Sand Through The Fingers [ADVENTURE]

Kara snaked side-to-side with the wall to the east, a syringe at the ready and ears prepared to discern the slightest perturbance of movement. While the many merry men in the main room were having their ball, their noises followed a certain theme – shifting at tables, sloshing drinks, clinking them, clapping and similar. Thus, anything with more subtle or measured value required investigation. She could see at the end of the hallway a closed door, situated closely to the wall behind, which could only mean two things – the entrance to a small closet or a transition point.

Upon reaching it, she placed her ear to the wood, but there was slate silence and indiscernible soundscape further down. Kara gently tried the handle, but to no avail. The door was locked. If she looked closely she could see more signs of blood near the entry, something she did as she crouched low. It didn’t take a lot to figure she had found where they stored their ‘cargo’.

Moving away from the sealed door, she went to another and listened. From within the room beyond, she could hear and smell the act of cooking, someone heavy booted moving to and fro inside the kitchen. Taking stock of the space around her, Kara had to wonder how long it would take for this door to be used, for the cook to need to come out by its shortcut.

How often did they feed their captives?

Stepping away from the door, she went back to rejoin with Emile. She found him waiting for her, and stopped to whisper to him. “I found a closed path leading down to the intended slaves and a way into the kitchen,” she shared, then watched his face to hear about his side of the layout. When all was said, there was really only one plan she could imagine to be most efficient.

“Any ideas to lure the cook and only the cook out? If not, we’ll have to wait for an opportune moment to sneak up on him.” Something in the depths of her eyes glinted. “Emile, have you ever worn an apron?”

The commotion Emile caused was short-lived, Kara being left outside to appraise his performance. Not having expected the man to be so easy to step to the role, she stood mildly impressed and cringed only slightly when he whistled to alert her he was done, only one room away from the gathering of slaver drunkards. She stepped in with a light pace, a finger going to her lips to remind him of silence. But he was going for the other door, leaving her confused as to his intention when he began to pick the lock.

Luckily, the men in the festive room were so engrossed with one of their own shaking his ass in a frilly dress that they entirely missed the commotion coming from the kitchen. Kara stepped up behind Emile and whispered near his ear. “That’s not it, and I don’t think it’s locked.” The obvious signs of merriment continued beyond that very wall. Having replaced the syringe with the sleep bomb, Kara nodded to the doorknob. “May I?”

Should he allow, Kara would simply push open the door, the hinges creaking under the velocity of the act, and step forward. A moment later she was hurling the bomb at the gathered mob, aiming for the grouping of tables where she discovered most were seated. There were a few gasps of surprise and some chairs falling over, but Kara and Emile wouldn’t get to see this. The pink-haired woman had shut the door after launching the power-full bomb, having left it to sail over the slavers and spread through the air. Coughing would ensue, some cursing, and soon enough the falling of a limp body.

Resisting the tug on the handle from the other side, the woman would let them to stew in the assault, then let go of the knob. The woman would bring out her claymore, ready to draw some blood as drunk slavers stepped into the kitchen one by one, armed with whatever they had available: daggers, broken bottles, the foot of a chair, and so on.

The first two men would try to storm her with their makeshift weapons, only one of them sober enough to notice she wasn’t the only one in the room after just spilling in.

Tag: HONODY EMILE

And so they got flooded, but the odds stood in their favor. What strikes Emile had not already picked up, Kara danced with ease out of the warpath of, twisting arms and cutting the tendons from the backs of legs as they got exposed. Even wielding a moderately long weapon, her strikes were precise, surgical, cutting only so far as to disable. At some point in the scuffle, she kicked the legs from under one of Emile’s more numerous opponents, leaving him for the man to finish as he saw fit. The rest she ducked low from, retreating and advancing with few forward thrusts and a majority of delicately appointed slashes. The confined space of their encounter impeded the drunken men, but to her served as advantage – not a few times causing them to stab into cupboards and even a cake as they warred.

By the time they were done, the pile of men blocked the entry they had spilled in through. Kara stepped around, her bloodied claymore kept to slanted attention as she looked beyond the door and then back where they’d come from. Next, she followed with a quick scanning of the men. “Emile, let’s check the pockets of these men, maybe one of them has the key.” And by ‘key’, she thought of two – the one to enter the building and the one to go down below to free the slaves. Whichever they could find, both if beyond fortunate.

Instead of helping in this task, Kara went about distributing anesthetic shots to all of their victims. The dose she would inject would be minimal and non-life threatening, perhaps erring on the side of mercifulness as she could not determine exactly how much of the sleep powder each man had inhaled. At some point, she stopped to tie a bandage around one man’s thigh, having found him wounded severely enough to potentially die of blood loss in the near future.

Once they were done, and whether Emile had found any keys or not, Kara would lead the way to the other door. By either opening it with a key or picking the lock, the two would get to open that door and descend into darkness, a much warmer environment greeting them the further down they went. The air was humid and hot, the walls sticky and warm to the touch, making it very uncomfortable to be there a moment, much less be kept there for long. Kara stared through the darkness, trying to find a switch to light their journey, when suddenly, there was the rattling of chains and the creaking of wood, followed by other sounds of shuffling. The closer they got, the more they could hear the labored breathing.

“Lightbulb. String hanging down.” There came a voice from their right.

Reaching out with her hand, Kara searched the general space until her fingers collided with the suspended switch. In the process, she knocked down a pot filled with fluid, spilling it forward.

The long room that would come into focus would reveal two lines of small cages, filled with three or more occupants at varying stages of dehydration and weakness. Some were down to the floor of their cage, not stirring to their approach. If they were not dead, soon they would be. The only true oddity in the room was a man submerged underwater, inside a tank of his full height. He seemed to be dedicating the last of his strength to keeping his mouth and/or nose above water, straining in the task as massive chains kept him down. From above, a piping system dripped a steady flow of water into the tank, continuing to fill it. Kara stepped forward, intending to quickly study the tank and see to the man’s release.

At that exact moment, a gunshot sounded off through the room, traversing the distance between the darkened room remaining at the very end of the long space, catching Kara in the arm. She reacted on instinct and stepped back, arm pulled to her chest. A pair of masked gunners, sober and posing a lot better fighting ability than their party-goers upstairs, emerged from the shadows. They aimed to poke holes through Kara and Emile. The one bullet that hit the tank didn’t manage to crack it, revealing its durability.

The slaves with any energy to spare retreated to the walls of their cages, covering their heads and huddling together. 

Not having hit the bone, Kara was left clutching a wound to the flesh, something that dripped quite an amount of blood. It pattered down from her elbow to mix in with the mud, hay, dry blood and feces on the ground floor. Now aware and avoiding more incoming shots, she struggled to find the right footing to counter the active gunman. The heat and rush of adrenaline caused her temples to pound, drowning out the muffled sounds of the frightened slaves.

To the left and to the right, she dodged every bullet and went around the tank, wounded arm set free so that she could use her weapon. She tried her reach, but the gunner was very fast, moving away from her slash, now reloading. Whether it was because she was tired or wounded, Kara could barely perceive what happened next.

All of the sudden, as if he had near materialized around the side of the tank, the gunner was right in front of her, aiming at her chest. Her eyes widened, she heard a great slosh and a loud crack, and suddenly felt a torrent of warmth pushing into her side. The gunshot came last, but she experienced no pain. Instead, there was a flow of sand suspended in midair, between her and the gunner. All of this happened within a less than a second, and as she jumped to gain distance and stare at the spectacle, she fell surprised.

More than 3/4ths of the tank was now dry, and the man kept to chains was partially transformed to sand, one of his limbs under this shape having broken through the glass. The sand hand had rapidly advanced further, grabbing the gunner by the neck. Kara didn’t wait for an invitation, and within an instant had pushed forward and driven her sword through the gunner’s chest. As the light and focus began to fade from his dark eyes, the sandy fingers that held him began to crack and crumble, the powerful grip gone weak and failing. Kara turned around to look at the man in the tank, and in the process noticed Emile on the ground.

Pulling her sword free from the gunner’s chest, she turned to run to him, in the process catching the fading sand against her skin, something that nearly instantly dissipated afterwards. The man in the tank lay at its bottom, dead from overexertion. Kara stopped by Emile’s side, one of her arms bloodied and her mind a rush of thoughts that converged into one soft utterance. “Try to stand still.”

Over the next dozens of minutes she would tend to both his wounds and hers, the man having escaped up the stairs engaged in a frantic stumble-run towards the ship left at dock. Also at some point during this time, something would change about one of the fruits in a bowl left untouched in the kitchen.

It would take the crew the rest of the night to ferry all of the liberated people and the unconscious slavers back to the ship.