GRATIA // AU FUNTIMES

[birdsbirdsbirds]

Robin hasn't been back in a week. He always tells Tek if he's going to be away for more than a day--even if Tek isn't around to hear it, Robin leaves a hastily scribbled note in their hideout and returns more or less in the time he says he will. This time, there's nothing, and the nothing stretches on long enough to be cause for worry. Maybe there's something in the air, in the spirit of the Underground, or maybe it's just Tek's imagination filling in the empty spaces, but something doesn't feel right about it.

Vincent doesn't seem all that worried (or refuses to let himself worry, one of the two), but says that Robin was working on something all over his kitchen counter before he disappeared. It's useless to Vincent, of course, but Tek is able to pick through what looks like a typical Robin research project. It's a messy assortment of handwritten logs, crumbling police records, and a few papers covered in the man's own preoccupied scrawl that all seem to point towards a collection of mysterious, magical anomalies coming from some caves below the living tunnels where Tek first arrived on this world.

Robin coincidentally scribbled a map during the course of his work. Most of it is incomprehensible from a traditional cardinal-direction sense, but the way to the entrance is fairly clear, and a number of names and descriptors ("Leviathan ?" being one note that got crossed out) give Tek the sense that wherever he's going will probably involve the Haunting, and the Monsters that dwell there.

Robin's told him a little about the Haunting. Enough for Tek to think he can handle it.

So he travels to the tunnels far below, following the map as it takes him past the muted, dingy bustle of decaying human life, and down into the cold, quiet, nearly untouched passages twisting and winding like roots underneath the world. It is there that he starts to smell things, inhuman things, and feel lingering traces of creatures that are neither living nor dead. The map illustrates "the descent" as a straight line through a winding passage and into a wide open space, but the smooth walls of the slowly-constricting tunnel Tek finds himself in makes it feel more like being swallowed, and it's not hard to imagine that whatever cavern lies on the other side is just the belly of the beast.

Robin had warned him that you can't really walk into the Haunting through a doorway. There aren't entrances and exits in the traditional sense. You just slip sideways, sometimes without even noticing, and find yourself enveloped in a different place entirely. This is what happens as Tek enters a massive, echoing cavern and looks up, having a second or two to wonder why there's a night sky in this cave before realizing that it's a lake and that he is on the ceiling and that there is a tremendous amount of magic holding him and the lake and all of the fabric of this reality together.

That's when something finally makes itself known, bursting from the surface of the water. A dozen impish, reptilian creatures dive and glide towards Tek with the full intent of pinning him down and stripping the flesh from his bones with their many, many teeth. They skitter and hiss and are surprisingly quick down here--but so long as Tek keeps his wits about him, they won't be hard to dispatch.

The lake is spilling all over the floor (ceiling?) where they came from, a spontaneous waterfall that should, by all means, be filling up the cavern. Instead, it cuts a path down the slope of the stone surface that leads to a set of stairs going vaguely downward.

And Robin is down there, somewhere. The feeling of him is unmistakable, now that the thin membrane of reality has been punctured. The trace is sporadic, though--his energy flaring to a sharp, dramatic point before dying off and slinking away, only to spike up again a little while later, somewhere else. It's hard to tell how much time passes between busts, because it's hard to tell that time is passing in general here. Each second seems to crawl on for a minute, but minutes are gone in an instant. How long has he been down here? Good question.

At least Robin warned him about this part, too. Robin has a theory that, yeah, humans who peer into the Haunting come back terrified, but their futile struggle to comprehend the Haunting is what pushes them into actual madness. It's best to just ignore it--time will pass, or it won't, and Tek will be better off for not caring either way.