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Save Point: The Rockslide

It's a very dramatic promontory, like Pride Rock on steroids. Cleo is probably the first and last real lioness it will ever see.

Suddenly Terrowne stops and stares at the sky.

It's a look she hasn't seen since she caught a brief glimpse through the uncontrollably gushing flames that were pouring out of her like blood as her powers destabilized atop Crescent Bay, at the wound in the world, moments before being snatched out from under her own death.

She tries to come out with exactly the same predictably crude phrase in so many languages at the same time that her mind temporarily seizes up, and they all cancel one another out.

"They're deploying something," he declares with gritted teeth, and then a tiny shimmer of Dragon flickers briefly across his features, long ears intermittently visible as they align and track. "I think it's a grazer.... run! Head for the edge!"

"Are you insane?" demands Cleo, but starts running after him anyway, the rest of her having made up its mind while her mind was still thinking about it. Calling the Dragon insane is redundant by definition because it is, and it always has a plan. "That's right out in the open! There's no cover! If they don't shoot us dead down here, they can track us by satellite and nail us from up there!"

Sethkill is screaming and shouting something that has to be 'run for it' in old low Sethurani at the Lady Hornbreast, who packs it up and chases after him at the double, following them. Cleo has a slight lead and the pursuit speed of a lioness (she once tripped a speed camera on a dare) but the long legs of the sethura can really eat up the distance over short spaces before they tire too much, so it's anyone's race. The use of a dialect known in her day for its underclass expression of short and urgently simple concepts seems to have spooked her.

"A grazer," explains Terrowne, who seems to be channeling Dragonish concepts into human ideas and has already swapped over to its digitigrade and taloned lower legs for an extra burst of quite conventional, non-physics breaking speed, "is a gravitational laser. You'd need one to, oh I don't know, maybe adjust the orbit of the moon like a billiard ball. Like those ones over there?"

The three moons near Sethuramandraki are currently at about half ascension and all in different places in the sky, but it is clearly visible by now exactly where they're heading, to a convergeance in the precise center of the sky.

"How it works is... well, fuck if I know... but the point is it makes coherent gravitational waves that then scatter when they hit a large mass object..."

Cleo visualizes an industrial cutting process of some kind, slicing through a inch-thick steel plate in a spray of sparks and small molten droplets.

"...but light always scatters outward, whereas gravity is kind of more inwards, if you see what I mean..."

She tries to imagine this, but the best she can come up with is a film of a industrial welder being run in reverse, drawing apart the solid steel instead of bonding it together.

"...which is going to make for some truly messed-up tidal effects!"

She dares a glance back and sees that instead of pursuing them or even pausing to try and take a shot, the Storm Front assault teams attracted by her earlier arrival have dispersed and are trying to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Someone must have thought to warn them of the switch to insane overkill and they are getting just as far away as they can.

The pale golden-grey stone is hot beneath her heels, smooth and dusty, not fully flat but with the engineered naturalness of long, almost horizontal strata dropping off into one another at regular intervals with a height of about an inch, having soaked up the intense light of the day, radiating it back now that the sunset is nearing. It's suddenly a terrible alien vista, and disappearing behind her a lot less rapidly than she'd like. The dead sprint is making her pussy hurt again.

Her thoughts segue into another film she saw once, in which at intervals the paced progression of the story would cut to a scene of a man, desperately running all by himself through empty desert, surrounded by nothing but tiny scattered pieces of gravel, searching for anything that might, just possibly, be used for cover.

There is no cover here. She really hopes that she is not that guy.

At least now she knows how Kirstine's giant floating swimming-pool slash fish-tank worked. It must have had a smaller grazer inside it, set to generate coherent gravity and fire it directly into a small mass anchor, maybe a big ball of super-heavy whatever. Tune it on the fly and it'd keep the whole thing quite stable and floating in mid-air.

One could conjecture, to take one's mind off a stressful situation like this, the sethura must have assembled a small array of grazers in orbit and used then to tweak the planetary orbits to achieve the desired alignment. Perhaps the fish-tank was a prototype, passed on to her as a kickback from whoever manufactured the main units, which must have been an amazing achievement and cost a great deal of money, or whatever favours pass for it in a partially post-monetary society.

Set suitably diffuse, you could move a world. They're the levers long enough that philosophers in ancient times dreamed about. But pull one out of the array, to set it to the tightest possible beam, and you could literally move mountains.

She is forcibly reminded that they are_on_ a mountain, which is not helpful.

The grazer is not visible, consisting entirely of gravity, but its secondary effects are immediately apparent as it completes whatever diffuse tuning cycle it was working on and ramps up rapidly to full power. The only good sign is that it seems to interfere with its own actions at the very point of impact, meaning that its wielders have to drag the point of focus about slowly once it's running at full and can't just flick it about like a flashlight.

Air rendered suddenly heavy is dragged downward in a column where the grazer hits, creating an instant thunderstorm like a vertical hurricane as the friction spreads cascades of lightning and dark clouds converge seemingly out of nowhere to surround the column, blocking all sunlight and leaving only a transparent column down the middle where the light shines clear. It looks like each and every 'hammer of god' divine airstrike special effect ever. As the beam hits the stone of the promontory, it chews it apart, pulling it inward in a spray of abrasive stone-dust that only adds to the mayhem as it swirls and collides with itself, like a rock-saw chewing through concrete.

Purple raindrops condense instantly out of the atmosphere under their own weight, hurled down like a rain of blood that smashes into the stone and smashes small impact craters into it. The heat of the friction sprays them into vapour again, billowing up and out as steam until, entrained again, they fall once more. The roar of complete destruction is hard to describe, like a sandstorm turned up to eleven and concentrated into the funnel of a tornado.

Further out, the lightning dances and sparks, and some of the liberated dust and water vapours escape at the edges, billowing outward, up and around. The promontory shakes underfoot like an earthquake was in progress, as the beam drifts toward them, presumably controlled by a trigger-happy weave-games enthusiast as something on this scale was never really designed to be fired at a small group of fleeing individuals.

In seconds, the dust is everywhere and has completely obliterated visibility, rendering whatever fire-assist systems may be available completely unable to find an optimal targeting solution. That doesn't slow things down for even a second, as whoever is firing the thing seems to be utterly and completely determined to make sure of them, by guesswork if necessary.

Seconds ahead of the sandstorm and approaching madness, they reach the edge of the enormous promontory. Terrowne slides to a halt, grabs the edge, and then carefully swings down over it, to push as much of his body up against the rock is possible. He looks like some sort of strange lizard that has had its basking interrupted by an unexpected weather event.

The Dragon's array of tentacles strike explosively from his back, punching into the stone around him, bursting out and around in a sort of radial array of spikes. "Hang from the very edge! Get as close to me as you possibly can, hang onto me if you have to! I'll try to protect you from the tidal forces as best I can!"

The words are being whipped out of his mouth even as he shouts them and Cleo can feel an ever-increasing weight pulling her back and reducing her traction, like trying to run up a steepening slope as it becomes a wall. Her depleted and now much less heavy pack pulls at her, trying to slow her escape, but she makes it in time and hauls herself up and over the edge, as sideways starts to turn into down and the edge of a cliff becomes an unexpected safe haven.

She scrambles in among the Dragons extended tentacles, grabbing hold of them to haul herself down. She's seen him manipulate gravity before, in the ancient library that was the cult-lair of the thing referred to only as She, but has no idea how long he can keep it up for or just how powerful it is. He was able to crush an angel-dust tripping hell-hound with it fairly effectively, but there has to be a reason why he doesn't use it to fly when he has to. It seems likely he's at a disadvantage against a large piece of expendable machinery designed specifically for the purpose.

She momentarily considers whether they could attack it like she did the fish-tank, but she was practically lying on top of that one and barely managed it. Even the Dragon would have trouble stretching its luck to accidentally hit something in orbit.

The Lady appears seconds later, the horned spikes emerging from her uppermost pair of breasts putting her at a disadvantage in climbing over the edges of things. She's really built for far more direct sorts of combat, preferably spear to spear on solid ground where she can strike between or around the bony protrusions.

Sethkill helps her up and over the edge, unhesitatingly hauling her up by a boob-spike and then hooking it around a Dragon tentacle to give her the fixture she needs to claw her own way up the remainder of the distance. The arm made of ceramics and steel that has replaced his own gives him the strength to do it, but the momentary delay sees him dragged back over the edge himself, unable to hold on except with his own flesh and blood.

Willpower can command carbon-fiber bundles to lock regardless of damage done, but the same is not true of mere muscle. He's being dragged back and it is the weight of all his gear that is doing it, the swordspear and counter-balancing staff a familiar pull that he has conditioned himself to a long time ago over the course of their travel. But the huge rifle that collapses fledgling universes is just too heavy, more so than its size would even seem to permit.

He's been dashing around with it, fuelled by rage and able to offset most of the additional burden to his artificial arm which, although it is not readily apparent on the outside, webs all the way up into his shoulder and through his ribcage and spine, the associated musculature also infiltrated to balance out the load. Yet now is the moment for a snap decision, and it's surprisingly easy.

WEAPON < 2 secs. > TOOL

Letting the wire-braided strap slip over his shoulder, he lets the weapon go, and with his newly freed arm suddenly lightened, he is able to pull himself up over the edge, away from the grazers destructive hunger. He doesn't look back to watch it fall.

They huddle inside the rough parabola of the Dragons recurved tentacles, each driven hard into the rock in a circle around the point behind which it clasps against the suddenly downward face with rip-talons and wrist claws. Visibility is non-existent, but the dust at least behaves normally inside this tiny space, as the grazer is dragged howling back and forth across the promontory in a random walk intended to destroy anything on the exposed face. Ironically, their current position, dangling precipitously just over the edge of the outermost point, is the single safest place on the entire surface.

The direction of local gravity fluctuates as it moves. A couple of times, lightning hits the tentacles and is absorbed by the Dragon before it can hurt them. The deafening acoustic roar also seems a little lessened inside their improvised shield, though it is not something any of them want to test.

Cleo tries to indicate to the Lady that she should cover her ears to avoid any loss of hearing, since it won't just heal back for her, but they're all too busy clinging on for dear life to care much.

She uses the uncanny extended interval to try applying more tactical thinking to the situation, as knowing exactly what resources your enemy has access to all part of winning the battle. Back in the Great City, the tiny bomblets that enemy flyers tried to drop on them, which punched straight through solid rock, must have been made by compressing matter at short range using something similar to the orbital grazer, but they didn't dare use the weapon on their own city because of the impossible collateral. Even out here in the terraformed, landscaped wilderness area, they seemed reluctant to use it and only opened fire when they were literally on top of a mountain.

They must be getting close to their destination, something that the Storm Front are unwilling to shoot at. So they've waited until the last second before shifting over to desperation tactics, taking the shot while they still had time, before their target could leave the area. The orbital array must make for one hell of an abstract threat, much like a stock of nuclear missiles, but they're on their own territory now. Actually using a weapon of mass destruction in this situation suggests a loss of confidence on their part that she is entirely at home with, and soundly approves of.

It seems to last practically forever, like all sandstorms, but it's only been a minute or two by the time the grazer finally powers down, shifts back into low intensity mode, and then abruptly shuts off. Somewhere, someone has finally convinced themselves that had to be unsurvivable, and has then successfully persuaded whoever had their thumbs on the trigger to finally let go of it.

As the gravity ripples finally fade, they're now hanging precariously from the edge of a cliff again, and they have to repeat the risky process of climbing up and over the edge. Cleo goes first, as the best natural climber, followed by Sethkill. Between them they are able to recover the Lady, who is still clinging intently to whatever she can reach and has to be gently persuaded to let go (she's not used to the walls becoming the sky, according to Sethkill's translation).

Finally, and only once he is sure everyone else is safe, Terrowne shifts out of the Dragon form and swings back up. Being able to dismiss and recover his equipment at will makes him the lightest of them all, but it seems there's no retrieving of Sethkills overpowered assault rifle. It's 'vanishingly unlikely' that he was ever holding it and so he can't recall it from the cloud of possibilities arising from the local temporal braid. "The only variants in which you could still have it are ones in which you destroyed your artificial arm holding onto it. Trust me, you made the better choice."

The storm above collapsed instantly with the end of the attack, and torn-up threads of cloud are being pulled this way and that at various altitudes as the freezing downburst falls apart. But the cloud of dust raised by the attack are also clearing, revealing enormous scars carved crudely into the rock as though by the clumsy misuse of a water-blaster on an industrial scale.

They're just getting ready to move, before the dust-cover dissipates and reveals their position to their orbital observers, when the stone platform of the promontory suddenly drops underfoot by a few inches, maybe not quite half a foot. There's a pause for a second, then it does it again. Fresh clouds of stone-dust begin to rise skyward from the random gouges sliced across the width of the cantilevered rock, which are widening and getting more and more dislocated from their opposite side with each passing moment.

Suddenly, the whole enormous overhanging block of stone plummets downward with them on it.

This time, Cleo gets to say several of the obscenities she was considering earlier in between small moments of free fall. The separated promontory is just so damned huge that it has an invincible weight of momentum, grinding past small irregularities and obstacles to mostly maintain original orientation and position as it goes.

It's impossible to stand upright and they're all on their knees, trying as best they can to minimize the impact of the all the random shaking motions underfoot and avoid getting gouged or injured, but somehow the whole thing is sliding down into the valleys below, rather than just falling or in fact breaking up. As it encounters the slope on the way down, descending motion is converted to an enormous forward acceleration, the huge rock taking all the damage of the transition from one to the other. Terrowne is shouting something gleeful to Sethkill about 'allochthonous rock' and 'it could slide for miles!'

Like it or not, they are tearing downhill on the worlds largest naturally occurring sled.