Drew nodded his head. Not wanting to say anything, his fingers began the process of casting refresh, but the brunette recognized the cast and put a hand on top of Drew's, effectively stopping the spell. "I just…can we just pretend everything is normal again for a few minutes?" Katie had turned slightly so she could look at his face as she asked.
"Yeah. Yeah, sure," Drew responded, and Katie curled her fingers around his, leaning back into his shoulder.
"Where are you from?" Katie asked.
Drew answered with a quirked eyebrow. The question was so normal, it seemed incongruent with the current state of things. The habit of answering these small talk questions had become routine to him since arriving in DC a few years ago. "Boise, you?"
"I'm from a little town in Vermont you've probably never heard of. Wait, Idaho? How did you join the Coast Guard from Idaho?" Katie responded, looking over at Mitch and Sarah who were in the other corner. The other two weren't talking, but Mitch was there for when Sarah was ready.
"It's a weird story, actually. I had finished college and was sort of just drifting, I guess. I went on a road trip with a bunch of friends to the Bay Area. We were heading to the Point Reyes Lighthouse and we passed a sign saying, 'Coast Guard training facility,' and I thought… I could do that. About a year later I was the oldest guy in my boot camp company." Drew shrugged.
Katie turned to look at him, "Wait, you joined the Coast Guard because of Petaluma? Are you crazy?"
Drew laughed softly, "No. I loved Petaluma. Horrible duty rotation aside, it was great being so close to Point Reyes. I must have gone out to Alamere Falls every other weekend the entire six months I was there."
"You and I clearly had different A-school experiences." Katie said with a grunt, "Man, do you remember how terrible the food was?" Her stomach rumbled in response, the thought of food reminding them both how long since it had been since they'd had a real meal.
"Yeah, I remember all the OSes getting off of watch, so they could do their normal school work while the rest of us that had been there twice as long had to clean the toilets after doing 8 hours of schooling," Drew said with another chuckle, which earned the pair a glare from Mitch.
The glare cut off any reply Katie might have been about to make, and the two sat in comfortable silence. After ten minutes, Katie asked, "So, who is Zoey?"
Drew grunted slightly, "She's my dog. I got her as soon as I moved to DC. She's helped me deal with some stuff."
Katie glanced at Drew again, a small smile on her mouth, "Well, I think I can deal with a dog as my competition."
Drew quirked an eyebrow at her, "Competition?" Drew wasn't exactly a lady killer; he spent most of his time playing video and board games or at the dog park. "Uh, yeah...no, she's uhm, you know, she's just my dog." The realization of what Katie had said made the normally self-assured Drew stammer a bit.
Katie's smile grew larger as Drew stumbled over his words, "Finally! There is some human under that machine face you've got going." She laughed softly before resting her head on his shoulder, "You should really talk to Rothschild, you know. She's going to need your approval."
"My approval? Why would she need my approval? I'm just an IT2." Drew latched onto the change of topic as a way of ignoring where the conversation had been going.
Katie blinked and pushed away from Drew again, "You don't see it, do you?" She studied his face for a minute and then shook her head. Drew couldn't help noticing how nice her hair was, and he had to mentally shake himself. This wasn't the time to get twitterpated; they were still in the middle of a dungeon, during what was probably the apocalypse.
"See what?" Drew asked.
"Drew, you're in charge here...none of us would have left that room if you hadn't shown up. We're all relying on your strength to get us out of here. The Ensign is going to need you to tell her that she didn't just get Juan killed." Katie's voice was quiet to ensure that it didn't carry far enough for Sarah to hear her.
Drew looked away from Katie, unable to meet her eyes, "Don't you think she might have, though? If she hadn't frozen…" He trailed off, not wanting to fill in the gaps on that sentence.
"Maybe. Or maybe he was killed immediately, and she couldn't have done anything. But that's not the point. We need her and telling her that she might have saved him is going to destroy her."
Drew frowned, looking down at his hands, "Maybe you should tell her. I'm...I'm not good at this stuff. I was never a leader. I'm too critical, too exacting."
Katie reached up and turned his head so that he was looking at her, "Drew, we all believe in you. She needs you. She needs your strength and your approval. You may not consider yourself a leader, but we all do. We all followed you out here. She's still a kid, and she's in way over her head here."
Drew bit his lip in frustration. Looking across the room at Sarah. "We're all in over our heads. I don't recall 'how to deal with an apocalypse' being in our training manuals." He paused, consider, "It's just...I've never been very good at this emotion stuff." In truth, the only person he really confided in was Zoey, and while a great listener, she was hardly the greatest conversationalist.
Katie shook her head, looking at him again, "Well, time to get better." She squeezed his hand before leaning back against his shoulder. She sniffed, "You know, you smell horrible."
"Yeah, getting coated in blood and guts on a regular basis will do that to you." Drew had gotten used to the smell; the lack of other options made it a necessity. Sarah was the only one in the group that was still relatively clean. Everyone had been wearing the same clothing for a few days, but the other three were colored in various amounts of red, blue, and green blood. He leaned forward, careful not to disturb Katie too much. "I…have an idea for this actually."
Standing up with a grunt, he grabbed the trash can in the corner and removed the liner. Then, poking his head out of the room for a minute, he put the can in the furthest corner and then walked back away, putting as much space between him and the area as possible. He then began the linking together hand seals to do the five-second cast of refreshing rain. When he was done, the gentle patter of rain sounded in the hallway, the wind and lightning of his other versions of the storm absent. With a shrug he walked into the rain, holding his hands out to the side and letting the refreshingly warm water wash over him. Katie, who had followed him, also stepped into the rain, her face turned up towards the ceiling.
Thirty seconds wasn't long, and Drew didn't start in the rain, but he managed to clean the worst of the gore off him. He walked over to the bin and frowned. The water inside was evaporating at a visible rate, and by the time he had picked it up, only a few traces were left. His clothing and hair were also mostly dry already, despite having been soaked through previously. His energy levels were greatly increased, but not as much as if he had cast refresh on himself.
Coming back in slightly cleaner, Drew shrugged, "Well, it's not a perfect solution, but at least we know I won't be flooding anything. I'll cast it again in a few minutes if you two want a bit of a shower." Both Mitch and Sarah looked up at his words, excited for the idea of being a little bit cleaner.
"I think I have an idea for these spider legs too, might as well work on them for a bit while we rest." He pulled the legs off the cart and put them on the table in the middle of the room. Then he climbed on top of the counter and began popping the dropped ceiling up so he could look at the pipes and wiring hidden within. "I figure we can attach it to some pipes. There might be a bit of a draining issue if the pipes still have water in them, but it shouldn't be too bad."
Selecting two five-foot sections of piping, he used acid dart to eat away at the metal, causing a half a cup of water to fall to the floor as he did so.
Using another couple careful application of acid dart, he ate away holes in the metal that he could use to keep the legs in place. Then he jammed the pipes into the spider legs and began to awl holes in the chitin using the daggers they had acquired from the orcs.
Katie and Sarah both came over and began to help him while Mitch began cutting strips of wire. They worked in near silence, everyone glad to have something to keep their hands and minds busy.
It took about an hour. There were several breaks for showers in the rain, to eat more of their food, and raiding the vending machine. By the end of the hour, they were cleaner, rested, sated, and they had two finished spears. They were crude, and Drew wasn't convinced the wire would hold up to the stresses of combat for long, but at least it gave all of them weapons.
The rain had wrecked the drop ceiling though, and several the tiles had warped and fallen, only to be speed dried shortly afterward. They all felt a little less safe when they realized just how much space there was above them that was difficult to see through. A spider could easily be hiding above them and no one would be able to detect it.
Finally, as they were getting packed up and ready to go, Katie nodded to Drew, who frowned at her, but nodded his assent. Katie pulled Mitch out into the hallway while Drew sat down at the table next to Sarah, who held the spear level, staring at the spider leg on its tip.
"How do you do it?" She asked, having seen Katie and Mitch leave the two of them alone.
"Do what? Kill the spider? A lot of luck and a bunch of fireballs," Drew peered at her, curious.
"Spider is part of it…but you left alone. You were safe and then you got attacked by stuff, a lot of stuff. You came and found us, and you were almost dead, but then you went right back out after I healed you." Katie looked up from the spear to Drew, "How do you keep going? What's the secret?"
Drew chuckled slightly, "There isn't a secret, I'm just too stubborn to sit down and die. Look, you couldn't have saved Juan. He was already dead. You couldn't have known what was going to happen."
Sarah's face tensed up as Drew mentioned Juan, but she just nodded slowly, "I think I knew that, but I just...I hate this. I hate how powerless I feel. All four of you were contributing to the fight and I just...I couldn't do anything. I was so scared." She shifted the spear around in her hands; it was too big for her small frame. But there was something in her eyes as she shifted the polearm around, getting used to its weight.
"I don't want to be scared anymore. I don't want to be the only one who can't contribute."
"You are contributing. You healed us all after that fight. And trust me, I really appreciate not being dead after the spider queen." Drew smiled at the girl, "And now we have weapons, so you can do something while your heal is on cooldown."
Sarah looked behind him, her eyes narrowing before she leveled the newly crafted spear and pushed it past him with a grunt. A squeal was the last thing he expected as he pivoted to the side to avoid Sarah and then saw what she was attacking.
A rat at least five feet long had just dropped from the ventilation shaft and onto Sarah's spear, impaling it through the chest. Still, it wriggled, unable to do more than scrabble at the spear shaft. Drew launched an acid dart and a spark at the head of the beast before it stopped moving. It was over before Mitch and Katie could get back into the break room, where everyone eyed Sarah, who was breathing heavy.
"Well, I don't feel quite as safe here anymore," Mitch said looking around, "Nice thrust, you pinned it perfectly." He helped Sarah pull the spear out of the rat, the serrated spider leg making removal difficult.
They rebuffed, everyone eyeing the dropped ceilings warily as they gathered their things. And then they headed out once more.