RP:The Art of Squid Watching
Background
Joliette Thorne had returned to Vailkrin and the Hanging Corpse, a flurry of orders given this man and that on her arrival. Her familiar's own directive was only that he refuel himself, ready for the heavy haul to be made on the morrow.
Maladroit, at such a loose end, took to wing across the ocean again, swooping low to taunt with a slash of claw the waves that each wore, in his twisted, spongy mind a certain face... An hour later, he was back in Rynvale, a gargoyle set upon one of the rocks by cove's dark edge, appearing to be nothing more than another jagged extrusion of stone, his blind head canted down toward the spuming waters that beat themselves upon rocks below.
A Cove In Rynvale
Nameless was the one who'd suggested they take a walk. It was perhaps a strange thing for a creature so enamoured with the skies to mention, in his huffs and looks and feelings that allowed Kirien to practically read his damn mind, but the wyvern knew well how much his companion adored the ground and being around it - within it, even. Though he was tired, Kirien had eventually allowed himself to be persuaded into a short wander and they'd ended up tracing tracks along the beaches, slipping in and out of coves until they came across this very spot. Motionless as he was, Maladroit still gave off that certain sense of something off through the earth, as if all life around him quietly protested to his otherworldly presence somehow. Upon picking up threads of that presence, Kirien paused in his steps, blinking in bemusement as Nameless emitted a soft huff from behind him, sharp claws clacking against the wet stone he'd just slipped on and knocking it with a heavy splash into the waters below.
There was no acknowledgement of that giveaway splash. Maladroit was already well aware of who was asleep or awake, walking or wounded, for a ten mile radius of the area and held no concern or care for any living thing at all among them. Except, perhaps, for one. The creature’s bullet-shaped head swivelled on its rubbery neck to ‘face’ the kit, the inevitable writhe of many-jointed fingers doing for whatever sort of greeting such a monster may give. Then Maladroit swung his blank visage upon Nameless, and if smooth, undented skin could at all wear an expression – or perhaps it was just an illusion from some radiating mental wave – that featureless canvas would appear to hold a hint of malevolent smugness, right before the gaunt slipped off the rock, wings folded tight to its sides, into the choppy, foam-ridden waves.
Long Way Down
The waters grow darker toward the sea-bed, and icy cold. But closer to the surface great slivery shoals of fish ripple in dazzling, shifting patterns to confuse sharp-toothed predators. Now and then a small shark will scatter them entirely, or the occasional pod of curious dolphins, often found in the vicinity of mer-folk. Visibility grows poorer the closer one gets to the silty bottom.
Kirien could not quite figure it out or really begin to understand it, but for some reason he held an odd sort of fondness for the hellish creature kneeling nearby on the rocks, surrounded by the echoing swell and roar of the ocean. He'd been terrified of Maladroit at first, of course - who wouldn't have been if they'd come across that horrific scene amidst Rynvale's foggy, forested wilderness? Still, the being seemed to 'like' him in some way or another; so the empath's fingers wiggled a little in a return greeting, while Nameless stretched his long neck out and peered over Kirien's shoulder at the shadowed familiar, nostrils flaring, eyes narrowed. He growled, low in his throat, clearly unnerved by that faceless visage turned his way but then abruptly Mal was disappearing beneath the waves and Kirien blinked, moving to the edge himself to peer sightlessly into the void. Recalling Jolie's words from days before, he was only hesitating a moment or two before hands were at the buttons of his coat and working them undone. Shrugging the heavy outer garment off, he was moving to nervously follow the gaunt into the water when Nameless nudged him from behind, appearing utterly perplexed.
"Stay here," Kirien told him, his voice rebounding off the far walls of the cove. "Look after my damn coat, aight? Goodness knows I don't want no mermaids stealin' it."
With that said, he'd be pulling away and sliding down to a rock close to the water, staring into what was, for him, a black abyss where only the vague outlines of surrounding stone formations could be sensed. He almost looked as if he were about to shake his head and turn back when abruptly the fox slipped and with nothing more than a startled yelp, was lost to the writhe and foam of the ocean.
All was dark below, though the moons above shone bright, providing schools of rock-feeding fish a perpetually rocking, vaguely silver ceiling overhead. Whip-like, the familiar's barbed tail was a serpentine contrail behind Maladroit's undulating form. The leathery wings were clamped tight to his sides, his fingers spread wide to reveal a thin sheen of webbing between them to assist his slow descent to relatively calmer depths. The fish, owning a similar wariness against that hellish creature's tainted aura, scattered like aqueous bullets in all directions, perhaps surrounding the kit who followed briefly with their panicked back and forth zig-zags. Arms and hind limbs treading the brine, Maladroit paused about half way down to the ocean's floor.
Kirien , dragged unwillingly beneath the surface by the tides, spent a good minute or so flailing around, fingers grasping desperately at any rocks he came into contact with here and there before he'd be dragged away again, pulled further down or off to one side. Eventually, though, he came to notice that he was not experiencing the woozy, light-headed sensation or the dimming of his mind as vital organs shut down due to a lack of oxygen - in fact, he felt quite fine. Abruptly remembering that he did not possess the need to breathe any more, Kirien suddenly found himself feeling quite foolish about all his struggling. He was still underwater in a world he could not really see, however, and this was problematic. Something brushed against him then and the vampire expelled a burst of bubbles in silent surprise; fingers extended tentatively to run briefly over the scales of a passing fish, the sinuous animals gathering in the water around him, flitting to and fro. There was a useless glance around in search of Maladroit, before Kirien hit a shelf of rock and clung on as tight as he could, feeling. He could pick up nothing much in the water, at least nothing that wasn't close nearby and giving off a good amount of vibration. He'd make his way slowly deeper though, figuring that was where the gaunt intended to go.
A webbed and rubbery hand would close upon some part of Kirien, then. It was as likely a mischievous attempt to cash in on the kit’s panic as an attempt to guide him into line with the purpose of this underwater sojourn, the gaunt’s bony but oddly powerful limbs keeping the pair afloat more evenly here, where the current roared like liquid wind above these stiller waters. There they’d stay for a time, suspended like two odd bubbles of flesh in the blackness. Kirien would sense, after a puzzling few moments, a queer tug at his mind, as though it too was being drawn out of its natural depth. If nothing was in place to prevent the offered link, Kirien would glimpse in some small way the gaunt’s own bizarre range of perceptions. If that proved impossible, Maladroit alone would ‘view’ the ocean surrounds as a mind-bendingly white space in which parti-hued and slightly pixillated objects glowed and moved, leaving trails of lights behind them and – very oddly – moving into a similar trail of mind-seen ‘echoes’ that came before. There wasn’t much happening, as yet. The fish were mostly gone or keeping distance, and only the gentle ripples of drifting weeds, less wary jellyfish and other boneless creatures stirred in the eerie, unnatural whiteness that existed in the familiar’s peculiar head.
Kirien thought he felt something edging closer and glanced round warily; but the water betrayed him and all sensations of movement garnered through his fingers on that rock he clutched at were warped and awry. He looked the wrong way, found a many jointed hand wrapping fully about his wrist, emerging without warning from unfathomable blackness from the opposite direction. The contact simultaneously terrified and relieved Kirien in that moment, though the former emotion melted into the latter as he quickly figured out who had a hold on him. Then there was an odd sort of pull that felt more mental than physical and the vampire frowned; he'd few barriers protecting his mind, at least not ones that worked very well currently, and so that queer vision of the gaunt's would infiltrate his head and suddenly fill his mind with sight - of a sort. He'd spend a short while being both bemused and incredibly intrigued by this new form of perception, getting used to the sudden whiteness that had erupted inside his head as if someone had suddenly switched on the lights. There was a glance upward at the thrashing, foamy covering through silvered fish that fizzled blurrily in and out of view before his gaze drifted to Maladroit and Kirien might've nodded slightly, as though indicating to the gaunt that moving was all right. He was, after all, quite curious as to what the being found so interesting down in this shifting landscape of white and pixillated movement.
The Wreck of the Virago
The shadow seen from above becomes an eerie reality. The hulking wreck, with its smashed-in hull lists heavily to one side, weighted down for years by the heavy cargo it was hauling before pirates sent it to Davy Jones with a deadly accurate broadside. Looted of its wealth long ago, the ship now lies a sad and empty testament to seafaring tragedy, as well as tomb to the dozens of brave men who went down with her. The main mast lies fallen, but the two remaining still flutter with tatters of canvas and decayed ropes coated in tar, salt tides instead of winds buffeting the pathetic remnants of sails. Exploring the wreck is tempting, but could prove a dangerous pursuit not only for the risk of structural collapse but also some among the many sea creatures that have taken up residence here, wily predators lying in wait for a meal of any kind to swim past.
Maladroit was now, as he had ever been in any form at all, utterly unconcerned with the desires of creatures other than himself beyond the capacity to cause them mayhem for his own vast amusement. But this flesh… unlike the dull, beak-clacking crows the necromancer had employed as vehicles for him, or the brief familiarity of a goblin's skin, this semi-summoned, semi-harvested amalgamation of matter he wore now was more than a mere meat-suit for the once-goblin's -cursed and mostly immaterial self. It had its own imperatives, at times, which lulled the wicked and stained soul ensconced within to a calmer, broader perception of existence. Maladroit thought, to put it less esoterically, not so much now in terms of petty revenge and other worldly malevolencies, and more about the vast reaches of space, the depths of oceans, the broad-reaching implications of actions rather than the actions themselves. It was with this implacable calm that he now held Kirien in his grip and thrust upon the vampire his own unworldly senses. Thus they hung and hung while the gaunt dogpaddled, for what must have seemed an interminable time for the kit. There was no warning at all when Maladroit dragged Kirien down another hundred feet, to halt again amid yet another snowy field of nothingness and kelp moving through time and space like the results of some not-too-terrifying ergot hallucination. And then, after another wait, the white, blank sea lit up like yuletide - the blind vampire would be dazzled by a sudden and pulsing swarm of globules, millions of them, it would seem, all aglow in a mind-boggling array of colours, many completely unknown to any other creature's perception. It was a white universe filled with galaxies of swirling, jigging stars, innumerable and mind-achingly beautiful. For here had come the squid at last, to Maladroit's soundless summons.
Kirien managed to manoeuvre his captured arm some in Maladroit's calm grasp, wriggling a little until fingers found purchase on mottled skin and curled round impossibly gnarled hands. It was a reassurance of a sort to the fox who would otherwise be blind here - to hold on as he was held on to in an attempt to retain all this peculiar vision even if the gaunt decided to let go for whatever reason. If this strange mesh of various beastly body parts stitched and knitted into one form released him, he'd be left alone in an imperceptible void of shifting waves, unseen turbulence and haunting echoes in the deep. A good thing he had a firm grip of the gaunt quite soon because then the kit vampire was being led further down into this snowy white underworld, to a depth he was not quite certain of until free hand brushed against a passing outcropping of rock and he calculated quickly how far beneath the waves they had reached. Glancing up, he noted that all above was a vast, blank nothingness. Wisps of kelp now drifted around Kirien who was reaching out to touch one of those banners of plant life when those squid came blazing out of nowhere, heeding the wordless call of the kit's faceless phantom of a companion - and suddenly, Kirien saw in colours that should not rightly exist. It was a whirl of confusion and blinking lights, glimmers and shimmers of elegant movement assaulting borrowed vision; he'd never seen anything like this, this fox who dwelled above the waters and feared the darkened depths he could not perceive in, and his mouth fell open, utterly astounded by the almost ethereal sight and dance of the squid racing in the waters. For a moment, Kirien felt as if everything he'd ever seen before, every colour and scene and landscape, had become terribly bland and flat in comparison to this underwater galaxy of living stars.
Not far away, and possibly unnoticed for the dazzle of the cephalopodic dance which swirled around the unlikely pair, was the faint, grey shadow of a wreck. At least, that's how it might appear to Kirien, who did not possess an amorphous sponge of globular cells for a 'brain', if the gaunt could be said possess any such organ. As the squid continued to swarm, Maladroit would to that changed sight resemble a queerly arranged spume of ‘living’ flame and strange spiralling pulses amid it. A terrible sensation would flood the empath, now; something looming, something vast and cold and hungry was rising from the lip of a bottomless black gulf on which one side of the wreck rested. Whatever it was, it was coming for them. Maladroit showed no sign of allowing the kit to flee its ancient, overwhelming presence.
Kirien might not have spotted that long-sunken shipwreck at all amidst the swirl of glinting cephalopods locked in some intricate, enchanting underwater dance. He'd have been quite happy not to notice it either, but he would do so abruptly whether he liked it or not, when that horribly chilling feeling crashed against the empath's psyche with a suddenness that prompted a flinch and a slight tightening of long fingers round Maladroit's own. Attentions were drawn swiftly away from the tantalising sight before his eye and in the direction of that wreck instead, the lonely ship rotting slowly away in the gloom. He'd attempt to tug at the gaunt, dread coiling into a tight spring in his stomach, but the other gave no sign of moving or of releasing him and the kit worked himself as best he could into a position behind the bulk of that faceless amalgamation instead, peering over a folded wing at the old Virago and the abyssal depths it listed so close on the edges of. The sensation in his mind was almost too much to bear and Kirien squinted, his eye half-closed in a reaction to that intense feeling filling the cool waters all around him.
It was a legend. It was a rumour, spoken about by drunken sailors, hailed in the way monsters are in tall tales told around comfort fires on land - but never at open sea for the superstitious to shiver at, perhaps knowing somewhere deep in their gut that not all tall tales are a drunkard’s entertaining lie. The tentacled ‘stars’ pulsed as one and scattered in looping fits that would only add to the kit’s confusion, while that unimaginably colossal presence rose at its own excruciating pace toward the upper waters of its fathomless home. Finally, breaking like a great, blinding sun across the oceanic shelf where the Virago had come to its doom, a massive orb of some indefinable and pulsing colour made the wreck a silhouette with its atrocious bulk. The orb – which Kirien may or may not come to understand was a single, peeking eye – peered at the two tiny figures through the stick-like, rotting masts and water-blown rags of sails. Maladroit wibbled the many-jointed fingers of its free hand madly. For here had come the one being in all of existence with whom the once-goblin shared any kind of true understanding these days. The kraken stared, emanating its immeasurably cold and distant interest in the relatively miniscule gaunt. Kirien may as well have been one of a billion eyeless deep-minnows it had ingested in its untold centuries. It stayed but for a moment. Its leave-taking sucked an oceanful of water in its wake, threatening to dislodge the rock-trapped wreck and drag the gaunt and his hapless companion down with it.
Kirien knew the tales. He'd been a patron in the Barrel often enough to catch both drunken earfuls and hushed whispers of the same legends, had found similar stories littering the idle conversation of many of the taverns he'd travelled to, in fact. There were ancient and terrible things in the deep places of the world; and more often than not, humankind remained ignorant of their presence or twisted old rumours of them, fashioning them into fantastical tales to frighten and amaze children at night. Kirien quietly figured it was a good thing they were ignorant. Still, when that enormous…orb of dazzlingly unimaginable colour reared up amidst the remaining flickers of smaller cephalopods that began to fade out of view like stars fleeing the rising sun, the kit, in a brief moment of tremendous and still steadily growing panic, tugged at Maladroit again. He thoughtlessly opened his mouth to whisper, "What is that?" but of course, all that came out were obscure, half-stifled sounds and a burst of bubbles. Perhaps the being would feel the question instead through their connection - empathic or telekinetic. Upon noticing that Maladroit seemed to be greeting the huge glowing sphere, Kirien hesitantly moved to do the same but the creature was leaving as soon as it had arrived, sinking back into the never-ending depths of its home. The sudden tug of rushed water following the kraken's descent pulled the vampire forward and he exclaimed in another surge of bubbles, legs kicking uselessly as if that would do anything to stop him from being dragged down. Maladroit seemed to be doing little to stop them so there might've been a muffled scream before the water shook a little around them, a pillar of rock thrusting up from in amongst the bed of kelp on the shelf near the wreck - it would attempt to wrap around both gaunt and kit and hold them securely in place until the pull of the abyss began to even out.
Maladroit hooked his own mysteriously jointed limbs around the rock extrusion until the maelstrom of displaced sea became an upward rush of opposite force - that hole in the ocean's waters left by the sinking monster of the deep creating one hell of a backwash when it filled and was pushed upward. On the shore, a massive surge of water threatened to slop over into the cove, prevented from doing so by the high wall of rock though the stony foreshore beyond it would be littered with a ton of debris and flapping sealife after. It was this new impulsion that tore the lot - rock, Kirien and gaunt, free of the ocean floor and shoved them up like a great, wet fist, chucking the two divers and the stone they’d clung to like so many tumbling dice to join unhappy cod and deepwater crabs, the mound of uprooted kelp and various slithering things that gasped for waters they'd never know again. Tumbling like awkward insect, Maladroit had at some point let go of Kirien. There was a damp crash, a scuffle, a snap of wet wings, and all was silent. It seemed the gaunt had left Kirien alone, skulking off on whatever task or impulse next called him. Nameless was no doubt highly unimpressed. Especially as he was probably quite drenched, with several pounds of seaweed dangling from his scaly nose.
The truly concussive force of that backwash hit Kirien without any warning and sent him reeling, torn along with Maladroit, it would seem, out of that secure stony grasp to soar upwards in a rush of expelled water. The world became an ever more befuddling mess of ethereal colour and blazing lights but the empath almost felt as if he were flying for a moment, hanging on to Maladroit for dear life (well, unlife). Suddenly there was air and, with a great splash, he was out and on his back. Gasping as if mimicking one of the silvery fish flopping about on the rocks nearby, Kirien only barely registered the gaunt’s swift departure and did not realise that his sight had returned to its regular, monochromatic perception until a good few minutes after. When he sat up, the kit took note of his wyvern, who sat grumpily nearby and surrounded by kelp and various underwater plant life, which he had shaken off of his golden scales. Kirien might’ve flashed him a fanged grin, looking a little giddy, a little stunned by the otherworldly beauty he’d experienced below the waves. There was a glance round at the fish that had yet to reach the safety of the water again. “…Dinner?” he asked Nameless breathlessly - the wyvern just frowned at him. As they left the reclusive little cove, Kirien's arms full of weakly flapping fish, the empath quietly entertained the idea of accompanying Maladroit back down beneath the waves for another visit to that phantasmagoric landscape, and did not tell Nameless a thing.