Logs:My, but it's dark and scary in here
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| RL Date: 26 February, 2010 |
| Who: Taikrin |
| Type: [[Concept:{{{type}}}|{{{type}}}]] |
| What: Vignette: Taikrin and Xeoshen and a bunch of other convicts are trapped inside the cave-in. This is some of what went on. |
| Where: Trapped in side the Rough Cavern in the Bowl, High Reaches Weyr |
| When: Day {{{day}}}, Month {{{month}}}, Turn {{{turn}}} ({{{IP}}} {{{IP2}}}) |
| Hour 3: The sound of crashing rock brought Taikrin out of her stupor with a start. Confusion set in almost immediately as she blinked dust-gummed eyes against the perpetual twilight of her surroundings. Only for a moment, though; the low sound of chatter from a pair of her fellow prisoners, combined with a sudden awareness of burning pain down her side was quick to bring her around. "Urgh... any news?" Taikrin's hoarse call to the pair got their attention, but their response was unhelpful. "Lots of clatter, not much else. Got an air hole, though." Sidon, nearly forty and mining stock to his bones, was stoicly calm. His companion? Not so much. "I think they're trying to bring it all down on us. Then we're not a problem anymore!" Vincet was younger, and hold-bred; his ill-contained panic obvious in the set of his pale jaw. With a horrible grunt of pain, Taikrin levered herself up from the ground with her left arm; the right still dangled awkwardly at her side. "Must be workin' on it. Better hurry, though." A meaningful glance directed at the comatose Deruan indicates the reason for the need for haste. "Need you boys t'give me a hand. Gotta do... somethin'... with this." Vincet eyed her obviously-broken arm uncertainly. "Do what? We're not healers." "What do you want done? Wrap it up?" Sidon, all business, stood up slowly to take a better look, though he hesitated to touch the damaged limb. "I dunno, maybe just, like, tie it on. Can't--" Taikrin's breath hitched as an errant twitch sent pain ricocheting down the limb. "-- so I ain't movin' it so much. Can use my jacket if y'help me get it off." Sidon nods, a rock in the calm. "Vincet, gimme a hand with her. Here, you just be ready to steady her, now. Just gonna ease it off here..." A pause as the jacket, several sizes too big, slid down the uninjured arm with a minimum of fuss. "This one's gonna hurt, you just hold on to Vincet here, Taikrin." Taikrin had time for little other than a bracing breath and a firm grip on Vincet's shoulder before Sidon began easiing the coat off her misshapen arm. Her teeth grit together audibly and black spots danced before her vision as it brushed against cuts and bruises and bone. Just as swiftly as begun, though, it was then off. "Here now, girl, come and sit down. We'll do it quick. Gotta straighten it out, too." Unflappable as a rock, Sidon eased Taikrin down against the stone floor. "You want me to knock you out? Quick cross on the jaw, won't feel a thing." The short bark of laughter that emerged Taikrin seemed to surprise her as much as the others. "Been out of it enough, I can take it. Had worse." "If you say so." Sidon knelt before her, gesturing for Vincet to do the same. "Hold her other shoulder back. Don't want her twitching none. Now." The jacket readied, Sidon's gaze met Taikrin's through the gloom. "We'll go on the count of three. Try not to scream." On cue, Taikrin's jaw clamped shut, her entire body stiffening in anticipation of the pain to come. "One." Her breath hitched again, breathing made painful in the waiting. "Two." And as Sidon's hands, a second early, darted down and gave a sharp *yank* on the damaged arm, Taikrin saw red. Then grey. Then nothing. Hour 4: "Hey, I think she's waking up." With monumental effort, Taikrin's eyes fluttered open to the land of the living once more. Well. Mostly living. She lay quite still for a moment where she'd fallen sideways on the floor, taking inventory of her assorted hurts. The jacket had been ripped and tied around her body, holding her broken arm quite tightly against her ribcage. The pain was still there, but it had dulled into a constant, low throb, accompanied by the occasional stab of fire in her side. "Still... alive?" Her voice was little more than a croak now, but audible. "Still alive. Still trapped, too." Sidon crouched down in front of her, reaching down a hand to gently lever Taikrin back up into a seated position against the wall. "Got you wrapped up, I guess. We ain't healers." Vincet, also jacketless, scowled fiercly at the now-aware Taikrin. "You owe me a new coat, too, bitch. You hurled on mine." For her part, Taikrin was without embarrasment. The one good shoulder shrugged, though the movement brought the inevitable hiss of pain. "Sorry. Everything still the same?" "More or less. Had a racket out there earlier. I think they might have brought some down on themselves outside. Been quiet the last few minutes." Sidon twists to sit back down besides Taikrin. "Best thing we can do is sleep. Saves the air. They'll get here when they get here." "Don't know if I can..." But Taikrin's head, now that she was upright, was feeling awfully light. Almost against her will, her eyes slid shut once more. Within a few seconds, she saw only black again. Hour 10: It was the smell that roused Taikrin from her fitful slumber, the unpleasant odor of latrine concentrated into the relatively small cavern. That, combined with the uncomfortable pressure in her bladder, was enough to coax her eyes open. Nose wrinkling, her gaze met Sidon's in the darkness as she got to her feet in a crouch. The other man nodded knowingly, then gestured towards the farthest corner of the cave which was both unoccipied and shrouded in darkness. "Mind the rubble pile. Good for burying, though," was the older man's only advice as Taikrin, moving with awkward stiffness, levered herself all the way up onto her feet and tottered carefully over to the corner. Life was getting more and more unpleasant... Hour 14: "... think there's ... that hole for ... some skins, maybe ... bread, if ... not to touch ... sides." This time, the voices that roused Taikrin were not from within the cavern, but were only faintly heard from the other side of the slide. She was suddenly aware of a terrible itching in her throat and a mouth gone dry as bone. "... and they've been ... all night ... be getting thirsty. If ... dehydrated, more ... die!" A quick glance around proved that several other of the trapped convicts had also picked up on parts of the barely-heard conversation. There was a gleam of eyes in the darkness, more than a few slightly mad with few and clausterpobia. Thirst that was as sharp as pain caused Taikrin to swallow convulsively in a movement echoed by several others. "Water! They're sending in water!" Vincet abruptly rose to his feet, drawing as near to the slide and the small airhole near the top as he dared. "They think we're going to be in here so much longer that we need water!" A note of hysteria, previously present but small, began to take over his voice. "We're going to die!" "Shut up, boy. And get away from there." Sidon did not rise, but he did gesture preemptorily in the dark for Vincet to return to his side. From beyond the fall came that faintly heard voice again: "... send a few in and ... doesn't ... any damage. ... works, we can ... more ... in after." Quite unexpectedly, a skin of water appeared in the hole. It held firm there, as if stuck, for more than a few seconds before a sudden jerk sent it tumbling down the rocks in a slide of scree. Vincet whirled at the noise, and as the skin came tumbling down he moved with the speed of madness to secure the bottle before any of the others had so much as managed to rise. "Water!" No time was wasted before he had the skin unplugged and was pouring water down his throat as fast as he could swallow. Faster, even: water was dribbling down his chin and chest with alarming waste. Seeing his example, the nearest convict to the rocks scrabbled over to grab the second bottle that came tumbling down in an even larger crash of debris. Barely had the seal been cracked, however, than he was facing the business end of a pickaxe. Sidon loomed over the smaller male, his voice dripping with doom. "I wouldn't do that, if I were you." Vincet, meanwhile, had managed to finish a good third of the skin before he was tackled by another inmate. Another third of the water spilled out onto the dusty ground in the resultant scuffle before Taikrin, who had done an awkward crab-shuffle, managed to retrieve it and re-stopper the precious resource. "We're going to share it! Anyone got any other ideas on it, I'd love to hear it." The way Sidon tapped the end of the pickaxe ever so carefully against the other man's temple indicated exactly the sort of listening he'd like to do. "One gulp, boy, then pass it on down." The young inmate, gone pale as much from the pickaxe at his temple as from the assorted blood-encrusted wounds down his left side, obediently unstoppered the lid in a slow, deliberate movement and took a careful sip before passing it on to the fellow next to him. "Good boy. If we're going to live, we're going to have to /share/." A hand came down to pat the boy on the head as one would a favored canine before Sidon moved on, following the progress of the full skin around the room. Taikrin's hand tightened convulsively on the nearly empty skin she'd taken back to the other wall, greed warring with cooperation across her filthy features. She was nearly invisible on the other side of the fight that now had two rather large men beating on a curled-up Vincet. After a moment's consideration, though, she reluctantly took just one giant swig from the skin and passed it on, though her gaze lingered hungrily on its path. Hour 20: There was little to do in the cave besides sit and wait for the intermittent drops of food and water, and that was making some of the convicts more than a little crazy. Twice the air hole had been sealed up by falling debris, and there hadn't been any more deliveries at all following a crash of several hundred pounds of debris into their prison triggered by a loaf of bread. Those meager supplies had finally run out, and with them had the last scrap of control of several of the inmates. Vincet, face far more bruised and bloody than it had been following the initial slide, had been hog-tied and left to whine on his own following a second fight over the water. Arguments were getting more frequent, and an all-out brawl had only been prevented by Sidon's threats with a pickaxe. Things were rapidly sliding out of control as despair set in. "Hey there sweet cheeks. How 'bout you and me pass the time together?" It was one of the inmates who'd been brawling, sliding down to sit on Taikrin's uninjured side, and pressing himself up far too close. "Have some fun?" Taikrin, completely unamused, slid herself a few inches away from the other convict, her voice droll. "Go bugger yourself, darlin'. I wouldn't touch you t'save my life." "Aww, come on now, don't be that way." He pressed his suite, moving to crouch over Taikrin in a smooth motion. A hand reached out to grab her chin. "Not like there's a lot to do. C'mon, baby." Jaws clenched, Taikrin's good hand groped about on the ground in a subtle way, until her fingers closed over a hard object. Then, with no warning, the rock was brought up and slammed into a terribly sensitive place on the other convicts anatomy. "I /said/ get yer bloody hands off'a me!" Leaving the man to roll on the ground in pain, Taikrin rose with more than a little wobble. Her head was light-- light enough that she felt more as if she were floating across the ground instead of shuffling awkwardly. As she came near Sidon, she collapsed back down to the ground with a boneless grace, letting out barely a grunt of pain as she jarred her arm. She was barely able to register the surprise on the other man's face before everything blurred, then went grey. Hour 26: Arguing. Taikrin thought she could hear arguing, but it was all so far away. She called out for them to be quiet -- or at least, she thought she did -- but all it brought her was a momentary surcease of noise. The voices picked up once more, then, though perhaps a shade quieter. The pain in her head and arm and side throbbed in time to the cadence of their voices. For a timeless moment, Taikrin was certain that if she could just make out what they were saying through the fog of pain, everything would be all right. There had been a dragon, she was sure, a bronze one, and if only she could understand the words the voices were saying he would carry her out of this dark painful place and back into the light. But the moment passed, exploding into a world of red-hot agony as something cold and damp made contact with the feverishly hot pains in her arm. Hour 30: "Easy there, girl, easy, how you feeling? Looking a little more awake, now." It took Taikrin several long minutes to realize that she could understand the voices again, and another moment more to realize that the speech was being directed at her. She felt some kind of surprise at the realization that her eyes were open, and that there were words coming out of her mouth. "... where'd they all go an' there was water an' it hurt an' then my da's leg got caught' an then they had t'cut it an' then there was all this yellin' and--" As the awareness dawned, the babble of words abruptly petered out. She paused, then, experimentally tried her voice out again. "Is it... fresher in here?" Though her head felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds, she lifted her chin until she could look over Sidon's shoulder. "That... that's a real big hole..." The other man's voice was gruff, but he too glanced over his shoulder to study the opening. "Nearly got us out, they said. Another hour, maybe, they think it'll be safe to start pushing people through. Here, drink." A half-full skin was thrust at Taikrin, lid already off. She protested for a moment about a lack of thirst... but then came the sudden realization that she /was/ thirsty. Direly so. A trembling arm reached out and, though barely strong enough to hold the skin, she somehow managed to pull it up close enough to her lips to take huge, desperate gulps. "Easy girl, easy. There'll be plenty more soon enough." Sidon said nothing about the waste; indeed, he didn't even move to take the skin back, but rather simply patted Taikrin on her good shoulder and moved back on towards the hole. It didn't take long for Taikrin to quench her thirst; indeed, it was only a few sips more before the somehow managed to put the stopper back into the skin and curl back up into herself. "Hope they got jackets... so cold in 'ere..." Hour 31: Taikrin was a bit more aware, now, after an hour's consciousness-- though also aware enough to know that her senses were dulled with fever. She'd been half paying attention to the rescue effort, staring vacantly in the general location of the hole that was carefully being shored up and widened. There was only mild surprise, then, when Sidon took her good arm and gently guided her upright. "Time to go back to the land of the living, girl. C'mon, up with you." There were obviously fewer people in the cave, now, and the air was cooler and fresher and sharper and /lighter/. Taikrin's legs were wobbly underneath her, and her head still felt filled with helium, but she stood up and managed to shuffle, more or less under her own power, towards the light and life. And numbweed. Amazing, magical, miraculous numbweed. |
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