Frostbound

[Jade Harley]

This side of the mountain isn’t as hostile, at least weather-wise. Jade wonders if she may have wandered into its rain shadow, because only a few twinkling flakes of snow flutter down every now and then. Furthermore, the wind isn’t as forceful, only the lightest of breezes rustling through her skirt and wind-tousled hair. A susurrus of air currents coasting across the frozen-solid ground luffs against her furred ears.

When she turns to gaze up at the mountain again, Jade can see that she actually didn’t even make it a sixth of the way up. In fact, she realizes while peering reflectively at the additional polar-white mountains breaking through the impassable mist of swiftly whirling snow, she has hardly made any progress at all. It’s almost as if she merely walked a half mile around the edge rather than straight up into the thick of things.

Other than that, however, it is still rather chilly out! Jade thinks she might be about to shiver right out of her glittery, dew-sequined slippers. Oh, if only she could click her heels together and be transported back home! Except, she can never go home. Not now, not ever.

Yikes, what a downer. She isn’t usually so given to such disheartened musings. After shaking her head a few times to rustle those sour thoughts right out of her brain, Jade focuses again on the glacial world around her. Her troubled mood is speedily whisked away as if by the whistling wind.

She appears to be in a seventy by fifty-something yards-long span of land, similar to the enclosure of a courtyard and cleansed of any kind of unnatural disturbance.

There are several lofty stones settled in an almost quarry-like arrangement around it, making the field seem rather defensible. They tower high above her head and stick out of the snow in a bizarrely lopsided pattern that has no clear cadence to it. Some touch at the tip, others at the center, while some are just piled one on top of the other, like a train of dominoes that have been thumped over. The stones form a hexagonal loop, practically a coliseum-like formation, from where they poke up out of the mountain’s roots.

“Huh,” Jade remarks to herself, voice muffled and rotund through the thick cloth of her hood. “That’s funny.”

She walks further out into the center of the naturally-formed stadium. Faint, shallow tracks define her footfalls. They are nearly soundless, feather-light under the heavy, stifling presence this area holds over her. Once there, she stops and turns this way and that to better scan the land over, a strange feeling of delight bubbling up in her chest like cream soda pop.

With new determination setting her soul aflame, Jade dashes through the slush and ice towards one of the surrounding rocks. Her mind is filled with the high hopes of gaining a better vantage point. Once there, she spends a few precious seconds searching for a foothold before scrabbling clumsily up the side. The stone is bitterly cold underneath her fingertips and grazes across her palms, even with the mittens on. Still, she does reach the top after several wild, scrabbling instants.

From her new height, Jade can better see the snow-dusted expanse before her. A thrilled, megawatt grin takes shape on her lips as she looks down at the field. Jade gazes straight across from herself at a rugged slope, a thoughtful aspect slowly manifesting in her expression.

The land is suitably flat, as if stamped down by the heel of some immense giant of frost. Because of the defining backdrop of dark stones, it is easy to pick out a nearly straight-cut edge along the organic shape of the mountain's side. There are five other lines of similar designation to complete the ring. As she looks around, Jade’s cheeks are beginning to hurt with how hard she’s beaming!

She is remembering her island, of course. How could she not? Her home, an incredibly tall white tower rising high above the treetops, glinting sweetly in the morning light, pinkish and molten-yellow dewdrops of colour slipping around its edges as the sun rises. Far below, a sprawling and intriguing dark jungle spreads out across the landscape, rife with crawling vines and blooming, bursting stipples of vegetation and exotic plants. A looming volcano is settled at a fair distance from her house, riddled with dark obsidian rock and steaming, wavering fumes of pure inviolate heat. Over beside it, amongst the dark foliage and covered in veins of archaic sediment and dust, there is an ancient frog temple, cryptic and ripe for exploring.

Then, SBURB had happened, and her lonely tropical home had been transported right smack dab into the middle of a winter wonderland—antagonistic imps and ogres aside. Lovely wooded areas had been placed in various regions across the planet, the trees enclosed in green bark and fragrant red flower petals peeking out from powdery, soft snow. Little spots of flickering, heartbeat-quick purple plunged and fluttered around in the tree canopy— thumb-plump hummingbirds, thrumming merrily along and characterized by their beady, milky-white eyes, each like a precious little pearl. Before its eventual thaw, the Land of Frost and Frogs had been gorgeous, albeit with an alien, curiously graceful charm to it.

Now, looking at this spot of land with a prospective eye, Jade sees an overwhelming, shining spark of sheer potential. She can see another opportunity to create— to reinvent her purpose, but more importantly herself. It is like a figurative pillar rising out of the land, pulsating with a beckoning, welcoming light.

With her fingers, Jade frames the exact spot that she imagines the tower would stand. Her tongue pokes out from in between her teeth as she runs through several casual mental calculations, attempting to adjust her sense of Space to this universe’s own dimensions and mathematic principles. It is a tough effort, and the course of it is bumpy and in places jagged, so the measurements are most likely skewed far beyond the outline she has pictured at the forefront of her mind, but it will have to do.

Maybe this omnilium stuff is good for more than just summoning sunglasses and mittens. Maybe, and Jade desperately, fervently, ruefully hopes that this is true— maybe she can build.

The last time Jade felt this hopeful, she had just ascended to the god-tiers. This is certainly something worth celebrating with jingling bells and lavish tassels, but the soft curve of Jade’s lips will have to suffice.

There must be someone she can tell about this. This land may be frigid and encased in ice, glaciers stirring slowly but surely like flotsam across a boggy pond, but Jade is plumb tired of being lonely. She had been alone nearly all of her life— no offense to Bec, but animal company just doesn’t cut it. She had been in want of intellectual conversation for too long. Heck, just plain conversation! Yips and growls leave a lot to be desired in that department.

Thankfully, she had managed to befriend John, Rose, and Dave over Pesterchum. In this Omniverse, however, Jade is fairly certain that the Game’s universal internet connection does not apply. She will have to investigate this further, or, in the event that everything else fails, scrounge something up herself.

While she cannot access her sylladex with its plethora of computers and guns— gosh, her grandpa would be so distraught about her wandering around unarmed!—, that omnilium stuff has proven itself as useful in the past. Jade believes that, with enough studious concentration and sheer gumption, she can recreate at least two of her favorite communication devices. They’ll have to be compact, though. Jade really doesn’t want to have to lug a bunch of annoying mechanical components around, after all!

Still thinking on what she would like to call up, Jade slides down the side of the rock, careful not to scrape her knees on the way down. Her feet hit the ground with a satisfying crunch. With one last careful glance around, Jade raises her arms out before her, humming a little to herself as she surveys the warm and cozy mittens covering her hands and experimentally wiggles her fingers about.

She’s sort of sure that she can do this without getting mauled by an enormous rabid snowbeast. It will only be a couple minutes, after all— that is, if she hasn’t already breached the finite amount of omnilium that has been allotted to her.

To be honest, Jade isn’t sure of where she stands on the merits of this strange new universe. On one hand, it doesn’t seem so bad. She’s alive, isn’t she? That little skirmish with the snowbeast was hardly something to get weepy over. At least, in comparison to SBURB. For a moment, Jade’s thoughts are transported back to a time when she had still been trying to stoke the forge, hunting for the right frogs in the snow with Dave. How, when a ferocious shadow had swooped down towards them, blade already wrought with blood and wearing her dog’s face, she had accidentally— well. She doesn’t like to think about what happened after that.

Whatever this Omni guy had expected her to do, Jade has already decided to just do what she thinks is right; and right now, while trying to tap into the reserves of omnilium she can almost-but-not-quite feel welling up inside of her, Jade trusts in herself enough to know that this is right.

Probably.

A shifting mass of rainbow colours appear between the confines of her hands, warping like heat waves over a desert. It is a peculiar comparison to draw while standing in the most desolate, frigid place imaginable, but it’s the only one Jade can muster up at the moment.

She starts by trying to picture her Lunchmuffs in her mind’s eye. Red in colour. Stylish. Functional. Part computer and part comfortable winter wear— the height of fashion, in Jade’s humble opinion.

After several minutes of attempting to give her thoughts a more definite shape, the item she had been wishing for appears in her hands and settles quite nicely between her palms. Jade’s fingers immediately latch onto the earmuffs, relishing in the familiarity of the Squiddles drawings on the sides.

Green eyes glittering like stars, Jade gracelessly fits the muffs over her pointed dog ears. Now all she needs are her goggles, and she’ll be ready to chat someone up!

Again Jade reaches into her reserves of omnilium, this time with an entirely new picture in her mind. They will be like her glasses, round, concave, and smooth to the touch. The glasses will have crucial designs for sooth-saying inscribed on them— pale lines drawn so that they overlap one another in the shape of a star. She imagines that they will be very useful, but also fidgety at times, and that she will have to be very careful with this sensitive piece of equipment.

With a final polychromatic-hued eddy casting a shimmering glow across her face, the Junior Compu-Sooth Spectagoggles pop into existence and drop into Jade’s hands. The lenses flicker to life, reddish digital lights already beginning to run across the screen.

She promptly replaces her normal glasses with them, securely tucking that pair in with the sunglasses. Her pockets are full of wiry, brittle plants, after all, and she doesn’t fancy having to scrub her glasses clean of nitty gritty vascular bits later.

Shrugging her shoulders so that her sleeves once again shield her wrists from the unpleasant cold, Jade looks interchangeably between a nearby rock and the wide, level slab of ground. The rock seems to be around thirty pounds dense, and there are several others within walking distance. She could use them to stake the grounds out later.

With this thought in mind, the long-haired girl strides back over to the tunnel she had exited the cavern through, planting her bottom on the nearest available space that is free of snow. Grinning softly to herself, Jade sets the Spectagoggles to open Pesterchum only to discover that her chat client of choice has been updated. She thinks that this is a little odd, but as long as she can communicate with someone, it’s certainly tolerable.

Opening a new memo, Jade begins to blabber about everything and nothing at all in equal increments. It is immensely comforting.