Cyg did not like the desert.

She did not like heat. Hoenn was tropical, but 75% of Fortree was high up, capturing the natural breeze, and free of the sweltering humidity of sea level. She did not like sand-- it got in your shoes, and in your shorts and in your naughty bits and it chafed. She did not like desert Pokemon, not really.

But she liked Isaac. A lot. A lot a lot. So she was absolutely not going to say no to going on this job with him. Being with him-- in the same place, she obviously meant, not, like, together, as a couple, who would think that, haha, what?-- made up for all the shortcomings the desert had to offer.

She also was super interested in what they were going to find. She wasn’t a big history buff, but the idea of exploring a cursed or haunted tomb? That was right up her alley.

Nothing could be scarier than Cyg’s regular life.

She peered through her sunglasses at the sandstone chunk, trying to focus and ignore the stupid sand as the wind picked it up and wove little golden ghosts around her ankles.

How do we get inside?

She laughed-- a haughty, fake chuckle, her best impersonation of an anime villain. “Oh, my sweet summer child,” she said, patting him patronizingly on the shoulder (then she squeezed because, it was just a joke, and she didn’t want to take it too far, oh, my god, when did she ever worry about that with him?) and tossed a Pokeball, releasing her Dusknoir. “We use ghosts.”

Who took one look at the sandstone block and turned back to Cyg, a singular eye fixed with a very unimpressed scowl.

“What? Don’t look at me like that.” Cyg made a let’s get goin’ hand gesture, carving a circle with her forearm. “You’re my safecracker. Get to safecracking.”

Zenaïs didn’t move for a second, but then her shoulders slumped forward and her arms went out, fingers laced together and knuckles flipping up and in, stretching the joints. Then, she turned intangible and faded into the sandstone block.

There was nothing but the sound of the whipping winds and hissing sand, for a moment, and then, with a very loud clunk, the front of the block slid open--

--and a coffin fell out.

“Ah! Fuck! Muirne.” Cyg yelled, jumping more out of anticipation than fear. “God damn it.”

The Cofagrigus fell on her face in the sand, flopped over, and then flopped up, sending the grit everywhere.

Zenaïs hovered out from behind her ghostly compatriot, wearing her permanent, impassive scowl.

Collecting herself, Cyg walked between her ghost types, gesturing to what lay beyond the opening in the sandstone.

“After you.”

Isaac Merlo

☉

Muirne took Isaac’s proffered hand-- then laid another, another and her fourth and final one all the way up his arm, each black, semi-transparent limb larger than the last. It would burn cold where she touched, and Isaac would get the distinct sensation of the smell of old paper, dust, and freshly turned earth.

“Muirne, stop hazing him.”

As she was bid, Muirne dropped her hands, retracting them into her coffin proper, and falling into stride-- well, into float-- behind Cyg, with Isaac bringing up the front, and Zenaïs at the very back of the party.

Her eyes began to adjust as they entered the sandstone structure, the basalt room absorbing any of the light that flowed in from the entrance; flames flicker on silver sconces, and all at once Cyg has chills going down her spine.

“Not going to mention how weird it is there are lights on in a sand-buried ruin?” she asked, but where her tone should’ve been fearful, it was full of excitement.

She turned a slow circle to take in the entire room; it was amazing, though the symbols and dots were definitely a different language.

“Braille, maybe?” she said, recognizing a scant number of dot patterns in the tactile language. “Is there anything else on the fancy podium?”

Isaac Merlo

☉

“Yeah, she does,” Cyg had to agree, “because she eats people she doesn’t like and turns them into mummies.” There wasn’t a joke in her voice, but she did laugh when Isaac’s tone grew raspy and channeled an old witch woman in a gingerbread house. Oh, wait, wrong fairy tale.

She finished one circuit of the room and didn’t find anything more interesting than the already burning torches. Coming to a stop next to Isaac, she flicked on her phone flashlight and held it up to look into the doorway, waiting like a cold, black, mouth.

“Legendaries?” she asked, voice small in the face of such magnitude. “Or… shit, everything has to do with Unown nowadays, right? They can float. Maybe they need tall doorways for that. The floating.” She realized she was grasping at straws, so she turned to look at Zen and Muirne, the former having come to a stop in the center of the room and shooting everything her cyclopian death glare; the latter hovered close behind Cygne, so much so that when Cyg turned she bumped her forearm against the closed casket.

“She’s very protective,” Cyg explained, moving Muirne aside to walk back towards the center of the room, towards what Halberd had found.

“Mmmmm…. Zen, help me up,” Cyg said, catching the sheen of the light from her phone in the helmet, “I’m gonna grab that helmet, probably. Isaac, get ready to run. It might be booby-trapped. Muirne, if anything happens, protect Isaac.”

Zenaïs gave a whole-body shudder that suggested she was heaving a beleaguered sigh, then floated up, wrapped her hands around Cyg’s wrist, and lifted, going up the pillar towards the helmet.

Isaac Merlo

☉

Cyg wrapped her hands around the horns on the helmet, squeezed, and tried to lift it. It wouldn’t come up, but it wiggled slightly. When she pulled instead, it slid towards her; all the doors ground against their thresholds and moved.

“Oh, shit,” Cyg said, mouth a perfect ‘O’ of surprise. “I feel like I played this in a videogame, once.”

Zen rolled her eye, lowered Cygne to the ground, and she stepped to stand next to Isaac.

“Mmmm… yellow,” she said, sliding her hand through the hair on the back of his neck, then ruffling it. “Yellow for Isaac.”

Muirne placed a black-shadow rubber-smacky-hand against her chest-- lid?-- and wiggled.

“Yes, Muirne. Yellow for Cofagrigus, too.”

Isaac Merlo

☉

Cyg and Isaac made their way to the yellow door, with Muirne hovering closely behind. Zen, who had a permanent look of displeasure affixed on her face, brought up the rear, decidedly unwilling to be a participant in any way shape or form.

Her eyes had to adjust to the gloom of the room beyond, their only light source being one of the creepy already-lit torches. At the center of the room there was a chair, radiating a golden warmth. Cyg tilted her head. “Think all the other rooms have different colored seats?” she asked, curious.

She followed Isaac deeper into the room, turning a slow circle, then following his gaze up.

“Hey, Zen,” she said, unable to stop herself, “look-- it’s you.”

Zenaïs scowled deeper, somehow.

Before she could warn Isaac about traps or curses he’d already lifted the tablet off the throne; figuring it was always better to be trapped or cursed with the person you-- care about, she peeked over his shoulder to read it.

“More braille?” she asked, squinting. “Face me… and then the alphabet?” She spent longer thinking about that last part than she should have.

Isaac Merlo

☉

Yeah, finding a subterranean, cursed, ancient Hoenn IKEA that used sandstone in place of pressboard would be par for the course for a region about to be decimated by a meteor and currently trapped in an invisible sea dome.

“Mm, I think the yellow would go well with the decor,” Cyg said, looking back up at the eye in the ceiling. “Maybe not, though. Maybe it needs more foreboding eye motifs to really match up, you know.”

She took a lazy walk around the chair. “Yeah, I had a JumpStart game as a kid with a Braille minigame. Don’t worry, I got until F before I realized it was the alphabet. I was trying to figure out what word started with ABCDE.”

By the time she came around front again, Isaac had taken his place on the throne and Cyg made a mental note to show him more scary movies about cursed objects and tomb exploration. Her lecture was cut off by the fact that something was actually happening. She was about to announce this when Isaac yelped and jumped off the throne.

Reaching forward, she put a hand on his shoulder, face creasing; her concern faded to a barely suppressed giggle because it seemed like Isaac was okay. “Are you sure it’s not just your hot butt?” she asked, managing to pull of the joke before she devolved into laughter.

Once she’d gotten her breath back, she looked up at the eye carving. “It was moving while you were on the chair. Coming out of the ceiling, like a pillar. It’s like the worst Skyrim puzzle, ever. But I don’t know if it was the staring that did it, or the butt in the seat.” She barely resisted smacking his ass and, instead, patted the back of the chair.

“Have a seat, Muirney,” she said, and the Cofagrigus settled her long, sarcophagus body in the throne, leaning against the back, and waited.

Isaac Merlo
cofagrigus sits in the throne!

☉

Cyg did love a good antique shop, even if she avoided buying anything from them because she was unduly concerned about acquiring cursed or haunted items. Just horror fan things.

Anyway, she was too focused on her boyfriend turning her dumb joke back around on her. “Oh, my god.” She pressed the back of her hand into the bridge of her nose like she had a headache, but she was grinning.

She titled her head and looked at him, then, as he puzzled through all the pieces, and eventually asked his Rookidee to pop on Muirne’s head. The Cofagrigus’ red eyes swiveled skyward as the little bird did so, but she didn’t move or protest. As expected, the seat began to warm, and the gilded edge of her sarcophagus began to redden as it conducted heat, but nothing happened until--

--the lights went out and Cyg reached out and grabbed Isaac’s forearm, rooting them together. Zenaïs, who, for the most part, had hung back and looked bored, faded from view, form dappling into the darkness and preparing to fight. There was a grinding noise as the cuffs shot out from the throne’s arms, but all of Muirne’s limbs were safely ensconced within her coffin.

The eye continued to lower, sending a cascade of sandstone silt crumbling to the floor. Cyg pulled Isaac closer, putting herself between him and the chair, but she didn’t exactly know where the danger would be coming from.

Isaac Merlo
roll initiative?

☉