The final blow leaves Sarah breathless and gasping for air amid the ever-present miasma and the acrid smell of roasted spider-monster, fully aware that she's covered in the gunk, and might have even gotten some of it in her mouth. She feels very sick right now, and retches and coughs in disgust. She slumps back against a wall, relieved that the fight is over and the surviving spiderlings had run for cover, hopefully never to return.
She notices Pip running up to a pedestal with a button on it, and watches with curiosity as he activates... something. Not long after, the miasma begins to recede, allowing Sarah the taste of wondrous fresh air. Soon, the hallucinatory effects would stop, and Sarah is glad for that. She picks up Pip when he gets back to her and she strokes his fur lovingly. She's not sure what happened, but if she is to venture a guess, there might be some old machinery in this cave, and that may be the source of the miasma. She'd need to make sure it's destroyed or disabled so nobody else could use it.
Once she's recovered enough from the miasma and the fight, she gets up, and tries to find a way to help the villagers. She starts with the poor girl the spiderling queen was feasting on, trying to heal her with her powers, and praying she's alright. Once she's sure the girl's recovering, she tries to cut down the villagers from the spiderwebs - while not hurting any of them, of course.
She soon hears steps coming from the cave, so she cautiously pulls out the sword, worried if it's more trouble, but to her relief it's Master Thunderfist coming in.
"Oh, Master Thunderfist," she says with a bow. "I've found the sword - and more importantly, I found where the villagers disappeared to. I hope they're all alright... And Pip was a great help, I couldn't have done it without him..."
She kneels down to stroke Pip's ears, who barks back in gratitude.
"Well, we didn't exactly crash," Penny says, looking outside. "We're a lot lower than we used to be, but still high enough off the ground. Do airships do this all the time, or did Nichole jinx us by mentioning an airship crash?"
When Vanna called her name, Penny turns to her, and nearly fumbles catching the glasses.
"Hey, you caught them, thanks Vanna," she says. "Not even scratched."
She puts them on, glad to be able to see normally again.
"I'd try and look for emergency kits," Penny says, looking for the nearest emergency cupboard. "I'd rather have a flashlight than try to find a non-smashed lightbulb to hold, and trying to see with bursts of sparks is giving me a headache."
She notices Dana's smile in the dim light.
"You're smiling despite all this?" Penny asks incredulously. She then breaks into a smirk. "Well, at least nobody can accuse you of bringing down the mood.
"I'm with you girls on this," she says regarding the plan. "No sense sitting around waiting for someone to help. Besides, even though we're supposed to be able to process Nox better than most people, I'm not gonna sit around soaking it in, trying to find how long it takes me to cough up a lung or something. They give Surgeon General's warnings about this stuff, you know.
"And yeah, now that you mention it, Ms. Wings of Justice seemed to have gotten some news right around the time the turbulence started."
She looks around in the cabin, but to no avail.
"Shit, no emergency kits," she sighs. "These guys really need to work on their prep. Let's get going, then."
Penny resumes lighting up sparks to light the way, though she realizes it's neither as elegant or as reliable as Dana's light.
Sarah continues cutting away at the spiderling horde attacking her, managing to cut another in half when she saw something dance in her peripheral vision. She's half-tempted to ignore it as yet another hallucination, but something makes her turn around and notice in horror as the spiderling queen is coming down hard - and aiming for Pip, who is too busy snarling and snapping at a couple spiderlings to notice. For a second, it seems as though everything was floating in water, a moment suspended in time. It takes every inch of will and strength for Sarah to force her whole body to move, trying to cover Pip before he gets fatally skewered.
"NO!"
By some miracle, she manages to block the tip of the spiky foreleg with the flat of her sword, placing herself between an angry spiderling queen and a surprised Pip who yelps and jumps back. However, by doing so, she left her back exposed, and one spiderling stabs her in the calf with a claw. Giving a pained grunt, Sarah tries to push back, but is slowly driven to her knees by the force of the queen's push, spiderleg scratching against unbreakable ancient steel.
Pip, mortified that his carelessness caused New Master to get hurt, turns around in a snarl and goes after the spiderling that just hurt New Master's leg. He bites but misses, the spiderlings falling back to avoid his wrath. This time, Pip doesn't pursue, trying to cover Sarah's back while she struggles with the queen.
For a moment, Sarah feels as though she'll be smacked down the ground, unable to keep up the effort against the queen's pressing leg. However, she takes a deep breath, and takes a gamble by changing the sword grip, causing the leg to slip off to the side, allowing Sarah to force the queen off balance with a twist of the sword. With the sword free, Sarah takes her moment to strike. She charges the sword with the biogenic power of lightning, lighting the cave around her with a brilliant azure flash, and swung as hard as she can at the queen in an upwards stroke.
Urgrapth looked up from her meal before she had finished killing her prey. There was a person there, with pink hair! The Intruder!! Urgrapth hissed from her position and jumped from her web onto the wall, a wave of her spiderlings began to cascade down the cave wall near to where the pink haired intruder was to get her.
What Sarah sees before her is nothing short of a monster out of a nightmare. A large, human-sized spiderling with eyes sparkling malevolently in the shadows and mist, a girl's upper body grafted to a large spider's abdomen, the girl would be considered pretty were it not for monstrous features betraying her nature. To Sarah's horror, the spiderling queen seems to be eating a villager, a young girl struggling weakly to escape her grasp, gasping for breath as her struggles weakened.
Upon seeing Sarah, the spiderling queen hisses and jumps backwards, letting Sarah rush forwards and check on the girl. The villager girl is still alive, Sarah notes with a sigh of relief, but she seems badly drained and weakened.
Pip notes it's one of the washing-girls from the village, and whines sadly as he tries to wake her up by nudging her hand and licking her face. The big spiderling had hurt her, and he could smell its scent on her, especially around the bite-marks on her neck.
However, Sarah realizes she has no time to tend to the girl; many spiderlings were coming her way, and she doubts they'll wait politely to put the girl safely away to fight properly. She instead stands over the girl's body, sword in hand, Pip growling besides her. If she's going to fight, might as well make a stand. This time, she's ready.
Pip opens up by blasting one of the spiderlings to a cinder with a bolt of thunder, the spiderlings bunching up meaning he manages to injure a couple others. Sarah grips her sword, and starts swinging at the incoming horde. The sword is a much better weapon than a stolen claw, far better than her bare fists, as it feels natural in her hands. She swings and cleaves a spiderling in twain, catching another with the backswing and severing one of its claws. This time, she has a longer reach and better weaponry, allowing her a desperately needed advantage. Furthermore, thanks to the sword's purging of the worst of the miasma's effects, she's far more lucid and in control in this fight. She glares at the spiderlings, as though daring them to take another step.
Penny was about to answer when the latest in a series of bumps rocks the airship. She ignored the previous bumps because the crew seemed to be handling it well, but now it really is getting worrisome. She's about to ask how things are when suddenly the clouds part to reveal a massive goddamn eye from hell. Penny guesses that's not something you see on an airship trip, and the sight fills her with dread. The eye disappears after a bit, but the sense of dread it inspires stays with Penny.
Then all hell breaks loose. The sound of breaking glass and shearing metal causes Penny's heart to sink; she's only ever heard that sound in a particularly bad accident downtown back in Siscia, where she happened to pass by. She's guessing that being in an airship, suspended miles above the ground, would be the absolute last place you ever wanted to be when an accident like that happens.
She's immediately proven right, as the airship suddenly starts plummeting. The girls and crew, Penny included, get tossed around like a child's toy inside an industrial mixer, slamming into furniture and surfaces. Penny cries out in pain as she feels her shoulder slam into what felt like a doorknob, before getting thrown into a bench and tossed around.
'Well, this whole thing went right into the shitter faster than a mess hall bean taco,' Penny thinks, considering it an entirely appropriate time to use her mother's military-grade vocabulary. 'This whole thing's gone FUBAR; tea party one minute, then Satan's eyeball shows up from hell, then the goddamn bird folds like an old geezer with a rebar up his ass.'
She forces herself out of the pity party and tries to grab onto something when the airship recovers. She reaches for her glasses, realizing she lost them somewhere in the ride, and feels a throbbing pain in her temple. Must have hit her head again on something during the fall. Despite her lack of vision, she's aware that the power's going out all aboard the airship, and the sound of magitech weaponry being fired.
"Well, shit," she mutters aloud. She snaps her fingers a few times to summon electric sparks, trying to see everyone in the glimpses of brightness. "This might ding the flight review a bit, girls, but right now I just wanna know if everyone's okay? Also, I lost my glasses, so I'd really appreciate it if anyone finds it."
Just as she turns to leave, Sarah is aware of something... happening. She pauses, looking around, but then it happens...
"Sarah.." a familiar, singsong voice chimes into existence, "Sarah, are you there?" An image of Asra appears in Sarah's peripheral vision. "I'm back, oh good, I'm back!" The Fairy giggled in happiness.
Sarah is half-tempted to consider this yet another miasma-induced mirage, but at this point she's just glad to get some extra information about who and what she is... and why did she wake up in a capsule in a cave?
"You must've found the sword then, good, that is so good. I was worried the Wizards had failed. There is so much to tell you, so many things have happened. Where do I start? From the beginning I suppose. I'm going to run out of time, so I'll tell you everything I can before my power runs out, you had better sit down."
Sarah pauses, but takes a seat, if only to rest her legs. She didn't have much time either, but she supposes a few answers would be worth it.
What followed was a long, confusing tale about a lost civilization, a Dr. Drake Logan, and the keys to uplifting and advancing a civilization, only for it to collapse when the very key to its salvation became the instrument of its doom - Harbinger. Seems like whatever ancestors she had, they had chosen... poorly.
"Before I went offline I was part of a protocol knows as the Oracle program. You see, for Dr. Logan's science to work perfectly the human body needed to be perfected, just like having a clean circuit within a computer. Oh, you don't know what a computer is, well, that's okay, believe me when I tell you, human's have bodies full of dirtiness. You, however, you were made perfect, in the image of a god. You were grown to channel Biogenic energy through your body without resistance, so what you channel is pure."
"You need the circuits to aid you, until you learn for yourself. The circuits are the Swords. They were designed to link to your body and allow you to channel your internal life energy into matter. This sword will allow you to channel your energy into lightning, as you can already feel. Every sword has two boosters that you can find, a battery which will double the amount of power you can focus into the weapon, and a bracelet, which will allow you to pull from Harbinger itself and release destruction 100 fold of what you could normally. Your kind alone are made to be trusted with this power.
She was... created...? Created to be perfect? Was she just some craftsman's creation, made to fulfill a purpose? The possibilities left Sarah a little uneasy, and she almost missed the bits about the biogenic energy within herself and the use of the sword as a... focus? Yes, focus seems like the best term for it.
It still feels weird for Sarah to have a fully developed vocabulary without the lifetime experience of developing and improving it.
Still, the idea of having woken up with only a name, no memory of herself, and now a destiny to fulfill was a tad intimidating for the girl. She certainly didn't feel like some perfect being. If anything, she imagined this is what a scared little girl would feel.
Though she felt it was unnecessary for Asra to insult her creators by calling the humans 'dirty'. For if Sarah is supposed to be some pure, biogenic-channeling superhuman, what did that make her creators, one who could not channel that energy nearly so well? Sarah wanted to have words with them, but somehow Asra unintentionally insulting them was mildly amusing.
"I've run out of time, find others like yourself Sarah, find others, and find more of the swords. Learn to use their power. The wizards will help you, they...." *SCHZITZ* "...an evil has reached out to Harbinger..." *S@CT!$ZCH*... "deeper in the caves you will find... "!SK$#ZTCH@%$. . ...
As suddenly as she appeared, Asra was gone, and Sarah was once again left alone in the caves with her companion Pip.
Sarah has learned about the history of the Oracles and the swords. Now she has an understanding of how to use the sword and why it works. She also has a hint as to the fact that she was created in the pod to be a perfect, god-like creature. Also, Our lady spider is chomping down on some poor towns person, I recommend you hurry, you may be able to save the little person from their death, maybe. Good luck!!
Sarah wants to call out to Asra, to tell her to keep explaining more. However, Asra had made it clear her time was short, so Sarah glumly accepts the fairy's hurried farewell, and hopes to see her again so she could ask more questions.
For now, she has to get out of the cave, and figure out what this Harbinger business is.
"Come along, Pip," she tells her companion. "We need to get going. The sooner we leave this cave, the better. And we need to warn Master Thunderfist about these creatures..."
Pip barks in agreement, and hurries along besides her, wagging his tail. It's good to see New Master in good spirits like this.
However, Sarah quickly realizes that while going into the cave was easy with the sense of the sword leading the way, going out was going to rely on memory and careful backtracking. To her chagrin, she had misread a path and found herself someplace... unpleasant. It looks and feels unpleasant, like a home for all those creepy little spiderlings she ran into earlier.
It's then she hears something, like something biting down, and a weak struggle and moan. She feels a shiver down her spine, but something was telling her to hurry, to find the source of the sound. It wasn't going to be pleasant, but she needs to be there.
Pip looks up at Sarah and whines anxious. He can smell... many things. He can smell the spiderlings, thicker on the ground and more in number. He can smell their foul nest, the home where there'll be much more of them. He can smell something even worse, like a bigger and meaner version of them. But then he realizes he can smell... the villagers! He sniffs the ground a few times to make sure. Yes! It's faint, but he's sure. The villagers were here! Maybe the spiderlings took them? He looks up at Sarah and barks, then looks in the direction of the nest, alternatively growling in apprehension and whining uncertainly.
Sarah, coughing on the miasma, notes Pip's behavior; he seems both anxious to go ahead and afraid of something. Part of her is afraid of what she'll find there, but Pip wants to go, or part of him does, anyways. She grips her sword, and feels the biogenic energy flow from her into it. She is at least better armed this time. Better to move ahead with caution.
What she finds horrifies her; people suspended in thick, sticky webs, dazed and moaning when they can be heard, or limp and apparently lifeless. Were these the people from the village? Did the spiderlings do this? And if so, why? Or was there something else in here? She reaches out to feel a hand to make sure it's not another hallucination - and to her surprise, it isn't. The people are out cold, but not dead.
She goes in deeper, motioning to Pip to stop growling as they hurry along, trying to find where this cavern of horrors ends...
...and then she sees something that could be described as a nightmare made flesh...
As she walks deeper and deeper into the catacombs, Sarah feels the miasma thicken around her. Her lungs burn even as they develop some tolerance for the substance, seeing becomes difficult as she has a hard time telling what's real from what isn't. The only thing keeping her fevered mind going is the growing certainty that the sword is nearby, that there's an end to this maze. She pauses to cough, her coughing dry and chest-wracking, her lungs protesting the foul mist filling the cave. She has to find it soon, she thinks.
It doesn't take her long to realize the growing gut feeling inside her, the sense that's she's arrived somehow. If she hadn't been following said sense to lead her to the sword, she would say she's hallucinating. Instead, she lifts her head, and looks around.
Sure enough, there on a dais, is a sword embedded hilt-deep. She's almost tempted to call this a hallucination too, if she isn't so glad to finally get here after all the trouble in the cave. She takes a moment to check her surroundings, to be sure that this is indeed where she needs to be. She can feel the stone dais, the strangely warm metal of the sword, and the pulls her finger when she feels a spark of its Thunder affinity. She looks at Pip, and realizes he's curiously sniffing the stone dais, then barks at her as to confirm it. She takes a deep breath before casting aside the used and broken claw she was carrying around as a makeshift weapon.
"Here goes," she says, grasping the hilt with both hands and pulls as hard as she can, trying to gather all her strength to try and get the sword out. She grunts and hisses at the effort. "Come on..."
Suddenly, she jolts backwards as the sword seems to free itself from its prison, and she feels a surge of electricity surge through her body. This sensation is strangely warm and good, filling her being with confidence and calm amidst her weariness. It feels as if the very sword itself was reaching into her with its power, filling her with newfound resolve. She feels its power washing over her, reaching deep into her mind and heart, as though to awaken something sleeping within.
When she opens her eyes again, the hallucination seem to have receded. She still sees things vibrating, the shadows shifting and twitching, and faint echos that aren't there, but her mind is no longer trap in feverish visions and fearsome illusions. She could see and feel more clearly, and the miasma isn't affecting her as strongly. Is this the power of the sword, or did it merely heal her of the worst of the effects. Either way, she's going to need her wits to get out of this place.
She takes a couple of practice swings with the sword, feeling it in her hands. It feels balanced, the grip natural, as though it had been forged just for her. She grips it tightly to reassure herself, feeling as though she could take on the world.
"Come on, Pip," she calls to the dog, "we need to get out of here and back to Master Thunderfist."
Pip barks eagerly, pleased to see New Master snapping out of whatever fear had been controlling her.
"Oh, yeah, I know that one," Penny says with a chuckle. "Liznliz watched the whole series, though you ask me, it really went downhill after the fifth. The second, though, that's a classic.
"So Nichole, you're from Hasta right?" she continues, pressing the conversation. "I hear some still call it by its old name, Paris. It's kind of interesting, because most Sanctum Cities generally just go by their official names these days. Is it really the City of Lights? I've seen a few pics on the 'Web whenever the connection gets through, and I'd have to say it's beautiful. I'm surprised you still have a building that's centuries old in the middle of your city, I think it's pretty cool!"
"See, that's it, isn't it?" Penny says with an air of academic discussion. "Altea's more... well, I suppose there's no better for it without sounding condescending, so let's say 'dark' and 'grounded'. The setting is everyday, she's more relateable as an everyday person, and while it does have more fantasy elements it still has a darker tone to it regarding loss and sacrifice. Alexis is, well, bubbly and energetic, and it takes almost halfway into season two to really start the character development going. I'd say the episode when they bring in Pretty Soldier Glenda, but she's a red herring at first to properly set up the rivalry with Alex..."
She pauses, then turns to face Dana.
"Okay, fine, I watch Gunslinger Alexis whenever I could," she admits, "but I'll take Altea over it anyday. Not saying it's bad, just saying I prefer mine.
"As for my sisters, well, we got the twins Liz'n'Liz - that's Elizabeth and Melissa - as the oldest, older than me by almost two years, I'm the one they had after, and then there's Nessa, she's ten and the youngest daughter, but David's the youngest and he's eight. Liznliz - yeah, we just put the two together most of the time - they're tomboys, and they can be a pain sometimes, but they're pretty cool and helpful most of the times. They're couriers, so they taught me how to rollerblade; they're really good at it. And Nessa's just a daddy's girl and a real sweetheart. I'm the one stuck being the responsible kid in the family most of the time..."
Penny feels the airship tremble again. She's never ridden an airship before, so she's not entirely sure if this is normal or not, but the other girls seem to notice it with unease. It makes Penny nervous as a result.
'Somehow, I get the feeling I've been insulted,' she thinks, trying to read Vanna's expression. It's just the tone of the answer, aloof yet somehow condescending. It annoys Penny - but somehow, she shouldn't really be upset. She at least should have read up on the Academy for the two years she's been waiting to get transferred, so she wouldn't look like some clueless hick from the boonies, but it's a bit late for that now. She resolves to study hard once they get there, and prove her worth.
"I'll say you have," Penny answers Vanna in resignation.
Dana's response earns an odd response from Penny. She assumes an expression of mock annoyance, and looks at the cheerful girl.
"Oh really?" she asks in mock challenge. "Mind telling me why you think Gunslinger Alexa is better? I mean, Altea has the more meaningful character arcs, if you ask me.
"Also, how many sisters do you have? I've got three - and three brothers too."
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