Welcome to Gaia! ::

With his graceless tumble into the pool, it wasn't surprising that Cain dropped into Eden on his head. The snow thankfully muffled the impact, but it still hurt - he fell into a coiled heap, arms and legs splayed out to either side, and gazed in a stunned way at the stars slowly dancing in front of his eyes. The pain receded almost instantly, but the stars remained; bright, twinkling, in a vast black sky.

Suddenly alarmed, he wriggled upright and almost immediately fell down again with a squeak. This was horrible! He'd broken his legs! Okay, it didn't hurt, but legs were not supposed to work like that. He was sure he'd read a book where some guy had gotten shot, and he didn't feel it right away because of something called "shock".

The pain never did arrive, even after what felt like minutes of waiting. Cain squinted back at his feet. Well, that certainly explained it. They'd disappeared. This was one mystery too many for the baffled toddler. His voyage of discovery had kept him from noticing the cold, but as he looked around, seeing a couple dark blobs nearby - people? - his teeth started to chatter.

Invisibility, sure. One fantastic thing wasn't impossible. But gigantic mermaids was pushing it! As the nearest blob-person, it was hard to miss Naida's silvery fish tail, even if her other features were obscured. But the strangest part was, she seemed to be looking right at him...

Cain saw her arm, the hand as big as his head, coming closer, and completely forgot that he'd broken/lost his poor legs. He burst out of the snow with a terrified chitter and bounced backwards over the snow. Some part of his mind was going, 'What on earth are you doing?!' and the other was screaming, 'GIANT MERMAID!' It wasn't hard to figure out which part won.

Even at a safe distance away, Cain still hopped nervously from foot to foot, filled from head to toe with adrenaline. The giant mermaid hadn't followed. It'd probably be hard to move on the ground with just a tail for legs, which begged the question of how she had gotten here.

Then he heard a strange rasping noise. The wind that blew across the snow, gently tugging at him, made no sound at all - so it must be coming from her. She stopped the disturbing noise and began a gentle coo instead, still sounding out of breath. He crept a little closer, concerned despite himself.

"Uhm." Cain cleared his throat. "Arre you o-kkay?" His chattering teeth distorted the words. Ugh. Well, hopefully she got the idea.

The closer he got, the easier it was to see her, so when she tried to explain by touching her throat Cain nodded, thinking he understood. She was mute. He wasn't sure how he felt about this situation - it had to be a dream, but it felt way too real. He was just kind of going with the flow. When she opened the coat, he gave her a stare that clearly said, "Are you kidding?". She may be a giant, and he was freezing, but he had dignity! Cain wouldn't mind sitting with her, though, since she didn't seem to be a homicidal giant. Maybe, even with her limited vocabulary, she could shed some light on what was happening.

Something bent under his foot when he stepped closer. Blinking, he paused and looked down at a familiar shape half-buried in the snow. "My glasses!" He waved a hand wildly - also invisible, unfortunately - until it hit snow, and then shoveled it away from the frame. Oh, wonderful. Either this was a country of giants or he'd mysteriously shrunk, because the glasses looked like they'd fit Miss Mermaid better.

The glasses were difficult to pick up, especially slippery with the snow melting on them, but he was able to hold them up high enough to see through. They revealed a broad landscape of snow and ice. The brown spikes were a range of mountains, the green a forest. And the girl was even stranger. Not only was she covered in silvery scales, but her head was ornamented with a fin cutting right through her hair. She wore a coat...an awfully thin one. He shivered in sympathy.

The worst part, however, was finding out he wasn't invisible at all, but in a very different state altogether. His hands were splayed halfway across the lenses, what with the strange way he was holding the glasses, and they were...not normal. Cain's brain turned off briefly. He dropped the glasses in the snow and skittered the rest of the way to Naida, hopping straight into the proferred coat and immediately burying his nose in the fabric.

Normally, this would be the most embarrassing choice of action. He would rather lie down in the snow and die. And he'd already decided "no". But running on autopilot, all he wanted was somewhere where he didn't have to think. Plus it was warmer inside Naida's coat; he was still shaking, though, and not from the cold.

Naida's heartbeat thundered in his ears, which was comforting until it began to speed up. Was there something out there?? No, no, it wasn't that. A similar thought as hers ran through his head, and he pressed up against her, trying to radiate warm-and-fuzzyness. What if she had been able to speak until she ended up here?

This was terrible. He was Cain, a person, not some furry rodent thing! And he was getting really freaked about being so small. If a polar bear came along they were toast. Unless she had some cool fishie powers, like that fish guy who could turn into a giant fish and swim in midair. Of course that was from a fantasy book, but it didn't hurt to hope.

Cain suddenly wanted to talk to her. At the very least he could find out her name! He squiggled up past her arms and popped out the collar. It was very disorienting, and extremely weird, to talk to someone from this angle - he had to crane his head way back to even see Naida's face.

"Um. Hhi." he said shyly. "I have a qquesttion." He cocked his head, faintly dismayed that the chattering hadn't gone away. It was better than not being able to talk at all, he supposed. "Ccan you wrrite?"

If only she could have talked about her story. Not only did Cain love to read, he also loved writing, although he wasn't very good at it. That would've been a real conversation starter for sure.

But since she couldn't, and the subject never came up, he simply slithered free of her coat and hopped down into the snow. Talking, he'd already decided, wasn't a good plan. So instead he stared down at a clean patch of snow and stamped a few words in ferret foot font (8 pt).

I'm Cain.

He paused, then also stamped, Do you know where we are?

"Nai-da?" he read aloud, wanting to make sure he didn't get it wrong. An underline meant business. Back on the ground, everything was blurry again. Cain leaned forward to read the next line and got a noseful of snow. Achoo!

He chittered in frustration and stomped the next words out: This is the WORST Haloween trick EVER!. Sabriel would have loved to pull a stunt like this, the miserable beast, but Cain didn't think it was a Halloween trick either.

His tiny claws worked into the snow as he struggled to calm down. It took even longer to think of something else to ask. There wasn't enough snow to write all of his questions down.

Can you normely talk? And not have a fish tail? Cain sat back on his hind legs and breathed on his frozen paws to warm them up for the next batch of writing.