Welcome to Gaia! ::

Enough already! The monsters were thick through the area that TURDD was trying to stagger through, and with a final blow Herryk sent the beast back from the fog that had borne it.

"Is everyone okay? We must keep moving."

HP: 40/40
DMG: 9
TAR: Mistbeast - u ded

It was like wandering through another reality as they made their way through the swirling mists. Zar had never seen anything like it in his existence and found it surprisingly difficult to concentrate within it. It was as if in addition to obscuring what little vision he had that it clogged his very thoughts. It had been difficult enough to shake off the insistent assaults of whatever the wispy figures had been, but Zar almost began to miss them in the face of this hollow purgatory.

Home.

It was all he could really think of, all that kept him walking. His entire life existed around the very idea of it. Home was family, home was the business. Everything he aspired to be was bound up in his parents, in his family line, his very appearance and hobbies defined by what was expected of him. Even when it made him miserable, he adhere to what his father and mother wanted. Home was a future, home was success. The idea that it and possibly they could be gone left a sort of numb terror in the incubus. A world without them was a world without grounding, without direction. Without his family he would just be any other demon, all that he was would fade like the far distance in this horrible fog.

There was another sort of home. A more immediate and new sort to him and that had been Amityville. The school had taken him on and asked little in return. He considered it a home of sorts, one with perhaps more problems than he would have liked, but problems he was willing to fight against, to subvert. He wouldn't be so actively working against the student plots if he didn't care.

And Amityville had been the place where he met the little cat he was currently still carrying in his arms, the one source of comfort in this grey and empty place. Nuru's canine traits had always endeared him to the Incubus. Loyal despite his insistent and frequent lashing out and attempts to chase the other boil away, honest in all he did and said, lacking any of the demonic double meanings and twisted intent his own kind possessed. He'd barged into Zar's life and made himself at home wether Zar liked it or not, which, in time, he had.

He almost tripped and fell in his distraction in this world of endless white, looking down only to realise the familiarity of the items, items he could actually see vaguely from this distance, though he wished he could not. It seemed that they had found the houses. Or what there was of them. They were home.

He reached down to pick up a piece of strewn paper, bundling Nuru close as he did, close enough the boil could likely hear his heart racing, and hear the way it skipped a beat as his claws made contact with the paper.

His natural ability was to read without looking, to comprehend words with touch alone. But here in this bizzare half-world, for just a second it extended not only to the piece of paper he touched, but the words all around it before failing completely. He reeled and almost staggered and feel as the magnitude of the times it had been written, the desperation in the scratched etched words, the repetition screaming in his head.

Home Home Home Home Home.

Pulling back his hand like he was burned he stood up straight, folding wings as protectively around them both as he could possibly manage, eyes wide, pupils slitted as he sought for some hint in the billowing fog that there was someone else out there besides them. But it was so hard to think, so hard to remember where they even were, to remember what they were even looking for. All he could hear was that word, over and over and over.

And then there were two lights, bright, shimmering in the fog. They were saved. Was that someone there? He took two hesitant little steps towards it, pausing to look down at the other boil. "Look Nuru." He could hardly think, hardly line up words.

"Home."

And it turned to embrace them, swallow them up.

And he let it, there was no reason to fight it, no reason to run or flee. His parents were gone, his house was gone. But this was where it had all been.

And he had Nuru. Even as thoughts faded away to nothing, even as emotion was swept away, leaving void in its wake, he clung to that idea. Until even his thoughts of Nuru vanished in the haze and he became aware of only one irrefutable, simple fact.

He was Home

The fog grew thicker.

The transition was swift, yet strangely intangible. One moment, Johnny Danger could see the hulking form of Herryk just ahead, and caught fleeting glances of his teammates spread out around him in the murk as they pressed onward. The next- nothing. It was like being blind, but instead of darkness there was nothing but a grey haze. An implied presence of light. Only the muffled sound of his footfalls accompanied him. He hesitated, and just in time - his toe edged on something that elicited a sharp tinkle of glass. JD glanced downward. The ground just before his feet was clear, the gloom swirling around a broken picture frame. It was strangely familiar. A relic of another time, lost in the rubble, perhaps? That realization alone was stunning, for it was indeed rubble he'd been standing in. It was like a veil had been lifted, and he was suddenly painfully aware of his surroundings.

They had long since arrived in Town Heights, such as it was. They'd been battling the fog and it's inner demons so intently they hadn't noticed. JD's feet had a mind of their own however, and had managed to navigate the maze of broken structures to arrive at the ghost of a particularly large manison that was deeply relevant to his personal interests. He stood inside the remains of a doorway, a threshold he hadn't crossed in some time. The picture frame, as he remembered it, had once hung on the far wall. He squinted at it, but to no avail. He couldn't remember who was in the photo. There had been a figure, standing beside him, and he'd been scowling, but... As he bent to look more closely, the fog scooted away to reveal a message crudely scrawled across the floor, a stark black laid against the somber stone.

Home.

Startled, he took a step back - but it was too late. Now that he'd seen the message, he realized it was everywhere - in the pattern of the marble tile that was the shattered remains of an occasional table - spelled out in strips of shredded tapestry... In some places, it was written in that same loathsome scrawl, but in others it was only hints, too subtle for him to have noticed initially.

This realization only lasted moments however, as the murk and gloom suddenly intensified. It became like the creatures from before, but somehow worse. The way the light bent around it made the sickening curve of a claw, another, a leg. It towered over him. This couldn't be real, he thought, but despite this affirmation, the thing continued to grow. Tiny yellow eyes stared blankly above a ferocious maw. The specter rose up, like a vengeful god. Unlike the other apparitions they faced, it didn't speak. Instead, the boil sensed something. A yearning, a hunger. As it fell down upon him, his final thought was of-

Home.





It was dark. Something felt disoriented, outside of reality. It - he - had no idea if time had even passed as he suddenly began sinking slowly into a kind of awareness. He opened his eyes. What he saw made him wish he hadn't. A macabre landscape. Pillows of smoke dotted the horizon. The ground was many feet below, smothered in a cloudy haze that emanated an unnatural glow. Was this hell? Or was this the end? His thoughts were sluggish. How had he arrived here? And what was... A face emerged below him from the pillar of smoke. He then realized he wasn't standing in the air, but floating - no, he was suspended in the column of FEAR, one that was not unlike the others that clawed at a dead grey sky. Looking up confirmed - there was more fog, and more faces. In fact, it seemed every facet of the cumulus billows was a face, or a body of some kind. They seemed familiar, but he could not place them. He did not have memories, only awareness. He watched passively as their lips flapped and eyes rolled. But there was no sound, no sound until...

"Johnny...."

A voice drifted from another column.

"Danger!"

The figure of a girl, trapped in the fog. The one from the photo? Or the one from before...? The boil couldn't remember there being any before. A portrait, and darkness. A darkness that was white, and had gleaming eyes. As she faded into silence, he didn't know what her words meant, but he knew it was imperative that he understand. But the rules were changing, and the columns of FEAR had already begun to dissipate. It was nearing the end. He strained to escape his bonds. A wind pushed them closer, and as the tendrils of FEAR connected he managed to free one hand. Only her hand remained undiminished. As their fingertips touched, he remembered.

Johnny Danger held his memories close as the last FEARs of a dying world faded. She was the girl from the photo, but she was also someone else. Someone with jet hair, awkwardly cut. A rather large, pointy hat. An angry cat? The thought was puzzling, but unimportant. There were others there, too. The hulking barbarian, the professional demon and his doglike companion. The reflections of them that existed in his mind. They were together, but also apart.

The angry, fiery glow from beneath sputtered out. The only sound was the clatter of horses hooves, sharp and crisp and pervasive. It was the end of the end. His last thought, as he was enveloped again by a welcome darkness, a, perhaps, Ultimate Really Dark Darkness, was of home.

Some people just want to watch the world burn.

The fog was everywhere, there was no avoiding it, or what it held. As they followed the path, it grew thicker and thicker, a wall of sorts. It had always been safest where it was deepest, but the cost...oh the cost. She wanted to explain it, the fog's price, but the words died in her heart before they could ever drift through her lips.

Home.

A house. A family. A friend.

Could she claim any of those things anymore?

The shattered remains of the residential district left her feeling...empty. This hadn't been her home for quite some time. She gave the fog a look that was almost longing, and turned her head toward the others. She didn't need to tell them, they'd find out soon enough. She wished they didn't have to.

Home.

Comfort and lies.

Quiet, seething madness and desperation.

She recognized it for what it was now.

This loneliness that can't help but consume everything it touches. She'd heard it called something else, something alarming and strange, but she knew what it really was, she'd lived in it's heart and carried it in her own for the past year. And now she was going back. Glancing at the others she tried one last time to say something, if only goodbye. A name slipped through her lips, jarringly loud as it echoed through air. The fog grew even thicker, obscuring the others now, swallowing whatever words she had left.

Last time the cost of the fog's embrace, it's protection, had been high. At first it had simply appeared like only a small bit of her own time had been taken, what she'd thought of as only a few days had in actuality been several months. That in itself was seemed so terrible. She'd missed so much school, her friends had moved on with their lives. She was used to being several steps behind, but when she'd come back h...h...here, she found the rest of the world had moved onto an entirely different course.

Maybe she could have caught up, just a little bit.

Maybe she could have adjusted.

If she had ever actually left that fog.

But every time she slept, every time she so much as closed her eyes, she was there again. Held in a shifting, whispering embrace of nothing, everything, hunger, that vast, terrible loneliness and...

Home.

She thought she'd gone home, when she'd found herself back at the school.

Home.

She'd been wrong.

Home.

There was no such thing, not for her, not anymore.

Emily Device bowed her head at the fog borne creature slipped around her. Last time she'd paid the fog's price, this time she simply had nothing left to give.

Home.

The whispers closed in.

Home.

This was as close as she'd ever come to it.