lifeaftr | I’ll take my throne, lay it on a mountain

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I’ll take my throne, lay it on a mountain

Who: Our volunteer mountaineers
What: Two parties split up to scale the mountain from two sides, planning to meet at it’s peak. Shenanigans occur along the way.
When: September 13th to 16th
Where: Group 1: G3, H2, G2 || Group 2: F3, F2, G2
Warnings: Please note any warnings in your subject headers!

Word spreads quickly in a small community such as this. What was originally intended to be a small party turned into something much larger- and on the day Chara planned to leave for the mountain, it’s not one, but two parties that make off for it’s peak.

Group 1, led by Chara, moves off during the early hours of the morning, seeking to search the furthest part of the mountain by following the river upwards. The path is longer and more winding- however, they are unhampered in when they can travel.

Group 2, led by Ardyn, takes off after the sun has set- due to the needs of multiple members to avoid the sun’s harsh glare. Their route takes them up the closest side of the mountain, which provides an easier path- however, they may only travel whilst the sun is set.

OOC: Welcome to the mountaineering open post! Keep in mind the following;

♆ RNG was happily done blind by our wonderful Guzma mun, with our animals RNG'd by Wade Wilson's! Thank them both for all your misfortune.

♆ Prompts have been provided for each group below! Simply toplevel wherever you wish and treat this like a normal open post!

♆ Since each group will generally be in close contact with one another, consider asking others if you can threadjack here and there; nothing says team-building like being a nosy parker.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Funnily enough, she's actually being entirely honest here- but that's the peril of developing a reputation like hers. Still, she'd consider it worth it anyway. You'd don't succeed in business by being a pushover.]

[Either way, she'll happily take the opportunity to complain about their adventures.]

The first part wasn't as terrible as it could be- absolutely stifling heat, but no real dangers. Unfortunately, when we camped for the night these horribly unpleasant plant things decided to pay us a visit.

Large, carnivorous, and thoroughly impolite. Worse, they shot spores that gave off this gas- I didn't get a dose myself, but according to someone who did it's a rather nasty hallucinogen.

[ Stifling heat or smothering cold doesn't really, truly bother skeletons like himself, but little temperature-wise gets under the skin monsters like him lack.

Papyrus always rejected Hotland purely because Undyne hated it so much. Not because he personally disliked it, but solidarity with his most important friends simply mattered more.

That's how awesome his brother had been. ]

Hallucinogenic? [ Sans huffs, as close to a scoff as he gets. ] Bet that made things real interesting.

[Intense heat might not bother Muffet as much as it would a human, but that doesn't mean it's fun. There's a reason she moved out of Hotland.]

Excessively so, yes. I suspect it was planning to get us disoriented enough to stumble into it and get eaten, the nasty little thing.

[Muffet has a very firm view of the food chain: she eats things. Things do not eat her.]

Woah, woah. Back up.

[ Hallucinogenic and then almost being eaten by something?

Sans decides to pull up a piece of ground and have a sit. Except, you know, it's less about pulling anything and more about plopping himself on the ground. ]

Maybe you better start at the beginning of this one.

Well, we'd stopped for a bit to get some sleep, since it was fairly late. A pair of us were on watch, the rest of us napping. I missed the first of it, but I woke up to hear this terribly strange scraping noise, and the first I saw was this large plant creature hauling itself towards us over the rocks.

Of course, I decided to get as far away from it as possible- which turned out to be a good plan, because it fired some sort of strange spore into the camp, which gave off some gas...

[She tells the story calmly and clearly, gesturing with her hands to outline various points. She doesn't go into excessive detail about what happened to the others, not wanting to talk about things they might not prefer to mention.]

[ Sans waits.

And waits.

And realizes, eventually, that no further details are forthcoming. ]

Ok, and the gas was hallucinogenic? C'mon, pal. You're leavin' me on the edge of my seat.

[ Besides, what's the big deal? Obviously everyone survived. Couldn't have been THAT bad.

...At least, nothing as bad as the hallucinations they'd experienced back at that dusty old castle. That was different. Wasn't some flora running amok, but an evil, sadistic queen, manipulating the memories and thoughts and dreams of those who would try to stop her from wielding absolute power. ]

I'm thrilled to hear I move you, then. Regrettably, most of what when on back at camp, I wasn't there for- after all, someone had to get that horrible overgrown Venus fly trap away from everybody else.

I shot enough bullets at it to get its' attention and then ran for the woods. It was larger and slower than I was by a fair bit, so it didn't take too long for me to find somewhere to string up some webbing behind myself and let it charge right into the trap. After that it was simple enough to chip it down to nothing, if slow work. I went back to the others afterward. Thankfully, I don't think anyone ran into any more of them.

[ The silence that follows is probably lengthy enough to be awkward. Sans, sensing this, scrubs at the crown of his skull with a hand. ]

Hey, sorry, but this whole... uh... thing?

It's weird.

[ Fortunately, he elaborates, but in that way -- with that grin -- that suggests he's now joking. ]

You just went from head barista of the Underground to big damn hero.

[ A beat. And he makes it worse: ]

Can I get your autograph?

[ LEAVE. ]

[Honestly, it would be weirder if he was taking this more seriously.]

That depends...

[Muffets smiles sweetly- a tad too much so to be innocent.]

How much are you willing to pay for it?

[Some things never change, at least.]

Honestly, though, I was hardly going to just stand around and let it eat me. I mean, really, can you imagine all the awful jokes someone might make if a baker died by being eaten? The only way the irony could be worse is if one of us wound up coated in butter and flour first.

[ That coquettish smile just means trouble. ]

Eh. There are worse ways to die.

[ Sans's grin, on the other hand, could mean a lot of other things, but this time it too means trouble. He doesn't feel bad about recycling a joke when it's terrible enough, what he does regret is reminding himself of when it was last used. ]

Like a couple of us drowning in a vat of chickpeas. I call that one a double hummus-ide.

[It does indeed... although her keeping a perfectly straight face can also be a hint that she's up to something, as shown when she calmly replies:]

Well, that's just because hummus is a food. If it was a beverage, then it would be sui-cider.

[ Sui-cider.

Holy cow, that's actually pretty good. Sans is a little impressed. ]

I do-nut know about that, maybe I just loaf life too much.

[She aims to please. Muffet's always had a bit of a stubborn streak- if she's going to do something, she insists on doing it well. Including puns.]

An admirable viewpoint. I do hear some people just piene away, but I prefer to enjoy myself while I'm still in the flour of my youth.

[Well, in her twenties, anyway. Still counts.]

[ He had no idea about this secret side to Muffet. She's kinda blowing his mind, here. What the heck, lady.

He puts up his hands in surrender, but the real reason? ]

Great. Now I'm hungry.

[ And here they are, up on a mountain. Sans directs his attention to the empty mana pool. Or, at least, that's what he suspects it is. ]

That thing over there, looks a lot like the pool back at, uh, camp. Too bad it's dried up, I'd call it a day.

[ And leave everyone else to keep working? Yeah, he would. ]

How do you feel about slightly squashed blackberries? Because that's about all I have left at the moment.

[Muffet would never be caught without at least some food, but keeping the rest of the expedition supplied with snacks up to this point has taken a fair amount.]

Hm... it's interesting that those pools even can dry up like that, since they seem to be at least partly magical. I wonder if it has something to do with how much energy the Storyteller has to spare?

Eh, 'ppreciate the offer, but I don't wanna take the last of whatcha got.

[ She's better prepared than he is. It's not that Sans lacks survival skills so much as the motivation to put them into practice. He looks speculatively at the mana pool. ]

Anyway, I ain't so sure they belong to the Storyteller. They ever tell ya something like that?

[She nods thoughtfully, conceding the point.]

No, they haven't claimed to be the original owner or creator of the pools as far as I'm aware. But given that the area they claim as their temple is directly next to an active one, and there are two more on the islets- which they have claimed to be responsible for- I'm inclined to assume they're at least associated with them somehow.

Do you have any thoughts about who else they might belong to, aside from...

[She gestures vaguely at their surroundings.]

...whomever the previous residents of this island were?

Huh, well, uh. I ain't an expert on this stuff, but--

[ He flicks a hand over the space they're occupying, indicating the interior of the ruins. ]

I wasn't in the Underground before this, I was somewhere else. Another world. There was a place kinda like this, a shrine to a god. Maybe this belongs to another guy like the Storyteller. Maybe beings like them get pools like this.

Hell if I know.

[Interesting. She did remember someone mentioning that he'd met Sans before, in a place like this one, but it hadn't really sunk home for her that it meant that Sans had been taken from home to somewhere like this once already, not when she could remember seeing him around in the Underground only a little while ago. But they had said that time could be strange here...]

Hmm, plausible- they did tell me that this world had other deities. The Storyteller referred to this place as their island, but there's no reason they couldn't have been sharing it before.

[She gives him a thoughtful look.]

If you don't mind my asking... how long were you in that place, that world before this one?

Yeah, but they might'a been sayin' that like a jealous sibling claims a shared bedroom's all theirs.

[ Not that he thinks the Storyteller is related to any other beings calling themselves gods, not in the way he and Papyrus were related. Just that they were there and... now? Well, from the looks of it, now they're not.

He looks at Muffet. Then he shrugs, canting his skull to one side. As it dips into the slanting sunlight, it catches on something in the supraorbital ridge above one eye socket.

A chip in the bone. ]

Eh. Year and a half, maybe? Couldn't tell ya, things got weird around the end.

[ Spending a month locked in an elaborate dreamworld and dying there does that. ]

C'mon, it ain't that interesting.

[She's not quite close enough to Sans to remember his face perfectly, but the chip in his socket catches her eye, and she finds herself wondering if it was there the last time she saw him at home.]

Sans.

You spent over a year in a world that, as far as I'm aware, none of us had ever heard of before. How would that even remotely qualify as uninteresting?

Even if I wasn't stuck dealing with a similar situation at the moment, I'd still be curious about it.

Tell ya what.

[ Sans isn't the kind of guy who goes yapping about his life story to anyone staying still long enough to listen -- hell, he's been on the receiving end of that nonsense more times than he can count -- but if he makes his condition practically impossible, then it's like refusing without risking pissing anyone off. ]

You find me a bottle of something strong enough, and I'll tell you all about it.

[...you know what? It's on now, skeleton man. You already made her curious, but now you brought culinary skills into it.]

Define 'strong enough', by your standards.

[How much proof does she have to ferment something to prove to you that she wants to know?]

Strong enough to grace the shelves of Grillby's.

[ Come on, she had to have heard of Grillby's.

Even if the spiders tend to avoid such a cold place as Snowdin. ]

[Oh yes, she's eaten at Grillby's. Visiting Snowdin takes about twelve different layers of fashionable winter clothing, but she had to check out the competition.]

[Which means she'll know if he tries to bullshit her about how strong Grillby's drinks are.]

Deal.

[She holds out a hand. Shake on it?]

I’ll take my throne, lay it on a mountain

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Wrapped, unless you've got more to add.