Postmortem Ch6 || Summit

Climbing out of the stairway into the landing of Zone A was...less than impressive. Rime snorted quietly. So much fanfare for the surface, so many had been so excited to leave, and this was all that greeted them. A large, empty room with overturned bins of garbage that had long ago lost its stink. Benches whose upholstery had become brittle and rotted off, exposing the even more brittle and rotten cushioning beneath. Pieces of the ceiling that had collapsed and fallen, sections of cinder block exposed behind drywall that had become so worn or rotten that it had fallen away. She curled her lip. No, she didn’t think that the surface would have much to hold her attention. When she had done as Basalt asked and explored whatever land lay outside the facility, she would return. That was her place, not whatever this was.

Tobias stepped out of the stairwell beside her, and Sunflower followed shortly after. The dacen glanced at the suchomimus from time to time, worrying quietly. Click didn’t appear to have gotten any better, but he hadn’t gotten any worse, either. He was stable. Theoretically. It was hard to really check on his patient when his patient was so far away, on an angry acro’s back. They’d gotten to Zone A, though. If Rime was truly going to be done with them when they properly reached the surface, then he could continue to tend to Click. His supplies weren’t too far away, if he needed them.

Except, Rime appeared to believe that she had fulfilled her use already. She knelt, expecting Tobias to help her remove the sucho’s body from her back.

Tobias merely blinked, gazing at Rime in return.

“Take him off of my back,” she growled quietly. “You won’t like it if I have to do it myself.”

“We’re not even at the door yet!” Sunflower protested. He couldn’t carry the sucho himself; the plates and spines along his back made it impossible to fit the sucho comfortably on his back. What else could they do? Push him the rest of the way? It would only make his injuries worse if they filled them with dirt and grit and whatever other nasty things were on the floor here.

Rime glared at the dacen, her eyes cold. “I have gotten the outsider to the top level of the facility,” she hissed. “That is all that I said I was going to do.”

“Basalt told you to help him.” Tobias’ voice was soft, simply making a statement. Rime raked her frosty gaze across the cryo, daring him to say something else as her quills rattled together. How could he know Basalt’s name? They had never given it to the intruder, yet he spoke it with the confidence that suggested he’d known it forever. Like they were old friends.

She had helped enough. She didn’t owe anything to the intruders, especially not one that had been so careless as to have been savaged by the Twisted Beast that prowled the zone furthest below. When she opened her jaws to fire back, there was another voice that interrupted.

“Is something wrong?”

An alberto stood towards the back of the landing, but not the one that Tobias had encountered before. A male, with flashes of vibrant yellow on his face and tail that stood in sharp contrast to the faded colours of the rosettes splashed along his body. Hazard. His colours and name a warning, but his temperament no more venomous than Rime’s. Less, even.

Tobias blinked at the newcomer while Rime scowled. No, nothing was wrong. Just that she had these desecrators and a dacen of all creatures as company. Sunflower shifted uneasily, but dipped his head in greeting as he did his best to appear friendly and as non-threatening as a dinosaur covered in spiked armour could appear to be.

“Click has-”

Hazard’s eyes widened in surprise, taking a step forward just as Tobias began to speak. He recognised this stranger. The little suchomimus that had swum down one of the flooded stairwells to investigate the lower levels. When he hadn’t seen him return with the other newcomers that ventured down, Hazard had assumed that he’d just missed his return. He hadn’t expected...this.

“What happened to him?” Hazard asked, glancing first at Rime, then between Tobias and Sunflower.

Sunflower spoke up first. “He was attacked-”

“He was stupid,” Rime interjected, turning her glare from the dacen to the alberto. She’d never seen one up close. They were smaller than she had expected. “Sticking his nose somewhere that he shouldn’t have. Nidhogg found him.”

“Nidhogg?” Hazard looked surprised to hear the name. “I thought he was just a story.”

Rime snorted. Showed how much the albertos knew about the lives that had been living beneath their feet, in the dark and dank depths. It was no small miracle that Hazard had even heard the name at all. “He’s very real.”

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence that settled across them. Rime glowered at the alberto, and Sunflower shifted his feet. Tobias gazed between them, just as calm as he had always been. Things would work out, as they always did.

Hazard took an uncertain breath, then spoke. “Do you need help-”

“We’re fine,” Rime replied coldly. She wasn’t going to be shown up by some alberto who thought that he blessed the ground he walked on just because he offered to help some strangers. Hazard shifted his feet, looking between the trio. The...four of them. Click was still unconscious, but he still counted.

“Okay, well…” The alberto didn’t seem to know what to do with such an outright refusal.

“Can you take me to the door?” Sunflower asked brightly. “I don’t know the way, and I’m afraid I’ll get lost if I try to find it myself. I don’t want to intrude on anyone.”

Hazard still seemed uncertain, but for a different reason. Dacen and albertos had never gotten along. Albertos hunted dacen, when they had to. The rats and other small creatures that occasionally had made their way into Zone A weren’t enough to sustain a population of carnivores, especially the growing young. Especially when some albertos were so greedy as to hoard what food was found for themselves. Sunflower seemed...polite enough, though.

“Sure, I can take you there.”

Rime scowled. By Sunflower asking if the alberto could show him, specifically, to the exit, he wasn’t helping her. Just the dacen. It would just so happen that they were all heading in the same direction. She had half a mind to just leave them and find her own way out, but that wouldn’t rid her of her cargo any faster.

Hazard hesitated a moment longer, then turned to lead them through the hallways past the living areas and recreational spaces. It would have been distinctly uncomfortable to walk in such silence, had Sunflower not filled it with more questions and comments.

He filled the friendly alberto in on what had happened since Sunflower had first encountered Tobias - leading him to the stairwell that would take Tobias further down, getting the light scared out of him when Rime appeared from the darkness before the cryo did. The injuries that Click had sustained and the apparent origin of them - teeth, mostly, but the impact had caused some damage and Sunflower was almost certain that there was something else that had torn the sucho’s hide - and what he’d done to stem the blood flow and do as much as he could to kickstart the healing process.

It was nice to have something to fill the quiet, even if Hazard didn’t totally understand exactly what Sunflower was talking about. The herbs that the dacen listed off - rosemary and mint came up most often - sounded nice, but he didn’t know the first thing about their actual use, or what they even looked like. Sunflower offered to show him, when they got to the door. He had some that he carried with him in the saddlebag that he’d brought, which hung loosely over his neck.

Tobias walked quietly beside Rime, with Hazard and Sunflower taking the lead. He glanced towards Click from time to time, who hung almost lifelessly over Rime’s back. The Morpheus facility had proved to be far different than the caves and crevices that the sucho was familiar with.

The tile flooring was too smooth for him to get a proper grip on and made his knuckles slip when he tried to crawl. There were no small spaces for him to squeeze past to get away from prying eyes, nowhere that he could safely hole up and rest. It was dark, but that was where the similarities with his home ended. Why had he gone on if the facility was so different from what he’d known, which had ended up so inhospitable to him? Every level that he’d gone down had been worse and worse for the sucho, yet he had continued on. Tobias didn’t understand it. It was like...there was another path, tangled with his. He just couldn’t see it.

Perhaps it was not his to understand.

He was beginning to recognise where they were, now. Corridors he remembered passing by, catching familiar scents that drifted through the once-still air. There were still many memories here which slipped through his claws like air. Intangible, but he knew they were there. It wouldn’t be long before they reached the wall. The door.

What a sight it must have been, to have been one of the first inside the Morpheus facility to see the wall split itself open, tear itself asunder. Did they think that the world was ending? That the tear would go up and up and up until it ripped the ceiling apart and the facility fell down upon them? If it was day, did the light blind them? If it was night, did they simply believe that the wall had split open to reveal an even larger section of the facility? None inside had ever seen starlight before, nor known the warmth of the sun. What a feeling it must have been.

Or maybe...no one had seen it, that epic moment in their history. Maybe they only heard the sound of the metal creaking and groaning as the door split itself in half, opening the facility to the world and exposing the world to the inhabitants within. Maybe they never saw the doors open and they believed that the wall just simply...vanished.

“This is it.” Hazard’s voice broke Tobias from his thoughts and he blinked, turning his pale, flat gaze to the scene before them. They had, indeed, returned to the entryway to Zone A. The door before them was like a great mouth, yawning open with the jagged silhouette of the cliff it was nestled inside just poking over the edge like rough teeth.

But unlike the hot breath of a living thing, the air coming from beyond the door was cold. His breath hung in the air in a cloud of fog, drifting slowly into nothingness.

Rime seemed entranced. It was the cold room, but...more. So much more. How had the cold escaped the confines of the lowest level of the facility, leaked beyond the metal walls? It had never even made it further than a foot beyond the boundaries of the cold room in Zone D, yet the air coming from outside was frigid and familiar. Perhaps there was something more to the world beyond than she had anticipated.

Tobias seemed satisfied and dipped his head. Basalt had wanted her to see something more than what the facility had to offer, and so she would. She might even come to like what she found.

Dr. Sunflower seemed less optimistic. The land beyond was unfamiliar to him, and the cold was bitter. There would be no herbs growing out there, where was the light? The warmth? His patient was here, besides. Before Rime took another step forwards, Sunflower spoke up.

“He can’t go out there yet. The cold will be bad for his recovery. He’s too weak.”

Rime stuttered in her step, the draw of the even more grand cold room interrupted. She glared at Sunflower. “Take him then. We’re at the surface, I’ve done my bit.”

Hazard was able to help this time, nudging Click off of Rime’s back for Tobias to catch him, while Sunflower found somewhere suitable to set up a treatment station. Somewhere sheltered and comfortable and far enough from the cold that it wouldn’t reach him, but not so far that he wouldn’t be able to easily find his way back to the stairwell if he needed to go back to his infirmary to collect more supplies.

Tobias paused, suddenly, gazing out into the dark nothingness of the night that stretched on before them. His voice was soft, not wishing to raise alarm but rather alertness amongst his companions. “We’re not alone.”