[PurpleXVI]

Everyone

The portal looked surprisingly mundane, rather than some brilliant conflagaration of magic or a titanic gateway, it was merely a shimmer in the air. It was about wide enough for a pair of carts to pass through, and tall enough that no normal human or demi-human would have to duck when they went through. The portal had sprung up out of the blue in a forest glade a few months back, in the winter. Now, in the spring, after studying it and making sure that no army of horrible things was poised to come through from the other side to flay everyone, they had opened it up to just about any adventurous soul.

In order to avoid stampedes guards were watching the area, and travellers were allowed through in batches of twenty once an hour.

Upon approaching the portal, though, it started to seem more of an impressive experience. As soon as anyone got near it, the shimmering seemed to intensify, waves of scintillating colour sweeping across it like liquid rainbows. The air thickened and got hard to breathe, as though magic had a physical property, a strange gas that displaced oxygen. Just a few yards from the portal, the travellers, who were now all breaking their initial, confident stride as they encountered the strange conditions, saw that they were approaching not just a shimmer in the air, but a hole in it.

The hole was framed by a thin, transparent crystal structure, so fine that you would expect it to shatter in a high wind or at a harsh shout, decorated with odd shapes which all seemed to tempt the viewer with some form of hidden meaning or appearance, as though looking at them from just the right angle would unveil hidden mysteries.

Within the structure was the hole itself, though calling it a hole was a drastic simplification of some obviously unnatural twisting of the very fabric of the dimensions. It was a long, grey-walled tunnel with sharp light at the other end, the walls were probably best left described as "gray," but in fact they had an eerie appearance to them, like the inside of a tornado, twisting and contracting like the intestinal tract of some giant beast, waiting for them to walk right into it's stomach.

For a moment, the group faltered, but then one gathered the nerve to step inside, and the others followed. The first step in was like stepping over the edge of a cliff, for a second there was nothing underfoot and then a falling sensation, except that this fall was straight ahead, parallel with the ground. Several of the travellers screamed, but had hardly begun before they were on solid ground again.

At first, everyone was blinded by the bright light on the other end of the tunnel, out of it's murky darkness they were suddenly standing in full daylight again. As they blinked rapidly and tried to see where they were, the next thing that hit them was the heat. At home it had been spring, just a tad on the chilly side, here it was like being in an oven, and though they were away from the thick air around the portal, they were suddenly finding it hard to breathe again. The humidity wasn't helping any either.

They were able to breathe, though, and vision slowly returned. Above them was a cloudless, blue sky containing a single sun, a giant red orb four times the size of the yellow one at home. Down at ground level, things looked both familiar and alien, they were once again standing in a forest clearing, though this wasn't the sort of forest they'd left. It was some tangled, dark-green mass of vines and trees which was almost dripping water from the pure humidity in the air. All sorts of alien animal sounds echoed through the surrounding woods, from echoing yells that seemed to be two creatures speaking to each other to spine-chilling cries which sounded like some beast running afoul of a vicious predator. And not all those predators seemed to be in a hurry to kill their prey, often those cries lingered for several minutes before finally ending.

The clearing here also looked more man-made than the one on the travellers' homeworld, trees and brush had obviously been cleared in the last few days, as exposed stumps and severed vines were already turning brown under the relentless sun. Near one side of the clearing, as far from the portal as possible without being in the jungle, trees and semi-permanent wooden structures had been set up. It looked like not all of the ones who had come through the portal before them had headed off in random directions to seek adventure, because it looked like there was a tavern, a blacksmith and even a ramshackle stable, as well as a few houses that just looked like where someone had their bed and hung their cloak at the end of the day.

Leading away from the structures and into the jungle were several well-travelled trails in all directions of the compass. None looked like they wouldn't be overgrown in a few weeks, though, it looked like few people had so far gathered the nerve for the dangerous task of heading into the truly unknown.

As people started making up their mind and heading away from the portal, most threw one glance behind them to see what it looked like on this side. Unlike the obviously artificial thing on their homeworld, this one looked almost natural. It had the same sort of entrance, but it was framed by trees whose branches interlocked and formed a wide arch.


Bas

(OOC: This is Kazilan's character.)

As soon as the druid gathered his wits about him, he found himself extremely uneasy in his new surroundings. It was nothing that could be easily defined, but he felt as though he was in a graveyard, a dead place, despite the rampant growth all around him, and it wasn't the man-made clearing that was doing it. Nature was used to pruning, in the form of living creatures, grazing or forest fires, this was something else, something much, much deeper.


Bas, Anne, Tamora, Lorath

(OOC: Kazilan, dplax, Armen and Man Who etc., respectively. Anyone else who finishes their character sheet can consider themselves to be present as well.)

As the other travellers split off and headed for the temporary village to get a drink before deciding where to go, four people came up from the structures. Two of them were carrying a third on a litter and stopped some distance off to put him down on the ground and get some rest, appearing to be tending to his wounds while the fourth approached the group. At first it looked like he merely had a limp, but as he got closer, he turned out to have bandages covering most of his lower arms, a crutch and an apparently injured left foot. He was a young human, blonde-haired and despite his injuries he managed to give the people he was approaching a cheerful smile.

"Welcome!" He said, his smile becoming broader as he stopped to greet them, "It's good to see some people that don't rush off to get themselves killed as soon as they arrive. Sirs and ladies, I am Jonas," he bowed as well as he could despite the crutch, as though they were royalty, "And as you can see, I and one of my friends got into a bad scrape out there beyond the trees, I'll recover, but I'm not sure that he will without help, so if you can help him, or can give us some coin, just a few gold pieces will do, I'll tell you what I know of the surrounding lands. There are a few places that it would be wise to avoid, as we learned..."

(OOC: If you don't have your character sheet in at this point, and don't finish it before this little encounter is over, don't fret, I'll find a way to introduce you once you get a sheet to me.)