Logs:Rock/Hard Place

Rock/Hard Place
Dramatis Personae Quentin, Roscoe
In Absentia	2024-10-07 "We got this."
Location <NC> Outside Asheville
As Superheroing Missions go, this ongoing project has not been particularly flashy. The past week in particular has been low on the exciting lifesaving of the first terrifying stormrush and high on the terribly unglamorous work of helping truck in supplies. Obviously important and lifesaving work, no doubt, but it's maaaybe a little bit why Quentin leapt at even a hint of Actual Danger. Is he regretting that decision now -- well, he certainly won't let on. The small cluster of ramshackle houses they're surrounded by out in the woods was, at one point, a tiny and somewhat embattled mutant enclave until the flooding drove them out. Hopefully those residents still alive will be able to return soon enough, but at the moment the squatters who have taken over in the interim are -- well. Quentin, just right now, is up to his knees in mud in what was once someone's living room. The slimy eel-like creature that just knocked him off the counter has vanished under the surface, and soon enough after it disappears the level of mud is rising, several of the creatures who have been nesting here spewing the sludge (as offense? as hiding place? maybe a little of both) from jagged-toothy orifices. Quentin is turning one direction and then the other, little though this helps him actually locate the creatures circling below. << Fuck >> might be an unintentional broadcast, edged and slightly anxious as it is; out loud he's calm enough: "-- hope they took care of that portal -- how many more of these are there?" Roscoe is still kneeling on the counter, clinging with one hand to a cheap cabinet handle, though judging by the mud gooped on most of his back he's taken a fall into the living room, too. He's shuffling on his knees to hold out one hand, scraped mostly clean on the countertop edge, to help Quentin back onto terra firma. He's not actually holding it in Quentin's direction, eyes squeezed shut with concentration, but flicking sharply around the floor. These toothy sludge eels are freaking him out quite a bit, the eeliness and toothiness and sludginess all combining into an almost overwhelming yuckiness, but on the bright side his resultant jumpiness is making it very easy for him to spot their snakelike movements through the mud. "Nine, maybe ten," he says, "I'm trying to --" it's not very easy for Roscoe to focus on the entire floor at once, with the mud not quite uniform in consistency and with his attention individually, viscerally drawn to every squiggle of tail, but the sludge is just homogenous enough that Roscoe can picture the creatures swimming within it. Unfortunately there is only the fuzziest sense of depth in this image, though he did helpfully superimpose a (completely arbitrarily scaled) mental Minesweepers grid. Quentin shudders involuntary at this count as though he'd had his mental fingers crossed for an answer less close to double digits. It does prompt him that much faster to take Roscoe's outstretched hand, when at first he had been gearing up to more slowly and sludgily drag himself up out of the muck alone. He's barely gotten himself back up onto the dividing island between goopy living room and -- still very goopy but newly eel-free kitchen when a pair of the creatures launch themselves out of the mire and at the teenagers. This time his "oh fuck" comes verbally, but some invisible wall has securely barricaded the youths away from the fishthings -- their sucker-ish manytoothed maws are, all the same, visible champing nothingness a scant inch from Roscoe's face. Quentin's hand has, for a second, clamped tight where he was still holding to his classmate but jerks back a second later as though the touch were electrified. The pair of eels are lifting hard, thwacking repeatedly down against the counter's edge, which certainly is stopping their assault but judging by the commotion beneath the water, considerably agitating the others. "Holy --" Roscoe doesn't get the rest of this out, voice pitching very sharply with terror; he also grips tighter at his classmate for just a moment, head turtling ineffectually between his shoulders and eyes screwing even more shut, before letting go. For a moment the only concern he can muster is for his eyes -- he's fixating a little on those gnashing rows of tiny pointy teeth and the ugly sucking orifices, way too close to his face, until the thwack jars him out of this unpleasant reverie with vague but immediate embarrassment, that Quentin is doing something about the eels and Roscoe is just looking at them, though he's not totally sure what else he could do. He shifts on his knees, determinedly focusing on the suddenly far squirmier map of the floor, trying to gauge which ones seem like they're preparing to leap up out of the muck, which he initially figures will be the ones coiled like springs until another eel flings itself up at the teenagers; Roscoe throws the kitchen cupboard door open to knock it back, with a squawky little yelp he immediately regrets Quentin hearing. Roscoe's yelp is echoed in a small squeaking gasp from Quentin. He has, briefly, levitated straight off the counter, though he returns there in short order when the eel gets knocked back. A heavy cast-iron skillet is yoinking itself up out of the cabinet, brandished in midair like a weapon, though when it comes down with a wet SPLAT it only hits mud and not actual eel, the creature resubmerged too quickly for Quentin's blow to land. Quentin himself is glancing at Roscoe, and though his lips twitch into a smirk it's very short-lived. There's a heavy iron poker prying itself up from across the room. Shaking itself somewhat free of muck, or at least of the thickest gloppy coating of it -- the poker floats over to hover in easy reach of Roscoe. "'least you know where these hideous things are." Roscoe takes the poker very gratefully, shifting himself onto one knee to give it a mostly unnecessary flourish, testing its weight -- "Thanks," he mumbles, much more breezy aloud than it was in his head. He resumes his nervous watch over the eels, half of them now gathered together in a writhing nest-like mass at the edge of the island, the rest still skirting around in the rising mud, leaning slightly forward over the edge to try to individuate the tangle of wormy bodies. "There's a bunch of them right there," he points with the poker, "I think -- we gotta get them out of the mud. So there's not..." he flounders for a moment with his lack of vocabulary for any principles of physics, before he finishes, "...mud resistance." He's a little concerned that whacking them around in midair won't do as much good as whacking them into solid ground, << you need a rock and a hard place, >> but his understanding of physics is largely derived from an understanding of physical violence and he's a little self-conscious voicing any conclusion he drew from it. Quentin is focusing in on the slithering bodies or, rather, focusing on the view of the slithering bodies he's getting from Roscoe's eyes. Though he's been staring into the mud kind of uselessly, now his eyes close. With the faint psionic weight that presses up at Roscoe's mind he's growing a little twitchier, small jittery shifts that echo his classmate's nervous energy, and at the same time oddly calmer, a new confidence there where his mind presses up at Roscoe's. Where Roscoe sees one of the eels moving Quentin is now grabbing it, lurching it up from the mud with a schlorp. "Rock," he's murmuring, almost to himself although very very quiet as it his voice audibly is, the words still feel just as clear to Roscoe as though he'd spoken them at normal volume. The eel freezes, thrashing helplessly and oozing a steady flow of mudgoo where Quentin's telekinesis has pinned it in easy swinging distance, secure and firm in midair. " -- Hard place. We got this." At first Roscoe both mentally and physically flinches from the psionic contact, hypervigilance already cranking overtime trying to keep track of the seven sludgethings, a moment later he nods, echoes, "Rock," as he plants himself more firmly on the countertop, and swings with a disgusting splat of sludge and cracking fishbones; Roscoe has squinched his eyes shut again, << do we need to add goggles to the uniform, >> he's thinking grudgingly, << eeughh. >> Aloud, as he wipes his cheek on his shoulder, "-- hard place," he says. "Lezzgo."