Dark Dimension: Homecoming: The Weird Tear

[xp_clea]

Clea and Topaz find themselves in the same city Clea has been dreaming about. They meet someone unexpected.



Topaz had thrown the blanket over her shoulder as they walked. Maybe it would do them some good later, who knew. At the moment she was resisting the urge to grab Clea's hand and keep her close. She didn't think the girl would wander away. That would just be stupid.

"How're you doing?" She asked after a moment, looking at Clea.

"I'm feeling a mixture of things at the moment and trying to process them all together." Clea said and peering into each of the mirrors as they walked by. "I have never been this far, even in my dreams."

"Into the unknown, then," Topaz murmured. "That's comforting." As far as people to be stuck in a mysterious dimension with, Topaz probably wasn't the best. Too bad Amanda hadn't volunteered for sleep watch duty.

"Look at this..." Clea moved to the side of the road and towards a half destroyed building before picking up a sign. "A whole different language. Where is everyone?" She was constantly asking herself this question. "Look there is footsteps here."

Where was everyone? That was a good question. Topaz paused, hesitating before dropping her shields - never a good idea in a strange place, but the lack of other living things was worrying. Even more worrying was that she couldn't seem to find anyone nearby. "What?" She said, looking back at Clea.

"I don't know how old they are but proof there are people here." As she was looking at the footprints, the small pebbles nearby started to vibrate and Clea had the feeling like they were not alone anymore. She stood up slowly before turning towards Topaz but it was the weird cloud formation that caught her attention, "Run." She didn't wait to for a response as she took off running in the direction of the castle. If this was a real place, that that thing that was chasing her had to be real.

Topaz felt the vibration and was about to question it when Clea was suddenly running. "What - okay, hang on!" She hurried after her. This was not the time to be getting separated.

She would explain everything when they got to the castle. Clea was the first to reach the courtyard and didn't stop until she hit the door at full force. Pain flared in her arm as she took a step back and started to cast a spell to unlock the door - what she didn't mean was her powers to also to flare up and the doors flung open. For some reason, she felt like they would be safe inside.

"CLEA!" Topaz demanded, trying to slow her down. They couldn't just run in there with no idea what they were getting into. She was nearly tempted to just go into Clea's head and calm her down. Better to ask forgiveness than permission. "Would you slow down for a minute?!"

A new voice echoed from down a side hallway, apparently reacting to the sound of the doors opening. "Yes? Is someone there?" The sound of footsteps heralded the arrival of an older man, balding and with tired eyes. He saw Topaz first, and smiled. "Ah, guests! It has been far too long. Welcome, welcome. My name is Orini."

Clea turned around at the new person before leaning over to Topaz, "He wasn't in my dreams." She whispered.

Topaz eyed the man suspiciously, letting her shields drop for a moment. She didn't sense anything amiss, but in this place, that didn't help. "Sorry to barge in," Topaz said with absolutely no hint that she was actually sorry. "You live here?"

"More or less, more or less," Orini agreed, scampering too and fro as he straightened some of the various decor. "Ah!" he straightened once he was seemingly satisfied, turning towards Topaz and Clea with a clap of his hands. "But of course, is it not only polite to introduce yourselves to your host in kind?" He asked, a smile on his face and a mild rebuke in his tone.

Looking over at Topaz before looking back at the man, "I am Clea. What is this place?"

Topaz looked Orini up and down, jaw clenched, distrust practically radiating off of her. She had a million questions. Where was everyone? Why was he the first person they had seen? Where even were they? What the fuck did more or less mean? Did he leave there or didn't he? She finally settled for, "I'm Topaz. Where the hell are we?"

"Topaz, Topaz, Topaz..." Orini muttered under his breath, placing a hand to his chin and pacing a small path. "Fascinating. Yes, yes, welcome! This is my home, of course. It's full name is--" at which point, Orini let out a ghastly sound, indescribable by all but the most blasphemous of words. "But everyone just calls it Mruuk. Come, come! You must be tired after traveling through the Outside."

"Mruuk? Never heard of it. Where is everyone? Where are we compared to Earth?" Clea listed more questions out. "Why do I dream about this place?"

"Ah, wonderful! Outsiders! Frabjous day! Please, please, come this way." He gestured towards the back of the entry landing, where a large pair of double doors loomed. "We have much to discuss. It is easier if I were to simply show you, as trying to explain it would take far too long. Many things you must see, if you wish to understand."

Clea looked over at Topaz and gave her the look of 'What should we do?'.

Topaz narrowed her eyes at Orini. She couldn't get a bead on him, and she didn't like it. But this place was big, and he was fairly old. They could outrun him if it became necessary. "Alright," she said, taking a step forward and putting herself slightly in front of Clea. A 'stay behind me' gesture to her and a 'stay the hell away from her' gesture to him. "Lead the way, mate."

If Orini noticed Topaz's posturing, he did not let it get to him. "Yes, right this way, then." One of the large doors swung open, seemingly on it's own. "There is much I have to show you," he exclaimed as, not even locking back, he walked through the door and into the hall beyond.

Clea only started to walk forward when Topaz did, "Topaz...I am getting a strange vibe all of a sudden." She whispered.

Orini was babbling as he led them along, and didn't actually seem to be paying much attention to the girls. Topaz frowned at his back, keeping her eyes on him as she leaned in to whisper back, "Trust you're instincts. What kind of vibe?"

"Like before when we were outside. It wasn't there a moment ago, but now...now I feel it." She whispered.

Topaz narrowed her eyes. "Stay close to the door," she murmured as they turned into a room. "And be ready to run."

Orini threw open the heavy wooden door and the group was immediately hit with the smell of old books. "Please, please, come in, come in. Welcome to the library. Now," the older man said, rubbing his hands together and approaching a shelf in the far corner of the room, "Where did I leave that?"

"No, no, no. Wrong, wrong... no, that's wrong too," he said, discarding books to one side or another. "No. No... no, no, no... I told you, we do this my way."

And it was at that moment they realized, Orini wasn't speaking to himself anymore. He turned and slowly straightened, the look in his eyes changing from welcoming to something... darker.

"Well, ladies. Shall we begin?"

Topaz caught the change immediately, shifting to hide Clea a bit more and pressing back against her, trying to push her toward the door. "I'd say begin what, but I don't think I want to know the answer," she said darkly. Sarcasm - the last refuge of the doomed.

Clea tilted her head to the side as the itching feeling of familiarity. She saw his eyes, they sparked something - old. "Topaz...Run." She tugged on the girls sleeves towards the door.

Orini's shadow shifted, suddenly pointing towards Topaz and Clea in spite of the library's light sources. He grinned. "Oh, please do. I love a good challenge."

Topaz did the only thing that made sense in that moment - she threw up a shield, well aware that it would deter.... whatever that was for seconds at best, whirled, and shoved Clea out the door before hurrying after her.

Clea was out the door with the help of Topaz. Once her friend was past the door, Clea turned around and cast a barrier spell on the opening. That should keep him at bay for a couple of seconds. Then she turned and ran before turning down one of the hallways.

Topaz hurried after her, putting up another barrier as they ran, and they tore off down the hall.




Meanwhile, back at the Mansion, Amanda, Megan, Billy, and Stephen enter Clea's room.



Despite the urge to just kick the door in and barge in, Amanda made herself wait for the rest of the magic class - no sense getting herself blown up without back up. Luckily it was only a few minutes before they were all there and without preamble, since her text had stated what needed to be said, Amanda turned the doorhandle and carefully eased the door open.

The cause of the alarms was immediately visible - above Clea's bed was the remains of a portal hanging in the air, a long gash of electric-blue light that crackled and pulsed ominously. The air reeked with dark magic, something ancient and powerful and very much not-from-here. Amanda caught her breath - even the very air was heavy with energy, crowding out sound and light and even the very air. But despite that, Cata was pacing restlessly on the bed, pausing every now and then to caterwaul at the dimensional tear.

There was no sign of Clea or Topaz.

Stephen's eyes were wide open, a strangled cry tearing from his throat as he lunged forward towards the portal. The teenager's hands were outstretched as if he could reach out and grasp the portal, tear it back open. It was easy to see what had happened, where the girls had gone. Yet despite Stephen's best efforts all he could do was feel the energy slipping through his fingers. "I couldn't hold it."

"Neither can I..." Megan's all-black eyes reflected the strange blue light. And like a reflection in a pool, the energy slipped away from her when she tried to grab hold of it. "How will we reach them?"

Billy’s skin crawled under the strange energy. “I don’t like the look of that one bit.” Fighting his instinct to back away, he touched his hand to the door frame and began forming a barrier to contain the dark tendrils of energy that were already beginning to leech past. A faint blue glow, much softer than that coming from the portal, appeared across the threshold, and small arcs of energy sparked between it and portal’s tendrils, causing them to slink back in retreat.

"Portals are basically doors and once they've been opened, you can open them again," Amanda said, perhaps more reassuringly than she felt. She carefully stepped into the room, leaving Billy to continue his barrier and grimacing at the feel of the magic. "You lot stay back for now - we don't know what'll drop out of this thing without warning." It was easier to deal with this dispassionately, dropping into work mode. "I have a feeling this is tied up with Clea's nightmares - the memory Jean showed me has the same sort of feel. So my guess is she was being contacted by someone. Or someTHING."

Cata looked at Amanda as she approached the bed and gave an interrogatory half-growl. Obviously she wanted to know what was going on as well.

Stephen span around to stare at his mentor, the panic is his eyes abating slightly at her words, taking one step forward despite himself. "We can really open it go after them?" He bit his lip and nodded, "It doesn't matter, so someone, if something is picking on her, snatched them away, we have to go and get them back."

"We can and we will," Megan said, briefly touching Stephen reassuringly on the shoulder. "Dreams are powerful," she said, thinking of how often dreams led to otherworldly encounters in Welsh mythology. "Do we know of anyone with the ability to use them like this? We will find them. We will find the girls, and we'll deal with this fiend." She took on a determined pose, hands on her hips, hovering slightly above the floor of the room.

Billy finished his chanting and stepped away from the door, turning his attention back to Amanda and the portal. "Any idea what we might be getting into on the other side? If they went through, we'll just have to do the same, but I'd feel a lot better knowing what type of nasties we might face when we get there."

Amanda returned to the doorway, Cata cradled in her arms. She'd managed to convince the faerie cat that it would be safer for the mansion as a whole if she held her vigil away from the closed portal and whatever might come out of it. The witch wasn't sure how much the cat understood of what she'd said, but Cata had reluctantly allowed herself to be picked up off the bed. "I was still working on the place from Clea's dream, but the energy feels the same and there's no such thing as coincidence in this place." She handed Cata over to Stephen. "It's definitely not the puppies and bunnies dimension, but I don't have much to go on as to what it actually is. And how it got its claws on Clea in the first place." She gnawed on her thumbnail, an old habit that showed just how disturbed she was by the whole thing. She'd asked Topaz to watch over Clea, and now they both were gone... "Right, here's the plan. Meg, you and I are going to start work on finding the spell that opens this bloody thing - there's got to be something in the books somewhere. Billy, Stephen, you're damage control. Billy's wards are a start, but I want you to make sure not even a speck gets through that portal without us knowing. Stephen, can you magic up some kind of surveillance system? Something that will let us keep an eye on the magical energy of this thing, maybe track it to other places on Earth."

Stephen let his hand run through the soft fur of Cata's back, cradling the faerie cat against his chest. The teenager could feel the warmth of the cat's body pressed up against his shirts, the hairs prickling his skin through the thin material, His hands idly stroking her, feeling Cata's small chest rising and falling against him as she made a sound between a purr and a hiss. Stephen barely noticed, his mind already swirling around the task put before him. "Hmm," he tilted his head to the side. "Maybe, if I could tie it into the wards around here then that would be easier, but I don't want to mess with them...yet. Maybe something portable, just something we can set out, kinda like magical security cameras."

“The security camera idea is good,” Billy agreed. “You can piggyback off my ward if you want, so you don’t have to mess with the permanent ones.” He touched the doorframe again, chanting under his breath, and the glow took on a mirror-like sheen, casting a shadowy refection of their movements in the room. “If you want to link that up with something you guys can take with you, you can look in, and I’ll stay here and working on getting the rest of this room warded.”

"Books with portal spells, right," Megan responded. She pictured the shelves of magic books in her mind, but nothing specifically jumped out at her from her memory. "Could it be dream magic? Is that a thing?" To find a spell, you sometimes had to think creatively. Her wings buzzed with anticipation. "Now of course Clea couldn't have nightmares about kittens and rainbows. But we've been to Askew world, we can do this."

"Maybe, Pixie, but that's what the research is for. And, good man, Billy. Make sure no-one else gets in there either, too. Last thing we need is another disappearance to fuck-knows-where." Amanda looked around the small group, her expression grim. "We've got our jobs, let's go do them."