Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft - Soup's On!
Carter Schimpff
(( Bedrock, Waterfall Cave – Callis I ))
K’Wara: ::glinting eyes:: Well, we’ll have to go back down eventually. ::checks water clock:: Just about 3 hours left.
Roy’s lips tightened, the untrimmed hair of his mustache pressing into his bottom lip. Three hours of light was the kind of number that sounded manageable – until you translated it into mistakes, delays, or one badly-timed slip.
Ollie shot him a playful grin as he reeled up their climbing rope. Roy returned it automatically, his eyes crinkling at the edges. The mood did seem lighter, suddenly – not happy, not safe and warm and fed – but something closer to that. Momentum. Maybe even, dare he say it? Hope.
Surreptitiously, Roy eyed Jovenan and found just about what he’d expected to find – carefully concealed tension. It was natural. The weight of responsibility had to be crushing to her. He could relate. He didn't carry the burden of command on his shoulders, but he did carry a burden for their survival just the same.
Jovenan: Let’s make use of those hours, then, shall we?
Bergmen: Aye, ma’am. Ready to go.
Bancroft: Yes ma’am. There’s an apple out there with my name on it.
The tunnel they walked through looked much like every other godforsaken tunnel in this cavern system – same worn stone, same narrow curves – but the walls here were slick with condensation, the air heavy with humidity.
Their chemlights cast long, distorted shadows across the stone surfaces, warping their silhouettes in grotesque and fantastic ways.
Roy fingered the hilt of his survival knife with his good arm and tried not to favor the other one too obviously. He could manage the pain. Had been, for a week now. But the climb had aggravated it further, and the ache was deeper and more insistent than ever.
They hadn’t gone far when Lieutenant K’Wara came to a stop, their fingers brushed up against the damp tunnel walls.
K’Wara: Wait. ::checks with fingers:: Jo- Commander, there are more etchings here!
Roy slowed with the rest of them, angling his chemlight toward the wall. These weren’t the simple wayfinders they’d seen near the entrance to this cavern system. No, these marks were intricate, perhaps even more so than the ones in their waterfall campsite.
Jovenan: ::to others:: See if there are more of them. ::to K’Wara:: What is it?
Ollie moved closer, sliding his hand along the wall. Roy watched his fingers sweep, then hesitate.
Bergmen: ::whispers:: Roja qiyametê?
Roy gave the Gideon a sideways glance.
Bancroft: ::dryly:: Bless you.
The joke came out on reflex, but the thought that followed it lingered longer than he liked. Federation Standard was his native tongue – easy and instinctive for him. For the other three, it was a learned language. In moments like this, surprise could crack the polish, allowing something older to slip through.
He wondered, briefly, how much of his own drawl survived the universal translator when it was working. Whether his folksy aphorisms were flattened into something cleaner and more neutral as they were translated. Whether he sounded less like himself to the other three now than he ever had.
K’Wara: This one’s not eroded as much as the one by the waterfall... They’re escaping from something. ::moves chemlight:: Water. There’s water behind them.
Roy leaned closer, studying the figure. Running. Reaching. Panic etched into motion.
Escaping from something with water at their backs. Sounds familiar.
Roy didn’t try to parse the imagery himself. Tamio sounded confident – and that was enough for him. He trusted their certainty far more than his own pattern-recognition in this sort of thing.
Jovenan: They escaped a… flood? Sounds reasonable, but with so little water around here now, something drastic must have happened with the climate since then.
Roy scratched at his beard, eyes drifting upward as Ollie lifted a chemlight toward the ceiling.
Bergmen: Is that a wave of the size of a mountain? Could it be a tsunami?
Roy followed his gaze. The carving overhead did look like a wave. Massive. Unforgiving. The kind that erased cities from history.
Bancroft: ::scratching forearm:: Looks like it to me, too. But if that happened anywhere around here, it must have been very long ago. Or, like Commander Jovenan said, maybe there was some sort of climate disaster.
He rubbed his eyes with balled up fists. There was an exhaustion in him that no amount of sleep would alleviate. Or, at least, that's how it felt.
Bancroft: Maybe related to the Cherub- er, Charibdus… ah, y’all know what I mean. The space storm that took the Karnack out?
K’Wara: Response
Jovenan: How many were there… A post-apocalyptic society doesn’t leave just art work. Let’s try to find out something more of them. Bones, tools, corpolites, anything. We might learn how they survived here.
Bergmen: Commander is right, let’s look around.
Bancroft: Aye, Commander.
K’Wara: Response
Roy sniffed and began scanning the walls and ceilings for more etchings, but was quickly interrupted by an exclamation from Commander Jovenan.
Jovenan: Everyone! Come look!
He moved to where she stood and felt his breath catch.
Light – real, honest-to-god sunlight – spilled down through a wide hole in the ceiling of a large cavern. It was almost painfully bright after the dim glow of the chemlights.
Below the opening, a pool of crystal clear water shimmered softly, ringed by green – real green. Living plants, tangled and overgrown, but unmistakably alive. And, hopefully, full of nutrients.
Bergmen: Huh, WOW…
Bancroft: ::quiet whisper:: Well I’ll be…
K’Wara: Response
The cavern smelled heady and alive in a way he hadn’t experienced in… he couldn’t even remember how long. The green wasn’t just a color – it was life. Damp soil. Leaf rot.
Honest to god photosynthesis.
His legs shook slightly, not from fatigue or pain or cold this time, but from the sheer improbability of it. After a week of brown mush and gray rock…
Ollie’s hushed voice cut through his reverie.
Bergmen: ::whispers:: Do you see it?
A chill snapped through Roy’s entire body, every muscle tensing. Another one? Now? Why? Why give us hope and then dash it away so quickly?
His eyes scanned the cavern wildly before he found it – and let out half a sigh. It was not one of them.
Bancroft: ::quitely:: Yeah. Let’s not move.
K’Wara/Jovenan: Response
The creature didn’t bare its teeth. It didn’t flee.
Instead, it tilted its head, studying them with a flat, unsettling focus that Roy recognized immediately – not fear, not curiosity, but evaluation. Like a clinician deciding whether something was worth intervening in at all.
Then it opened its snout.
The sound that came out wasn’t a cry so much as a signal – harsh, resonant, engineered to travel. It cut through the damp air and stone like a blade, setting Roy’s teeth on edge. An alarm, he realized. Not distress. Communication.
The answer came almost instantly.
A scatter of whistles rose from the tall grass, layered and directional, too many to count at once. The greenery rippled as shapes withdrew in practiced unison, bodies dissolving back into cover with a coordination that made Roy’s stomach tighten.
No panic. No scramble.
Just disappearance.
The grass stilled. The sentry was gone. And with it, any lingering illusion that they’d stumbled into an empty place.
Bergmen: And there goes the dinner…
Bancroft: ::letting out a low breath:: At least we weren’t the dinner.
His hand left the hilt of his survival knife. He hadn’t even realized he’d reached for it.
K’Wara/Jovenan: Response
Bancroft: Even if meat’s not on the menu, much of this flora is probably edible. What do y’all think - focus on looking for fruits and roots first?
He cringed at himself. Boiling down those creatures to 'meat' was crass. Then again, being polite wasn't going to keep any of them from dying of starvation or malnutrition.
K’Wara/Jovenan/Bergmen: Response
Roy spread out with the rest, carefully making his way through the grass, each step chosen with care. Those animals had seemed harmless, and the fact that they’d been here probably meant no predators were laying in wait to ambush them.
Probably. Probably wasn’t going to keep anyone alive in a place like this.
He stopped near a squat tree, its bark a bright shade of yellow, and reached up to pluck a fist-sized growth off of it. It reminded him of a pear.
Bancroft: Right. Any bright ideas on how to tell whether this'll feed me or earn me a very awkward autopsy?
K’Wara/Jovenan/Bergmen: Response
He raised an eyebrow, the corners of his mouth turning downward in amusement.
Bancroft: Fair. Well. Let’s give it a shot, then.
K’Wara/Jovenan/Bergmen: Response
TAG/TBC!
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Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft
Medical Officer
USS Artemis-A
A240205RB1