Seemingly Nothingness

[Silver Adept]

Ah, finally, the gambit revealed.

"Now that we have everything out in the open, then, it may be time for frank negotiations."

Silver steps behind a tree and has a good look at its composition. Both tactical and natural abilities aer examined as he studies it.

"Might be worth climbing just to see who's up there."

[Zzyxx]

Zzyxx slide down from the roof of his newly summoned cottage and looked at all the slack jawed Lizards around him.

"What? I know you've seen summoning before."

With that, Zzyxx turns his backs to the lizards and begins walking down the hill toward Nari, Variah, and Azurel.

[Damion]

When he emerged from the forest, Damion did it with a heavy limp, and a silver cane at his side. He came slowly, knowing they would have heard him by now, entered the clearing in which the portal home had been, and simply waited for one of the reptilian forms to greet him.

[Akanari]

A raptor snarled at the elf, annoyed at his weakness.

"We wish you to go home, but it is against our ways to let you. You people from the other worlds, we say we learn from you, but we don't understand how. We only understand how to."

The group composed themselves and two of them broke off to trot quickly after Zzyxx, not hunting him, but keeping watch on him. The rest of the group started to head towards the mage, but they all stopped suddenly in unison, looking towards the direction of the portal. One lifted his head and sniffed, a growl coming from his throat. If one was a mind reader and had touched the mind of one of these creatures at that moment, they would hear a jumble of questions, thoughts, curiousities, and warnings, all lead by one instinct. Hunger.
~
Only one creature stepped out from the shadows of the trees, opening his empty claws wide before the man, then nodding his head. The raptor looked at the man's silver cane, then down at the spot where the portal used to be, now a spot of bare dirt. The spatters of silver-red blood had been collected and put away, holding a connection to the stag-woman. A flutter of wings was heard above, and when one looked up, there was the raptor-bird, still against the safety of the tree.
~
The shaman pulled his claw from Nari's shoulder, grazing the bare skin lightly, making three little lines of blood. She smiled and put a hand to her shoulder, wiping the blood down her arm, staining her skin. Alparen nodded and looked up towards the outsider's camp, watching the blue elf widely flanked by two of the shaman's men. He placed his claw around her stained arm, then tightens his claw, still looking at the elf. Nari stops smiling and looks down at her arm, opening her hand in pain and claws dig in a little deeper, breaking skin again. He looked at her, released her arm, wiped the blood down the length of her arm for her, then sighed, closing his eyes.

What are they trying to do?

[Zzyxx]

Zzyxx keeps tabs on the raptors the follw him, he knows they are there, as an assassin he already marked all of them and prioritized them by threat without even thinking about it. His insticts were almost in full control of his motion, his mind was silent, and he reacted without thinking based on what his instincts deemed to be the safest actions. He approached the rest of the group and stopped behind Nari and Azzy.

"Nari, you're bleeding again, why this time?"

[Akanari]

She frowned and looked down at her bloody-arm, then hurriedly tried to wipe it off. The shaman kept looking at the blue elf, then wiped his bloody claws on his tunic.

"She is bleeding because I made her bleed. Call it a sacrifice for the well-being of others. Ritual, you know."

Akanari nodded weakly at the ground, then looked longingly at the silver pendant hanging around the shaman's neck, depicted a scene of raptors chasing down a human. He looked down at his pendant, then lifted a claw to rip it from his neck quickly, tossing it to Nari. She catches it and immediately dissolves it into her blood system, fire flowing around her hand for a moment longer than usual.

[Zzyxx]

Zzyxx didn't lik the look of the fire at all. his instincts almost sent him into full assassin mode, but his will held that urge back. Zzyxx saw what was depicted on the necklace before it was consumed by the blood of Nari.

"Why were your peopl forced to leave? If what i saw on that pendent was an acurate assement of the past why isn't it the humans who fled to a new dimention?"

Variah moved up beside Zzyxx, the wolf sence her master's shift towards his old ways and she similarly shifted without having to think about it. It became a matter of instinct.

[Damion]

Damion returned the nod that was offered him with a nod of his own, and spoke confidently, his clear blue eyes meeting those of the humanoid before him.

"I assume you know why I'm here. Tell me how to open it."

[Silver Adept]

"Sen-Sen, go be a dear and scratch the eyes out of that lead shaman, please. He's annoying me just enough that I want an explanation or a pair of eyes."

Even though his dragon is not on his shoulder, or for that matter, in this dimension, the comment does express Silver's mood at watching the events unfolding. Theer's a good chance of explosiveness if things continue apace without more explanation on someone's part.

[Akanari]

The shaman looked annoyed at Z, as if he had mistook everything he had said.

"We weren't forced out by anyone. We were forced out by something. The world's climate changed drastically...and we found this place. All of our surviving species came through, and we established ourselves here. For manymany years our culture did not make any advancements, until humanoids started to appear. That is what that pendant portrays, us hunting the humans, who had not expected us, and were not yet advanced enough to fight back as we hunted them. However, while hunting them, we learned more than we could ever have imagined before then, and then we started to develop."

Alparen gestured around him, then smiled slightly, a not very comforting smile.

"Akanari here understands most of our history, not for any particular reason, she just approached me first. That is why she is submitting some of her blood, not herself, to me. For examination. I may not have collected any from her, but it is inpolite in our culture to collect blood straight from a person. We can make that person bleed though. Blood is a very important fluid. Very important."
~
The raptor in front of Damion turned his head to the side, looking at the man with one eye, up and down.

"We are not allowed to give you that information at this time."

The raptor's yellow eye stopped on Damion's face, then he turned his head to face forward again. He looked into Damion's blue eyes, observing, amused. The raptor looked towards the ground, then smiled and drove his large curved claw into the dirt, dragging his foot to the side. He lifted up the claw, placed his foot a bit to the right of the new line, then drew another line at a 90 degree angle to it with his claw. The raptor looked down, then nodded, stepping back to stand beside a tree.

"That is the exact spot. That is all I can show you right now."