World Tree MUSH

It's probably understandable that Sieger would have been reduced to bedrest for a good while after making an uncontrolled orbital entry into the Mushroom Kingom-- and the castle.
    But, after the initial fall and the carrying over into bed-- he's up surprisingly quickly. And when we say 'up', what we mean is that the young man is peeking out carefully from the doorway of the room he was carried to. Confused, uncertain and completely unfamiliar with his surroundings.
    Equally carefully, he slides out of the room, as if he might not belong there at all. Might be he just really, really doesn't want to deal with those weird mushroom things people were calling 'toads'.
    Why would they call them toads? They're obviously not frogs.

Anna is making her way over to the Royal Library right near the palace, carrying a book titled she'd checked out titled "On The Medical Applications of Transformation Magic" and chattering aimlessly with Spiral on her shoulder. "... and, definitely, I'm almost at the point where I can transform, just need to make one last push!" Anna's saying cheerfully. "Maybe next time there's a huge spate of Distortions ..."

Spiral chuckles. "I'm guessing you mean if it doesn't happen right when you have a test?" she says teasingly.

"Nnnnnno," says Anna, grinning and ruffling Spiral's fur. "I mean, yes, but, no."

    By all reason, Sieger really doesn't need to be sneaking around. But he doesn't know that, in his defense. He is in a very strange and alien environment after having falling through a wormhole in the sky for the SECOND time in the span of a few days. So he stalks through the hallways, completely unaware and ignorant of which way he would actually need to go in order to get out...
    Which leads to him rounding a certain corner. Right in the same time as Anna does from the opposite side.
    Uh oh.

Anna blinks as she finds herself face-to-face with Sieger. "Oh, hi!" she says, giving him a cheerful and friendly smile, as if he wasn't sneaking around and hadn't gotten into a huge argument with someone else she knows the last time they saw each other. "You doing all right?"

Spiral just ... watches him carefully, her eyes narrowing slightly and letting Anna do the talking for now.

    "D'AH!" The yell of surprise comes from Sieger the instant he just briefly comes at risk of smacking into Anna, promptly jumping back a pace or so with his hands up.
    "Scheisse! Don't sneak up on me like that!" He accuses with his hands lowering down right after. ... Yes, that was terribly hypocritical of him, wasn't it.

Spiral opens her mouth to respond, but Anna is the first one to speak. "Whoa, hey, hey, settle down, guy," she says in a soothing tone, smiling. "You can relax, you're safe here. Probably ... safer than a lot of worlds, really."

At that, Spiral just closes her mouth.

    Sieger doesn't seem particularly convinced right off the bat. His posture and overal presence is very much guarded, but after a moment, he straightens up just a bit with a heavy sigh. "Gah... I guess I should be thankful I didn't end up falling into the bloody sun or something instead, huh? I'm just.... Nnnh." His hand rubs along the front of his face. "I'm sorry. I'm just... It's been a lot of bullshit in a really short time, you know?"

Anna shrugs. "In my experience, the vines don't just drop people into lethally-hazardous places," she says. "However they actually work, I mean."

Spiral peers at Sieger. "I'm not entirely sure why you appeared high up in the air, either," she says, adopting as neutral a tone of voice as she can. She gives an odd cat-shrug. "Just another weird thing about them, I suppose."

    "That wasn't even the first time!" Sieger points out, in frustration. "That's how I ended up with the first portal or whatever you called it that tossed me out of my home. Except that one wasn't *several kilometers above the ground* in all fairness." He huffs out, and turns to lean his back against the wall.
    "... So where the bloody hell am I, anyway? Land of the mushroom people or something, or whatever those creepy little guys were called?"

Spiral promptly nods. "This place is called the Mushroom Kingdom," she says. "The people here are called 'Toads.' As in 'toadstool' I guess. But there are humans in this world, too, like the ruler of this kingdom, Princess Peach."

Anna nods. "Dunno why you got dropped the way you did," she says. "What kind of world did you come from, by the way?"

    "... So it's a kingdom inhabited by weird mushroom people and some humans here and there," mutters SIeger, sounding all the more disbelieving by the second, pinching at the bridge of his nose. Anna's question prompts a sharp "Huh?" from him, though, and his hand falls away. "... How am I supposed to describe it? I'd say 'normal' but 'normal' could mean anything to you lot. I lived in a planet called Earth, in a city called Berlin, where humans are the only intelligent lifeform and there's no space travel and no known magic or whatever."

Anna nods. "So, basically the same as mine," she says, "except the world is slowly catching up with the fact that people get magical abilities," she says. She continues down the hall she was going through, and gestures for Sieger to follow.

"Worlds called 'Earth' tend to be pretty similar," says Spiral, who now seems to be more-or-less relaxed. "What year was it where you're from?"

    "Ughhhhhh." Sieger's hands both rub at the sides of his head, with the increasing headache that this whole process of coming to terms with his situation seems to be causing.
    "At least this isn't as bad as the super-future space world where being entertained is illegal *I guess*."
    His hands fall away again, upon Spiral's question, staring at the magical critter curiously. "...Two thousand and six."

Anna nods. "Twenty-eighteen in my Earth," she says. She frowns. "... being entertained is illegal? Yeah, that does legitimately sound like complete bullshit to me."

Spiral nods to Sieger. "Anna and I have a sort of ... interest in the worlds of the World Tree," she says. "All of which seem mostly designed for human-sized people, and I can't shapeshift that big, so we're always going together."

    "THat's how that... one girl explained to me anyhow," Sieger notes with a wince. "Apparently she was some kind of singer celebrity freedom fighter. Or... something."
    He stops for a moment, crossing his thick arms together while he looks the girl and her mascot over. "So, what? Humans are the constant?"

Another moment of walking takes them out of the castle; Anna exchanges a cheerful wave with the Toad guards, then makes her way out towards the nearby library. "Yeah, I should hope a place like that has freedom fighters!" She she considers the other question. "I dunno if 'constant' is the right word," she says. "Maybe it starts 'human', and, like ... I've fought some anthropomorphic-talking-animal pirates ..."

Spiral gives Anna a look. "'Fought'?" she says flatly.

"... and there was this one giant lizard person who insisted that magic isn't real," Anna continues, ignoring Spiral, "but I don't know if there were humans in the world she came from." She shrugs. "I guess, like ... human is always the starting point, and it doesn't go too far away from them? Like, even the pirates were human-sized, and interacted with the world in human-like ways. And when there is something as non-human as like Spiral here, there are always also humans, and humans are the ones who interact the most with the World Tree? Maybe?"

Spiral says, "I mean, we aren't exactly experts or anything like that."

    "... SO maybe 'humanoid' then, I guess, maybe?" Sieger suggests with a grunt and a roll of his shoulders.
    He looks increasingly bemused while Anna talks about... her experiences, though, with deliberately slow eyeblinks littered in b etween there.
    "... Well if it makes you feel better," he mutters. "I didn't even realize anything supernatural existed until just before I got sucked out of my world."

Spiral gives another odd cat-shrug. "'Humanoid' is as good a term as anything else," she says, then pauses. "When you come from a universe where there's all kinds of life in all shapes and sizes, and then you find portals opening to a whole multiverse which exclusively appear on this one seemingly-random planet, and most people on the other side of those portals look like the people on that planet ... you start to wonder."

Anna looks curiously at Sieger. "What kind of magic?" she says. "On ... my Earth, it's people awakening with magical abilities, and there's these hidden monsters called Curse Phantoms."

    "... I'd say that that might imply something about fate and free will and all that but htat is much too big of a philosophical headache for me to think about," Sieger mutters over Spiral's words, and rubs his right temple with a couple fingers in that sort of 'headache suppression' sort of way.
    Anna's question... it makes him look sheepish. "Well..." His left hand moves to unbutton the strap that keeps the sleeve of his jacket tightened around his wrist, loosening it enough that he can pull it up to a point of revealing a gunmetal-grey, sleek bracer running along his forearm, with a red gem exposed in the middle.
    "I found this just before I fell through the hole."

Anna stops walking, and she and Spirl both peer at the bracer, and Spiral's eyes flicker with a pearlescent light. "You know," says Spiral, "for some reason, that thing is giving me verrrry similar readings to a Star Gem, which is one of the two ways people in our world can become magical warriors to fight the Curse Phantoms."

Anna brightens. "Oh!" she says. "Are you saying he's a magical boy?"

Spiral, her gaze never wavering from the bracer, facepaws.

    Sieger gives Anna an entirely blank look. Sloooowly his eyes blink once at her. Blink.
    Aaaaand right back to Spiral. "Right, you wanna run that by me one more time?"

Anna blinks, as if she seems a bit confused by Sieger's confusion.

Spiral sighs. "The male equivalent of a magical girl," says Spiral weakly. "Anna has been training to become a magical warrior, and if I know her half as well as I think I do, her 'armor' is going to involve a frilly dress."

    "...That sounds like... a term out of some saturday morning cartoon or something," points out Sieger, sounding just a little put off. He lets go of the sleeve and crosses his arms indignantly with that, too.
    "... I have an armor, I guess," he admits then. "It's... what stopped me from turning into a red splat when I hit the ground. It disappeared right after though."

"It is!" Anna says cheerfully, and Spiral groans. "Sorry, sorry!" Anna looks embarrassed. "Just thought there was a sort of resemblance to the way stuff works where we're from."

Spiral sighs. "Can we get back to returning the book already?"

"Right! Sorry," says Anna, and resumes the walk to the library.

    Sieger remains standing still for a couple seconds once Anna has already started moving again, looking after her during that until he sets to walking behind her again.
    "I don't really know how this thing works," he confesses. "I got shoved out of my world literally right after I got it. And it didn't... you know. Come with an instruction manual. ANd if it's specific to my world then... whoever could teach me got left behind too."

Spiral nods. "Can't really help you there," she says. "Things that specific tend to be specific to your world. And if you can't get back to your world ..."

"Yeah," says Anna. "Not much else there is to do about that."

They enter the library. The Toad librarian waves cheerfully to Anna. "Hi, Miss Freeman!" she says. "Find what you needed in there?"

Anna is instantly smiling. "Yep!" she says, depositing the copy of "On The Medical Applications of Transformation Magic" into the return slot.

"Arright, cool!" says the librarian. "Lemme know if you ever need anything else!"

    "Yeah that's... a problem, I don't... know how to get back," Sieger mutters, his tone of voice much more somber with that. "I need to get back. Not just... because of that. I made a promise to some people. I can't... leave them."
    He shakes his head to try to shake that off just before the two of them slip through into the library. His green gaze wanders from side to side, from down to up, to take in the royal library, eyes widened.
    "So... Of all places for me to land, I ended up in the housing of the local royalty?"

Spiral nods. "That's certainly understandable," she says. "But it sounds like your world is a Bud, which means it's next to impossible to get in or out under normal circumstances." She pauses. "The good news is, time flows at a different rate inside and outside of the individual worlds, and Buds tend to be consistently the slowest."

Anna nods, starting to head back out of the library. "Five'll get you ten it'll be only a few days after you leave at the most, when you do get back."

    Sieger stops again. Atsuko might have implied the same thing the two of them are saying, but it was never outright said to him.
    That he isn't able to go back home.
    And so, in the hallway, Anna will probably notice pretty quick that there isn't a sound of footsteps following her anymore. ANd when she looks back, she'll see the leather-clad boy there, slumped back against a wall, staring at the floor.

Anna turns around instantly, realizing that she and Spiral didn't really say the right thing, and she hurries over to put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "Hey," she says softly. "Hey, it'll be all right, okay? It's rare, but it happens. I hear about it all the time. It'll just probably be a while."

    Sieger's own hand sweeps up, to lightly slap ANna's away from his shoulder. "Not helping," he grunts-- though there's not much strength behind that complaint when he says it. He very much remains slumped there against the wall, too, and evne starts sliding downwards, to the floor. "There were... people I was supposed to protect, back home. Because the place where we lived, it was... it wasn't safe. But there was no other choice for us. I was going to make sure those people wouldn't hurt my friends anymore and--"
    "Now I can't."

Anna stares at him, and exchanges a couple of nervous glances with Spiral. It's clear that neither of them knows what to say in this kind of situation.

"I'm sorry," she says softly after a moment.

    "I don't need you to be sorry," Sieger mutters, just before his butt lands onto the floor, and he just sort of... drapes against the wall, limply. "... I need to get back. I need to..."

The librarian leans over the front desk, frowning over at Sieger with concern.

Anna heads over to her. "Hey, could you watch out for him?" she says softly. "I ... dunno what to do here, he just found out that his world's a Bud."

"Oooh, all right!" says the librarian. "I'll keep watch over 'im for ya until he leaves!"

    "I know what you can do," Sieger's voice rumbles a moment after, and when she turns, it's just in time to see him pushing himself up again, with just by maneuvering his legs alone.
    "HElp me to another portal. So I can... keep going. Keep looking."

Spiral and Anna exchange a look, then both of them nod. "Vines are easy to find in Blossoms like this," says Spiral. "Just ... be careful with them."

Anna nods. "And you might want to keep your Palad-- uh, your armor on, just in case." She turns back towards the front entrance. "I'll show you where most of 'em tend to open up here."

    "If I have any hope of getting back then I have to try," Sieger declares, just as he rubs the back of his knuckles against the corner of his eye. "... Unless I decide to go back to... that world. ANd help that girl instead. I don't know yet. I have to... I have to think. It would be best if I could at least pretend to have a lead to either direction though."

Anna nods. "Okay," she says softly. "Let's go, then!" She starts leading Sieger out of the library again; the librarian just looks relieved.