tushanshu_logs | EVENT | LANDFALL | KITHIKA

EVENT | LANDFALL | KITHIKA | BOTTLE

Characters: ALL!
Date: February 12th - 28th
Location: Kithika, inside the bottle
Situation: The discovery of an artifact from the first war against Malicant reveals the land of Kithika within a dimension of the Death Plane... and just happens to be contained inside a bottle.
Warnings/Rating: Please indicate content warnings in subject headers as applicable.

OOC INFORMATION ♦ CITY OF KEELIAI ♦ INSIDE THE BOTTLE ♦ THE WORLD EATER
Arriving in Kithika is unpleasant for the most part. Transport through the glass vessel deposits you in the middle of a thick and murky swamp, with air so hot and humid it feels as though one is breathing through a wet towel. This is a place of perpetual night and there are no celestial bodies visible overhead through the twisted vines to break up the blackness, making the only light visible that which comes clumps of marsh fungus that emit a steady glow in a variety of muted colours: pale blue, whitish green, watery mauve. The only other light comes from those who can generate it themselves and that will reveal numerous broad-leaved trees, in some places standing too thick to move through. Below, knee-deep water laps in swirls at their legs, accompanied by the occasional slithery feel of something moving in the bracken against wet limbs, gone before it can be identified. A variety of strange noises from creatures of the swamp fill the air with buzzing and hoarse croaking, interrupted by the screech of mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds darting past and hungry for a meal.

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OOC NOTE: Characters will not be able to progress past the Temple and the Grounds for 48 IC hours after which point, the way to continue onward to find the dragon will be discovered. The second log will be posted on the 17th, to help spread out the tagging. Thank you!

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Gah, human communication was too much pressure. Now he was even more discombobulated. "Kurt." Was there a point where flustered teenaged humiliation would stop building and he at least wouldn't become more useless and uncommunicative? If so, it hadn't been identified. "Waggoner, though. I mean, the other me is Wagner, so... I mean, everyone seems to know him." Since most interactions he had seemed to start with did you shrink?

Kaine merely shrugged in response. "I can't say I knew the other guy well enough to confuse you."

In fact, he didn't know him at all. It was merely a name he had heard in passing, just like 99% of the X-Men.

"Besides, let's just say I'm familiar with the concepts of alternate universes. Kurt is fine with me."

Okay, they'd definitely stayed in place for too long, as far as Kaine was concerned. He motioned forward. "I believe you were headed in this direction?"

Edited 2014-02-24 03:53 (UTC)

"I mean, probably. I hope there's something better on the other end of the swamp, anyway. I'm not all that big on nature even when it isn't trying to kill me with dark magic and blunt force trauma." Sometimes you kind of had to take quest-type junk as it came and hope it wasn't an elaborate trap or even just a bad decision.

"Tell me about it." Even in his time chasing his brother Ben across America, he had always preferred even the crappiest areas of a city over "the great outdoors." This was no different--especially since everything was apparently out to kill them. "Anything's better than staying here. Let's go."

And with that he shot a strand of web from his wrist and began swinging in that direction.

So cool. The fact that web-shooters would have been fairly useless for a teleporter with extra agility (and probably worse than useless, given the reaction of fur to anything sticky) was not even a little bit relevant. "Good idea," he said a little dazedly, and hopped forward, flattened on the branch to avoid a branch trying to take his head off, made a short jump to cling to the trunk of another tree, and hauled himself up with his tail. "Yeah, maybe the next stand of evil trees has baked goods and cash prizes."

Kaine's movements were quick and precise. He sized up the potential of a tree attempting to murder him at a glance, and shot his webbing at what appeared to be the weaker ones, never staying still long enough for them to reach him.

He glanced behind him at the fuzzy blue kid. "Yeah, and if that's the case I'm the tooth fairy."

"In that case we gotta have words. What's with a quarter per tooth? Maybe for the little ones, but once you get into molars, I'm thinking as much as six bits would be fair." He swung around a branch, pressing up against it to avoid a sudden swish from beneath, and hopped again.

There was a snarky comment about how he was being sarcastic on the tip of his tongue, but then what Kurt actually says sinks in.

"It's seriously still just a quarter?"

Not that he ever had to deal with the tooth fairy, so he had no way of knowing if it was ever a quarter to begin with. But it was precisely because it was something he never experienced that he was interested in it... it was just one of the many little things about childhood that he just didn't get.

Short teleport into some branches too weak to hold him, swing down on his tail, jump to the next tree barely ahead of a particularly whippy attack. "I got a dollar for each fang, but besides that, yeah." His parents had never completely settled on what to do about their mutant kid. Sometimes they went to a lot of effort to ignore it and sometimes they were all about how great it was to be special. Paying extra for his weird teeth was one of the weirder impulses that came of it.

Kaine vaulted over a tree branch attempting to hit him.

"I think you got jipped."

Again, not that he would know. It's just a gut feeling on the matter, one stemming from the belief that had Aracely still had any of her baby teeth back in Houston, he'd be broke paying for them.

Kurt ported quickly at an unexpected branch and wound up hanging upside-down with his hair an inch from the sludge on the ground. Bleh. "This is entirely possible. I was kind of pain wimp back then. Maybe there was a surcharge for listening to my whining." He'd still had molars to lose after he wound up kidnapped and stuck in a mutant-powered machine, and if memory served it had been way less fun to complain about it hurting with just an unimpressed Mr. Howlett for company.

"If it were me, I'd make you pay me for having to listen to you whine all day long." He really didn't mean that. If anything, living with Aracely has given him a higher patience for people annoying the crap out of him more than anything else in his life.

He webs two branches together to keep them from going after Kurt.

Actions speak louder than words in this case. He smiles gratefully. "Thanks." He could probably have gotten out of the way in time, but no need to test that the hard way and end up face-down and bruised in a muddy swamp-river. Plus, getting saved by web-shooters is awesome. "I'd offer a couple of ports, but there's barely room for me in some of these spots and a lot of people kind of hate it anyway."

Yeah, Kaine's kind of the master at saying one thing, followed immediately by an action that completely contradicts what he just said. It's probably why his reps gotten so bad as of late.

"That's fine, because I'd pass. I'm barely used to the webs."

Or superheroes in general, for that matter. He may be the clone of Spider-Man, but he spent a long time trying to get away from all that. It was still surreal, the fact that, after trying so hard to get away from it, he's swinging around wearing a full body costume with a spider on his chest.

All for the best, though Kurt had to resist the urge to defend teleporting as a totally reasonable way to get around. People he took with him tended to complain that it was a pretty unpleasant experience, but it lasted less than a second. A little heat, pressure, and sulfur smell seemed to him to be a lot less trouble than fighting through this whole swamp.

However, traveling by webs was really cool, so that was a perfectly acceptable counterargument. "That's fair. Seems to be working for you."

It was, wasn't it? Considering he hadn't shot a web in his life before Spider Island, the whole thing came completely natural to him. ...Was it because of the Parker inside of him, or the Other, or... or something else entirely?

Whatever the reason, it was something he found he didn't want to think about too deeply, and so he preoccupies himself by vaulting over a branch.

"I could say the same thing about you and your little teleportation trick."

"All these short jumps add up, but yeah, it's doing the trick. And if I can find the end, here, I can always come back for people. I have a pretty good range as long as I know where I'm going." Though from here he had no idea how far the swamp would go on. With visibility like this they could be fifty feet from the end and not know, and given how obviously magical all this junk was...

Kaine flipped over one branch that swooped down to attack him, only to quickly contort himself to slip between two branches trying to take advantage of the first branch's failure. This forest was getting old fast, and as far as Kaine was concerned, if he never had to go through it again, it was too soon. If this kid wanted to go back, that was his business, even if he was a sucker for even considering it.

"That's to say these damn trees won't move on you."

Kaine ducked under one last branch, and rather than land on yet another tree, he landed on something decidedly different. "What the...?" It was barely sticking out the swamp, but he could definitely make out a face. He landed on a statue. These better not be moving, because if this turned into that scene from Ghostbusters, Kaine decided he would be so done. He did not have time for that kind of bullshit.

Kurt ported out a little further, hooking himself around a statue like a fuzzy gecko. "Aw, sweet, a save point. Or at least it's clear enough here..." He looked over his shoulder. "I better start going back for people." Because yes, he was an absolute sucker. Or hero, as the X-men liked to call it, even if this was more of a protracted inconvenience than an exciting rescue. Slightly annoying welts and wet feet for great justice?

Nope, definitely a sucker. Everyone who entered this bottle did it of their own free will, and if they didn't know how to protect themselves they were an idiot for signing up in the first place. He had no sympathy for that. Especially not when he was tired and could feel the bruises forming on his skin from the trees he wasn't lucky enough to dodge.

Still...

"Just... be careful. You don't know what other surprises that damn swamp might have."

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EVENT | LANDFALL | KITHIKA | BOTTLE

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