Ah, history. She figured it would be history or English lit. Those two always cared about books a great deal. She cared, too, just probably not as much as him. She was more focused on her life here.
"If it helps," she said slowly, feeling it wouldn't help all that much, "I'm sure this will be part of history. If we live through it, we'll have one hell of a story, huh?" she laughed a little, the tightness around her chest ebbing away the more she listened to him talk.
"There will always be more books, right? But this...it might be a once in a lifetime opportunity."
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A once in a lifetime opportunity... maybe. The hurricane had been that too, only they'd had more warning, more of a chance to escape. To get out of the way. There had been less warning this time, only a few hours, and he had little doubt things would be much worse."Well, it'll be a hell of a story anyway." He muttered.
It was mostly curiosity that made him lick the air - a lingering curiosity about what he'd smell-tasted before, and he was alarmed when the smell of blood was stronger. That meant it definitely wasn't the boy who'd been hurt (a concerning thought he'd been trying hard to ignore). No, whatever was bleeding (or had been bleeding, because the blood seemed to be less fresh to his refined senses) was closer to them now than it had been before.
"Something was bleeding nearby. Or might still be - it's hard to tell." If it was bleeding less, sometimes it could be hard to tell over the smell of older blood. "I'd say in the same direction we're heading."
Ellyn had been searching for something more to say when he brought up smelling blood. She looked ahead of them, mouth pursed. It wasn't long before she even smelled blood. That was bad. There was no way whatever it was was alive, not if she smelled it too. That was far too much blood for comfort.
"I smell it too," she said uneasily.
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Ophion stopped walking, fingers balling into fists. He'd done well in not showing (or really, not feeling) his fear, but this? This was different. Something (or maybe someone) was bleeding nearby. Maybe they were dead. In fact, it seemed even more likely the closer they got that whatever had done the bleeding had only stopped bleeding because it had run out of blood. The odds that it had survived were getting slimmer and slimmer, especially when he started to be able to just smell the blood."Do - I mean, we could go around." That would be easy enough. "Or.. I guess we could check." He wasn't going to make her look at a body, and while part of him wanted to do the heroic thing and check it out in case someone had survived... well, the rest of him was a big fat coward that didn't want to stumble onto a ripped apart animal or anything.
"No," Ellyn said. "What if it's someone who needs our help? That's a lot of blood, but not everyone here is human." She said that to remind herself and hoped it would calm her nerves. It hadn't. She had to clutch the material of her pants to keep her hands from trembling.
With one deep breath, Ellyn stood taller and walked forward. It had to be close. And it was. Close enough that he heard her gasp in horror. Ellyn turned around and stepped back through the thicket; she shook her head. "Don't." She couldn't complete the sentence, but he didn't need to see it. He really didn't. Her face had gone completely pale, and it was only by pure luck and a small lunch that she wasn't vomiting right then and there.
Behind her, right beyond some bushes, hung Ophion. At least, it looked like him. Only he was paler, his lips were hued in blue, and his eyes had glazed over in death. He was hung by the ankle from the thick branch of a tree, and his throat had been gruesomely cut open.
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There was no way he could not look. He couldn't just let a sixteen year old look and take that as enough. He had to look, and look he did.And of course he immediately regretted it. It was not just the fact that it was a body, it's throat cut with blood everywhere. It was the fact that it was his body. Not just someone who looked like him, but someone who looked exactly like him. It was like some kind of horrible before and after shot, showing just what would happened to him if he died.
Only that was wrong - they hadn't been killed by the tsunami, crushed under a wave. Someone had killed this other-him. He stayed rooted in the spot, frozen in the exact pose he'd been in when he'd first caught sight of it, eyes fixed on it.
He kept waiting for the other foot to drop. He kept waiting to find something wrong. To find something different. To find something that would indicate it wasn't him. But there was nothing - everything he could see indicated exactly that it was him. That he was looking at himself, but dead. What was going on? Was this some... some alternate self? Some self sent back from the future?
"What - what the fuck is going on?" Who really cared about language, when you were looking at your own dead body?
Ellyn gnawed her lower lip. She couldn't help but look again as he did. She'd never seen a dead body, and this was an even odder occurrence. When Ophion spoke, it snapped her back to reality and far from those dead eyes she'd been staring into. When one person was freaking out during a disaster, the other had the tendency to take the brute of things in stride. That was how Ellyn felt right then.
She had moved before she thought about it, stepping in front of him. She wasn't tall enough to hide the gore from him, so she laid her hands on his shoulders to give him a little shake, hoping he might look at her. "We have to go. We can think about everything going on when we get to safety, but right now we have to go."
Please move, Ellyn thought. She wouldn't know what to do if he didn't, save for try and drag him away. In the end, she was smaller than him, though.
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His mind just kept on swirling. There were so many possibilities. On an island like Manta Carlos, there were a million and one things it could have been. A doppleganger, an illusion, his future, his alternate self... too many possibilities. They'd all but locked him in place when Ellyn finally moved in front of him. He startled slightly, staring down at her for a moment before jumping into action.He pushed past her, approaching the body. He felt like he was possessed - like he had to know. There was no way around it. He had to know. There was one single thing that would help him understand, and one thing that he might not get a chance to investigate later. So he reached up, grabbing the bloodstained shirt, and pulling it free of the corpse's pants to reveal his torso.
Aside from a stain of blood, it was clean. There were no scales, no markings. If it was an illusion, there wouldn't be any either, because he hadn't shown anyone his scales for a long while. Whoever he was looking at, it wasn't really him - it was a trick, or someone else entirely.
But it wasn't him, and that was what mattered. He jolted backwards, staring down at a single bloody hand, and then turned back to Ellyn.
"Yeah, lets - lets go."
Ellyn didn't fight him when he pushed by her. She watched, perplexed, as he revealed the cadavers torso. She didn't know if he had found what he was looking for because she couldn't read his face. She stared at his bloody hand when she saw it, but she didn't flinch. Ellyn didn't know how she felt about all of it. She was in shock. Too afraid to feel the fear anymore. It had turned cold and icy in her stomach, settling there.
When they started walking again, Ellyn's head was buzzing with thoughts. How was that possible? Was it illusions? Glamour? And if so, who had they been? She glanced at Ion a few times. She couldn't comprehend how she'd have acted had it been her body they found.
"I'm, sorry you had to see that," she told him, standing a little closer to give unspoken comfort. It helped people to know when others were around. It helped most people. "It must have been horrible. Are you going to be okay?"
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Was it fucked up that he felt relieved? Someone had still died. Someone was dead, but all he could feel anymore was relief. Maybe it was shock, or maybe it was just that he was so happy it wasn't him dead that it balanced things out.It was fucked up either way.
"Dunno." He finally said, after almost a full minute of silence. "That... I don't really know how to process it. It wasn't me though. It wasn't me from the future or me from an alternate dimension or anything - it was just someone who looked like me, or someone who was made to look like me." But why? There were so many questions, lost in a swirl. Why? Why was there someone who looked like him? Why had he been there? Even worse, the odds of him getting answers to his questions was looking increasingly slim. The tsunami would come, and then...
Shit.
"It - the body was tied up, wasn't it? Tied to the tree?" He glanced at her, seeking assurance. He really couldn't trust anything he'd seen.