"If I'd thought you were going to say that," Skandra muttered darkly. "I never would have opened my fucking face."
A twisted pile of leather caught his eye. Not for its own sake, but because it was resting on three wooden planks stretched across a metal frame. There were ropes tied to either end, great strong things that came down from above and split apart before attaching to thin wire rails which stretched across three of the four sides of that one, massive wooden surface. He was smart enough to know a hand-crank when he saw one, and it was hanging loosely from the wire. Somehow the network of rope was all attached to that crank. And Skandra was willing to bet that if you turned the thing, you would start to go higher. He'd seen the same thing in Illos, or so it seemed to him from years of experience.
"All right, all right, let's agree that I'm right and drop the subject," the Immortal said, before he pointed to the wooden platform. "I think we can take this up, if we're careful. Given how much you weigh..."
There was a nasty edge to the joke that he didn't like entirely, but he imagined it only because he was in such a foul mood. Or so he told himself. Aeotha probably imagined the same, and small wonder, but what Skandra was really interested in was the fact that they'd fashioned crude machines. They had supplies. Gershul said they'd been here before. It was odd to think that he'd establish a base on a world entirely separate from Caeleste, on the off chance that he would use it as a base of operations. Of course, it was also possible that he would hope reaching out from this place would somehow take him somewhere else.
That sounded like his sort of though process. Cruel, methodical, and completely uninterested in how the rest of them would make out.
"I'm not looking to kill anybody who doesn't need to die," he picked up the subject again as he tested his weight on those planks; the scaffold seemed solid. "If your friend Limbo is still alive, we'll try and keep her that way. Running back home isn't going to help, and neither is pretending that Gershul is some kind of demonic force. He's just like you and me. Stab him in the throat and he'll bleed to death before your very eyes. That's an event I'm looking forward to watching. Go ahead, climb on. We're on our way."