Shimmer, Glimmer, & Gleam - A Quest of Loss & Gain

"Me?" Jack protests, when you ask him to come along with you. "You sure you don't want my sis-"

So you growl at him.

"You can't just do that any time -"

The growling intensifies and gets a low rumbling.

"...I can't deal with the combined fear and arousal, fine."

* * * *

The plan is pretty straightforward. Nattie has gotten volunteers from amongst the university students and therefore grabbed an engineering professor, several engineering students, and a few members of a "swim team", one of whom is also an engineering student. You wrack your memory and find that this does not register as unusual or remarkable to the point where you don't have a conscious explanation for it, so you let it go.

FOR NOW.

This core of vital non-combatants for the rescue will be escorted by Project Throwback, moving along the main roads. Your people, mounted up on the spider-women (and now that you understand why people are snickering when you say 'mount up' the combined glares of you, Jill, and Asset Protection do wonders to make them stop it in front of these poor almost-people) will serve as outriders, scouting ahead and to the flanks, on the watch for potential 'bandits'. Nattie has explained, patiently, that most of the survivors they've encountered have been folded into Threshold's various projects, not that it's stopped a few from making stupid choices.

"The 'buy gold' motherfuckers are so eager to die that I've stopped feeling guilty about shooting them and started seeing it as triage," she admits, with less pleasure than that sentence should imply.

The first leg out towards the Bay is in the same general direction as the drag your community has been pillaging, but goes right past that exit. No matter how you slice it, the shortest route is going to be Fifteen Hours of marching, necessitating an overnight somewhere, preferably not upon arrival since you might have to fight when you get there, nevermind on the way back. You've grown used to the relative silence near your own community, but as you get further away you discover that this is, evidently, unusual. Salt Bay City is alive; mayflies made of twisted wire buzz through the air, fighting with mosquitoes, both of whom are preyed upon by birds whose stained glass bodies splash color instead of shadow. As the joint team moves past, your binoculars show you the local branch of the Imperial Zoo, off in the distance; strange figures that might be survivors are still tending to the animals in their enclosures, somehow still feeding and caring for them. Something that must have once been an elephant makes eye contact with you through the binoculars, and while your heart catches in your throat it waves its trunk, as if to say hello.

Tears well in your eyes. Your new world is still so beautiful.

It's three hours in when Jack's mount scrambles up next to yours. He nudges your shoulder and points, lifting his binoculars. You follow the line of his hand, and see one of those massive 'rats'. It's dying in agony, bleeding from dozens of holes all over its body, but they look wrong. They don't match any weapons that come to mind, not even the lances from Asset Protection...

It spasms, and goes still. A moment later, dozens and dozens of little kittens, glass-clawed and wire-furred, emerge from its flesh and begin to feast. Something human-ish, in a long raincoat, walks up and starts petting them while they eat.

Choose 1
[ ] Whole lot of not our fucking problem
[ ] Investigate