World Tree MUSH

    The school had become abandoned because of asbestos concerns, with the city council deciding it would be more politically expedient to build a brand new school with more modern facilities on a larger campus. It was rather cramped campus, with three stories and the sort of architectural style that was popular in the post war period. There were long lines of glass windows with panels of warm colored river rock decorative strips. Ram-rod straight concrete buttresses mark the major divisions of the building, painted a sort of sandy brown to compliment the orange and red river rocks. The campus is ringed with trees, partially obscuring the place from the street, the afternoon sun falling in dappled patterns on the lawn. If th building seems strangely maintained, it may be because the Marin county locals would abhor a shabby run-down school driving their property values down.

    Lex looks around. Once again, she's found herself joining with Aurelia for this adventure; she feels slightly odd about once again being the only person in this group who's an outsider from this world, but she finds an easier time trusting Benedicta than she trusted Damian.

    "Hmm ... well, uh ... hm." She holds out her robotic left arm, and in a swirl of mint-green pixels and Elvish computer code, Lightshard 18 materializes in her hand. It looks odd, a six-foot-tall woman holding a five-foot sword in one hand. "Whaddaya got, Shard? Anything interesting, and stuff?"

    "Let's have a look-see," says her sword. "Scanning the area now. You might want to get ... changed, depending on what I find." A slight pause. "Aha, I can already detect time-magic here. Shall Lex and I take a look around and try to map it, everyone?"

Now that Benedicta's not busy she's been sent to investigate this as well. She's kind of surprised that someone hasn't taken a wrecking ball to the old school after all it's just taking up space. Her horn is already glowing yellow as they get closer to the school, "I hope the Cabal hasn't decided to crash here after we raid their last party." She heard about a white-haired woman here but it sounds like someone who looked older so that ruled out Shield-Maiden and she figured Baroness Spider would stand out too much.

 "Sure, but don't get sucked into a black hole or anything...we don't know what we're up against here."

    Stepping out of the van (transformed mode of course), Jun surveys the area suspiciously. "Ah... hm... Well, at least it still looks nice," he points out. "Less chance of the whole thing coming down on us?" He hopes, anyway.

    He nods, though, when Lex mentions the time magic. "I thought so. There had to be a reason for what happened to Julia, and I had a feeling it wasn't done being a nuisance," he agrees.

    He winces a bit as Benedicta mentions the Cabal being here. "I hope not," he replies. "Hopefully they think they're too good for an abandoned school." He can hope anyway. As for black holes? "Yikes, I hope not for that too!"

    Aurelia steps out of the van. She's not transformed, since her armor is extremely flashy and it's still daytime. She pulls a maglight from her pocket, though this is just her making use of the hammerspace-like effect she has at her disposal. It's bound to be dark inside, right? "Yeah, mapping it out sounds like a good idea. Don't need to step into the past, right?" Aurelia squints as she concentrates on the lock on the front doors, working on getting the thing picked with her magic. After a few minutes, the lock clicks and Aurelia opens the door.
    Although the exterior has been meticulously maintained, the interior is lined with a carpet of dust. The main hall is lined with lockers and goes straight back to a courtyard type area. "Okay guys, I guess we should let Lex figure out where the time holes are first?"

    "Shrug," Shard answers Benedicta. "We might not know precisely what's here, but I think we can safely say that we have a reasonable idea, after our previous adventure. But I'm not detecting anything any black holes, no."

    Lex nods to Jun. "How is Julia, by the way?" she asks. "Settling in all right?"

    She looks over at Aurelia, and nods. "Couldn't've put it better myself," she says. "... Uh, Shard, can we do it while you're inside my arm?"

    "Not really," answers Shard. "That would be too easy."

    Lex grimaces, and puts her sword onto her back, where it stays in place without any apparent means of support. "Worth a shot, I guess." She starts walking, making a slow circuit around the school while Shard scans it.

"Well, hopefully they learned their lesson after last time." Benedicta says to Jun before attention turns towards Lex, "I read the report, but I still find it kind of hard to believe that someone ended up over 60 years in the future. Hopefully, it's not one of those one way kind of deals and she can go back to the past." She frowns a bit at that. "Maybe we can track down someone who was alive back then who knows what happened..." Someone still had to be around from them right?

    Jun follows, leaving the lock to Aurelia -- he has nothing to help. And when she suggests letting Lex figure out where they shouldn't step, he nods. "Yeah, that sounds like a good idea," he agrees.

    As for the mention of Julia? Jun nods to Lex's question. "She seems to be," he confirms. "I brought her some candy, but I had to look for some that was more familiar to her. I didn't want to just load her up with sugar, you know?"

    And he nods to Benedicta. "We can hope." There's a lot they still don't know about what's going on -- at least, a lot HE doesn't know about what's going on, anyway! "Maybe once we find out what's behind the time screwery, we can send her back home." Optimistic, maybe, but he's still enough in the dark as to what's actually going on that he can justify optimism here.

    The fields of time magic are shifting things. Whenever they get too near (or somebody near them), the sounds of things being torn down and hammered into place can be heard. The weirdness continues as each of the people who came to investigate disappear from each other, whisked away to some other time and place for now.

Benedicta finds herself standing on the roof of a tall skyscraper all of a sudden with the sky pouring down rain. Sybil is knelt down next to her crying, "I can't believe that she's gone...rabbit, I mean Benedicta...it's not worth fighting anymore..."

 The al'miraj girl can't believe what's going on here and completely puzzled, it seems like she's replaced her future self somehow but she has no context to what's going on but find herself speaking anyway, "Sybil, I'm sorry..." She finds herself placing a fur covered hand on her rival's shoulder but she backs away from her.

 "I don't want your pity! Just leave already!"

    Jun had been trying to stay with the group... but staying away from shifting time shenanigans is hard, particularly the 'shifting' part. They're changing shape and location, these time field-things, and it's hard to dodge a moving target. So between that and the fact that Jun is convinced that some deity either really hates him or just wants to play tricks on him, he does find himself isolated.

    "...Well, shit," he mutters. "Hopefully I'm not completely lost..." Not that he really has much to go back to, does he? But it'd suck to leave Julia all by herself. Though it wouldn't be hard for someone to tell her what happened. She'd probably understand, given... well, it happened to her.

    And because Jun's thoughts are wandering, he doesn't notice for a moment that things hae utterly changed around him. He's underwater. Or at least, that's what it looks like. It's... a palace? That's what it looks like -- a palace made out of pearl and corals and other stuff that came from the sea. Most of it is green, but there's just enough blue, red, teal, and yellow to set off the architecture in a beautiful way. The place may be huge... but the creatures before him are utterly tiny.

    A gathering of people stand before him, the fact that they're underwater not seeming to bother them one whit. They're standing on the bottom too, neither the pressure nor the water seeming to bother them. They're dressed in flowing clothes of blue and green, clothes that look like traditional Japanese clothing. It's not from any one era, though, looking to be a combination of many.

    And each one of them bears fins on the sides of their head instead of ears. A few even have them pierced, like humans do with their ears. Their skin looks mostly 'human normal' for Japanese people, but they all have scales of various shades of blue and green where their skin shows -- mostly just on their faces and necks.

    There are lines of retainers and guards on either side of a central path to where Jun is, retainers dressed similarly to the people before him, guards wearing armor that looks both like it's made of metal but also formed of living coral. It's a throne room, Jun realizes...

    ...And he's in the throne.

    But not just that. A quick glance down and Jun realizes that he is not in his transformed mode anymore. Nor is he in his mundane form. His form is somehow that of a massive serpentine dragon with emerald green scales, golden horns like antlers made of metallic gold coral, and a long blue mane.

    ('...What?!')

    Lex nods to Jun. "Probably wise on the candy front, yeah."

    She and Shard consider Benedicta's positivity. "The awesomest-case scenario," says Shard in a dry-clinical-robot tone of voice, "is that we shall repeatedly meet a mysterious woman of about seventy or eighty who gives us cryptic hints which will point us towards resolving the matter ..."

    Lex giggles. "Oh jeez."

    "... and then when all is said and done, and Jun's young charge is returned to her home time," Shard continues, "our mysterious benefactor will finally introduce herself as JulWATCH OUT THERE'S A TEM--"

    Suddenly, Lex finds herself in the throes of the curse which binds her to Shard, in the midst of the overwhelming despair which seems to be caused by the curse. She is hovering above a barren wasteland in her Shinewander Sky form; it feels like her hands are held out to the sides with her sword in hand. She's surrounded by an orange fiery glow with mint-green cracks and holes, as if the curse had been severely damaged; some of the holes are shaped like those three triangles which form part of the emblem of Hyrule. There's a pure white light emanating from directly behind her, or possibly just really bright green and orange; wings, perhaps?

    It appears as though whatever is happening to her has interrupted a battle between masked Dawnfall agents in black with orange trim, and various defenders from the World Tree, all of whom are now staring at Lex with various expressions of shock and worry. The Dawnfall warrior called Vanguard is directly in front of Lex's field of vision, looking injured and holding a newer design of a Lightshard sword. "-- of this world and every other!" she's in the middle of saying.

    Off to one side is Lex's boss, an olive-skinned elf named Ezella Hawthorne, who was already facepalming at what Vanguard was saying, but at that last bit, she adds her other hand to the facepalm. However, she's startled by a rumbling off in the distance. Lex can't see what it is; it's getting harder and harder to see through the glow which surrounds her -- the green light seems to be winning -- and in any event her field of vision is tilted too far down to see the cause.

    Aurelia stands on the orichalcum of the Sunset Road, at the very top of it. The dwellings that encrusted it have fallen away into the waters of the straights below. In front of her is a dark-haired woman covered in oily black metal armor, coughing up heart's blood. Aurelia's shocked gaze moves down to see her sword, somehow the head of a spear, embedded through the woman's torso. Clearly this was Noctis, but how could Aurelia kill somebody who is already dead?
    In each of the time visions, a woman with white hair, olive skin, and clothes that seem to be one thing then another every time one blinks... gently puts a hand on a shoulder and says quietly. "I'm sorry you saw this, I didn't mean to break things as badly as I have. Take my hand and we'll get back to where you need to be."

Benedicta takes the offered hand, she doesn't want to be stuck in this future. "So how did all this happen to begin with?" She can't help but to wonder what caused them to be hurled into the future, "Not to mention who exactly are you, anyway?"

    "What's going on?" That is, of course, the first thing out of Jun's mouth. But of course he takes hold of the offered hand, because he wants to get out of here!

    Of course it does occur to him to ask, "...Wait, Julia. If you can get me back, can't you get her back where she belongs too...?" He expects not... because if she COULD, she probably already would have...

    Lex jerks her head upward towards the woman. She tries to speak, but nothing comes out; it almost feels like she's being consumed by the green part of the light. Her free hand twitches forward, then falls into the woman's hand.

    Her future-self also seemingly tries to make the same motion, but immediately goes limp as the green light expands around her, and columns of green and orange flame erupt from the ground. The last thing Lex hears is Vanguard's voice. "The nascence of a divine life form," says the Dawnfall warrior. "And form taken by the throes of its apotheosis ... is the annihilation of all --"

    Lex glances back over her shoulder, startled. She opens and closes her mouth a few times, but as the future fades away, the words won't come.

    The four of them are standing outside the school, the sky darkened by twilight. How long had it really been? Had time actually passed personally for them? There's a letter in Jun's hand.
    Aurelia has an extemely confused look on her face. She looks at Jun, Benedicta, and Lex in turn. "Did... you guys see something weird too?"

"Yeah, Sybil crying. I didn't know that was humanily possible." Benedicta's just as surprised as the rest of you are. She looks around for the woman but she's nowhere to be seen. "Hey, where did our guide go? She didn't answer my questions."

    With a gasp, Lex sinks to her knees. She makes incoherent and not-particularly-feminine noises for a moment, before she finally manages to get out, "W-what the ... jeezum ... heck ..."

    A couple of Lightshard 18's running lights briefly flicker orange. "Warning!" she says. "The curse is trying to take hold! ... I don't know why I said 'warning' like that! Shouldn't Sheik have ... Did the curse try to influence us through time? Wait, no, that doesn't make sense ..."

    Jun is just... kind of stunned for the moment. Stunned and confused. And it takes him a while to register what's going on, where they are -- and more importantly where he ISN'T.

    The letter registers, and he clutches it before realizing what it is. But Aurelia's words draw his attention up, and he nods. "Y-yeah. I'm... not sure what it was. I don't think I wanna know, actually." And then a look around. He's a bit shaky. "...Is everybody okay?"

Benedicta is suddenly reminded by Lex's comment, "Speaking of which, I was still in Al'miraj form in the future...does that mean I'm never able to remove the seal?" She looks at the Cabal mark on her right arm a bit disappointed at that. "Or my future self is now in the present?" She doesn't hope she just stumbled into some kind of time paradox.