The one that Jessica hit is quickly taken down by Victor. The Fenris-impersonator tries to turn to him, but the-one-they-have-been-calling-Arthur starts punching him fiercely.

Felix decides he doesn't want the reptoid to get whatever magical device Vii was using and throws it away. It doesn't land close to Dayo, but Dayo is closer than anyone else.

The reptoid gets fed up with Felix and tongues him, taking his shape as well. Felix falls inert to the ground, eyes unfocused.

Dayo lunges at the thing, while Victor makes use of the fact that he's better at punching and dodging than not-Arthur to engage that reptoid.

Vii is rising slowly.

Jessica feels something cold wrap around her ankle. The reptoid that she hit with the door wrapped his tongue around her leg. A numbness and cold quickly spreads through Jessica's body and her senses blur.

The Jessica-impersonator quickly stands up, apparently unharmed from Victor's beating. He joins the fray by trying to land a hit on Victor.

Dayo reaches the thing, but Felix-impersonator uses a wing to bat it away. He then makes his own attempt at grabbing the thing for himself.

Victor: is pretty damn good at dodging. He tries to go for obvious weak spots: solar plexus, knee, back of head, chin, even throat if he can find an opening.

(But Jessica still goes out like a light.)

Dayo now lunges for the impersonator to try to grab the thing.

The Jessica-impersonator and Fenris-impersonator disengage for a moment and simultaneously have the idea of tonguing Victor.

Jessica is still very groggy, but she is coming back to herself and so is Fenris.

Not-Arthur doesn't see who tongues him, but he falls to his knees.

Vii jumps at the Felix-impersonator. There is a horrible cracking sound of a wing being broken and the reptoid turns back. Dayo finally grabs the damn device. It's metallic but warm to the touch.

"Quick!" Vii shouts from where she is holding the reptoid down. "Throw it at me."

Victor would normally be able to deal with two combatants but the tongues are something he wasn't trained for. He goes down.

Dayo, meanwhile, throws.

Vii reaches for the thing. She would've grabbed it, but one of the other reptoids grabs it with his tongue. One of the Victor-impersonators hits Victor's head hard against the asphalt. Then Vii gets tongued. The other Victor-impersonator tongues Dayo. The last coherent thing Dayo sees is Vii's miserable expression.

And she's out.

The cold and numbness take hold and everything becomes blurry and distant. Her perception comes and goes in flashes. Including her sense of time.

"-managed to kick it to the-" Darkness. "-can't retrieve it-"

Very far away there is the sound of footsteps and maybe those are boots. "-mess."

"Sssorry, massster. We sshall kill-" Darkness. "-take them?"

"Yes, buffoon. They need to disap-" Darkness. "-put them to good use."

"Yesss, massster Jamessson."

Dayo is abruptly moved. This too is in flashes. One moment she is on the ground. Then in scale-covered arms a clawed hand gently brushes a hair lock away. Then in the backseat of a vehicle, feathers brushing against her arm. Then a long stretch of nothing but dark roads. Finally there is a syringe stab somewhere she can't even tell and the darkness becomes deeper and complete.

Felix jolts into conscience. There is loud music around him and the sound of conversation, just in the other room. A party, a large one by the sound of it. He is in a large corridor of reddish brownstone. The light is provided by torches, and by what he can sense there are torches everywhere in this building.

Weirdest of it all: He is holding a food tray-

A young woman - who Felix immediately recognizes - comes through the door. "Felix? Is there something wrong? Are you going to bring the food? People are waiting for you."

"Oh. Sorry, Vera. I feel like I forgot something... Do you know where everyone is?"

"In the next room, silly."

They walk into the room. The party is massive. Some people are playing with fire, some are on fire, but this appears to leave them completely unharmed.

There is no sign of Fenris or their genderfriends. And soon Felix is distracted by the sight of people on fire.

Fenris is flying as fast as he can.

In the back of his mind he notices a small confusion. His mind is telling him that he just crossed a portal but he can't remember the event itself. The recollection feels like a detailed memory of a memory. And the next memory is him flying.

He is holding two people by the hand. His parents. Except they are ethereal and thin. And getting thinner by the second, like ghosts that are somehow starving. And the sense of urgency to save them is much greater than the desire to check that small confusion in the back of his head.

Over there, there is a cluster of boulders floating above the frozen sea. So close-

A giant sea serpent emerges from the ice, its body black and slick with teeth like daggers. It snarls at Fenris and his parents. Fenris needs to dodge and only barely doesn't drop his mother. That would be the end of her.

Fenris circles around and a second serpent emerges. He goes up and flies towards the boulder cluster in an arc. Almost there, his parents are barely there, but they are almost there.

Then a third serpent sneaks up on them and Fenris dodges.

Fenris doesn't know if he let go or if they ran out of time, but his parents turn into dust and then into nothing.

He would've stood still if the serpents didn't decide to converge and attack him at same time. Avoiding them was easy, he just went further up in the sky.

There he saw another... vision. It wasn't his grandfather, but it looked like him. The vision stared at Fenris and with just his eyes conveyed a message.

"You failed."

Fenris observes the serpents and with a simple feint manages to land on a boulder unharmed.

The thing is the size of a house, bare gray rock with nothing growing on it. Not even moss. It's barren and with a single feature.

There is a spring perpetually dripping water, which overflows and runs into a little canal.

If Fenris hadn't failed his parents would've drunk from it and-

Fenris drinks from the spring. It changes shape, the stone grows and becomes smoother. It gains a purposeful form. The cylinder of a fountain adorned by a stone statue. It depicts Fenris, looking forward with what might be called determination. But to the real Fenris it feels like the expression of failure. Absently, Fenris makes the boulder float higher than the serpents' reach.

He solved one limitation. Now he needs to figure out what to do next.

She opens her eyes.

White. Pure whiteness expanding in all directions. There is light, but no sun, just white luminescence with no visible source coming from the white sky. She can't even tell where the horizon is. It blends with the ground, which is covered in fine white sand.

White like a blank canvas turned into reality.

No tracks on the sand and no features or clue to tell her how she got here. The question of how she got here feels somehow meaningless.

...the ground feels solid. It's how she can tell there's a ground. After a minute of staring at nothing she crouches and touches it. Fine sand, fine enough that it gets stuck in the creases of her skin, and the solid ground beneath it. She tries to dig her hand into it but there's no give.

She stands up again and wonders idly how she's not blinded by the light, there's so much of it. She knows she's not blind because she can see her hand, her self.

But everything else is so empty.

She starts walking.

Whiteness update: still white. Is she going to stay at it for hours?

No. This is giving her a headache (it's not really but it feels like it should be). She needs something. Why is there nothing? There should be something. It makes no sense for there to not be anything, nothing—this featureless empty eternal nothing—nothing is crazy. There are—molecules. The ground must be made of those. They must've come from somewhere. Everything comes from somewhere—the Big Bang, ultimately. The great soup of everything in an inflationary period followed by the rapid cooldown—soup of matter, too energetic to even be called elements, coalescing in random locations due to gravity, forming the very first stars, the simplest thing made of matter, the place where all matter comes from, and if there's matter then there should be stars—

The sand shifts and moves like being carried by the wind. It's hard to see the white on white, but she can tell something happening up in the sky and then darkness starting to spread out from the middle of the whiteness, moving much like sand. It's quickly followed by color that paint beautiful nebulas. The cosmic clouds then quickly form stars dotting the heavens. She can see a galaxy overhead for a solid moment before it's replaced with a star that grows larger and larger and then... there is a sun hanging from the clear blue sky.