Snippet #2451388

At the top of the world, where the Genesis began, all was deathly silent save for the song of the siren's. Genesis, as her name implied, was the lifegiver for this part of Albion, her waters nourishing what would otherwise by a uninhabitable desert. From her shores, trees sprung to life, grass rose from the ground, and she gave life to all the creatures that inhabited the forests. The wellspring stretched out as far as the eye could see, the other shore sitting somewhere far over the horizon beyond sight. Everywhere she touched, she gave life-- everywhere but here.

Here silence ruled. There were no chirping birds, no whistling winds, and no footfalls of creatures either big or small. The only sound that remained was the haunting siren song. This shore was completely empty. Completely empty save for one resolute entity. He stood atop the water where he faced the shore in a silent vigil. His armor was a cloak of brilliant greens, from forest, to sage, to even accents of lime. Engravings of roots and vines etched deep into his arm, dancing across the metal organically as if they too were alive. Impressions of leaves rested upon his shoulders and his breastplate. Atop his crested helmet sat a pair of intertwining antlers.

In his hands rested a massive greatsword, as wide as a small child. Its tip dipped into the water only slightly, and every breath he took caused the water around it to ripple ever so slightly, breaking the illusion of stillness. Here he waited, without word or without movement. Here there was only him and the siren song that draped over his shoulders. His silent vigil was broken by the sounds of life. Echoes of footsteps drifted toward him, labored breathing followed closely behind. His lonesome watch became not so lonesome anymore. He made no movement, nor acknowledgement. He simply waited.

Well. This was just charming, wasn’t it? Kethyrian was getting really sick of the music, frankly, because she didn’t like being jerked around like a dog on a leash, and, mentally at least, that’s exactly what it felt like. Collar her with old thoughts she didn’t want, tether her to some damn temptation, and pull. It was honestly a wonder she hadn’t gone off by herself towards it yet—or may the greater surprise was that she hadn’t turned and fled from it. She wasn’t stupid, after all: this was a spiderweb, and they were flies, one and all.

She shouldn’t have been surprised to see some idiot bedecked head-to-toe in green metal standing on the surface of the water, but if this was what that song had been trying to tempt her to, either she or whatever was singing was more confused than she had imagined, because she was entirely nonplussed by whomever this was. She was pretty sure none of her deepest desires involved knights in shining armor, thank you very much. “Well,” she supplied bluntly, “I’m guessing we don’t just get to mosey on through, do we? Is there a ‘you shall not pass’ in here somewhere, or do we just have to infer that from all the silent ominous standing around you’re doing?”

Well, the elf was even less patient than usual today. Not that he blamed her for that, exactly—most of them were. Still, pissing off someone whose status as ally or enemy you did not know seemed like a rather counterproductive approach. Lohengrin almost wondered why it was that he stood by so much water when the song had been promising him the freedom of endless sky. Perhaps he was simply destined to be forever disappointed as well as forever disappointing. There was a certain kind of symmetry to the thought, at any rate. “Gonna go out on a limb here and suppose that he’s not going to speak with us. Anything supposed to happen now?” This, he asked of Theon, given that nobody else around here dealt in prophetic dreams.

"Fuck if I know," Theon said, shrugging. "Everything I saw in the dream's already happened. The singing bullshit, the lake, this asshole in the green not saying anything to me. I even shot him in the dream, but it just bounced off him. All he did was open his visor, but I didn't see anything inside." He'd have shot the floating knight now, too, but he didn't want to bother with reloading, and also didn't want to drop the duckfoot in the water.

"You sh-shot him?" Dio asked, notably standing out of the water. It might have looked quite refreshing to her, but she wasn't going to risk another electrical burst going off while she was in it. "W-why? Did he d-do something to you?"

"He wouldn't let me go in," Theon explained. "Oh come on, it was just a dream, it's not like I actually shot him. Fuck off." Dio narrowed her eyes at him instead. "Well, m-maybe he knows you attacked him in the dream. We don't kn-know that he's an enemy. You don't have to go and m-make him one."

"We don't know he's a friend, either," Theon said, rubbing at his temples. The little girl wasn't helping with his headache any.

The Lieutenant readjusted himself, keeping his arm steady as a pillar. Green knight, indeed. His gaze raked across the vibrant cloak nestled over the thing's shoulders, hardly flapping like it should have been. A general unease settled over his own, weighing heavy on his neck. As if someone were pressing down on him with great, unyielding hands. Bigger than his own, and volatile in nature. He had trouble differentiating whether or not this green knight was human or some sort of creature, or neither—perhaps, a God. Not that he believed in anything that he couldn't see with his own eyes, but days before, Sven never believed in age-old guardians either. His mouth tugged into a rueful smile. A goddamn good fight was going to happen. He could feel it in his bones, gathering in all the tight spaces of his muscles, screaming for release. Bent, twisted, angry. All of the temperance he'd cultivated over the years was slowly going to waste, trickling through a sieve, growing larger and larger, the longer he listened to that fucking song.

Now that they were close enough to see him with their own eyes, Sven could see her as well. Beckoning him to leave the group and drop the boy, come to the woods with her and leave everything behind—because they would be all right they would always be fine without him but I need you I do. She peeked behind branches, only long enough for him to blink her away like a mirage. Like an ill-imagined vision. Her voice, however, did not leave him. It lingered, whispering how this was his only chance to set things straight and do the right thing. His mechanical arm twitched and rose from his side. He settled the rubber pads of his fingers against his forehead, rubbing small circles against his temples. Half measures. He was always taking half measures, half steps, half decisions, especially when all he really needed was action. Kethyrian's collar may have been an annoyance, of things long past, but his collar felt like an anchor, dragging him down. Sweat beaded his forehead, slick against his palm. He felt like he was fading.

"We could sit here and continue to bitch," Vivi spoke up, airy tone evaporated. The siren's song had wrung every drop of animation out of her very soul, and what was left was only the bitter rind. If only she could find the source of the song, she'd make whoever was singing it suffer until she got tired. Unfortunately, no such sirens were found, only a jackass in green armor. "Or we can get on to whatever it is we were supposed to be doing here. Don't know about you, but I want to leave," She hissed out. Then her arm swung wide and pointed at the green jackass. "If what we need is past him, then we go past him. There are nine of us and one of him-- I mean, what the hell?" She said already going for the sword on her back.

Percy on the other hand was much more quiet and much more thoughtful-- as thoughtful as he could be with his scattered brains. Speech had become more and more difficult to come by, and once instead words a buck's grunt left his lips instead. He had since resigned himself to one word responses when he needed to speak, and nothing more. He had Sven's arm clutched in a hard grip. He fought the urge to drop to all fours and walk that way valiantly, and if the large man wasn't around Percy wasn't so sure he could have stopped himself. On the lakeside, he did an admirable job of tuning all the other voices out, instead keeping this "Green Knight" in focus.

Was he a man? Or was it a constuct? Perhaps whatever it was, it was of the same type of thing the guardian was? Surely it wasn't a guardian itself-- these creatures did not seem the type to simply appear and wait. Percy's antlered head tilted in curiousity as he took everything in and processed it. Perhaps more slowly than usual thanks to his current state-of-being, but Percy was still Percy, the animal couldn't change the man. What caused it to stand on the water? Some kind of magic? He squinted and then noticed that it wasn't standing on the water at all. The knight stood on top of a shallow sandbar, obscured by the reflectiveness of the water.

That answered one question, but many still remained. Who, or what was this knight for instance.

Perhaps ordinarily, proud Kethyrian would have simply ignored the presence of the knight and marched right past him, or at least been willing to try her luck and see how he reacted, but she was having a problem. A very large, wellspring-sized problem. She stood at the very back of the group currently, eyeing the water with more than a little trepidation evident on her sharp features. Her scowl looked less angry than usual and more… apprehensive. She’d never gone so far as to tell anyone, but Kethyrian had nearly drowned as a child, and had feared sufficiently-large bodies of water ever since. It was something so banal, so ordinary and weak of her, that she couldn’t stand it about herself, and seldom chose to give it any thought. This situation, however, was giving her no choice, and she shifted from one foot to the other with discomfort, her long-fingered, claw-tipped hands wrapped around her biceps and crossed protectively over her chest.

#9 was having its own issues. At some point during the walk, it had lost its ability not only to communicate in the common tongue or dialects of it, but even to understand spoken words. It knew that it was not to harm these people, it knew that they needed to get past the being wearing green. It did not have any protocols suggesting that it was to respect the ground that the knight was clearly guarding, and so its reasoning process, stripped to bare logic and probability, free of any of the more cumbersome attachments such as feeling and rightness, presented it with the obvious conclusion. Without anything blocking the way mentally, it immediately acted in accordance with the conclusion of its calculations, and went to cross the water. It was, of course, built to resist damage from such things, and it felt none of the Favisae’s reservations, simply moving through the water briskly until it alighted on the sand bar the green-clad creature occupied and then continued walking forward.

Mordecai would find the way forward wasn't so simple as taking a step, at least not without stepping through the Knight. The tip of the greatsword lifted out of the water and turned, the knight taking a step to the side to put him in the direct path of Mordecai. He had been tasked to protect this place from all those who dared approach, no one was going to pass while he still stood.

Mordy's steps though paved the way for others. Vivi in particular was the next to follow. In fact, as soon as the Automaton took the first steps into the water she followed close behind, wading into the Wellspring. She watched as the knight moved to stand in Mordecai's way, leaving the path she took wide open. At least, for the time being. As she drew closer to the invisible threshold, her progress was blocked by the knight's greatsword. Held out with a single hand, he barred her passage further into the spring.

Glaring at the knight, though his eyes were locked on the automaton, Vivi then tried to duck under the sword, only for him to lower it. Then she rose to try and step over it, only to find it rising with her. Hate filled her eyes as she tried to step further around the sword to find that blocked as well. The knight angled his sword and corraled her back to her initial position, like a mother would a child. That managed to draw hostility. In a moment Vivi's pistol found it's way to her hand and in another a crack echoed through the forest. The ringing of metal filled the area as the knight's head ripped back grotesquely. He stood like that, head ripped back and staring at the sky above before it slowly fell, unseen eyes drifting down and finally toward Vivi where they stayed.

The shot was then replaced by Vivi's defeated scream.

Gwen rubbed a hand down her face, murmuring something probably unflattering and colorful, though the slight tremor in her shoulders made it just as likely that she was laughing, as absurd as that would have been in a situation such as this. So much for getting on with it, as Vivi had so inelegantly phrased her suggestion. Well. Either they fought the knight, or they talked him down. Considering he’d taken a point-blank gunshot both in dream and reality without appearing at all fazed, she was really hoping that talking was going to get them somewhere.

“Ahem,” she started, drawing some attention to herself and waving sardonically at the… being in armor. “Hi there, ser knight. I don’t suppose there’s some nonhostile way to get past you, is there? It’s a bit of a matter of life and death, fate of the world and all that, so we can’t really just leave. I’d also really rather not die, so. Well, you see where I’m going with this. I don’t suppose there’s some kind of fetch-quest option? Some object to retrieve, a riddle to answer, maybe? Anything at all?”

Theon probably should have been angrier at the knight for threatening his sister, but so far he hadn't seen the guy do anything more hostile than stand in their way. He was tempted to smirk, but kept a relatively straight face. "Really, sis? I told you that wouldn't work." Dio, meanwhile, had distanced herself even further from the water, a good ten or fifteen feet from any of the other party members, at which point she crouched down slightly and let off a large discharge of electricity, arcing through the air around her for a second or two before it dissipated. Sighing when it was done, she wearily pushed herself back to her feet and stepped with trepidation into the water. She didn't have Kethyrian's fear of it, but she had no desire to accidentally hurt anyone. "Please," she said to the green-clad warrior, "We really need to get by you. Can't we work something out? We don't want to fight you." Her statement came in direct contradiction to some of the others' actions, but she said it anyway.

The knight's response was a predictable empty silence. There was no quest, there was no riddle, there was no passage. He had only one task, one duty, and that was to protect the Wellspring from all comers. He made no indication that he'd even heard the women's plea, and made no move other than to deny this passage past him.

The answer was simple then—it knew that they would not get past unless they moved the obstacle in the way. It knew itself to be capable of this—no matter the being’s seeming invulnerability to damage, it could still lift and hold, and this it calculated it must do. #9 moved with surprising speed, locking one of its arms around the Green Knight’s own left one and another around the corresponding leg, and then it turned several circles on the spot about the sandbar, gaining considerable momentum, before it released the being much as an athlete would a discus—sending the mysterious armored entity flying for several yards. It opened its mouth to speak, but all that issued were strange mechanical sounds—it did not remember how.

Kethyrian watched the knight go flying with wide eyes and a tight jaw. “This… isn’t going to end well,” she muttered, still eyeing the water with evident discomfort. Maybe the rest of them could go while he was down, and she could run in the opposite direction? Maybe she’d take Dio with her—water conducted, after all, and that seemed like a bad idea just waiting to happen.