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do-your-socks-have-holes-in-them · 5 years

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Til the End of the Night / Ch9: In which even weirder stuff happens in the forest

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Summary: Virgil is fully prepared to throw down with the local flora. Logan experiences a videogame tutorial level. Patton gets lost through, for once, no fault of his own.

Warnings: none

A/N: I feel bad for giving Virgil a hard time in these next few chapters but like, not bad enough to stop doing it lol

Read on AO3

Virgil came to in an unfamiliar part of the forest with an awful headache. He shot to his feet as soon as he remembered what had happened. He could move normally now, at least, but the sense of danger he felt only increased as he took in his surroundings.

Neither of his friends were anywhere to be seen, and he had a feeling it wouldn’t be a good idea to try calling for them. It shouldn’t be nighttime at this point, but it certainly seemed like it was. The main difference was that instead of crickets and whatever making noise, there was a near-total eerie silence, save for the occasional rustling of leaves. The trees above him were simply so thick that almost no light reached the ground, not to mention bigger in every dimension than Virgil was entirely comfortable with a tree or anything else being. He didn’t like being loomed over, even by plants. The point was, he couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead with any clarity. The air had an earthy, almost primeval scent, so strong it overwhelmed him at first, and it was strangely cold despite the fact that every day previous had been practically summery. He suspected it was a result of the location, not the actual weather. Wherever he was, it did not feel like a place he wanted to be.

He bent down to pull a silver-handled dagger out of its hiding place in his boot and walked forward slowly, doing his best not to step on anything loud. It wasn’t just the trees that were thick. With the amount of underbrush and weird roots sticking up around here, he’d almost believe the forest was actively trying to trip him. He really, really hoped it wasn’t, but… you never know. Something touched the back of his neck and he whipped around ready to defend himself- it was only a vine hanging down from a branch, but he took a step away from it anyway. He wasn’t going to trust anything around here, no matter how inanimate it may appear to be.

His footsteps crunched on the ground, obvious in the silence despite his best efforts. The only thing louder was his heartbeat. He had a growing certainty that he was being watched, though it had been fifteen minutes and he had yet to see another living creature, and put his hood up in an attempt to block out the feeling of eyes on him from behind.

The brush tangling at his feet grew steadily thicker and taller the further he walked, reaching almost to his hips. Thorns tore at his clothes, and he thanked his past self for designing an outfit that covered all his skin. Maybe this was a sign he was going the right way… or maybe it was a sign he was going the wrong way and was headed toward an even more dangerous area. The thought that this area had yet to prove itself at all dangerous didn’t even cross his mind- he was too busy wondering what might be ahead.

He turned around, having second-guessed himself enough that he thought maybe he should just go back the way he’d come and try a less prickly direction, only to find that the way he’d come wasn’t… there anymore. The growth behind him was now so thick he couldn’t force his way through it if he tried, and he feared that if he tried too hard he’d end up stuck and probably, like, die there or something. Well… either he was going the right way after all, or it was too late now to escape the trap he’d walked into. He turned back around, swallowing hard and shifting his grip on his dagger, and pushed on.

When Logan opened his eyes, he found himself in a strange cavern. A torch on the wall nearby cast flickering light and shadow on the area around him. He stood and brushed himself off, and found his bag on the ground nearby. The contents didn’t appear to have been disturbed, which left the motives of whoever had put him here a complete enigma. “Curiouser and curiouser,” he muttered to himself, raising an eyebrow. The reference seemed fitting.

He wasn’t going to find out where he was or how he’d gotten there by standing around wondering about it. He took the torch down, careful not to burn himself, and went to investigate the areas still hidden in darkness. It turned out that he was in less of a cave and more of a decently sized room carved out of what may have started as a cave, in that the opposite side of the cavern featured the outline of a door. However, there was no handle, and pushing on it did nothing. Fortunately, it wasn’t the only thing on that side.

Something resembling a pipe ran along the floor, connecting the assumed door to a strange device several feet away. Logan walked over and examined it, finding a convenient bracket to set the torch in on the wall nearby. The device appeared rather simple, the only part of it he could interact with being a currently-useless switch, but the pipe leading up to it twisted around itself in knots and was covered in runes of a presumably magical nature. He would have liked to take a picture of it, but his phone had long since run out of battery thanks to all the other things he’d wanted pictures of, so he settled for scribbling down as much of the writing as he could make out in one of his notebooks.

Just below the switch and at the end of the twisted pipe was a metal bowl. The outside of the bowl had as much writing all over it as did the pipe itself. The inside, however, was inscribed with only a single symbol, glowing a faint orange. Even more of note was the pedestal next to the device, which held a baseball-sized metallic sphere and, beside it, a tool which resembled an expensive ballpoint pen from an alternate universe where pens are one solid piece with no recognizable ink and glow the same orange color as the symbol in that metal bowl. There seemed to be a fairly obvious solution to try. Logan picked up both items and carefully copied the symbol onto the sphere using the probably-magic writing instrument, painting it with that orange light, then placed it in the bowl.

As soon as the two metal objects touched, the writing on both changed from orange to blue and the room shook with a low grinding sound. Logan grabbed the pedestal for balance. When he looked up again, the door was open. He smiled faintly, a bit pleased with himself for working out how to open it despite the fact that the solution had practically been handed to him. Removing the metal ball from the mechanism caused the door to lower again, and he had no desire to be crushed by it, so he left the ball where it was, retrieved his torch and proceeded on to the next chamber. If his tentative theory on what sort of place he’d found himself in was correct, he would have no shortage of opportunities to test his puzzle-solving skills.

Patton yawned and rolled onto his back, blinking lazily against the warm sunlight that had woken him. He should get up; his friends were probably waiting on him so they could finish their trip through the forest. Where were his glasses? Right, a few feet off to the side- Virgil had insisted on putting them a safe distance away so they wouldn’t get broken if he moved around in his sleep. He always thought of everything. Patton would be lost without him and Logan, both literally and metaphorically.

Speaking of Virgil and Logan, where had those two wandered off to? When Patton sat up, he didn’t see them anywhere. He shook his head at them even though they weren’t there to see it, clicking his tongue in mild disapproval. Even if they did think he wouldn’t wake up before they came back, it would have been more considerate to leave him a note before going to find their bearings or whatever else they were doing.

“Oh well,” he said to himself, looking around at the clearing. “I’ll just wait…” If they were here, that’s what they would tell him to do. They wouldn’t want him to get lost trying to find them. He was sure they would come back soon, anyway, and until then, he had a nice comfy spot to sit against a tree and enjoy the lovely day he’d woken up to.

He sat and waited, and got bored and walked around the clearing for a bit looking for interesting plants, and sat back down in a different spot because he was overheating a little with the sun on him, and waited some more. What on earth were his friends taking so long to do? He really hoped they hadn’t gotten lost! Maybe he should go look for them after all. He took another look around, hoping there was some clue as to where they’d gone that he just missed when he first woke up, and… He frowned in confusion.

“Wait a minute…”

There had been a blanket on the ground when he’d fallen asleep, and now there wasn’t, which incidentally meant his hair was full of pine needles, but that wasn’t the important part right now. He didn’t see how they could have gotten it out from under him and put it away without waking him up. Also, come to think of it, why would they have left him alone and unsupervised when Virgil had previously insisted on holding his hand like he was a small child to make sure nothing happened to him? And, and the trees, it had been kinda hard to see last night, but he was pretty sure the trees looked different than before!

“Uh-oh,” Patton whispered to himself. “I don’t think this is the same clearing…”

He had no idea how it had happened, but he was in a different place now than he’d been last night. Maybe all the magic made him start sleepwalking? ...And he’d somehow remembered to bring his glasses with him? He hoped Logan and Virgil weren’t too worried about him, but knew they almost definitely were if he’d just up and vanished in the night before they could wake him for his turn on watch.

If they hadn’t found him by now, they probably had no idea where he was. He didn’t have any way to contact them, either, his phone dead for reasons that definitely had nothing to do with playing Candy Crush because he got bored. The only other thing he could think of to do was just… start walking, and he’d get out of the forest eventually, and then meet back up with his friends when they got out. They’d all walked for a long time yesterday, so it couldn’t be too much farther, right? (He ignored the fact that they may very well have gone in the complete opposite direction while running away from that… horrible giant murder-bug. And also the fact that he had no idea which way was out now.) He just needed to pick a direction.

“Uh…” Everything around him looked pretty much the same. It was all just… trees. He closed his eyes and spun in a circle, only to make himself dizzy and trip over his own feet. “Haha, whoops,” he laughed at himself. He sat up and almost gasped when he saw the bit of forest he’d landed closest to. He hadn’t noticed from the angle he’d been looking from before, but there was something of a natural path, lit by sunlight that filtered through the trees. That had to lead somewhere! He stood and brushed the dirt and pine needles off his cloak, feeling much more sure of himself. “Well then, looks like I’m going that way!”

#sanders sides #virgil sanders #logan sanders #patton sanders #this one mostly just sets up what's happening #my post #my writing #til the end of the night

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