At around that time, a very distinct feeling suddenly appears to Strawberry's conduit-senses. What was previously just an ordinary bridge to Earth flares, then tredecuples, as if what was one bridge is now twelve all stacked on top of each other, each one leading to a different world. It's not an especially comfortable sensation, liking having your eyes adjust to sunlight on a bright day after spending a while inside.

That's followed by two loud gunshots. Then, the intensity of the world-auras fades, and peel apart, the Earth bridge remaining where it was and a cluster of twelve (including, if Strawberry focuses, a bit of every world she's connected to, and plenty more besides) moving...towards where she is.

Soon enough, two odd humanoid figures peddle up on golden bicycles with translucent pink tires. One is has an androgynous build, with pale orange complexion almost matching the color of the gold and short tusks.The other, perhaps more notable, is a broad-built man literally ablaze with color, his hear and beard wavering like flames in every color of the rainbow (though primarily also gold, at the moment). The former has a long rifle strapped to their back, and the both of them are equipped with armor made from the same gold as their bikes, and have sheathed swords hanging from their waists.

"Oh!" the fiery man exclaims as Strawberry comes into view. "You're new. I'm Fib, and this is Sniper," he gestures to his companion.

The other gives a slight smile and wave.

"I guess we've come too late tonight...or, this morning, to catch Groundskeeper."

She stares, baffled. Somehow she felt like that being on fucking fire like a Pokemon might've come up in conversation. "Uh." She moves to get up from the bench, only to tumble on to the grass. "Wah!" She scampers to her feet. "I, uh, hi! Hello!"

Fuck. "I'm, er, Stawberry, nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you--" / "Nice to meet you--" the both of them begin with nearly the same tone and prosody, before stopping and giving each other a look, then chuckling to themselves. Sniper gestures for Fib to continue, and he does. "Nice to meet you as well, Strawberry, and sorry for giving you a scare."

"No, uh, I'm good, I'm good. I've met Groundskeeper today, actually, she told me a little about you." She looks at Fib and... Sniper? She feels under dressed, clad in fairly normal girl's clothes compared to the men clad in shimmering golden armor.

"I haven't been doing this conduit thing for very long, Groundskeeper was the first other conduit I've met."

"Oh, same! Sort of. We met her a few-- weeks ago, earth-time. I've been wandering around for about a decade, subjectively speaking, or I think just over three years, objectively. Oh! And, Sniper's a friend of mine from way back when I was just getting started. They're not a Conduit but I've got a thing that lets me bring people and stuff along with me, as long as we're riding or driving or whatever. I met another over on the Rim since then, and now you're the third!" He turns to Sniper, "Three all in one outside year. Bit of a streak, isn't it?"

Sniper nods, though they seem to only find the observation a bit droll.

"Who's the other conduit? What're they like?" She sits down on the bench.

"Busy, but trying very hard to do right by her people. She's got a whole country of elves-- the Rim's local people are elves, and they're all women kind of like here in the Academy, though not in exactly the same way. But yeah, she's got a whole country to keep track of over there, which keeps her plenty busy especially since she's doing her damnedest to do it right and not be a tyrant or anything. She's nice, too, keeping some back-up bodies for me and my friends in stasis in case the Bondworks back at my Stone Library fails or I run into some Quellers while I'm on an Earth and don't manage to run away or fight them off."

She opened her mouth, then closed it. That was a lot of words in quick succession that she either didn't understand or was completely new to her. "I feel like I should be taking notes."

Bondworks? Quellers? Backup bodies? Elves? Trying her darndest not to be a tyrant?

Why is that one of the first things he brings up? Is she at risk? Does she go to Tyrants Anonymous? What is happening in the Rim?

"Sorry, there were a lot of new words there, uhm, Bondworks?"

Fib's colors visibly flicker, bluing and dimming briefly before being revived by a seemingly effortful injection of yellow. "Sorry about that. It's hard to remember that not everybody is as used to this as my most of my friends are. The Bondworks is a special bondfire-- like from Crucible? A special one that I have in my Stone Library, so it's protected from all the nasty shit on Crucible, and it can store Color-- that's what makes me look like this," he gestures to his colorful flames, "and use it to protect you from that sort of cold, grey feeling that reviving at a bondfire usually has."

She makes a mental note to ask about what's so bad about resurrecting through a bondfire later. "So your Stone Library, that's in your Bevin? So you essentially have an extra cool bondfire in it?"

"There's a word for it? Convenient. And yeah, it's incorporated into my Bevin's boiler-slash-furnace room."

"That sounds really cool! And super convenient." She opens her mouth to ask another question, then thinks about it. "Actually, do you have anything that you need to be doing right now? What's your routine?"

"Normally I meet Groundskeeper around here, chat and have some food, share the news, deliver any packages we've got, that sort of thing. Then I try and explore this place for a bit, since my Tether is ornery about me having spent so much less time here than my other worlds, Eventually we need to head back to check on stuff at Revival Base, rest and recuperate, do some training or studying, then more mail route stuff and exploration."

"Oh yeah, I remember Groundskeeper talking about how you have to go to the worlds you're connected to." 

"Hm." She holds out her hand as a mason jar filled with jam materializes in it. "We can eat, and if you don't have compunctions about eating food stolen from vending machines, I have plenty more!"

Fib laughs, and Sniper gets a bit of a smile. "Oh, we stole a lot more than just food back during the first couple years, vending machine sounds good!"

"Cool," Her bedsheet appears in her hands, which she spreads over the floor. "it's a picnic." Various snack foods appear one by one in her hands as she drops them on the impromptu picnic blanket. "Lets see, I have chocolate bars, rice balls, chips, cans of coffee, water, these chocolate cookie things..."

Fib and Sniper offer various Rim-sourced goods from an insulated bag, including various alien fruits and vegetables and grilled 'vegan sausages' that seem suspiciously meat-like in aroma and texture. Fib will partake a little of Berry's various sweets, as well as a can of coffee, while Sniper will have one of her rice balls and some water.

As they eat, Fib (and to a lesser degree Sniper) will happily explain more about their situation (and what they know more broadly about the multiverse), if Strawberry seems interested.

She is, in fact, very interested. She asks many questions, and with every word a picture is painted of the multiverse at large. Angels, forests, an endless sea, a pink... sex desert? Fascinating stuff. Crucible though, with every death a little, tiny piece of her gone. She had already died four times, she hasn't noticed yet, so it was a slow decay.

She... wasn't really bothered by this, a slow decay was the default assumption and apparently old age wasn't a problem for her. But even if she did, there was a way around it anyway? She was immortal. It gave her pause.

Quellers, a rumor from Cean about people who made it their business to hunt conduits. Disturbing if true. She couldn't imagine a secret like that keeping itself in her home Earth, but there were many strange powers around, maybe even something that could maintain a masquerade. But with all the Earths that existed, maybe they were based on some antiquated Earth more accommodating of a masquerade.

And Cean. Well, she trusted Groundskeeper, and by the transitive property of trusting her she also trusted Fib. But did that Extend to Cean? She didn't know her at all, for all she knew she had lied to Fib about the Quellers to make him nervous enough to trust her with his DNA, to be used for some arcane purpose she didn't understand. But then again, she could also be completely honest. She supposed that she was suspect of this Cean because she was a long-lived immortal ruling over a primitive society of short-lived- "Fifty years?! But they're elves!" -people, which automatically made her suspect in her books. But apparently that was just how the Rim worked? She didn't voice any of this aloud, merely hummed noncommittally.

She herself told them what she knew of the Academy and Crucible, mostly the Academy. She had made a third copy of her and Groundskeeper's mapping project, showing the bridges to Arbor, Earths, Crucible and Rorch. "You can keep this copy, we just finished this today, we'll add more as we explore."

Fib does not like to draw attention to the fact that his Reservoir makes him an empath, but he fails to resist the urge to reassure Strawberry despite her outward actions not seeming to demand it. "Like I said, she's trying hard to be good to her people. One of the first things she brought up when I first spoke with her was seeing if I might be able to help her make her people immortal too, which I think says a lot."

Ooh, map! Fib will go ahead and pull out his smartphone and take some pictures of it. "We can take it if you want, but it might be better to save it for someone who needs a hard copy. Honestly we should probably make something like this too. Relying on our memories has worked for now but it might not always."

Well, trying to make her people immortal is a noble goal. Frankly, she could've done with more of that attitude back on her Earth. She can't help but notice the way the colors of his flame shifts as they talk, the way they seem to paint a picture of his emotional state on a moment by moment basis. It makes her wonder if he misses the ability to not broadcast his emotions like that.

"I have easy access to photocopiers, making copies of this is no problemo. Take it." She pushes the binder towards them. "This place is so uncanny. It's just colleges, parks, young girls and beaches as far as the eye can see. And that's almost fine, except I killed a monster like a month ago and have no idea what was up with that."

"Fair enough!" and he'll take the map after all, rolling it up gently before handing it over to Sniper.

"It is rather uncanny," Sniper adds as he packs the map away in their pack. "There's an odd sort of homeliness to it, for me at least, though I'm not sure what for other than the linguistic similarity. The mystery of what exactly they're teaching all these young women for, other than to teach the next generation of students, is another conundrum."

"I'll sit in for a few classes after I figure out the language, see what they're teaching, but from what little I can glean, it seems... normal? I don't even know where the girls even come from, or the weird eyeless specters either." She lays back on the sheet. "Hm."

Fib shivers and his fires shift a touch redder, though only briefly. "Those things are fucked, yeah. I'm not a fan of having a third kind of fucked up bullshit monster that can pop-up when I jump, either, especially since they're..." he makes a grasping gesture vaguely, "stickier than wildlife from Rim or Mu. Harder to clean up. At least they're rarer."

She had mostly stayed away from the specters, but they hadn't struck her as aggressive. She'd have to investigate. "Third? It's not just dinosaurs?"

"Nope! Even just from the Rim, I get all sorts of animals. Mammoths, saber-tooth tigers, giant crocodiles, giant spiders, weirder shit that I don't really have a name for in English, the works. The stuff from Mu is usually smaller, but it has a worse habit of coming through in larger numbers, and being more, uh...more fucked up, I guess. There's a lot of animals that do weird body horror or psychic shit there."

"That sounds amazing and I want to see it. In fact take me with you." She sits back up.

"Uh..." You know, fair enough. There's all kinds. "Sure, though which one did you mean?"

"All of them! I want to see the multiverse, man!" She raises her hands into the air. "And what kind of multiverse doesn't have bizarre psychic eldritch abominations?" She points to Fib. "A boring one, that's what." She shrugs. "Besides, I've been procrastinating here for a month, I really need to go out there and explore."

Fib and Sniper give each other glance, wordlessly agreeing that it's probably not worth trying to argue about the boring-ness of a multiverse that isn't trying to kill-you-or-worse, before turning back to Strawberry, giving her a nod. "Sure, though given how rough my jumps are, I hope it's alright if we don't break from the schedule too much? I've got a route worked out to help with keeping my Tethers happy and make sure I don't miss packages."

"Sounds great," She stretches. "when do we leave?"

"Uh. Well, I was planing on exploring here some more for probably a few hours to keep working on calming my Tether to it? We could head out early, but we'll just need to wait around the next world, the metal forest, instead, which is...not super safe or comfortable, or else my whole schedule will be off."

She blinks. Would he have done something so harmful to himself if she had insisted? "No, no, there's no rush! We should obviously go with whatever you find most convenient, I'm not the one who has to equally distribute time between a bunch of worlds."

His flames green a little, and his face relaxes in a brief expression of relief. "Cool. Thanks for understanding."

Then he checks his phone, looking at his picture of the map and comparing to some prior notes taken, before deciding on a direction to head in...after they finish breaking fast.

The two of them both seem open to further questions, but aren't necessarily talkative of their own accord.

There is a fundamental lack of assertiveness that nags her. If she were in Fib's position and some tart decided to tag along for shits and giggles, then she would be informing said tart in no uncertain terms that they would play around her schedule or not at all. Berry should have zero say in Fib's schedule, barring some catastrophic emergency.

It puts her in mind of the conversation she just had with Groundskeeper and wonders if she has the mental fortitude to deeply interrogate a second person's relationship with assertiveness in the same day. It might be a conversation for later.

Further data is required.

She looks at the golden bycicles. "Cool bikes."

If she's paying pretty close attention, Strawberry might notice some flicks of teal and cyan in Fib's flames, which sort of percolate out and transmute into a more pervasive spread of purple, similar to the normal color of Azoth, before he gives himself another shot of gold, right before she comments on the bikes. He gives her an exaggeratedly cocky grin and replies with an odd intonation, "I made them myself!" Then, a beat. "Following the designs that the engineers back at Revival Base drew up. They're really comfortable, too. I never learned how to ride a bike back before I became a Conduit but it's been surprisingly easy when I can make my own bike from scratch just how I want it."

She feels like she's going to have to ask about the flames at some point, there's something worryingly deliberate about the way it flares gold before he looks happy again. Would she be happying herself if she could? Maybe, it honestly sounds really useful, but why would he keep needing it like that?

"No shit? Is making things a power of yours? Is that where the armor comes from?"

"Yeah! Sort of. I can summon the gold, orichalcum the aengelim call it, by...uh...praying, which makes it appear in big blocks, then I need to sort of fold it in on itself until its whatever shape I want it to be. There's also another world, the pink desert where everything wants to literally fuck you, where I can turn the sand into this sort of glass, but it's weird glass, since I can make malleable or elastic, and also working it is a...it's an experience, I guess." Another lick or two of blue, though they seem to fade on their own quickly.

Gold is obviously happy, green is probably relief? So what're blue and purple?

If its literally everything that wants to fuck you, maybe the sand gets frisky? Blue could be embarrassment. "What are the aengelim like?"

"Very serious, and very, uh...like christian conservatives, if your Earth has those. Honestly kind of a pain, though I'm fortunate enough to be in contact with one of the more liberal factions at least. They're still not very fun to be around, though."

Lovely. She thought. With any luck they aren't as acquainted with slurs as they are on my Earth, or else I might just kill somebody this time. "Figures. Angels are real and they're assholes." She thinks of something. "None of these worlds are, like, any of Earth's afterlives, right?"

Fib nods, then scratches his flame-beard. "Yomi's kind of afterlife-y, but not as much as the Aether is like a fucked up version of Heaven. But people don't just, like, automatically end up in either, at least as far as we've been able to table. Yomi does have cursed potions that will make you go there when you die, though. We had some run-ins with that in the early days, back before I had the Bondworks figured out."

"I see, I'll avoid eating or drinking in Yomi then." The thought that she was in some kind of afterlife had occurred to her, she had gotten here by dying. But if other people who died resurrected as conduits then the worlds would be flooded with them by now. The thought occurred that on her last moments on Earth were spent as a conduit and she hadn't even known. That she became immortal before that car hit her.

She turns to Sniper. "So, you're not a conduit, are you?"

Sniper nods. "Correct. I, and all the sosei-shita, are former kagemono, inhabitants of Yomi, that Fib has helped release from that place. I and a few of the others at Revival Base often travel with him through his power to bring others with him, but we don't have the ability to travel between worlds on our own, except by way of reviving at the Bondworks when killed."

Ah, the noble speedrunning tradition of the death warp. "I see, what is Revival Base, actually?"

"It's the main sosei-shita settlement," Sniper replies. "A few dozen of us living there permanently, and another couple hundred that are there on a more temporary basis, making a life for ourselves out in the Rim, exploiting the time-advantage to develop skills and build infrastructure that's useful to our other settlements on a the Earths, the Pink Desert, the Aether, Crucible, and Rorch."

"You have settlements on Earths?" Now that sounded surreal, the introduction of a supernatural element to an otherwise mundane Earth was easily one of the most pervasive thoughts she had, seeing it happen in person would be truly weird, was Fib a celebrity? Would she be a celebrity? Was she ready to go to an Earth? A little knot in her stomach formed at the thought of her Earth. "Are you guys, I don't know, famous? Or are you trying to lay low?"

"We-" / "We-" the two of them begin simultaneously, Fib letting Sniper take the lead this time. "We haven't been advertising ourselves, exactly, but haven't been hiding...previously at least. It is surprisingly easy for rural communities that have little to no connection to larger road or infrastructural networks are easy to miss. There is some attention on them, and it has been growing...but we've also learned relatively recently that there's a threat on the Earths that specifically targets conduits and their associates, so we're going to be implementing more information security, as much as we're able at least."

"Opsec is important." She looks away. "I might just lay low when we get to Earth, if you don't mind. If there are enemies hunting conduits then the less people know about me or Groundskeeper, the better."

Fib makes an accepting gesture with his hand. "Oh, for sure. Honestly if I didn't, uh...cause a giant explosion most of the time when I jump, and drag a palpable zone of Weird with me everywhere I go, I'd be trying a lot harder to lay low too. We've been working on figuring out a more, eh...protracted methodology for interacting with our non-sosei-shita trading partners on the Earths, but there's only so much security we can build in, like, a month or however long it's been on Earth since we first found out."

Hm, I can move people through bridges. Should she offer? It's a commitment to providing a service maybe only she can provide. The thought isn't thrilling, the freedom of being beholden to nothing is something she has always craved. She might need to follow a schedule, or need to work long hours. Or worse, not be asked, but know that if she doesn't do anything, people will have a bad time.

That might already be the case, though. "I can shove people through bridges, or pull them through. I can't move really big things, but I can move smaller stuff between bridges. Maybe I could help." She can teleport, if anything ever becomes truly intolerable she could just leave.

"Maybe, if you want to? It's not exactly fun work, and I don't know how much demand there is for small packages that me and my friends aren't already covering. We've got five semis in the garage plus some shipping containers we share with the off-Rim settlements, so volume-wise we're doing alright."

"Well... I can use my Bevin as extradimensional storage, so I can actually move quite a bit of volume, even if its not all that big, at least compared to Groundskeeper's Bevin." She gets up and stretches. "So you guys want to take a look around here?"

Oh, yeah other Conduits' Bevins aren't inhabited by other people who will be significantly endangered by a big explosion and 0-3 monsters getting pulled in. "That would probably be helpful, actually, now that you mention it. Me and Sniper will ask around about that. Having someone other than me who can bring stuff to Rorch in bulk would be a major boon, I think," he says, glancing to Sniper for their opinion, who nods back.

"And yeah, probably scouting out some of the further afield bridges I can feel, stuff that's out past the edge of your maps."

"Sounds like a plan!" A binder appears in her hand, she gets on her knees and spreads the constituent sheets of the map on the picnic blanket, then points to the northwestern region of the map. "We're here." She gestures to the markings on the map. "I don't know where you have been, the nearest bridge from here is this one, leading to Arbor, followed by this one, leading to Earth. I haven't had a chance to scout it yet. There are two other bridges to Earth, one to Brazen, one to Rorch and one leading to Crucible, though those last two are pretty far away."

Fib nods. "There's a bridge to Yomi, too, and one to the Aether though it's quite far. And of course there's a bridge to Kuiper but it's up there," he gestures vaguely up at the morning sky. "So, finding that Earth bridge seems like a good first stop, them maybe one of the further out ones afterwards?"

She looks up. "Huh." I wonder if I could teleport up there? She had an idea for how to gain infinite height with teleportation without risking death, but that was an idea for later. "Alright, do you want to ride there, or should I teleport us?"

"I personally prefer to ride, since I need to get my time in anyway, and the exercise is hardly bad for my health! But, we can just meet you there if you'd rather not walk or ride with us."

"I don't have a bike, maybe I'll run, and jump ahead if I fall behind."

"I could also head back to the Rim and make another bike for you in, like, a few minutes? Including however long it takes to handle whatever pops up during the jumps."

Ok, no, she has to know. "When you jump, what happens? How dangerous is it?" Groundskeeper described his jumps as explosions and minor disasters. How much danger was he willing to put himself in? The question was whether he was so used to it that he didn't see it as a danger, or-

-or that the danger to himself mattered less to him than inconveniencing her.

"So, I've got this thing where-- you know how bridges to most worlds have some kind of weirdness about them? Like the world on the other side is bleeding through a bit? That same kind of weirdness follows me around, for every world I'm connected to. And then I've also got a thing that makes it so that whenever I jump, those weirdness effects all get majorly amplified, all at once, for a little bit, especially when I'm jumping with lots of big vehicles. Some of the effects are mostly, like, mental, and those suck for me and my friends but they're also usually pretty manageable even with the dial turned to 11 with the help of some Color, but there's decent number of physical effects too, and when they're all pumped up at once, it can be a destructive. Plus, three of the effects involve, like, monsters potentially showing up, like I mentioned earlier, and then if more than one of those procs at the same time they tend to not like each other and that can be its own issue."

He takes a breath, then gets a thoughtful look as he reviews his memories. "Overall, it's not super dangerous for me personally? I've gotten pretty good at managing the results over the last decade and change, i'm always traveling at least with Sniper, who is appropriately a crack shot with that rifle, and even if I die or get maimed or something I can just pop back to the Bondworks and make sure to stock up on Color the next time I'm in Mu. It's more dangerous to the people around me, which is why with more populated places, like here, I make sure there's nobody around before I jump, and with my Bevin I always try and send them a warning a few minutes before hand so that there's nobody hanging around the mudroom who might get caught in the blastzone or stomped on by a dinosaur or whatever."

Bad.

It was bad. She's going to have to have the Groundskeeper conversation again. She schooled her features as best she could. "Fib, if our positions were reversed, would you have asked me to go make you a bike?"

He scratches his flame-beard again. "I don't really know what your situations is like, not in any details, so it's hard for me to say? If you're worried about me though, it's really not a big deal. I have to jump super often anyway or else my Tethers start forcing me to at random, which is even worse, and the Rim is already where I'm jumping to and from the most. Adding one more jump there and back every couple weeks or whatever, it's not actually that much more risk?"

His colors shift in an increasingly chaotic way, until he shrugs and injects enough green to calm himself down. "It's fine either way. I'd feel kind of bad about riding while you run, though, so maybe we can just all walk?"

She looked away, maybe she's completely wrong. She had thought maybe she would try to race them with her magical girl transformation and newfound parkour abilities, but at this point she felt it would've been too awkward to suggest it. "Yeah, sure, if you're good with walking."

Another little wave of blue, purple, and even a little bit of red crackle through his fire before he batters it away with more green. "Sure. Like I said, exercise is hardly unwelcome."

And then they can start making their way to that Earth bridge.

Idyllic parks and beaches pass them by as they walk, she hangs just a little behind to stay out of Fib's peripheral vision, and keeps an eye on his flames. She makes an effort to relax, and remembers that she is making new friends. Cool new friends wreathed in flames and clad in golden armor. Before long she's smiling again as she looks at the bright blue sky.

"So how do the flames work?"

He remains mostly green, though it's less pure, and perhaps less forced thereby, with more natural tinges of cyan and chartreuse, and little tongues of yellow as he turns his head and glances back with a bit of a smile to answer. "So, you know how Azoth is kind of like a fire in your chest? Mine's all mixed up with my Reservoir-- that's, like, kind of like a second circulatory system that's full of Color, and because I try and make sure I've always got lots of Color in me, and since it gets all mixed up with my Azoth, it comes out like this. That's what we've figured from comparing me to other stuff from Mu that metabolizes Color, anyway."

So Azoth can be mixed with stuff from other worlds. "So, what is Color exactly? What is it's relationship to emotion?"

"It's this sort of luminous goop that flows in big streams through Mu's upper layers, and it sort of is emotions? It both sort of reifies the state of having an emotion and is also reactive to their presence. There's a whole sort of funky psionic chemistry going on with it, combined with the starlight from Mu's stars, which we're pretty sure is how the psychic powers from there work."

"Oh, right! Psychic powers! What kind of psychic powers are there? Telekinesis? ESP?"

"We haven't exactly done a detailed survey, but so far we've found various types of empathy, telepathy, that sort of thing both receptive and projective, as well as, like..." he makes a vague grasping gesture with his hand, "Biokinesis? Fleshwarping? Except there are some big fishy bastards who can do it to stone too. We don't really know what's up with that, and getting close enough to get a better look seems unwise."

Biokinesis?! Like Amy Dallon? Or like Akira? "That actually sounds pretty spooky. What do they even do with biokinesis? Can they do it at a distance? Or do they have to touch you?"

"Thankfully we haven't found anything that can do it at range, though we don't know if it's strictly impossible. And most of the animals use it for camouflage and various sorts of parasitism, but the local people-- they call themselves something along the lines of 'dreamborn', though they don't really have language such as it is, since they're all proper telepaths on top of being biokinetics, but they use their biokinesis mostly for self-expression, body-mods and making fancy bespoke pets, that sort of thing."

"Huh, blinging out your pet with biokinesis sounds horrifying, but telepathy probably balances that out a bit. More pet owners should be able to read their pets' minds. What are the local people like, anyway?"

"Not a fan of guests, or answering questions, sadly. The three we've tried to contact have all mind-controlled our ambassadors to leave them alone after making basic introductions. I'm still not entirely sure if they saw as more than particularly complex, annoying animals."

"Did they... are your guys ok?"

"As far as we can tell. Their emotions aren't permanently fucked in any way that I can detect, and they haven't reported any long-term effects, but we all agreed that they might have some kind of fucked up machurian candidate sleeper agent bullshit implanted in them and consequently shouldn't ever go back to Mu."

She stops. "You're fucking with me. That can happen?"

He shrugs. "We don't know for certain, there are definitely animals that do that kind of thing to other animals. There's a whole fucked up ecosystem based on this kind of stuff. We mostly try and steer clear of pretty much everything on Mu while I gather Color."

"Mu is messed up." Wait, he said something else, right? "Oh, uh, what did you mean by "that I can detect"?"

His flames definitely blue a bit at that, and Sniper rolls their eyes. "Color reacts to emotions around it, including the Color in my system. It gives me empathy, basically. The psychic kind."

He's an empath.

"You're an empath." Ah, that makes sense.

"Correct."

"All of us are, a bit, but Fib is strongest at it," Sniper adds, "since he's always filled to the brim with Color rather than just having enough to revive once or twice without starting to darken."

"Well that explains a lot." Heh, I'm going to be overthinking my emotions for minutes before I forget again. She tried to think back to what she said and how he reacted, but she couldn't remember. Well, she remembered him being insistent on Cean, so he probably picked up on her hesitance there. "Heh, ah well. So you just know what people are feeling?"

"Pretty much. It's a spatial feel, too, so I can tell who's feeling what rather than just what the vibe in the room is. It's helpful for tracking down little fuckers that get dragged in from Mu since just about everything from there has way stronger emotions than your average, like, insect or plant or whatever."

"Ok, what are the inhabitants of Mu? Squid? Crabs? Crab-squids?"

"They're kind of all over the place, 'cause of the whole self-modification thing. It seems like they might have a kind of humanoid bauplan, with basically an octopus for a head, from long-range observation, but we might have just stumbled across a fashion trend, basically."

"Right, right, ok, psychic humanoids with octopi for-"

"FUCKING MIND FLAYERS!?"

"As far as we can tell, they don't implant their larvae into living humans' skulls in order to metamorphose into their adult stage, so they're not exactly the same, but it's an odd coincidence, especially since the big fishy bastards I mentioned earlier are pretty much dead-ringers for aboleths too. We tried looking into whether Gary Gygax was a Conduit before he died but as far we can tell he was totally normal. Very weird coincidence, but maybe not much weirder than that Japan, Yomi, and this place's languages all being really similar, or Rorch's language being basically English."

She just stares at him, entertaining the possibility that the most ludicrous and surreal thing that has even been said to her was actually spoken in earnest. 

"We live in a very, very strange multiverse, but also an oddly familiar one." His flames pretty evenly split between shades of blue and green. "Sometimes, when I don't have anything to do, just waiting around trying to fall asleep, I wonder why things are like this."

"I definitely cannot handle a CR nine encounter that can mind blast me." She scrunches up her face. "They can't mind blast me, can they?"

"I am pretty sure they can mind blast things. I saw one defend their garden from a wild animal with something that looked a lot like a brute force psychic attack just from how the animal's emotions reacted anyway."

"Hahahahaha! Amazing! Incredible! Mind Flayers shooing away aberrations off their lawn with mind blasts!"

Fib chuckles along, though it sounds a little strained. He and Sniper both glance back Strawberry looking a little concerned (and Fib's colors bluing again, though not too much).

"As he said, we don't make a habit of impinging on their territory nowadays," Sniper reassures.

"Eh heh..." She clears her throat. "Right. Uh. So... any other parts of the multiverse concerningly resembling popular tabletop role playing games that I should know about?" 

"Not that I'm aware of, no," Fib answer. "Though...well, you're connected to Crucible, right? Does it seem familiar at all to you from before? Because from what I've seen of it, it's oddly reminiscent, albeit more so in the broad strokes than the details, of the settings of a few video games I remember from my Earth."

"Dark Souls, it's Dark Souls. But purple. And dark. And rainy."

"I'd go so far as to say there's a significant amount of other Soulslikes mixed in but yeah it's Dark Souls," Fib comments, but beyond that it doesn't seem like either of the two have much more to add on that particular subject.

"Yeah, I dunno. The fact that you reemerge at fires after you die is weird, and that you can spend Azoth to make yourself stronger is suspect. But it mostly feels like weird coincidences, rather than being obviously a one to one thing."

The both of them nod. "Nothing's been an exact match yet, at least nothing isn't coming from a Conduit at least. Even the aengelim aren't an exact match for angels, at least in any angelology that we've been able to dig up texts for on an Earth, nor are the oni in Yomi an exact match for either any traditional folklore or modern reinterpretations. It's just a lot of near misses, but taken as a whole it's still really weird, to me at least."

She looks around. Class is in, and nobody but them can be seen outside. "I wonder what this world looks like from space."

Fib hums curiously at that. "You know, I'm not sure."

He considers for a moment before asking, "You can teleport to bridges, and can pull or push stuff through them too, right? Could you push something through a teleport, rather than send it to the other side of the bridge?"

"Yeah, I can, why?"

"With your help, I could pop up to the Kuiper bridge and get a look at the whole place from space," he says with a smile, turning more green with flickering tongue of gold around the fringes.

"Uh?" She looks up. Her senses are pointing to the nearest bridge, the Earth bridge. During her wandering she has never felt the Kuiper bridge at all, so it has never been the closest bridge to her, which gives her a rough minimum distance. It isn't close. "My accuracy suffers beyond about eight kilometers, the further I go, the harder it deviates. I also can't sense the bridge at all from down here, I don't know what direction to send you in."

"Ah, yeah, range limits. That makes sense. I guess could still just, like, jump to Kuiper and then right back, which should let me be right on top of the bridge, but it'll probably be pretty unpleasant for any animals that get summoned by my issue. Maybe not this time."

"How far up do you think it is? I was thinking that I could teleport up, then jump into my Bevin to stop myself from falling too much, and then just keep alternating between teleporting up and going into my Bevin, which should let me just climb up arbitrary distances?"

Oh yeah, that trick probably works way better for people who aren't Fib. He nods, then thinks and then shakes his head. "It's gotta be at least 30 or 40 miles up, well outside the atmosphere. I'm good to handle that kind of thing but I don't know if you are?"

"Nope, I was banking on limiting exposure to a second being safe, but that might be kinda dumb. And I don't think I know about Kuiper? What's it like?"

"100% outer space, pretty much. No planets, and all the lifeforms are void-adapted. Space-whales, space-crabs, space-algae, that sort of thing. Plus these weird of sorta magical living asteroids, who get smarter the bigger and older they are. The more animalic ones can be okay but the ones that are more people-y don't seem very friendly, not that I've seen anyway."

"Oh. I'm just gonna, stay away from the hard vacuum world, I think."

"Eminently reasonable! I can't help but feel very fortunate for not having stumbled into it without the ability to survive in the void of space. It still totaled the car I was in though, which was kind of rough."

"Oof, that's rough buddy. So you can survive in a vacuum? What else can you do?"

"Well, I've got the orichalcum-- that's the gold, and the desert glass, and the Bondworks, and my weird mixed up Azoth-Color, which is also sort of mixed into my lungs, which lets me breath it out, which is how I'm able to revive the sosei-shita. And if I'm riding a bike or driving a car or whatever, as long as it's not really big, I can take it with me when I jump, and if I have some friends driving other vehicles nearby, I can bring up to four of them along too."

"Is it-? Uh..." No, that can't possibly be how it works. "It doesn't specifically have to be a bicycle or a car, right?"

"Oh, no, it just needs to be something that I..." he makes another vague grasping gesture, an evidently common part of his gesticular vocabulary, "control the movement of? I tried with a tamed dino that the elves ride around on sometimes and it worked with that too. Nearly startled the thing to death, though, so I try to only do it with non-living stuff."

Phew. "Ok, cool." She looks ahead, trying to remember where they are based on their surroundings, she thinks they're close.

The bridge definitely feels close.

"This is it." She takes a deep breath. "So, how many Earths have you been to?"

"Like, visited at all? Maybe a dozen, maybe two? Most of them I don't stick around long enough to know for certain I'm visiting a new Earth that's similar to one I've been to and not just another bridge to one I've already seen before. But I only regularly visit three, the ones that have sosei-shita settlements in them, since they're part of my mail route."

"Right, right." She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. "I can peek through bridges without going through, so give me a second." Her vision opens up, and she experiences a second of panic as she sees a park, but as she pulls her vision up and away from the scenic footpath she is greeted with an honest to god road, and cars. "The bridge leads to a park, I can't tell where this is, hold on..." She pulls her perspective up higher and higher, she can see a stadium, 'TORONTO' is clearly written across one of its ends in giant letters intended to be clearly visible from the sky.

Well that was convenient. "It's Toronto." She says.

"Oh, neat. I went there once a few years back, before all this. Or, well, to the version from my world."

He'll give it a look-see as well, and can confirm that it's not his world since it appears to be several years in the past from the last time he visited, let alone however it must be nowadays. "Definitely not my world, this one."

"Oh, you can do that too, ok." She opens her eyes. "Hm, I don't think we should cross today. If this isn't a world you've been to it's probably safest to avoid. I'm more inconspicuous, so in my own time I could look around and get some info, then pass it on to you next visit. Sound good?"

"Sounds good, yeah!"

He considers where to head next. He can kind of figure where a bridge to Rorch would probably form, maybe like a little shopping area or a pool or beach, but he's less confident about a bridge to Crucible, and honestly has no idea where a bridge to Brazen would show up.

"Maybe we can check out the Brazen bridge next, then the one to Crucible?"

"Right, uh, let's see..." A compass appears in her hand. Based on where she is, the Brazen bridge should be northeast from here? "This way. If time starts being a problem I can teleport you guys. The Crucible bridge that I know of is really far, probably something over a hundred kilometers, if you want to check that out in a timely manner I'll have to take you."

"Yeah, that'd be a bit far, for walking at least. We could maybe do that in the bikes and meet you there in, like, 3 or 4 hours probably?"

His color blues, with even some flickers of purple. "I'm mostly just kind of worried that teleporting might proc my whole explosion thing, since it still sort of involves bridges?"

"Hm, maybe..." How would she test that? She could send him like a hundred meters away? They would still be around to help with the fallout. If they're doing that she should transform first, given the danger- "Danger." She breathes.

"Ooh! Ooh! I have an idea! We don't even have to jump, hold on." She moves to place a hand on Fib's armored shoulder.

Fib does indeed hold on, clenching up a bit as prepares for Whatever Is About To Happen.

"What exactly are you planning?" Sniper asks, having taken a steps back and ready to draw their rifle.

She doesn't jump. She doesn't have to, she just has to take aim, a step to their left. Nothing. Experimentally, she aims a teleport directly upwards, and is filled with the familiar dread associated with teleporting directly in the air. Carefully, she aims a jump through the bridge, and savors the sharp feeling of danger she gets from it.

She smiles. "It's safe! I can tell when a jump would be dangerous, going through the bridge is dangerous, but sending you a foot to the left isn't."

Fib lets out a sigh of relief and relaxes significantly, while Sniper returns to a more neutral posture.

"Good to know! So, we can hit up the Brazen bridge and then teleport over to the Crucible one to see what's going on there afterwards?"

"Heck Yeah!" She holds up her compass and eyeballs a rough vector, it'll take a few jumps. "I can only do one of you at a time so hold on." She opts to go with Fib first, then comes back a second later for Sniper. 

Fib pretty quickly turns gold with joy. It's really something else, seeing the world shift and fly by like this, without needing to worry about all the shit he normally does. He hollers happily when Strawberry drops him off, and high-fives Sniper with a metal clang once Strawberry drops them off as well.

"Haha! Yeah!" It takes a few jumps for her senses to point to the bridge, and a few more to actually arrive. "We're here."

"Excellent! Wow, that was a blast. I sure hope I can figure out how to spot exploding every time I jump, that was great."

"We'll need to remember to pick up the bicycles at some point," Sniper adds, though they're smiling too, seemingly having enjoyed the trip as well.

Now, to zero in on that bridge and see what its influence on this place is like...

"Ah fuck!" She says, choking back laughter. "The bikes! Hold on!" She vanishes.

Almost thirty seconds pass before she reappears. "I gottem'! They're in my Bevin."

Fib chuckles and is mostly green and yellow, though there's flicks of cyan and deeper blue as well. "Thanks! I appreciate you handling that, and hope it's not any trouble," he says, as the three of them begin inspecting the bridge and its surroundings, Fib pull out his phone to annotate his digital copy of the map.

She looks around, now that they're closer, she can properly sense the angle at which the bridge is at, from the looks of it, it's below a university. "It's indoors."

Fib nods. "Down, yeah."

He and Sniper look around somewhat conspiratorially, and Sniper asks, "Do we need to worry about entering a building uninvited? We've mostly be staying outdoors and sticking to places that seem like public areas."

"Well... I've walked in some of these buildings, but I look like a student." She frowns. Something about the idea makes her uneasy, she has no explanation for the specters or the tar monster she fought, she doesn't know how they'll react. "It's probably best if I scout ahead."

The two of them nod, and will hang around nearby, somewhere where they won't be in the way of students, staff, and faculty who happen to walk by.

"Right." She looks around, wipes her sweaty hands on her skirt, remembers that she is wearing a skirt and feels a brief wave of euphoria before she teleports to the front door. The thought occurs that she could just teleport straight to the basement but right now is averse to the thought of jumping blind. She blinks, then shakes her head. I'm stupid, I can just...

She jumps to her Bevin, then maneuvers her perspective through corridors down to some sort of boiler room. It's empty, save for a single specter. No eyes, faint and see through. It is... it's male. She hasn't looked at one up close before. And now that she is, she can still barely make it out. It's doing something, to the boiler, but she can't make out the details of its form well enough to get a grip on what that thing might be. Whatever it was, it seems to finish and leave, passing through the open doorway. After a few seconds she decides that good enough and returns to Sniper and Fib.

"The coast is clear. Let's go." She teleports with Fib, then Sniper.

Interesting! And it makes sense that it'd have to be somewhere down below, deep and dark, given the whole 'inside a giant cave' thing that Brazen has going on. Fib gives the other side of the bridge a spy, too, just to get an idea of where they'll be jumping to later so that he can start considering potential battle-plans depending on what his jump summons.

"I wonder whether it'd be possible to make one of these into something like the Bondworks?" Sniper idly remarks as they inspect that various tanks and ducts of the boiler system.

"What do you mean?"

"The Bondworks were made from the old furnace in the Bevin, which seem...not identical to any of these, certainly, but similar enough. Maybe?" They give Fib a curious look.

He scratches his beard-flames before answering with a speculative tone. "Maybe? From my time in Crucible, I've gotten the feeling I might eventually be able to develop the ability to make a bondfire, somehow? At least once whatever's got me backed up is dealt with. Then maybe we could apply what we learned with the Bondworks to that and make more of them elsewhere. God, something that'll let people revive back on the Rim would be great. Maybe we could even try and figure out some way to combine it with Cean's cloning tubes? Something that'll have the best of both worlds, so to speak."

Sniper nods along excitedly at the prospect.

"Cloning tubes." She mutters. The multiverse she occupies has reason to have bodies in big tubes, what a time to be alive. "What's got you backed up?"

Fib shrugs. "Not entirely sure? Just something that's, like, taking up all my slack. I was just barely able to force myself to develop the Bondworks in my first couple years, since then every bit of juice that I've gotten has gone right towards connecting with new worlds. I know that if I don't work on getting more connections, it'll just keep building up until it does something. Something'll, like, come out. I just don't know what."

"Worrying." She couldn't fathom what it could mean. She opted to simply take a look at Braz-

"Brass." She breathed. Metal flora covered the sandy landscape, up above was the sky, the metal sky. A dome?

If it was a dome, it was of an inconceivable size, high up as clouds normally would be. Its edge, if such a thing even existed, was past the horizon, and stubbornly remained that way no matter how high she raised her perspective. The clockwork mimicry of the sky held its crystal sun within a path, no doubt for it to tick along as the day passed. "It's incredible."

Fib smiles. "It's pretty crazy, right? The first time I showed up I was in an iron forest, which made it easier to not realize that the whole thing is inside of a fucked up planet-sized bunker or something. It's surprising there's breathable air, but the sosei-shita checked and there is, it's not just me not needing to breath."

"Yeah. Pretty crazy." She looks at them. "So, should I go in first, or should I go after you? Am I taking Sniper?"

"Oh, we weren't thinking of going already! I don't think it's even been an hour yet? I don't need to be at a bridge to jump through it anyway, I mostly wanted to see what sort of places Brazen bridges turn up in, and get a look at where I'd be ending up on the other side."

"Right, right, of course." She takes another look, drinks in the alien landscape. "Ok, so Crucible next?"

"Yeah! And since we're teleporting, we'll still have plenty of time to just stroll around, too. Maybe see if can find any rare buildings or landmarks or what-have-you."

"Yeah, cool, let's get out of here." She teleports the two of them back into the open. "Let's go."

Fib and Sniper both prepare to be teleported, Fib turning chartreuse with anticipation.

She teleports back out of the building where they just were, then scrutinizes her compass again. It's going to take a bit to get to the Crucible bridge, and doesn't want to have to double back because she was off target. On a whim, she aims far beyond her normal range. As usual, she is greeted by a nebulous dread, as her destination becomes uncertain, and the probabilities where she is teleported into the air mix with those where she ends up safe. She sighs. Whatever, my range is still fantastic by any stretch of the-

The probabilities suddenly sharpen and crystalize into safety, while aiming almost ten times her normal range away.

"I might be stupid."

Fib gives her a look somewhere between concerned and curious. "What's up?"

"I can teleport straight to Crucible's bridge. In fact..." She moves her aim around where she thinks the Earth bridge is until the destination becomes certain. "Earth too." She aims at the Arbor bridge, and doesn't find it. She frowns. "Maybe not Arbor? Huh."

"Ah! So your range is from the bridge you're teleporting to, not from your current location. Kind of like how I can jump up to a few miles away from the bridge I'm landing at. I guess if you're mostly hanging out in the area with a bunch of bridges in relatively close proximity it'd be easy to miss."

"I've been teleporting from my Bevin's bridge! No wonder. I'm going to have to run tests later." She thinks for a second. "Given this, it'll be faster to teleport to the Earth bridge and go straight to Crucible from there."

"Makes sense!" And the two of them will once again prepare to be moved.

It doesn't take long, before a minute has passed they are before the Crucible bridge. A drab looking shed that looks almost out of place in the Academy. "I can tell you some of what is around that bridge, I've done some exploring. Close to the bridge is an old prison of some sort. The prisoners... were not treated well."

Fib grimaces, but his color only blues slightly. "Yeah, Crucible is like that. We're trying to help the sosei-shita settlement do better than that, but they're still quite small, and there's still quite a bit of...tension with the locals."

"I killed the warden, he used some sort of magic through a bell that could paralyze and fire these green orbs. He made servants that could float and use those same techniques." She sighs. "I found a book that I think details his methods, Groundskeeper has it, she's intent on translating it. Hopefully we learn something useful."

"Freaky! And, hopefully it's not just, like, the records of whatever fucked up shit he was doing with the prisoners."

Fib will take a quick peek through the bridge, but just a little one to situate himself and maybe see if there are any Crucible landmarks he can recognize.

She takes a look herself. "It's... dark. It's very dark." It's about as dark as the last time she went here, she can hear the rain through the connection, but trying to get a sense for what the rest of the area looks like is hopeless, its just too dark. there was a bonfire in the prison itself, but that's about all the light that can be found. "Yeah, I can't see dick. I can walk around with a high powered flashlight if you want to see, otherwise we might want to move on."

"I wonder if anyone has, like, a darkvision power," Fib ponders aloud as he retracts his scrying.

"Have you been around this area, on this side of the bridge, before?" Sniper asks Strawberry.

She snorts. "Briefly. I was too concerned with my nudity to actually take in my surroundings. I went to the nearby dorms and stole some clothes, then left."

"Damn, you were naked?" Fib asks. "Did you, like, get snatched out of bed by your first jump and didn't have any clothes on?"

"I got hit by a car, and came back to life naked." And female. "I didn't even know I was a conduit yet." 

Fib blues considerably, then goes purple, scrambling to apologize. "Sorry! I didn't realize that was even a thing that could happen. That sounds awful!"

A smile finds its way onto her face as she looks away. "It wasn't so bad." She says in a soft voice.

The purple fades, though he remains a bit confused and uncertain. "Fair enough. That's...good? Sorry."

"What about you? How did you become a conduit?"

He remains blue, but dims suddenly and significantly. His flames aren't smaller, they're just darker. "I kept having these really awful nightmares where just by existence I was destroying the world around me, set in a bunch of different weird places, which turned out to be all the worlds I was connected to. Then the same sort of effects started happening in real life, and I had to get out of my house immediately before my partner or my downstairs neighbors got hurt. I ended up driving away with nowhere in mind, and when I started getting the feeling of being close to bridge, though I didn't know what it was at the time, I just sort of went, and I ended up in Brazen, in the middle of an iron forest, still inside my car."

With visible exertion, he forces his fire to brighten, blue becoming green and then yellow, and a somewhat strained smile pulling his lips apart. "It wasn't a great time, but it's in the past! I'm still in touch my partner, or, ex-partner since we're not together anymore on account of me not being on our Earth most of the time and having kind of abandoned them, but we've talked through it and are still friends. I've got new friends, even new Conduit friends! Things aren't perfect but they're not totally awful and they're still getting better, slowly."

Sniper nods along, looking a little concerned for their friend. They give him a pat on the back, which becomes a tight hug.

"Thanks, Sniper."

"I'm sorry, that sounds really rough. I'm glad things are better for you now."

"Yeah..." He's quiet for a long moment before chuckling. "Your first jump respawning after getting hit by a car, and mine was while I was driving mine. Odd little contrast."

"Anyway," Sniper interjects, "Given it's relatively unexplored, maybe we can find something interesting around here?"

"We can take a look." She tries the nearby shed door, but it's locked. "I don't expect to find anything new, but we can check." She looks at the shed and teleports inside. There is a smell of wet and rotted wood in the pitch darkness. The shelves and neglected tools are bathed in the purple flame of Azoth that appears in her palm. Nothing but gardening implements, and a stack of large bags with pseudo-japanese writing on them.

Her hand closes around the flame as she teleports out. "Nothing in the shed."

The two of them both nod. "We'll probably check out the neighborhood more broadly for a while. If you'd rather hang out somewhere else in the meantime, we can meet back up here later this afternoon?"

"Yeah, yeah that sounds good, I'll meet you around here." She wants to try stuff out with her teleports.

"Uh," Fib begins, before Strawberry teleports possibly miles away. "Our bikes.... Do you think we should wait here or..."

"We should probably wait. Even if she probably won't have a hard time finding us, this is still the closest open space to the bridge she'll be targeting if she has to teleport from further away."

Fib nods, and they'll hunker down a bit to wait.

Experimentally she tries feeling out her maximum range, then she goes back to the Earth bridge they were just at. She focuses on the Earth bridge, and sure enough, her max range is somewhat longer.

"Can I bounce off my Bevin bridge instead?" She focuses on the overlapping sensation of the Bevin bridge over the Earth bridge, aiming a teleport is hard, it's the path of most resistance, but it works, her range is smaller now. It probably tries to use the bridge that will give her the longest range. But how long? She goes back to her Bevin to pick up her binder off the shelf, behind the bikes. She stares at the golden bicycles for a couple of seconds.

"Fuck!"

She reappears at the Crucible bridge. "Fib!"

"Strawberry!" he exclaims in return, jumping up from where he'd sat down. "Thought we might be stuck on foot until you were back," he says with a bit of joking tone.

"Heh, yeah, sorry." She summons the bikes one at a time from her Bevin, faintly embarrassed. 

"No worries! Happens to all of us, I think. You wouldn't believe how many times I've ridden off with someone else's bits or bobs in my car without realizing," Fib replies as the of them collect and mount their bikes. "You certainly got back more promptly than I generally manage. Anyway, see you later! I hope your stuff goes well, and if you need me for anything just look for feeling of a dozen different bridges stacked on top of each other!"

"Yeah." Fib isn't exactly missable given his aura. She wonders what she feels like, asking would be prudent, she decides. She teleports away to run experiments.

Meanwhile, Fib and Sniper start exploring the local area. It is significantly more specter-haunted than the area around the place where they usually meet Groundskeeper, and has a lower population of non-specters. There's also just a generally creepy atmosphere, even fairly far away from the Crucible bridge itself. Still, good to know what's out here, what sort of situation they'll drop into if they ever need to emergency-jump from Crucible to this place.

They also briefly try and acquire a local lunch before remembering that the locals all just completely ignore their existence and react...poorly, when they don't have that option anymore. They briefly consider stealing something, but unless they stole it right off someone's plate, the only thing they'd be able to grab is vending machine stuff. It is a new world's vending machine stuff, though...

They end up getting a good bit of snacks and drinks, and might still be working through it as time passes from morning to afternoon.

She quickly finds that hopping off of a bridge gives her extra range, but its not consistent. Crucible gives her the most range, followed by Earth and then Rorch. Jumping off of the Arbor or Brazen bridges doesn't give her extra range, and she can't jump straight to them. As far as she can tell, none of her powers originate from Brazen or Arbor, so it probably has to do with that. She hasn't absorbed any of their essence. She can't teleport straight to the Kuiper bridge either, or she can't find it. She has time, she could probably try to go up there, if she wanted to. But she can't fly and can't survive in a vacuum, so it'll have to wait. However, practicing getting altitude is something that she definitely wants to try.

She transforms then times a teleport upwards right after she jumps straight up as hard as she can.

The cold wind is suddenly roaring in her ears. She is above the clouds. In fact, the clouds are so far down that she can barely distinguish them in terms of distance from the ground below it. She has been on planes and she realizes that she has never been this stupidly high up in her life.

"OH GOD!" She panics as the momentum of her ascent bleeds away until only the relentless pull of gravity starts taking her down. It is only pure animal fear that guides her back home. Her desperate flailing is aborted as she hits the ground of her Bevin gracelessly and collapses in a heap on the floor.

She rolls onto her back and simply breathes for long seconds, adapting to the jarring quiet of the dim Sandstone cave. "I was not ready." She says. "I probably shouldn't have jumped as high as I could." She is going to have to go back down now. Jumping upwards as she exits her Bevin will give her a bit of time to aim downwards. But first.

She closes her eyes. She hears the roar of the wind outside as she looks. It's an absolutely incredible view. The ground below feels as far as the sky is normally, just this vast and distant thing beyond distance being a meaningful concept understandable by the lizard brain. In a sense, it's like being in a void, it feels like the sky and the clouds are just one big boundary.

At least the far ones, this high up she can see the wispier strands of cloud, which are the only frame of reference for her perspective and the only way that she can tell for certain that the scrying input is actually moving. She loses minutes just staring at the sky and the clouds, watching it all slowly drift by.

"I want to fly."

Teleportation is nice and all, and it has its nuances. The ability to 'scry and die' as it were, is a potent tool in her arsenal. But she always thought that teleportation was kinda lame as far as fictional modes of travel were. It's nice as an option, it covers a ton of distance really quickly, but actually going from point A to point B fast is what she craves. She should spend more time in Rorch, parkour around. Swinging around a city with grappling hooks and sick jumps is the coolest way to get around.

She gets up. "Ok, deep breath, don't panic, you've fallen before, you will fall again, this isn't a big deal." She aborts her jump twice before she manages to get herself to do it on the third try. She jumps, then jumps, then high in the sky she aims and jumps downwards as far as she can. She ends up higher than she wanted and manages to focus enough to teleport down the rest of the distance. "Woo! Ok!"

She spends the rest of her time wandering around and stocking up provisions from vending machines and cafeterias before heading back to the Crucible bridge and waiting on a nearby bench.

Fib can feel her auras suddenly appear back around the Crucible bridge, and leads Sniper back to it, finding the sitting Strawberry easily from there.

"So, ready for the tour? We'll be back here in probably six--, well, I guess probably you won't want to stick around for the whole Rim portion since I imagine you don't want to just mill around for three days. So if we skip that, you'll be back here in, like, 14 or 15 hours."

"I don't mind milling around, actually. If stuff needs doing that I can do, I'll do it. Besides, it's an opportunity to learn about what you do and how you operate." She has been milling around enough as is, actual work will be a nice change of pace.

Fib shrugs, but he's got a bit of a smile. "Fair enough! And, hey, since you've got teleportation, you could probably visit my Conduit friend, Cean, a lot more easily."

Sniper pats him on the shoulder, and he turns and nods, then turns back to Strawberry. "So, ready to go?"

"Yeah, I'm ready. Let's go!"

"See you on the other side!"

Then Fib and Sniper will pedal off, and once they're going at a decent clip, they disappear, the terrible, almost writhing weight of Fib's world-auras disappearing along with them.

"Right, let's see." She opts to teleport to the boiler room rather than go straight through the bridge to Brazen. 

"Ok, first step into a new alien world. Here goes nothing." With but a thought, her surroundings shift, and she is on the other side.

A faint smell of metal greets her as her shoes sink into white sand, the girl spins slowly in place, taking in the massive false sky. "Woah."

Fib and Sniper are visible not too far away! And they appear to be covered in white-sand and carrying their bikes on their backs. Fib appears to be waving at her as they approach.

Right. "Hey guys, should I be taking those?" She jogs ahead to catch up with them.

"What?!" Fib yells back, evidently not quite hearing her. Sniper says something to him, then he continues, "Yeah! That'd be nice!"

And indeed they'll hand over their bikes for storage, once they've met up. "I don't recommend falling in this stuff," he gestures to the white sand on which they're standing, "It's a pain in the ass to clean up and if breath it in it will fuck up your lungs."

"Right, don't breathe in the sand. I can do that." She looks around. "What are the natives like here?"

"There's two main types. There's the bees, who are a bit stand-offish, towards me at least, but can at least be bargained with, though the proceedings are always kind of tense, and the wasps, who are, uh...Violent."

"We haven't managed to communicate at all with any of them so far," Sniper adds.

"In generally, we mostly stick to these white sands. Nothing really grows out here, so the locals mostly avoid it."

"Bees and wasps, huh? You can talk to the bees? I didn't think they'd talk."

"Oh, they don't. Our procedure so far has just been to kind of, shove stuff that we guess they might like in their general direction and then stand still until they stop dancing angrily at us, take it, and then go away."

"I... see." Dancing? Isn't that a thing that real bees do? Kinda? "They communicate by dancing? They're sapient, right?"

"They've got the emotional complexity for it at least. We don't usually try and follow them back to wherever they take the stuff we bribe them with, since they seem kind of territorial."

"I wonder if the language could be learned." She does possess language learning powers, theoretically it should help. "So are you trading with them or are you just giving them stuff?"

"I don't see why not? Assuming you've got the same language talent power thing that Groundskeeper has, and are able to get them to teach you. And, we're 'trading' for the occasional right to move through the forest, since there're sandstorms out here sometimes and the forest's the only decent nearby shelter. I've considered building some kind of orichalcum bunker out here instead but I've never pulled the trigger on it since I don't know how the locals will react."

"Right, giant territorial sapient bees." Bees. "Do they make honey?"

Fib and Sniper shrug simultaneously.

"I was wondering if they gather anything from the local flora. Maybe their territory is their territory because they need the vegetation in it. I mean, assuming that they work like normal bees. But metal or no, the plants here grow, so they must be alive, Groundskeeper grew some in her garden, so maybe some of them have something that the bees can make into honey."

"Makes sense. I know the trees have flowers, rarely, and that there's some red sand too that has more, smaller plants that are a lot more prone to flowering."

"Groundskleeper's... bleh," That girl needs a real name. "Groundskeeper's garden has red sand in it, she has collected some of the metal flowers from here, they're very pretty." She didn't really think of herself as a garden person, but man, metal plants are fucking cool. "So what's next on the itinerary, boss?" 

"Well, the plan was to just kind of chill here for, like, an hour and fifteen-ish, then head to the statue garden. We could explore around here if you want, though we didn't bring much to pacify the local's with."

"Ah, yeah. Well..." She really wants to see the bees, and the forest, and-

-and everything really. "I could probably jump around and scry on things from my Bevin. Maybe I could check the interior of a hive, find out what they do in there."

"Sure! Let me know what you find, I'm honestly pretty curious myself, I just figure I'd get torn to pieces and waste a bunch of time and Color if I tried to investigate myself. We'll stick around the bridge so you can just hop back here if you run into trouble. Maybe I'll see about building a little fort in the meantime..."

"Which way are the hives?"

"I don't know where the actual hives are, we've never gotten anywhere near that close, but we usually encounter the bees vaguely in..." he glances up at the sky, orients himself, then points, "that direction, ish."

"Alright, I'll see what I can find." She teleports away. She tries to aim another one, but finds her range coming up short. "The hell?" She can aim just fine within reach of the bridge, but can't teleport outside of that, not if she cares about accuracy at least.

"Oh no." Her surroundings shift again, white sand replaced by black, the ever-present metallic smell becomes sharper. She's at the edge of what the bridge will let her jump to. "Well... shit." So her powers, some of them are from Earth, the parkour and maybe the lightning are from Rorch, Azoth manipulation from Crucible, and magical girl transformation from the Academy. Each of those worlds provided a range boost when she teleported off of their bridges, but Brazen didn't. Her Bevin's  bridge seems to not provide any extra range, so what? Does she just have zero range here? She walks for a bit into the forest, between the trees, she lays a hand on one, it's cold. "Dang." It doesn't make much of a noise when she knocks on it, it's probably not hollow.

Out of range of the bridge, she aims a teleport, and finds that she can't go further than a few feet. "Well shit." She jumps to her Bevin to try scrying around. And thankfully that doesn't seem to be affected. "Ok, so where is there a hive?" She pulls her perspective upwards, above the canopy. "So there are lots of types of hives, the classic ones hang from trees, but I think there are others?" She thinks that some of them are on the ground? "A giant beehive would have to be on the ground, right? These trees aren't big enough to hold them otherwise. "Do bees have underground hives?"

A fair distance away she spots a large globe of brass the size of a house in a clearing. "That must be it! Man, how did they build that?" She spends minutes pushing her scrying sensor closer, but to no avail, she was getting too far from her starting location, she was going to have to get closer. "Man, if they are smart bees then them seeing me intruding could be an issue, especially if they see me with Fib afterwards."

She always had the option of teleporting back to the bridge, so she could just escape if she were spotted. She could always just not look into their homes.

No, she was too curious, she had to see.

"Ok, I still have an hour." She says, meaninglessly, since she has nothing that can keep the time. "I really need to steal a watch or something." She goes back to Brazen and starts walking, keeping her  ears peeled for strange noises. The temptation to just transform and parkour off of the trees like a goddamn ninja is strong, but she doesn't want to accidentally run anything weird.

The sound of the wind passing through the stiff metal trees was fascinating, with much less give and flexibility than wooden trees there was basically no rustling of leaves. There was, however, just enough give that two trees that grew up just a little too close would have a leaf or two scratching against one another in a horrible, shrill scratching sound. "Blegh. At least they're pretty." The large blooming flowers spread throughout the canopy made it look like spring in an alien world. Which, come to think about it, might be the case.

The opportunity to ogle a clockwork bee presented itself as soon as she heard a buzzing sound, from her Bevin she looked around, spotting her brass creature.

The wings were a red blur, dark eyes that might've been actual rubies, faceted like precious gems. The main brass body of the bee was a brass shell, with circles lining the abdomen, and a single black spike at the tip. It was actually rather large, maybe the size of a kitten, though that didn't seem to hurt its agility any, it darted quickly and precisely to a flower on the tree.

When it landed, and its wings stilled, she could see that it actually had two pairs of glass red wings framed by shiny brass. As it crawled in the flower, the inner layer of the abdomen rotated, revealing holes, then crawled out of it, holes closed and trailing dust. Pollen? It repeated the process several times with the flowers on the tree. She tried to get as good of a look at it as she could manage. It seems like the pollen was stored in the abdomen, which seemed to be a mostly hollow capsule. It made sense, normal bees carried pollen on the hairs of their abdomen, which wasn't an option with clockwork and brass.

After a few minutes it seemed to be full and flew off, it was much faster than her perspective, so she lost it fairly quickly.

"Clockwork bees! Clockwork bees! They're so cool! They collect pollen? Do they eat? Metal flowers have pollen?" She peaked into a couple of flowers and they had some sort of dust in them, but who knew if it actually served the same purpose as Earth pollen.

She jumped back and made her way closer to the hive. Making sure to avoid bees wherever possible. The ones she was seeing were mostly the same size and roughly the same appearance. She had noticed some subtle variation, which carried implications about how they were made.

Deciding she was close enough to the hive, she went back to her Bevin and made her way to the ribbed brass globe. The closer she got, the greater the concentration of bees. She hadn't seen an Earth beehive in a while, so she couldn't tell how it compared, but this hive had several openings and... doors? It seemed that there was some mechanism to shut the entrances if needed. For defense?

The bees here varied wildly in size, and their eyes and wings seemed to vary in color too. The red ones were out there collecting pollen, bigger than her fist, but there were ones as big as a toddler, with clear glass eyes and four sets of wings. The number of legs wasn't consistent, six legs seemed to be fairly common, but there were others with eight or ten. Most of the extra legs seemed to be used as manipulators, with brass claws on the end.

Some of them were carrying sheets of brass that seemed to have engraving on-

"They have writing!" She hissed. She went in for a closer look. No doubt, the hexagonal brass sheets it carried had strange curving gyphs on them. "Literate bees!" She whispered excitedly, bouncing in place. She had to get a closer look, she just had to, she had no choice in the matter, she was looking at a brass hive filled with sapient and literate clockwork bees!

She held her breath as she moved in closer. If only she could take pictures! She moved through the wall of the hive, her vision blackening for a second before brightening once again.

Her jaw dropped. The interior was covered in curving walls covered in hexagonal cells illuminated by glittering crystals shoved inside them at regular intervals. The glittering liquid inside many of the other cells told her that yes, they did make some sort of honey analogue. But that wasn't all, the cells were divided into sections, many of them were capped with hexagonal plates with glyphs, a group of bees seemed to be in the process of manufacturing bee parts, packing them tightly, quickly and efficiently into the tight hexes, then capping them with the plates. She made a note of the glyphs, if she took notes, maybe she could show them to groundskeeper and the two of them could start deciphering the language!

If she closed the connection now, she'd have to move her perspective all the way back to the hive. The blonde girl, perhaps stupidly, opted to grope around her Bevin blindly, in hopes of finding one of her notebooks.

She bonked her head on a sandstone shelf. "Fuck." She hissed. The bees went still.

I really have to stop doing this. 

The bees started moving, searching for the source of the noise. Berry opened her eyes. "That could've gone worse." She grabbed a notebook. The next long while was spent mapping out the hive, recording glyphs and not saying words out loud that bees could hear.

"Ok," she said after closing the connection again. "I should go tell Fib what I found." She went back to the bridge.

When she returns, she'll find Fib kneeling in the white sand, hands clasped and lips forming silent prayers. Sniper is standing watch over him, and gives Strawberry an amicable wave when she reappears.

Huh, she didn't think he was religious. She waves back at Sniper as she walks up to her. "What's he doing?" She whispers to her.

"He's working on conjuring some orichalcum. We're not going to commit to anything infrastructural yet, so it's mostly just going to be a sort of monument, to serve as a landmark and as a test to see how the locals react."

"Ah, I see." So probably not religious. Activating Aether powers through prayer makes sense, she supposes. Does it have to be sincere? She could absolutely pray sarcastically if it means cool powers. The girl is bursting with excitement to tell them what she found, but she doesn't want to distract him. "What does orichalcum do, what are its properties?" She asks Sniper in a low voice.

"It's very resistant, in a general sort of sense. It's rigid, its an electrical and thermal insulator, in general if something tries to change orichalcum, it will resist that change, and pretty strongly. We've put it through a bunch of tests and just about the only thing that's managed to ding it is other pieces of orichalcum going very fast. Orbital speeds fast. It's only pliable to Fib's touch because he's the one who  conjures it, so it recognizes him on some level."

"Well that explains the armor." She pokes Snipers shoulder plate. It's not cold. Thermal insulator, so it doesn't conduct heat as well. "Wow, that feels weird." The prospect of armor becomes more attractive, but not enough to ruin the magical girl aesthetic. Maybe a shield? Actually, I could cosplay genderbent Gilgamesh in gold plating. Fate/Stay Night already hot-girlified king Arthur. I can even keep all my treasures and weapons in my Bevin, it's perfect! I guess I'd have to figure out how to launch things out of it with speed, huh?

She eyes Sniper's orichalcum gun. She should probably get her hands on some sort of firearm, even if she intends to primarily fight in melee, a ranged option would be nice. If she starts working for them, she could probably trade for one.

There is, however, one weapon that would be an excellent fit for her, given what she can do with bridges and teleportation. "Do you guys work with explosives?"

"Not much, no. We try avoid being too destructive. Why do you ask?"

Teleporting.

Grenades.

"No reason, just curious." Maybe she could raid some army base on Earth. She waits for Fib to finish.

After 15-30 minutes of prayer, there's a feeling of culmination, a flash of divine radiance, and a whooshing sound, a huge block of gold-gleaming orichalcum land on the sand, blowing out a billowing cloud of the white dust-fine particles and sinking slightly into the ground. Sniper, seeming to just realize the potential problem, jumps in front of Strawberry to try and block a portion of the sand.

Without really thinking she grabs Sniper and jumps to her Bevin. "Uh. Sorry, I just- sand."

"It's fine, this is better than risking damaged lungs, probably," Sniper replies.

If Strawberry scries through the bridge, she'll find Fib wiping sand off his face, looking around, briefly freaking out at Sniper and her being gone, and then noticing Strawberry's Bevin bridge and calming down. "All clear!" he says, presuming (perhaps erroneously) that she's listening in.

The two of them jump next to Fib. "Are you ok?"

"A bit dusty, but other than I'm fine, yeah. Ego's maybe a little bruised for not realizing that would happen. You two alright?"

"Yeah, we're fine." She whistles at the size of the blocks. "That is more than I expected. What are you planning for the monument?"

"Nothing special, really. I don't have a Logo or anything, so I'm either going to just make it a big noticeable spire, or maybe a statue of me and Sniper so that people can recognize us later if they find it. Honestly though I'm pretty open to suggestions."

"That's way better than my idea for a huge, ominous and inexplicable monolith. For a more serious suggestion, maybe keep them small if you're just testing the waters?"

"Hm..." Fib scratches his flame-beard, then nods. "Reasonable."

Then he gets started shaping the metal, which is a rather odd sight. It almost splashes away from his hand when he swipes through it quickly, which he uses to establish a platform on the sand. Then he forms a rough mound of metal with a sort of two-armed tossing motion, which he climbs atop and refines into an angular, pyramidal pedestal with four sharp kicks, the excess metal sort sloshing down and disappearing into the platform, before forming a tidy set of stair steps with a sequence of stomps. Then he hauls the last of the metal up on top of the pedestal and carefully shapes it into a decent but definitely not perfectly accurate life-sized statue of Sniper, and...a suit of armor with a ball of fire resting over the gorget, which is presumably Fib's attempt at replicating himself. Then he presses in a little plaque at the feet of the statures, with their names in English, when they visited, and the purpose of this monument to declare their presence and peaceful intent.

It's a sight to behold. She watches the process in awe.

"Woah. That's amazing."

Maybe enduring Aether's conservative Christianism for a year or two is worth it for divine powers.

The process is also surprisingly quiet. Orichalcum being sculpted releases a subtle tone, almost chime or bell-like, or like the ring of a sword being drawn from a sheath. It could be pleasant, if one enjoys that sort of thing. Fib seems to, give he's golden himself as he steps down from the pedestal and onto the plinth, beaming. "Thank you! I don't actually get the chance to just have fun with it all that often."

Sniper offers a quiet but genuine clap, and Fib returns the gesture with an exaggerated bow.

"I've been wondering, what kind of powers can you get from Aether, do you know?"

"Ehhh," he rises from his bow and tilts a hand side to side, "Some? The feelings I've gotten is that it's all about the Radiance. My orichalcum is made from it, but you could do other stuff, like using it to sustain your body, which also lets you grow angel wings, or storing it inside yourself and then unleashing it to smite people with holy fire. I know I could also push my orichalcum further, to summon some kind of tower- or beacon-type structure in the Aether itself, which would be some kind of status symbol? But, mostly I don't really pay too much attention to the feeling I get about potential powers from other worlds since I can't really get them."

Wings. I'm getting wings, baby. "Yeah, I hear you. Though I might pick something up there." She stares at the plaque on the statue. "Oh yeah! The bees have writing!"

"Oh shit! Nice!" Fib replies.

"Did you get any look at what they wrote? Was it recognizable at all?" Sniper asks.

She pulls out her notebook, turning the page to the strange sweeping glyphs she saw. "Yes, I did! And absolutely not!" She says, cheerfully. "They engrave their writing on these little brass hexagonal plates, and they cap many of the cells of the hive with them, like labels. They make honey, many of the cells are taken up by it! And collect... something akin to pollen from the flowers in their abdomens, and the inside of the hive is lit up with glowing gems! They pack some of the cells with spare parts! It's so cool. Their hive also has doors, which they can close, of varying sizes because some of those bees get big, like," She holds her hands. "The size of a small child, and they don't always have six legs either, I've seen some with ten, though those had manipulator claws on the ends of the extra legs, it's just..." She sighs. "This place is great."

"Oh yeah, me and Sniper and a couple others once ran into a bee that was, like, the size of a truck who was cutting down one of the trees with, like, a diamond saw or something. We steered well clear of her, but they definitely get huge. But yeah, neat!"

Sniper studies the copies Strawberry made of the bee-glyphs. "Would it be alright if we took a picture of this and sent it back to Revival base? The others back home might be able to puzzle out some kind of meaning eventually, at least with the context of this being labels being used by bee-people to denote what's inside of various hive cells."

"A truck?!" She hisses.

"Oh, yeah, go ahead. I'll probably come here on my own and try to get more samples of the writing, maybe me and Groundskeeper can decipher it, since we're good at languages."

Some of the glyphs are labeled, those of which were inscribed on cell caps, but the rest aren't. "I saw a bunch of hexes on a hinge, like a book, I wrote down what I could see."

Sniper pulls out their phone, almost fumbles it into the sand and only catches it after a comedically long sequence of near-misses and almost-catches, faux-pretends they did that on purpose, then snaps pictures of Strawberry's notes. Then they check the time on their phone and say, "Time's coming up we should probably head off to the statue garden soon."

Fib, however, is looking off into the distance. If the direction that Strawberry went off in earlier was 'east', then he's facing 'south' now. Sniper follows his line of sight and seems surprised as well. If Strawberry does the same, she might see what looks like a brass butterfly fluttering in the shadows of iron forest. If she pays attention with her conduit sense, it's clear this is a Conduit.

"We should...come back, later. More prepared," Fib says, before turning to Sniper and Strawberry. "We're headed to a world that's sort of, made of marble, except for some rubbery black trees growing out of the gaps. Do you think you can get there on your own? Sniper can hop on my bike and you can get on theirs until we're there."

"Uh. Maybe? Which way is the bridge?" Another conduit? She pulls out their bikes, eyeing the sand. Can they get enough speed on this terrain?

Fib focuses for a minute and then pivots, in a third direction, north, deeper into the white-sand desert. "Roughly in that direction. Huh. White. I wonder if that's related."

"I-" Questions later. "Ok." She aims far in the direction that Fib pointed in. And can find nothing. She waves the hypothetical point around finding nothing. Maybe she could- She shakes her head. "I can't find it, let me use the bike."

Fib nods and grabs both bikes, then...firmly plants both in the sand? Right next to each other. He gets on one, with Sniper sitting kind of awkwardly on the bike's back platform-slash-attachment point. Fib has one hand on his bike's handlebars, and reach out with his free hand and grabs the handlebars of the other bike. "Once you're on, I'll count down from three, then jump."

"Right." She gets on the golden bike, it sinks a little in the sand. "I'm ready." Is this going to work?

"Three...two...one...go!"

Then, without even pedaling, the three of them are no longer in Brazen.

Instead, they're on a vast plain of marble, with a patch of dust-fine white sand that was brought along spilling out in a circle around them.

Also, there's a trippy, bioluminescent jellyfish-thing flopping pathetically under a cloud of dark miasma. Dark miasma which is now injecting itself into the jellyfish, lifting it up off the ground and inflating it grotesquely. It is rapidly becoming larger and more...monster-y, in a way that gives Strawberry a similar feeling as the tar monster she's encountered previously.

"Sniper!" Fib calls, the sound oddly muted by the intensified effect of his world-auras, though Sniper is already moving, dismounting the bike, getting into a stable shooting stance, retrieving a red-jacketed bullet from underneath their plate armor with one hand while they pull their rifle of their back with the other. They chamber the round, aim, lock their armor, and fire.

"What the fuck?!" She shouts. Her hand closes around her sword as the shot detonates in a fiery burst inside of it. It shudders as Strawberry dashes towards it, engulfing herself in light, emerging transformed as she draws and slashes with her sword in one swift motion, spilling briney black liquid on the marble.

The monster ejects itself from its own damaged body like a snake shedding its skin, landing on three chitinous legs.

"Shit!" Fib exclaims as he dismounts as well, his flames billowing with red-fringed purple, drawing his sword and attempting to take a fighting stance.

"Contact effects are fading!" Sniper states, and indeed the odd muting of sounds is fading, as are the melange of mental impressions that were mostly balancing out into a sort of uncomfortable emotion weight on the brain, at least back down to the normal level that is always present around Fib. "Try to be quiet, or else we might disturb the rubber men," they add, flipping their rifle around in their hands and sliding a golden stiletto blade out of the toe of its stock, turning it into a wickedly long spiked club.

"Oh sure, I'll just murder a giant monster quietly." Strawberry mutters angrily. She lunges towards it, bouncing off of one of its crab-like legs to put her on a trajectory between the other two, she slashes the inside of one of its joints, sending it toppling onto its side. She rolls back onto her feet, facing the creature.

"So what is-?"

The surface of the bulb shimmers a deep, almost black purple. And right then and there, in the pit of her stomach, she knows that there was never any hope for her. She is a loud and miserable creature that the people she inflicts herself upon can barely pretend to tolerate.

Of course you didn't go back. Nobody was really going to miss you.

She stares into the darkness, she doesn't move, besides a trembling in her sword arm from the white knuckled grip she has on the handle.

"Rrrgh!" Fib growls, barely restraining his voice as his flames continue to redden. Then he rushes the creatures, making an attempt to slash the through the black-purple mass.

Sniper's face hardens in a mask of cold fury at the same time, and they begin to step around the creature, readying to make a swing with their rifle-club and take out another leg of the thing.

And, in Strawberry's breast, amidst the growing darkness, in the hearth of her Azoth, a hot-burning spark of anger is thrust.

She sees red. Then she sees red. Then she screams.

Her Azoth ignites, engulfing her in purple and red flames as she throws herself at the creature in a burst of superhuman power and speed. Her sword bites into the soft flesh several times before it ejects itself from its body again, but she pursues relentlessly, ripping at it with sword and bare hand.

Caught up in the emotion, Fib and Sniper both follow suit, as best they're able, Fib attempting to chase after the much faster Strawberry, while Sniper retracts the stiletto, flips their rifle back around, and chambers another incendiary round before beginning to track the fight from a distance, waiting for a good shot.

In the distance, a tree black as pitch begins to rouse, disturbed by the ruckus.

She stabs her sword into its leg, forcing it through carapace, then uses the sword as a handhold to lift the whole creature, balancing it above her for a moment before slamming it head first behind her with a roar. It slams its other leg into her from behind as it falls, sending her sprawling as it lands with a loud splat, popping its head sack, sending foul-smelling brine all over the marble.

Fib...is still catching up with her and not yet close enough to do anything, other than maybe throw his sword, which he is not stupid enough to try (for now, at least).

Sniper, meanwhile, is still watching closely, getting ready to fire if the creature escapes from its own skin again to try and nail it midway through the process, hoping that interrupting it might prove fatal.

The creature twitches, it spills out of itself, trying to stagger back to its feet. Strawberry throws herself at it as it does, breaching the carapace on its leg with a punch.

In virtually same instant, a fireball explodes underneath the creature as another incendiary round lands, scorching its freshly regenerated underside and blasting it up into Strawberry's punch.

Fib is now close enough to think he won't miss if he throws his sword, and hucks it with his merely-mortal strength, still managing to gash open the creature's soft and fleshy bulb and his sword embedded in its body.

Strawberry seizes both sword and opportunity as she flips over it, grabs the embedded blade and slashes it out of its body as she attacks with her own sword. It paints the marble with a fresh coat of innards.

With haggard breaths, Strawberry withdraws the purple fire within herself. She manages to relax as she sees that it isn't moving again.

Fib jogs up behind her, seeming calmer and also distinctly dimmer (and no longer stoking the flames of rage in anyone else), though also definitely still on fire. "Well! That was kind of crazy!"

"Rubber men!" Sniper kind of loud-whispers from where they've begun to hunker down against the marble of the ground. Indeed, a handful of the gross sacs dangling from the nearest black tree have fallen to the ground, and brutish, faceless humanoids seemingly made of shiny black rubber are now rising from them, silently shaking off the moisture of their birth.

"Anything I should know about them?" The magical girl says as she readies her blades. She offers the gold one to Fib.

He considers insisting she take it since she's at least as good with it as he is, but given how she's reacted before he just takes it back and tries to wipe off the weird black-purple guts. "They're, uh...sensitive to sound. Not in a weakness kind of way, in a 'it makes them mad' kind of way. They're fucking fast, too, and heavy as fuck. Getting hit by one at full speed has killed me in one shot before. I don't know exactly how that stacks up with your, uh...combat-mode? But it's pretty nasty regardless. But, now that the fight's over, if we keep quiet and stay still, they should just come over, check us out, maybe watch us for a while, and then go back to their home tree and be reabsorbed."

Indeed, Sniper has fully balled up on the marble ground and locked their armor, becoming a motionless golden bumpy nodule resting on the marble.

Well, she can try quiet. She still holds her sword in front of her.

Igniting the Azoth within herself wasn't something that she had considered as a realistic combat option. It was essentially a multiplier for any enhancements that she had made within herself with Azoth, of which she currently had none. The boost has been minor at best, most of her power coming from her Magical Girl transformation and rage.

 She had been holding on to the Azoth she got from the prison in Crucible for a month now. Strawberry had kept telling herself that she should just use it, but the enhancements she could get were minor and 'but what if I need it later?' had been the brain poison that had stopped her from using it. Now she had less of it.

The next time she had some time to herself she was going to just bite the bullet and invest it into her body. At some point she was going to have to choose a weapon and upgrade it, but that could wait.

She waits patiently for the rubber men to approach.

Fib nods, and mirrors Sniper's stance, hunkering down against the ground, covering his head, slowing his breathing, and in general being as still as he can manage. His flames also go mostly blue, with a bit of cyan.

The rubber men walk over, seemingly unhurried. Despite being pretty large, larger than the average human by a significant margin, their steps are completely silent. They almost strut up to Strawberry, inspecting her eyelessly. One gets down on all fours and nudges Fib, while two others break off and continue walking, approaching Sniper's position.

Y'know, I always thought that many creature designs could be improved by removing the eyes. An lo and behold! I'm right. 

She's not worried. Her companions are immortal. And she herself is very strong.

The two rubber men inspect her stalk in a circle around her for a while, but unless she starts making lots of noise, they'll leave her be, turning their attention to Fib instead. Soon enough the other two that were inspecting Sniper also come over to poke around Fib. One of them lays across him, prompting him to flatten out further against the marble. There are briefly tongues of purple and red in his fire, but he quickly returns to still blueness. A second rubber man lays atop him, and he wheezes as the breath he didn't realize he was hold is forced out of him, the noise prompting the rubber man that just laid down to press into him a bit more, though fortunately at this point structure of his armor prevents him from being compressed any further.

They all wait like this for a moment. In the background, Sniper quietly unlocks their armor and carefully begins to stand up.

She keeps still, and quiet. Watching the rubber men with curiosity, then takes a moment to look at her surroundings. Purple clouds, marble as far as she can see, an ominous inverted pyramid in the distance ahead of her, the odd leafless tree. This must be the Prison. She looks down at her feet. She remembers that standing still was a bad idea, but so far nothing seems to have happened. Whatever happens is slow, right? She thinks. She watches as two of the rubber men fixate on Fib. Then blinks as one lays atop him.

Uh?

She turns to Sniper, holding up her sword questioningly.

Sniper slowly and carefully raises up their arms and makes an X with them, before beginning to gently tip-toe towards her and Fib.

The one rubber man that was pressing harder into Fib gives up on trying to press through his orichalcum armor, which fortunately does not creak or groan as the pressure lightens. Fib remains blue, albeit another notch dimmer than he was before, and doesn't take a breath, but slowly turns a gold-gauntleted fist on its side and gives a thumbs-up.

Alright, I guess we can wait.

She just stands there and does nothing for the moment.

It takes a frustratingly long time for the rubber men to be satisfied that there's nothing worth their attention happening, during a which one stacks itself on top of the two already laying across Fib, prompting him to give another quiet thumbs-up.

Finally, maybe fifteen minutes later, the laying ones get up and join the ones stalking around the three of them, then a moment later they and stroll back to the black tree they dropped from and sort of, collapse into its roots. melting back into the substance of the tree, prompting the entire thing to bend and twist briefly, as if resettling itself after reabsorbing their mass.

Fib takes a big breath, then another, as his colors return to a more even mix. "Alright, crisis averted," he says. "Sorry about that. Still not entirely used to the new addition to my contact effects from the all-girls-school world."

"Let's get away from them." She whispers.

Sweet baby Jesus I thought they'd never leave.

She starts walking in the opposite direction of the strange black tree.

Fib grimaces a bit at that, before getting up and following along behind her, Sniper joining them a moment later.

It doesn't take much walking to notice that there's another black tree, growing up from between a pair of marble boxes, ahead them.

"They're kind of the only thing that grows here," Fib comments, quietly.

Ugh. "Fine," Her voice a barely audible whisper. "then what do we do? We just wait quietly until its time to leave?"

"Pretty much. Me and Sniper usually just play games or check social media on our phones."

Check social media?! "The fuck do you mean check social media?" She hisses.

Fib retrieves a fancy silver hand-mirror from under his armor. "This little beauty means I'm connected to my Bevin's internet, which in turn connects to the internet in all the sosei-shita settlements." He stows it back under his armor before adding, "I can give you the current password if you want. The sosei-shita in my Bevin change it every twelve hours, or every 25 passes in the Rim."

I've been gipped! Internet?! His Bevin comes with Internet?! "I don't have a phone. And even if I did, like, it would be from my world, right? Wouldn't there be differences in the... however networking happens? That would make them incompatible?"

"The mirrors handle all of that, actually! It's been remarkably convenient. I can loan you mine for now and I can entertain myself or share with Sniper, and then when we stop in the Rim we can buy you one."

"Huh." She takes the phone from him, then taps on the internet browser, then opens a fresh tab. She stares at it.

She hasn't held a phone or anything connected to a network in a month. And... she has to admit, it was freeing. She googles the current date. Thursday November 11th, 2027. Three years ahead of her.

She hands the phone back to Fib. "I'm good."

He shrugs. "Suit yourself. If you want anything, just tap my shoulder or something."

Then he goes and removes the seat from one of the bikes, set it down on the ground, and sits down with his phone. Sniper opts to sit on their bike itself rather than removing the seat.

Unless they decide to break the silence, or something very unusual happens, it's going to be a quiet hour before it's time to head over to the Rim. Fib's color is distinctly green.

She looks down, she's still in her magical girl outfit. "I'll be right back." She goes to her Bevin, reverts to her normal clothing in a flash of light, then cleans her sword with a towel, then sheathes it.

Her bed sheet will do for something to sit on, she folds it until it is a square, then takes it back to the Prison, sets it down, attempts to sit down cross-legged, remembers that she is wearing a short skirt, then gives kneeling down a shot. She's seen the girls do that at the Academy.

She stokes the Azoth within her as she begins the process of fortifying herself with it. Stronger, better reflexes and coordination, speed. It's just a little bit, but it will add up in time. At some point in the near future she will go to Crucible and start hunting for more Azoth, and for the materials she needs for her Flask.

By the end of the process she is nearly out of Azoth, the enhancements went a lot further than she thought they would, but she's just starting out, there will be diminishing returns.

Also god her legs hurt. Leave it to the Japanese to make sitting down in an uncomfortable way to be a point of pride.

Fib, meanwhile, has been staring since she started using her Azoth to modify herself. "Damn. That's a thing you can do?" he asks as she seems to complete the process.

"Hm?" She blinks at Fib. "Yeah, I can make myself or objects stronger with Azoth. This is the first time I've done it, I made one trip to Crucible about a month ago to collect this stuff, and have been hoarding it ever since. I've been agonizing about what to spend it on, and have been dragging my feet in regards to making a second trip to Crucible to collect more. It's not all I can do with it. I could use it as a weapon, though I haven't tried yet, and you saw me ignite it within myself to temporarily make myself stronger."

"Nice! I, never knew that was possible to do with Azoth." He sighs. "Is it weird that even after a decade of being an immortal multiverse-traveling wizard I still feel kind of inadequate most of the time?"

"No, absolutely not. No amount of being an immortal demigod will make that go away, it's the human condition to feel bad about yourself and your capabilities regardless of what you can actually do. I mean. I think. Maybe there's a conduit power for not feeling inadequate. I definitely don't have that one." She smirks.

Fib briefly flares yellow, then settles into green. "I guess I sort of do, it just feels a little fake, or like taking mood stabilizer, and consumes a valuable and kind of dangerous-to-gather resource."

He sighs again. "It's just rough when there's, like, three or four worlds that are simultaneously making me feel worse, and that also get more dangerous the more depressed I am, that I still need to deal with every day."

"Y'know, when I met Groundskeeper earlier today, I had a moment where I realized that she didn't... value herself. I said that I didn't want to take advantage of her and then had to dig deep to figure out how to make that happen. So I have to ask. Is this a you problem? Or is this a powers problem? Because from what we know you have something going on that'll emerge at some point after you make enough connections to disparate worlds, right? If that's the problem then the solution will come eventually. As conduits we will become stronger as the years pass, and I can't imagine that you'll remain tethered to the worlds forever."

"A you problem is harder. And there are no easy answers."

He gets a thoughtful look, and the forced green dissipates into a more even mix of color. "A little of column A, a little of column B, probably? I've been struggling with depression, low self-esteem, executive dysfunction, all that stuff, since I was kid-- wow. I just realized I'm technically almost forty. That's kind of fucked...Sorry. But yeah, there's definitely some element of my problems being exacerbated by the situation, but I don't think I could say they're really the source of anything."

She gives him a long look. "Depression and executive dysfunction I'm not sure how to tackle. But Self-esteem doesn't come out of nowhere, and the fear that you might inconvenience somebody is brain poison. You might just need practice here, I've had to deal with unpleasant humanity, and any compunctions about 'inconveniencing somebody' has eroded to nothing. Change and improvement never come easily."

"Fair enough," he says with a shrug, seeming distinctly unconvinced, or maybe more so disengaged.

I don't know what to say. "Sorry."

Fib briefly flickers between cyan, blue, and purple as he mentally fights the urge to apologize for making Strawberry feel the need to apologize, before pumping the breaks with an injection of green, raising a hand and making a dismissive gesture. "It's find. Don't worry about it."

She chuckles. "I had such an agonizing conversation with Groundskeeper earlier today, and trying to get to the root of why she didn't value herself was so hard. I didn't want to take advantage of her, and I meant it." She sighs.

"When you offered me the bike, that's when I knew I should be worried. If I were in your position I would've never made that offer." She shrugs.

"I feel like you are overestimating how much work it takes me to take make a bike," Fib replies deadpan.

"She's trying to be considerate too, you know," Sniper replies to him in turn.

"Yeah..." he agrees with a sigh.

"Hahaha, ah, alright, I'll drop it." She gets up and stretches. "How long has it been?"

Sniper checks their phone. "Just about 50 minutes since we jumped from Brazen."

Fib nods. "We could probably head to the Rim now if you like. My Tether to this place is generally pretty calm so cutting the stay a few minutes short isn't a big deal."

"I can wait." She jolts as she remembers something. "So many things happened at once that I forgot, who the fuck was that butterfly conduit on Brazen?"

Fib smiles. "I have no idea! They're only the fourth other conduit I've ever seen, and this was the first time! I didn't even know that non-humans could be Conduits, honestly, though I guess it makes sense! Though, hm..."

"We haven't encountered any butterflies on Brazen before of any kind," Sniper comments, thinking along the same line as Fib.

"So, it's possible they are a human, but, like, some kind of crazy clockwork mind-upload? Is that even possible?"

Sniper shrugs. "Being transformed from a kagemono to a sosei-shita wasn't possible, and then you did it. I wouldn't be surprised if other Conduits have done similarly impossible things."

"I'll have to ask Groundskeeper the next time I see her. She has some Brazen powers. Honestly, the worlds are all weird enough that I'd bet its possible. Anyway, I thought you knew them and they were dangerous or something."

"No, never seen them before. Just...you never know, and Brazen has been a lot more confrontational than the all-girls-school where I met you and Groundskeeper, and my first encounter with Cean was her going way out of her way to warn people far beyond the borders of her country about earthquakes, which made a pretty great first impression which was consistently reinforced thereafter. No such circumstances here, so I'd rather back off and come back with the possibility of contact in mind rather than in the middle of my mail route."

"Right, be cautious." She lays down, using her folded up sheet as a pillow. "I can do that." She stares at the sky, in the gloom between the clouds she sees something weird. "That's not... Is that a ceiling?"

"Yup. This place is all layered. Alternating air and marble."

"Weird. So is the world a layered globe? Or is it an endless flat expanse or what?"

Fib shrugs. "No way to know for certain, as far as I'm aware. We haven't tried super hard to measure whether there's any, like, curvature, though, so maybe?"

"Man, I wish I could teleport here. Hey, so... why is this place called the Prison? What's... kept here?"

"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?