---

The night had swung the stars across the sky overhead and the bush made quiet noises around their fading fire. The prisoners, like the horses, had been left to sleep with tied forelimbs since there were weapons to be got, the rope run under the sergeant's blanket to wake him should one start to wander.

Thomas Daniels slept like the dead, conserving energy. Jack was more wakeful at first from the itching of poison saps that had struck his chest and arms through the course of his cutting, part-surfacing at times to see Murphy sat quietly alert, toying with some small object, or the dim shape of a wife pacing out the dark. Brigitte had a deep and private nest of brush to lay her blankets on, and tiredness from the heat and unaccustomed work of heaving up and cutting water-branches scrubbed the memory of dreams from her mind. She remembered only seeking, and depth. Thomas also recalled little of his dreams, save a sense of accusation, of trying and failing to get somewhere before something...scrabbling at the ground in an attempt to reach a doorway, cursing, his fingertips raw and the ground smeared, then welling with old, foul blood like groundwater.


Jack woke with a crushing, dream-deep sense of failure within: he had been buried alive among scratching roots in his dream, and Peggy and his child were desperately calling him, searching side to side alone in the vast bush; he knew he could be distingished from the background sounds of insects and birds if he could call to them, but he had to call out to both, and he had forgotten his child's name. The sense of being a terrible father was wrenching. It took two aching, upset breaths to come fully awake and remember he was himself, above ground, and didn't have any children.

Everyone had risen with the racket of the birds in the blue-grey of dawn and breakfasted on tea and a coal-warmed mash of bush yam and something that tasted like nuts and scrambled eggs. The dish's exact nature remained mysterious, since the sergeant would not let Garangwaari translate the word "burradhan" around Henry or Brigitte. Henry seemed to have slept poorly and his skin had not calmed at all, leaving him fidgetty and inclined to poke at his face. Sgt. Wilkins took rum with his breakfast without comment and inviting none, clearly having slept ill himself. Once another round of water had been cut and drunk by horse and human alike they had got on their way.

---

The day was a hell of heat and thickets. Even under the canopy, the humidity pulled from the punished soil almost cancelled out the mercy of altitude, leaving everyone breathing hard and at points forcing the riders to lead the horses, as none had breath to spare for carrying their weight. The baby cried in complaint whenever energy permitted, desperate that the adults who met all other needs should make the breeze get up and the heat just cease. Flies came to drink their sweat.

Jack slept like a pile of potatoes at noon break, despite the baby and the cicadas' screaming: he woke to the others loosely grouped about him, seeming relieved that he'd finally shown some response to noise and shaking. Murphy insisted Jack be given at least some hours off, and Garangwaari came and gave him a small ball of clay to roll about in his mouth for medicine as well as water, saying it had the 'right salts'. He tasted earth for the rest of the day.

---

Henry volunteered himself as second cutter, and matched Thomas' afternoon speed quite well, despite the difference in their reach. Jack did get put to another stint of bushwhacking "in case you start getting a mind to be lazy, my lad - faints won't get you out of it", but not for very long. They made camp where it seemed Bowen had done, a natural clearing a short walk from a stream running deep through current-carved stone to the north, and overlooked by a rise of rock on the western (upslope) side. Garangwaari filled her cradle-basket with water and bathed the baby; Ngamurudyin made up a yellow paste for paint.

Sgt. Wilkins decided to carol as he made up the supper, passing through a deeply sardonic 'We Wish you A Merry Christmas', figgy pudding and all, to a surprisingly tuneful and sincere 'Adeste Fideles'. This round of soup was better fortified, with rind at the bottom and bush greens thrown in, though most of the party would have eaten their shoes, assorted rocks, or parrot at that point if it took off the effects of the heat. Wilkins read more of Calder's journal when they were done, though soon flagged and laid off, telling the rest "-and it gets stranger from there," before going to do some negociation with the guides.

Beds were secured and Ngamurudyin took first watch. There might have been drumming, far off in the night. Mostly there was the first stirrings of cool air to breathe, and with it, sleep.

---

Morning broke between the close bars of overcrowded trees, though the birds sounded a bit more distant, their voices echoed down rock with a bright, ethreal quality. The crowded bush seemed to suck down light even before sunrise, outlining its vine-drowned trees and teeming leaves with excessive clarity, as though all were seen through blue glass.

Jack surfaced slowly, though today the vague ache in him was only physical.Finally properly awake, the trees above him soar and sway in a bewitching canopy. The thumping in his head is gone, but his mouth somehow still tastes of earth.

Thomas stirs, and he knows he has been looking for Sally Jane in his sleep - Sally Jane who was trying to tell him something, desperately. In his dreams glyphs crawled out of rocks like flattened spiders and the trees grew fungus that was really teeth. A circle of trees. A circle of teeth. A circle of foul and poisoned water. A surrounding arc of fifteen smooth spheres of unknown rock. A circle of...his mind flinched and would not answer, bringing him awake. The sergeant is boiling water for tea three or four paces away, not yet aware Thomas is awake.


There had been stranger dreams for Brigitte: she had definitely been further down the great well (the spire, above the tower, above the palace that was perhaps above a city, fathoms deep where things lived lightless and could not imagine the existence of the sun), far closer to the base. She knew she had slept on the stair, and gathered some kind of hairlike fungus for sustenance there before resuming motion, as though her dream self continued her questing whilst the other self was awake. There was something...large, to a sense she could not describe, and it had smelt her, or done something like smelling her, following the colour of her thoughts, and it had got close.

Great-Grandmother's 'voice' had faded as she pulled away, but Brigitte had woken with a start as Melusine's scales had touched her side.

She finds herself kneeling under a slight overhang of rock just in earshot of camp. Her wrists hurt slightly, and looking down Brigitte sees she has been digging, or rather made some halfhearted attempt to dig, achieving no more than a shallow scrape in the earth. She looks up and sees that Bowen was also here, for that design of haloed circles and reaching limbs (or tongues, or flame) is above her on the rock.

This one is the most recent she's seen, its bloody charcoal crisp and dark.


This message was last edited by the GM at 00:05, Wed 01 July 2020.

Jack crosses the distance to Henry Cotton as the camp stirs,

"Henry, thanks t'ye fer spellin' me at bush whackin' yestiddy. I was fair done in, I was. By the bye," he adds, nonchalant as you like, "Who was it made up Calder's party? Their names, I mean. D'ye recall?"

If he wasn't up already, Thomas gets tugged upward by the rope between himself and Jack - the sergeant notices, and heaves up to go untie Thomas first.

Meanwhile, Henry doesn't stir. Now at liberty to do so, Jack steps forward and realises he's talking to an empty blanket and a bundle of pillowed clothes. Something about the lack suggests things have been so for a while - should he crouch to touch them, the objects contain no remnant heat.

Perhaps Henry went down early to wash: Jack doesn't know how many clothes the apprentice had along, so these may not be all of them. Wherever he's gone, he hasn't taken his boots, either.

Looking about, Murphy is gone, too (so are his boots and clothes, though, so he's probably at the stream), and Brigitte is not where she had slept. The birds' noise fills the space where they had been.

"Here, Sergeant! Cotton's gone." Maybe Wilkins will take up a new suspect and leave Jack be for a bit.

"An' where's Murphy an' th' Countess? Ye'll have t'tie us all to ye, I reckon."

Brigitte looked at the drawing for a time once she came around. "Was she sleep walking now." she thought. As she made her way back to the camp she looked for anything out of place. Looking at her hands it was obvious that she was acting out her dreams while she was asleep.....

When she arrives back at camp she first has a cup of water before adding "I found something I think you need to look at..."

She then takes whoever was interested back to the cliff and the drawing. "I had a weird dream last night as well, incredibly vivid..."


-

Sergeant Wilkins looks over at Brigitte when she speaks, then immediately away on realising the lady is in her shift from the night. He refocuses quickly on Garangwaari with no hint of a flinch, despite the native not having more than a loincloth in the first place. "Go see if it's dangerous, I'll be there in a minnit," he says.

His response to Jack is to abruptly haul the rope towards him, almost pulling the little Irishman off his feet. The rope, itself probably made in Kent, scrapes hard against Jack's wrists before the sergeant has stepped forward to catch the binding and start untying. It puts them very close. Neither of them smell good, even after yesterday's access to water for washing. "You remember they're free to go where they want. Ngamooroo'-!"

Jack can't see the guide's response behind him, but guesses she doesn't particularly like the address, as the sergeant's tone only gets harder. "Go fetch Murphy and Cotton down at the creek with this one, there'll be tea when you get back." He shoves a physically liberated Jack towards the native.

Ngamurudyin is wearing some ash- and yellow paint today, though not enough for full camoflage or dancing. She gives Jack a look that's also somewhat fed up with the machinations of the British Empire as it is locally represented, but points with her chin to move down towards the creek, recognising that her wife's willingness has split them up as the sergeant intended.

The baby reaches out of her basket at Ngamurudyin's side and takes a grip of Jack's shirt, as though she's set to pull him along, too. Should he look down to query this he'd see the child briefly spook, then instinctively realise he was some kind of human and laugh, having as yet no more emotions to her range than joy and upset.

*AaReeuuh*
This message was last edited by the player at 14:04, Wed 01 July 2020.

Garangwaari follows Brigitte, passing up the Countess' blanket as she goes - it seems Brigitte had simply risen from her bed and wandered over to the spot she'd woken at, though it looks like someone else barefoot scuffed through the ash of the campfire at night and walked onwards, off into the bush.

The natives might also wander at night, of course. Feeling the uncertain texture of leaves, twigs and sandy rock underfoot, Brigitte was not entirely sure how she had not woken herself, though Garangwaari moved without sound or difficulty on toughened soles. Gaarangwari frowned at the thing Brigitte had found, and listened to her comment.

"What thing did you dream? Was it like this?" she asks, and crouches to look at Brigitte's digging. Her slim shoulders are marked with an unfinished pattern of paint today that moves as she reaches to feel the form of the tiny hollow.

Jack does his best to keep his eyes away from his employer's form in such a state of undress. Conversely, Ngamurudyin's near-nakedness he gives not a second thought; maybe it's the paint. He nods and grins in response to her grimace at the sergeant's orders.

When the baby takes hold of his shirt, he startles at first, but then emotions left by his dream wash over him and a sprinkle of tears smart his eyes. Blinking them away, he smiles at the mite.

"There's a good babby," he coos.

This makes the baby delighted, but does not make her let go.

*AAaayyeeeooouu!*

Ngamurudyin sets to rescuing Jack from her daughter's deathgrip as they head off, somewhat amused.

[[just a minute, I'll get you a new thread...]]

"There is nothing here," Garangwaari confirms of the scrape, looking up at Brigitte. "What did you dream you were digging for?"

The sergeant can be heard wading through the undergrowth towards them presently. Sunlight begins to filter through the trees.


[[in case you were waiting on me/confirmation the others had gone.]]

"A snake, that could speak.... it sounds silly now... but It seemed so real. On a stair case in a city, called Melusine...." Brigitte now realised what she was wearing, "I have to get dressed..."


-

"Maybe it is the spirit that helps your clan's women that was speaking to you," Garangwaari replies, out of her depth with what the settlers might know or not know. "That spirit would try to help you."

Sgt. Wilkins comes up, looking very much at the rock and the words and not at all at Brigitte, though he spares a glance to Garangwaari and the scrape in the ground. "Well...hmm." He doesn't swear, just leaves the harsh vexation in his tome. "Awright, 'ow long's that been there, then?"

Garangwaari looks for clues on the ground. "I don't know...everyone has walked about here now. I don't think the last night, unless he put old blood in his paint. Do those figures talk?"

Wilkins eventually understands by her gestures that she's asking if the parts of the drawing opaque to her in meaning are words, and crouches to read her the inscription as Brigitte trails off to fetch clothing. Small scuttling things avoid her feet.

"...to read, that is to hear that kind of drawing?" she catches Garangwaari saying over there as she does her best with her towelcloth and a little water, then looks out her outer garments. "Can you do reading, in a body?"

"I think our friend the artist is stark raving mad," the sergeant opines, and a glance over there shows him touching the image, just to be sure it's not been put there by Brigitte herself.

Brigitte continues to don her clothes... as she spoke"It could be possible, but things that can enter your mind are not look upon fondly in my culture..."

It had certainly been a very strange night.


-

"It is your mind that goes far when you are sleeping," Garangwaari points out, bush-wading back towards her. "...that is how we touch the...big Dreaming. The other place. Is there a word for that?"

The sergeant scuffs about a bit more over there in case any clue should appear, but returns once Brigitte looks more decent and toes Daniels into looking alive enough to serve tea (it tastes slightly of soup).

"Did the snake tell you anything that would help us? If it is a secret knowledge I will not ask more, but this is not a good place, with the story about the witches. I have heard that woolymen live up here, too."


[[edit: better leads for unsticking.]]
This message was last edited by the player at 14:23, Wed 08 July 2020.

Brigitte gave as good of description of what happened and was said in her dream as she was able. It was obvious that the aboriginal woman would be able to better understand it then her so she left no details out as she did not have a clue what was important and what was not.

It was exhausting and she went to find a cup of some thing wet and warm most likely.



-

It took some explaining, since Garangwaari was unfamiliar with the idea of towers or wells, though she knew what steps and windows were. She'd listened closely, still thinking whilst Brigitte went to fetch and resettle with tea. Henry Cotton had still not returned, nor anyone else who'd gone down to the creek.

"I think...the thing that talked but could not be understood, even in the Dreaming, it was from a different place. Like you to this country, but not on a sea or from a country that...is this not-Dreaming. All this world. It is from a different place, so when it spoke to you it was like if you put a sea-spiky," she mimes a sea urchin, cupped hands then spikes, "-in spring water. The landwater poisons the one that lives in seawater, because it is from a different place. So the stranger-thing's talking, giving its thoughts to you, to you it would be like going in the landwater. I don't...do you think its shape was like the drawing you found, on the rock?"

"I think your ancestor-friend the water-snake knows what the Stranger was, and the Stranger is afraid of her," Garangwaari reasons. "I do not know what she means by eating each others' young...it would be bad for something here to eat the Stranger's children, I think, though I do not know what they look like. They might be like a beast or a plant or a rock, or like nothing we have seen. I think we would feel the wrong water feeling, though, if they could speak, or dream they speak to us."

The birds have pretty much quieted down by now and a golden light filters down through the foliage, picking out leaves like copper coins and slivers on the packed earth. The sergeant has taken to pacing, agitated by the others' lack of urgency in returning yet unwilling to leave or send Daniels and the women after them. He doesn't contribute to the discussion of dreams, keeping whatever the night had brought him to himself.

As Jack makes his way up to the campsite, he misses the weight and the warmth of the little body that had been given into his care for a while.

When he sees the others, he asks, "Any sign of Cotton at all?"

The force of Sgt. Wilkins' direct attention as he looks up is like a blow of heat from opening an oven door. One look is enough to make Jack glad he can't currently be accused of trying to carry off the baby. "It was you was supposed to be-"

"He wasn't down with me. There was one moment I might have missed him walkin' off on my watch when the Countess took herself aside right through the shrubbery, but if he left then Cotton's been away an hour and a half, easy," Murphy talks fast, striding over to give Garangwaari her child and look back to where Cotton had slept. "Might be sunstroke, sleepwalkin', not sure. We heard a scream might be a mile off or more along the water."

"Got fish," Ngamurudyin announces, holding up a specimen almost as long as her arm. It proves a sucessful distraction, for a moment, from the presence of one more person behind her, his skin as land-dwelling dark as her own. "He-" she throws a question over to her wife. [Language unknown: "onar n forie si elou'chre wi English?"]

"Nephew. To the guide," Garangwaari explains, setting the baby to her breast. The child proves willing and their tension eases, the baby looking up with an unformed, animal love for this being that provides food and comfort, Garangwaari looking down with quiet contentment and a smile.

Ngarungadurung, meanwhile, can tell this redcoat whitefella is like one of their thickset, short-faced camp dogs, ready to sink teeth right to the bone at a shout or perceived provocation. He bristles, hand on the small fire weapon at his belt. "Tell 'im he'll be more welcome once 'e's put that spear down," he says.

[Language unknown: "As ekame, pohe whetbe, manlatbut."] Murphy tries, his accent thick and odd to hear but effort in it.

Besides the ones that have spoken, Ngarungadurung can see a sullen, youngish whitefella sitting on a log away across the fire, and one of their wrapped-up women standing near Ngamurudyin's wife sipping a hot drink. Under the large straw hat her hair is also pale, wound up like snakes on her head, and he gets the uneasy idea that her flesh would be soft as a grub's.
This message was last edited by the player at 01:26, Thu 16 July 2020.

The new man squats where he is, at the edge of the camp, and places the spear on the ground next to him. Then he removes his skin cloak and fibrecraft bag, folding them carefully on top of the spear.  He remains sitting on his heels and regards the group with silent eyes.

He has rarely been so close to such a large mob of whitefellas. His nose twitches at their fetor.

Jack crosses the clearing to his employer.

"Is there anything you're needing, Milady?" he asks.

The sergeant lets go of his fire weapon and picks up an object to dip it in the bigger container by the fire, brushing off the bottom with his sleeve. He cautiously steps up to place this in front of Ngarungadurung, handle towards the newcomer, half an eye kept on what Jack is doing.

"Hot," he says firmly, as though Ngarungadurung will know what he means. The redcoat does not smell at all good, though the dark, gently steaming liquid in the cup has a neutral, soft plant-like smell with a tinge of earth, like lying where kangaroos have recently been grazing.

Beyond the whitefellas, in their own little patch of clearish ground, Ngarungadurung can see the huge riding animals, some brown, some pale and some spotted. Some are paying him attention.

In reply to Jack Duggan (msg # 21):

"No, no I am fine. Just a long night that is all." Brigitte watched the new comer for a time and the sight of the fish was welcome at least it would be something other then rations.


-

The aboriginal man says nothing to the redcoat but lowers his eyes and gives a small nod of the head. He touches the container gingerly, testing the heat, then uses the handle to bring it to his nose. He sniffs, cools the liquid with his breath, and takes a tentative sip.

The liquid proved smooth, with a not-unpleasant hint of bitterness and an aftertaste of salt and a little unknown grease. It was odd to be offered something brewed when not sickening with anything, but perhaps the whitefellas were trying to make him more resistant to ghosts or sickness in their own way. At any rate, after a short span it seemed to make him feel more awake.

The big fish was coal-baked and the crayfish boiled, all being distributed relatively equally. There was some talking about the camp, but also a tension - not just because of the native visitor, Ngarungadurung realised, but between each other - and still Henry did not come back. Murphy had done some cursory tracking and searching whilst breakfast was cooking but could say only that the youth had walked straight out into the bush, bootless and with no care for concealing his step, or even avoiding brush in his path. Murphy posited sleepwalking. Brigitte kept finding stray grains of earth caught in her nails.

The sergeant thought hard about their situation. "We'll give 'im the morning," he decided, glancing at the horses. Whilst their rations were easy to supplement with bush tucker whilst Murphy or the natives were around, a horse poisoned by unwise experiment with native foliage would have to be shot. Murphy, Daniels, and Garangwaari with the baby were left in camp in case Cotton should return, whilst the rest made a careful foray into the forest along Henry's track.

---

There seemed to be less cicadas up here, spacing their sound into an uncertain maze of sharp and dull that shifted with a turn of the head. Ngamurudyin and the stranger tracked, up ahead, whilst the sergeant kept an eye on Jack and Brigitte kept an eye on the sergeant. There was some breeze today, but breathing the hot leaf-dampened air was still much like breathing through cloth. The Europeans began, invitably, to sweat.

Now, perhaps an hour and perhaps not even a mile from camp - Cotton's determined sonnambulent upward path had dissolved into confused wandering some way back, making for tedious stop-start tracking as he looped and backtracked, sometimes walking, sometimes at a run - Ngamurudyin is crouched down close to the ground, looking for the most recent of overlapping tracks. The trees all sway a little, giving the impression of a general restlessness. They all look so similar to the non-natives that they might as well be dropped on the surface of the moon in terms of landmarks. The cicadas rattle and screech.

Then off away to the right somewhere ahead comes a far less distant scream.
This message was last edited by the GM at 00:21, Sat 18 July 2020.

Jack feels that he senses Cotton's mind as they stop and start in tracking his wanderings: He's lost here. He's wakened and don't know where he is or what he's about.

The scream brings Jack up short in his musings and he turns his head in the direction he thinks it came from.

"That sounds just like..." He shakes his head and mutters, "Wish Murphy was here."

"This heat." was all Brigitte could think about and the incessant noise of the insects. The scream woke her from a slumber of near exhaustion from the walk. She looked in the direction and then followed the rest of the group as they investigated.

"Had the lad slipped and fallen she thought."


-

The two trackers are ahead of the others on the path, and Ngarungadurung’s eyes flit to those of the Compass Woman.  [Language unknown: “Ecive al ion iocaun a loissa. Trstri it oucefi'foss sasapo n i, hoaleeet atsa fi i omentiwit out oveil nte n llmo.”]

Ngamurudyin makes a quiet noise of agreement, looking off and up to where the scream had come from, her keen sense of direction determining their position perhaps to the footstep.

[Language unknown: "Ck eauresrom, chur,"] she remarks, rising. Sergeant Wilkins gestures at them, moreso at Ngarungadurung, tensed.

"His friends?"

Ngamurudyin shakes her head. "Maybe ghosts." She frowns. "Cottonfella go down that way." She gestures with a flat hand at perhaps a little less than a compass-quarter to the place the human scream had just come from, though there is no sound but insects now, that constant confusing cicada scream.

"Ghosts," the sergeant repeats, like a curse. He looks at the trees that way, then at the area the scream had come as though those trees might look any different and provide a clue, lips pressed tightly together. He takes a swipe at the sweat of his brow with his sleeve and glances over at Brigitte to see if the party's most "delicate" member had any thoughts on which way they should go.
This message was last edited by the player at 13:49, Sun 19 July 2020.

"Follow the natives, I think they have the best of it. Let them do their job...." She looked to the native guides and would follow behind trying not to get in their way.


-

Jack nods at the Countess and shrugs at Wilkins. He'd feel better with a fowling piece, or at least his cudgel in his hands, but figures the Sergeant would even begrudge him a stout stick. He'll look to the aboriginals to keep them safe from harm.

The sergeant looks from the direction of the scream to Brigitte, then waves the natives on, scowling. It's not clear if he's relieved or resentfully restrained by the noble's decision. "Awright, keep after Cotton. Probably not much we can do for whoever that was anyway."

He's tense, however, and Ngarungadurung gets the impression that should an ambush occur by anyone remotely the same colour as him he should avoid the redcoat at once lest he be assumed of their party, even if the attackers were plainly Gundungurra or strangers from over the mountains. Ngamurudyin gives a glance that says she's also aware, but quietly tracks Cotton onward across the indifferent ground. They swing downward in a direction that might be northeast, though under the trees it is hard to tell. For all the Europeans know after so many turns they might be walking back on themselves.

---

The group eventually come out by the creek in a chorus of sawing cicada-echoes and a sting of sudden sun, everything ochres and yellows and brightness. The water runs broader here but still deep, particularly at what looks to be the entrance to a gorge some thirty or fourty yards upstream to their left. A rise of rock like a crumbled castle wall juts from the landscape on this side, its opposite a road's width away at the narrowest point and more closely colonised by trees, slumping down gently into a broad gravelly place that might be a billabong when the stream was in flood. Flies begin to find them.

Ngamurudyin paces out, looking for any indication of Cotton's direction, moving cautiously to the edge of the creek. The sergeant stands and squints about at the empty place, taking its measure. The cicadas never cease.


[[Jack, may I have a mystery roll, please?]]
This message was last edited by the player at 14:57, Thu 23 July 2020.

Jack hangs back a bit in the last of the woodsy shade.

Jack Duggan rolled 84 unknown.

Brigitte expected the air near the river to be "clearer" perhaps a little lower in temperature... she was wrong. She had a near paralyzing need to wet her scarf before they moved on, but at this point she would wait to see if it was safe.

She watched their guides as they looked for Cotton in a sea of browns and reds.



-

Ngamurudyin had been crouched to cast about for any faint traces on the rock and packed clay at the water's edge, but now she is straightening again, frowning towards the cliff on their side, her body absoloutely tensed. The sergeant notices and looks that way, too.

In the quiet of unspeaking breaths the cicadas and their echoes overlap; filling the open space, doubling off the rocks and water; filling the air drawn hot into five pairs of lungs; filling the blood from that air and pushing further, filling all space for complex thought. The humans breathed in the heat, and the sizzle of cicadas could no longer easily be told from their own pulses, heartbeats rising to the call of...what?

Jack takes a step and picks up a thick, heavy fallen branch from the ground. He gives it a testing swing, a grin crossing his face. He looks at Wilkins and takes another step in the sergeant's direction, then stops, branch still clutched in his hand, staring at the redcoat's head.

The sweat that pops out on his face and palms has little to do with the sun and heat. He takes a sudden, sharp breath, turns his back on Wilkins and flings the club into the trees.

"Graah!" he expels his breath. Taking off his hat, he rubs his trembling  hand over his head and takes several steps back into the shade.
This message had punctuation tweaked by the player at 17:35, Fri 24 July 2020.

Brigitte sees what Jack is about to do and yet she does not intervene or even give a warning. She watches the branch cartwheel into the brush as he seems to come to his senses. "Here Jack I will get some water." and with that she takes his scarf and her own and goes and gets them sopping wet.


-

The sergeant looks round at the crash of the branch into the undergrowth, readied violence rising up in him like a thunderhead. He looks at the branch rocking a moment where it lies, at the sweating back of Jack's neck, then at the Frenchwoman deftly taking the kerchief from about the young man's throat with her own fair hands, her expression neutral.

Wilkins bristles, the overheated killing urge finding no outlet until a gadfly lands on his jaw and he smacks it hard, leaving the insect smeared redly across his stubble. As Brigitte steps over to the stream through the constant scream of cicadas and at last feels a feathering of cooler breeze she notices the natives are still standing quite still, attention on the cliff. For a moment, with the water running blessedly cool over her hands, she hears it too, or almost hears it: a different texture of sound up there, of rapid motion.

The sergeant is still staring at Jack's shoulders. "What...?"

He doesn't get much further, interrupted by the distinct snap of live wood being struck by something large hurtling headlong up above. Jack looks back. The water pours clear and cold off the cloth in Brigitte's hands. The Aboriginal man draws in a breath as though bracing for impact. A white youth runs out onto the cliff.

He's not Cotton. He's brown-haired, yes, but lighter, taller and with a longer stride that those below can see is about to betray him since he's staring back in terror as he breaks from the trees, not noticing the narrow slice of cliff underfoot. He does see in the next instant, though, and tries to brake himself, desperately throwing his weight back though also looking behind for whatever is coming after. There's a lound crunch and scrape of gravel. The cicadas scream and scream.

The young man hits the ground hard at an angle, doubtless taking skin from his arms though the impact thumps any cry out of him. For a moment it looks like he might stop before his tilt turns critical, but then he's rolled and is falling off the edge, a body that had known earth and solid surface all its life given into the new element of air. He has time to scream - time for the scream to colour with pain as he strikes a jutting piece of the formation and his arm is laid open to the wrist - before the angle of his neck and skull meets with the base of the rock and his last short flight is silent, a pale arm flared up in leaden unconscious farewell.


        "AAAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGH~*"


The watchers hear a plunging splash they cannot see. The cicadas continue their yelling. The creek runs clear and calm and bright across its stony bed as leaves flicker their pale surfaces to the wind. Through the numb horror of watching another person die those gathered surface towards a still worse realisation: that was the same scream.


[[SAN checks, everyone, please.]]
This message was last edited by the player at 01:07, Sat 25 July 2020.

Jack Duggan rolled 61 for Sanity 40.

Jack moves up toward Brigitte and the water, looking to see if there's any hope the man is only injured.

Brigitte was unable to take her eyes off the falling man, or boy she was not sure. As he fell into a crumbled heap she looked to the top of the cliff to see what had caused him to run.


Brigitte d'Anjou rolled 12 using 1d100.  SAN.


-

"No you don't," Wilkins says, grabbing Jack by the collar and hauling him to heel. There's a strange raw waver and crack in his voice.

The water flows on quietly as before and the body does not surface. Brigitte watches the trees the youth had stared back at with such desperate terror, fleeing for his life, and sees nothing of note. There is a broken branch up there. There is the line of blood on the rock where his arm caught just now and tore so cruelly into the skin. It is brown, days old if not weeks. A kind of vertigo not of body or height but of Time siezes Brigitte for a moment, leaving her sense of when she is reeling a handful of seconds (minutes? hours? days?) out of true.

Up above, the only movement is from trees in the wind. Jack can feel a slight tremor in the sergeant's knuckles at his neck.


[[Brigitte, that's a loss of 1 SAN for you.

Poor Jack loses another 4 and is having a very bad time of things. He's doing better than the sergeant, though. We...were very close to turning Fifteen Smooth Rounded Rocks into an episode of Happy Tree Friends just then. Scary dice.]]
This message was last edited by the player at 21:57, Sat 25 July 2020.

Brigitte half sits or falls onto her rump as something set her off kilter. She takes several deep breaths as what ever it was subsides and she wipes her face with the wet scarf as she outs it around her neck.

"From the seated position she asks did anyone know who that was ?" She looks at the blood again as she speaks.



-

The new man—if anyone were to be watching him—seems impassive. Almost as if he expected something like this… He studies the cliff face in a pensive manner.

01:13, Today: Ngarungadurung rolled 5 using 1d100.  SAN 70.

Ngarungadurung's sweep also sees the blood the falling whitefella left, and its age of days or weeks, there on the rock, and the way the body does not rise from the river. The cicadas yell uninterrupted and in the quiet the heat beats down like a cosmic pulse. A tension rises in his chest, though whether from within or from some external stress upon the air he cannot tell.

Ngamurudyin starts to pad across to where the lad should have washed up, if what they had seen made sense in Time. The lighter-coloured soles of her feet are so close to the colour of the rock it is as though she un-leaves footprints on the trackless expanse as she goes, pulling her traces off this stranger-country.


[[That's only a loss of 1 for Ngarungadurung, rather good all things considered.]]

In reply to Sgt. Wilkins (msg # 41):

Caught unaware and yanked off balance, Jack sprawls heavily at Wilkins's feet. Anger flares in his eyes that are suddenly bulging like a drowning man's, he gasps for breath for a moment before finally drawing in a huge breath.

Hands clenched in impotence, he mutters, "Ó, tú salach, mac lofa fraochÚn. Fanann tú."

He climbs, shaking, to his feet, glaring at the water instead of at his enemy.

Jack gets two deft applications of the sergeant's boot before he's up, once in the ribs and once in the backside to encourage him to heel rather than stagger off elsewhere, hard enough to smart but not to bruise. His baleful muttering draws a hard, snarling response from the sergeant, less a shout than a blow of furious, focused sound: "Get back in line, Ryburn! D'you want to die again, fall outside the redoubt an' make us listen to you pleading your saints and mother for six hours, yew 'orrible little man? You will stay behind me, Private. what will you do?!"

Ngamurudyin looks back long enough to see that no deadly violence is immediately occuring, then walks on. She examines the cliff. Ngarungadurung has no idea why the redcoat is so angry with the smaller foreigner, though there had been something in his bark and snarl like the alarmed remonstrance of a parent seeing a small child about to set their brushfire against the wind. An anxiety and fear of physical harm that belonged to neither of them yet plunged to the gut.

Jack's reaction, or at least the lack of whatever the sergeant seems to expect from the dead young man his mind had put in Jack's place, seems to break the moment's hold. The sergeant looks away and scrubs the fly-remnants off his face with his sleeve, alerted to their presence by the way a drop of sweat had wavered through the stubble and caught there, trembling. The air is so hot.

Sgt. Wilkins addresses Brigitte as if that outburst had not just happened. "I would imagine that was Jacob Cadlow, apprentice surveyor." The body does not rise. The fear of drowning is still heavy in Jack's chest. "-or his ghost."

The water blesses Brigitte's brow and the wet cloth shades her nose and mouth as though for a moment she breathed within the cool tiled depths of a cathedral. There is no taste of blood or boot-dirt in the trickles that reach her lips, and the slightly startling cold on the back of her neck becomes an extremely good feeling, soaking a slow-spreading line down her back and replacing the irritating damp of sweat across her chest. A fly of the big, furred biting kind investigates the folds of her skirt across her knee, its intents opaque.

Jack staggers back from the Sergeant, not from the kicks or even the threat of further violence, but from the raw grief in his face and the ragged Ness of his...caring. That any such tender feelings could inhabit the soldier's prickly carapace is as profound a shock as any he's experienced these past days.

"Stay behind ye, Sergeant, aye." he says as he takes a position behind the man.

He shivers slightly, looking at the clear, rushing water.

Ngarungadurung doesn’t understand the what is going on between the whitefellas. He watches the apparently heated exchange blankly, then turns and rejoins the Compass Woman to consider the pool where the young man’s remains should be.

[Language unknown: “Ad no conallble sta has peheic i venortres ave pl fiwhi ckomne.  M weeemo dayio anear ntestalat.”]

He scans the trees and shoreline downstream, evidently looking for something.

The water was a relief but it came with a very uneasy feeling. She passed Jack his scarf back and then looked at the blood on the rocks again. It was starting to feel like they just witnessed a reflection in time....

"I think that fall happened some time ago...."



-
This message was last edited by the player at 22:27, Mon 27 July 2020.

"Thank'ee, Milady." Jack accepts the wet neckerchief with gratitude, wiping his face with it, letting the rivulets run down his throat and onto his chest, then looping it about his neck.

"Y'mean, like at the farm?" he asks, nodding, "An' th' ghosts in Calder's book?"

Ngamurudyin nods at something on the ground nearer the shallow loop of water. [Language unknown: "Com stakor'notestpre ousbe oul anen wi. Redineeen t al nt u plwi ithectson, ortlatman i ithe i, si Mi n levor unfo leul a unckla ter wasss ecte tiona."]

[[Optional EDU for a tiny bit more information to be found on the ground there.]]

Standing at the water's edge Ngarungadurung can just see the little tree he's looking for. It looks extremely sturdy and healthy, life filling the leaves that show their upsides to the sun.

Ngamurudyin waves for the whitefellas' attention. "Cottonfella go up," she says, nodding at the land near the jut of the cliff over the water, then raising a hand to indicate where small plants had been disturbed by climbing.

"D- dash it, why would he-?" The sergeant shakes his head and motions her to come back. "Leave 'im. 'e knows where the water is, ought to be able to find 'is way back to camp at least. We'll leave word there."

The redcoat is tense all over. The creek runs quietly in the bright sun. The blood left on the rock is dull and old.

Ngarungadurung crouches down to study the place by the pool, then rises and walks to the little tree by the waterside. He lowers his head, whispers, makes some indecipherable gestures and puts his ear to the sapling, as if communing with it.

Long experience in the ways of life and death let Ngarungadurung glean insight from the section of shore he'd stared at. There had been fragile fragments of shells there, not from aquatic life.

The young tree's bark is sweet and textured-smooth, its leaves full and flushed to their edges with colour despite the drought elsewhere. Listening to it brings Ngarungadurung the intimate rush and clunk and shift of any tree so interrogated, but he feels the welcome in it, the contentedness of a life stretching up to the sun.

Over near the cliff, Ngamurudyin looks straight up, abruptly tensed. The sergeant sees this, or perhaps hears a different texture in the cicadas' shrieks, and tries to herd those present downstream towards camp. "Let's leave 'ere, come on," he snaps, only partly to her.

Jack is confused by the man's sudden rush to depart.

"Hang on, Sergeant. We came t'look for Cotton, didn't we? Shoul'n't we let th' trackers have their go?" He lifts his eyes to the escarpment and hollers, "CO-OT-TON! HEN-RY! CO-O-OT-TOOO-ONNNN!!"
This message was last edited by the player at 20:49, Wed 29 July 2020.

"Yes Sergeant I would rather we did not leave him out here, though the signs are not good." She rubbed her face with the end of her scarf.


-

Ngarungadurung leaves the tree and walks back, unhurried, towards to Compass Woman. He glances to the ridge with a somber demeanour and cants his head slightly to one side, listening.

[Language unknown: "Et ckngro hernt an her ei anolnt wi thaoutthiyin. P Et poncfo in Of na p ri m pe st."]

He gestures to the rocks where the tracker had spied traces of Cotton's ascent.

Ngamurudyin had seemingly been trying to determine the same by sound. [Language unknown: "U outoverut ncto thalie...ec, plugh fower u asess ss,"] she murmurs, staying still, looking up. She does not stop him, however, and the heat and cicada song shrill around him like one thing as he reaches up to find hands and footholds on the rock. The country does not hold him on its surface as easily as places he has known; does not know him.

Jack's hollers find no answer but the constant chanting of insects. The sergeant's tension is only rising. "Listen, that lad 'ad water an' a good guess at the way back to camp, and 'e climbed up there and went off again. Somethin wanted 'im in the forest and 'e went. Would you-" he trails off, seeing Ngarungadurung scaling the rocky outcropping at the easy part of the join and then the side of the cliff. "Hoi! Get down from there!"

Brigitte hears the snap of a living branch somewhere above. She remembers that sound.

Ngarungadurung's hand is all that has reached the narrow spit atop the cliff when that same white youth runs out onto the formation, alive and terrified. He seems to take note of Ngarungadurung of a sudden, flinching away and unbalancing himself in his urgent headlong run, not seeing the cliff edge.

The sergeant turns his back on it and tries to physically push Brigitte and Jack into motion, class propriety in the former case be damned. "Come on, come on, get out of 'ere," he grates.

Ngarungadurung holds himself tight against the rock face, not certain if his presence will have any further effect on the youth--or vice versa.

Ngarungadurung's presence only causes the youth to notice the cliff edge two urgent, loping steps later; he tries to stop, as before, falling in the same place. This time, Ngarungadurung can see the paler scrapes and the pinking start of blood as the lad's sliding momentum barks his bared forarms, see a new kind of terror flood his expression in the instant his rolling does not quite stop. The whitefella catches his eye for half an instant, stark, blank and endless fear all there is to read as he tries to grab the cliff edge and cannot, is already turning.

Jake Cadlow falls, and screams, and the jutting rock tears through his arm and the scream goes from fear to pain, right until the next form of sandstone meets his skull.


"AAAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGH~*"


There is a splash the watchers cannot see. The cicadas continue to cry out. The creek runs clear and calm and bright across its stony bed and leaves flicker in the wind. All is as it was and the sergeant is shaking.

_
This message was last edited by the GM at 13:36, Sat 01 Aug 2020.

Jack breaks for the cliff face and begins to scramble up, trying to follow the holds that Ngarungadurung used. If he can get to the top, what if he can intercept poor Cadlow and break the cycle of his constant fall.

"BACK in LINE!" the sergeant roars, and Jack knows he'd better hope he's fast enough to be out of grabbing range before the redcoat has his wits together.


[[So you're aiming for a Hard DEX roll vs. being grappled (or Dodge if preferred) before anything else...

If you suceed at not being grappled and possibly subsequently punched out for "either escapin' or mountain madness, I don't know", roll me a Climb, please.]]

Jack Duggan rolled 62 for Dodge 25.

Well.

Not certain what is happening between the two white men, Ngarungadurung finishes his climb so to clear the way for the Jack-fella.

"Hands off Sergeant or the Major will hear of it" Was all Brigitte said before her attention was again directed to the top of the cliff. She shielded her eyes from the glare as she again watched the lad fall in muted silence.

When Jack made his dash she moved out of the way if it was required.


-
This message was last edited by the player at 07:48, Mon 03 Aug 2020.

Brigitte briefly got a look that was hot and flinty and dangerous, but then that awful scream cut the air and Jack had bolted towards the cliff. She steps back and lets them get on with it.

Jack  gets no more than three steps before the sergeant is close, yanking the back of his shirt to pull him into range for an arm thrown hard across the upper chest. Jack feels himself forced off balance but can do little more than brace for impact, held suddenly by this man who has killed men, pulling in air through his thumped lungs that is one awful miasma of sweat and scarlet dye, weapon oils and smoke. The sergeant leans on his shoulders, keeping leverage. Both of them are breathing hard; Jack gets a split instant of sheer fox terror from some instinctive backwater, convinced the farm dog's jaws will meet traplike in the soft of his throat and shake him dead.


[[That would be an opposed STR if Jack's going to put up a fight/try to wiggle out of being actively held.]]
This message was last edited by the player at 07:29, Mon 03 Aug 2020.

Ngamurudyin takes stock of what's going on back there, though not understanding any more about the antipathy than her compatriot. She looks up to Ngarungadurung.[Language unknown: "Diiou wasioname a wi olom?"] she asks.

Ngarungadurung gives a glance—perhaps quizzical, perhaps disinterested—to the struggle of the white men below him. At any rate, it doesn’t much distract him from the business at hand. He calls down to the Compass Woman, [Language unknown: “Ectalltinvename prprri k ee at ac, ortcomastkor leres ec thehasnti wi taol ekwaen le.”]

[Language unknown: "Th ri ilulma pentit Cottonfella ion? No eiha oswaec t os eveel, vorut fi u laril test st il elncce...Ri moaiie plomil hou wi t sahios th si rend'allehi lleeas, prac ticwhibut li er paushi et plnendre tail illtinear m etun'pack."] The guide slap-flicks a gadfly before it can take a bite, glancing back.

[Language unknown: "...she chfor ith ant latareted but ecte-ofof."]

"Jay-sus, Wilkins! I jus' wanta try an' save that poor lad is all. An' find Cotton inta th' bargain. Where am I gonna run to afoot in this wilderness? Don't be daft."

Despite his words he lies quiet, not resisting or struggling at all.

"Just calm down, everyone... we seem to have found some rip in time were the same action is repeated.... I don't know is it a warning or something else gone wrong."

She looks to the trackers and tries to catch their eye.



-

Wilkins' voice at Jack's neck is the closest he's ever heard to a growl from a human speaking words: "Then stop feeding it."

The sergeant swallows. "Cotton went up there to see, and 'e ain't come down," he says, almost reasonably if he were not making it hard to breathe with his pressure, the brutal beast smell of him not honest enough to be animal. "Them kids with the witches, Calder wrote that when they was watched the repeats got closer. Telling 'em something. I don't want to- I don't like watching that poor bastard die, an' I don't know what is talkin' to us but I do not want to listen."

He glances up at Brigitte as though wary of physical interference, but his breathing evens out. The pressure on Jack's shoulders shifts, not quite letting him up but at least letting the little Irishman draw breath without a twinge of pain. "Now, can I trust you to follow orders, my lad, or is it the collar again?"

Ngamurudyin's eye can be caught easily enough - though Brigitte is not used to reading the natives' more subtle expressions she can see the tracker's attention on her and some quizzical bent. "?"

Ngarungadurung pads about at the top of the rock face, attempting to trace Cotton's path.

Aside from vanishing into the undergrowth on the landward side there is little Ngarungadurung can tell of Cotton's direction. The sparseness of wildlife around here is distracting, with no small scuttling or hopping things leaving traces on this useful vantage. That there are slightly less cicadas than the extreme abundance lower down does not really explain it - perhaps this bit of country was unfamiliar with them, too.

Jack breathes in. Then out.

"Aye, Sergeant, I'll mind ye. But 'tis best, I'm thinkin', we root out what's happenin' here or quit this territory altogether. Anythin' in between is just dangerous folly."

"Did you kill Adam, Sean and Cara Ryan?" the sergeant asks in response, his voice soft and even as though asking if Jack had seen a dog or shut a gate.

"I didn't--" Jack stops, never taking his eyes from the other man's, "I don't think I did, Sergeant. I think I'd know if I'd done such work and there's nothin' like that in me heart at all. But I don't know where all that time went, y'see? I don't know if Cotton right now knows he's wand'rin' in these woods, or if he thinks he's settin' in his room sippin' tea."

His eyes are frightened now, scared of not knowing.

"But I give ye my word I'll stay th' course with ye an' not try t' run. Whatever we find here, I'll stay th' course all th' way through trial, if need's be. An' if I did them deeds, I'll take m' punishment. God help me."

Jack gets a long look from which little can be read, just squinting calculation and dirty blue. Wilkins does offer him a hand up when he stands, however. "God 'elp you indeed, my son." He swallows and looks over at the cliff. "God 'elp all of us. If 'e even remembers this place exists."

He shakes his head and the swordlike soldier's edge returns to his voice. "Right. So if it ain't you killed them kiddies it's either Daniels or the man we think is Bowen, who definitely used some bits of Ryan in whatever sorcery 'e got up to. Whatever devils live up 'ere, they've been up 'ere at least since them witches were alive - an' given the local tribes apparently knew about 'em and avoided the area that's a few generations, at least - an' probably since God put this land down and filled it with blacks and parrots."

"Calder stirred 'em up, Bowen listened to 'em. Maybe Cotton got 'is dreams tangled with 'em, I don't know. He'll come down or he won't. Me, I am doin what I ought: there's an 'ole continent of unknown out there, just savagery an' chaos, an' my job is to keep the little bit that's England safe."

"So I am going to catch that killer, bring him down, an' see 'im 'anged. Anything else...we don't need to dig nor disturb. Now come on, let's get out of 'ere."

Brigitte listened to Wilkins speech and then followed the man as he went to leave. She kept part of an eye on the trackers as they made their way through the undergrowth.



-

Ngamurudyin is simply standing by the rock face, by now looking mildly irritated. Seeing that Brigitte didn't want her after all and her compatriot is poking about at the edge of the foliage up top, not entirely keen to enter, she drops to a comfortable squat and watches the white folk to try and work out what they're doing now.

[Language unknown: “Lardinive’wa omesanvir osilun iv,”] Ngarungadurung calls down, [Language unknown: “Weosis art nthelo llil’i esver t ectom ectreapro. Ntedaynti ckfi pracet undreatin antverenc nita tr?”] He follows Ngamurudyin’s lead and sits on his haunches, peering over the edge of the cliff at the Europeans below.

Ngamurudyin gives an expressive shrug, then raises her head a little, listening. [Language unknown: "Si omesheoul thelesvor u ateithour,"] she remarks. Ngarungadurung can already tell that's true. The cicadas sing in all their clumps around them but not here.

[Language unknown: “I’a ic erie hi M menlo men letr’p besapa’al.”] Ngarungadurng scrambles for a vantage to one side of the cliff, seeking a spot hidden from and sightly higher than the dead man’s path.

The sergeant looks up at the sudden movement up there, squinting. The cicadas chant and chant and chant without relent.

[[Hmm...give me either a DEX roll or a Hard (half) Stealth, depending on whether Ngarungadurung is more concerned about getting a good position or staying unseen.]]

Brigitte stops as well and then moves over to Ngamurudyin and asks "Do you know what he is trying to do or why the scene keeps repeating ?" She did not question in her head what she had just said, instead hoping the native tracker might understand.


-

"Let's watch, Sergeant, and see can he do anythin' about this," Jack says quietly.

Vantage over stealth...
09:27, Today: Ngarungadurung rolled 28 using 1d100.  DEX 65.

Ngamurudyin understands about four words of Brigitte's query, letting the Frenchwoman get to a sensible talking distance before making a response. This close, Brigitte hears a thrashing and desperate flight through the bush above as Ngamurudyin looks up at her.

"He look," she says, though Brigitte feels there is more. The sounds above are clearly footsteps now.

---

Above, Ngarungadurung has pulled himself into a short snow gum, scrambling onto a chest-high branch to carefully grasp its upward curve and stand peering into the foliage.
Ngarungadurung doesn't have time to do any more than shout after the lad, should he be minded, before the whitefella has plunged far past, looked forward, then down, confused, too late in the aggregate of seconds those movements take.

---

Those below hear an urgent voice above call out amongst the cicada screams: "The- -the speared man! Speared man! Run!"

"No!" the sergeant barks, but Cadlow does not hear him and does not obey, obeying only gravity as he buckles back in his attempt to save himself and slides. Momentum rolls him that one degree past saving as the sergeant turns away, eyes shut as though merely hearing would bear less certain witness.

Gravity remains certain and indifferent. Cadlow falls, and screams, and strikes the rock twice before the water takes him to itself.


"AAAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGH~*"


There are no ripples. The water moves as it did before, and the wind blows and the insects screech. "No!" the sergeant says again, though it's not clear who or what he's trying to command. "No no no no! Enough!"

"God rest him," Jack says quietly and he crosses himself. This is what he expected. "'Tis sure there's no saving the lad."
This message was last edited by the player at 01:47, Mon 10 Aug 2020.

"'e was dead long before we got 'ere," the sergeant says, and calls sharply across to those still near the cliffs. "Are you satisfied, now?"

Brigitte was struggling with what she was seeing and struggling to believe. "Let us go there seems to be little we can do here."


-

Ngamurudyin looks at her a moment, considering, and calls up to the man from the bush: [Language unknown: "Pa! Thaca hiseinnaro houll u ll ine sonnt a U wiiopr vorme chss elofac. Peekar Tr ome con tharutcom ate adanth oneillhou? Atch er preol roai paosca ncain, eeha fo teomof e trathaome ceni sa wias, Il werratear. Cethi evpaen vir eered?"]

"I say him you want go," Ngarungadurung confims to Brigitte, standing.

-
This message was last edited by the player at 15:23, Wed 12 Aug 2020.

"Yes, unless you think there is more to be learned ?" The moisture from her scarf had already disappeared and was quickly being replaced by sweat.



-

[Language unknown: “A thero ek prosankor plugh his sa tioai ameeveoer. Ll setithver Cotton-fella nt icred wa te teain, nd icaen intof cepo,”] Ngarungadurung calls down, [Language unknown: “En haek ec red ce ove, u k wilai.”]

[Language unknown: "Isro, ie? Ven witcomatitraven? Be stme, e po in ai eveveroulrom m er aiel ic ore prole, ti lessaness mi an noncul,"] Ngamurudyin replies, backing enough for him to see her beckoning gesture.

She tries to tackle Brigitte's question whilst explaining: "He say Cottonfella go up, run away. Speared man hunt 'em. Maybe hunt us, too. I say him come down."

"Are you 'avin a picnic over there?" the sergeant calls over, tense and impatient as the insects screech.

Her reference to the repetitive ghost stirs Jack's interest.

"What is th' speared man?" he calls across to Ngamurudyin.
This message was last edited by the player at 12:17, Fri 14 Aug 2020.

Ngamurudyin raises her voice just enough to carry, wary of attention that might be drawn. "Man," she clarifies. "Spear," she says, miming grasping a haft before thumping the midpoint of her chest like impact.

Jack had never seen a fire-hard sapling spear pass through a man but he could imagine from that: the sudden shearing of muscle and bone into a new, brief reality of hot lost blood structured about the shaft that had interrupted the body and rendered its world so changed. He could imagine a speared man, certainly. It was harder to imagine a speared man that could stand, or to whom such mutilation was so natural a state he might continue to live, desire to draw others into that red, killed way of being; hunt.

"His dreaming," she says, gesturing at Budyirikaranga's nephew to indicate a thing not quite her story to tell.

The aboriginal man climbs down from the cliff, to stand near the Compass Woman. He watches the dialogue mutely, seemingly with little comprehension.

As he is turning at the top of the cliff, Ngarungadurung realises his own movements and the discussion with the whitefellas has masked other sounds; he glances up at pale motion swift approaching as Cadlow looks forward and sees him, too late, and braces low in his step for collision. None occurs. Their bodies occupy the same space but from the separation in time or reality or solidity Ngarungadurung's skin feels nothing and the running youth strikes nothing, overbalancing himself to fall a little sooner than he had before. Among the raw terror and the utter confusion at having run through a seemingly solid man, in the instant the young man's gaze meets Ngarungadurung's there is a distant flicker of recognition, like someone trying to place a face they'd seen before. Then he has rolled over the cliff and screams in fear, then in pain, and then stops screaming with a quick, hard crack.


"AAAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGH~*"


There is a splash. The insects ignore the disturbance and the water flows. Ngarungadurung reaches the ground and it is a great relief. Ngamurudyin frowns upwards, then beckons native and European on alike, somewhere else that is away from this. The trees shift as the wind suggests and the water runs in its course, and the cicadas scream to their echoes and back again.