nepharious | Stick it (Reply)

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just2hands (conditional others)

Dimensional travel feels and looks a lot like being strapped to a firework. Or how Neph imagines that must be, careening around at violently disorienting speeds combined with streaking colors and a total inability to guess direction. As for the landing, eh, it’s very second-verse-same-as-the-first, splayed out on the ground like a drunk with her stomach in her throat and her vision badly out of whack. Her arms are a tangle over her head, caught in the sleeves of her borrowed coat. There’s a weird tingling in her toes, and a cold strip across her lower back and belly where her shirt’s ridden up, dew and morning air pricking goosebumps from her skin.

“Not gonna throw up,” she tells the whirling sky, and means it. Not like she plans on being a frequent flyer (or an ever-again-flyer, a thought that twists her already unsettled stomach) but there oughta be some improvement in her arrivals.

The sky drifts to reassuring stillness as Neph breathes through her nausea. There’s a mid afternoon quality to the light, and the air is lighter and thinner than Faerun’s, less weighty with magic but way more familiar for it. Grass tickles her neck and the exposed small of her back, the wet green smell undercut by gasoline and bugspray. That, more than anything, tells her she’s come home. She’d worry about finding herself splayed out in somebody’s backyard, but there’s no accompanying hum of traffic or distant voices.

Neph rolls onto an elbow and eases herself upright, bracing for a stab of vertigo that never comes. These surroundings are less ‘deep woods’ and more ‘cleared but abandoned’, the occasional pioneering tree struggling through choking grass and shrubs. That is not a distinction she’d’ve known how to make three (Three? There’d been snow on the ground when she left. There isn’t now, but there’s a nip in the air and a frosty hardness to the earth that hints at frosty nights yet) months ago, but circumstances kinda forced her out of her urban comfort zone for a while there. She shakes the chaff of old grasses from her hair and reaches for the vials strapped to her wrist. Now that her stomach’s settled, she wants her metals in it.

Standing, she can just make out the artificially straight line of a road girder in the distance. Neph tugs her sweater back into place, shrugs the wool-lined leather of her coat over it and stomps the last of the tingling from her toes. Only her boots survived the unexpected Faerun vacation, but she and Moritz had tried their best to assemble an outfit that wouldn’t draw too many odd looks back home. So what if she’s got no idea where the portal dumped her? This is her own Earth under her feet, there’s a road in easy striking distance, and a car’ll come along eventually. Nephele turns up the collar of her coat, inhales the lamp oil and applewood smell of that other world still lingering in the fleece, and hums to herself.

Time to go home.