“It’s gotta be magic, right? Ain’t exactly hauling around a hundred pounds of arsenic with us.” Mila paused, leaning left and right from where she sat on the overly firm bridge. Unfortunately, nobody perked up and pulled a massive thing of Andro from hammer-space at the opportunity she served up.
Instead, everyone looked to Naw-Naw, collective breath held. As grim as it might be, there was a long and fabled history of poison-laced feasts put on for one’s enemies, which put it firmly into the space of the gnoll’s Goddess.
As they chewed over the implied question, Mila’s fingers danced down the length of her tail, held uncomfortably still. One claw tip slipped under the prong of a buckle to lift it so that two other claws could snag the strap and pull it out, releasing the tension before moving to the next securing point. They finally had the time and space to stop moving, and she wanted to give her tail some room and relax it a bit.
“Wit’out a poison proper tah start wit’, can’ do much in the conventional sense,” came the eventual, less-than-perfect news as Naw-Naw working things out, either in their own mind or with the big lady upstairs.
Hughestace gave a not-hum to prompt for the unconventional sense that might be doable as Mila gingerly wound her tail blade into a tight, dangerous loop. The one downside to her new weapon, really, that putting it away was a chore that needed to be done carefully. She had managed to not get herself with the sharpened steel yet, though. It did mean her eyes were glued to her own work.
“There might be something else, then?” Was Rora’s gentle prodding, prim and proper from her seat across the circle. The heavy metal could not have made the hard surface more comfortable to sit on, even with the fabric padding, but Rora had not been showing any discomfort, instead sitting up straight and tall, contrasted to Mila’s own slouched, fiddling posture.
Naw-Naw was still thinking hard on the whole thing, but eventually gave, “A curse of starvin’, maybe. Puttin’ i’ in the food itself, so’n the bait gets taken back first. ‘En those that eat of it’ll go mad of hunger.”
“That might be better. The starving ants may over-consume what food they have gathered, or perhaps turn on each other.” Aluca flicked a finger into the palm of his other hand, working it out. “They’ve run out of easy food, so ruining what buffer they have may be enough to collapse all of the colony. Or they kill each other.”
Hughestace gave a grunt of approval, agreeing with the overall point. As Mila snapped the clasps of her case closed, putting her weapon away, she looked up just in time to meet Rora’s gaze, staring hard at her and waiting for the pink kobold’s own thoughts.
And it seemed good, a damn solid plan. Avoiding trying to fight the endless tide of bugs was highest priority, which this checked off, but it just felt like a good plan. Poisoning your pests was one of the simplest ways to do it, and whatever divine poison-curse got cooked up here was hardly going to wreck the environment worse than the ants themselves had done.
Mila gave her nod.
That set Rora to nodding, before turning back to Naw-Naw. “That just leaves the question of, what do we use for the ant food?”
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“I feel the need to revoice my issue with this plan,” Mila stated, rather blandly, as she quintuple-checked the hemp five-point harness she now wore. Six-point, maybe? She was unsure of how her tail factored in to counting anchor points.
They were all back towards the base of the bridge, although pointedly had not stepped off of it. Without the immediate threat of a swarm of giant ants and some time away, they had all noticed the ant corpses had a funk about them. Less bad smell than Mila expected, honestly, but nobody was itching to get back to climbing.
Her backpack and the case with her new weapon and almost all of her stuff had been put to the side, a hinderance in her coming task. Mila was kicking herself now for being as fast and light and sporty as she was, when it was getting her volunteered for this kind of thing.
They had nowhere close to enough food of their own to use as the poisoned bait for the ants, but they did have a craftiness that had granted them access to what was almost certainly more nutritious than what the ants were now willing to stoop to when it came to their vegetables. While the canopy up here was wilting, not long for this world, there was a good chance that if they brought some to the ants, the ants would happily accept the gift.
The issue was that ‘up here’ was still some distance away from the end of their bridge, and so needed to be retrieved. To retrieve it, somebody was going to have to get over there.
That somebody was her, apparently.
Mila was not upset, exactly, and there were safety precautions they were rolling out - namely the harness and a length of rope that should allow her to make it to the nearest tree but prevent her from splatting if she missed. But she was now calling into question her earlier mental back-patting about not having a fear of heights.
Acrophobia was not on her docket, but she was weighing in some acrobatophobia now that she would have to jump… a ways, to gather some wilted lettuce.
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“You’re the only one fast enough to make that jump, and light enough for us to catch,” was Aluca’s repeated reasoning, but it just had Mila smiling and shaking her head. The other three were being a bit more visibly sympathetic but were quiet about it, knowing that she knew.
“I’m the only one stupid enough to be talked into it, you mean?” She joked, arms up and doing a slow turn as Rora and Hughestace did their own check of the rope work for the umpteenth time. “I do wonder what you’re doing, knowing all these fancy knots, Hughestace? Anyone special we should be knowin’ about?”
The elf turned a bit purple at the joke but was professional, focused. A couple failures here would not be acceptable, and he knew it just as acutely as anyone else. He was methodical in his checks, making sure that nothing would ever slip and that nothing was too tight or too loose.
Rora gave a small, nervous laugh and fretted. It was clear to Mila that her not-putting-labels-on-it-yet-friend had no real idea of what she was looking for, but that the looking over had to happen anyway. For all that it was not strictly helping with safety, it did make Mila feel a lot better, a weird little bit of pampering before she went and did something dumb as smartly as possible.
Naw-Naw and the human mage were busy organizing and coiling the other sets of ropes, for usage once Mila was actually over there. That was all tertiary and would not have her life in the balance, and was what Rora was supposed to be helping with, but Mila kept catching their glances over at her, at the coil of rope connected to the back of her harness at one end and a two-javelin anchor at the base of the bridge on the other.
Naw-Naw spoke up, after a few unwieldy beats of silence. “We c’n fin’ another way, if’n we have to,” was an olive branch, a second thought to figure something else out that did not feel quite as risky.
Mila barked a laugh. If she were truly, deeply unwilling to do this, there would have been no way in any hell that the harness would have ever been assembled about her parson. If there was a better, safer way to get some food analogue for their bigger plan, it would have been thought of, voiced, and acted upon in the last hour or however long these preparations were going on for now.
It was a sweet offer, a kind gesture, but it was not one Mila, or the group as a whole, could take.
“Nah, this’ll be easy. When we were doing those tests, I made longer jumps than what we got here. Ain’t nothing to it, and I’ll look cool as fuck when I ace this.” Which, in Mila’s defense, was absolutely going to be true. Because if she did not ace this, she would be a lizard pendulum off the end of the bridge while she was slowly pulled back up, which would not look cool at all.
Hughestace pulled away, finally satisfied with either his own work or that Mila was properly comfortable now. Rora kept hovering even as the other two, coils of ropes put out in rows, stood and approached a smidge.
Rora was careful to not mess with the harness, hands all fluttery and never actually touching Mila, all nervous energy. As she came back around, watching for anything out of place with where the rope came up and around Mila’s hips, Mila took her own bit of initiative.
Faster than Rora could react, Mila slid forward and threw her arms up and around Rora’s shoulders, the other woman feeling massive and immovable with the big thick armor-and-moonlight plating padding out her muscular shoulders. Mila even put that vastness to the test by squeezing her hug tight, and she managed to move the mountain, Rora’s arms gingerly sliding around her waist and giving her own restraining hug.
Mila leaned into it further, pressing her body forward and giving her embrace that much more force, but this time it was futile, no more space available to squeeze out between them. Instead she settled on just holding it, ignoring the soft ‘aww’ from behind her.
It was only when some of Rora’s rigidity leaked out that Mila finally said, “Don’t worry about this. Really. You’ll be there holding the tether, and we won’t even need it.” And, peculiarly enough, Mila felt as confident on that as she sounded. The hug had been to ease Rora’s nervous energy a little bit, but it just felt good, and that was enough.
Their faces were so close to each other and, yes, their friends were right there, but that did not matter. Rora’s gorgeous eyes, somehow so much more golden than her freshly minted scales, could see just how steady the toxic green pools of Mila’s were. It was not false bravado, not jokes to ease the tension of a bad situation.
Mila had this, just like how their group had this whole wider situation handled. They had solutions, they were mitigating any and all dangerous. It was just a matter of carrying it out.
Rora broke their moment by slowly letting Mila go, and Mila supposed that they did have to do the thing, she and Rora could not just spend all their daylight looking into each other’s eyes. Not today, anyway. Mila slipped away, trailing her own hands down Rora’s arms and the backs of her gauntlets.
There was another beat, another temptation for their gaze that meant something to return and draw them back into each other, but it was interrupted by Hughestace clearing his thought quietly. Both kobolds turned to him, and he just gestured down the length of the bridge, keeping them on task.
Fair enough, was Mila’s thought. She, Rora, and the elf moved to take their positions along the runway, each making sure that their section of the rope was managed before turning to check on the others.
Rora had a section of the tether wrapped around and through both hands, to ensure that if Mila fell, she would not just swing back into the mountain of dead ants.
Hughestace had the looped slack of the tether, to be tossed out alongside Mila with her jump, so she would not need to worry about pulling it behind her or it getting tangled.
And Mila, she just had the harness itself. She stood the furthest back for now and, as a last moment’s thought, verified she had her knives, nice and secured at her hips. Once all three had met each other’s eyes several times over and passed on the curt nods, it was time. Mila sank low, crouched and coiled, tail twitching, focused.
She gave a short, “Now!” Before rocketing forward, world narrowing to the silvery strip before her, where it ended, and the sickly yellow leaves with branches beneath. Each footfall on the bridge felt like a thunderclap, ponderous in its weight and significance.
And then there was no more bridge. There was only the uncoiling, the pushing off into air, and her target. Her tail lashed behind her, correcting her course minutely and automatically as she sought her prey, arms extending for the conceptual kill.
Mila hit the foliage with a small rustle and vanished into the leaves, with only the rope showing where she had been. The others had been holding their breath and kept it held until the low groan came from Mila, pulling deep from her soul.
“You’re ok?” Was the tentative question, Rora gritting her teeth just a bit but ready to yank Mila back out of the tree at a moment’s notice.
Mila had to take a second to find the words. “It’s- the leaves are so mushy and gross! And it’s all in my shirt!”