Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was the first night that had broken him: the inescapable constant crawling on his naked skin, the room without doors or windows, the lack of distractions, the certainty that he would die slowly and weakly, starving and covered in a million scuttling legs. Everything had flowed from this. He still twitched, still scrubbed frantically at his hair when an errant underground current of air stirred it, only to cringe and ache and weep when the errant underground current of air turned out to be an actual moth or firefly or beetle, which set the terrors off again. He found himself resting near doorways after it became obvious that any enemy here knew of his presence, for fear that the doorways might again vanish when he slept, even if the doorways led to nowhere.

And he had food now, and water, even if he had to debase himself like a dog for some of it. If he died, perhaps it would not be slow and painful. Perhaps he might be granted a rapid death.

Do your job.

He feigned more weakness than he felt, and not long after the first couple of visits supplying him with meager provisions he clambered painfully to his feet and he stood silently in the middle of the room of dead men's coats, listening hard for the sound of some whispering, rattling approach. When none came, he left the room, and he began the slow and random and useless process of doing his job. Fiona was the sort of contented approval might one find in the purring of a cat, camped in a corner of his head. Her lack of alarm with the situation in general unnerved him, angered him: he was grateful for it.

He summoned her repeatedly, at every turning, marking his way until he realized that it did him no good: the walls moved, reconfigured, made his efforts hollow. He ceased.

Several twisting corridors and empty rooms later, his efforts were rewarded. His knees buckling, he followed the sound of running water--though this, too, choked him with the terror of memory--and when he turned through the arch he nearly collapsed entirely.

There you go, sir, said Fiona. See what good it does you to get up and move about instead of sitting in a corner feeling sorry for yourself.

He told her to ******** off, and he tried to find a fruit that looked like the one Lurks had brought him, one that felt safe. Possibly nothing here was. He ate anyway, voraciously, in quick gulping painful bites, and then he ate another, and then he knelt by the fountain and drank and drank until Fiona dispassionately pointed out that he would make himself sick.

He longed to wash himself. He longed to scrub beneath his fingernails and rinse out his hair; to wash away the stink that reminded him acutely of autumn nights in the underpass and how you could die sleeping on the bare ground even if it didn't seem that cold. But if he did this his captors would know that he had found a sort of relief, and this seemed unwise. He refrained, and settled only for carefully removing all traces of juice staining his fingertips and his forearms, rinsing out of the end of his sleeve that which wasn't camouflaged by the mottled stains of long-dried blood--someone else's.

He tucked a fruit into the oversized pockets of his too-big coat, and then another. He would try to hide them, and if all else failed he would bolt them again when he was back on familiar ground. It was a risk, he felt, worth taking.

This was followed by a succinct description of the next open area he found himself in: another crossroads, one he remembered only dimly through a fog of fear and dread. Another photo: again the doorway he intended to go through, selected at random; again a note that it likely meant nothing. And a few more snaps of the more interesting-looking carvings, the ones less densely packed, photos dimly-lit by Fiona's runes and the ambient glow of the things crawling on the walls (because he feared what a camera flash might bring about) but taken with a steady hand.

There was no surprise in finding himself once more, given a few minutes on his own, back in the room of the well reservoir. He repeated the same process as before: snap of the symbol over the door he'd just come through and a description of the corridor beyond, snap of the doorway he planned to go through, repeated stressed emphasis on the fact that the walls here were living, complicating any attempts at actual translation.

He paused here, however, and filled in some of the gaps of conversations he'd had with Lurks and Qarah and Waits, trivial though they were. He might or might not have requested specific direction on things to ask, and dropped a passive aggressive, desperate, terrified, thinly-veiled plea for help. He realized that the two things were directly contradicting one another, and did not care.

It felt right and appropriate that he should turn a corner and find himself in a room that he disgustedly realized he was mentally referring to as "home." He heard the sound of approaching steps and he decided that he was not done here, that he was not ready yet to submit to Lurks' cosseting or Waits' sneering or Qarah's interrogations. He quietly slipped away, steeled and ready for interruption, but the hallways were kind, and the sound of approach faded behind him.