If you haven’t already, read the introduction in the [thread=17447]<b>OOC thread</b>[/thread].<br/><br/><span style="font-size: 22px"><b>Rise of the Tentacles</b></span><br/><br/>It hadn’t been a mental challenge. Move away from the tentacles. It had in fact been so easy that one could’ve done it half asleep and still have some room for sloppiness. The hard part was to stay awake. To keep on moving. To doze off whenever there was a moment of peace. The orange light from the large, glowing pods was too dim to reach behind obstacles, so pretty much every small ledge in the rugged stone terrain provided a shade of nearly perfect blackness. It was easy to fall asleep where the purple monstrosities were out of sight. The hard part was to wake up before they caught up.<br/><br/>Now it was getting harder to make decisions. The surrounding hills were closing in faster than they had done before, and their squirmy cliffs of tightly bundled tendrils stretched forward to eagerly explore the space still unoccupied them. The rocky paths were getting narrower, and eventually, the small group of human survivors were facing a choice: they could either push further south where they’d been mostly headed for the last few days, or go back north where they could take a different turn. At distance, they could see patches of water to the south, showing reflections of pink and yellow light, but couldn’t really tell if they were natural ponds, parts of a river or a lake divided by the tentacles, or even just newly formed pools on the organic terrain itself. To the north, the path the group had come from was still wide enough to safely pass through, but there was no telling for how long or how far. The closest mounds of tentacles were already less than quarter a mile away, while the widest parts of the path were still nearly half a mile wide.<br/><br/>It had only been three hours since the hills had started to move faster, and only half of the group had managed to catch some sleep while others kept watch half awake. A small steam vent at the haphazard campsite made a constant hiss that nearly overcame all the distant squelches of the closest tendrils and had provided enough heat to prepare something to eat; perhaps a chunk of an unfortunate, over-eager, lone tendril caught by surprise by a blade, or even canned food, provided that there were tools to get some open. On the smooth stone ground that looked like it had been washed clean of all dirt and pebbles by some powerful force, there were now several tiny streams of cold, crystal-clear water that originated from somewhere among the tentacle hills and twisted and turned along the sloped passage towards south. The rock wasn’t freezing to the touch, but the water was nearly ice-cold, and the air comfortably warm.<br/><br/>It was probably going to take hours until the tentacles would reach the campsite, but the longer the group stayed to rest, the bigger the risk got to become fully surrounded by the hostile terrain. Then again, if the survivors were too tired to walk, they might eventually pass out anyway. In any case, they’d soon have to decide whether to head south towards the water, or go back north where they had seen other routes, although less tempting, forking from the current one.<br/><br/><br/><b>Reference Images</b><br/><br/>These images should give you some kind of an idea of what the terrain is like (apart from tentacle hills everywhere and the fact that it’s like a constant night) even though they don’t represent it exactly like it is. I’ll do my best to better describe it in future posts.<br/><ul>
<li><a class="externalLink" href="http://navinsarmaphotography.com/wp-content/portfolio/greatfallssunset.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://navinsarmaphotography.com/wp-content/portfolio/greatfallssunset.jpg</a></li>
<li><a class="externalLink" href="http://oxfordgreenlandexpedition.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/20130810-sf4-crux-pitch-capping-roof.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://oxfordgreenlandexpedition.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/20130810-sf4-crux-pitch-capping-roof.jpg</a></li>
<li><a class="externalLink" href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Rocky_Bank_of_a_River_Ruskin.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Rocky_Bank_of_a_River_Ruskin.jpg</a></li>
</ul><br/>These images set the mood for the lighting (just ignore the details and picture them in yellow, orange, red, pink, and purple).<br/><ul>
<li><a class="externalLink" href="http://images.alphacoders.com/150/150263.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://images.alphacoders.com/150/150263.jpg</a></li>
<li><a class="externalLink" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-blQF-IwDSR4/UCvM-Sz7ZKI/AAAAAAAABhw/_ltROEG6LZ8/s1600/wallpaper-2133079.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-blQF-IwDSR4/UCvM-Sz7ZKI/AAAAAAAABhw/_ltROEG6LZ8/s1600/wallpaper-2133079.jpg</a></li>
<li><a class="externalLink" href="http://images2.alphacoders.com/269/269812.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://images2.alphacoders.com/269/269812.jpg</a></li>
<li><a class="externalLink" href="http://images2.alphacoders.com/202/202490.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> http://images2.alphacoders.com/202/202490.jpg</a></li>
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