"It's called the Prison? Uh. I have no idea. We always just figured it was planes of marble with geometric statues and black rubber trees growing out of it."

"That's what Groundskeeper called it. She's connected to this world, but she doesn't have any powers from it, so who knows what this place does."

"Hm..." Fib hums as a curious look creeps onto his face, before he gets in a shitty approximation of lotus position, seemingly trying to meditate.

She lays back until its time to move on.

Another thirty minutes or so pass before Sniper says that it's time to head onwards to the Rim. Fib replaces the seat he removed from his bicycle then mounts up, Sniper switching from their bike to sitting on the back of FIb's.

"We're going to be getting picked up on the Rim side of the jump, since otherwise we'd probably have to spend all day biking to get to Revival Base, since the Prison-Rim bridges near here usually ends up pretty far from it."

"Ok." She gets on the bike and waits to start pedaling with Fib. "Whenever you're ready."

"I'll count up to three, then start pedaling. Then we'll try and get close and match velocities, then I'll count back down, and jump on the word go. Alright?"

And assuming she offers no question or complaint, they can get get started.

"One, two, three," he says, calm and quiet, before starting to pedal, working up to a decent but not blazing speed.

"Let's do it." She pedals in rhythm with her new friends, allowing herself to be carried along like last time. She braces herself for the ride.

They match up. "Three, two, one, go."

There's the same jarring explosion of world-aura, and now they're pedaling across a grey plain of shale.

In the distance, off to their side, there's a war-rig, a big, golden tanker-truck tricked out with armor and weapons, which blares its thunderous horn as it sees them. Then keeps blasting their horn over and over as they turn and start heading towards them.

A quick glance behind them will reveal a mass of writhing tadpole-like bodies almost melting into each other, surrounded by the same dark miasma that turned the jellyfish into a youma back in the Prison.

"Motherfucker, again?!" Fib shouts.

"Ready for recoil!" Sniper replies before managing to spin around in their seat, facing backwards and drawing their rifle as Fib begins to pedal as hard as he can.

Self-preservation is almost not enough to stop her from gaping at the upwards curve of the ring world she suddenly finds herself on. She quickly takes in her immediate surroundings as she throws herself off her bike, initiating her transformation by enveloping herself in light.

Her shoes, then her gloves materialize one at a time, her sword finds itself in her hands as she completes her transformation.

As she does so the mass bloats in size, tentacles sprouting at odd angles thrashing in a medium they are obviously maladapted to.

The mass struggles momentarily, before eventually beginning to pull inwards and upwards, bulging up and then forming into a rough arc, thought the ground at two points, with a mass atop the arc sort of wobbling and up down. The dark miasma surrounding it pulses and whorls, and the mass shivers and contracts again, the lower portion becoming more defined, like a pair of legs except arranged one in front of the other rather than side to side, while the upper portion straightens and narrows, extruding two grasping tentacles from its apex, reaching towards Strawberry.

Fib has lifted his feet off the pedals of the bike, and Sniper has loaded another incendiary round taken aim, and locked themself into position on bike.

"Clear!" the sosei-shita shouts, then takes a shot for the center of the mass, briefly sending the bike flying forwards 

The burning pain is plainly visible in the seizing of its tentacles, the shots sends it reeling. Seeing an opportunity, Strawberry breaks into a sprint as she raises a hand and blasts it with lightning just as it takes a stumbling step backwards, causing it to seize at just the right moment in its stride to fall backwards. She pounces on it as it falls, planting her sword in the smoldering crater in its chest.

"Please don't get weird on me." She grimaces at the smell of charred sea life.

With an upsetting sound four human arms emerge from its center of mass along with... her face?

"Oh c'mon!"

Christ. Polytoads are already kind of fucked up but whatever that miasma is doing to them is making them even worse. "You got any more reds?!" he asks, his voice loud to overcome the ringing in his ears.

"Three more!" Sniper replies, already beginning to load another.

"Turning around!" Fib adds, and bringing the bike into a wide swinging turn. Sniper pivots around again, resting their rifle on Fib's shoulder to begin taking aim again.

The war-rig is now driving directly towards the mass, which is in turn reaching out, attempting to grapple Strawberry with three of its arms (which are beginning to grow a second skin in mimicry of her gloves) and trying to grab her sword out of its chest with the fourth.

"Gah!" She is enveloped by mimicries of her own hands, her sword arm caught between fingers, the sword itself leaving her hand as she is squeezed. She strains to loosen its grip. "You leave my soft, nubile form out of this!" Coincidentally, as if in response, the center of mass stretches out and morphs to be more... anatomically correct. "Oh c'mon! They don't have to see that!"

Less distantly, the war-rig blares its horn. It's approaching rapidly now.

Fib has started to circle around to give Sniper a better shot, that won't result in Strawberry getting a face full of fireball.

The mass, meanwhile, is sort of pulling out of itself, sloughing off the damaged and dead flesh and revealing a surprisingly complete humanoid form, fleshy garments extruding from its skin to mimic Strawberry's magical girl regalia. It's posture is oddly calm, as though it's lost track of being in a fight, and is holding and inspecting her and her sword.

"Hey good lookin'." She mutters. It looks into her eyes with mimicries of her own. "What? Got something on my face?" It's still squeezing her, adjusting its grip to keep her restrained, but otherwise doesn't attack. She can hear the vehicle driving behind her.

"Are we friends now? Amigos?" Her grin is shaky, she doesn't know what to make of her reflection, staring at her, holding her close to its face, breath smelling like brine. It moves her closer, then closer, it opens its mouth-

Strawberry pumps as much electricity into it as she can manage, it convulses and tighten's its grip on her, squeezing painfully tight. Some electricity circulates back to her, letting her quickly reabsorb and pump it out again.

The horn's blare grows louder, squished into a higher pitch by the Doppler effect. Then, layered over top, is the buzzing roar of something like a chainsaw.

Strawberry falls free in a shower of blood, the three arms that were holding her, as well as the head she pumped full of lightning falling to the ground alongside her, deflating grossly before splitting into a handful of wriggling tadpoles, some of which seem to die soon after while others try to squirm away from her across the hard shale ground.

The war-rig is now on the other side of her, one of the sosei-shita riding up top having swung out a sort of chainsaw-claw on the end of a boom arm and torn through the upper portion of the mass.

Fib is turning the bike to face back towards the mass again, and Sniper returns to lining up a shot.

Her whole body aches as she tries to catch her breath. She is slick with foul smelling viscera tinged uncomfortably with the coppery smell of blood. "Fucking... ew." She hears wet noises, footsteps, the roaring of engine and chainsaw. When she raises her head she sees herself running away, much smaller now, sword in hand. "Hey! My sword!" She lifts her hand at her doppelgänger, a few pathetic sparks arcing between her fingers, she's out of juice. "Fuck's sake."

To her left the fleshy mass has grown, appearing to take on a form similar to the rig that just cut her down with chainsaws. "Oh what the fuck." It can't possibly have functional wheels, can it? In lieu of finding out she opts to pick herself up with a groan and run as best she can manage towards her copy.

Her doppelganger's running form is...not the best, to say the least, though it is surprisingly energetic for having just pulled itself free from the rest of the mass. For the moment, she's gaining on it, though its form is also steadily improving as an eye on the back of its head occasionally glances at her.

Behind her now, there's the increasingly familiar sounds of Sniper's long gun booming, and then sizzling burst of an incendiary round exploding inside of soft, wet flesh. Then the rolling thunder and creaking of war-rig turning around, revving up, and something between a splash and a wet thud. A moment later, things are quieter, and she can hear a bicycle coming up behind her. "Rest of it's handled!" Fib's voice calls. "Want me to try and grab the sword?"

She bites back her instinctive dismissal at the notion of needing help, she honestly feels pretty beat. "Yeah, actually, thanks."

She lets Fib go ahead and takes a moment to breathe. She was squeezed pretty hard, she feels a dull ache when she takes in a deep breath. She turns to the mutilated remains of the imitation war-rig. "Well that didn't last very long."

With nothing left to do she drops her transformation with a breath and a burst of light, twinkling sparks of light lingering for a couple of seconds before fading entirely. In an instant she is clean and dry, even the taste of brine has left her mouth. "Shower power."

Sniper hops off the introduce Strawberry to the sosei-shita operating the war-rig as it pulls up slowly to where Strawberry is resting, who are humanoids like them who come in a surprisingly diverse array of colors, though all in fairly dark shades, and most with one or more horns or knobs or other protrusions around the crown of their heads. They have simply descriptive names, like one who tends to be quiet and contemplative named Thinker, one whose skin is dark grey and particularly smooth and shiny named Steel, and ironically enough, Namegiver, who has been part of the community since Revival Base's founding and helps new arrivals pick names for themselves if they struggle to do so on their own.

Fib bikes on up behind the doppelganger, which is still running as fast as it can. It gets spooked by him approaching from behind, clearly unable to outspeed him on the bike over flat ground like this, and opts to chuck the sword at him in the hopes of distracting him and that ditching the extra weight will let it run faster. Fib is able to avoid the inexpertly tossed weapon, but since it's what he's coming for anyway he doesn't bother to pursue further, turning around, picking the sword back up, and heading over before handing it back to Strawberry.

She greets them in kind as Sniper introduces her. There is a stab of embarrassment as she introduces herself as Strawberry, but she swallows it. No regrets. They look like they're straight out of a work of fantasy, one is green, another blue, another a dark red. The short horns make her think of oni, which, given the names, makes sense. All the while she studiously ignores the backdrop as she talks to them, and avoids looking up. As she see's Fib returning she spots her duplicate running away. "Is it ok to let her go like that?"

As they group of them start climbing back into the war-rig, bringing both of the bicycles aboard, one of the sosei-shita, the dark red one who happens to be named Rightside, asks: Why's she named Strawberry?

To Strawberry's own question, Fib only shrugs. "Probably? There's lots of fucked up shit out in the wilder parts of the Rim, one escaped polytoad colony is barely a drop in the bucket. It-- she didn't have any of the weird black-Light in her anymore, which was the only part I was really worried about."