Night 64: Hall of Faith

[vstheworld]

[From here]

...would have been next to impossible even if the door hadn't locked them in.

For you see, when Scott put a foot down just inside the hall, he expected it to hit ground. He was slowly getting used to trusting that ground would be there in the absence of being able to feel it. In this case, gravity told him otherwise. Scott began to tumble — painlessly, painlessly down a darkened, rocky incline, with no way of knowing which side of him was on the ground at any point.

"Whua! Augh! Doh! Fuuu— Sonuv— Rolling! Help! Bah! Uaaaaaaa!"

It was Scott's dumb luck that while the incline was steep, it wasn't smooth all the way down. Eventually, his heel rammed into an outcropping of rock, and Scott's sense of momentum kept him from keeling over forward when it hit. "Uuhhhhhgh..." Scott groaned out of dizziness. He could barely see in this light, but from what he could make out, his coat and pants were in bad shape — dusty, ripped in some places, and completely sliced open from the cuff to the elbow on the left sleeve, where his sword had caught the fabric on the way down. Said sword that was now gone, by the way. He was pretty sure he had heard the tink-tank-tumbling of metal careening down the hill without him.

"Crap..." Scott said as he rolled back the ripped sleeve. He squinted. "Craaaaaap." That was blood. He wouldn't have known it if he hadn't seen it, but there was blood coming from the palm of his left hand. He'd cut it kind of deep, too.

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[vstheworld]

With the bandage in place, Scott felt reasonably confident that he could make his way down the hill the rest of the way without digging more gravel into his wound. Having S.T.'s light shining near the edge of the pit helped, for which he was glad. He was not in the mood to go for another tumble just yet, especially not one down a seemingly bottomless pit, if the stones were anything to go by.

By the time he made it down, Harvey and S.T. were already discussing their next move. Good, so he hadn't missed anything. They were as stuck for ideas as he was. "Thanks, man," said Scott as he carefully took the sword from Harvey, making as sure as he could that all five of his fingers were closed securely around the hilt. Thank goodness it had been his left hand that had been cut, he thought, or he probably would have had more trouble getting his hand to cooperate.

"Camp out, roast marshmallows? I could go for some s'mores right now," said Scott, peering out veeerrry carefully over the edge of the pit. Not much of a view.

[toxicspiderman]

"Sorry, man. All out of snacks." With everyone at the edge, he turned the flashlight down the hole. No light. It only took a hundred feet or so for the sound of gravel landing on dirt to be impossible to hear. Something like that. He hadn't been on one of the tourist cave tours since he was a kid. These days, if he was going to rappel down a hole, it had a manhole cover on top.

"It's like a trust fall. Without the trust." That or it really was a garbage disposal. "The walls aren't closing in, are they?"

Nope. Too bad. "So do we give up or do we jump?"

[dualistic]

When Scott made his way down, Harvey was careful to hand the sword over, still not quite sure how the kid was getting by when he couldn't feel anything. He thought about a local anesthetic and then imagined it spanning his entire body and it seemed horrible.

Still, that wasn't the problem at hand. As far as they could all tell, they'd reached a dead end, but there was clearly more to this. Harvey moved his flashlight around the area, searching for any clues on the walls, any other paths out of here that they might have missed. But there was nothing.

"I'm not interested in giving up," he said when Sangamon posed the question. "They wouldn't have designed this to kill us. We've come too far for that, and they could have done it in much easier ways. So if we jump, chances are something else is going to happen."

He had no idea what, but pushing past the nerves that came with that was probably part of the challenge.

[vstheworld]

"Damn," said Scott to S.T.'s first comment. His stomach rumbled as if on cue. Huh. Guess I actually am hungry. Who knew?

In any case, there was more at stake here than a lack of marshmallows. The other two had hit the nail right on the head, and Scott wasn't sure if he liked where that nail was going. He might not have been able to feel pain right now, but he still had his senses of equilibrium and gravity, and neither of those were particularly happy with the idea of jumping into a bottomless pit to nowhere.

Still, Harvey had a point. Nothing so far had been designed to kill them, even the stuff that had been designed to kill them. And what else were they going to do? Sit here like babies, wait for nightshift to end, then come back to see Bag-'o'-Bones and do the whole song-and-dance again?

"...Well if we're jumping, I say we all jump together," said Scott carefully after unconsciously pushing his teeth down on the inside of his lip. He hoped it wasn't bleeding. "If the ship's going down, we all go down with it... Or something pithy like that."

Okay, mostly, Scott just had a case of the wussies and didn't want to jump by himself. But still. Pithy.