RP:A Mermish Interlude

Part of the Venturil's Bane Arc

Ruined Castle, Cenril

Jerica had not, as yet, been down this way in Cenril. She really didn't like being close to the water and that was probably why. However, the sound of the waves was distant here and Jerica could handle that. Stories of a castle had her intrigued enough to go exploring so here she is, picking her way along carefully and eying the strangely built walls. Arches and holes gave the impression of windows and doors without the barriers, like some herculean child had sat down to carve this out of coral and rock on a day trip. An outcropping of bumpy and pock marked coral wall serves as a seat where Jerica can sit and contemplate the structure set out before her. At some times she fancied that maybe it were the skeletal remains of some long extinct and ancient amphibian. Other times she could envision the structure it might have been. All in all, the rather small and nondescript woman found her mental musings relaxing to some extent.

Plop.

Plop. Plop-plop.

From above, came a strange rain. It was green and rank of scent, and kept falling for a time before the odd precipitation ceased. No inspection of the upper walls of that ruin would reveal the source, but for a slight dribble of brine on the ledge of one crumbled-away window.

Maladroit dropped 2 cenril sea-weed.

Jerica pulled out of the fantastical nautical fantasies her imagination conjured up after the second wet sounding plop. Cautiously she looked around only to find the small pile of sea weed where none had been before. Some of the coral looked wetter than it had been before in a spot. Should that seem odd? Frowning and chewing on her lip Jerica casually raised a hand to pat the twist of her hair held by a rather innocuous looking stick. The stick was still there and that made her feel slightly better for whatever reason or purpose the hair do-dad served. Keeping it casual and slow, Jerica gets up and wanders closer to the structure for all the world looking as though she only meant to explore it. Somehow, she kept her gaze from straying too often and hopefully too obviously to the pile of aquatic vegetation. At the door way, she braced one hand where a person could assume a frame would be and leaned in to look both right and then left, again casually like she was debating if the place was safe to go in.

Maladroit moved in the manner of a swift lizard, all scurry of limb and lash of tail, swifter than a blink and strategically, so that where Jerica's eyes alit, it was not and where its dark form marred the pale antiquity of the structure was only shadow, should she happen to glance there. So it clambered, in the space of two breaths, to the lower reaches of the coral, where it leaped with the kind of silence cats own to the sand in the precise moment Jerica peeked into the ruin. There, behind her, the creature's blank head stretched a rubbery snout forward as though to sniff the woman, though it were as noseless as a stone. One wiry forelimb raised, multi-jointed fingers wibbling, Maladroit lowered itself to its haunches, and waited.

Jerica had that peculiar sensation that something or someone was watching her. It started as an electric shiver that darted down her spine and ended with a tingle at the nape of her neck. She ignored it and stood a little straighter, maybe canting her head a bit towards her shoulder and frowning as though puzzling something out in her own head. She was definitely not alone. The problem arose when she couldn't pinpoint the exact location of her unease. Is there really any point in pretending that she was alone anymore? Not particularly. "Hello?" she calls in a voice pitched low and just barely above a whisper before she cleared her throat and spoke again, "Hello? Is anyone there?"

Maladroit had never entirely shed its original consciousness, and while the malevolent goblin it once had been was now firmly subsumed into the greater conglomerate mass of its new awareness, a wilful streak of mischief nevertheless remained Thus, the star-walker plucked a little stone, smoothed from millennia of sea-tumbling, from the sand. Rolling this between the tips of two black and oily-textured fingers, the creature mused for a moment on its perception of the pebble's long journey from the cliffs of Rynvale, where it had fallen into the sea as a considerably larger chunk of rock containing the fossils of elder species long extinct that had once roamed that island. It mused too, on the ramblings of those animals across a land bridge which no longer existed, and had once joined the isle to a larger land mass, submerged entirely at present. Herds and rocky avalanches, blurs of life and stone, bloomed from the little pebble as if it were a seed bursting with brilliant, strange flowers. All of it passed in the beat of a gull's wing, and Maladroit savoured it as it tossed the stone high, its trajectory the same open hole of a window it had vacated. There was, shortly after, a stony clatter from within the ruin..

Jerica , being a rather nondescript woman of below average height with mousy brown hair and equally mousy brown eyes with pale freckle splattered skin, is nonetheless cautious when she hears the scrabble of something falling or sliding inside the coral palace. Releasing her grip from the hinted at doorway she moves with sure footedness (now a word regardless of what spell check says) deeper into the water-bored coral. Did she believe that the Watcher was further in? It's hard to tell as she picks her way along long unused corridors and down worn looking steps. Gingerly she reaches for the harmless looking stick and her brown hair falls down her back. One end is removed revealing a collection of long needle-like projectiles which she is careful not to touch or be pricked by. The other end comes off and is pocketed for safe keeping and now is left with a tube no more than six inches long. "Who's there?" she questions the air again before carefully plucking a dart from it's holder and sliding it partway into the miniature blow gun.

Maladroit followed, padding on soles that were naturally rubberlike, and which owned the property of allowing the gaunt to stroll walls and ceilings as casually as if they were the Kelay road. It wasn't hard to evade eyes, when one had the foreknowledge of where next they may shift their attention. And so the thing followed, like a bizarre and hell-mangled hound. Once the woman who was far from 'non-descript' to Maladroit's eldred perceptions, was firmly within the structure, the once-goblin halted, lifted its rubbery hands and proceeded once more to wibble its manyjointed fingers. Jerica could not possibly know, but between those twiggy digits was slung a cat's-cradle of time filaments, memories imbedded in the coral, haunts and specters of history all living now, and forever, in the great weave of creation. And that would be why, of a sudden, Jerica would find herself surrounded by a bustling castle-ful of merfolk, silvery tails flipping and streams of echoes screeing, fish being chased from the vaunted halls and royal children being chastened for their childish ways. The dead coral was not dead now, but an eye-aching forest of colour and texture, the living stone blooming with rare anemones and luminescent corals, wherein scuttled a mindboggling array of tiny creatures and the beings which hunted them. Ignorant of the woman's deadly cluster of pointy things, a moray eel circled her head.

Jerica wasn't too alarmed at first, the changing happening so gradually that the woman barely batted a lash. She even went so far as to step out the way of a passing mer-child. She could then feel the way her clothes seemed more buoyant and drifted naturally from her body. More specifically her shirt followed by her hair which fanned out and floated before her eyes, scaring off the eel with a flutter of bubbles caused by the whipping of its flat-fanned tail. Being so real, Jerica was fully immersed in the illusion and here she is under water. The thought slammed painfully into her head and her heart stopped, skipped a beat then pounded hard against her ribs. Under. Water. The blowgun and darts forgotten, Jerica instinctively held her breath and looked around in that wide-eyed manner a panicking woman does. Clawing the air, which felt like water, Jerica reached for what she saw or thought was the surface. Her lungs screamed painfully for air and in her frantic state the normally level headed woman believed herself to be deep underwater and swimming with flailing limbs towards the surface.

Maladroit observed this procession of events with the same stoic apathy with which it tended to observe all things with rare exception. It watched the woman flail, shimmers of sardines and the odd haddock fitting from her path, or through it, or through her as time and space melded and fluctuating, parted again, and she swam for a surface which did not exist. No move was made to assist her. Any moment now, the air in her lungs would burn its way free of her, and she would be forced to inhale the odd amalgam of oxygen and temporally displaced liquid. Perched now upon the ceiling for which she swam, upside down and seated on its haunches, the gaunt tilted its blind head - and waited. Merfolk, in some distant epoch, gargled and burbled and scree-d to each other, regarding the peculiar, bifurcated phantom their children were wailing about, passing it off as young imagination, though some would note how terribly flighty the fish were this day.

Jerica fought it. She fought the hitch of her diaphragm and the instinctual urge to release the carbon dioxide and inhale fresh relatively clean oxygen. Every cell screamed for it until she couldn't ignore them anymore. Everyone has to die sometime and it was just a little ironic that she would die in the very way she feared most. Drowning. Ceasing her ineffective attempts to reach the surface and the promise of air, Jerica closed her eyes, made a last wish and took a breath. She felt; better. Not at all what she thought drowning would feel like. She took another breath and released it just to test her theory. She didn't feel dead or dying. Jerica felt relief that oxygen, that much needed molecule in the air, was replacing the exhausted supply she'd stored. Fluttering open her eyes, Jerica took the time to actually look around and observe her surroundings. Looking down, her feet were still firmly planted on the ground. That just seemed odd.

Maladroit, from the shattered half-dome of the palatial hall where once and once then again a mighty race of mers had founded the heart of their doomed civilisation, gave Jerica a little wave. Or, at least, that's what it seemed to be doing. This was immediately prior to the thing, which resembled the result of bulls and apes and greyhounds and bats being thrown together in some arcane blender and reassembled - not too terribly far from the truth - swarming down the living walls of its temporal half-illusion to land beside her with a rubbery 'plop', effectively blocking the path through which she'd entered, which happened to also be the sole means of any kind of hasty exit.

Maladroit peered at Jerica, or gave the sense of doing so, though its head bore no trace of feature or outward expression.

Jerica delighted in the silvery flashes of fishes and mermaid tails as they swept past and she breathed. Clearly she had fallen asleep and this is a dream. Else-wise how could she be breathing underwater. The dream, as she chose to see it, was quite lovely and she simply stood in one spot too afraid that moving would burst this little bubble of tranquillity. She missed Maladroit's wave although it might be certain she was not meant to see it even though again she felt that creepy-crawly sensation. This time when she stilled and heard that 'plop', Jerica turned around slowly and carefully with her head down as though some sixth sense told her that she really did not want to see what had fallen behind. And maybe she was looking for another small pile of sea-weed. Jerica's throat worked convulsively to get some moisture into her mouth through a series of hard and fast swallows. It did not help. Forgotten is the majestic display of coral castle and the inhabitants thereof. Dismissed is the fact that she now appears weaponless, her small blow gun and the darts having been lost in her needless bid for a surface that didn't exist. Jerica saw first the creature's feet. Or were they hands? Its legs and spindly body before rising higher to its face. Except that there isn't a face to be seen. The air captured once again in her lungs is expelled on a breathed, "Oh" moments before her eyes rolled back and Jerica did something she has never in her life done until that point. She fainted dead away and crumbled in an almost slow-motion way to the skeletal and unforgiving coral beneath her feet.

Maladroit's arm snatched out, and the creature caught her up in the manner of an ape taking a tasty fruit from the forest floor, a bear catching its supper from a stream. It was, it realised, somewhat in need of fuel.. the malignant portion of its awareness, ever festering away at the back of what passed for a mind, suggested that human fat burned well and cleanly, and was seemly to the senses if you didn't mind a slightly porkish aftertaste. But Maladroit had plans for supper, and plans for this sentient bundle it cradled in its forelimbs, and so it ignored the imperative of hunger and shuffled on its hind legs out to the beach, where it laid Jerica down on a thin layer of window-flung seaweed. Then it loped back into the ruin, startling a long-dead mer-nanny into scaly conniptions and prompting her to quit her service to the royal family, thus saving her life and that of her flar-flung future progeny that were presently swimming somewhere off the coast of Rynvale.

Plucking needles and blow-pipe off the scumbly coral floor, Maladroit returned and placed these neatly by the woman's side. Thoughtful, it pondered her. It was deathless, being constructed of death, and had all the time in the world to wait for Jerica's senses to catch up with her. So Maladroit loomed above the human, and pondered, while gulls overhead soared and screeched, and the world circled its sun, and the universe wheeled about them. Patience would, however, prove a weaker impulse than starvation. The gaunt, for reasons known only to itself, gently placed a smooth, brown sea-pebble on Jerica's swoon-paled brow and then left her to bake on the beach, loping off to find suitable nourishment in the deeps of the ocean which moments later swallowed it whole.