[Open-ish] So what'd I miss~?

[godsandbats]

WHO: Kirk and whoever he may encounter
WHEN: Immediately post-Mission 11
WHERE: Various locations in Etraya
WHAT: Someone comes back after a vacation of sorts alongside Etraya's pets
NOTES\WARNINGS: Please see here for potential content warnings.

After Mission 11 ends, various purple portals open up throughout Etraya. Pets and others animals emerge from these portals and are returned to their proper places. Meanwhile, one purple portal opens up near the Tower of Justice and a bat of a different kind has returned.

Kirk isn't ready to be relieved yet through. He wants to assess first how Etraya is after what sounded like an intense mission.

He's prioritizing the Tower of Justice and any other places where his friends may be to check on them first. But it's possible for others to also catch him while he's flying on the way.

Comments

[will_chase_balls]

Dwayne is walking along the shores of the Seasands, searching for weird phenomena, which is particularly difficult for Dwayne and his innate tendency to dismiss most things as perfectly fine and normal.

As he looks up, wondering if there might be any weirdness to the storm he sees in a small, contained area, he happens to spot Kirk in one of the many not-stormy parts of the sky. Dwayne smiles and waves.

[godsandbats]

Kirk spots Dwayne waving at him as he flies. Soon, he smoothly comes down for a landing.

"I just came back," he simply says as he looks over the shifter. He seems to be physically fine at least.

[will_chase_balls]

That's right, Kirk opted out because he was worried about drinking people.

"Yeah. I hope everything went well for you being holed up. There was definitely more going on than just an open window and poison particles."

Which were enough of a problem on their own.

[godsandbats]

More than just an open window and hazardous particles was what Kirk suspect was going to happen. Still, he doesn't like that happened.

"What happened?" He asks.

[will_chase_balls]

"Well, on Farway there were these weird circles that kept popping up, splicing the island with different other worlds, bringing creatures and plants and things, and anything alive that got caught where the circles popped up ended up mixed with other things. Part of my arm turned into mushrooms. It got better, though. Farway still has craters where all the circles popped up."

[godsandbats]

Kirk frowns as Dwayne recalls the experience. He was expecting more of adverse psychological effects instead of that.

"And these circles disappeared only after the vent was closed?" he asks.

[will_chase_balls]

"Oh no, the circles are still there. Just the splicing only happens when they first appear. Want to go look at the craters?"

[godsandbats]

"If you don't mind. Do you have your powers back?" Kirk asks. His own abilities aren't affected and he'd rather not drag anyone to investigate with him if it was too dangerous for them.

[will_chase_balls]

"Yeah. Once the vent was closed my powers went back to normal."

He'd managed to survive the madness that was going on in Farway without his powers, so he feels confident going back when he has his powers as well as Kirk for backup.

[godsandbats]

Kirk nods and gestures Dwayne to lead the way.

"Was it painful?" He asks. Dwayne seems to be taking things in stride but the experience still doesn't sound pleasant.

[will_chase_balls]

He starts walking.

"It was weird. I don't know how to describe it. It wasn't pain exactly, it was more...incredibly wrong. If there weren't so many things around trying to attack us it probably would have bothered me a lot more, but we had to keep moving."

Speaking of which...

"Now, when that lizard-bird-cat managed to work a tooth through one of my bracers, that was painful."

That also didn't just go away, but it's also hidden away under a sleeve, so it's easy to ignore. He did rinse it off and bandage it first, though.

[godsandbats]

"A what attacked you?" Kirk asks, confused. Or was it exactly how it sounds?

[will_chase_balls]

"A large creature with the head of a massive lizard, the body of a cat and the wings of a bird. I think it kept getting caught in those circles. It ended up getting spliced again with a tree and I was able to get away."

[godsandbats]

Kirk frowns again as he imagines the scene Dwayne describes. It's visceral and would be discombobulating for anyone.

"Lucky for so many other animals, the dome didn't have anything like that," he says.

[will_chase_balls]

"Well, that's good. Because it was...bad. Seeing it, I wonder if that's what being in Cyre would be like when it became the Mournland."

He wasn't there, of course, because there were no survivors as far as he's aware, unless the strange mutated monsters counted. Still, the strange creatures that came out of the Mournland told a story that seemed to be echoed in what he saw in Farway.

[godsandbats]

"Did it also have similar phenomena as those craters?" Kirk asks. Something getting renamed into Mournland sounds rather ominous.

[will_chase_balls]

"Something like it," he explains as he continues walking, "We don't know what happened exactly. Maybe there was some kind of massive spell gone wrong, maybe they angered the gods. Whatever it was, the entire country was affected. As far as we can tell, none of the citizens survived. The only thing to come out of the country since the Cataclysm are strange, twisted creatures. They look a bit like the spliced creatures I ran into in Farway. There was a scouting party that tried to go in to see what exactly happened, but they never came back out. We had some people scry for the scouting party, and they were able to find out that they're still alive, but when they got to the part of the spell where they determined exactly where they were, something went wrong."

[godsandbats]

“Wrong in what way?” Kirk asks. It sounds as though it was magical body splicing. “Perhaps the fog did pull something directly from your world.”

[will_chase_balls]

"Multiple faces and mouths on one body. Parts not matching up. More limbs on one side than the other. That kind of thing."

Much like some of the creatures he saw.

"Maybe it did. It was just supposed to be hallucinations, but it definitely brought in real stuff, too. The Mournlands are covered in fog."

[godsandbats]

Kirk frowns as he tries to imagine the scenario. It's certainly body horror.

"It sounds like the mission involved more than what Aurora mentioned," he says.

[will_chase_balls]

"Far more. I guess it's good to know that her descriptions might not be accurate."

[godsandbats]

Kirk nods. It's something he realized before and he's still not happy about it.

"It happened during the previous mission as well," he says. "She said our morals would not be affected like it had affected the superheroes on that Earth. Unfortunately she was wrong about that."

[will_chase_balls]

"Well, that's settles that, then. We can't trust that any of these missions will be exactly as we're told. I'm just glad I didn't have my axe put away like Jayce suggested, or it would have been a disaster while fighting the lizard-bird-cat."

Going forward, he'll only take these mission descriptions as vague suggestions of what might happen.

[godsandbats]

"It's understandable why he suggested it though," Kirk says. "If there was heightened paranoia then it was best that people were at least unarmed."

And it's part of why Kirk opted to do a mission pass. It's easy for him to imagine turning against people so long as his hunger for human blood is around.

[will_chase_balls]

"It was a perfectly reasonable request. He had no way of knowing that the information we had was wrong. I just hate handing my weapons over, and I figured I'd find a way to use something else as a weapon if I lost control, anyway."

But he certainly doesn't fault Jayce for asking for people to hand their weapons over.

"But now that we know the information can be wrong, we'll want to keep that possibility in mind in the future."