[Trade] Gardening

Atlantis was everything their mother had described it to be, a green hell with glass ceilings and an endless pit of greenery to be swallowed in. Brambles stood up on the nearest elevated plain, barely a cliff against the side of the leaning banyan trees. No matter how she squinted or tilted her head, a path didn't reveal itself amongst the foliage. She growled to herself and walked down from the ledge, back down to the siblings she had brought as cannon fodder.

"No clear way forward," she grumbled, "No sign of mom either, so tracking her seems to be a no-go."

"Mom knows what she's doing, we shouldn't bother her," Haze interrupted. Brambles whipped around and scowled at him for interrupting, 

"She's not your mother," she snapped. On reflex she wanted to bite or scratch at him like she would at Powder but the Carno was far bulkier than her sister and would be more likely to fight back. She settled for a verbal wound and stalked away into the jungle. 

"She's your mother too," Powder said sternly to Haze. He nodded his broad head, it would take more than Brambles' spiteful words to shake his confidence in Speckles. He wasn't entirely sure why Brambles wanted to follow their mother down here though, she had always been the prickliest of Speckles' children and didn't seem to respect the community focused nature of the older Cryo. Rarely seeking her guidance, Brambles' hotheaded personality had her clashing with her mother more often than not, but here she was several hundred feet below the water's surface to find her.

It hadn't been too long since Speckles had left the Isla Kela jungle to take another trip down to Atlantis, but Powder had a bad feeling. The only reason she was cooperating with her bully of a sister was to have an extra head in a fight, if nothing else, Brambles was good at fighting. Powder had a rough layout of the Atlantean jungle in her mind from her mother's stories, the outer layer, the denser tangle of foliage that made up the vast majority of the dome, and the Atlantean court, somewhere in the middle of it all. Powder wouldn't consider herself an expert tracker, not by a longshot, but she was gifted with a cheerful disposition. If she could approach a potential foe before Brambles opened her mouth, she could make a new friend.

Putting her theory to the test, in the deepest parts of the jungle, Powder managed to nudge Brambles out of her way by using Haze as a shield, pushing him into her meaner sister and making her stumble. She made a beeline for the Euoplo she saw wandering across their path and slid to a halt when it raised its tail club threateningly.

"State your business!" the knight barked, his golden helmet dull under the heavy coverage of the trees.

"We're here to meet the court of Iguanodons," Powder said cheerfully, "Do they perhaps need any busywork done?" She could hear the sounds of Haze and Brambles scuffling behind her and shuffled slightly to the side to block them from the Euoplo's view.

"You are volunteering your services to the court?" he asked suspiciously, his pale blue eyes narrowing as he looked between her and her siblings.

"That's right," she assured him, giving up on blocking the others' increasingly loud scrapping from his view, "We know we can't just approach empty-handed, that would be disrespectful, Mister um.."

"Talos," he answered shortly, before taking a moment to think. At the very least Brambles and Haze had ceased their squabbling and were now watching the Euoplo deliberate. "We have an outpost nearby, we call it Zeta Outpost. It's been overgrown for a while now. If you can clear the plants from the door, the court should be grateful enough to let you in," he told them firmly, like he was reading from a script.

"Some plants?" Brambles scoffed, "We've been fighting plants just to get here, this'll be easy." Talos didn't seem impressed by her braggadocio and turned to Powder instead.

"I've marked the location on your map, you'd be doing us a great service."

"My what?" Powder tried to ask but the dark blue club of the Euoplo was already vanishing into the foliage.

Luckily, a soft brown Euoplo they encountered along their new path was glad to give actual directions, going so far as to lead them directly there.

"You have no idea how much this will help us," she gushed, "We've been wanting to reclaim Outpost Zeta for years but we never had the resources to allocate to it. I don't know what the court sees but I think you surface dwellers are alright in my book." Haze and Powder exchanged glances, the stone knights had been so eager to send them this way, was this really going to doable by just the three of them? Two of them if Brambles decided to be uncooperative. "Here we are," Donna said cheerfully,  pushing  the branches out the way with her armoured body to let the Cryos and Carno pass into a small clearing. 

A small, squat dark grey building sat in its centre, completely overwhelmed by plants. Vines and large thorny bushes swamped the doorway and made opening the short door completely impossible.

"No wonder you haven't bothered with it," Brambles remarked drily, "It's tiny, you'd barely fit one Iggy in it." Donna chuckled.

"Most of Outpost Zeta lies underground, you're not even seeing a fraction of its true size," she said cheerfully, like the thought of going even further underground in this place wasn't the most horrifying thing imaginable.

"So, we need to clear the door?" Haze clarified.

"Exactly," Donna nodded, "We want to scout the interior ourselves first before letting any outsiders in, but your help would be greatly appreciated with clearing the way." Brambles rolled her eyes and stepped up to the door, seizing a mouthful of vines and pulling. Her sharp teeth sawed back and forth over the thick green stems and eventually cut through. The darker Cryo pulled back, stretching her jaw like the process had caused an ache.

"Well? Am I supposed to do this alone?" she snapped at her siblings. Powder and Haze hurried over to stand at the opposite end of the bunker, beginning to bite and tear at the vines too. They avoided the thorns for now, unsure if they had a way of safely removing them without ending up covered in scratches. It turned out Brambles had accounted for this and when the vines were cleared and only the thorny bushes remained, she enacted her plan. 

With a swift kick she sent Powder sprawling into the shrubs, her sister flailing and panicking as she lost her footing and landed dead in the middle of them. Haze gasped and ran to help her, his tiny arms wiggling helplessly by his sides. He could only grab Powder by the scruff in his jaws and tried to pull her out. As he pulled, the thorns dug further into Powder's feathers and skin, moving with her. Donna hurried to help but neither of them could pull her free of the thorns, dragging the entirety of the shrubbery with her. As Powder lay bloodied and scratched, Brambles stepped forward and pushed the bunker's door open.

"Look at that," she said sweetly, "We cleared all the plants, nice job Powder." Her voice dripped with enmity but her sister couldn't hear her over the sound of Haze and Donna rushing to pick the thorns from her flesh.