Cave-In

[knux400]

It seems quiet.

You slowly uncurl, avoiding putting any pressure on the damaged leg. You don't need all eight to walk; in fact, you could probably lose another three or four before basic ambulation becomes an issue, but obviously you'd want to keep all of them. There isn't any light in the tunnel, but thankfully you brought your own. ...Right?

You activate your headlamp. It's flickering now, you're sure it wasn't doing that before. Something might be loose in there, but you're definitely not in an ideal spot to do maintenance on your own head. As for your leg, the hinge closest to the end seems to have taken most of the impact and is bent inward. The pin keeping your claw in place is missing, and in fact the only thing holding it together is friction. Checking one more time for anything nearby, you retrieve a set of emergency tools from one of your pockets. The things in there are small and extremely limited, but it's enough to get your casing taken apart and put back together again.

You shuffle into a crouching position and gently open the casing near the damaged hinge. Retrieving a tiny set of scissors, you cut the wires inside one by one, trying not to freak out as you feel your leg losing sensation bit by bit. Sometimes you wish you didn't have fear. The urge to curl back into a ball and stay there isn't really productive or helpful right now. Better or worse, you're stuck here, and more than likely no one is going to come help you. But fear- and all the other emotions- are part of living, you remind yourself. Without them, you wouldn't be any different than a laptop or a cell phone. But it would just be nice to be able to turn them off when they get distracting, or intrusive, or an active hindrance to what you're trying to do.

You realize the last wire has been cut, and you take the opportunity to dismiss that train of thought. You tug on the end of your leg- it's really stuck on there- until it pops off with an unpleasant scraping sound. Now that you've got a better look at it, you examine the hinge more closely. It looks like it just needs to be bent back into shape, and the pin needs to be replaced. Lacking any large wrenches or pliers, you look around for the next best thing- a rock. Sifting through the bits of rubble around you, you eventually find one that's sort of the right shape to fit inside the gap and bend the hinge back outward again. You also find the missing pin in there, much to your relief. You were really not looking forward to finding a perfectly cylindrical rock to jam in there.

You slot the leg back into place and push the pin in. It's not a perfect fit, but it'll work for now. As you retrieve a wire stripper and some electrical tape, it occurs to you you should probably get some pictures of everything, just in case you do make it back. If nothing else, you can get this whole section of mine shut down for safety. You trust your repair skills enough to work by touch for a moment as you glance behind you at the rubble on the ground and activate your camera attachment, taking a few pictures of the area for posterity. You shove the prints in your pocket as you turn back to your leg, feeling sensation come back to it bit by bit as each wire is reconnected. Once everything is back in place, you flex your leg experimentally. It seems to work alright.

You turn your attention to the rubble again, trying to find any other survivors.

That's bizarre. There is... shockingly little rubble in here compared to what you felt and heard. There isn't even a pile large enough to accommodate one person, much less an entire surveying team. In addition, the tunnel itself doesn't seem to match what just happened to you at all. Now that you're using your eyepiece instead of echolocation, you notice that both ends of it slope downwards a bit, meaning you and the debris would've had to roll uphill to get here. No matter how you look at it, there just isn't any way that you would've fallen down a large hole and ended up in an elevated section of a small tunnel.

Seeing no better option, you pick the direction where the rubble seems to have come from and start walking.





It's a long walk. Way longer than it should be.






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