Scrapyard Dive

[Aura]

(Kassandra Vaitaki continued from Really Should Have Thought This Through...)

Damn.

By far, this was the biggest pile of garbage that Kassandra had ever seen in her life.  And just her luck, the vast majority of it happened to be sharp, metal, and frequently rusty.  Sure, that was to be expected from a place specifically labeled a salvage yard, but it was the kind of thing that one didn't really understand the full magnitude of until they saw it for themselves.

Man, she had never been more thankful for her tetanus shot.

Looking at it, it was clear that she needed a strategy if she really wanted to tackle this thing.  There were so, so many things that could go wrong if she just started grabbing random things.  If she pulled out something that turned out to be supporting a lot of weight, the structural integrity of the pile could fail and send it tumbling down.  If the tried to climb it and stepped in a loose spot, she could fall down the side.  Hell, she could even trip over something on the ground.  All of those possibilities had a strong chance of ending in her getting sliced up or impaled by various sharp pieces of debris, so she needed to avoid disturbing the pile at all costs.

Plus, she wasn't just in this for herself.  If she get herself killed before she made it back to the gazebo, then Marion would still be cuffed to the pole, and she already knew that not everyone on the island had good intentions.  She was in a race against time, but she couldn't afford to be reckless.

Her first plan was to scour the area around the big pile in search of something that looked like it could get through the post, but could actually be handled easily.  For example, she found a lot of pieces of thin, twisted metal that looked absolutely razor-sharp, but none of it had anything that even remotely resembled a handle, or at the very least a comfortable or convenient spot to hold while swinging it, so all of them were useless to her.

... Ugh, this was no good.  She had been combing the ground, and nothing was viable.  Everything she found either wasn't capable of breaking through the post, or was impossible to wield safely.  Figures that everything that was easily within reach turned out to be useless.  It made sense, though.  All the litter on the ground was probably made up of the stuff that got tossed aside by other scavengers in the past for similar reasons, so of course it would almost entirely be made up of the worst pieces.

But with the ground a bust, that meant that Kass would have to start working on the big pile.  She was slow to approach, and her legs were afflicted by a tingling feeling at the sheer enormity of the mass of disconnected metal that she was faced with.

No time to stand by though.  Just had to shake it off and get to work.

She started to gingerly take pieces of metal from the pile and examine them.  Everything that wasn't viable got tossed to the ground with the rest of the trash.  And continuing with the pattern that had already started, she kept finding pieces of unusable junk one after another.  The first one clattered to the ground like someone tossing a trash can from a window, and the jolt made her stop working and look around in case anyone had been attracted by the noise.  After that, she started placing the debris on the ground far more carefully and quietly.

It was dull, dull work, but she had to keep going and stay alert.  She had a job to do, damn it.  And more than that, she made a promise.  She said that she was going to get Marion free, and she was gonna do it.  Besides, she still owed her for leaving her behind earlier.

Wait... she thought she saw something.  There was some sort of pipe sticking out of the pile.  It was poking out far enough that she could get a grip of it and still have plenty of room to spare.  It was one of the first things that she had found that actually had a decent grip, so that was already one positive.  She pulled lightly on it to check if it would come out, and it slid out almost immediately with very little force necessary, surprising Kass with how easily it came out.  She took a hasty step back and froze in place, looking up at the pile as though she expected it to attack.

Nothing happened.  The pile stayed in place.  She took another few careful steps back, still keeping her eyes on the mountain of metal, until she felt secure enough to turn her attention to the pipe that had caught her eye and was now grasped in her hand.

It was about as long as her arm and looked decently sturdy, or at least she hoped it was.  It was a piece with a bend, but the section right after the end had somehow broken off, leaving a jagged, uneven edge after the elbow.  It looked like something she wouldn't want to step on barefoot, but she didn't know how well it would work as a cutting tool, or how she would even test it.

But time was running thin.  She had been at the scrapyard for a while now, and the day wasn't getting any longer.  She took a calculated risk and brought the pipe with her.  It wasn't perfect, but it was the best thing that she could find.  With her new tool in hand, she kicked into gear and started running back to the gazebo.

(Kassandra Vaitaki continued in Really Should Have Thought This Through...)