Somewhere deep underground, in a quiet echoing dim-lit cavern disturbed only by the whisper of ventilation shafts painstakingly installed, the woman sings. Her voice rises and falls, one moment clear as a mountain-brook, the next husky and deep, then almost a scream or maybe a sob.
She sings of rage, and pain, and loss, and despair, and a final desperate quest for vengeance.
She sings, and she makes it beautiful - and makes it hurt, both at the same time.
A man sits at her feet, his fingers drawing impossible-seeming sounds from the sitar-like instrument held in his lap.
The ventilation tunnels above are mostly not very spacious. However, there is a certain route by which a sufficiently determined and stubborn - and also sufficiently skinny - teenager, who is not claustrophobic, can wriggle most of the way down and then emerge into a nexus with a little more room.
Anstat drops into the chamber as silently as possible, starts the chemlight, and slides his lovingly dissassembled-and-packaged electric violin down on its tether. Then pulls the collapsible rubber pipe that they bought for this out, and pushes it through into the next ventilation shaft until it's up the the red mark.
He tugs the tether three times to send the 'start preparing' signal, then starts putting his violin together.
Ronda, fronting Trashfire but not too hard, starts loading the ammunition to send down the pipe.
Anstat assembles his instrument. Plugs in the miniature-but-powerful amplifier and speaker setup, and slides those, too, down the ventilation tunnel as far as they'll go. He only has enough battery for five minutes but it's enough.
He sends the final signal, five very fast tugs. He places the bow. Hopes the instrument is in tune, there's no good way to check.
He plays a note, that echoes on and on and on.
Trashfire laughs, angry and wild, and flips the lever on their homemade apparatus to start the ammunition going.
And in the space between two notes, a woman falls out of the air and lands with an undignified squawk.
She scrambles up to a sitting posture, gaze darting around the cavern, looking for threats.
There's just a woman, singing her heart out about something that sounds very angst-driven, accompanied by a man playing a string instrument of some kind.
There's an audience, too, mostly arrayed in a semicircle and flopped on various soft things; she's landed right in the middle of them.
And then, about three seconds after she lands, the ABSURDLY LOUD strain of a violin note echoes from, apparently, the ceiling -
- from which, a second or two after that, an absurdly vast quantity of ladybugs start pouring out, as Anstat moves into the opening notes of 'Ladybug Ladybug Won't You Be Mine'.
A month earlier, elsewhere:
"Hey," Veth says, lounging back and looking at her tablet. "Did you know you can buy ladybugs in bulk? They ship them refrigerated by the pound."
"...Oh no."
"We have to do it."
Trashfire is DELIGHTED!!!!
Nobody of Thorn's likes bugs, so instead she ends up shifting to the her that's the best at screaming like a little girl.
She shrieks, and crabscuttles backwards.
If they were hoping to startle Nightengale enough that she would stop singing, they do not, actually, succeed in this. She's pretty hard to distract.
Rastax, on the other hand, swears loudly. There are ladybugs somehow inside his sitar, rattling around upsetly.
Oh, don't worry, they have EVEN MORE LADYBUGS COMING! It turns out you can buy a really ridiculous quantity of refrigerated ladybugs for about the price of a used scooter, and this was a WAY BETTER purchase.
- and Hannah comes up.
She closes her mouth with an audible click of teeth. There are bugs on her ew ew ew.
(At least they're just ladybugs. Look on the bright side.)
She follows the crowd's reaction as best she can, scrambling up onto her feet so she can move.
The crowd is...taking this remarkably calmly? Not quite like it's an everyday occurrence, it's definitely getting attention, but they're mostly not freaking out about it.
....Dance party?
Dance party!!!!
idk just roll with it
She starts dancing, trying her best not to inhale a bug.
Nightengale is having fun.
She reaches the end of the half-improvised song. Waits for the violin sounds to die down before yelling up at the ventilation duct; she's excellent at projecting. "Who's there? You're half decent!"
"Well, then, Mister Wizard. I'm sure we'll meet again, someday in these depths, and I never forget a voice."
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