[Day 5, SMR] What's Out Here?

[Kannon]

She spotted something that looked like a stone ledge flat enough to sit a thopter on, though it was perilously close to the sand of the Erg. The thopter would be vulnerable there.

[Cuyler Gray]

"That's the only spot I can see."she sighed. "I know it will be risky for the thopter. But, it's the only way to take a look around down there."

[Kannon]

"I'll seat it there." And, after some spiralling manoeuvring, he did. It was quieter there on the ledge, and Cuyler could sense a faint trace of spice in the air. "What now."

[Cuyler Gray]

"There's spice down here." she said. "Time to look around, quietly."

She carefully climbed out of the thopter and moved towards the rocks.

[Kannon]

The man reluctantly left the thopter behind. "I smell corpses." And that was true as well; apparently some of the executed hadn't fallen into a spot in which sun could mummify them and kept rotting in the shadow of the Chin Rock above them.

[Understand 2]

[Cuyler Gray]

"Then there's a place the sun can't reach, a place not visible from above."

She took out her glowglobe and began searching.

- - -
[Day 5, SMR] What's Out Here?, Understand (6)/Truth (8), Deductive Reasoning?: 2#1d20 10 2

[Kannon]

If the corpses smelled, they must have been tossed off the cliff very recently and in some numbers, otherwise the desert creatures would have taken care of them completely. Perhaps they had been executed even just prior to their arrival. Perhaps because of it. Was it a way for the Harkonnen to deal with people who could have told the auditors something? There were better ways for people to disappear on Arrakis. Were the Harkonnen in such a hurry, or rather slaves to an inefficient yet theatrical habit?

Cuyler could find the bodies amid sharp rocks if she wanted to deal with the unpleasantness. Her nose advised strongly against.

And what did the spice and the stairs have to do with any of it?

[1 Scene Momentum]

[Cuyler Gray]

She didn't dare get too close to the bodies. "They executed so many before we arrived."

Looking up, she tried to determine where the stairs had been and where they would have led.

[Kannon]

[Discipline 3, Glowglobe cuts it to 2, Deductive Reasoning applies]

`[2 Threat: Glowglobe was noticed]

[Cuyler Gray]

"Let's look over here."

- - -
[Day 5, SMR] What's Out Here?, Discipline (8)/Truth (8), Deductive Reasoning, Glowglobe: 2#1d20 17 5
2 successes

[Kannon]

Deep under the ovehang, hid behind sharp rocks, aside to wherever gravity could have led the bodies to, there seemed to be a half-collapsed walkway leading into the bowels of the rock.

"There seems to be your passage?"

[Cuyler Gray]

"Let's see where it goes." She carefully made her way through.

[Kannon]

The passage was truly narrow; while she could squeeze through, her companion had to remove several rocks - perhaps intentionally placed there - before he proceeded.

The tunnel path revealed old stonework, just like the stairs, though bearing signs of later laser interventions to widen it here and there. Cuyler was lured in by the intensifying scent of spice. It wafted from within...

...A memory came to her, one that didn't seem her own. I don't like leaving him behind. The thought was someone else's, the voice in her head was someone else's, even as it was oddly fitting to her particular situation. Perhaps this is what had triggered it...? But it was all very strage. Was there some life of her she didn't remember?

[Cuyler Gray]

"There's definitely something here." she said softly as she pressed forward. "Spice, at the least."

[Kannon]

Finally, her glowglobe illuminated a larger - though not too large - chamber, that must have been somewhere deep underneath the Chin Rock. The smell of spice was intense, but she realised it was because of lack of ventilation. It was no secret hoard - at least not anymore. There were broken and tumbled containers, empty except for some small residues that once scraped off could still be marketable amount. There seemed to be an elevator shaft leading somewhere up, but it was now fully molten by lasguns, rock blistering from heat in its vicinity, plasteel tangled. It was a scene of violence, over whatever spice had once been stored here, but it seemed cold, unrecent, preserved in its form mostly because of its seclusion.

But that seclusion also meant that the air was saturated with spice vapour. The air wasn't truly transparent, it had an orange mist to it... Cuyler felt that if she remained only a bit longer, if she took several more breaths, the spice would overcome her. Was the dosage here lethal...?

And yet, the hyperawareness melange could give purportedly allowed for the truthsense, for self-awareness, for digging into memories and perhaps even prescient visions that could unveil so much to her...! She always wanted the truth behind the veils of appearances, didn't she? Her reluctance to plunge into her very affinity was what barred her from the truth, Arrakis pressing this very fact upon her!

Would she go back now...?

[Cuyler Gray]

She was disappointed and frustrated. "You were right. I've wasted your time. I'm sorry."

Cuyler knew she should leave, but she lingered. She told herself that it was to make sure she hadn't missed anything.

That was true, wasn't it?

[Kannon]

And as she finished those words, her awareness took a plunge. But it was not like being immersed in a liquid, more like being tied to a rope that swung across nothingness, with other ropes dangling within or out of reach, depending on the move of the pendulum. There were stories encoded on those ropes, as if they were shigawire spools of old records, except they were for the paths not taken. Her not coming to Arrakis, now receiving accolades for her entrees from Duke Flambert himself. Her great-grandmother never migrating from Harmonthep to tend to the lions kept on Kirana for Emperor Elrood's one-time amusement when Barbara Mutelli had still been his favourite. She saw that woman dying to poison that wasn't even meant for her, never giving birth to Cuyler's grandmother. And then she finally found her great-great-grandmother, Prudence, the woman who had survived Salusa Secundus, being sent there for her husband's infractions, to settle on Harmonthep after serving her sentence, and saw her never surviving her encounter with the laza tiger, never giving birth to her second child, Cuyler's ancestress. Cuyler's own life was so frail, so contingent on the small respites from violence this universe was replete with! Her life was such an odd circumstance that she was unlikely to ever bet on it occurring! Most of those who'd ever served the Mutellis were born and died on the same planet for generations. Kaitain, Salusa Secundus, Harmonthep, only then Kirana... that was extremely unusual.

But who was Prudence's first child? Was it on Salusa Secundus with its parents? Did it ever leave? Was it male? Cuyler saw no male lives, only female ancestry revealed itself to her in this stunning, paralysingly frightening swing above the abyss. She felt that she could maybe go a bit deeper, but even now her rope was already strained, hanging by a thread... She felt the unrestrained plunge meant never going back. And that filled her with unspeakable terror.

[Cuyler Gray]

It seemed so fragile. It felt so meaningless. So many things could have easily gone differently. Her very existence was dependent on luck or fate as much as anything else. That existence might mean nothing, now that she was here on Arrakis. She'd already seen how easily life could end here, multiple times in multiple ways.

She didn't even know why she was here.

Cuyler wanted to know that much at least. If the spice could tell her, why not let it?

She'd listened to her senses all her life. So, she'd listen now.

[Kannon]

Climbing up the fraying thread, she discovered her (?) face, Fremen-like, weathered by the desert winds, eyes blue-within-blue, water-stricken...

[Cuyler Gray]

She stared.

"I don't understand." she muttered as she reached out.

[Kannon]

"You may have eternity. I have only now." That's what she heard, in the voice of that woman she saw. Hers? But it was heard just as the vision began fading, as if there wasn't enough spice to push her any further into that special awareness. Darkness thickened, threads thinned, until all was one substance and there was nothing more but it.

---

She would learn the next day that she'd been comatose throughout the storm. The Sardaukar had pulled her out of the cave and had escorted back to the frigate before the storm had hit. She was then attended to by the Suk Doctor, and medicated for melange overdose.

[For complying with her Truth statement, Cuyler gets +1 Determination and a Complication: Budding Spice Addiction.]
[For D6, she can take part in threads from FMR onward.]