08-13-2013, 10:18 AM
Finally. Some peace and quiet. Aria wasn't an issue; the girl seemed to be wound a little tight, but at least she was quiet. That Candy had finally shut up was a bloody miracle. Hood moved with all the casual confidence of a man who had walked those tunnels a few times. The 'Dead Reckoning' module and auto-map program in his more advanced Land Warrior goggles already contained some maps of the tunnels, and when they wandered beyond the areas he had traversed, it began building onto what already existed.
The two Atharim would occasionally pause and study their surroundings, not unlike a pair of cats on the prowl, but each noise, or lack there of, that seemed to spark the attention of the two women were usually dismissed by Hood. He was no expert by far, but he had spent enough time in the tunnels to get a good idea of direction and distance for those sounds. And even if it were close by, he seemed pretty hard to spook, simply turning slightly in the direction of the source and studying the shadows before moving on.
Even in an area as run down as where Hood lived, some of the tunnels still had light. In places, at least. In others, they had been deliberately smashed or had simply burned out over the years and not yet been replaced. There were far higher priority areas in Moscow at the moment, and so long as water, gas, and electricity still flowed, the city couldn't be bothered with renovations.
He wasn't sure what to make of the two women; Candy seemed almost to be following a scent, and Aria, while still calm, seemed a bit off-put by something. Or everything. He couldn't quite decide. But she did seem to be calming down; the last thing he wanted was to have to deal with some over-eager gun bunny and a claustrophobic knife fanatic.
As Candy knelt to sift through the debris on the floor and round up some spent casings, Hood circled the larger chamber; partly to let his glasses map the area a bit more thuroughly, but also to scan the walls for where those fired rounds had ended up. Some he found, and he casually dug one projectile from the crumblnig concrete of the tunnel wall. There wasn't too much out of the ordinary; whatever the missing Hunter had been firing at had been at chest level; no crazy wall climbing monsters this time, it seemed.
Once they were ready to move on, both Rune and Aria's glasses would flash a brief update message as Hood wirelessly transferred an updated version of the map his goggles had assembled, then he resumed his place at the rear of the column and continued following. No comments, no remarks, no questions. He wasn't sure how exactly she planned to track these things straight to their hole, but that was what the Atharim were supposed to be good at, and he decided to just leave them to it. This was their show, after all.
The two Atharim would occasionally pause and study their surroundings, not unlike a pair of cats on the prowl, but each noise, or lack there of, that seemed to spark the attention of the two women were usually dismissed by Hood. He was no expert by far, but he had spent enough time in the tunnels to get a good idea of direction and distance for those sounds. And even if it were close by, he seemed pretty hard to spook, simply turning slightly in the direction of the source and studying the shadows before moving on.
Even in an area as run down as where Hood lived, some of the tunnels still had light. In places, at least. In others, they had been deliberately smashed or had simply burned out over the years and not yet been replaced. There were far higher priority areas in Moscow at the moment, and so long as water, gas, and electricity still flowed, the city couldn't be bothered with renovations.
He wasn't sure what to make of the two women; Candy seemed almost to be following a scent, and Aria, while still calm, seemed a bit off-put by something. Or everything. He couldn't quite decide. But she did seem to be calming down; the last thing he wanted was to have to deal with some over-eager gun bunny and a claustrophobic knife fanatic.
As Candy knelt to sift through the debris on the floor and round up some spent casings, Hood circled the larger chamber; partly to let his glasses map the area a bit more thuroughly, but also to scan the walls for where those fired rounds had ended up. Some he found, and he casually dug one projectile from the crumblnig concrete of the tunnel wall. There wasn't too much out of the ordinary; whatever the missing Hunter had been firing at had been at chest level; no crazy wall climbing monsters this time, it seemed.
Once they were ready to move on, both Rune and Aria's glasses would flash a brief update message as Hood wirelessly transferred an updated version of the map his goggles had assembled, then he resumed his place at the rear of the column and continued following. No comments, no remarks, no questions. He wasn't sure how exactly she planned to track these things straight to their hole, but that was what the Atharim were supposed to be good at, and he decided to just leave them to it. This was their show, after all.