Chapter Text
The bell rang with a lilting ding-dong, and I was the first one out the door. I didn’t run, but I moved at a decent clip as I headed up the stairwell to the third floor and made my way to the girl’s washroom.
There were a half dozen girls there already, which meant I had to wait for a stall to open up. I nervously watched the door of the bathroom, feeling my heart drop every time someone entered the room.
As soon as there was a free stall, I let myself in and locked the door. I leaned against the wall and exhaled slowly. It wasn’t quite a sigh of relief. Relief implied you felt better. I wouldn’t feel better until I got home. No, I just felt less uneasy.
It took maybe five minutes before the noise of others in the washroom stopped. A peek below the partitions showed that there was nobody else in the other stalls. I sat on the lid of the toilet and got my brown bag lunch to begin eating.
...
Then I yelped as the toilet vanished from under me, and I found myself face to face with a... a... a dragon?
Naturally, my first response was to run away, screaming my head off.
A bewildered Teriarch watched as the second human to appear in his cave out of nowhere ran away screaming, and resolved to move even further up into the High Passes.
I had never been more grateful for the jogging routine I had recently taken up. After a solid 15 minutes of sprinting down what appeared to be a mountainside, away from the huge lizard (dragon? Lung??) , I stopped to take stock of my surroundings.
Looking back, there was no sign of anything following me, dragon or otherwise, which was good. I seemed to be somewhere out in the wilderness, with a huge mountain behind me and a vast plains before me. All of this led to one question: what the fuck ?
There was no sign of how I went from hiding in Winslow’s bathrooms, to inside a cave in the middle of nowhere. The only known teleporter in Brockton Bay was Oni Lee, and he couldn’t have done this. Was this some new villain, or the result of some Tinker experiment gone wrong? But who would attack a school? Was this a Simurgh plot? I hadn’t heard any Endbringer sirens...
As I tried to figure out what was going on, I started to notice the local bugs. I had been too panicked to pay attention at first, but now that I was catching my breath...
Most people can’t tell the difference between species of insects that look similar. Most can’t tell the difference between a house fly and a stable fly, or a house spider and a brown recluse. But with the intimate knowledge my power gave me of the insects I controlled, I could tell the difference.
So when I turned my attention to the insects in my range, I immediately noticed something was off. I could still pick out the normal types of insects you might expect to find - flies, spiders, butterflies, grasshoppers, etc. - but I didn’t recognize any of the species. I could have written this off as a consequence of being in a very different part of the world, but some of the insects were extremely weird, beyond anything I’d ever heard of - and I had done research into exotic species that might be of use if I could obtain them.
One of the weirder examples could be mistaken for a large fly... except it had four legs, instead of six. And it had a bulbous abdomen filled with... was that acid?
Even stranger were a few nests of spiders I could sense, consisting of camouflaged pit traps in the ground, filled with spiders of all sizes. And when I say all sizes, I mean ranging from your normal house spider, to a few feet across in size. And all of them had very sturdy carapaces covering their entire bodies.
Were these the creations of some bio-tinker? The species all seemed to be fairly ingrained in the ecosystem. At the very least, if this was the doing of some villain, I would have more firepower to work with.
After about a half hour of gathering myself and getting used to the local wildlife, I started walking again, towards the plains. I needed to find civilization, or at least some water. The only things I still had were my wallet and bagged lunch; I had put down my backpack and water bottle in the stall, and hadn’t checked if they had been teleported with me before running away screaming.
From a distance, I had thought the plains were flat. But as I got closer, I started to see that there were actually huge hills and valleys, covered in grass as far as I could see. So I set out to climb up the closest hill for a better vantage point.
As I neared the top of the hill, I saw... smoke! In the distance, a plume of smoke, rising from somewhere behind another hill. It could just be a wildfire, but with nothing better to go off of, I started in that direction.
An hour later, I had finally climbed up the second hill. Everything was so big here; even the sky seemed bigger. When I looked back at the mountainside I had come from, I couldn’t even see its peak, obscured by huge clouds in the vast sky.
But as I reached the top of the hill, all of that left my mind. I could see the source of the smoke, and it was a building! In the middle of nowhere, with nothing but grass as far as the eye could see, a lonely building, the only sign of civilization.
And it was probably inhabited, too! Though, would they speak English? This was very far from home...
But no matter, getting there was the first step. Pushing my worries aside, I quickened my pace, breaking into a light jog. I waded through a stream, and then passed by a boulder...
And then leapt back as the rock suddenly sprang to life! Two long, brown pincers snapped closed where I had just been. A flash of pain went up my right arm as one of the pincers nicked it, but I was too occupied running away from the giant crab that had been hiding under the rock to care.
Instinctively, I sent some bugs towards it to get in its face and slow it down. I expected to buy some time by annoying it, maybe enough to outrun it. I did not expect it to freak out and start clawing at its own face, making sounds like a deeper, extremely loud cricket.
...I guess those really were acid flies. Useful.
As I neared the building, I could see two signs. One, a plaque above the door: “The Wandering Inn”. The other, hammered into the ground: “No Killing Goblins.” They were both in English, so that was a good start. But.. Goblins? The bio-tinker possibility was looking more and more likely.
The door opened, and a girl stood in the doorway. She was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, both fairly dirty and slightly singed. She held a knife in one hand, and something I couldn’t quite make out in the other.
As we met eyes, she visibly relaxed, lowering the knife. She then broke out into a smile, and raised her hand in greeting. “Hey! I’m Erin. What’s your name?”