Latyon
New Member
Jäger held the wrapper between his teeth, feeling its rough texture against his lips as he pressed the beige, woolly bandage to the seeping sore underneath his armpit, and winced. After a moment of sharp stinging and unbearable burning, his very nerve endings seemed to dissolve into a wintry, minty cloud. It was a strange feeling, to taste a medicine as it entered an open wound in the torso, but indeed he could; a sort of deep and bitter post-nasal drip, like good volocain.
He took the wrapper from his teeth and crumbled it between knotted fingers, his veins and arteries twisting beneath almost translucent skin. He tossed the wad of paper, sportsman-like, toward the bin near the privacy curtain, but missed; a sportsman, he was not.
Though he was hardly exerting himself, he could feel fatigue manifesting in beads of sweat forming in the crook at the back of his skull, where the head and neck met, and then dripping freely down his back. He wondered how there was still so much water in his body after all this time - two weeks, now, on a journey theorized to last no longer than a week - adrift. His body felt as if it were overheating, yet a chill pervaded every room on this damned airship.
This damned airship. Ostensibly the largest in the world and yet, impossibly cramped. Every corner and hallway darkened at all hours of the day, never a moment of quiet, with the storm howling outside. A machine of impossible simplicity but quite a hefty amount of upkeep, crewmembers milled about like blood cells, crammed together in capillaries built for smaller things. And there was a smell - like a swimming pool full of sweat, baking in the hot sun, swirled with gunpowder and the unmistakable, roasted-honey thickness of soma.
Popping the lids off three small glass bottles, he poured an assortment of tablets into a pile and separated them meticulously, into symmetrical groups of equal size and composition. These he tucked away into a kitschy set of several bags, save for the final group, which he dropped into a glass of water and swallowed with most apathetic gulps.
Jäger peered into the tiny mirror, with his tiny overhead light, and swore he saw his own skull staring back. One more thing, he thought to himself, as he lifted a dark bottle from the sink, nearly empty save for a small and lethargic puddle of honey-like ooze. He licked the medication from inside the bottle with great stress, his tongue unable to move the way it used to, on account of the scarring.
He smelled great. He looked...
He smiled, a sincere, charming, mischievous smile, his tongue pressed against the small gap in his two front teeth. Sure, he might've felt like shit, but no one was going to know.
A muscle in his abdominals seized, interrupting his breathing for a moment. Like someone plucked a violin string in his bowels. The medication only made the pervasive hunger more intense.
The periscope glided effortlessly in Admiral Navarro's grasp as she peered into the swirling darkness beyond. The storm outside raged on, its fury reverberating through the metal walls of the bridge like apocalyptic hail. Yet amidst the chaos, her determined gaze remained fixed on the eerie spectacle unfolding - or perhaps, folding? - before her.
There, looming in the blackened void, backlit by flashes of red lightning, were the unmistakable forms of the creatures they had been tracking. Massive, contraglowing orbs hung suspended in the tempestuous winds, their ethereal shadows casting an otherworldly light on the churning cyclone below. Each orb was adorned with spindly, needle-like appendages that swayed and undulated like toothy stalks of kelp, waiting for something edible to drift by.
"Gods," Admiral Navarro murmured, her voice barely audible above the howling winds. "Is that a fish or a tree?"
Her stomach rumbled in response, a stark reminder of the dwindling food supplies that plagued the fleet. The quartermaster, ever pragmatic, wasted no time in offering a solution.
"Whatever it is," he replied, "there's a lot of it. Each one of them could last us two weeks. Surely that will be enough to see us through to the far side."
Navarro's jaw tightened as she considered his words, her mind racing with questions and doubts. How could they be sure it was safe to consume? What risks were they willing to take in the name of survival? As she often did when she was thinking, she probed at the hole left behind by a missing molar with the tip of her tongue.
But as she stared closer at the mesmerizing spectacle before her, she felt a strange sense of certainty wash over her. It was as if the creatures were beckoning to her, offering a glimmer of hope in the darkness.
"So ordered," she declared, her voice ringing with authority. "We have little choice. All hands - bring it down!"
With a sense of purpose that belied the uncertainty gnawing at her heart, Navarro turned away from the periscope and set about preparing the crew for their daring hunt. For better or worse, their fate now lay in the hands of the enigmatic creatures - or plants, or whatever - that lurked within the depths of the Land's End Maelstrom.
The shift whistles wailed throughout the ship's decks around five minutes earlier than Jäger expected, which annoyed him - he deeply valued his four hours of sleep and the time between waking and work. Before he had time to contemplate the reason, the ship's quartermaster barked from the brass talking tube in the center of the barracks.
"All hands to main deck. Repeating, all hands to main deck."
It was a haunting thing to hear, those words - he'd had nightmares of the very ones. All hands...never good.
But the quartermaster seemed rather...blasé, about it. His voice lacked urgency. Desperation.
Curious.
Jäger heard the pounding footsteps of the other sailors responding to the call and tucked all of his supplies away, with one last glance in the mirror.
How much longer could this go on?
He took the wrapper from his teeth and crumbled it between knotted fingers, his veins and arteries twisting beneath almost translucent skin. He tossed the wad of paper, sportsman-like, toward the bin near the privacy curtain, but missed; a sportsman, he was not.
Though he was hardly exerting himself, he could feel fatigue manifesting in beads of sweat forming in the crook at the back of his skull, where the head and neck met, and then dripping freely down his back. He wondered how there was still so much water in his body after all this time - two weeks, now, on a journey theorized to last no longer than a week - adrift. His body felt as if it were overheating, yet a chill pervaded every room on this damned airship.
This damned airship. Ostensibly the largest in the world and yet, impossibly cramped. Every corner and hallway darkened at all hours of the day, never a moment of quiet, with the storm howling outside. A machine of impossible simplicity but quite a hefty amount of upkeep, crewmembers milled about like blood cells, crammed together in capillaries built for smaller things. And there was a smell - like a swimming pool full of sweat, baking in the hot sun, swirled with gunpowder and the unmistakable, roasted-honey thickness of soma.
Popping the lids off three small glass bottles, he poured an assortment of tablets into a pile and separated them meticulously, into symmetrical groups of equal size and composition. These he tucked away into a kitschy set of several bags, save for the final group, which he dropped into a glass of water and swallowed with most apathetic gulps.
Jäger peered into the tiny mirror, with his tiny overhead light, and swore he saw his own skull staring back. One more thing, he thought to himself, as he lifted a dark bottle from the sink, nearly empty save for a small and lethargic puddle of honey-like ooze. He licked the medication from inside the bottle with great stress, his tongue unable to move the way it used to, on account of the scarring.
He smelled great. He looked...
He smiled, a sincere, charming, mischievous smile, his tongue pressed against the small gap in his two front teeth. Sure, he might've felt like shit, but no one was going to know.
A muscle in his abdominals seized, interrupting his breathing for a moment. Like someone plucked a violin string in his bowels. The medication only made the pervasive hunger more intense.
The periscope glided effortlessly in Admiral Navarro's grasp as she peered into the swirling darkness beyond. The storm outside raged on, its fury reverberating through the metal walls of the bridge like apocalyptic hail. Yet amidst the chaos, her determined gaze remained fixed on the eerie spectacle unfolding - or perhaps, folding? - before her.
There, looming in the blackened void, backlit by flashes of red lightning, were the unmistakable forms of the creatures they had been tracking. Massive, contraglowing orbs hung suspended in the tempestuous winds, their ethereal shadows casting an otherworldly light on the churning cyclone below. Each orb was adorned with spindly, needle-like appendages that swayed and undulated like toothy stalks of kelp, waiting for something edible to drift by.
"Gods," Admiral Navarro murmured, her voice barely audible above the howling winds. "Is that a fish or a tree?"
Her stomach rumbled in response, a stark reminder of the dwindling food supplies that plagued the fleet. The quartermaster, ever pragmatic, wasted no time in offering a solution.
"Whatever it is," he replied, "there's a lot of it. Each one of them could last us two weeks. Surely that will be enough to see us through to the far side."
Navarro's jaw tightened as she considered his words, her mind racing with questions and doubts. How could they be sure it was safe to consume? What risks were they willing to take in the name of survival? As she often did when she was thinking, she probed at the hole left behind by a missing molar with the tip of her tongue.
But as she stared closer at the mesmerizing spectacle before her, she felt a strange sense of certainty wash over her. It was as if the creatures were beckoning to her, offering a glimmer of hope in the darkness.
"So ordered," she declared, her voice ringing with authority. "We have little choice. All hands - bring it down!"
With a sense of purpose that belied the uncertainty gnawing at her heart, Navarro turned away from the periscope and set about preparing the crew for their daring hunt. For better or worse, their fate now lay in the hands of the enigmatic creatures - or plants, or whatever - that lurked within the depths of the Land's End Maelstrom.
The shift whistles wailed throughout the ship's decks around five minutes earlier than Jäger expected, which annoyed him - he deeply valued his four hours of sleep and the time between waking and work. Before he had time to contemplate the reason, the ship's quartermaster barked from the brass talking tube in the center of the barracks.
"All hands to main deck. Repeating, all hands to main deck."
It was a haunting thing to hear, those words - he'd had nightmares of the very ones. All hands...never good.
But the quartermaster seemed rather...blasé, about it. His voice lacked urgency. Desperation.
Curious.
Jäger heard the pounding footsteps of the other sailors responding to the call and tucked all of his supplies away, with one last glance in the mirror.
How much longer could this go on?
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