Kiah groaned and put a hand to her forehead, blinking in confusion at the abrupt dizzy spell and blur over her vision. She reached out to steady herself on the armory's door frame and quickly became more confused. Why did the door frame feel like rough tree bark? She blinked through the last flashes of swimming lights and opened her eyes.
Wow. It really looked like a tree, too. In fact, the entire training ground looked amazingly like the edge of a forest. Kiah pulled her hand back quickly in shock, as if the tree might bite her, and slowly allowed herself to look around.
No. Way.
Trees. Lots and lots of trees as far as she could see ahead, and strange flowers in colors she'd never heard of sticking out of the ground, and enough rubble strewn at random everywhere over the forest floor to account for several houses worth of lumber and junk.
And the sky.
The bright blue sky that remained blue no matter how many times she blinked at it, stubbornly insisting on being a color it shouldn't while hanging over a place she couldn't possibly be. There was no room for anything but horrified shock in Kiah's body; she suffocated for a minute as the air leapt out of her lungs in surprise.
Blindly, as if backing away from a lunatic waving a knife, she started to walk backwards. Out of the forest, away from the rubble, away away away someone make the blue sky go aw-
She bumped into something that creaked and stopped, looked over her shoulder to find that it was a fence that kept going on either side to border the forest. One heck of a jalopy of a fence, too, made from random boards of different heights and colors connected to eachother by everything from yarn to wire.
"'D you hear that!?" Several sharp intakes of breath on the other side of the fence; the slow shuffle of cautious feet on dirt, worried muttering.
Kiah froze, not wasting time on berating herself for panicking, and took her bow off of her shoulder as slowly and silently as possible. She set an arrow to the string, a distance weapon is more threatening and they don't know my aim, and quickly peered through the crack between two boards.
Three people coming towards her carefully, two men and a woman, seeming reluctant as if afraid, dressed in raggedy clothing, all armed wi-
Blue eyes, green eyes, brown eyes! Oh gods, where am I? Who ever heard of having brown eyes!?
-armed with small blades and one with a small handheld metal object that didn't look threatening but probably was judging by the way it was carried.
Could run for the forest, but there's no knowing what's in there or if they have ways to track me down, better to leave that for a last resort, but oh gods, brown eyes and a blue sky. It had been thousands of years since enough exposure to the mage barrier seeped into people to change the last set of eyes purple. Tiny white flecks of light danced at the edges of her vision, threatening her with mind numbing panic again.
Kiah took a gulp of air and scurried a few feet along the fence until she came to a wider crack and stuck the tip of her strung arrow through the opening. She pointed it at the closest of the three people, crouching to make a smaller target of herself. "Stop there and I won't shoot."
She was almost startled into dropping the arrow at the sound of her own voice. Surely it couldn't be her, to sound so calm and commanding? How could her voice carry that so well when she felt like climbing up a tree and hiding there until the world spun back to where it was supposed to be?
It had a decidedly different effect on the three people.
"SSSSSHHHH!"
"Shush!"
"Are you mad!? It's not this side of the fence that you should worry about!"
For a moment Kiah eyed them skeptically, but the fact that they looked an awful lot more concerned about the trees behind her than the arrow pointed right at them, the way all three started backing away from her shout rather than her weapon with wide frightened eyes was genuine. The woman with the brown eyes gulped and hurried forward, ignoring the arrow with stare fixed on the treeline beyond, and held a hand over the fence.
"C'mon. You'll want an explanation for everything, and we don't want to start a fight if you don't," she whispered fearfully. Her hand trembled.
An explanation! Kiah hurriedly put her arrow away and hopped up to take the woman's help in climbing over the rickety barrier. Her feet had hardly hit the ground before they tugged at her and rushed her away to duck behind another messy pile of rubble. While they peered over the top of the pile, the shorter of the two men holding a battered trumpet readily near his mouth, Kiah finally took a minute to look around at this side of things. Bare dirt, grass, weeds flowers and shrubs, always with some piece of refuse abandoned nearby. Here a wagon wheel, there half a brick, a yard from there a once extravagant feathery hat, of all things. Disorganization reined. The plants didn't even seem to match.
Finally all three of her impromptu guardians relaxed, the second man relievedly lowering the trumpet and setting it down. Kiah opened her mouth to demand the promised explanation and was answered by tired groans.
"I told the last one."
"I told the one before that."
"I don't bloody care if it's my turn, I'm not doing it."
"Someone needs to tell me," growled Kiah, afraid and uncertain and fighting to keep her hand away from the comfort of her dagger hilt lest she spook these people who suddenly seemed too ashamed of something to look at her. This must be some of what the books meant when they said diplomacy was difficult. And here she'd always scoffed, so certain that only the soldiers worked hard enough to complain.
Three tired sighs answered her demand. The tallest man, dressed in poor raggedy clothing like the rest of them and balding above blue eyes, finally brought himself to look at Kiah's face. He cringed as if just the sight of her was painful. "There are nasty things living on the other side of the fence. That's why you need to be especially careful around it. You want the rest of the story, like where you are, ask someone else. We're sick of explaining it."
"What do you mean? People get lost here often?" Kiah stood and folded her arms stubbornly over her chest, bow swinging uselessly in one hand still. The way these people were acting as if she'd done something wrong, when they were the ones being difficult about telling her where she was! But at the question they all just shook their heads and waved their hands as if to ward her off.
"Just go that way. Someone'll explain." The blue eyed man pointed off into the distance away from the fence. Squinting out that way Kiah could vaguely make out more piles of random objects, various scruffy plant life, and now that she was looking for them, blurs that were probably several people milling about.
"But I don't-" She blinked in surprise. The three people had scurried off while she wasn't looking, like frightened children. Gods, where... what.... Even her mental voice was at a loss for words. She slung her bow over her shoulder again, blatantly let her hand rest on her dagger's hilt, and jogged over towards the settlement, cautiously scooping out the terrain along the way. She still didn't dare let her guard down, not by a long shot.
Now that she had time to really look around her jog slowed itself down to a thoughtful walk. She needed to get a bearing on her surroundings ASAP and plan from there. But I can't plan how to get home until I find out where I am and how I got- no, there's no time for how I got here yet. That can wait. Already she was feeling pangs of something like homesickness, missing the warm safe feeling she had gotten used to from waking up every morning and knowing she was exactly where she wanted to be.
The blue sky was too bright and looking at it for more than a few seconds made dots swim in front of her eyes. The grass was normal green, but that was the end of anything she recognized; the shrubs ranged from having such delicate leaves that they looked like fuzzballs to another bush that spread aggressively over the dirt and seemed to be made entirely of thorns. The ground dipped into craters without warning, all ornamented with pieces of unrecognizable junk. In the course of her walk she had to step around the broken half of a coffee table, over a battered old clothing mannequin, and around an entire glass doored display cabinet full of shattered china plates and bowls.
Even stranger was the tense feeling that hung over everything. There was a smell like lightning or gunpowder in the air, a feeling of disorganization. The whole area had a... a... an aura of Weird.
Yes. An Aura of Weird.
Kiah hurried her jog up.
The settlement looked was nothing more than shabby tents and lopsided sheds. Kiah had expected to see some kind of central buildings loom up as she came near, or at least a few larger and better looking tents behind the front lines. Instead, the closer she got the more convinced she became that she had landed herself out in the absolute middle of nowhere. Random junk was still everywhere just begging to be tripped on, though here it had been mostly dragged into piles or improvised into something useful. At least a dozen people ambled around with slumped shoulders. At least a couple looked drunk. Just a few were working on building things out of freshly gathered piles of stuff, one using a table made of a door balanced on brick and cinderblock legs, while the vast majority seemed to be either sitting on something, sleeping, or talking with those around them. She noticed the talkers getting frequent dirty looks from the resters. And the people themselves-
Well that woman, for example, had a very small pair of feathery wings sticking out of her head. And the man next to her appeared to have green skin.
............ Screw diplomacy. Kiah's hand went white knuckled around her dagger's hilt and tried not to tremble.
"Hey, hey!" Someone had noticed her, but Kiah, frozen, couldn't look away from the woman to see who. The woman turned to look too, and... orange eyes. Kiah became vaguely aware of more shouts in gibberish languages and the scuffle of approaching feet over the thunder of her pulse.
Screw staying calm, too. Kiah turned and bolted.
The people blankly watched her go, shook their heads, sighed, and went back to what they were doing. A few were tense, fidgeting nervously as they considered going after her, but those were quickly and silently subdued by threatening glares from the rest. Once the oppressive muggy atmosphere had returned to a safe level of blah, nobody bothered to notice what appeared to be a bush slipping casually away in chase.
Fifteen minutes were well spent for Kiah, huddling between the fallen remains of a rusty old tin shed and a few thick clumps of shrubbery catching her breath. She was in plenty sound enough shape to handle the run, but the panic was another story. The strategic part of her brain was annoyed at her for not being more careful about her choice of hiding place, but the rest of her brain was all busy yammering like a ninny and wanting to sit with it's head between it's knees until it was sure it wouldn't pass out, so nobody listened to the strategic bit.
Okay. A plan. A plan is needed, here. Kiah latched onto the comforting thought. Plans were good! Plans were her friend! She would think up a plan of action for what to do next, and then everything would be fine. And that did a very good job of calming her down-
"Sal?"
-until one of the shrubs rustled slightly and began speaking. Kiah's dagger finally came out of it's sheath as she jumped to her feet and glared, eyes coming back into focus and picking out that it wasn't a bush speaking, but rather a very bush colored... er... dog? With horns. It had slightly violet blue eyes. "What?!", she managed to blurt.
"Oh, good, you speak english. That's a common enough language here. I'm sorry to have scared you, but could you put that down? Please?" The dog backed up apprehensively
Kiah opened her mouth to demand something appropriate that began with 'who' or 'what', but instead ended up muttering jadedly to herself. "...the talking green dog with horns is now making more sense than anyone else I've heard today." And then she said it again, just to make sure she really was saying something that absurdly true.
The Lascivus, A.K.A. talking green dog, sat down slowly and smiled with the sad patience
that people usually reserve for a child who's just lost their favorite toy. "Hello. My... name... is... Rais. What... is... your... name?"
Kiah didn't so much sit down as collapse into a seated position. Numb shock was setting in. "Kiah. Hi."
"Hello, Kiah. Did you just get here? And you have no idea how?" Kiah nodded, and Rais valiantly fought the urge to look guiltily away from eye contact. "Have you ever heard the multi-dimensional theory? That there's an infinite number of worlds, universes, that exist on top of eachother without anyone really knowing?"
"I've heard of it."
"I'm afraid it's true. And you see, there's this one dimension that's seriously unstable for some reason, and it appears to randomly, er, fluctuate or something, and create, ah, possibly wormholes, we aren't... er...."
Defying all logic of the situation, Kiah's eyes had actually begun to glaze over slightly at the threat of overly scientific explanation.
"What it comes down to is that this unstable world randomly reaches out and grabs things from all the other worlds and sucks them in. And doesn't spit them back out, ever."
Silence.
"Things and, er, people."
Horror, exhaustion, and the fact that it had already been nighttime for Kiah when everything had gone crazy crashed into eachother like confused tidal waves. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she toppled over, unconscious and overwhelmed, into the dirt.
that people usually reserve for a child who's just lost their favorite toy. "Hello. My... name... is... Rais. What... is... your... name?"