Citizen 1050 Poem

“How, exactly, does climbing this dumb cliff prove to anyone that I'm an adult?” Poem muttered under her breath as she stomped across the beach towards the sandy cliffs. Voices crowed out from behind her, several young voices calling and jeering at her about her rounded neck plates. Poem snorted and pinned her ears, shaking her head. As much as she wished to not care about what those stupid kids were saying… She was 28. It was.. probably about time to prove herself, rounded plates or not.

Poem’s ears pricked up as the boiling sunlight was cut off sharply by the sudden shade of the cliff’s ahead. She craned her neck backwards, blinking as her eyes adjusted. A monolith of stone and sand jutted sharply upwards at a near 90 degree angle. Its alabaster was only broken apart by tufts of some sort of strange spongy greenery, clinging to life on the barest excuses for shelves that peppered the surface of the cliff face. Aside from those patches however, the entire expanse was a case study in the color white. Poem took a deep breath and reached a hand out to touch the exposed stones. The sudden shifting of sand and rock sliding off under her touch sent her recoiling as if it had bit her. They… Really expected someone to be able to scrabble up this? And rexes have been doing it for how long? 

A scream from behind her sent her leaping away from the cliff face, twisting wildly to look back at the sea. The tide was out, leaving the expansive beach to bake under the noon time sun, and the gaggle of dark coated rexes was out playing in the far off water, already ignoring Poem as they wrestled with each other and the waves. The racket was coming from a pair of seagulls, clearly fighting over some creature they had picked up off the sands. Poem screwed her eyes up against the harsh light as she tracked the bird’s brawl across the sun. 

As they disappeared over the top of the cliff, a strange glinting caught her eyes. Snagged some thirty feet above her in a tuft of that strange spriggy greenery, was… something. From this distance it was nearly impossible to see, but… Finding something from the lost civilization that had owned the islands before her parent’s generation had found it was… also a way to prove you were an adult… right? And, Poem reasoned with herself, thirty feet was a lot less dangerous than well over a hundred.

“Ok, new plan.” Poem growled to herself, reorienting herself to the area just below the shelf that hopefully held her future in its strange tangled greenery. Tilting her head, Poem lifted herself onto twos, reaching above her head to feel at the rock above her head. The surface of the cliff  was far less sandy up there, probably because it was mostly out of the oceans flood range. Testing her weight on it in incremental steps, she was surprised to find that the stone seemed… surprisingly stable. Poem dropped back down, inspecting the cliff in front of her, analyzing the tiny shelves and broken sections of stone between herself and her prize. Could she jump high enough to push off of that ledge, and grab onto that shelf? Or would it be better to pull herself up directly onto that shelf, and use her arm strength alone to pull herself vertically from there? 

Brain aflame with possibilities, Poem sat in the shade for nearly an hour, trying to puzzle out the climb as if there was an easy solution. Frustrated, Poem shook her head with a snarl. This wasn't a climbing wall someone had built, or the strange stone indentations used to climb up a house, this was wild. There wasn't going to be a perfect way to do things. It was time to give this an honest try, instead of stalling. Rising back to fours, Poem took several steps back from the cliff face, her tail warming considerably as it exited the much closer shadow of the cliff. Steeling her nerves, Poem took a deep breath.

Eyes fixed on the best paths, at least as far as she figured, Poem exploded from her standstill, sending clumps of sand and shell flying off behind her as she thundered towards the cliff. Bunching her legs under herself, Poem jumped with every ounce of strength she had, throwing her body upwards towards the widest of shelves in the cliff. Poem’s eyes widened as she realized just how high her jump had sent her, sailing wildly over the shelf she had been aiming for. Panicked, and with little else to do for it, she slammed her claws into the stone, scrabbling wildly for the few handholds she had been able to see from the ground. 

The slide down the cliff was awful as her heart leapt up into her throat, and Poem closed her eyes, preparing herself for the inevitable injuries. She wasn't ready for the jarring halt that wrenched at her shoulders as her claws caught on various outcrops of stone. Poem’s eyes opened in shock, as she grabbed onto those precious handholds with everything she had. Nearly 20 feet up already, she had managed to jump nearly twice her height on twos. Blinking rapidly, Poem shot her gaze up at the shelf that held the strange shiny thing, startled to realize she was nearly at it already. 

Taking a moment to take a few deep breaths, Poem’s eyes scanned the cliff to try and find the handholds she had planned to use for the last few feet of the climb, but everything looked much, much different from this angle. Even the ledge her feet where now perched on hadn't been visible from the ground. With a gulp, Poem looked back up, but closer than where she was aiming. There was a handhold there, a jutting of stone just above where her left hand was. 

“Alright, easy enough. Just. Let go with that hand and move it up.” Poem whispered to herself, her voice coming out far more breathy and distorted than she expected. More concerning, was the fact her hand didn't seem to want to move. Infact, most of her body seemed locked in place, glued as it was to the few inches of safety it had found. 

“Come on, you can't stay there.” Poem growled at her hand, though to her ears it sounded more like a whimper. Her body just wouldn't listen to her, as she managed to get her hand to loosen from the rock only the barest of inches before it would return to its death grip. Snarling in frustration and at her own foolishness for thinking jumping would have been the better plan, Poem tried in vain to calm herself. Over and over again, she tried to move, with very little improvement. 

Eventually though, she did manage to let go of the stone, it was only a moment, but she sent every scrap of willpower she had into this first movement, forcing her shaking hand to inch upward to the next handhold. And then the next. As if a dam had broken, she was able to move, and refused to let herself get trapped again. Hand over hand, hindlegs scrabbling against the powdery stone, she managed to haul herself up, and up, and up the side of the cliff. Focusing on one handhold to the next, Poem’s vision narrowed, her target forgotten as she braced herself into just moving, one hand over another. 

It wasn't until her hand snagged on a tuft of springy greenery while navigating a strangely challenging inverted slope that Poem realized she had made it. “Oh thank the ancestors. Where was that thing?” Poem breathed, pulling herself up farther onto the shelf so she had a free arm to rifle around in the foliage. Her hand caught on something hard, and she nearly shouted in her success, easily wrenching the metal object out of its resting place. A strange device, two strangely shaped bits of greenish metal that seemed interlocked with each other, with several strange carvings decorating its surface.

“W..What the hell is it? Oh no… how am I going to get down from here?”

Artist: Babykitten