The Hunt for Home

[The Dreamer]

Continued from "This World is Wild, But is Not the Forest"

Emerald tumbled out of the portal, hitting the ground with a rather hefty thump. She took a few moments, trying to gain at least a sitting position with which to gather herself. That trip through gate was much rougher on her than she'd imagined.

Instant transportation huh? Not what i expected from portal between points such as this. She paused, spitting out a mouth full of dirt she'd collected during her spill out the gate. Then again, most everything I've seen so far isn't anything close to what i'd expect. While on Earth, there were plenty of teleportation pads across the planet, and the intra-planetary network was strong and well, it was nothing like the experience she had just had. All trips between pads, while much shorter in travel time than walking to your destination, still took a few minutes to transport you there. In between, you floated, more or less, through tunnel of sorts in the fabric of space. this was nothing like that though. Literally, near instant transportation. Quite a marvel in Emerald's eyes, as an instant teleportation between two points took so much more energy to perform than could practically be done, and yet, she had just herself experience it without exploding into the atoms that make up her being, or decimating the area around the target destination. Marvelous, she thought, turning towards the gate.

She looked the gate over again, closely. It looked nearly the same as it did on the other side, in the vast white space she'd essentially been dumped in when she enter this... world? Plane? Dimension? She still wasn't quite sure what this place was.

She put a hand to her forehead, a reaction to an intense pain she felt. Her head ached as she thought more about what this world might be. She could see a flash in her mind, a flash of white light and a memory, not a whole one, but of a small, child-like figure, and a word came to her tongue as her head throbbed.

"Omniverse."

Omniverse? Where did that come from? She thought, raising her hand to her head again as it ached. It must have something to do with that figure i remember... Fuck, i don't even remember what he looked like. Just as soon as the image had come to her, it had faded just as quick, along with the pain she was feeling.

"So, the Omniverse then," it felt very... correct as she said it, like it fit exactly in the place of all the confusion she felt about where exactly she had ended up. Although, the more she tried to remember, the deeper she dug to find that image she had seen, the further it seem to pull away from her grasp.

She wiped the sweat from her brow, Wow, that took more of a toll than I had thought. She was breathing a bit harder, harder than she should be for only sitting still. I suppose I will take that and put it near the top of my list of questions so far. Cause i'll be damned if I sit for long without know what force of nature, or man, dragged me from my forests and dumped me here. She looked around her at the greenery around her. She marveled at it's sight.

This is nothing like what I've seen on Earth. Holy Shit. It certainly wasn't even close to the forests on Earth, even the more tropical ones she had been to. It's so... She jumped up from her seated position, still a bit on the wobbly side from the trip though the gate, and moved towards a nearby tree at the edge of the clearing. Emerald awed in it presence. It was such much larger than anything like that on Earth, and she could feel with a touch to it's trunk how alive it was, and how many things lived in it's branches. At the same time, she could feel, even hear the humming of the tree from inside it. It rang with the same hum that she had experienced in the vast white space on the other side of the gate. Her skin began to shimmer with a rainbow color, just like earlier when she drank from the ever-changing fountain where she had awoke, and her gem began to hum as well, perfectly in sync with the tree.

"This place," she looked around at all the other trees that edged the clearing, and into the sky above, birds flying high in the sky, and then back at the tree she had her hand on still. "It's absolutely marvelous. Everything here is connected, as well as connected to all that I felt before, on the other side of that gate. She looked over the the gate again, and while similar in look to what it had been when she step into it, and when she arrived, it had changed. The vines that coiled around the sides continuously moved, loosened, and re-tightened themselves snugly around it again. It seems that things on this side of the gate are ever so slightly more alive that those on the other side of it.She found it intriguing how a plant could even stand the spatial ripping that occurred when transporting from one point to another like that, so much so that it could continue to grow and thrive thorough and on the other side of the gate. Amazing.