Rogue Evolution

The Mountain 6.5

"A mountain, a mountain. How did we even end up in a mountain? This is a hiking trip meant to go through the valley. We were never even supposed to enter Mount Salvo aside from a depot at the very top made for tourists to look at rocks. Unbelievable. Honestly. I guess it might have been useful if I were paying a little more attention during the club's outings and 'debates on rocks,' but come on, who has time for all that? Rocks and sediment are great and all but can you blame me for being a little more interested in what happens above ground?"

Scott had been on this one-man diatribe for well over three hours. Anna knew the exact amount of time because every few minutes she would check her watch. A few times she wondered if the seconds had somehow slipped backward and rolled back into previous minutes. Her only assurance this wasn't the case was despite Scott's constant yammering he never managed to repeat himself. If there was a silver lining to ever be found in her pile of shit life, it was at least that. She supposed that she had somewhat gotten dulled to the outspoken barrage of a person's consciouses due to living so close to Kitty. The difference was, at least Kitty talked about something that was interesting.

"Rocks, stones, minerals - what is even the difference? I guess the difference is minerals can be found in spring water and we need a certain amount of minerals in our diet. Then there is iron. It can't be the same kind of iron that's pulled out of the ground that we need to eat, right? It's a different type of iron."

At least Kitty talked about anything interesting. On the other hand, the constant talking filled the void in their otherwise utterly dark, utterly freezing existence. Over the past hour though, she was really starting to feel the dullness scraping away at her few remaining pockets of willpower. She was becoming more aware of how her legs felt like chunks of concrete somehow attached at the knee by broken glass, and the muscles in her neck and shoulders were now tightly wound piano wire under the weight of her pack. It took all she had to keep walking forward, one step in front of the next. She wasn't about to let her body fail her before Scott's did his. She noticed the limp in his left leg, the longer breaths he was starting to take between sentences and the occasional slight trips on the uneven floor. He was in just as bad a shape as her, despite his monologuing.

Though the trek had been long and just as unforgiving as the hike outside, it wasn't any worse either - which surprised Anna. When she first met up with the King of all Butt-Munchers, the chamber they found themselves in had outcroppings in all sorts of strange directions. Some snaked down and looked only accessible by crawling on your stomach, and others were so high you had to be a bat to get anywhere near them. Still, there were many man-size corridors like the ones they were in now. Mostly level, their corridor snaked around and branched off at regular intervals. None of it felt natural, but none of it looked new either. Every so often her wrist-mounted flashlight would uncover strange markings on walls that almost looked like pictures. Wispy stick-looking things were depicted and something she thought was a normal 'S' she now was beginning to think was a snake. She found figures drawn with what were clearly spears, then jagged diagonal lines she figured were mountains. It was all so haunting and yet strangely beautiful at the same time. The thought that, where she walked, were people like her thousands of years ago painting, cleaning a recent kill, or maybe little kids playing with little toys. She felt questions like, 'Who really were these people?' and 'Did they live long and happy lives living in a cave?' float across her mind. In her history books, it was all just dates and big boring important white guys, but then there was the little cave kid drawing a moose-looking thing on the wall in front of her. She couldn't help but wonder what that kid's life was like back in their time.

"Anna, are you listening?"

She blinked, her eyelids sticking to the balls of her eyes while she did. "What part? It was all just so goddamn fascinating, Scott." He grabbed her shoulder and it sent a shock through her system that was near enough to knock her over. "Wha-"