Rais and Kiah were still surprisingly energetic as they neared what Kiah had already begun to think of as home base, bolstered by a sense of purpose and success carried in their full bags. Kiah whistled sharply for attention as they came near, nose wrinkling as she yelled ahead. "Oi, did you guys start a bonfire or something? Here we are out on an honest day's work, and you guys start up a party without-"
Words, jaws, and baggage alike were dropped as the smoking beams and rubble came into view, Shiva trembling fretfully where the porch used to be and peering into the chalky gray dark of the late hallway. Rais promptly fell over in a faint, leaving Kiah to charge forward and inside past Shiva's squeal of protest.
"Zeke! Gods, Zeke! Nicol!" Her voice went flat and dead, absorbed by the thick carpet of warm ash and lost to the new lack of ceiling, blue sky seeming to leer down at her mockingly. Walls, furnature, everything not completely gone was more than half eaten away by black and gray char. Blessed movement caught her eye down the half-blocked halway, making her stomach twist with a flick of hope against the panic.
A pile against the wall shifted and groaned as she came near. "Ugh. Kiah? When did you... where's...." It was Zeke, face and hair almost white with dust and eyes threatening to roll back into his head as he tried to speak rather than just hack and cough. Kiah hurriedly kicked the remnants of a board off of him and started to drag him up, but he tried to push her away. "No... wait, I can't...."
"You need cleaner air. It's outside with you, right now. Come on."
"But can't...."
"Now, I said!" Kiah gave him a quick shake to try clearing his senses, yanked him to his feet and started drag-walking him out, sacraficing gentleness for speed.
Shiva lept to her feet at the sight and squirmed with upset as Kiah dragged Zeke a few yards away and stretched him out on the ground next to a few rescued boxes of papers and gadgets. The poor stressed bunnydragon skittered around him in worried circles, eyes wide. Kiah gave him a few seconds to get the hang of that breathing thing again before shouting over the inturruptions of his coughs.
"What the ... happened? ...! It's only been a few ...mned hours!"
Get a grip, Kiah. More panic is not what we need right now. And no, it isn't possible to give an abstract like common sense a dirty look.
"Zeke? Zeke, c'mon man, calm down. Deep breaths. What happened?" Kiah gestured for the eager to help Shiva to prop Zeke up, guessing correctly that her presence would be comforting. The young man finally stopped trying to hack up a minor internal organ.
"Nicol's experiment, something went haywire." His voice was scratchy and raw, more from yelling his friend's name than from the poor air. "He kept going back in to try and salvage things... I was helping... but the last time I came out and he didn't. And the ceiling of his room...." A sob broke into his voice, eyes suddenly going disturbingly glazed and distant. "No phoenix downs... no healers anywhere... didn't save...."
Kiah set him back down quickly and ran back into the house, sickened both by what she knew she'd find inside and by Zeke's sudden hysteria. And there it was- Nicol's workroom burnt out and buried under the smouldering bulk of the ceiling. Kiah covered her mouth with her sleeve more as a shock reflex than to ease her breathing. The tons of gadgets wired to random jerry-rigged bits of salvaged batteries and who knew what other kinds of less than perfect power sources, all the paper... it looked like it'd gone up like a torch, bringing the ceiling down to crush anything left in the room and trap it in the....
"Oh, gods."
Kiah sat, miserable and alone except for the company of an upset Shiva, next to the passed out Zeke and Rais. She had already dragged them and the three boxes of stuff they'd managed to save under the cover of an especially dense leafed tree, and now sat staring blankly at the black skeleton of the house and stroking the bunnydragon's head comfortingly.
It's getting dark, cold, and late. It's time for a plan again, Kiah.
She ignored herself numbly.
Please?
Poor Shiva. And the others too, really. Kiah wished she had blankets for them.
Alright, that's a start. At least build a fire and maybe something to huddle under.
Well, that was reasonable, despite the painful irony that there was enough wood around to gather but nothing she could think of to use for lighting it.
------
Eventually Rais woke and sat up to blink slowly and look around, filling in the blanks on his own by the sight of the house and the look on Kiah's face as she sat staring tiredly at a neatly gathered pile of dry branches. She kept her backpack close at her side as a familiar comfort, the extra bulk inside forgotten.
"Zeke's still out," she said without looking up. "He got pretty delerious before he fell asleep, but I think he'll be okay."
"So then... Nicol...."
"It's bad, inside. I don't reccomend you go in. There's nothing more to save, anyway. Nicol and Zeke dragged those out before." She waved an arm toward the boxes, and Rais slunk over to peer into them with head held low.
"Must be pretty important notes and experiments, then. I mean, if he risked his life to... I mean...." He sighed and stopped stuttering to poke around instead. The first two boxes he recognized as old notes and experiments that had failed, but proven to be such useful references on what not to do and what might work someday that Nicol treasured them. But the third box....
"This is odd. Look, the stuff in this box is mostly junk and scrap. Everything except this whatsit on top and this book here, I've never seen these before." Rais carried them over to Kiah tenderly, like relics from an ancient tomb, and they looked at the things with blank lack of understanding but fond respect. The gadget was vaguely tubelike and smooth inside, and the notes were clearly freshly written but illegable in what was probably Nicol's native language, as were the majority of the other notebooks.
"These... these are probably the last things he ever did," Rais whispered with a tremble in his voice, suddenly making Kiah grateful that she hadn't been the man's friend for as long as the others had. She didn't think she could have handled that much heartbreak right now. Rais sniffled stoicly and padded away to sit with a solemn air in front of the remains of the building. After a minute Kiah could hear foreign words softly whispered, another language but still clearly a prayer or memorial. She sighed and got up to try starting the campfire on her own, comforted by the activity, and kept at it while ignoring the eventual fact that Zeke was getting up and stumbling over to sit with Rais. Maybe it was better to let the two friends have their privacy for a while.
----------------------------------
Kiah slept poorly and fitfully on the hard ground after the relative comfort of the cot that was so briefly hers. It had been a mistake to stay near the house; the smokey smell was still overpowering, attacking her with a rather aggressive headache. Deprived of the rest the others were exhausted enough to catch up on, she turned to the dimension's native pasttime- working with what you have until you get what you want. By sunrise (the first sunrise, anyway, as the others weren't really bright enough to have a major role in time passage,) she had mauled the coal carrying bags into three workable backpacks and filled them with as much of Nicol's more significant looking things as she could. The last notebook and gadget were wrapped carefully in the remains of a blanket and given a less-likely-to-be-squished spot in her own pack.
And, after much thinking, her mindset was now likewise better suited to the circumstances.
One after another the others woke up and with the exception of a terribly uncertain looking Shiva, sat there and stared at nothing in particular.
...This is so lacking in sensitivity and tact.
But it needs to be done. The longer you wait the longer they'll be numb, and in a place like this... nobody can afford to let themselves sit idle and depressed. It's too tempting.
Callus and insensitive, but true.
"Hey, guys," Kiah said as gently as possible while offering each of them a hand up. "C'mon over here and see. I made us backpacks, so we can carry most of this with us. Shiva, dearie, do you want to carry something too?" Kiah had made a bigger pack for her but only filled it lightly, not wanting to strain young and growing bone structures with too much weight. Assuming normal animal things like that applied to dragons at all. Shiva chirped in answer and sat up to grab at the bag eagerly, for all the world like a toddler wanting to help carry groceries and be a big girl. A really big toddler, with claws.
Rais, however, didn't seem to be getting it. "Carry it with us? Where are we going?"
Kiah kept on moving, gathering confidence with the momentum. "To find someone that can read whatever language Nicol wrote in, so we can translate his notes and keep his work going. I can help you put this on if you'd like, but I'm not sure what to do with your wings, seeing as they aren't actually attatched to your back."
"But... but...." Rais stared back at the wrecked house, looking torn until Zeke stepped in and squeezed his shoulder.
"Come on buddy. Nicol would have wanted it this way. You know he always said the project was more important than any of us."
Kiah held back a sigh of relief that she'd guessed right on Zeke's determination. She would have said the same thing herself, but it would have been too harsh coming from her. She handed Zeke a backpack too and started walking slowly, urgingly. He put it on, and after one final long, sad look back at the house, followed Kiah's lead. Rais copied the look before forcing himself to start walking as well, though his legs had never seemed so heavy.
"Onward and upward, like they used to say, eh?" Zeke sighed, took a deep breath of the cleaner air as they left the ruins, and pointed ahead and to the right. "I think there's a decent settlement of NPCs that way. We could start looking there."
"Uh... 'en-pee-see's?"
"People."
"Right."
Apparently all that trauma wasn't enough to shock Ol' Zeke out of whatever his slight dysfunction was, but really, somehow it was starting to grow on Kiah. And it was a more than welcome distraction as they trudged somberly along. Rais, being the quiet one for once, wasn't helping in that department.
"Hey, uh... if we do find someone who can read this stuff? I mean, I know it's completely unlikely that we'll find someone right away-
If at all.
None of that, now.
-but if we do... don't you think they'll probably get all upset when they realize what it's about? Experiments and working toward home and all that?"
Zeke pondered that a moment. "Yeah, I'd say that's about right."