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Predatory Puddles (6) : Summer rains aren’t uncommon, so finding puddles dotting your path isn’t in itself particularly surprising or abnormal. However, as you walk past them, you feel the sensation of being watched, like eyes are on you. If you look into the puddles, you don’t see your reflection--nor the reflection of anything familiar to you. Instead, you see strange, decayed buildings, and odd, rotting plants. Something is watching you through the puddles, but before you can investigate, between one blink and the next, it’s all gone. When you look back, the puddles are oddly non-reflective, and then in the next blink, they’re all gone. The feeling of being watched doesn’t fade, though.
Mundilfari was doing his usual routine of being an absolutely crap lousy Dark Mirror Senshi. Even after the snafus he'd been through, he just had no motivation to take the dang thing seriously. He hadn't even properly flexed his dark wizard powers yet! No, dark Senshi. Not wizard. Senshi.
He could've homebrewed some fancy DnD stuff for this senshi wizarding gig, but that felt excessive when he barely did the thing.
His cause for powering up today was simple: these funky puddles that were occupying a parking lot he was passing through. Even from a distance, they didn't look normal. They were way too shiny for regular puddles, so maybe they were Negaverse youma puddles or something. When he finally got a good look at them, he blinked several times to make sure his eyes hadn't gone funky, even wiping his glasses on his overlay.
The reflection in the puddle had nothing to do with Mundilfari staring into it, or any of the actual environment around it. There were these towering, decaying buildings that matched nothing he knew was in Destiny City, and sometimes he'd see a very unnatural-looking tree or flower. It was hard to determine why they looked unnatural, only that something was very off with them.
Unsure if this was a portal, a vision, or something else entirely, Mundilfari decided to hedge his bets and attempt to mirrorwalk through the puddle. That's right. He'd barely ever mirrorwalked before, but here he was, about to just saunter into a new and potentially dangerous location through a puddle that wasn't really a mirror. All he could hope for was that he could mirrorwalk back if he really did get deposited into a post-apocalyptic alien hellscape.
Hey though, if he was going to start being a proper Dark Mirror Senshi, now was a good time! He could explore the alien hellscape before it killed him. That'd be an interesting way to die. Such thoughts didn't really suit Mundilfari, though, so he sucked in a breath and prepared to slip into the puddle world.
He wasn't sure if he totally expected to land splat on his face in a regular puddle of water. That was unpleasant, a wake up call, and it jolted him back to reality. Grumbling and spitting out puddle water, he pulled himself back up and wiped at his face.
Now, however, the puddle had changed. There was nothing reflected in it at all. No other world, no nothing. Maybe now it was a mirror?
Once again, Mundilfari tried to walk through the fake mirror, except this time he just landed face-first on the asphalt. With a pained proclamation of "ow my face," he pulled himself up and rubbed the dirt off.
Now the puddles were just gone. How splendid. He'd been trolled by fake puddle vision mirrors that weren't even real. Put out by the revelation, Mundilfari pulled out his compact and issued a warning: "Heads up, if you guys see any puddles that look like they take you somewhere else, don't jump in them. You can't walk through 'em. Trust me."
He probably wasn't even using the compact right.
