Cave Game

IX - Last Train

He shifted his weight. The heft and feel of the iron armor he was wearing was obnoxiously obtrusive to his sensory field; he couldn't go a second without once again acknowledging its presence through some minuscule detail or way it changed how he acted. It was like a new body entirely. Each time he walked or gestured, he could feel the plates scrape and slide off one another, stiffly hampering his freedom of movement. He could feel the thick, cool metal of the helmet pressing into the sides of his face, insulated only somewhat by the thin, soft lining. He could hear the sound of the boots he wore clinking on the stone with each footstep. He could see the gleam and shine of the bright, flashing light reflecting off Alex's matching chest piece, pauldrons, and greaves. Each shone like a mirror, engulfing her in light.

She did a spin, glimmering like a rhinestone. "How do I look?"

Enchanting. It was that feeling thinking again, the clay pigeon flying on faux wings. Mid-flight, the skeeting disc morphed into a globby effigy of a real avian, soaring on its brown wings.

"Ready for the ball, Cinderella," Steve said, his comedic tone the result of a compromise between his thoughts. The pigeon was shooed away.

Alex mimed a curtsey, made awkward and rigid by the encumbering apparel. "I guess it's time to dance then," she said, drawing a bucket from her inventory. "Isn't that right, Waldo?" The creature in the bucket mounted the lip to stare back at her ogling eyes.

While on the search for more veins of iron, Steve had accidentally stumbled into one of the many terraced clay pools that speckled their layer of the cave. While floundering in the stalky leaves that grew from the shallows of the water, he had felt something jostle his leg. Something alive. Exactly how he was able to attain the speed at which he had leapt from the murky bed of silt still confounded him, even now. Dripping wet, and peering from the malleable edge of the pond, he watched. A bright pink creature emerged from the shallow depths of the body of water, its six, feathery horns that protruded from its head breaking the surface first. It gracefully went gliding and splashing through the pond, propelling itself with its stubby, meek limbs and its thick, cylindrical tail. The axolotl-- as Alex so ecstatically called them as she sprinted up to investigate the commotion-- swam up to the edge of the pool to greet her and Steve with its beady eyes and thin-lipped mouth. To his horror, Alex bent down and scooped the critter up with the iron bucket she created as a failed attempt to forge a helmet. Once more to his appallment, she also insisted on naming it.

"Wasn't he Herb twenty minutes ago?" Steve rhetorically questioned. Alex had decided to name the axolotl, but had yet to decide on what that name would be.

"He has a working title," she replied mock-angrily. "I don't know what to call him yet, other than adorable."

Maybe something more along the lines of 'vile' or 'slimy,' Steve thought, relieved that she put the bucket away, back into her inventory.

"He is just so cute, isn't he?" Steve hoped he had gotten better at lying. "We should get a move on, though."

The pair walked up to the precipice of the cave's layer. Below them, lapping at the side of a sheer cliff washed a sea of inky darkness. Alex's boot scraped the edge as she ground her heel while peering down. The loose grit plummeted dramatically off the edge and into the darkness, disappearing into the maw of the black chasm. She turned to look at Steve, holding the torch she sported aside.

"Is there even anything down there?"

"Of course there's something down there, it's a cave." After a stint of silence, in which he had time to process what he just said, it suddenly occurred to Steve that this world guaranteed nothing. "I mean, I-I'm pretty sure something might be down there, probably..."