Welcome to Gaia! ::

A day or two has passed since last time Rei got stumped by the villager's answer to his question.

He decided to retreat into his headphones to pass time until the next bus came, but...

Somehow, the atmosphere in the village has changed. The villagers can be seen interacting with the Halloweeners (yes, he can distinguish them rather easily, given...obvious reasons of the Halloweeners didn't go with the cloth-over-head fashion statements as the villagers. Also other tiny details like extra tails, heads and other organs normal villagers won't even have.)

---speaking of which, are the villagers NORMAL at the first place? He hasn't had a chance to sneak a peek under that cloak, after all...


As he wandered around the village, sneaking about around some scary Halloweenians, he stumbled upon a couple of villagers talking about eggs...

Rei listened fervently about the story, the two exotic pair of wyvern-that's recently died out of non-natural causes left an egg atop the mountain range just outside of the village. Due to the weather conditions and storm prediction, the egg that's supposed to be safe normally atop of that mountain should be carried below-otherwise there's a great risk it'll fail to hatch due to the low temperature winds blowing inside the nest, or even the nest itself destroyed by gale.

The villagers, however, has their own problems to tackle. The approaching storm will also bring them problems, so they need to prepare.

They looked at Rei expectantly. In retrospect, he should've left quicker...

Climbing was usually one of Puella's most favored hobbies, but with the oncoming storm she was a little less fond. She was tracking mud all over her clothes, too, and having seen giant snakes once...well, she really didn't want to meet another one. Still, Puella was a little mad that the invisbile apex thing had just taken her egg like that, and she wanted it back badly. So it was up the mountain for Puella: sometimes, it was that simple. Fortunately for TK he hadn't lost anything in the fight, so she'd seen fit to part ways with him for a little bit, at least. It was worth it for them to have different experiences, right? There was only a limited amount of time - if they pooled their information, it'd be greater than before!

She bobbed her head gently as she walked. She wanted to close her eyes to the velociraptor minis she spotted along the way, but she couldn't really afford to. It was a mountain she was climbing, after all. Instead she sent them the toughest glare she could muster: close enough, she thought. She hoped it could ward them off.

Yeesh, though. How had it started raining that quickly? She'd forgotten to pack an umbrella, and was feeling a little distressed by it. Maybe she should've popped into a cafe or something instead of hiking it all the way out to this mountain. She was beginning to feel a little cold. And she was probably the only person dumb enough to have done this...or at least, the only one who was also dumb enough to have gotten caught fighting that invisible thing. It gave Puella the creeps!

Wait, no. She could definitely see a tall figure...standing on top of a rock? What was that boil doing?

Oh, Jack. She needed to run a little faster but she couldn't really bear to, with the terrain working against her the way it was doing. "What're you doing up there?" she called, marching slowly up the steep incline. "Shouldn't you be finding shelter?"

Ack! She was so wet!

As he's a Ghost, the idea of being 'wet' doesn't really apply to him. The rain evaporates as soon it touches his 'skin' of electric plasma, yet because the hissing sounds annoys him Rei just allowed the drops to pass through. His headphones, being a physical object still get wet, so he begrudgingly took it off and stashed it inside his coat.

-which is already wet. Yeah, Ghosts and physical objects just doesn't match.

"Yo." He greeted the...spidergirl? looking at him strangely. "So, the villagers pushed you into this too?" He again groaned, finding the stash of food the villager gave to him missing, highly probably getting dragged by the landslide.

"Thanks for your concern-but I cannot be dissipated by that bolt. I am a Tsukumogami-a soul that resides in an object. As long as the object does not break, I'll just respawn from it." He said lightly, pointing to the blood-smeared black headphones inside his transparent body.

"Also, I'm here on the villager's behalf to get an egg. They said something about it being a wyvern's egg, but I'm not so sure about that. Since there's a storm coming they wanted to prepare against it and pushed the duty to me." He sighed. He should've remained sleeping inside the 'phones until the next bus came, shouldn't he?

Anyway, they walked for a while, safe from any kind of PEST due to most of them get dragged beneath with the landslide. As they arrived to the peak of the hill...

"-these aren't wyvern eggs. It's too darned small for it!" Rei cursed.
But a job is a job. He focused, making his ghost body tangible to lift the egg.

This pose...is awkward.

EGG HP = 10
As the spider girl pulled a complete egg from her backpack, Rei could only gawk. How. How did that object can fit into that small bag.

And yes, he forgot to introduce himself due to the chain of events. The villagers DID lie to him. The wyvern's egg is in the next mountain.

Or maybe they're just testing him? This girl, Puella has already passed this test.

-then why did she come back? Only questions emerged from each hypotheses he made.

"Name's Rei. And giant invisible...minipet?"

He REALLY ought to leave this mountain.

"Okay, we got the eggs. Let's be careful with our steps since the ground are loose because the rain and landslide." He said-

That being said, with the egg blocking his face Rei can't really see what's in front of him. Well, the rain has lessened so he can use his headphones safely.

"-[Jack]." He said softly after putting the item over his head and pushing the plug into thin air; instead of dropping, it looked like it's stuck mid-air.

"Yep, I can sense the surroundings now." muttered Rei, steadily stepping down the mountain.

-what about the spider-girl, though?

EGG HP = 10 - 2 = 8!

"A fishing rod? Sand whale?" Now that's something that he didn't see often, even in Halloween Town.

"Oh, I'm from Earth. Maybe my earth is not the same like yours' but...yeah. I'm a former human." He remembered again his past and somehow smiles a bitter smile.
As they walked steadily down the mountain, a sound like gravel being crushed suddenly entered his ear-

"This sound...the ground?"
As he lowered the egg to get a better view, a pillbug-no, a sand lobster(?) suddenly leapt from inside the gravel and smashed right into the egg!

A small crack formed at the surface of the egg, but it's not big enough to destroy it. Rei quickly kicked it away, making the creature roll into a ball downhill.

"...are those creatures supposed to do that all the time???" Groaned Rei, minding the crack at the egg.

He's already at halfway down the mountain, though.

EGG HP = 8!

400 years! Darn, that's a long time to live as a spider. "Must've been tough, living that long as a spider. Everyday living hiding from everyone..."

He can't even imagine how that must feel like. Each steps of larger being will be felt as mini earthquakes, your house being destroyed daily...

-having to eat bug as breakfast.

Okay, that's not a very good direction to bring a conversation to. "So, you've been living in the town for so long before you get to this form. Myself, I just found myself there somehow few years ago. I've been loitering around the place, hopping to and fro different sides of the city." He refocused his mind after feeling the egg almost passes through his plasmatic body.

"But yea, the town's good, the people's good. I wish there's less...strange things happening, though. Even if I'm now a ghost, my heart's still partly human." He said again.

They almost reached the base of the hill. It should be easy now.

"Wait, what?" asked Puella, blinking owlishly at the ghost. "Oh, no no no - I - I'm not a villager! I go to Amityville Academy." She shuddered briefly. "I'd never wear one of those cloaks and be mean to people." She paused as the rest of his words sunk in, though. "Um...wait. Wait, you mean you're from this village?" She gestured at Miasma Village, below them. "Well, not from here, but...do you know a way out of here and into the rest of Halloween?" She gestured wildly. "Do you know anything about this apex virus?"

Wow, and here she'd thought he'd known nothing about those giant minipets! This was getting to be pretty informative.

Oh, wait. Maybe she was being selfish. She peered over at him again. What was that he'd asked? "And, um, the good thing about it is that I wasn't really sentient until a little over a decade ago." She shrugged, stretching. "I wouldn't even know I lived as a spider for four hundred years if my sisters hadn't told me." She was only really aware of it because that was supposedly how all joroogumo came to be. "I was probably even tinier then, though," she admitted. And she was already pretty small, if you asked her, at just a little over five foot two.

She cleared her throat at his very last statements, though. "I...I haven't taken any classes about humans yet," she confessed. "So I don't even know what that means."

Egg HP: 9/10