It's always nice when she gets assigned to the same dungeon as Bryce and Toby. Doesn't happen that often, but it puts a smile on her face every time.
Doesn't mean she's not busy, of course. The second she finishes checking up on the last rescuee out of the dungeon, she sees one of the other rescuees tripping on the corner of the guiding tent, and heads over to double-check that nothing inside broke when they fell on it.
As she approaches the guiding tent, she will hear:
a shriek, which may or may not be human,
followed by the distinct and earsplitting sound of many tons of concrete and asphalt splitting and crumbling instantaneously.
She will see:
All right! We are not freaking out, we are problem solving!
She takes a breath. She can breathe, so that's cool. It's nasty slimy in here, and hard to hear much over the distant, muffled screaming reverberating through the walls.
First things first, she should check herself for injuries... all good? All good.
Next... if there's anybody else in here, she should find them and make sure they're okay... which is going to be a bit difficult, on account of the slimy screaming darkness. Welp, no time like the present. She cautiously forays a low, "Anybody there?", prepared to get louder if results are ambiguous or quieter if anything seems to be riled up by the attempt.
She, let alone anyone who's in there with her, can barely hear the words. She might not be able to make them out even if she shouted at the top of her lungs.
Oh that is a loud-ass whale. Or whatever it is. She's just put in mind of whales because of that bit in Pinocchio.
How about shuffling along the slimy wall, anything getting in the way of that?
She can certainly trace her hands along soft slimy walls. Or at least, soft slimy surfaces. Soft, slimy... folds.
Her feet are a different matter. It's not altogether clear there's solid ground down there. It's not completely clear that "down" is even the direction her feet are in.
Okay, if that's the baseline level of orientation available in this here whale belly, her best bet is to stay put for now. If anything starts feeling digestive she'll reevaluate. Or if somebody runs into her.
Nobody runs into her.
Something grabs her hand, though, as it's tracing.
It's entirely plausible that it's another human hand! It's not doing anything other than grabbing.
Okay cool, she can hold hands with a stranger in a big slimy whale belly, why not. Adjust grip somewhat, attempt to confirm humanity of grabber?
Those might be fingers! That might be a palm. That is very plausibly a wrist.
It squeezes her hand, twice.
Valid of them, honestly. She can chill out and hold hands until something else happens. Try to hang on reassuringly, that kind of thing. In an ideal world she would be able to say "can I check you over for injuries" but this is not an ideal whale so she's gonna wait on that for now because blindly groping all over their body is not going to make this a calmer or more pleasant experience for them even, perhaps especially, if they are in fact hurt.
For long minutes, there's nothing, just the soft and the warm and the humid and the slimy, and the scared desperate grip of a stranger's hand,
and the scream.
The ?whale?'s orientating might be changing, gradually. It's hard to tell.
Vomiting is an unpleasant experience. Being vomited is utterly singular.
The slick soft folds surrounding her and holding her in place slacken, giving her body just a moment to slide free before an enormous hot gush of air and slime geysers up from below her feet and carries her up through the creature's throat. Was she ever knocked over and spun around by a wave taller than she was, visiting the beach? Did it smell and taste not like brine but like bile - was the air hot, damp, blind-dark - did her wave deposit her ungracefully in a puddle of thick colorless worm-spittle on a slab of dark rock in the middle of a sandstorm. It's like that.
Well that was all around pretty gross, but hey, look on the bright side! She can see now!
Did the person she was holding hands with make it out? Any others? How many? Is she gonna have to take charge of this situation? She hates taking charge of situations but if she's gotta do it she'd better do it right away.
The person she was holding hands with is maybe moving to hug her and start crying.
There are quite a few other people who made it out, yeah - probably everyone in the rescues tent and possibly everyone in the guiding tent too and a couple people who were nearby besides.
She can totally hug a crying person. She is so well specced for providing hugs in difficult situations.
What she doesn't see, squinting through the blowing sand, is anybody else who can reasonably be called upon to make this situation their problem instead of hers.
Wiping worm slime off her face reveals that this sandstorm is godawful to breathe in. She shields her face somewhat with an elbow and tries to communicate to her new friend, mostly with mime and gesture because she's a bit deafened by worm screams and she bets they are too, that they should try to get everybody huddled up so they can communally keep each other's faces out of the wind as best they can.
Then together they can hopefully get everyone into a big huddle and have a slightly less awful time breathing while they wait for the storm to die down. (If it's gonna die down. It might not.)
While she's herding everybody, she keeps an eye out for obvious injuries. If the storm passes in a reasonable timeframe she can check everybody over then, but in the meantime if she sees someone having a really bad time she can think about what to do for them. And if she sees anyone wearing a jacket, she can try to convince them to take it off and use it to shield faces with. The less sand in people's faces here, the better.
No one's badly injured, at least not immediately obviously. One person is sitting curled up on the ground, fists clenched in their hair; one person is taking off their jacket and trying futilely and kind of desperately to towel the slime out of their clothes with it, even as the sandstorm buffets them.
Can we get the huddle to shelter the curled-up person while also kinda sorta giving them a bit of space? Let's find out.
A man in a brown leather jacket, apparently under the impression that he's helping, seizes curled-up person by the scruff of the neck and attempts to incorporate them into the huddle.
That is not an appropriate way to grab people! How about she takes over herding the curled-up person into the huddle so the guy in the jacket doesn't have to.
Jacketguy tosses his head in an eye-rolling sort of way at the notion that curled-up person is going to stay curled up on the ground and not contribute to the co-shielding effort but makes no further protest or resistance.
As long as he stops trying to drag people around by the scruff of their neck he can roll his eyes as much as he wants.
Distressed About Slime Person is still Distressed About Slime, and looks to be dithering between joining the huddle for sandstorm protection, and staying away from it so as not to touch other slimy people, or touch people while being slimy themself.
Can she try motioning them over to at least shelter next to the huddle, if not directly in it? The shelter won't be nearly as good but it'll be something.
It takes a bit of doing, but after a moment they seem to decide they can bear to go along with someone else's decision if they don't have to make it themself. They won't quite touch anyone in the huddle but they'll keep close to it with their face away from the wind.
Then assuming nobody else has any glaring problems... man, can she get people to shield each other's faces with their jackets? Maybe not, the sand is blowing pretty hard and her hands are starting to sting. Maybe it is time to just huddle up and wait it out.
As long as the sand allows, though, she'll squint her eyes open occasionally to check on people, even if she has to do it behind her hand. Everybody on this rock is her problem now and if somebody needs something she'd better notice so she can figure it out.
Curled Up Person is curled up. Distressed By Slime Person is anxious and tense and shifty but adequately contributing to the huddle. Jacket Guy is not making trouble. Crying Boy Who Held Her Hand As They Tumbled Out Of The Sandworm is huddling close to her and maybe wants to hold her hand again.
After a little while, Hand Holding Boy will try to yell over the storm to ask her how much longer she thinks it's going to be. Not many people can yell hesitantly but he manages it.
"Hard to say," she yells back, trying to be as encouraging as possible while shouting from behind her hand to minimize sand ingestion. "Could be a while!"
Her squinting-through-her-fingers checks get rarer and rarer; she's concerned that if she does them too often, eventually her eyes will catch so much sand she won't be able to see either way. But as best she can, she pays attention to how everyone is doing.
The vibes are miserable, but no new emergencies present themselves - not, at least, before the sandstorm starts to die down.
It did take a while, but it didn't take forever.
The dark rock slab is covered in drifts of sand - not so thickly that they can't tell it apart from the dunes, but thickly enough to have buried some ankles.
The sky is too-pale blue. The dunes stretch on forever.
In addition to some ankles, the sand deposited by the storm has half-buried the remains of the guiding and medical tents, also spat up by the worm as it deposited its victims.
When it becomes clear that they're getting a meaningful reprieve and not just a vague lull, she gets moving.
"I see tents! Who wants tents? C'mon, help me get them set up."
She can start with just Hand Holding Boy if nobody else jumps at the chance to help, but one of the things you pick up after spending a while as senior gofer at many successive dungeon sites is the ability to take a vague pile of tasks and an aimless crowd of potential assistants and get them matched up to each other in a semi-organized fashion.
Of particular note: how much of the supplies made it through? She's crossing her fingers hoping for her big first aid kit, and if she's really lucky, the box of extra wet wipes that she's pretty sure was next to it. They could all use a little less slime in their lives right now, especially that one guy.
Hand Holding Boy sticks close to her. Brown Leather Jacket Guy can be directed to help dig out the tents. The first aid kit will turn out to be there, tumbled over but securely shut. The box of wet wipes was jostled open but at least some of them are salvageable. A woman who she enlisted to help sort through supplies also turns up a box of mini water bottles.
Curled Up Person progresses to lying on their back in the sand staring at the too-pale blue sky. Distressed By Slime Person is stripping down to their underwear.
She clears a space in the middle of the rock slab and gets two tents arranged face to face; it'll be an awkward squeeze to get in, but it'll help protect against sand blowing in through the front. Helpful people get directed to pile up the sand against the sides as much as possible, to weigh them down so they don't blow away, and to protect them against being eroded by blowing sand. To help weigh them down and to make sure there isn't a huge scramble for shelter when the storm starts back up, she asks people to crowd into the tents as much as possible unless they've got work to do outside, and she stashes useful supplies inside the tents as well. Any useless debris like broken boxes, sand-clogged wet wipes, or the third tent they find that's torn mostly to scrap can get tangled up in the sand piles on the outside, to give them a little more structure and hopefully stop them blowing away too easily.
Anyone who wants water can get a mini water bottle of their very own. Extra wet wipes go to Distressed By Slime, but everyone can have a couple of wet wipes for general sand and slime reduction purposes, there's enough to go around. She keeps an eye out for anyone who might be in need of the first aid kit; if she has the time before the storm resumes, she'll try to give everyone an individual check-up to catch non-obvious issues.
Most folks are willing to pile into the tents, at least at first. Mini water bottles go like hot cakes. Distressed By Slime wants to stay out behind one of the tents with minimal clothes on, at least for now. Curled Up Person is still lying on their back, outside; someone's crouched next to them, trying to wheedle them into coming inside the tents.
Okay, how best to approach this...
She'll do the check-ups, she decides. A lot of these people have already gotten a check-up from her, but then they took a trip on the Worm Express, which in her opinion makes them due for another one.
And in the course of doing the check-ups, she naturally ends up separating the Formerly Curled-Up Person from the person bothering them, so that eventually, when she gets around to checking up on the Formerly Curled-Up Person, she can have a little time and privacy to sit down next to them.
"Hey," she says. "Rough day, huh?"
They drag themself laboriously up into a sitting position.
"Sorry," they say, in a small voice.
"I mean, I think it's pretty fair to be having a hard time right now. Nobody loves a giant worm."
Snort.
"I just, I," they say, and curl their knees up to their chest and hug themself.
"We were out."
"We were out and now we have to do the whole thing again, and, it's - "
Their breath is starting to come faster.
"Yeah. And that sucks! But you got rescued that time and we'll get rescued this time too."
...there's always a part of her, when it comes time to use certain parts of her training, that thinks it's not going to work. Surely she's just going to sound silly. Surely she's not reading the situation right, surely she doesn't really know what she's doing, surely the things she was told to try won't help, won't land right, won't get through.
Sometimes the right thing to do is to sound silly, though.
"Can you take a deep breath for me?"
They scrunch their eyes shut, and clutch harder at their hair, and their scalp - but they do take a breath, long, slow, and let it out shakily.
Instinctively, she matches the pace of her breathing to theirs. It makes it easier to lead by example when she says, "Again?"
She leads them through a few more breaths, and when it seems like they're catching the rhythm and following it down, she leads them through a couple more and then hands them a water bottle.
Breathe. Sip.
"I just," they say, and their voice still sounds strained, shaky, but not on the edge of spiraling any more, "I don't feel like I can do it again. I don't even know what I mean by that, it's not like I can - "
They gesture around, jerkily, frustrated. "What am I gonna do other than do it again. But I can't."
"Yeah. It sucks that we're here. If I could make us not be here, I would, but all I can do is try to make it suck a little less."
Sad giggle. "Thanks."
They dehug a little, and run their hands through their hair.
"Can you just," they say in a small voice, "just - tell me what to do."
"Yeah, I can do that."
She directs them over to the tents, to shelter against them a bit out of the way but within easy reach, so that if everybody needs to pile in there in a hurry they won't be left behind.
Slightly less clingy, slightly less shaky. "Thanks. Sorry I was useless with getting the tents set up."
"Hey, sometimes the first step in taking care of yourself is to lie on the floor going 'fuck my life'. It doesn't feel very useful from the inside but I think it also doesn't work very well to skip it."
"Thanks."
"I - I think I can stand here, for a little while at least, without freaking out again. If you've got important leader stuff to be doing." They think about asking whether the group can do something together to pass the time but it doesn't seem - right, somehow.
"Yeah, I should probably check on some stuff, make sure everybody's got their water, that kinda thing. One more hug for the road?"
Hug. "I'm glad I could help!"
All right, does everybody have their water? Are we chill? We're probably not chill.
We are indeed not chill.
Brown Leather Jacket Guy is having an argument with Distressed By Slime about whether it is appropriate for the latter to use some of their limited water supply to wash more slime out of their hair. Someone wants more water. Someone wants food. Someone wants to put together a scouting party and look for the exit portal.
Everybody gets their own share of the water, it's probably a better idea to drink it than wash with it but anyone who just really really needs that grit out of their eyes or that slime out of their hair can use their own water to do it. She is not handing out more water yet but she will when enough people get thirsty. Has anybody found food? If there's food then they can see about sharing it out in a sensible way, otherwise they just gotta wait.
As for the exit expedition, "I'm worried this place is big enough that anybody trying to walk around out there would get lost in the sand. As long as we all stick together on this rock, we're way easier for rescuers to find."
" - plus isn't this Arrakis?" says a red-haired woman. "Don't the Arrakis worms kill you if you walk on the sand?"
"Wait, jesus fuck, what?" says one of the erstwhile scouting party members, a blond-haired late teenager or early adult, and someone else says "Do you mean Infested Wasteland?" and yet a third person says "I thought this was Shimmering Sands, doesn't it also have worms" and the blond boy says "No, hold on, there's sand all over this rock from the sandstorm - "
"Infested Wasteland... yeah, I remember reading about that one, now that you mention it," she says. "The big worm that carried us here fits the bill, right? Okay, so everybody should stay on the rock."
"Okay but there's sand everywhere, we are stepping on the sand even if we're on the rock," says Starting To Kind Of Panic Blond Boy.
She scoots over a little closer. "Hey, it's okay," she says. "We know it's safe on the rock because we've been on the rock this whole time." Is this a deep breaths situation yet?
" - okay," he says. He does take a couple of deep breaths, but on his own recognizance. "Okay. We're safe if we stay on the rock?"
"The worms come up from below," says Red-Haired Lady Who Thinks She Recognizes Arrakis, and mimes this with her hand, making a little three-jawed worm mouth with her fingers. "They can't do that with a rock in the way. And it doesn't kidnap people just to kill them - I mean that's what I read."
"All right. Uh. I won't leave the rock," he says, a little sheepishly. He looks at Erstwhile Organizing A Scouting Party Guy. "Sorry, man, sounds like it was a bad idea."
"Yeah. We'll be all right here until the rescue teams show up. And if giant worms are busting out of the street to kidnap people, there's no way they're not already putting together rescue teams. All we have to do is hunker down and wait."
Smile. They shift anxiously for a moment, then blurt out, "would it be like totally crazy or inappropriate to suggest we look for a deck of cards or something to pass the time."
"No, I think that's a great idea. Does anybody have a deck of cards?" She glances over the crowd. "Two or three, if we're lucky?"
Oh they were not totally expecting Kimberly to make the two of them the center of attention immediately after they asked that. They blush a little. But okay.
The crowd does turn up a couple of decks of cards, one fairly old and battered and one still in the plastic, bought before the previous dungeon had kidnapped its owner. (Folks looking through their purses also turn up three (3) cherry tomatoes in a plastic bag and one single granola bar.)
Then Kimberly can get everybody organized into a couple of card games. And make a note of how much food they've got; frankly, that's enough to be a problem and not enough to be a solution, so she's mostly hoping nobody will get hungry enough to start a fight over it before the rescuers show up.
Two decks across this many people is a bit of a stretch, but somebody also turns up a pen and a notepad and offers to referee a game of Mafia. Old battered deck gets used to play Thirty-One, new deck gets used to play Spoons (with N Minus One miscellaneous objects scrounged from several purses.)
Kimberly fishes around for some pocket junk to contribute to the spoon pile and comes up with the most spoonlike object anyone has found so far, a sort of mutant spork with a spoon on one end and a fork/knife on the other. It's made of purple plastic and has some pocket lint stuck to it, especially around the vestigial plastic serrations in the knife area.
One of the spoons guys examines it and sporfles. "Hell am I even looking at here?" he says, delightedly.
"I call it a sponk. It came packaged with some food my best friend bought, and she foisted it off on me because she didn't want it. It's so silly, isn't it?"
"It's fuckin' spectacular," the guy says, and then, to the table: "she gets her sponk back at the end of the game," to which there is general agreement.
"I will admit I'm kind of fond of it, even though I've never been glad I had it in my pocket until today."
