Digging a hole you might not get out of

[evantuality]

CHARACTERS: Chihiro, Urahara and Evan
DATE: Early October, same time as the fracking fields event.
WARNINGS: they may not know what they're doing.
SUMMARY: Someone's got to go hunting for those missing records.


The idea of ALASTAIR having been on this planet before was more than enough to fascinate Evan. It didn't strictly shock him to find out that the other half of this story was that ALASTAIR had lost their records of the planet; more and more, the organization's, well, lack of organization was failing to shock him.

Good thing they had such dedicated recruits to clean up the mess.

In all honesty, Evan felt ill-equipped for most of what was coming down the pipes since they'd arrived. The train had been a near-disaster, and his attempts to casually interrogate townsfolk had ended in terrible embarrassment for him. Although at three missions in to his tenure with the team Evan was used to having to stretch his boundaries in order to be useful, it was hard not to feel the pinch of it. When the bounty had gone up to look for the records, therefore, he had jumped at the chance, and then wisdom had dictated finding a few other intrepid searchers to tag along for backup and extra eyes.

That is how he's found himself in the depths of the mines with a small child and a man in a hat.

Evan has taken a spot at the fore of the group, mainly for the sake of light. Eschewing lanterns, he's simply summoned a lick of flame to carry on behind him, and in the still, dusty air of the mines the light is steady and doesn't flicker. They've descended several levels down, following the directions of the coordinates ALASTAIR had pinpointed. They're ambiguous enough to require some hunting, but this far down, they've got to be close, right?

Evan's carrying on with an eye for anything unusual ahead of them when the first shiver hits the ground. It's a tremor barely fit to make jello quiver, but in the silence and the thick atmosphere down here it's all too apparent.

He glances behind him, to Urahara and Chihiro. "Did you feel that--?"

Comments

[predomination]

Urahara places a hand on the wall as bits of dirt and all assorted shake free of the ceiling and come to land on his shoulders and hat, prompting him to remove it briefly to shake it clean. "An Earthquake, I think." Having lived in Japan for a hundred years, earthquakes are no more than a nuisance to him, for the most part.

Still, not something one wants to happen while you're presently stuck underground, especially when he avoided the cave-ins back on the Zeta-12. Rey would never let him hear the end of it if Mr. I'm Comfortable Underground pressed his luck too hard.

"They must not be too worried about us being caught up in the middle of what they're doing to the planet."

[onethousen]

Chihiro agrees with Urahara's assessment, likewise having braced herself with her legs set apart, knees bent, and arms held out to her sides. Her lips twitch down into a frown, shoulders hunching as she looks upward. They're down enough levels she can imagine all the dirt and rock and world overhead, and how itty bitty and tiny there were in comparison.

A small quiver was thankfully just a small quiver. She's content to let it be little more than that.

"I don't think they're even worried about being caught up in what they're doing to the planet." She straightens her shoulders, peering past both men as she brushes dislodged dirt off her shoulder. There's a hollow thumping off in the distance, a low building of pressure paired with a new sub-sonic keening. It doesn't really register as more than a discomfort to Chihiro's eardrums; on the surface, she wouldn't have heard any of this at all. Down here, it's a not so subtle indication of building pressure.

"They're planning on leaving when they can't mine anymore. How close are we to those coordinates now?" She steps closer to both adults, subconsciously taking comfort out of mutual proximity. "We keep going down without finding anything other than extra rocks." Shocking, she knew, when they were in a mine.

[evantuality]

Evan finishes brushing debris from his own shoulders and shaking it from his hair before he pulls up his wrist gem, calling forth the little holographic display he's set up for the coordinates. Below it is a ticker that shows their own coordinates in the same numerical range, and he turns and shows this to Chihiro and Urahara.

"It's got to be somewhere on this level," he insists -- what he's been telling himself since they descended to this echoey corridor. "We're straight parallel to it now, as long as this path--"

A sudden press of air makes Evan wince, his hindbrain catching on a moment before the rest of him what that bone-deep strangeness means. It's not quick enough, though, to furnish him time to do much other than go wide-eyed before the ground beneath them bucks. Through the grind and thudding crash of rocks shifting and sand falling, Evan yells, tilted onto a wall. He goes down groping at a supportive wooden strut, and clutches tight to that anchor as the world shakes.

[predomination]

Urahara doesn't think when the world bucks, but grabs Chihiro by her waist to flash step out of the way of some falling debris. The sad truth of the movement, however, is that moving fast doesn't necessarily mean you can remain balanced when you're trying to compress distance in something unstable. If flash stepping were so easy to do under those circumstances, you wouldn't really have much problem traveling through the dangai.

As such, Urahara overcorrects and ends up slammed with his back to the wall, grunting from the force and still holding onto Chihiro. "Of course, we come too far to turn back, and now it's going to be difficult," he says, the wryness of his tone betraying most of his annoyance. He waits for the shaking to subside, and calls out, "Evan-san, are you all right?"

[onethousen]

She'd been peering at Evan's display when the pressure dropped, clapping her hands to her ears. There's no time to react, instead registering a vise across her chest and the thud thump of smacking back into someone forgiving who is, in turn, pressed up against something generally unwilling to move. "Evan-san! Urahara-san!"

Which is odd, she thinks, as the whole world moves around them. Urahara calls out to Evan, and she finally registers what's happened, holding on and craning her head back to see some fraction of what's probably his face. "Urahara-san, are you injured?" He's seemed difficult to injure in the past, but it was better to check.

Even if asking sent her into a coughing fit, inhaling the dust thrown up by the collapse of the tunnel behind them. Curling herself around Urahara's arm, she reminds herself to breathe.

The tunnel shifts and settles, the quake having lasted fifteen seconds or so, traveling away into silence with no aftershocks. Small rocks trickle down to fill in new gaps found between larger cousins. They're lucky. The forward tunnel remains passable for all several support beams now list heavily inward.

The same sounds of settling rock and stone and dirt echo from the only way forward. So, too, does a haunting, frantic note, a keening with no vocal chords. The shocked reaction of a sand worm digging out of collapse produces the strange sounds some fifty yards ahead in the collapsing darkness.

When Chihiro can find enough air to speak, she posits one small, scratchy supposition. "Where's the disc now?"

[evantuality]

That keening is the final, eerie punctuation mark in a thoroughly terrifying experience, and Evan is held rapt by it for a moment -- or maybe simply by the ferocious cocktail of adrenaline and shock that the quake had sent coursing through his system. The voices of his companions snap the young man out of it, and he sucks in a breath, coughs immediately at all the dust that drags into his lungs.

"Ahh--" What he wouldn't do for some water. He gropes his way up the support in darkness, his illuminating flame having gone out sometime during the shaking. "I'm not injured," he croaks out.

Upright once more, he raises a hand, the gesture more for concentration than necessity. A flame sputters upwards in the dusty air, throwing them all once more into ruddy light. When Chihiro asks that all-important question, Evan stares at her... and just about laughs.

"Points for staying on-mission," he croaks, swallows, tries again. The flame floats freely when he lowers his hand to check his wristband again. "Um, its position hasn't changed. I don't know whether the quake's thrown off the tracking, or... but it says it should still be up ahead."

He carefully stands away from the metal support beam, brushes dust out of his clothing, frowns seriously. "I don't know how much we have to worry about aftershocks. Nobody was expecting a quake, were they?" He certainly hadn't heard anything from the locals.

[predomination]

"No," comes the quick response, and he deposits Chihiro gently on the ground once he's certain he's not going to have to move again. The keening sound takes all of his attention away from both of his human(ish- he's not really certain about Evan) companions, and he focuses entirely on the direction it's coming from, wishing he could just sense it the way one does Hollows, so he could register the amount of threat it poses. Reiatsu simply doesn't work here the way it does in his own world. It's quite a pain.

He snaps back to attention at Evan's laugh, momentarily distracted, and glances down at Chihiro with a broad grin. "Chihiro-san is just very determined." He can't blame her for that- she's operating under presumably a very large handicap here among people who are larger than life. It's admirable, really.

"As for the quake... I think it might have been triggered by the Qorral, so perhaps they'll know to stop now." Maybe. He glances back towards the sound of the noise, listening to the sound of rocks settling from the aftermath, except perhaps it's not the aftermath at all.

"Straight ahead, you said?" He doesn't look back at Evan when he asks, and before he gets an answer he holds up his cane to yank the blade free of its sheath. "There's going to be an aftershock, my friends, but not the kind you're thinking of. I think it woke something up."

[onethousen]

Back on her own feet, she's still blinking and lowering her hand from when Evan had brought his fire light back into play. Determined is a lot like stubborn. Evan's humour is easier to let roll off her as she curls her fingers around her necklace, bringing it up out of her uniform to hold the jewel in the palm of her hand. She still thinks this is a weird sort of network, but the magic and technology in combination also has a strange sort of familiarity to it all.

She wants to see if there's any word from the others. However, focusing on their objective down here comes first. Urahara has the right of it in Chihiro gamely pushing forward because she's on a team with dozens of larger than life individuals. Her parts to play are smaller, but she won't allow herself to be less dedicated. How else to prove her contribution and earn her way home? It means fighting all the harder on the levels where she can, lest she otherwise be forgotten or find herself becoming a burden instead of an asset to the group.

She wants to pull her own weight. However, she also knows she needs to listen. Both to Evan, who she answers belatedly with, "I don't think they expected one today, but that's um. One of the problems that's been happening, isn't it?" While then commenting quietly on what Urahara has said. "I'm not sure this one will teach them anything new."

Earthquakes were frightening, but managed, and when drilled for often enough the means of handling them felt like they were second nature. (How that compared to an active reality was a different story.) Man-made earthquakes? On several levels, the concept alone felt wrong.

She steps up closer to Evan, trailing behind Urahara as he makes his pronouncement. In the tunnel before them, beyond where Evan's light holds the dusty darkness back, the sound of shifting, falling sand intensifies. So does a thrumming sensation, a sort of soft vibration more heard than felt through the feet. She remembers her glimpses of this man fighting before with the insect while she desperately led away a contrary, bloodthirsty unicorn. Seeing him now with a blade in hand, one that came from his cane of all things, has her standing ramrod straight, expression at first pale, then determined.

Her hand falls to the knife strapped to her left hip. Pulling it out, she flicks open her buck knife. It's for defense rather than offense, so she holds it low and watches Urahara's back for clues on what to do. "Something that's coming." Hence the aftershock.

Not long after she says as much with dry-voiced certainty, the sounds of scraping and falling sand grow loud enough to echo in their enclosed area, one of the tunneling sand worms barreling up from the straight-ahead they needed to head down. It lurches forward at Urahara, wider around than he is, more mouth than body from this angle. Chihiro swallows a gasp and holds her ground behind the adults. Chances are, if that thing gets past Urahara and Evan both?

... She was already a lost cause.

[evantuality]

Evan has brought no weapon except himself. With a sword he'd be more a danger to his teammates than to an enemy, and despite Riza's offers and his own occasional sojourns shooting cans in the back acre at home, he has never looked to take up a gun. Not, he thinks, that most guns would do much against something like that worm.

It's a spectre in the dark, until suddenly it breaches the circle of light his fire throws and then in all its writhing, slick-looking glory, it's worse. It's worse in the way that a picture of a tiger does not stack up against the reality of the stare a tiger gives a person, the way that makes all the hairs on the neck stand up; it's worse in the way a centipede in your bed is a million times worse than a centipede on the sidewalk. Evan cries out despite himself, startled, though its target seems to be the other man.

It doesn't seem to have eyes, so a fireburst might do nothing, Evan reasons, rapidly and urgently. No, not light, but maybe heat -- "Urahara, heads up!"

He's been practicing targeted bursts, and this is no iron horse that he's trying to pinpoint the fuel chamber on. Flesh burns, not quickly, but he's told the pain is quick and severe. As the worm is still ten feet from Urahara, squirming forward as if preparing to lunge, one such burst goes off at the worm's head.

It screams that same unearthly throatless scream and coils like a prodded earthworm, but its forward momentum resumes in a moment. Something in Evan clenches, hopes the worm will retreat rather than throw itself on Urahara and his sword, but another fireburst seems only to anger and confuse it and it roils forward again.

"It might just be trying to get past us!" he calls, urgent. "Maybe it'll go if we let it!"

[predomination]

Urahara's extreme speed is always his advantage, though in a cramped space all he can do is leap to the side and dig his clogs into the cavern wall, seemingly hanging suspended in the air above, one hand pressed flat on absolutely nothing, as if he had leaped up onto some invisible platform. The hand still gripping his sword remains out as he waits for a moment to strike the fleshy parts of the giant worm's back once Evan has made his movement. A precise strike would have to do- if he risks using kido or dragging the fight out, then they're going to have a lot of problems.

He grits his teeth at Evan's suggestion, still in that strange mid-air crouch- reiatsu may work differently here, but it's still easy to manipulate the spirit particles and use them to his advantage, at least. The urge to not back down from an enemy and, instead, strike it down where it stands (or, in this case, lurches) boils at the back of his brain, but after losing himself to the thrill of the fight in front of both the people with him, he tamps down on the urge. The less they see of his darker side, the better.

He remains where he is, out of the way, and rapidly losing his shot, but he still listens to Evan, already working on a counterplan in case the man's hopes were wrong.

"Both of you stay close to the wall," he calls, lowering his sword to show his intent to try and let the beast pass.

[onethousen]

There was no great exit behind them, was there? Chihiro glances back in spite of herself, listening to Urahara's call and backing up until she's pressed up against the wall, tucked up next to one of the wooden supports in this part of the tunnel system.

"Is the way open?" It's a question she doesn't have an answer for, eyes wide as the creature is upon them. Evan's bright blast, Urahara's acrobatics that kept him poised mid-air (is he certain he's not a spirit?), the ululations of the sand worm itself...

Chihiro swallows hard as it throws itself forward, past Urahara. It doesn't continue on its way. Instead, it veers toward the nearest source of heat and movement within reach of its mouth: straight toward Evan. The sand worm's gaping maw hung open, circles and circles of teeth leading down an impressive gullet. That voiceless cry still echoes in their enclosed space, but the wet, whispering sounds of swallowing empty air creates an even stranger horrific undertone as the creature lurched closer.

"Evan-san!" She jerks forward, then slams her back against the wall again, still minding what Urahara had requested of her.

[evantuality]

Well, some distant calm part of himself reasons, that's what he gets for assuming the best of an angry wild animal. The rest of him, on the other hand, is deeply preoccupied with not becoming the next tasty thing to fall into that angry whirlwind of teeth. His hope had been that the sandworm would be able, somehow, to bore its way through gaps the humanoids wouldn't have fit through, or even make new holes itself, but--

But the monstrous bulk coming at him was the most distressingly direct proof of his utter mistakenness. Evan yells, for all his preparation he's still ill-equipped to fight back against an angry animal. He throws himself to the side, narrowly avoiding the sarlacc-like maw of the thing, his hands coming up to fend it off as it turns. Lord, but his hand-to-hand combat drills with Haise had always been assuming a humanoid target, these aren't movements he knows how to dodge. The worm roils and turns, crazed.

He ends up falling back over a fallen rock even as the worm lunges at him, which is what saves him from a face full of teeth. It's a glancing blow that mashes him into the cave floor, and in a moment of inspiration Evan wraps his arms around the monster and bursts them both into flames.

Fire is not a quick death, nor does it easily adhere to flesh. The worm screams as it lights up, thrashes with Evan still clinging to it, dragging it to the floor of the cavern and keeping it comparatively still. It's an opening, if Urahara's nimble with his swordplay.

[predomination]

If he had a middle name, it would be nimble, right up there with scheming, calculating, and generally unpleasant on most days. His observations had primed him to take advantage of the beast lunging towards Evan (another mark on his tally of situations that boil down to "he can probably handle it and it's better to not overconcern myself with the details while I'm trying to get control." Chihiro has warned him against that, and it does feel uncomfortable to disappoint her, but he expects she'll have to get used to that).

...Or perhaps not.

You see, in all his calculations he did not anticipate Evan doing that, and it throws him off-balance for a second- but only for a second- before he's dropping off his invisible ledge as easily as if stepping off a platform and flashstepping to bridge the gap between himself and the giant beast, currently doing its best to not be on fire to no avail. This may have not been the plan he intended, but it's a better one, and that's always something to celebrate.

He leaps into action as soon as it's down, the thin blade of the sword-cane- much less impressive than Benihime in her full shikai, but efficient, nonetheless- striking a tender spot on the creature's back, close enough to the flames that he can feel the heat licking the imitation flesh of his gigai, uncomfortable enough to make him grit his teeth, but not enough to risk a little light scorching for the sake of ramming the blade deeper and with phenomenal strength that's far beyond someone of his size drags the blade through the thick hide like slicing bread if bread makes an unpleasant bloody squelching sound as flesh separates.

He can't decapitate it fully with the way it's positioned, but between the fire and the borderline Glasgow smile Urahara's given it, it has very little chance of survival.

He jumps back, satisfied by his work and pats a few errant flames off the sleeve of his haori. You don't work in SRDI and not be accustomed to being a little bit on fire. "My, my, I'm starting to think the two of you enjoy watching me take things seriously."

Evan just immolated himself and Chihiro just watched them both brutally murder a giant sandworm after believing for a hot second that it might actually bite Evan's head off, and he's going to make jokes, because that is precisely the kind of man he is.

there were so many regrets

[onethousen]

She chokes on Evan's name, the dirt and dust thrown up by the sand worm's violent passage leaving her coughing violently into her hands. Everything happens so fast; Evan's thrown to the ground, the worm lurches forward, Urahara moves impossibly fast. Confusing and a constant whirl of motion that she presses back to stay out of, knowing she's more likely to hinder than help if she doesn't.

What flies so far past her ability to comprehend is watching Evan go from the man she knows to a human-shaped torch, his spontaneous self immolation so startling and horrifying that she's unable to hold back the scream that bubbles up, Chihiro lurching forward only to jerk back. It's a brief sound, interrupted again by her coughing, high pitched and shrill with the horror that's born from believing with all her heart she's watching someone die and there's not a dratted thing she can do to stop any of it.

In a way, she's right. The sand worm screams without a voice, flesh and fluids squelch and squirt; acrid scents of burning flesh fill the air even as the heat devours the oxygen. She can feel it, incapable of being far enough away in this collapsed part of the tunnel to be outside of that immense fire's reach. Close enough that the thrashing of the dying worm splatters her with fluids, across her face like the artistic whimsy of a five year old unleashed on finger paints and a blank canvas known as the wall.

Her hands are covering her mouth, eyes wide and unblinking as the coughs shake her shoulders, hurting her ribs. Her knees feel alternately like iron rods and jelly, and much as she wants to get away, as much as she'd rather run into the darkness ahead simply to escape the heat and the feeling like she's suffocating, she doesn't move.

For one, if she's witnessing Evan die, she can't look away. Because she couldn't do anything. She couldn't even get his name out before all of this is happening; it's slow registering that Evan isn't crying out like the worm does, that she can see him in that conflagration and he's not curling into black as his flesh is consumed and discarded by the fire's happy appetite. Urahara is the one casually batting flames off the sleeve of his haori, utterly unphased.

Her eyes water, a reaction to the heat and dust and smoke from the burning remains of the worm. Urahara jokes, and she makes some sound closer to a choked sob than anything else. "You," she says, spitting out the word through a dry and aching throat, hand falling away from her gore-splattered face, "Don't take anything seriously enough at all!"

She wishes she were brave enough to use a very bad curse word right now, because maybe it would make all the tightness in her chest feel better, but she isn't. She doesn't. She balls her hands into fists and fights off tears and the gagging reflex to this stench and horror, quivering with restrained emotion. She's barely avoiding going into shock, breathing rapidly and unable to look away from it all, heart rate elevated to the point where she hears the blood rushing past her ears, hears the pounding in her chest as much as she feels it: a bird desperate to escape the restraint of its elegantly barred cage.

[evantuality]

For reasons of his own, Evan has kept the fire from his face in a desperate gambit not to lose what he'd finally gained back. It works, more or less, as his face ends up mashed against a part of the worm that isn't burning, protecting his one vulnerable eye as the worm thrashes. His world is the worm and only the worm, his litmus for success the worm's struggles and the strength thereof. His back will be bruised purple against the hard, uneven floor, but that's a worry for later. The fumes of burning ichor scald his nose and throat and his heart hammers fit to burst against his ribs. He misses the fuss, Chihiro's screaming, Urahara's nimble swordwork, everything but the flailing of the worm.

Finally, finally the thing ceases to thrash. Evan releases it then, going from clinging hard to desperately kicking the corpse off of himself in a moment, scrambling back and away from the monster. The fires die down unnaturally quickly, all at once, both from him and from the beast. His left eye streams tears, squeezed shut; the other does not.

One of the problems with being an autoconflagrant is that very little else that comes with his day-to-day life is fireproof. His clothes and his satchel, which he had been wearing at the time, are in smoking tatters, intact here and there but for the most part no longer anything resembling garments. Where they're not burned they're smeared with ichor, and so is his skin, so that after his battle Evan is a hideous mess of ash and soot and grit from the mine's floor and monster slime. His sketchbook has survived, thank god, as has the pen he received with it, but everything else...

He stares, one eye squeezed shut and the other as wide as it'll go, at the corpse. "It's dead?" he asks, a bit stupidly.

And then, looking down at himself, pulls the remains of his satchel onto his lap before the last of his clothing flakes off. "...I don't suppose anyone brought spare pants."

[predomination]

Urahara is perplexed by Chihiro's outburst- she isn't wrong, of course, but he had reasons for not taking this particular thing seriously, and those reasons present themselves with Evan rises again like a naked and ichor-covered phoenix.

He removes his haori and walks it over so Evan can have something to cover up with, even if it's with great trepidation. He's going to have to ask the higher-ups about adding a few more of that exact same coat to his wardrobe at some point. It's becoming a pain only having the one.

"I knew Evan-san wouldn't have made such a snap decision if it was going to prove to be fatal for him without any warning," he explains as he hands over the garment. "I apologize that we didn't give you much warning, Chihiro-san, but time was of the essence. We both had to react quickly."

If nothing else, he does seem to be genuinely apologetic about upsetting her, even if he's being calculated and flippant about justifying himself.

[onethousen]

It's too ingrained to not fight with her elders; on so many levels, it'd be easier to let herself back down in the face of inadequate, calm explanations from the people she's supposed to respect. It'd be easier to let it go.

She stares at Urahara, then steps forward, brushing dirt off her shoulders and scrubbing at the gore on her face. She makes more of a mess of it than she helps anything, taking careful steps toward Urahara and Evan. It doesn't matter that one party is naked and in process of becoming presentable. Chihiro doesn't even care. She's more glad he's not a human-shaped torch, and details like gore-splattered, fluid-covered, dirty nudity doesn't register.

"Evan-san, was anything you did planned?" She ignores Urahara entirely with that statement, a ten year old holding herself together with sheer willpower and the tap tap on her display to bring up the map display on her wrist. Its soft glow adds some more light to the overall situation, one she can control. "It would be nice to better understand what you are. Since I don't believe you're human, or fully human." She makes the allowance, knowing there are stranger things on heaven and earth than possible Hybrids, Horatio.

Her fingers twitch, and she makes herself calm as she squares off against Urahara's side. "Including you, Urahara-san. Which isn't bad, being something that's not human. But it'd explain a lot about why you act and think the way you do." She has nothing against people of different species, not even ones who have been part of a larger collective that would have been happy eating her. If the sandworm had relatives that could talk, she'd speak with them.

But right now she's ten and tired of all of this and terror has flown right out of her head, she has no room left to hold it all. Instead, she checks back on Evan standing, and without further words, walks toward where the sandworm had entered their collapsed portion of the tunnel. She waits there, simply a small, dirty, pale young presence waiting for the adults in her immediate life to move.

"I'm ten years old. I'm a human child. I have no special abilities or powers. ALASTAIR hasn't done anything like give me magic, either. I have a protective charm from my friends in the Spirit World. Or... a spirit world. There's probably more than one." She breathes in, shaky, finding her hands steady only when she fists then and then straightens them again. "I guess I was spirited away once. Now I'm here. I might not be able to do the kinds of things a lot of people here can do, but I want to live and get home too, so I'll keep trying! Even if everyone's going to keep secrets that, that — Evan, I thought you were dying!"

Ah, the crux of the issue. She rubs fiercely at her eyes again as they prick and she wheezes from something other than her coughing fits earlier. Chihiro turns her back on Urahara and Evan. She wants to find this disc, get out of here, and never go back into a tunnel for as long as she feasibly can.