Log:A Breach in the Case, Scene 2

A Breach in the Case 2015/10/29 Siege Indira Rick 2 Indira is surprised as she starts to slide down the sump walls towards the bottom. She braces her footing and leans back to avoid pitching forward, then raises her hands up in a scooping motion, fingers spread but partially curled. The saplings tumbling with them start to grow and twist to her calling. Their roots wind through the earth to hold the crumbling avalance together and stop the tide of rock and mud.

Once the avalanche settles, Indira slides down the slope to the bottom as the ground evens out. Her dress may be ruined and muddy, but she doesn't even care. "Kaldri bosh...heina...Rick?" About the only part of that which was english was Rick's name, but the restsound like a hopeful prayer of some sort.

Griffin looks to the oncoming tide with trepidation then he turns back to what looks to be Rick's body. He slips and slides down the walls toward the bottom, he looks at Indira as she begins her very effective performance art piece. He is awe-struck as he looses his footing and he falls over into the muck. He gets up and fights the urge to curse.

He follows behind Indira, pushing her back a step or 2 as they near Rick's body. "Ok Ambassador- let me ... check him... just in case..." Griffin obviously fears something beyond a cold, stiff Rick.

Rick's body does not move when Indira calls to him. Errant chunks of ruined earth and broken trees bounce and roll by, having escaped from the dam of roots and saplings that Indira's raised on the sump wall. Griffin comes out of the slog covered in mud and muck and what he suspects may have once been half of a dead mutant rat. He probably smells awful to Indira's heightened olfactory sense.

Now that Indira's on the same surface as Rick, she can get a much better sense of what's going on here. The "artifact" upon which Rick's body is laid is some kind of metal drainage grate. She can feel the metal pipes leading down to some kind of primitive processing facility about 8m below the surface. Indira also gets the impression that this is not, in fact, Rick's body; it feels very much like his body, but there's something not quite Rick-like about it.

Griffin comes stumbling out of the last wave of muck to splash down past the root dam. His boots may be filled with unpleasant liquid as he gets his first good glance at Rick's body. It's immediately notable that Rick's body is slightly cooler than the surrounding air temperature, though what Griffin really notices is the fact that the body has very waxy flesh. No doubt Griffin has several unpleasant memories from before his time in the freezer that involve similar circumstances.

Griffin's experiences at the tip of the spear has given him a good eye for traps & more importantly- dead bodies. This is all wrong.

Without thinking another thought Griffin twists his hips and launches himself toward Indira.

He lifts her off her feet and hurls them both clear of what he suspects the blast area will be.

Indira's senses start to tell her something is wrong, but as she tries to figure out what is not quite right with Rick's body, Griffin tackles her. She lets out a surprised sound as she's easily knocked off her feet and away.

Griffin knocks Indira to the ground and the dynamic duo get to face-grind through some more mud before coming to a halt at an odd angle compared to where they started - and compared to Rick's body. There is a long pause - Griffin estimates it's just long enough for Indira to have approached the body and possibly even touched it - before Rick simply explodes.

By sheer dumb luck, the blast radius seems to be extremely tight and mostly focused on blowing out the drainage grate and the soil surrounding it. Everything collapses into the drain, leaving a messy - and empty - grave behind for our intrepid heroes to regard with whatever emotions may be boiling below the surface when they look toward it.

Griffin rolls off of Indira and stands to inspect the hole. "Like this wasn't weird enough already." He puts his hands on hips and turns to offer Indira a hand up.

Indira had smelled Rick before. It was his scent. She still can't put her finger on what the discrepency was. But as she tries to twist to look towards Rick's body, she lets out an anguished cry to see what little is left. "A...a trap. Who...who would do such a thing?" she weeps, her voice raw and outraged. The idea of boobytrapping a body of someone she cares about is so barbaric, she can't even fathom it. She is both naive and lucky in that regard. Whatever awful smells there are, she ignores them as best she can.

She forces herself to look away from the blasted "grave" and accepts Griffin's hand, pulling herself to her feet.

"You ok?" Griffin asks as Indira rights herself.

He looks to the hole again, "Alright- so game on. Someone doesn't want us to retrieve your lost puppy, Ambassador. Luckily for us we didn't get a face full of Faux-Rick, and I bet they didn't expect that. That's our edge. We hit them in the blindspot." Griffin says with a smile behind a mud and muck covered beard.

"No. No I am not," Indira says as she wipes at her eyes and takes a moment to compose herself from the emotions of having thought Rick was killed. She has mud streaks on her face from the tackle, and the whole front of her dress is covered in dirt and mire. As Griffin starts to speak, she taps her translation collar. Now is now the time to misunderstand or be misunderstood. Her speech immediately sounds much more natural and familiar with english.

"I still can't believe someone would do this. Why? Who were they trying to kill?" Indira fumes as she stays close to Griffin's side. "There is a facility below, down that grate."

"That's what we're gonna find out." Griffin says, "Then we're gonna make them choke on their teeth. But first we gotta move!"

He moves towards the hole in the ground and looks down it to see if there is anything hidden beneath.

"The Hole" isn't really much of a hole at all. Dirt and muck have rushed into the gaping wound in the earth, leaving a clogged up drain pipe, only the ragged edges of which are partially visible above the new ground level. Maybe the "facility" down there connects to that warehouse with Rick's EOD team logo on it?

Indira's bare feet feel through the earth, trying to find another way. "I may be able to clear a path down. Or maybe we can find another way. What...was that body? It seemed like Rick's. But it wasn't, was it?" Around Indira's feet, little sproutlings begin to push up from the soil. New growth.

"It just looked like Rick's body- maybe it was a clone. Maybe it was some kind of futuristic paraphin wax. How they got his clothes seems to be my concern." Griffin says.

He looks down to Indira's feet and smirks.

"Let's go check that warehouse- it has Rick's battalion patch painted on the side. I can't help but think that's where we need to go from here."

Indira blinks a few times. "They stole his clothes and gave them to a clone? Who were they trying to bait?" She looks over to the warehouse and nods. "Is that normal to be in buildings?"

Log:A Breach in the Case, Scene 3