[ The joke sailed over her head, but at least his pathetic comment made her feel a little more solid. Contemptuously turning off the flashlight, because it was possible for people like Chikane to turn off flashlights in contemptuous ways, she hovered in the dark waters, waiting for him to recover.
Wait, was that?... ]
Over there.
[ Decisive, and said more to herself than to him. She saw the faint glow filtering through the water and cast upon the tunnel wall.
Swimming past Nagisa, and with her light staying off, she made her way to the turn-off. It wasn't much of an opening, off to the side; a hole so small that if they were too much bigger, they couldn't squeeze through it. She tucked a protective hand over her breathing apparatus as she stuck her head through the hole.
On the other side was a short tunnel, at the end of which a vast, open cavern was visible. The light source was immediately apparent: the pale bodies of columnar sponges, the scale of which she didn't understand until she saw the flecks of fat fish swimming among them. They were huge, 3 or 4 meters tall, and glowing softly. Around their bases wide shelves and concentric rings of the white "mushrooms" grew. Long silver bodies snaked out of the tops of these sponges, reached into the water, and then retracted smoothly. Chikane couldn't tell what they were doing. The terraces of stone against the walls (and even up into the entry tunnel) were salted with some kind of short, squirming grass, or was it a kind of anemone? Neither altogether, nor all separate, but in colonies uncoordinated, flights of grass would pulse with a blue light, flatten their tall stalks against the rock, and dim.
Fascinated, saying nothing to Nagisa, she slipped through the tunnel and into the cavern. ]
no subject
[ The joke sailed over her head, but at least his pathetic comment made her feel a little more solid. Contemptuously turning off the flashlight, because it was possible for people like Chikane to turn off flashlights in contemptuous ways, she hovered in the dark waters, waiting for him to recover.
Wait, was that?... ]
Over there.
[ Decisive, and said more to herself than to him. She saw the faint glow filtering through the water and cast upon the tunnel wall.
Swimming past Nagisa, and with her light staying off, she made her way to the turn-off. It wasn't much of an opening, off to the side; a hole so small that if they were too much bigger, they couldn't squeeze through it. She tucked a protective hand over her breathing apparatus as she stuck her head through the hole.
On the other side was a short tunnel, at the end of which a vast, open cavern was visible. The light source was immediately apparent: the pale bodies of columnar sponges, the scale of which she didn't understand until she saw the flecks of fat fish swimming among them. They were huge, 3 or 4 meters tall, and glowing softly. Around their bases wide shelves and concentric rings of the white "mushrooms" grew. Long silver bodies snaked out of the tops of these sponges, reached into the water, and then retracted smoothly. Chikane couldn't tell what they were doing. The terraces of stone against the walls (and even up into the entry tunnel) were salted with some kind of short, squirming grass, or was it a kind of anemone? Neither altogether, nor all separate, but in colonies uncoordinated, flights of grass would pulse with a blue light, flatten their tall stalks against the rock, and dim.
Fascinated, saying nothing to Nagisa, she slipped through the tunnel and into the cavern. ]