"Nyyghhh..." Scarlet stretched and yawned. Roy, who stood and cracked his back outside, found the note pinned to the tree and swore.
"What?" Wally asked, running over, instantly awake.
"The left us here! I don't believe it, but they LEFT us here! Alone! Some emergency or crap!"
"We're alone?" Scarlet asked, looking shocked.
"Yes! They just left us!" Roy punched a tree, infuriated.
"They left us the cooler of food, at least..." Dick pointed out. He opened it. "We have hot dogs and water and some crackers and stuff. Scarlet, stir the fire back up."
Scarlet expertly scampered off to gather some wood, digging through the ask pile to find some live embers and blowing on them. In less than a minute, there was a small fire going.
Roy's anger was momentarily forgotten. "How do you know how to do that?"
"Gypsy skills." Scarlet said, grinning, before pulling her hair back into a ponytail.
"Right. I can't believe the left us here." Roy said, sliding down the tree trunk. Wally shrugged, skewering some hotdogs on a stick and putting it above the fire.
"I can. Hero business always comes first. Look on the bright side- at least we still have the toilet paper." Wally pointed out.
"Screw hero business! What about us!? They just sneak off sometime in the night to do some hero crap and leave us in the middle of the woods? Great." Roy sighed.
"Hot dogs are done." Wally said, pulling one off the stick and handing it to Dick. The boy smiled and took a bite, and grease dribbled down his chin... Roy couldn't help but smile.
"Hey Scarlet- Scarlet?" Roy looked up to see she was thirty feet up n a tree and gaping a something.
"Scarlet? What is it?" Wally asked, looking at her curiously.
"Smoke. And tons of it on the horizon. Batman said we were sill five miles and a 500 foot elevation change from the top of the mountain. But I think we better get there. Something's going down."
"Right. Necessities..." Dick threw all the food and water he could carry in the bags, while Wally worked on compressing the toilet paper into his bag...
"Wait. Why are we headed to the top of the mountain?" Roy asked.
"Because there's smoke. That's probably where our mentors are. And maybe we can help..." Dick said, shouldering his pack and nodding to the others. "Now let's go. Scarlet, keep a radio frequency going, try and see if you can pick anything up as we get higher in elevation." Dick ordered.
"Right. It looks like it'll be awhile, though..." Scarlet said, and Dick nodded. "As long as we can go..."
"What direction was the smoke in?" Wally asked, looking interested.
"West." Scarlet said calmly. "It was opposite the rising sun..."
"And it's only around seven in the morning, so we have time. Let's just hope we can make it to the top of the mountain soon."
Roy was silent as they hiked. Everyone was, it seemed, the only sound the animals of the woods and dried pine needles and leaves crunching beneath his feet. Roy was thinking.
He'd been raised on the Indian Reservation after his father, a man working in a logging camp, had died in an effort to save the Indians and put out deadly forest fires. He'd succeeded, but lost his life in the process. Ever since then, Roy feared massive fires...
He wasn't sure what to thin about the possibility of smoke on the horizon, now. It was rough going over the steep terrain, and already they were tired, but the dragged on- because they had nothing else to do. But he wondered- if the did happen to be caught in the fires, would he have the courage to go out fighting like his father had?
They were all sweating, and it was growing colder as they clawed their way up the mountain. Finally, they stopped. The forest had been thinning for a long time, they'd hiked for three hours, and they now faced a sheer rock cliff in front of them.
"No way around it. This is the last hundred feet to the top, where we can see everything. We have to climb." Dick said.
Roy stared. The craggy peaks and few handholds made him wonder if they'd ever pull it off even if they'd HAD proper climbing equipment.
"Can't you use your grapple guns?" Roy asked.
"Too unstable. It might pull out. We have to free-hand it." Scarlet said, staring up the cliff. It would be crazy if they made it, death-defying, even, but she was a Grayson, and she'd done this every day on the trapeze...
"If one of us climbed, we could do it. Maybe. If they dropped down a rope." Wally suggested.
"Except we have no Rope. Except for the grapple gun cable. And that's as likely to slice through your arm at high tensions as it is to hold it." Dick pointed out.
"Free handing, then." Scarlet said, finding her first handhold.
"You're seriously going to try this?" Wally asked, looked at her with a mixture of shock and awe. "What if you fall?"
"Why not? It's not like there's any other way of getting to the top. Besides, I'm a Grayson- Grayson's DON'T fall." She swung sideways towards where her grip was, clutching another handhold before leaping slightly, grabbing another handhold, finding a foothold, taking a breath before lunging up the rocks again...
"She's right. We'd better get going." And Dick was headed uo the rocks as well, at a slightly faster pace.
"How do they DO that?" Wally asked, watching them claw their way up, using mainly their hands only, amazed.
"Just one of those things they do, I guess. Come on. We'd better make sure they don't fall." and Roy found he was pulling himself up as well. He was far less graceful than the birds, and a it wasn't pretty to watch, but he could do it. St twenty feet, he looked down at Wally, cocking an eyebrow. "You coming?"
"Y-yeah." And Wally was shakily finding his handholds and following his surrogate siblings up the rock face.
Twenty feet wasn't very hard, thirty was an effort, and by fifty, they were tired. The last twenty five feet was total agony, with sweaty, cramping hand and arm muscles pulling them up and fumbling legs. They pressed their bodies flat against the craggy rock face, the wind was stronger up here, and forced the,selves to fight through the pain, gritting their teeth against the strain as sweat trickled into their eyes. Dick finally pulled Roy up, and Scarlet helped Wally. They all knelt and looked down, shocked at what they'd just conquered.
"Wow. If we'd have fallen..." Roy said, shocked. That might've been the dumbest thing he'd ever done. One slip, one false move, and he'd have fallen to his dead. Dick had stood and turned to see down the other side of the moutain, which was a much more gradual descent.
"Guys. We have a bigger problem." Scarlet said. She was already looking down the other side if the mountain...
They all looked over to see the forest at the base of the mountain and surrounding grasses all aflame, leading towards a small valley which could only house a settlement of people...
"No kidding." Roy muttered.