"...real Arthur?"
Tentatively and with very deliberate movements Felix also leaves the vehicle. Followed by Fenris. One of the officers approaches them.
"Evening, ma'am and men. S-" The officer clear his throat. "Sorry about the inconvenience. This one escaped the asylum a couple of days ago. Real nutcase, I hope she didn't try her spiel about alien abductions on you."
Jessica is still in the car so she uses a door to hit one of them, at the same time as the driver quickly opens his door and jumps out, a gun in his hand already pointed at another reptoid—
—but it doesn't fire. Cursing under his breath, he jumps at the one he was firing at and tries to use the butt off the gun to hit him.
The one that got hit by the car door lets out a rather pathetic. "Ouch!"
The tackled reptoid breaks away and shoots a long tongue at Fenris, causing him to slowly collapse to the ground. The reptoid takes Fenris' shape, including the wings. The Fenris-impersonator tries to fly at Dayo but falls to the ground.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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-
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.
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.
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.
Fenris thinks that the memory of crossing the portal wasn't real, but trying to fly beyond the edge of the dimension proved useless (he just kept being turned around). After some effort he locates the point in the sky where the portal stands and uses this portal's opening key. Make the wind go in a circle and then rise up. Just like in his memory. Fenris flies through it.
He doesn't find himself on the other side, instead he wakes up on some sort of cheap hospital bed in a poorly lit room. It smells terrible in there.
Fenris keeps his eyes shut for a moment, before peeking through them very briefly. A reptoid is in the room, but turned away from him. There are at least two other people in the same room, both unfamiliar and both in similar beds, sleeping.
Fenris takes a few moments to observe the reptoid. Two people pass outside the room and the creature tenses.
"This delay is unacceptable!" hisses someone.
"Ssorry, massster. We will be ready to explore their pocket dimensssions sssoon. Your nephew isss troublessome." Says someone, obviously another reptoid.
They move away and Fenris can't hear the conversation. The reptoid in the room relaxes marginally and Fenris observes what he is doing...
...Apparently the reptoid has a pen and a book and is drawing or writing something while sitting on the floor. He casts furtive glances at the door every so often.
Fenris considers his options. His powers are back, but he can barely feel the sky which means he is somewhere underground or very closed. The air feels dry and the terrain feels flat. A desert? They most likely have been moved from Florida then. He also considers his... dream and what it implies.
Very carefully, Fenris removes the pillowcase from his pillow. He picks a moment where the corridor is quiet and the reptoid is distracted. With a swift but quiet movement, Fenris flies and then stuffs the pillowcase in the reptoid's mouth. While the reptoid is still surprised, Fenris immobilizes the being. That part doesn't go as quietly as desired. The creature panics and starts kicking. Fenris hoped he could get some information, but he probably should get on the move.
Fenris lets go off the reptoid and then causes the air around the scaly being to get so hot as to make anyone pass out. Fenris leaves the room and flies close to the ceiling. Searching for Felix, Dayo, their mutual boyfriend, Jessica, Victor and Vii. There are more people on beds, but no one he recognizes. Mostly pale and old.
Fenris has no idea what is going on here. He thinks he spotted Vii through a door's window, but upon closer inspection... a room with at least two dozen white-haired people. Most puzzling of it all: they are wearing or holding various metallic objects with the apparent magical effect of assembling common electronics like smartphones. They all look scared, starved and miserable.
Fenris lingers too long searching for Vii among them and one of them spots him. He is out of there in a flash, but that's not fast enough, he can hear shouting behind him. Fenris finds the stairs and moves up. Reptoids start pouring into the stairs and Fenris catches the brief glance of an open window and bull-rushes past a pair of reptoid creatures.
There is a brief moment where Fenris thinks he made it.
Something pounces on him from behind, sinking sharp teeth in his neck. Much bigger than the other reptoids and with clawed hands that feel strong enough to break bones. There is some kind of poison spreading out of it, which causes Fenris' vision to blur and his blood feel like it's on fire.
Worst of it all, whatever what is holding onto him is making almost orgasmic sounds at the taste of his blood.
Fenris half-falls and half-tries shrug the thing off. But that only earns him an embrace that probably did break something as they both crashland-
Even as the blood causes him to lose consciousnesses, Fenris tries to not just give up, even if he thinks there is an alternative, he doesn't know if it will work... He just needs to keep trying anyway...
Darkness takes hold of him again.
There's wind, now, and a sea.
Planets are ejected matter from stars, right? Balls of molten rock and iron, elements coalescing randomly into stuff big enough to be approximately-spherical under its own weight. That's how rocky planets are formed, at any rate, and she's clearly on a rocky planet, so that's what must have happened. But the ground is solid and cool, this isn't molten rock, so it must've cooled off. The core is still molten, of course, but that's far away.
And there must be water, right? That's an important part of temperature regulation, is water—and the microorganisms in water, converting carbon dioxide into oxygen, which is then hit by ultraviolet light that turns that into ozone. The ozone layer and the atmosphere keep the temperature stable and breathable. So this planet must have water, and an ozone layer, and the water must be salty—an ocean—because it's always in contact with the rock. The rock on which she's standing, for instance, in the middle of the ocean.
Now the ocean is really violent, to almost impossible levels. The capsized boat is swiped aside, one of the reptoids actually goes flying up in the air and lands closer to the shore. But the waters are dragging most of everyone else away. Some are going under and not coming back.
If she says so. The portals will close in tighter on her.
What is that black thing over there in the frozenlands? There are shadows moving over there.
She can see a reptoid running, being pursued by... a giant black sea serpent that slides in and out of the ice like it's liquid. The serpent is missing an eye. They are moving her way.
They are in a dark room with four beds. Jessica and Victor rest on two of them. A reptoid is face down on the floor.
"Dayo," Felix sighs in relief. "I don't know, I woke up in this place and there are more reptoids about. None of you were waking up and I have no idea where Fenris is."
They creep closer to the source of voices, which have the particular exaggerated hiss of reptoids.
"...Busssy with the mothersship. Not gonna notisse," says one reptoid in a loud whisper.
"Masster will!" answers another, fearfully.
"Then our ssscaless are gone anyway. The commander sssaid that our dreamsshaper iss too much trouble. Massster will kill him. No more ussse."
Felix nods. There is a lot of hissing whisperers. It turns out to be a list. "And almosst everyone from nine."
"Ssissu iss dead?!"
"No. That'ss why almosst."
The following hiss is somehow exasperated. Pause. "Sstraight up and sstand guard."
"I think someone is coming," Felix whispers.
Three knocked out Reptoids.
One reptoid looking around the corner alarmed. It blinks at them. Felix manages to recover from the surprise fast enough to knock the creature out...
...but not fast enough for them not to shout at the top of their lungs.
"Fuck." Felix says as the creature's scream die down.
And she turns into a dragon. It's huge, easily serving for all of them to ride with a lot of leftover space. She's red, and she glows with barely contained fire from the inside. They can feel the heat from where they are, emanating from her body and her breath. Her scales shimmer with the movement of her muscles, and her eyes are ablaze with yellow-orange light. This has, of course, the expected effect in the architecture.
"Mount up," she growls, somehow not needing to make the proper mouth shapes to speak.
The place gets way less structurally sound than it once was. The walls and ceiling start cracking. Felix blows away debris.
"Dayo, go up! Break the ceiling."
Reptoids advance on them, trying to tongue Dayo. It feels like lashes of cold water against her scaly, glowing-hot carapace. The reptoids experience something much more unpleasant, holding their burned tongues or convulsing on the ground.
The wind picks her up.
Felix looks down. He feels weak over being unable to do it. He feels weak over wishing to do it at all.
Fire, fire everywhere, except around the living being who is trying to fight it with cold and by gathering electricity to form a thunderbolt. Felix counters both.
Killing is something he is unable to do. But burning away most of the oxygen in the area is another story.
They put distance between them and the inferno below.
Felix points and after a moment he remembers how dimensional edges work and lands on Dayo's back. He uses the wind to guide their direction.
Soon enough the pure blackness is replaced by a sudden fog, a sense of something missing that grows around them, more and more...
And there is a moment where gravity fails and there is nothing in the universe but each other's presence...
...then it all comes back at once. Compared to the absolute darkness of before, the night sky above them is practically an explosion of light. The stars shine in unnatural blues and purples.
Under the moonlight there is a city beneath them. Skyscrapers standing very tall, reflecting the stars like dark mirrors.
There is no sound of people. No cars. A few dozen points of artificial light scattered around the windows.
"I don't know... this dimension is much smaller than the rest? And-"
A portal opens near them, but instead of standing upright it's horizontal and parallel to the ground. Then another opens, and another. They form a straight line of six portals and then two more portals open to the left and right of the second-to-last portal. Then yet another two portals open aligned to the third-to-last portal but further away. It's very obviously a shape...
The portals vanish when they get too close. But their destination becomes pretty obvious soon enough. The other large portal arrow was not necessary. The cluster of floating rocks up ahead is literally the only feature around.
Except maybe for the giant black sea serpent things. They dig through the ice very easily and snap jaws at them, but the group and the rocks are far too high to be reached by the creatures.
The floating rocks are large, boulders the size of a small house each. Six in total... featureless except one of them has... something... a statue?
Plenty. As they get closer it becomes obvious the statue is surrounded by a fountain of sorts, simple and circular. The entire thing is made from the same stone as the rock.
Felix hops off suddenly. He takes a look at the statue and takes a step back. He looks at the fountain and his confusion doubles.
The stone statue's face is the same as Felix's, but the wings are like Fenris'.
And there is a red bubble inside the fountain and inside it there is something that could be a fetus of some kind.
The water is very refreshing, almost delicious. It seems to reach deep into her fiery being and quench her soul.
Also, she suddenly finds herself the possessor of a few new senses and her previous senses get an edge. Which isn't all that helpful when she is suddenly experiencing a twisting pain in her wings, which appear to be cut a thousand times. From the inside. Her awareness expands outwards and she can feel the sky: air pressure, movement, temperature, humidity and electric charge are obvious like colors in a painting. And she gets that there is something wrong with the sky here, it's... too still.
Also, her wings are now covered in red and black feathers and the floating rock is under her command.
The water tastes much better. At least in the second it takes before her wings start growing. That's possibly the worst pain she has experienced in her life and also the briefest.
Now Jessica has a pair of blue-green wings sprouting from her back,her irises turn white, and she gets a keen sense of the sky surrounding her. She in fact can tell with good-as-eyesight precision the shape of things in a few meters around her. She can feel the water too, as something under her direct control.
There is something off about the sky, and it's pretty obvious a property of this particular pocket dimension. The air just stands too still.
She can also feel the rock under her feet as something she can move. A statue starts emerging from the spring after a few moments.
She can move her own claimed rock and nudge another towards them. They collide and the ground shakes, but no one is thrown off balance
"Did you do that? I already have skymagery..." he does not say that Fenris didn't look changed despite drinking from the water, "...but I guess the reptoids could come here and take it and that would be one less power in their hands."
He hops to the floating island and drinks.
"This tastes good, but I am not feeling- wait, you can control the rock with your statue on it?" he asks as a statue starts emerging.
Dayo also has a knife. It's tiny in comparison to her body.
"Where is Earth?!" she roars, and speeds up her flying. "This is ridiculous I'm tired of these pocket dimensions I want to become a human and hug my boyfriend and figure out how to rescue my other boyfriend and cry."
Felix hugs Dayo's back. Which probably can't be felt through the thick hide. "We really ought to have found Earth by now... fuck, the probability- there is no place outside the conflux with this many pocket dimensions overlapping."
The next dimension has a colorful forest, dotted by the occasional cottage. Felix groans.
It turns out that wind control is a great way to make airborne objects move where she wants. There's still a delay when they cross the vanishing point, but it comes faster.
They appear on a desert that's too bright.
Floating islands above a desert.
Floating geometrical crystals, above a swirly colorful void.
Above a non-floating castle that's on fire.
"Wait a minute, I recognize this place from my dream."
"Be careful. I am pretty sure it's a reptilian monster."
And as they get closer it does look like a reptoid... actually, two reptoids, except one is apparently unconscious and being dragged by the other. The conscious reptoid spots the massive dragon and yelps and does their best to run away while carrying the other.
"It's mine, just as much as Felix's place is Felix's, and I think I might have killed people there, and I am pissed off at them for making me do this but this is mostly the way my dragon psychology is dealing with the fact that I am horrified in myself. Gods, I am going to be so traumatized when I turn human again," she sighs.
"Boyfriend?" Sisu inquires.
"Sisu, just answer the questions to the best of your ability."
"Okay... Masster Jamessson iss in charge of usss. He tellss uss to explore placess for him."
"What are those places? Why did he kidnap them?"
"They are pocket dimensionss... Masster kidnapss people to make dreamshapersss and ssend usss to the pocket dimenssionss."
"It's probably not a good idea to search for more people. At least not until we have a better place to keep Sisu and friend. Which, name of your friend?"
"He isss Ssalo."
"Okay, find somewhere we can hold Sisu and Salo. And grill him for more details. Do you know where they are keeping all these people? The magical slaves and dreamshapers?"
"I know where. But I don't know many."
"Estimation? More than fifty? More than a hundred?"
Sisu starts counting on his fingers and gives up. "Lotss."
"More than you can count in your fingers."
Nods. "Dreamsshaperss are thirty before you came. But the otherss are lotss."
With Sisu's help they figure out the base layout. Most dreamshapers are kept in this area on this level. Artifacts stay locked up over there. Other enslaved people stay over there.
"The Arthurss might be in the mothersship. I think..."
"Mothership?"
Sisu needs some coaxing to explain. The mothership is in Arthur's - the original one - dimension. Something happened and the original Arthur locked himself in there, which is related to how they needed the other Arthur.
Felix nods. "Can you explain the mageborn you have around? What can they do?"
"There's the White who are our ancient enemiess. They don't need to sleep or rest."
"Alright. Is there a convenient portal out? Somewhere that we can sneak out without drawing attention and lead people to safety. Away from here."
"There iss a portal to crasshlandss. There iss a path there to village."
"An Earthside village?" Sisu nods. "Alright, lead the way. Can we go from that portal to the mothership?"
"Yess, but on the oppossite direction."
They start moving people. Descending the stairs and following Sisu.
They arrive at where the portal is. It's a hallway that looks like it has seen better days (well, hours, it's not that old yet).
Sisu opens it with elaborate hand gestures. The other side reveals a gray rocky desert. There is a military-looking truck that looks like it has been forgotten.
And go they go. Three skymages (one a dragon) and two evil henchmen (one passed out). They opt to have Dayo walk while Felix and Jessica fly low to the ground, since they need to spot caves. The terrain is rocky and irregular enough that they have a couple of false starts, but eventually they find a place.
"Dayo can't get inside like this, but if I am reading the currents right there is a pit that is hard to get out of if you can't fly." To Dayo. "Wait a minute and don't do anything harsh?"
They take the second reptoid off Dayo's back and make their way inside.
Sisu decides to just throw himself on the ground and tremble.
Inside the cave, the initial passage is narrow and twisted, but they soon find themselves in a large domed chamber. Felix creates a light for them and looks down at the ground.
"Okay, this does look good enough to leave Salo behind. I think he can even climb out, but not in a timely manner. Help me carry him down?"
They take Salu down by way of a controlled fall. Felix makes the wind swirl around them, and they land on the packed dirt. They are about to lay the reptoid on the ground when a section of the wall moves on its own and spits a glob of something viscous at Felix's back.
She manages to tackle Felix in time, but now she, Felix and Salu are a heap in the ground.
It is too dark to see, so Jessica feels their attacker through her new skymage sense. It is changing shape; it is similar to a reptoid, but shaped more like a frog-man than that.
Between the tangle of body parts (including new body parts) and the general confusion of the situation?
The creature manages to spit up slime on both of them. It hits her in the neck and Felix's across the face. He produces a gurgled strangled sound.
And all Jessica's senses turn blurry, things don't go dark, but everything feels smudged and out of focus. And... and... is that her family over there sneering at her? No, wait it's the frog-creature. No, it's her family-
Weakly, Felix tries to help her stand up. He helps mostly by getting out from under her, but his attempts to prop her up more get in the way than not.
Her mother (?) looks down at her (it looks so much like Jessica herself). The revulsion and disgust are like physical things dripping from Jessica's skin. "We never wanted you. From the day you were born it was a child too many, and through the years what happens? We are proven right!"