To Live and Uplift Underground 16


Earthquakes.


You might be wondering how anyone in the underground at all survived these bloody things. Being essentially trapped underground, it would be correct to assume that there is no safe places like there were in, well, the surface. 


Given that Drow society, for better or worse, persists through these horrors, obviously something is going on. You might suppose at that point that, perhaps, some way and some how the earthquakes we experienced were not as bad as they are anywhere in the world.


Or my past life, for that matter.


Because the fact that Outskirt Drow existed in the numbers that we do DOES imply a less terrible experience. 


However, that supposition undermines one of the very few positives the drow have.


Certainly, our sheer survival showed a certain mastery not only over our land, but also the phenomena that happened in it. Or, at least, the grit necessary to gain them.


You could also point to, in theory, the safety of the City: however its mechanisms worked, the City’s safety also indicated manners in which the rest of us could swing and weave with these quakes. But by this point, I hope you’ve realized that we didn’t benefit from those.


In the end, while the City has its magics and its miracle workers, all we had was spiteful endurance.


Yes, there were a number of tunnels and caves that were so inherently stable that they never collapsed in the Outskirts. But we had to find them to begin with. Nobody told the first exiles where they were, and our gang didn’t have magical compasses that told them where they were when we traveled underground. Nobody is born with this sort of knowledge.


Yes, the fact that there even was an Outskirt community showed that adapting to the earthquakes was possible. But that adaptation came at a cost measured in blood.


About the only thing that allowed us to survive them was the fact that, like people, not all earthquakes were equal. And because they weren’t, “safety” was a scale rather than a binary.


The best place to weather one was, of course, in a home of your own; caves and tunnels that the most knowledgeable woman of your gang could vet for their stability and survivability. Or, at the very least, could reinforce to make them so.


Lacking that, sometimes, being within “raid me please!” distance of the City was enough for their protections to also apply to you.


But without either of those? There was always the possibility that the caves or tunnels you were in were particularly sturdy. After a whole life of living down here, drow elves became passably good at identifying them, at least.


But not like the gang’s Survey Mistress.


Jarn’at, Talia and me looked each other in the eyes and the same thoughts, at the same speed, with the same conclusion passed through our minds:


We had to go back.


Not because it was their mission and my goal, but because, then and there, it had the highest chance of being safe.


However, that was the last time our minds matched.


“Quickly, Arione,” Jarn’at rushed in and grabbed my right hand.


“Come with me!” Talia, at the same time, rushed in and grabbed my left.


“Hey!” I scuffed as they pulled me into two different directions, getting us nowhere.


And this, just as walls were visually lilitating like a bad screen effect, and the ceiling started spitting dirt down on us, and the ground started making us take short hops.


 “What are you doing?” they both screamed at each other as they stopped and wasted precious few seconds glaring at each other.


So I took the hands grabbing me, and pulled at them as I legged it back to the gang.


“No-Arione, that way’s too long!” Talia growled with fright as rocks started falling around us, pointing at the direction I was heading. It was the path my screening squad had taken, “Take the tunnels going up; they are twice as fast!”


“And twice as unstable!” Jarn’at yelled as she dodged a stone that loosened from a wall, “There are a few holes cutting through all the climb and bends just ahead. They are holes from small moles, so they should be hard to collapse!”


“You want us to crawl?” Younger Talia gaped as we started swinging like a drunken pack, “Do you want to get buried alive?”


The sound of stone grinding was enough to awaken all the most primal instincts that I had, so I knew that my cousins felt them, too.


It made thinking clearly hard, and that was without having to spend any brain power on talking like they were.


In retrospect, all options were equally bad. The best choice that we could have made was to commit to one of them right away and hurry through it.


Instead of doing that, my cousins wasted time opining equally contradictory choices.


And I wasted time opining the compromise, “The scout path that my squad took was planned by our Survey Mistress, right?”


I actually didn’t know that, but it made sense to me at the time. 


“I-I-maybe?” Younger Talia stumbled.


“It has to be, since all crew leads talk to her, right?” I reasoned as I helped her get up.


“I don’t think it-” Jarn’at started to say but stopped when I looked at her pleadingly.


“...pro-probably,” she ended up breathing out as a loud crack collapsed a part of the ceiling behind us.


And forced us to commit to the option.


It made so much sense to me, you know. Mother’s circle was full of women considered indispensable to the gang and, so, of use to the whole of it. Why wouldn’t the crew leads use her?


However, I was assuming that she was perfectly omniscient.


The path that my squad had taken wasn’t always the one that gang would have to take, but it certainly had to cross it at many instances.


The amount of distance just 5 Outskirt Drow could take in just 5 days was deceptively quick, so we were a fair distance away from our gang. 


The time that it would take the gang to get this far marked the area we were in as the midpoint of our immigration path.


So we were far away from our gang, could probably expect help to be too late to arrive, and even if they did, they’d have problems finding our exact location if they even knew to look for us.


We still had to try.


The violence of an earthquake made it feel as though it only lasted less than a minute, topside. But underground, we got to taste its foreshots and tails. While this quake probably and barely felt like 5 seconds on the surface, it felt the walls and floor did not stop moving for at least 5 minutes.


5 terrifying, that we couldn’t afford to idly wait out, minutes.


We stumbled across a shaking floor, and we stepped away from crumbling walls.


The stability of the tunnels we were in held on remarkably well, which is the only reason why we weren’t just doomed to die. 


The ceiling closed around us as we dispersed through wide caverns that seemed to collapse on themselves as well dissapeared around us. More than traveling back to the gang, at this point, we were simply avoiding being buried alive, always one step ahead of falling debris.


But it didn’t seem that way.


To us, it just seemed like our paths were collapsing one after the other.


Maybe if we had been faster on the uptake then, maybe, the way further ahead would have been less unstable.


Maybe if we had taken the other paths we could have found one of those super stable pockets. Maybe our initial resistance screwed us over, no matter which way we picked.


I suspect that last one was the true factor at play but, honestly, I don’t know.


All I know is that Matreal’s glee started to quiet, and the shakes of the earthquake started to ebb.


We made it past the collapsing caverns and got on a tunnel that had done a fairly good job of retaining its shape.


Despite the difficulty of making any headway when the earth is shaking beneath your feet, it was only then that it could really be said that we started to slow down. Trying to be swift while retaining your stability was incredibly tiring, as it turns out.


The girls even stopped to check themselves.


And even I tried to catch my breath.


Smiles, despite the mutual enmity between my cousins, sprouted on all of our faces.


That thrill that came with surviving mixed up with the realization that we could have all just died and made us all choke out vibrant, joyous, coping laughs.


I walked ahead of them for the moment. Not because I meant to, but because it hadn’t yet occurred to me to stop. You’d understand if you ever survived a natural disaster like that.


But that’s when I felt it.


Or, rather, when I saw it from the corner of my eye.


I stepped on a tiny fissure that developed before my eyes. The tunnel that we had been traveling, so seemingly stable, was developing a crack that ran from the bottom of my feet to the top of the ceiling.


The trembling was so low by this point that the earthquake had practically ended, so it seemed safe. It should have been, really.


But above us, the ceiling was about to collapse.


We had slowed down too much.


I turned around and reached for my cousins.


“JUMP!” I yelled as I tried to grab one hand from each of them.


But they were too far apart for me to grab both.


They were both leaning against the wall as sweat ran down their faces, and they were catching their breath.


They were half crouching, their backs in the motion of sliding down those walls.


They were, in a word, caught flat-footed at the worst possible time.


They both made to get up, to try and get out of there.


But I knew they would not make it.


Not without my help.


But I…I could only reach one.


I could only save one.


Aunt Talia’s talk came back to me  all of a sudden, in that frozen moment of time. She told me that I would have to make a choice at some point, regardless of what I preferred, because of the sort of person I was.


But this wasn’t that!


This was-


This was…


…so unfair.
.
.
.


You.


…what do you think?


You know which one I chose, right?