AUgust 01 Underwater (Doug, Hope, Frye, Quincy)

a/n: 31 stories in 31 days, all AUs, except not really, since Mira holds multitudes. Today, a team explores an underwater cave.

Almost no editing because I want to play XC3.

All the good things belong to Monolith Soft.


Their lights were sweeping the cave, four lines cutting through the water and dotting the walls. Hope and the Curator geek were focused on their appointed regions, working their way carefully around the domed area. Their job was to catalogue and bring back as much information as possible for later study. Frye's light was skittering up and down, backwards and forwards. He'd pause, swirl around something that made no impact on Doug but might have been important to Frye, and then push off to another corner of the cave. Doug had his own routine, mostly checking the front and back of the cave. As long as nothing had followed them in or showed up from ahead of them, he didn't have much else to do.

He pushed up from the bottom of the cave, drifting slowly through the water and giving his mini-skell a bit of a twist. It was almost fun, feeling the thing swim through the water. He told himself he wasn't goofing off; the skell researchers wanted a detailed report on this new model almost as much as the rest of BLADE wanted to know about the underwater cave system that Frye had accidentally found. Prospectors wanted mineral reports, Pathfinders wanted a nice map, and the brass wanted to know if the caverns provided access to the Ganglion base that made travel between continents tricky. He muttered a few notes for the Outfitters, listing how the skell handled, and swept his lights over the entrance again.

"I wish we'd brought a Prospector," muttered the geek, Quincy.

"You weren't going without me," Frye brayed at him. "Me and this cave, we're thinking of getting engaged. Ain't we, baby?" His light spun around madly.

"Is something bothering you, Quincy?" Hope's voice was sweetness itself even with the limited frequencies of the comms.

"The water feels wrong."

Doug's instincts flared. "What are you saying? Poison? Radiation? Are we in the body of some amoeba?"

"I've checked the samples as best I could, and no to all of those," Quincy replied. "Not that I couldn't be wrong. More along the lines of it being, I dunno, too heavy? Like gravity affects it more? That's why I mentioned the Prospectors." The Curator's mini-skell floated methodically to his next sector. "I don't want to be that guy, but I'd suggest cutting this short the minute something weird happens."

"Oh, Quincy, now you've done it," Hope said with a laugh.

"Done what?"

Frye interrupted them. "You just gave the planet a dare, dude. You ask this place to make you work for your beer and 11 out 10 times she does it. But that's cool. Me and the cave, we've got a relationship. We like spice." His skell was nosed against a drip of rock at the top of the cave now.

Doug swept his light over the entrance one more time. Quincy thought the water was weird. Frye thought the cave liked him. Hope was being nice. None of them were talking about the fact that the cave was lined with statues. From what looked like a tiled floor to the more natural roof, statues were carved into the walls, row after row. Doug had done his best to keep quiet when they'd entered the cave and his light had picked out a silent face. He'd choked back a shout, thinking it was an enemy or maybe a body, but in a moment he'd realized that the figure was rock, half emerging from the wall. Doug hadn't said anything, and neither had the others. They'd just settled into their assigned jobs.

Spare glances had shown figures that he'd guess were male and female, all of them mostly humanish. Arms, legs, torsos were equivalent to human ones, albeit twice his size. Robes swirled around them, in frozen form, and their faces had their eyes peacefully closed. Or maybe they were wide open; it was hard to tell with statues. Doug risked flicking his light toward that first face.

She was beautiful, with almond eyes and a face even more perfectly shaped than Hope's. Her hands, slim and graceful, were crossed over her chest. On closer inspection, her robes were made of wings, or maybe a cape made of feathers, trailing from her head to the toes. Doug let his light linger an extra second. He wanted to remember that face on his own, without needing to look at the collection of scans the others were making.

It was the last thing he saw clearly before a flashbang filled the cave with blinding light and a ripple of pressure. His eyes started to come back on-line immediately, but the cave was still mostly dark from the after effects.

"What the hell, Frye?" snarled Doug, lighting up the skell's limited weapons. He didn't need to see at all to be able to do that.

"Not me!"

"Go. Go. Frye, on point."

Frye was already shooting through the entrance. Quincy and Hope hesitated, he was sure of it, but one beat later the Curator had dropped his equipment and was shoving Hope's skell ahead of his own, following Frye. Doug swept the cave one more time as he covered their exit. His light was barely doing more than reveal the water directly around him, murky with sediment drifting from the roof. It picked out a rock on the floor, an uncarved section of wall. Doug made for the cave's entrance. It was time to leave the statuary.


a/n: Yes, this is the cave system from "Leaning." No, that isn't important.

Next up: Artist's muse. The stories will interconnect for a little while.