It worked!!

She continues to listen to the voices ahead as they march forward. She'll speak up (at hopefully a more reasonable volume; she's not actually sure how loud she should be) when it sounds like they notice the party, when she sees them, or when someone else in the party can hear them, whichever comes first.

Camellia indicates after a few seconds that she can now hear the annoying kids.

"Hello up there!" she calls, at a more reasonable volume this time.

Pause.

"Hello!" calls the deeper voice, approaching their location. It reveals itself to belong to some kind of fucked up half-lizardman, with a bow and arrows strapped to his back. "I - are you surfacers?"

The higher voice, presumably, belongs to the girl following him at a more leisurely pace. Her aesthetic is more coherent; blue skin, cat eyes, spider legs on her back. None of this mix-and-match nonsense. She's also got a bow and arrows.

She looks like she'd really like to act like she's not even interested, but she's having a hard enough time keeping herself from immediately running up and sniffing them all personally, so she's compromising by glaring at them.

Miko looks back at her companions for a moment before looking back at the pair of… teenagers.

"Yes. What else would we be?"

This doesn't bode well for their chances of getting back up. Hopefully Camellia's Commune With Nature does its job.

"You could have been Neathers like us. With really subtle tells. I knew a girl who looked almost like her on the outside," gesture towards Camellia, "it was weird, you couldn't even tell she was one of us until she took off her-"

"Wenduag!!!"

Unspoken: don't be weird in front of the surfacers!!!

Camellia frowns. "I have been likened to more unpleasant beings, but I might like the implications here the least."

What! What even is a Neather! When you learn the Secret Lore of the Sapphire Guard you kind of tend to assume that there aren't any more insane secrets left to learn!

"I don't think we have… Neathers… where I come from."

"You might be more familiar with the common term mongrel," Camellia contributes. "Not that I knew they were real, but. One does hear stories."

Wenduag bares her teeth. "Don't call me that, you unblooded -"

"Wenduag!" Lann's voice is firmer this time. "It's just a word. And it means what it means. Yes, we're the mongrels... back during the Crusade, almost seventy-five thousand gongs ago, a few units of crusaders were sent underground, and their blood no longer ran true. They looked like we look, and their children did too. We don't know why that first generation didn't return to the surface; they could have. Since they didn't, no one is willing to... or, well, a few have left, but no one will actually try to mobilize the population to get us all back up. So we're just a story to scare little kids, instead of being a part of the world again."

The usage of "mongrel" Miko's familiar with is people who are deliberately trying to be rude about half-orcs. She doesn't volunteer this.

"… Interesting. How long is a gong? Do you take damage from the sunlight? Was it the simple fact of being underground that corrupted you?"

She does NOT want to become even more of a template stack.

"A gong is half a surface day, we've got keepers to track them. The sunlight never hurt me when I went up, but it's... disorienting, for the first week or so. And no. We're not corrupted, and what happened to our ancestors was unique and singular, all at once. There's a few surfacers who ended up in the tunnels one way or another, and they get pale but they don't get like us."

Mental math, mental math… if Lann is correct, then this happened about a hundred years ago, it sounds like. She doubts his claim that this could be anything but corruption and wishes she had access to a Restoration spell. Maybe Camellia can prepare it; she'll have to ask her if they don't find the surface before she has the opportunity to prepare spells.

At least if he's telling the truth she won't necessarily wind up a Neather on top of everything else. She's not sure how much she trusts that, though. And there's something else important that he just said:

"We're trying to get back to the surface right now, actually. Would you be able to help us?"

"Yes!" Lann says immediately. "And - will you help us as well?"

Wenduag looks sharply at him. "What are you doing?"

"If they can find the Sword -"

"Oh, yes, they'll find the angel's sword and then hand it to us, no trouble, these filthy mongrels have a prior claim, it's not like we play by finders keep rules -"

"Crusaders have honor," Lann says stubbornly. "And this woman is a crusader."

Wenduag makes an angry cat noise but doesn't have words to go with it.

Oh, good, they brought up the sword first. And it's not as bad as she first feared—it sounded like they had maybe looted it off a body, at first.

"Tell us more about the sword?"

"The angel Lariel, one of the celestial warriors sent from the Upper Planes to aid the crusaders, came with our progenitors down to these caverns. He was killed, in the battle they were sent to fight. His tomb is somewhere around here. They buried him with his sword, a powerful artifact of the forces of Good. Generations of Neathers have searched for it, to no avail. If I can find it, I know I can convince the chieftain to bring the tribes aboveground. It'll be a sign."

"If it doesn't burn you for your corruption," Wenduag hums.