Fanfic - Sentimentality (SevU one-shot)
Sunday, March 9th, 2014 06:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfowlgirl posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
mindcrackloveA brief thank you to both Lioness and Tuan for editing it.
I hope you guys enjoy! :D
Vechs was in his lab when it happened.
It was nice to be back in his lab, back in his home, especially after everything that had conspired in the past several weeks. To just relax, fiddling with the familiar electronics beneath his gloved fingertips.
He’d even requested the day off, just to avoid being drawn away for endless meetings or appointments that tended to pop up without his noticing. Privately, he suspected with a dark amusement just why they always did that.
As his hand wrapped around the handle of a screwdriver, a shrill ping! echoed throughout the room. The ringing sounded once, twice, and then went silent.
Vechs’ gaze, shrouded by the green lenses of his engineer’s goggles, darted over to the computer sitting in the corner of the room, almost cramped by the plethora of screens surrounding the small keyboard and desk chair. A window had popped up, a scrolling map quickly covering the screens and zooming in on a specific location. Each screen contained some new view of the same area, a red dot blipping its indication on every map.
He hurried over to the desk, typing for a few moments and studying the dot simultaneously. He sucked absentmindedly on his lollipop. A thin grin spread across his face before he closed out of the program.
“Time to go and see who’s decided to spoil my day off.” He left the room with a strange bounce in his step, whistling tunelessly as he went.
~||~
“Why?” the blue haired girl shrieked as she bashed away at the angry zombie before her with the dented remains of her iron shovel. “Why would you convince me that coming down here was a good idea? Why was I so easily convinced? How the hell are we getting out of here?!”
“Come on, Proxy,” her grey-green-skinned companion replied. “It’s an adventure! Think of how many people have gone through here, how many riches and relics they left behind!”
One final hit sent the zombie down. “And lives, Cthulhu?” Proxy glanced pointedly at the half-decayed skeleton they’d first found after tumbling headfirst down into the sandstone caverns. “Whoever they were didn’t even make it past the entrance!”
“The Legendary Caves are exactly that - legendary. They probably didn’t have what it takes.”
“You say that like we do.”
Cthulhu stuck his ghastly tongue out at her. “If you’re gonna be such a scaredy cat, I’ll lead the way.” He took a couple steps forward, even ‘daring’ to turn to face Proxy and walk backwards cockily. “See, nothing bad’s -”
His foot caught on a tripwire. A loud beep sounded before the sand floor dropped out beneath his feet, tossing him gracelessly into the pit it had made.
Proxy leapt over to the pit’s edge in a surge of adrenaline, staring into its dark depths with her heart in her mouth. Cthulhu’s voice came floating up on cue, decidedly nonplussed. “Ow.”
“I TOLD YOU!” Proxy shouted down at him.
“SHUT UP!” He quickly hunted through the cloth satchel hanging by his side before looking back up at her. “And throw me down a rope, would you?”
She rolled her eyes, one end of a rope promptly flying down to meet him.
~||~
“There’s still so much loot here!” She dug through the chest, wood rotting off its edges and lock long since rusted off. “Look at all this leather. Enough for a few sets of makeshift armor.” Proxy held up some stale bread loafs. “And I mean, these won’t do amazing, but at least there’s some food down here.”
“We could play hockey with that bread.” Cthulhu ducked as one went whizzing by where his head had been seconds before. “Hey!”
“Be appreciative.” She stuffed the newly acquired materials in her backpack. “So far we’ve found swords, guns, bows, food, armor, building supplies… it’s not like anyone’s gonna miss it.”
“Yeah, and whatever weird tech was laying around in that one cave, or the remains of some of those… traps…”
The girl raised an eyebrow as her friend trailed off. “What’s up? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“V-v… V-v-ve-ve-ve…”
“Hiya!”
Proxy shrieked and jumped up, spinning around to face the man that had just managed to sneak up on her. “Vechs?!”
“Speak of the devil and he shall appear,” Vechs remarked with a bemused smile. He hung from the creaky wooden rafters above by his knees, not terribly unlike a bat. “Long time no see, ProxProx, CtherpTerpDerp.”
“What are you doing here? Do you live here or something?” Cthulhu spoke up, slyly drawing a loaded handgun from his waist without ever taking his eyes off the newcomer.
“What? No, that’s ridiculous. I got an alert that a trap was set off around here.” Vechs raised an eyebrow beneath his helmet. “You two wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
“Us? N-no, of course not.” She took a brief moment to compose herself. “We haven’t run into any traps.”
“Not even the sand pit at the entrance, already triggered? At the bottom of which I found this?” He held up a small green article that, after a moment of study, Proxy recognized as one of Cthulhu’s scales.
She elbowed Cthulhu hard in the arm.
“Ow!”
“Moron.”
The two adventurers jumped back simultaneously when the infamous Mindcrack engineer dropped down from his odd perch, somersaulting in mid-air and landing on his feet with cat-like grace, closing the distance almost as quickly as they had gained it.
“Look.” Vechs threw his arm over a paralyzed Proxy’s shoulder, all whilst keeping his unsettling smirk. “I know the way around this place like the back of my hand. You’ve got a ton of supplies, which, even if I tried to take it from you by force, would probably get me at least one bullet wound by trigger-happy over there. What d’you say - partners, for the time being?”
She eyed him warily for several seconds, before slowly nodding. “Sure, I guess.”
“Great.”
It took a few frazzled heartbeats after the still-grinning engineer had removed his arm from her shoulder, that Proxy realized he’d lifted her gun.
~||~
“Are you sure you know this place like the back of your hand?” Cthulhu chimed up.
“Of course I do.” Vechs hopped down off the ledge, holding his arm out. Proxy used him as a balance as she dropped down, while Cthulhu found it best to jump off himself… only to trip and fall flat on his face.
The scaled beast’s muffled voice continued from the floor before he pushed himself back to his feet. “Then why did we just circle back around the same passage, twice?”
“‘Like the back of my hand’.” Their unruly companion held up his covered arm. “I wear gloves 90% of the time. I don’t exactly see my hands very often - either side of them.”
“So you have no idea where we are?” Proxy offered.
“I have… a general idea.” The tunnel cut into a long rail system. He looked left, then right, then left again. “I think we go… left here.” Vechs eyed the remains of some poor unfortunate soul resting on the ground to their right. “I’m going to take that as a sign we go left.”
“What if he was running from something that came from the left?”
A shrug. “Then we’ll find out, won’t we?”
~||~
Proxy screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. She clung, just barely, to the side of the cliff face, one hand locked in a death grip on the sandstone and the other wrapped tightly around her sword, as if it might somehow save her.
“Drop the sword.” Vechs leaned over the edge, one hand extended towards her. “And loosen up - it’s only a hundred-meter drop.”
“NOT HELPING!” She looked down, briefly, before quickly facing back up, terror written across her face. The ledge had a slight incline here, leading out to a corner hanging precipitously in the air, and her grip wasn’t quite enough to keep her in place. The sandstone was crumbling gradually beneath her fingers, disintegrating into the fine sediment it had once been formed from. Her breath hitched in her throat as she felt her momentum shift discreetly, slipping in a slip-slide fashion ever closer to her impending doom.
She clenched her teeth. No time to be prideful. She could always find something else to serve as a weapon, and once they were back home - they were going back home - she could always forge herself a new sword.
It actually took a modicum of effort opening her other hand, as if the deadman’s grip had been translated into both her arms. The sword slowly slipped from numbed fingers.
It fell until it was completely out of view. She held her breath, trying to count the seconds. Distantly, there was a faint clank.
She slung her now freed arm up, Vechs barely managing to grab it. He reached over, gripping Proxy by the waist, before pulling hard enough to get her up and off the ledge - sending them both tumbling over each other until he landed flat on his back …
… with her laying on top of him.
Her face flushed, and she sprang onto her feet. “Do not. Say. A word,” she growled threateningly, still shaking slightly.
He giggled as he stood with a flourish. “I knew you liked me, Proxy, but not that--”
She slapped him with every ounce of her pent-up adrenaline. It actually made the manic trickster rock back slightly on his heels.
“Yeah, yeah, I deserved that.” The engineer steadied himself. “Although that wasn’t even supposed to be a trap… it’s just a cliff that you somehow managed to fall over.”
“I - just shut up. Where’s Cthulhu?”
“He said he was gonna go fetch some iron.”
“It’s been half an hour!”
Vechs shrugged. “It’s a long trek. These caves aren’t exactly small. We’re nearing the exit, though, so we should probably split the loot soon before we leave.”
“How is it that we manage to lose all of our weapons, but somehow you have three?” Proxy pointed out the pair of guns hanging around his waist, and the metal sword stuck in its scabbard.
“I’m more careful?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I’m watching you.”
“I know you are. Let’s get going.”
~||~
The spiraling stairway entrance stretched out above them, going up what seemed like forever. They had finally reached the exit.
“It’s been fun,” Vechs said aloud, a smile flickering across his face. He inserted another lollipop into his mouth with one hand, opposite hand reaching up to light the end with his tiny lighter. It took a heartbeat of the two (rather tousled-looking) adventurers staring at the (only mildly crazed) engineer before he realized what he’d done. With a hurried resignation, he extinguished the lollipop between gloved fingertips. “But I’m afraid this is where we must part ways.”
“Aren’t you heading back to Novis City?” Proxy objected. “Our route’s along the way, we could walk with you until we got there.”
He shook his head, grabbing the bags he had collected and slinging them over his shoulder. The blue haired girl’s eyes widened as she realized that one of the bags was hers, and the others was Cthulhu’s. Calling loud enough that his voice echoed around them, Vechs shouted, “Activate protocol 7903. Password: ‘Dalania will rise’.”
“Da…Dalania?”
Proxy shot forward, just barely cut off as a rock the size of a van landed mere inches in front of her. An earth-shattering rumble passed through the caverns. Vechs grinned, waving with one gloved hand as he headed up the stairs. “Take it easy, you two!”
Cthulhu and Proxy could only watch in shocked silence as the corridor caved in around them.
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Date: Monday, March 10th, 2014 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, March 10th, 2014 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, March 10th, 2014 03:31 am (UTC)<3 SevU Vechs. Wonderfully depicted.
O.o Dalania hasn't risen yet? :D
"Take it easy, you two!" Bothers me though. So much more used to, "Until then, take it easy."
But still, I reaaally love SevU Vechs. Every Vechs part I read at least twice.
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Date: Monday, March 10th, 2014 03:42 am (UTC)And yeah, I tried to get it in that way but it felt kinda... off. Obvious farewell quote is not supposed to be /super/ obvious ^^;
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Date: Monday, March 10th, 2014 06:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, March 10th, 2014 06:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, March 10th, 2014 07:37 am (UTC)Glad to see such a warm reception for your work here, Elfy. <3 You did this world and her inhabitants justice.