"How long ago?"

"Two hours!!"

"We couldn't blow our cover--" fuck that sounds so fucking weak

"I should have found some way to follow them, but anything would have brought down all the guards--" She should have though.

"Too long ago to catch the car, then," she says, very calmly, although this does kind of make her feel a little uneasy about how useless these people will be if she gets kidnapped. "I'm going to check the map at the front desk, do you know anything else about what happened before I go down?"

“I—he was knocked out by a woman, Victoria Prescott, this morning, she hit him in the head and he was bleeding so much, I didn’t know if he was still alive and a man rescued me but I didn’t want to go off on my own and probably just—get kidnapped again, or make you think I had—I’ll explain more later—“ Wow that also sounds pretty weak.

"--That would be -- the woman who hired us this morning--" he feels sick. Hasn't quite identified the specific details yet.

"Zoe, I would appreciate you coming with me. I don't think any of us should be alone right now, even momentarily."

"I'm with you."

Well, they can check out the map. Are there any notable locations in the direction that the car drove off in.

Yes! The Dingli cliffs.

"Oh god."

Hm. "Do we have a car here?"

Can we get another taxi? Fast?

Annoying. Didn't they have a motorcycle at some point, did they ever take that off the plane?

They can take the bikes to the Dingli cliffs.

Araari is not really talking. Or thinking. Just kind of... Following Oswald around so she won’t be alone.

"...The new moon is still tonight, isn't it." He doesn't want to do anything about it. He wants to hide in the other hotel room with Lev and let the world end without him.

Might not even be this new moon. Might not even connect to the actual new moon. Who knows. It might not matter at all what he actually does.

Well, you can probably fit two people on the motorcycle if you're not a coward. "I think I can take one other person to the cliffs on the motorcycle, who wants to go ahead with me?"

If nobody has strong opinions she'll just pick Zoe on the grounds that she has a vague sense that an acrobat might be good at doing things related to cliffs.

Also Zoe actually saw the people who took him away, and stuff.

This seems like good logic and he's glad he didn't have to volunteer it and look like a coward.

Araari is just going to be saying prayers to herself in a mixture of Amharic and Ge’ez. She mixes ones for Mordred’s safety in with ones for the rest of his immortal soul and figures that God will know which ones are applicable. She is also very glad that she didn’t have to confront the fact that she wanted to say “not me please”.

Zoe packs her gun and her ropes and wears something good for moving in and looks grim.

She'll speed off in the direction of the cliffs with Zoe, then. She's not at all optimistic about saving him, but they should at least try to recover the remains.

The next thing Mordred knows, he's washed up on a warm, sandy white beach.

He opens his eyes and he can't see. Everything hurts -- his skull and his side where he hit the water and his limbs from the places where he didn't manage to avoid getting hit by underwater rocks and his eyes and his lungs and his throat.

The beach is quiet and warm.

He passed out in the ocean and didn't drown -- and he can't see -- not panicking is something of a lost cause but he's not dead how is he not dead.

The beach is quiet and warm and a pretty good place to panic if he's going to panic, which he is.

How is he not dead -- the cult here knows his face now if not his name -- but he's not dead how is he not dead -- the water's shallow here, he can hear the difference, he's not sure how he can hear the difference but he can and it's weirdly comforting -- his lungs still hurt, he coughs a few times and coughs salt water -- he's not dead. Somehow, he's not dead.

It takes a while for his vision to return and when it does he stands up (his limbs feel dead and everything hurts and he's soaking wet and covered in salt and sand but he's not dead) and brushes himself off, mostly ineffectually, and walks away from the beach. He's not totally sure where he is but, as far as directions to start walking in at random go, "away from the ocean" seems at least as good as any.