World Tree MUSH

    The Napa Valley catches the winds out of the San Francisco Bay and turns them into breezes by way of the rolling hills. The region is verdant with grapevines, roads and low shrubs forming the borders of the vineyards. At night under the moon, the wind creates a susurrus and the shadows of the vines move about like ghosts. 
    The vineyard targeted by the Beacon Society is between owners; it seems nobody holds onto the place for long before selling it. The name of the place seems ominous enough; Fairy Circle Vineyard. The "For Sale" sign swings in the breeze along with the relator's sign. The driveway/parking lot is abandoned as well, except for the innocuous pest control van that the Beacon Society has sent along as transport for its investigators.
    Aurelia glances out at the hills the vineyard occupies from the open panel door on the side. "I've never been to Napa before. This is kind of spooky even if we weren't here to investigate supernatural stuff."

     Investigating spooky supernatural stuff is right up Damian's alley! Ghosts, poltergeists, specters, a haunted vineyard with a mysterious past and strange happenings, warping time and space with their very presence! It can only be described as prime Halloween material, and while it isn't October yet, all the stores are already putting out spooky decorations and candy and stuff, so... why not?

In any case, even though he isn't officially affiliated with Beacon in any way, the demon jackal princeling does his usual thing and just /shows up/ with no prior warning, a bag of popcorn in hand. Crunch, munch, crunch. "So why's it called Napa Valley anyway? Isn't that a kind of cabbage?" he asks, tail swishing behind him as he floats idly behind Aurelia.

    There's a cyberpunk magical girl covered in iconography of the number 17 and a familiar high-tech Lightshard sword sitting in the van and looking thoughtful. Lex transformed after she got into the van, and told Jun and Aurelia that Shinewander Sky was supposedly "Lightshard 17" (which was wielded by Vanguard of the Dawnfall the last time Aurelia and Jun would have seen it), but since Damian abruptly showed up, she has basically clammed up about that aspect, and now makes a show of stealing glances at the two of them.

    She looks over at Damian when he asks that question. "Well, let's see ..." She pauses. "Oh right. No wifi signal out here."

'Pest control'. Ominous, isn't it? Jun peeks out as well, trying to make certain that there's nothing immediately dangerous out there. Yeah, the supernatural set is still something scary to Jun, even with his abilities. But he comes from normal human stock that didn't grow up knowing that all this existed. So he's a bit wary. Aurelia's words get a nod. "Well, I mean. All those vines moving around, looks like a field of snakes from here. Or something ith shadowy tentacles, one of the two..."

He's just started to step out when Damian freaking APPEARS out of nowhere! He gives a high-pitched squeak that wouldn't sound out of place for his life before his uh. 'Circumstances' changed. It takes him a second to process. "Oh. H-hi," he offers, sheepishly.

Not to worry, Lex. Jun's not going to spill no beans. The lid on that pot stays firmly shut! He does, however, blink a little at Lex's assessment. "Wow. I didn't think places without wifi existed anymore."

    There's something about the place that just feels off somehow. That sense of deja vu in particular...
    Aurelia uhs and blinks at Damian's sudden appearance. "It's a Native American name, not Japanese." She finally states.
    There's movement that doesn't match the movement of the wind, just behind the rock-and-wood main winery building. Four out of place shadows.

     Damian snickers at the wifi remarks. "You guys would be totally lost if you went to some medieval world I bet." he teases them, before shrugging at Aurelia as he pops another handful of popcorn into his maw. "Mreh, like /I/ know the difference. I slept through Babylonian class, you think I'm gonna try to learn Navajo or whatever? Nah."

He does catch sight of the shadows though, and for a moment considers just leaving them be until he realizes there are four of them. "Hey, that's not my fanclub..." he thinks aloud, floating towards them for a closer look as he summons a flashlight into his free hand with a snap of his fingers.

    Shinewander Sky glances back between Jun and Damian and smiles faintly as she disembarks. "It's just that we're is out of range, and this place is nominally shut down," she says, placing her sword on her back. She sounds ... a bit more like Shard than Lex at the moment, though her electronically-distorted voice sounds distinctly different from Shard. (Quite like Lightshard 17, in fact.)

    She frowns at the sight of the moving shadows. "Uh ...?" As Damian just heads towards them, Sky does a ten-foot vertical leap, trying to get a better look with the tactical readout in her mask. She descends with unnatural slowness.

IT might not take Jun long to see the unusual movement -- he's on high alert, after all. And he'll duck behind Aurelia (which might or might not be funny, depending on if he's taller than she is or not). But she's leading this expedition, right? So she's the one that he's going to hide behind!

Jun isn't moving forward with Damian just yet... and unlike Shinewander, he has no way to 'scan' what's going on down there. So he sticks with Aurelia for now. But he does note to Damian, quietly, "Be careful, we don't know what's going on down there yet."

    Aurelia is not a tall person, so the taller Jun hiding behind her does look awkward. She glances back at Jun, slightly confused. Then she transforms into her armor in an instant, the warm tones of the armor taking on purple hues in the nighttime. She stalks towards where Damian and Lex are headed.
    As people approach where the shadows were, they sense something slightly wrong. They could glance back and see themselves reacting to the shadows they saw, which would be where they're standing at this time.

     Damian is not exactly the most cautious person around. Still approaching the shadows, he shines his flashlight at them and... they're not there anymore? "Huh, weird." he says with a shrug, turning around to head back and oh it's one of these kind of situations. He frowns and remarks, "Ooooh, like in the ghost stories. Gotcha."

    Shinewander Sky lands from her glide. "... Temporal anomaly detected," she says. "Those four shadows we saw ... are us, displaced in time." She turns around. "... Oh well then." She pauses. "I'm effectively only a month and a half old, but I think I can chalk this down as 'the weirdest day of my life.'"

Jun's already in his 'maho' form -- he's almost never not, since there's really no point not to be. It's his stronger form, and he never knows when he's going to encounter danger. And it's not as though he has any reason to protect his identity now.

But yes, he does accompany Aurelia. And the revelation that there are 'past' versions of themselves earns a blink. "The future and the past seem to be sort of... mixing together somehow," he remarks. Looking to Aurelia, Jun asks, "Is this one of those things like that movie? Where we shouldn't touch the past or future versions of ourselves?"

    Aurelia squints back at the van where the four past versions are. "One of those days I guess. Uh, I'm not a time mage, I don't know?" She shrugs to Jun.
    There might be a reason that this place has changed hands so many times over the years. It's not even a blink of the eye before the chrono-phantoms of our four protagonists wink out. And in a moment the grapevines have gone from being harvested to growing to fully ripe to falling off. Patches of them reverse the process. It's a bit surreal.

     Damian sighs in relief. "Oh, so they're not bodysnatchers? That's good. Didn't wanna explain to daddy how /that/ happened." He shines his flashlight toward the vines then, watching the process as it plays out. "Definitely some weird time stuff going on here. Nnnnnnot an expert on time stuff. Was really hoping we'd find some ghosts..." he grumbles.

    "Movie?" says Shinewander Sky, glancing between Aurelia and Jun. She taps her chin thoughtfully. "I expect that it'll be weird, but we probably don't need to worry about 'changing' anything, because of Sinyamahtar's Self-Consistency Principle -- it's physically impossible to change the past because it's already happened." (This principle probably has a different name in world that don't have elves.) She hesitates. "Or maybe it works differently in this Blossom, so, uh, never mind."

    She watches the vines change in the light of Damian's flashlight. "... I feel as though I ought to wonder why the time-manipulation isn't affecting the light," she says. "Maybe it's because the temporal effects cancel each other out, due to the fact that light has the same velocity in all intertial frames of reference." She shrugs. "Or maybe the magic 'just works.'" Her tone of voice suggests that she thinks the latter possibility is more likely.

'A bit surreal' would be putting in mildly. This is full-on some 'Alice In Wonderland' nonsense. "...Right, where's the White Queen?" Jun mutters. That was the part of the second book where time went all screwy, right?

Either way, Jun figures that since Shinewander can detect these thing, that she'd be their best bet for figuring out where the source of it is. "Hey, Shinewander? Do you think you'd be able to narrow down where the source of this is?"

    An ear-splitting scream pierces the night, followed shortly by the barking of dogs and shadowy things moving through the vineyard, towards the back edge of the property.
    Aurelia's already started towards the source of the scream.

     Damian's ears twitch toward the scream, and his flashlight and eyes soon follow. Flying high into the air to get a better view, he waves the light toward the sound of barking and rustling vines, trying to see what's going on. "Finally, some excitement! Doesn't sound like ghosts though, just burglars... so I guess this makes me Scooby Doo, haha!" Following after Aurelia, still a few dozen feet in the air, he calls out, "Ruh roh, Raggy! Rooks rike re got trouble~"

    "'Shinewander' is what type of hero I am," Shinewander Sky answers Jun. "You can just call me 'Sky'. But ... let's see ... I'm going to have to take readings from multiple places in order to --"

    She pauses at the sound of that scream. Without hesitation, she does another ten-foot vertical leap, gliding through the air after Aurelia.

Jun jumps at the sound of the scream, but he's also not far behind Aurelia and heading for the source of it. Some of their shadowy company might be themselves from different points in time, so he's not going to bother too much with them for now.

    The shadows seem to be people searching the vineyard, calling out a girl's name. The farmhands and dogs they're leading seem to be illuminated as though it were daylight when they are. But eventually...
    The quartet find a large shaggy beast with silver fur, what Aurelia will call a grendel, trying to get into a utility shed. A young girl's screams come from within the shed, though the snarls of the beast are nearly as loud.

     Damian had a thought about the shadows being like the last set too, but that doesn't seem to be the case here as he gets a good look at the group. More importantly, there's one of those creatures from back in the sewers trying to break into a shed where he can hear a girl screaming. Hmm... "Hey, buddy! You look a little hungry, how about a snack?" he calls down to the grendel, magically swapping the popcorn in his hand with a popcorn-shaped lump of iron that he just... drops toward its head unceremoniously.

    Shinewander Sky regards the monster, and immediately comes to the opposite conclusion that the Grendel is trying to help!

    And then she stops as she sees what Damian is doing. "Oh, huh." She draws her sword from her back, and gives a single swing, firing out a mint-green sliver of light, aimed to hit the wall next to the grendel. It's more of a warning shot, really.

A grendel? That's definitely bad. Upon seeing the creature, Jun pulls the sword hilt from where it hangs at his side, and concentrates his energy into it. In response, a blade of light springs from the hilt. The blade is 'holy', and its existence may get the creature's attention if it can sense 'holy'. He isn't moving to attack yet either, though that's mainly because he doesn't want to be 'tank' if it comes down to a battle.

    A lone grendel, especially one that was not magically engineered by a mad mage, is not really a match for supernaturally empowered heroes. It dives after being hit by the iron popcorn kernel, right into Shinewander's beam. It collapses pretty readily, greviously wounded.
    Aurelia looks at the grendel's eyes for signs of humanity as the shaggy thing takes labored breaths. There's a nod from the young woman and she swiftly beheads the creature with her blade to end it.

     Damian re-summons his original bag of popcorn, dropping down to just above ground level (don't wanna get dirt all in his fur, y'know) as he munches on the snack, eyeing the headless grendel and then the shack. "So uh... It's safe now! We killed the thing. You can come out, we aren't going to hurt you." He also glances toward the last place he heard the shouting and barking from, and ponders aloud, "Gotta wonder what their deal was too. Why's there just one of these things here; don't they hunt in packs or something?"

    Shinewander Sky winces at Aurelia's beheading, but doesn't comment. She sighs softly, and lets Damian handle the door-opening, putting her sword away and hanging back.

    She considers Damian's speculation. "One possible explanation that the sounds were 'temporally displaced'. We could accidentally wander into last week depending on how hard we chased it down." She pauses. "Or next week, for that matter."

Jun breathes a sigh of relief as the grendel's threat is ended. "That one wasn't... a person, I guess," he reasons. He nods as Damian comments about the lone grendel. "The time screwery might have separated it from the rest of its pack," he suggests. "Though I guess that means there might be more prowling around, so we should probably be careful."

But, that said, he approaches the shed. He hasn't put his sword away, but it's down, where it isn't going to be a danger to anyone. He'll try to peek into the shed. "Hello?" he offers quietly. "I think it's safe, more or less..."

    "It was kinder to kill it quickly, whether it was a person or not. The pack hunting's kind of recent." Aurelia says quietly.
    The young girl looks like she's 11, and dressed in what was all the rage in 1954. She takes a long puzzled look at the people assembled and the dead grendel. "... Is this a movie?" In the light of the flashlight, the girl looks to be of Italian extraction, with dark hair.

    Shinewander Sky smiles faintly. "No, we're from other worlds --" She stops, frowning as she regards the girl's manner of dress. Worry starts to cross her features as she begins to realize the full implications of the situation, and she looks over to Aurelia with a 'what do we do?' sort of look.

    ... Yeah, Lex kind of has a problem with wearing her heart on her sleeve.

     "Yeeeaaah, better to not go digging into the morality of killing these things." Damian says as he finishes off his popcorn and banishes it with another snap of his fingers. When the little girl appears, he blinks a couple times and adds, "Alright, more time stuff, definitely out of my element here."

Jun shakes his head at the girl's question. "No, I'm afraid not," he replies. "Do you happen to have any idea what's going on?" Because no, he doesn't know either. "What happened before that thing came after you?" And here he lets the sword blade disappear, putting the hilt back where it was. Now he doesn't look scary.

    The girl looks at Jun, still wearing a confused look on her face. The other worlds thing seems to pass right over her head though. "I was getting some water and the white-haired woman in the kitchen said I had to run and hide in the shed. Then the silver wolfman chased me and I ended up in the shed."

    Shinewander Sky gives Damian kind of a dirty look at his blase attitude about killing, but doesn't comment. Then she pauses. "... Hey, the time distortions are gone, and stuff." She looks down at the dead grendel. "... welp! Guess we know what was causing that. Even if we don't know why," she adds under her breath.

     Damian just shrugs at Sky in response to her dirty look. "What? Literally the son of Satan here. I've seen lots of dead people, and most of them /become/ monsters when they end up in Hell. And boy let me tell you, some of the stuff that goes on down there..." he trails off, glancing back at the strange girl from the shed again. "Yeah okay maybe I should just stop talking.

Jun nods to the girl. "I think it's safe now," he replies. "Do you know who the white-haired woman was?" He'd noticed the phrasing -- she spoke as though she didn't know the woman. He's partially talking to get some information, and partly because he wants to cover up part of that conversation back there. It's not really stuff a young kid needs to hear...

    The little girl gives Damian and Shinewander a squint, nearly a glare. "Are you sure all of you aren't actors?" She shakes her head. "No, she didn't look like Nona Gianna or any of her friends." She steps out, towards Jun. "Did they put you in a camp?" She might be referring to the fact that Jun looks Japanese.
    Meanwhile, Aurelia is pulling the grendel's corpse behind the utility shed.

    Shinewander Sky peers at Damian for a moment.

    ('Let me take over for a minute,' says Shard in Lex's ear, audible only to her. 'I've got an idea.')

    And then she shrugs, and folds her hands behind her head. "I suppose I can't argue with your experiences," she says. "I'm a sword, after all -- you're talking to a projection made of magic wearing a jewel coat." She tugs at her costume. "I wasn't exactly constructed to poke people's noses --"

    She realizes that the girl is looking at her. "No, but we are absolutely a bunch of characters," she quips. And then her expression sours. "Uh ... I hate to be the one to tell you this, but ... you've fallen through time. The year is currently 2020."

     Damian shrugs and summons his banjo, strumming a little tune on it as everyone chats. "A 'camp', wow. Guess we've confirmed what time period she's from. Let's just hope she doesn't start pulling out the slurs next." he says, then chuckles and nods at Sky's comments. "Oh yeah, definitely a bunch of characters. I mean, to be fair, I'm part of my school's drama club, so I /am/ in theater..."

A moment later, he asks, "Who's Nona Gianna?"

Jun looks a little surprised at the question, and regards the girl with a confused blink. "Wha? No, no one put me in any camp..." He's probably forgotten that she seems displaced. Or they do, one of the two. It's hard to tell. "We all came here because there was strange stuff going on, and then we found the... wolfman trying to get you," he tries to explain. He's hoping to keep things light on details.

Damian's got the question Jun was going to ask, asked, and Shinewander's explained a bit. So he offers, "Yeah... that's what I meant about 'strange stuff going on'. Things were going all weird with time and everything. The wolfman might have had something to do with it, since I think all the strange time stuff has gone away."

    The little girl frowns, thinking. "So my nona, papa, and mama are... gone?" Now she looks like she's about to cry, so she hugs Jun tight suddenly, and starts crying.

     Damian stops playing his banjo and gives the girl an awkward look. "Yeesh, I've never been good at this kind of thing. You got this, right uh... phoenix guy?" He's just now realizing he doesn't know the guy's name, or at least forgot it. They were kind of fighting off an army of grendels last time they met, to be fair. "I mean, I could sing a song or something..."

And that is exactly what he does, plucking out a somber tune to suit the mood.

    Shinewander Sky looks helplessly at Aurelia. She ... really doesn't know how to handle this. Which is just as well, because it's in-character for Lightshard 17 not to know this, either. "... What's your name?" she asks the girl uncertainly.

Jun winces a bit when the girl points out that, well... she's separated from her whole world. When he's hugged, he moves to hug her back. "It's okay, really," he tries to soothe. "They're not gone. They're right where you left them. You just sort of... went somewhere far away. Or, well... some when far away."

The girl's name is also something that he'll need to know, yes -- after all, he's not going to just abandon the girl, and he's not sure either of the magical organizations will actually see to her. And since her name is being asked for, he offers his. "My name's Jun." Just a first name for now.

    The girl says her name is Julia Gallo. Which draws a weird look from Aurelia since that's the name of a fairly famous winery in California.