In the rose-blue hour before dawn, Kiah woke up to a tickling sensation on her face, slapped a hand to her cheek. Her fingers came away wet. Tears. Why was I.... She groaned sickly as the dreams flooded back to her. The castle breaking, falling, the cobblestones slick with blood, the muted roar of homes on fire, the screams... the mad laughter... and the sky, the beautiful purple sky cracking to reveal- blue.
"...Are you all right?" Kiah turned her head to one side to find Rais looking worriedly down at her, one paw raised and reaching out. "I was going to wake you. I... I'm sorry."
Kiah sat up and nodded, looked around, dully noted that they were still behind the broken tin shed and bushes. But what did it matter? Life, death, safety, danger, what did any of it matter from here? She stared straight ahead with blank eyes.
Rais, uncomfortable, tried to lighten the tone. "You're off to a fine start, Kiah. You can speak a common native language and I can see you've got a good head on your shoulders. Most people are in all kinds of hysterics at this point, insisting that they're dreaming or insane, and getting overly upset about my talking. Apparently most world's rules don't allow creatures that look like me to speak. So really, this isn't such a bad place for someone like you to be."
"I was asleep for a long time."
"Several hours. There's kind of an interdimensional jetlag. You'll get used to it in a few days."
"Why did you stay?"
"Well, it would have been pretty cruel of me to just leave you there, wouldn't it?"
Kiah sighed tiredly, looked up at the lightening sky. "'Not so bad here', you say. Tell me about this place."
"Well......" Kiah's stare fell heavily on Rais, making him squirm like one might if challenged to advertise the fun of getting a root canal. The elliptical silence stretched on for several minutes.
"It happened to everyone here? All of them, just grabbed up from other... planets, worlds, whatever?"
"We think so. It's impossible to know if there were ever natives. It's been happening for a long time as far as we can tell."
"And has anybody ever found a way to go back?"
"Well we're trying, you see, but it's dangerous, very difficult, but if you keep- Kiah? Where are you going?" She had stood up and brushed herself off, checked over all her equipment, and started walking. Rais trotted worriedly after her, timidly waiting for an answer.
"I'm going back to the town. If you can even call it that."
"Yes, okay, but why?"
"To get the rest of the people who want to go home and find a way."
"AH! Miss Kiah, no, I assure you that is a very bad ide-"
Kiah lifted her bow, fitted it with an arrow, spun and pulled the string halfway back. "If you try to stop me from getting home so help me I will pin you to the spot to keep you out of my way. I don't have time to waste."
Rais, who didn't know about her infamous aim, froze more because of the mad glint in her strange purple eyes than the one on the arrow's tip. The tense moment dragged on long enough to make it's point. Kiah lowered her bow, turned away, and kept walking.
Rais waited until she was out of earshot to shake his head and mutter to himself. "So much for being levelheaded. I guess I'll have to let her learn this lesson the hard way...." Cautiously, quietly, with head bowed low and ears perked, Rais snuck after Kiah.
That stupid annoying rational part of Kiah's brain was acting up again. It was probably screaming something along the lines of 'this is bad tactics AND bad diplomacy!', but the stubborn resolve to get home immediately and out of this twilight zone was too thick. It muffled the reason into an irritating buzz that only made things worse. Just because he's a very sensible talking dog doesn't mean he's right about everything. A whole planet of people from all kinds of places, there has to be someone that can fix it.
To which she answered herself, If you're seriously using a simple blanket term like 'fix it' to calm yourself down you clearly don't realize how deeply you've landed in the sh-
Shut up! She glared up at the sunrise lightening sky. Stupid sky. Stupid blue. It would be a miracle if she could ever like the color again.
The people who were actually awake, outside, and with it enough to notice her approach did not look happy to see her coming; the crack of dawn timing probably didn't help. And by reason of temporary insanity, Kiah didn't care. She marched right up to the green skinned man she had seen before, now sitting on a dirty wooden shipping carton and looking at the sky, and tapped him on the shoulder.
"Excuse me. Do you-"
"Dreka?" The man blinked at her with startled and confused yellow eyes. Kiah sighed.
"Sorry, sorry. Nothing." She backed away, hands raised apologetically and already loosing some of her steam to dismay. The language barrier, I forgot about that. She looked around... only two or three other people were awake, and both eyeballed her strangely- one looked like a scared rabbit ready to bolt. Body language wise, not literally.
Maybe I should wait until later....
The sky was lightening into a robin's egg color. Kiah set her shoulders and marched over to the twitchy person, a shockingly normal looking light haired young man. Brown eyes. "Sir. Excuse me."
"Whatdoyouwant?" He twitched again, took a step away. "I didn't do anything to you, what's your-"
"Look, calm down. I'm not going to hurt you or anything. I just want to know if you're sick of this place or not, if you want to get back to whatever home you came from."
The man's eyes bulged as if Kiah had just sprouted claws and a muzzle. "I DON'T KNOW WHO TOLD YOU THAT! I DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT THAT, I DON'T KNOW WHY YOU-"
-and he interrupted his own sentence by turning and running away.
What in blazes? But before Kiah could even consider what to do about that she went stumbling forward from a hard shove and fell. Daily battle training be blessed, she was rolling and back up on her feet in the same second that she hit the dirt. A thin old clay cup, drunkenly thrown, shattered on the ground where she should have been.
"Troublemaker!"
"We don't want people comin' here and messing up the peace, you little-"
"If you know what's good for you-"
The last awake person, the only one she hadn't tried speaking too yet, had apparently rallied a few of his friends and come back once he saw where things were going. None of them are in good shape and the best weapon between them is a broken bottle. I could take them. I think.
Unless they have more behind you, Kiah, or nearby, or they're better organized than you think, and this is why we don't do stupid things like this, Kiah, for future reference.
But her internal monologue was broken into by her getting a good close look at the man's face, bloodshot blue eyes, stubble and all, as he grabbed her by the shirt collar and leaned in to glare inches from her nose. "Look here, girly. We don't know where you came from and we don't really care. We're all stuck here and we always have been, and we're sick of you stupid crackpots coming around and upsetting people. Gets everyone's hopes up for about a week, and then it's the rest of us left to clean up the bodies from the suicides. So take a quick lesson in life here, and since you're staying a long time you're smart to listen up. Find something to keep yourself busy and quiet, and shut your trap about leaving. We aren't the only ones that would rather have one body to deal with now instead of twenty later."
As it turns out, having five people glaring genuine bloody murder at you over the shoulder of a sixth person does wonders for sobering one up. Stupid all around, Kiah. This isn't the time or the place. She held her empty hands up by her shoulders in surrender. "Sir yes sir."
He glared at her a little longer to make sure she wasn't being smart, nodded, and finally let go of her shirt and stomped away. His friends likewise eyed at her for a minute longer to make their point before breaking up and wandering off. Quickly deciding that this wasn't a place to hang around Kiah grabbed her dropped bow back up, hiked her backpack up on her shoulders, and discretely edged away out of sight.
"When you're done working all that out of your system..." There was the green dog again, sitting there and waiting with annoyingly upbeat patience. "Not that I blame you for it. I'm actually a bit proud of you; most people don't learn that lesson so well. You can have a cool head afterall."
"I threatened to kill you! What're you still helping me for?"
"You threatened. Some of the people I've played welcome wagon to have seriously tried. Besides, I think you might have a chance. I was going to tell you that it's a bad idea to just charge out announcing that you want to leave like you did, but if you go talking to the right people..."
Kiah stopped mid step and, wide eyed. "You, Sir, have my attention."
Rais smiled warmly and actually gave his tail a wag.
--
Rais insisted that Kiah be given a short crash course in what parts of what plants were safe to eat before they went anywhere; it was no small feat for Kiah to agree. He modestly neglected to mention that he was an earth-elemental of his species and thus gifted with profound understanding of plants. And he was right- her brain started working much more clearly after a decently sugary meal.
"So. Where do we go from here?" Kiah bounced on the balls of her feet, backpack bulging oddly now that her bow and quiver had been crammed into it, eager to get moving onward to wherever. Plus the tree they had stopped to sit under made her nervous. Orange leaves just seemed distinctly not right.
Rais took another infuriatingly thoughtful and calm bite from a fruit he'd found. "Well. We want to find an old friend of mine. The closest thing to an expert on the teleporting phenomena that there is, and he's been working on a solution for years."
"What're we waiting for then?"
"It's just that I don't really know where he is."
Kiah stared dumbfounded. "I thought you said you were old friends!"
"Well we are, but nobody stays in one place for long here. You'll get used to it. Plus people don't like him because of his work and the types it attracts, so he gets chased on a lot. Besides, you'd think he was jinxed or something, the way volatile things keep Falling near his camping spots."
"Falling? From whe- oh."
"Ah, don't look so disappointed! We can find him. We'll just have to find ol' Zeke first."
"Please tell me Zeke can tell us exactly where your friend is and that we aren't going to have to do some giant wild goose chase chain of rumors quest."
"Funny you should ask that..." He fidgeted guiltily, and Kiah stopped pacing to glare down with crossed arms.
"Well?"
"Well Zeke's a nice guy, you'll be hard pressed to find someone more solidly faithful to the cause, but he's very odd. He constantly refers to some set of 'Rules' and 'signs' that nobody can figure out the origin of. He actually does like to try and send people off on weird quests now and then. But really, a good guy if you can be patient with him. I swear."
Kiah tried not to sigh and massaged the bridge of her nose. How could this get worse?
"And I should warn you, he's got a dragon."
She froze.
"Oh come on, don't tell me you can't accept that- look who you're talking to, for crying out loud. Besides, she's a sweet little thing." Rais swallowed the last bite of his fruit, licked his chops, and hopped to his feet. "So are you ready to get going?"
Kiah stared at him. "Tell me something, Rais."
"What's that?"
"If a ball of flame fell out of the sky and lit your tail on fire, would you even mind? Or would you just point out that it makes a jolly good torch and skip on?"
The first several minutes of their trip were sheepishly very silent.