I need a hero...

<snip>
“I can't hold you all!” Seymour wheezed as the weight of six people stretched him. If it wasn't for the articficial legs, he'd have let go instantly, but his grip was slipping. His hands had never done anything more strenuous than the washing up.
“I'm slipping!” Cass shouted up to him. “Have you got hand cream on or something?”
“What's wrong with that? It keeps my hands oh so soft!”

But it was Whitewolf who lost his grip first. A large wave caught him, and at the bottom of the chain he fell straight into the water and was quickly washed away by the current, followed by Alex and Gomez, who all cried and spluttered as they tumbled over and over in the river
</split>

“Shit” Cass groaned, gritting her teeth and tightening her grip on Seymour’s soft, silky smooth hands, trying to halt her inexorable slide out of his grasp
“You’re hurting meee!” Seymour whined in response as her fingers dug into his flesh, almost crushing his hands as she continued to slip
“Tough shit” Cass gasped “I don’t want to die”
“I don’t think that’s any way to speak to someone who just saved you” Seymour huffed, but Cass just ignored him and glanced down at Jay instead who was swinging around below her, maintaining a vise like grip around one of her ankles with one hand and trying to aim his grapple up at the crane gantry above them with the other, but was struggling to be able to manage an accurate shot
“You might want to hurry there” she moaned, trying to gauge the height of the fall beneath them; eight, ten metres, maybe more; and who knew what lay beneath the surging, murky eddies below? “I can’t hold on…”
“Yeah” Jay growled distractedly, trying to sight the grapple as he swung back and forth “alright…”
“Jay, I…” Cass started, before one of her hands finally slipped away from Seymour’s, leaving the two of them swaying wildly, supported by just one of Seymour’s frail arms
“Owwww!” Seymour howled “You’re pulling my arm out of joint!”
He needn’t have worried however, as his hand slipped from Cassandra’s seconds later, and Jay and her fell away from him in slow motion, Cass’s long black hair billowing up around her startled face as she fell
Jay, unimpeded by swinging wildly at one end of Cassandra’s legs, finally succeeded in taking his shot with the grapple as they fell; the tiny dart streaking from his suit, trailing its filamentary cable and embedding itself in the crane gantry above them, bringing the two of them to a jarringly abrupt halt, Jay’s nanosuit’s enhanced strength taking the brunt impact on his arm as the wire jerked taut, but Cass’s own weight and momentum twisted her ankle out from his grasp and she continued to fall
“Shit!” Jay snapped in frustration, as he watched her twist acrobatically into a dive and plunge deep into the murky water below

Cass broke the surface some thirty or so seconds later, gasping for air and pulling her wet hair back out of her eyes, blinking the water away as she bobbed around on the slowly calming waves
“Shit” she spluttered angrily “My smegging cigs…”
“You ok?” Jay shouted down to her
“Yeah, yeah” Cass smiled mirthlessly up at him “This water’s bloody freezing but I’ll live”
“Great, glad to…” Jay started, but stopped, his eyes widening
“What?” Cass snapped as she caught sight of his expression and turned instinctively to look behind her to face an array of long, thin, pallid tentacles that had broken the surface and risen some three metres out of the black water behind her; each studded with suckers and tipped with what looked like rudimentary eyes encircling a wickedly sharp looking claw
“Shi…” she managed before she was hauled beneath the surface

<tag>
Turns out that those “fish people” we’ve heard about are more like nightmare calamari… A little help please?
</tag>