Welcome to Gaia! :: [Edel PRP] Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

It was high noon, and Franklin Avenue shimmered and rippled in the intense heat. The residents of the community had retreated to the safety of their beds for the day, their circadian rhythms inverted in order to avoid the hottest summer any of them could ever remember experiencing. It seemed deserted, and from the state of the buildings, calling it a ghost town wouldn't have been too far off.

A lone figure humming to herself and hopping from shadow to shadow dispelled that image, however ghostlike she herself may have appeared. Eirlyn liked the heat (though she wouldn't have admitted it within earshot of her Lady or her Lady's Host), but it was so boring waiting for sundown for everyone else to wake up!

"You are my sunshiiiine," Eirlyn warbled once humming got boring, "my only--sunshiiiine. Something, something elllllse, when skies are graaaaay~!" Her eyes were firmly fixed on every patch of shadow that happened to fall before her feet; she didn't notice the mage until she had almost run into him. "Oh!" She said, arms pinwheeling and tail lashing as she struggled to stop her forward momentum. "Hello!" Eirlyn flashed a toothy smile at him, not appearing at all suspicious or wary of this strange man standing before her.

"What?" Eirlyn replied, watching the stranger bow to her with no small amount of bewilderment. "No, silly, I'm not a god! What a strange question to ask!" Her tail flickered behind her, and she rocked back and forth on her heels, pleased to have someone other than herself to talk to. "You're not from around here," she stated confidently. "I've seen everyone who lives here, but I've never seen you, so you must be from somewhere-else-not-here. Where did you come from, Mister...Mister?"

The cheery smile on Eirlyn's face froze as Malh'reth stated his purpose for wandering. Her ears drooped at the mention of the Pantheon, and her hesitation to respond was noticeable to anyone with eyes. "Um," she said, her tail curling around one ankle. "Um. No, no, no, I don't--I've never heard of it or seen it and, and I don't know where it is, sorry! Haha, what a funny name for a place," she babbled nervously, her voice strained with the unfamiliar act of lying.

"What a neat name!" Eirlyn said, overtly attempting to change the subject. "My name's Eirlyn. You traveled by sea? That must have been hard! I've never seen the sea. What's that like?"

Eirlyn ducked her head under the weight of her moral dilemma: she didn't want to point her new acquaintance towards the Evil McScary Pantheon, but he seemed to really want to go there. "It's that way," she said, pointing down the street in the opposite direction of the Pantheon. "But you don't need to go there! I can answer your questions!"

It would have been a good thing that Malh'reth became too incapacitated to continue the line of questioning that Eirlyn had no idea how to answer--and no real inclination to, anyway--if she hadn't been similarly effected by the pulse of raw, broken energy. Her mouth opened to ask Malh'reth what was wrong with him; no sound came out, but her jaw widened in a silent scream as the world around her shifted, seeming to expand and contract simultaneously. White static took the place of natural brainwaves, and she toppled against the side of a building.

Her fur stood on end and her eyes turned glassy, as if she had turned inward to examine the damage being done to her body by this strange outside source. The world went black and white and every hue in between as Eirlyn curled up inside herself, willing the pain to go away but all too ready to accept it. It wasn't within her to fight.

Malh'reth's voice called to her, echoing through her skull and insinuating itself into all the spaces pain hadn't claimed. She latched on to it, wrapping it around herself as she let it pull her back to consciousness, to life. Sight and sound came back in sudden, overwhelming relief, and she gasped and flailed, nearly sending herself to the sidewalk in an effort to regain her bearings. "What?" She mewled, confused and lost and hurt by the sudden nameless thing that had lost all interest in her when she hadn't succumbed. "What--sorry--what?"

Eirlyn shrieked and jerked away at the mage's touch, too shaken by far, too sensitive; it felt like all of her nerve endings were on the outside, and she hurt. "I don't know!" She wailed. "I don't know, but it hurt, and and and I didn't like it." Her tail bristled with agitation as she paced up and down the sidewalk. "You should stay here--your eyes--we should just stay until everything's fixed."

"But," Eirlyn protested halfheartedly, her ears drooping as her new friend--who had gotten hurt while she had been standing right there, and didn't that just make her feel guilty?--berated her. Going to the Pantheon was a terrible idea! Even so...he had given her an order, and she was made to serve, even if not necessarily every mortal that crossed her path. Several other options that didn't include going anywhere near the Pantheon were thought up and discarded before she sighed in defeat.

"Okay," she said quietly, reaching out to the mage to take his hand. "We should go slow, though, just in case."