“Oh God, oh God, oh Lord oh God.” Ursula mutters without looking behind her. “Architect! What the hell’s going on?!”
“I don’t know! That’s… I don’t know!” March repeats with frustration. “It’s way more magical than anything else we’ve seen so far. And the falling thorns are… weird! I don’t know!”
“They hurt my head.” I grumble and try to wrench my eyes open. The light hurts too much. “I don’t know why, but when they hit the ground it feels like they’re directly hitting my brain. Making me shiver in pain.”
“Shiver? Like… from being too cold?” Ursula asks with a frown in her voice. “I haven’t felt a change in temp. Must be some magical bullshit going on, but why’s it only hurting you?”
She’s… perfectly fine? Nothing at all? I try to lift my head and manage to point myself towards the thing under the waterfall. There’s only two reasons she’d be fine; her Mind stat’s higher than mine, or she doesn’t have an awareness. But Pearl’s perfectly fine too. So… what the hell is it?
“No debuff?”
Ursula shakes her head in confirmation. “Nothing. Not even a notification saying my stats fought off a debuff.”
Shit. So it is just me. A whole-body shiver nearly makes Ursula drop me, but she manages to right me at the last second.
“Thanks for not dropping me.”
“Not sure you’d fall even if I did.” She chuckles warily. “Architect, where’s the entrance? Can’t see it from where we are.”
March taps on her keys, then hits one with slightly more vigor. “Up twenty feet from you and directly in front.”
“Gotcha.” Ursula grunts and pushes off even harder. More pillars–thorns, I mean–cement themselves into the ground and equally in my brain. I must be twitching something fierce, because Ursula winces and tightens her grip around my legs. “Shit, Gambler, you still with me?”
“Yeah.” I grind out.
From how Ursula’s shoulders rise, that seems to surprise her. Honestly I’d love to pass out right about now, but the pain isn’t the kind for that. It’s the kind of agony that makes everything way too clear and keeps your mind as alert as possible.
Torture. It’s torture.
“Hold on for a few seconds more. I think I… yeah, there it is!” Ursula shouts and jumps three times. Her shoulder digs hard into my stomach, but it’s the least of everything I’m feeling right now. “An outcropping with a hole in it we gotta drop down into. I’m going in, Gambler. If the sensations don’t get any better soon, relocate us back to the surface.”
A little confused noise burbles involuntarily free from my throat. “Both of us? What about the job?”
“The job? Sister, the job ain’t worth shit if it means one of us goes home in a body bag.” Ursula wraps her arms around me tight, and then everything starts to drop. “Damn client should’ve signed on months earlier if she really needed this shit. Or she could’ve been a goddamn normal person and hid the coin away somewhere a little safer than an abandoned oil rig!”
“Mrgh.” I mumble in agreement, but a little part of me doesn’t want to leave.
There’s something else here. And whether that thing in the waterfall is said something else–or if we haven’t even run into it yet–it’ll be lost when the krarig is completely tainted. All the elementals will lose their source of magic, all the non-krarig apocalypse monsters will be killed, and all the salt will disappear completely.
It just feels like such a waste. A waste that’s trying to rip my brain apart with a frustratingly painful mixture of sensations, but a waste nonetheless. I involuntarily clench my jaw at another wracking all-shiver. We need to find out what’s causing this shit if we’re going to stay here.
“Architect.”
March whimpers quietly. “Yes?”
“Find anything on salt elementals. See if it’s them that’s causing this.”
“Of course! Please don’t push yourself.”
A little too late for that.
And for the next little while Ursula just… runs. The shivers never get any less intense, but they do come further and further apart. Nothing comes close to the rapid-fire pain and shivers from the very beginning, though now that I’ve got a few minutes to recover between the thorns of agony, I can almost work through it.
Almost.
I wince and rub my temples as my body defies me, then take a raggedy breath and slowly open and close my eyes. Ursula sits across from me on a chunk of crystal that somehow grew sideways, and I’m on its slightly larger twin. Magic pulsates through everything around us in much greater quantities than before, but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the shivers.
Ursula leans in and gently pats my shoulder. “How’s the head?”
“About as good as I can hope.” I sigh as I lower my hands to rest on my thighs. “Give… gimme a few seconds and I’ll put down some relocation coins.”
“Sounds good. Take all the time you need, sister.” She gives my shoulder one last squeeze, then walks away. “Architect?”
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“I… I… I don’t know.” March whispers apologetically. “The only information on salt elementals comes from the other world. It doesn’t say anything about anything like this.”
Shit. I was really hoping that there’d be some obvious explanation to this. But I guess I might be the first human to get shellraiser awareness, so even if this exact thing was happening somewhere else, people probably wouldn’t be affected the same way I am. It doesn’t offer any relief, but a possible explanation is better than nothing.
I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and push relocation into two coins. Ursula accepts hers without even looking, holds it to her chest, and hands it right back to me. Looking around for a few seconds finds a nice little nook for me to hide them, and I slowly push myself to my feet to walk over there. Shivering thorns wedge themselves in my thoughts as I drop the coins which fall to the ground with dull clinks.
Ursula watches carefully the entire time. “You gonna manage?”
“Yeah.” I say and manage a small smile. “Let’s get as far away from this thing as we can.”
“Don’t gotta tell me twice.” She chuckles and steps up right next to me. “I’ll be right here if it gets real bad again. And don’t hesitate to relocate outta here if you can’t take it any more–no need to warn me beforehand.”
My chest warms a little from Ursula’s words. It’s taken over almost instantly by the shivers, but I know it was there. “Thanks. I’m still going to try to warn you.”
“Appreciate it. Lead the way and set the pace.”
I nod slightly and start moving for real. Every step is a struggle with the remnants of whatever that thing under the waterfall did to me, and I have to catch myself on the crystalline salt wall more than a few times when the shivers send me staggering. Ursula keeps me from full-on falling down every single time and patiently waits for me as the sensations dull to let me move again.
But… more than the pain or the discomfort… it's frustrating. I’m just goddamn walking–it’s not rocket science, so why am I struggling so much? Pearl’s perfectly fine–sitting in her shell biting her lip with worry and a different kind of frustration–and Ursula’s obviously not struggling in the slightest. If I wasn’t slowing us down right now, we’d be more than a few dozen feet down this salt tunnel and a whole lot closer to whatever awaits us in the next room.
“Sorry.” I mutter under my breath as I struggle to shrug off another thorn.
Ursula wraps an arm around me and helps me back to standing up straight. “Not your fault the weird magic thing hit you instead of me. I know it sounds horrible, but it’s way better that only one of us got the shit end of the stick. Next time I get knocked down by some magical asshole, it’ll be your turn to throw your arm over my shoulder and pull me down a hallway. Deal?”
I shake my head and chuckle. “Not much of a deal, but sure.”
Almost an hour later, the tunnel finally starts to open up. The constant barrage of thorns dulls to one every five minutes or so, making it possible to confidently walk on my own for about four minutes at a time, and it’s only going down the further and further we get. I choose to take that as a good sign, and try to forget that I’ll have to go back there at some point. Some point very soon.
“It’s smaller than I thought it’d be. Be really careful; the place is surrounded by elemental signatures.” March warns us, then audibly leans back in her chair. “No sign of any Class Coins. You could skip this room.”
Ursula shakes her head. “If nothing attacks us, there’s no harm in looking around. Especially since turning back means going back to the thing in the waterfall.”
That gets a good shudder out of me. Ursula winces and throws her arm around my shoulder, but I gently brush her off.
“That one was natural.” I assure her and step up to the edge of the tunnel. The salt in the air’s gotten so thick that it’s like walking in a blizzard, so I can barely see a few feet in front of me. “Any elementals on our level, or are they all above or below us?”
“All above and below.”
“Both a good omen and a few scary as hell possibilities.” Ursula sighs as she joins me at the edge. “Architect, can you tell what the room’s like through all this salt?”
“No, I… wait.” March’s chair squeaks, and her voice gets a little louder like she just got closer to the mic. “It’s really fuzzy, but I think… wow. This room’s mostly on the blueprints.”
I cross my arms and lean over the edge to try and get a better look. All I can see from up here is something that might be a floor a good ten feet down, and a whole bunch of salt along the one wall I can trace down to said floor.
“How can it be ‘mostly’ on the blueprints?”
March hums loudly and doesn’t answer right away. Her hums get louder and quieter as I shoot Ursula a questioning look, but she just shrugs and signals for me to wait. Apparently this isn’t the first time March has done this.
“I found it!” She exclaims. “This is part of the pump room–and it should lead to a storage room, but there’s no other exits I can see.”
“Part of a pump room? What’s that; one pump?” Ursula asks as she jumps down into the room. Her feet hit the crystal with an almost glassy note, and she looks around with a frown. “Huh. Pretty sure metal coated in solid salt shouldn’t make that noise. You comin’ down, Gambler?”
I hop down next to her and bend my knees to absorb the impact. She nods at me, then summons a flashlight and holds it like a night watchman as she scans the room. It doesn’t do a good job seeing through the salt, but she must have her reasons.
“I think the other parts of it are completely sealed in salt.” March mutters in a way that I’m not sure if she meant for us to hear it or not. “If you followed the left wall, and there’s half of something jutting up from the ground, then it’d definitely be cut off.”
Okay, that definitely doesn’t sound like it was meant for us. Ursula puts her hand on the left wall anyway, tracing a path along the room’s perimeter as she walks. I follow closely behind while looking around cautiously for any of the elementals March warned us about. The glow of magic completely overtakes everything, though, so I wouldn’t know an elemental was there until it smacked me in the face.
A soft thunk echoes out. Ursula slows to a stop, then turns and gestures for me to come closer. I don’t need to move much to bring a huge… thing into view. Half of a thing, to be precise. It doesn’t look like any drill or pumpjack I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure.
“The hell is this?” Ursula mutters to herself as she scans her flashlight over the hunk of metal. “It ain’t moving, so the apocalypse hasn’t gotten to it yet, but it definitely doesn’t look like it belongs here.”
I lean in and tap my knuckles against it, and it… reverberates. Like a sheet of metal instead of a solid chunk. It’s also weirdly coloured–yellow and black–with a huge cut-out indent at the bottom that looks like something’s supposed to go there. I turn around and face the middle of the room, where another pump might be, and suddenly, there’s no salt there. It’s still in the peripherals, but there’s a perfect path from me to the chunky mechanical thing that juts up through the floor and extends into the ceiling.
Now that–that’s what I expected a pump to look like. Not whatever the hell is half-encased in salt.
I turn back and almost fall over at the disturbing clarity that’s now on display. Ursula still shines her flashlight at the thing as if she can’t see beyond her nose, but from where I stand, it’s beyond obvious what’s encased in salt. What’s even more obvious is that it shouldn’t be here.
An industrial dump truck doesn’t belong on an offshore oil rig, after all.