Summary:Mera and Eve investigate a source of black goo. Log Info:Storyteller: n/a |
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Eve has received a communique requesting her presence at what passes for a remote beach in the New York area. A midnight meeting has been scheduled. Eve's botanical friend was also invited but she may not be available.
The beach is deserted. No lighting, despite being so close to the city, and an ominous silence. The sounds of the big city strangely muted. There is a watchtower on this section of the shore that looks to have been built in the 1930s and Mera has requested to meet there. The redhead standing in the darkness near the building, waiting patiently. She is not in 'human' clothes tonight. Rather it is what looks to be a green scaled bodysuit - it may even look a lot like Poison Ivy's.
At first, Eve might've even thought it was Ivy since she's never seen Mera in this before. Still, she's arrived and is…dressed in what amounts to worn and torn — though artfully — gothic attire.
By design.
"Yo," she says when she finally realizes who's there.
"Interesting get up," she adds.
"A pleasure to see you again." Mera offers a little bow of polite greeting before glancing down at her own clothes. "It is armour" she explains; though why it needs to show off cleavage is something only Atlantean armourers know. "Your friend could not come?" she asks about Ivy, not waiting for an answer before shrugging her absence off. "No matter. We shall investigate ourselves. Can you see in the dark?"
Eve is certainly wondering about that. She does not voice the question. It would be inappropriate.
She clears her throat and says, "Her minders wouldn't let her. Apparently, underwater trips may be verboten for her. So, lead the way. And not especially well, no. I mean, /maybe/ I could change that, but… let's just bring flashlights." She deosn't explain what she means about changing that, though.
"Her minders?" Mera considers this but it is not her world - much too primitive for that. They will do what they do. "We do not have to go underwater. Not fully. Not yet." Mera will indeed lead the way but it is not towards the water. Rather it is towards what little vegetation has been allowed to flourish on the sandy shore. A copse of trees, the interior extra dark this night. "I do not have a flashlight. Nor one to give you." A woman who has to see in the depths of the ocean has no concerns with a dark forest.
"I have my phone. It will do," replies Eve. She made sure it was charged entirely before she left, of course, and she is indeed following her along. She does stumble occasionally amongst the wildness, but on the whole, she seems to navigate it rather well. A moment's focus and she navigates it all but perfectly, actually.
"This is the area where the infection seems to be most prevalent" Mera explains as she steps through the undergrowth as if it was the middle of the day. "I do not think it started here but perhaps this is where it first made landfall." The trees and bushes around them show the black veins of the strange virus but she doesn't seem interested in plucking at them. Instead she leads Eve to a hollow where what looks to be an old shelter has been built into an earthen side. A Civil Defence bunker but long unused. "We should look in here" she informs her companion.
"Sounds like a plan," agrees Eve. She can feel the life around her, strange and alien as her own is, though perhaps less so.
She pulls her phone out and turns on its tiny flashlight.
A glance at Mera. A nod…
…and then she's heading into the bunker. Just like that.
Mera grips the old handle of the overgrown metal door and rips it from the hinges, before carefully placing it to one side. No need to make a mess. She will lead the way, lit from behind by the glow of the phone. The light casting her shadow ahead of her as they walk down a concrete corridor that seems to slope downwards.
"The humans have many of these…fortifications…on the shoreline. Almost like they knew about us, though it seems that they are more frightened of each other than Atlantis." Vines grow along the walls and floor of the damp, dark interior. Vines that seem to react to their passing. Dark leaves making twittering noises as they shake with no need of a wind. "You sense this life, yes?"
"This better not lead me into some 'Gehenna: where death lives' time loop situation," mutters Eve, who watches too many awful horror movies on Netflix. "Yeah, these are to watch for invasions from other, you know, continental powers. Not you guys." She does nod, though, "Yeah. I sense it." She eyes the vines. "I don't wanna eat all of this," she grumbles.
"I do not know what this Gehenna is" Mera replies honestly. "Another entity? A God of Death? A God of Time?" With power over Death and Time it seems to be quite a powerful entity. "We need to find a different way to stop it than simply eating it. Although I am sure that you could consume it all if you need to." Stairs lead down to another door that is soon torn from its hinges and placed carefully to one side.
It leads into a large, cavernous room that must be under the sea; unseen by all those who use the beach nearby. It may have once been used as a submarine pen or some kind of vast storage for a forthcoming nuclear holocaust. But tonight, it is a stinking, rotting soup of infected vegetation eating at the metal and concrete of the walls. An exit to the sea is in the floor of the room. A sea that glows black with the strange goo.
"Later," is what Eve says in response to the talk about 'Gehenna'. She'll just have to explain terrible movies later. And then where the name for terrible movies come from.
"I mean, I'm not sure me eating it is a great idea to start with, but I didn't have any problems with it last time. It was just… kind of like eating the worst thing you can imagine." She makes a face at the smell of the vegetation, stopping dead at the exit. "Well."
"Okay, then," she says, staring down at it.
Mera frowns as she steps into the chamber. The smell is rather distasteful but there is more important things to worry about than her sensibilities. "I doubt eating it was a good idea either" she replies with a smirk, doing her best not to breathe too deeply. She crouches down by the water inlets, big enough to hold submarines, the water black even under the brightest light. Dipping a finger into it, she is rather repulsed by the oily feel, wiping it on the ground before looking around at the walls that seem to throb with life.
"Fire may destroy it" Mera theorises. "But we should take samples to get to the root cause."
There is the sound of tearing vegetation mixed with the screech of metal. It seems that the black goo wants to have a sample of them as well. Ripping away from the walls are black shapes, about ten feet tall and made of goo, metal, and concrete. They shamble towards the pair.
Eve considers for a moment and then glances towards Mera. She has no idea how powerful the woman is, and thus, plainly tells her, "Step back. I can handle this." And she advances towards, well, the horrible black shapes and goo and metal monsters. "This is gonna get really unpleasant and hurt horribly," she says with a weary sigh, but she's already taken the moment to strengthen herself, improve her reflexes. She throws her head back, her hair lengthening into tentacles. Yes, really, actually no-good tentacles, vines ripe with thorns slithering free from her wrists bloodily.
Mera looks slightly annoyed that someone is attempting to do the fighting for her. She is a noble of Atlantis! She has already ripped huge metal doors off their hinges without breaking a sweat, and this woman wants her to hang back like a soft human? Though it seems 'woman' is not quite the right term. As Eve starts to change, Mera is struck by how similar she looks to the creatures that are now advancing on them. Creatures that are now also shooting tendrils out towards the pair.
Mera takes a deep breath, her body tensing as she concentrates. The water in the submarine pens starts to bubble and boil, lifting up into the air, leaving the black goo behind as it forms into a solid ring around Mera. "Why is it going to hurt?"
"I mean, I know you're strong," continues Eve, "but I'm probably in less danger from these things than you are given the way it spreads," replies Eve, "and because it /always/ hurts," says the bloody handed-Eve now. She's fought monsters before. Plenty of them over the years. This is sometimes what she gets asked to do by the right figures. She throws a vine directly at one of the creatures, aiming to hook the thorns on the ooze, to rip and tears at its surface and see what happens, to see if they try to consume them.
She's hoping they will.
Eve's hopes are met. Her vines sink into the gooey mass, metal and stone the only things in the creatures that are solid. Something to tear at. She can feel the substance trying to corrode her 'flesh'. Trying to permeate it. All the while the creatures advance. Mera's water wall blocking any vines that come her way. A wall that becomes a globe around her as they start attacking from all directions. To Mera's eyes, it doesn't look like Eve is winning.
To most, certainly, it would appear that Eve is a simple plant-controlling hero of some kind. The reality is that as long as the plants are connected to her, such as the vines, they are part of her, a part of her wholeness. She can feel them trying to pass their nature onto her, to consume her the way she herself might… but it does nothing to her, not really, as she's not really much of a plant. She's not even a human being, after all…
….and two can play at that game. As she binds up that gooey mass in more of herself, she begins to devour it, her vines twisting, spreading, growing, /digesting/ and absorbing its biological mass.
"…ugh… gross… Just a second. I need more. Don’t worry. I'm okay. No matter what you see, I'm okay."
…and then she vomits. She vomits blood, teeth, and tentacles. Her jaw distends. More of them pour from her, her face flaying and erupting in a spray of blood and ichor… and more tentacles.
So many more.
That is…not something Mera is ever likely to forget. She stares, wide-eyed, at the orgy of destruction. The very messy orgy. Bits and piece of who know what slapping into her wall of water, staining it, but it's still holding.
Eve's 'show' is also attracting the attention of all the beasts. They now seem much more interested in her than a boring redhead. Tentacles rain down on Eve, slamming into her flesh, twisting around her own tentacles. The conflicting absorption a horrific battle all the way down to the cellular level.
Mera moves to scoop up some errant goo, collecting enough for them to test. When she's not entranced by the battle taking place.
Eve is breakable. Things break.
She doesn't have time to worry about them. An arm snaps, but that's okay. Sure, it hurts, but it's not relevant, and she can grow more arms, like she grows more tentacles. Her anatomy has long since stopped making sense.
She tears one of them apart, having dissolved enough of it to really do so, leaving it destroyed and shattered remnants while she is a mass of tentacles, vines, thorns and… mouths There's a human in there somewhere, Mera can see the eyes of her face which has long since peeled apart to make space for more mouths and hissing maws.
The noise of all those breaking 'bones', oozing wounds, and exploding 'bodies' is not the most pleasant sight or sound. It is even hard for Mera to tell where Eve ends and the goo starts.
"We can leave…Eve" Mera calls into the bubbling mass of tentacles and gore. Is Eve even in there anymore? Was she ever? Mera heads for the door, waiting there as she waits for Eve's decision to fight or withdraw.
It's a while. Eve is busy fighting for a while. She can't exactly /disengage/, after all, and it takes her a while to put herself back together. Eventually, she emerges from the mess out the door except, you know…
Naked.
She's doing her level best to cover herself.
"Sorry about that. Couldn't leave those things in there."
Eve may have returned to that 'human' form, but it is unlikely Mera will look upon her in the same way again. She has seen what lurks under that skin. Nakedness is no concern for her - it is only a false form anyway.
Mera looks at the chamber now that Eve has finished her meal. Concrete, stone ane metal strewn across the floor. The wall still oozing…though substantially weaker. Alas, Mera has no spare clothes to cover Eve. "Where is your phone?" she asks. Without that light, she will have to carry Eve through the dark.
"…fuck," says Eve.
That's it.
That response would suggest the phone is part of the detritus left behind from the fight. Mera nods in understanding and then picks up Eve to carry her out of the bunker. For all those tentacles, she doesn't seem to be that heavy. "What exactly are you?"
She really isn't heavy. And she is now being held by another person. While naked. THIS IS AWKAWRD. AUGH.
She doesn't have an immediate answer because she's busy trying not to be really weirded out by the nudity.
Turn into a horrible monster and eat horrible monsters? NO PROBLEM. BE naked with a princess grabbing you? Clam up.
Of course, after what Mera has just witnessed, she doesn't even think Eve's nudity is 'real'. "You do not have to tell me if you do not wish to." That silence of Eve is secrecy, not embarrassment. "I apologise if I was being…nosy? Is that the word?"
It won't take them long to reach the entrance, Mera carefully putting Eve down before replacing the thick metal door into the doorframe. "Will your friend Ivy be able to look at some of the samples?"
"Uh… name's Eve. We've already met. I mean, just because you saw what you probably think you saw doesn't make me any less a person, you know. As for what you saw, that's because I'm sort of tied to some eldritch space horror shit." She's got a practical view of it. She's no wizard, after all.
"…still just Eve, though, okay? AND WATCH WHERE YOU PUT YOUR HANDS." Then she's sat down.
"Yeah, possibly."
"Eldritch space horror?" That's a good description of what Mera saw. "Very well, you are Eve. And I promise to continue to treat you in the same way. I do not break promises."
Mera considers the naked woman in front of her, peering up at the lightening darkness. "Wait here." And then she is off into the ocean, disappearing from sight once she reaches the water.
Eve just kinda stands there.
Naked.
Feeling like a dork. A naked dork.
Thankfully, Mera does not take long. Her swimming speed far superior to her running speed. When she returns, she is carrying a waterproof bag that she places at Eve's feet. "These should fit." And, despite having carried the naked woman for some time, she looks away to let Eve dress in private.
"… oh my god is this a Xena t-shirt?" says Eve, eyeing it. Then she's slipping into it. At least it'll fit, if be a bit awkward.
Mera glances around at the question. "Yes, is that bad? She seems to be quite the heroine of your race. I can understand why you wish to commemorate her on your clothing." Then she looks away while Eve sorts out the pants dilemma.
…short shorts are the worst, but Eve is no wearing them. She sighs.
"She's fictional," she mutters.
"Oh…is she?" Mera frowns a little. "That is unfortunate. You have transport back to your domicile?" They arrived separately. "Take the bag with you, it also has some samples for your friend."
"I'll do that. Yeah, I can get back. And please keep what you saw to yourself. I have /enough/ people that get on my case over the whole eldritch space horror nonsense," remarks Eve with a sigh.
"Of course, I will tell no one. You fought well and have earned my respect." Mera offers her hand. "I shall communicate with you soon, Eve. Discuss what we encountered down there. Have a safe journey home."