Leila took a couple of moments wondering how a fractured arm bone was supposed to “come off with a spot of water”, only to later have to remind herself that Breeze probably didn’t know of the ominous indications of her evaluation of the weapon’s power and was instead referring to the inkblot that now spanned the wall.
She muttered chains of apologies and thanks and reassured that she was alright to those who came over to help her, while struggling to get back onto her feet, grabbing onto the nearby chair for support. To her relief, it did seem like that little tumblr didn’t do any significant damage to her body.
She’s also never been called an artist, for one thing. She also stared very hard when Inadi showed her his now perfectly healthy ankle - it might have been possible to notice her tentative gesture to try to pull the ankle closer for inspection, yet did not eventually do so for a number of reasons - including that she would probably have cause Inadi to topple over on the one leg on the ground if she did, and how the mental image of her holding and intensely looking at a perfectly normal ankle didn’t seem exactly coherent.
"Woot! Are you guys ready? Let's go!"
The scene that lay beyond the metal doors made walking through the gates feel like walking from one world into another.
The treetops of the forest could be seen from outside the dome, yet it was a completely different feeling to be submerge in it. Back home Leila read of forests in tropical places, where trees grew to unimaginable heights, forestation dense and diverse enough for each vertical layer of the environment to almost sustain its own brand of ecosystem - and she wondered if this was how one of those looked like back on earth for she had never seen one herself. She wandered upon the thought of the possibility that the doors didn’t actually open up to ground level, and they were instead walking on yet another layer of treetops that was dense and sturdy enough.
The air was saturated with moisture and carried scents that carried connotations to dirt, greenery, fungi, and what’s left of sunlight that reached the ground level. The feeling of the high military boots sinking slightly into the decomposing ground differed greatly from that of walking on the metal floors behind the bay doors.
The teams they eventually settled on had her with Harper and Lesley along with two other soldiers. She was placed at the very left side of the group, and she looked to her right to see the other members of the team - a sight that she found helpful even if she couldn’t really see their faces clearly through the helmets.
She glanced towards her shoulder to see a row of lights glowing in a healthy shade of green. The part about the force field technology seemed almost sufficiently reassuring if you left out the part about the health bar reaching zero and that all the theoretical processes Leila knew that would possibly create force fields had a considerable possibility of producing instabilities with potentially catastrophic results.
Deciding that that was probably not the best thing to be thinking about at the moment, Leila refocused her attention on the environment around her. It was a rather complex scene, and she found it difficult to filter out the potentially useful information from the noise. What seemed like the cries of birds echoed throughout the forest from time to time, and occasionally the shorter bushes would ruffle and have her almost jump back a few steps before the cause would be revealed to be some sort of seemingly harmless creature. The entire area seemed to be inhabited by such beings - Leila came to wonder how this place, as large as it is, was supposed to be maintained; or, otherwise, that its self-sustainability was a feat. What actually was, she decided, probably lay somewhere in between. Then again, after all she had seen in the City, she couldn’t really be sure whether all the life in here was actually organic.
Leila kept her hands wrapped firmly around the paintball gun. It seemed like one of the guns that were smaller in size and lighter - such that it was a reasonable size and weight for her to operate. She never got to test out the weapon, but was fairly confident she knew how to use it. She kept it pointed at any direction where there things seemed to be moving, and always making sure that it was rested stably upon her hand and shoulder every time her finger moved near the trigger, having learnt what to expect from a firing paintball gun.
Thus she marched forwards, slowly, along with the other members of the group, while constantly monitoring what was happening around them. She was told that the objective was to defeat the opposing team, which - apparently - could not be achieved without locating their members first. So where -
just as she thought that, the advance of the group halted as they all cast their sight and trained their weapons in the same direction - to their left. Leila stepped backwards so that she didn’t obscure the line of sight from Harper, Lesley and the two soldiers; but did so as swiftly and silently as possible as they their attention focused on the area some distance away, behind some chunks of greenery: ruffling, but with an identifiable pattern, and apparently caused by something larger than the little critters that they’ve previously encountered.
She felt her body react instinctively towards the imminent threat - even if she knew this was no more than a game - and when she asked only in a whisper the voice didn’t feel like her own:
”Are those...”
Her question was cut short for a moment, for what emerged from behind the ruffling leaves was beyond any of her speculations. Yet the sentence was then continued, in a way that consisted a very different set of implications:
”...hostile?”