with the most recent developments. Neither was Red, to be frank, and her quietly muttered summary of the situation was filled with aspersions on Sláine’s character. Idiot, reckless, clueless, don’t blame me for this! Etcetera.

Sláine smiled. She knew it wasn’t fair to take pleasure in Red’s misfortune, but the part of her that was still ruffled about being compared to a scantily clad waitress enjoyed the sound. And it wasn’t like she understood much of the conversation, Red hunched over and speaking quietly to Aria.

“Yeah, well, neither do I, but either way you slice it, we can’t climb back up there, and there’s only one path out of this room. All we know that we’re deep and that it’s very, very dark.” A pause. "Yeah, I know, but — " She cut herself off, sighed. "Okay, fine. If you’re sure about this.”

There was a shuffling sound then, and Sláine could only assume that Red had turned around to face her. “We’re being told to stay put. Help is on its way.”

“You sound… less than pleased.”

“Of course I am!” Red snapped. “We’re waiting in a weird pitch-black room with no real idea how long it’s going to take for us to get pulled out of here.”

“…Didn’t you say there was a marker on us? One that would make it easier for us to be extracted?”

“Holy shit. You can actually pay attention sometimes?” A pause. “Yes, there is. But that only tells them our approximate coordinates; if they don’t know the path to us, they could be on the other side of the wall and we’d still be fucked. Dungeons don’t let you change their layout. Even things that should be able to break through these walls can’t. Administrator privileges, you know.”

Sláine didn’t know, but from Red’s tone, she didn’t think the other woman really expected her to.

“But still, we have a channel of communication with our allies, and they know generally where we are. Why do you seem so nervous?”

“Because this is weird!” Red hissed. “I’m not expecting you to know much about monster politics, but upstairs was a turf war between two different manifestations of the Swarm, and darkness isn’t the domain of either of them.”

“What do you mean?” Sláine shifted, turning her head towards Red’s faint silhouette. “Don’t bugs like the dark?”

“The Swarm wants you to see it,” she explained. “It wants you to feel overwhelmed and crowded in; it likes narrow tunnels filled with too much awful shit to deal with. The Tunnel Mites are designed to creep you out with how many there are, and the bits of Swarm that focus on rotting want you to fully experience all its twisted, festering, corrupted glory. Didn’t you think it was weird that we could see in windowless tunnels without any torches?”

“…A little,” Sláine admitted. “I thought that might have just been something you were doing.”

“No.”

There was silence beyond that, and even though Sláine should have learned her lesson last time… “What do you think is here, then?”

“…Well, it could just be that this is unworked territory.”

“And if it’s not? Who has dominion over the darkness?”

“Boundless,” Red replied, a quiet scrape of a noise. Sláine wrinkled her nose in thought.

“I don’t think I’ve heard of that Power.”

“That’s because it, and all the cults that worship it, are fine just chilling out in the Underdark and being spooky. The Dark is all about manipulation, control, and the fear of something far, far greater than you. They hate Arpege’s particular brand of bullshit because its ability to bind things to a more understandable (and fightable) form, so they don’t think it’s worthwhile to try to get a foothold here. Way different from Contagion, where it doesn’t matter if you can hypothetically fight all the nasty rotting bug things, they’re still gross.”

Sláine finally felt good enough to ease herself up, rubbing at her neck to check the state of the healing there. Most of the flowers fell off at the touch, revealing dark, unblemished skin. They’d done their work, she supposed. “Since you have abilities related to shadow, are you stronger here? In the dark?”

“Not in the way you might be thinking,” Red replied after a substantial pause. Sláine opened her mouth and then simply… closed it again, sensitive to the other woman’s position and reluctant to pry. She knew what it was like to have uncomfortable secrets. But if there was genuinely something dangerous about their situation, she couldn’t help come up with a plan if she didn’t know what Red could or could not do.

After an awkward silence, Sláine decided to respond with honestly. “I’m sorry.”

“Wait — what?”

Sláine couldn’t tell if Red’s abject shock at an apology coming from her was annoying or embarrassing. She decided it was a bit of both. “I did something that ended up putting you in a very uncomfortable situation, both immediately and in the future. I’m sorry. You’re right. And because of that, I want to… try to help figure a way out of the predicament I put you in, but I unfortunately I am lacking the sort of information I’d need to make an educated plan. Know that any questions I asked aren’t meant to pry into your personal matters, but are my attempts to help figure out how to proceed forward in the best way I can. I know I haven’t been very… communicative, after all.”

The silence stretched on so long that Sláine was starting to think she’d never get an answer, that the two of them would just sit down here in the dark until help (or something more ominous) came for them, but then she heard a rustle of fabric and the thunk of Red’s mask hitting her knees.

“Fuckin’ — ugh. Fine. Fine! It’s not like I can keep it a secret forever.” Red grumbled. “[ Fearmonger ]. That’s my [ Class ]. It’s custom, and it makes a lot of people really, really uncomfortable.”

Sláine did not have enough context about Arpege’s classification system to understand any cultural taboos that might be present for certain [ Classes ], but she did have enough basic understanding of words and their meanings to know that sounded pretty dubious. Fearmonger: a person who spreads fear. And in the context of everything she’d seen Red do…

"You derive your power from the Fears," Sláine said in surprise. "How? I saw you use those cubes — you get your abilities from the residue monsters leave behind?"

"Yes.” Despite the lack of judgment in Sláine’s tone, Red’s voice went taut as a wire. “Monsters embody things that are feared. Conquering them allows the Protocols to contain them, which is what that crystalline, cubic form of ‘loot’ represents. I’ve learned how to manipulate those remains and extract the abilities monsters used to inspire fear — frost, fire, poison, disease, and the like — and turn it on them.”

"So what you’re saying is… Protocols eat fear, and you use it to kill."

"That’s about the right of it."

"That's incredible!" Sláine exclaimed quite genuinely, and Red did not answer. She immediately thought that anyone who’d judged Red for abilities that were both clever and incredibly cool and useful, wow were closed-minded and not worth anyone’s consideration, but she supposed it was a far more complicated matter for the masked woman. “Is that the case with all of your shadow abilities, too? Are there shadow-cubes you’ve been using?”

“That’s… different,” she replied enigmatically. “Think of it like your — flower healing. It’s a — ha ha — racial bonus.”

Well, Sláine had already figured Red probably wasn’t human, but she owed the woman even more apology-flowers now and wasn’t intending to mess it up by asking more uncomfortable questions about where she’d come from.

“I see. Well. How about we figure out the safest way to bunker down here, so even if something strange does try to ambush us, they’ll have an absolute hell of a time with it?”

>> Start planning