protect_and_survey | (no subject)

She pauses, tilting her head (very much looking like the RCA pup, sadly).

"... No?"

"Maybe it's nothing."

Rae wishes she could sound convincing.

"Let's... ah, tread quietly, shall we?" she says, continuing forward with the hovering light.

Rae earns a very dry sort of look for that - she may be SciOps, and not at all field-rated, but she's not an idiot.

But she doesn't argue - the point is valid, after all. She should settle down and look for more clues. That is definitely a good plan.

That light is really distracting. She's pretty sure Fitz would love it.

"Um... which way?"

There's a fork in the passageway up ahead, crumbly stone and cave fungus in abundance. But also, the blackened remains of a torch, set into a roughly-worked iron sconce on the wall. One of the passageways leads unevenly uphills, while the other seems to curve away downward. Both ways are equally dark.

Simmons peers first down one pathway, then the other. There's not really much to recommend one over the other, so she does what she believes is the next logical step: Get more information.

This is accomplished by pulling the torch out of it's sconce, knocking off the worst of the carbonized bits, and stuffs some of the cave fungus onto the top of it as best she can.

"I don't suppose that light of yours can set off a spark?"

"It's just light, no sparks," Rae replies, stepping forward. "I can light that torch."

It's the simplest thing, creating fire. She gives Jemma plenty of warning before she does it, though.

Simmons has lost interest in her surroundings. Rae herself is much more fascinating.

(Is she from her world? Is she on the list? Isn't there someone who deals with fire on the list? She's pretty sure, but she doesn't have full access, and it's been a while, honestly.)

Rae is ignoring Jemma's staring, and trying to ignore the way even the uneven drip..............drip of water droplets from somewhere in the darkness are making her tense up.

"I vote we head that way," she says. "Uphill."

That sound comes again - a far-off, echoing sound, like the enraged bellow of an animal. But the passageways make it impossible to tell which way the sound is coming from.

"Okay, I know it's not my imagination now. Let's go."

Uphill makes sense, as a cave system has to run out somewhere, and the higher you go, the less ground there is in general.

"It could be the locals are using the caves for cattle storage - it would be an easy way to get them into a defensible space." She muses, because babbling stops the rattle of nerves. Sort of.

"Locals who might've left those decorations back there, you mean?" Rae says dryly, climbing. "I really don't care to find out whether that was a cow or something else."

Right before another branch in their path, there's a particularly steep bit where part of the stonework has fallen away, broken by something stronger than itself in some distant time past. Rae manages to pull herself up, and then, with a grip on an edge of the wall, offers a hand down to Simmons.

Rae's protests are met with a long-suffering look and silence, waving off the offered hand to clamber up on her own. The other woman might not actually be a SHIELD field agent, but the attitude is familiar - in this case, depressingly so.

"Well, you seem to have a plan - lead on."

"Only if 'keep going and don't die' counts as a plan," Rae replies, only faintly wry, as they approach the next fork. "I'm just as lost as you."

Simmons makes a non-committal noise at that, studying the rock strata layers in the rough-hewn walls visible through flickering torch light and her travelling companion's odd fire ability. She would love to get Fitz's DWARF droids down here, but she suspects she'll have less luck at that than she has getting them into the bar proper.

"Which way next then?"

"They look... just about the same." Rae hesitates. The fork in the passageway is a flat T, one way leading right, one way leading left, both passages disappearing quickly into darkness. From somewhere in the echoing halls, there's the deep sound of rock grating against rock. Rae can't help the uptick in her pulse at the sound.

"Which would you say?

"They do look remarkably similar." She agrees, scrunching her nose at the options. "Clearly not a natural formation."

"Yeah," Rae lets the light above them drift a little ways down the left corridor, and then down the right. "They were definitely built - or at least hollowed out - but ages ago, by the looks of things. Built, and then abandoned."

"Apart from, you know, whoever contributed their blood to the decor back ther- oh gods," Rae covers her mouth, having seen the skull and partial skeleton the hovering light had illuminated down the right passage.

Simmons, on the other hand, moves forward, using a shard of rock to carefully push aside scraps of clothing and desiccated flesh.

"Relatively young, but poor dental care, probably lives near an ocean or desert - there's lots of sand in the diet, you can see the wear on the teeth."

"Sand blown into the food, and stone-ground flour," Rae says, not looking at the body, her lips pressed together and her eyes closed. "You get a lot of grit, in the bread. Damages the teeth."

"Ah, so, if we're somewhere or when on Earth, it's pre-industrial."

"Not necessarily, but definitely somewhere distant from a major metropolis." Simmons shrugs. "Probable cause of death is head injury - something fractured the skull back here, but that could be postmortem damage."

"This place is full of 'not necessarily's," Rae rolls her eyes, frustrated by not being able to determine anything about her surroundings apart from not wanting to be there.

"Let's keep moving. I'd rather get out soon than find out what's been leaving these decorations."

"Which way? Further on past this fellow or back the other way?" Simmons asks as she looks over what's left of the skin on the arms for any tribal marks or tattoos.

"Well, we didn't go the way Mr. Arterial might have been going. Let's not go the way Mr. Massive Head Injury might have been going, either."

Because really, one way is as good as the next, when you don't have any way of knowing which way either of them were going. Just that the passages they mark have death in them - and as Jemma said before, it's not a strong recommendation.

"I vote left."

"Very well." She gives her new skeletal friend a pat goodbye - there just isn't the time or the equipment to properly record all the information she could get.

Each passage is much the same as all the previous passages; each fork in the broken stone corridors as unmemorable as the ones that came before it. Sunshine is growing thirsty, and longing for the sun, and it may be the presence of another person that has kept her calm.

Still, every so often, there are sounds. Some are easily identified - drips of water, the high-pitched squeaks of bats. But some... some make the hair on the back of Rae's neck stand up.

"Hey," she whispers, reaching out to touch Jemma's wrist lightly. "Stop for a moment. Listen."

Very faint, there is the semi-regular crunch of something hard impacting stone.

"We'd best look for some place defensible then." Simmons decides - she learned way back in Academy that running blindly gets you killed. Finding a place to defend sometimes gets you killed too, but at least there's a chance.