[ OOC: Raië is still attached but I can’t use her until I get a Rogue as a sub, so I’m playing off that she’s "unconscious", fudging it a bit to move it along lol ]


A burning spike of pain struck what felt like the backs of her eyes. Admittedly so that wouldn’t be a pleasant way to wake up under any circumstance, but seeing as the last time she had been conscious she’d been sent down via fire, it struck a nerve a little deeper. But she wasn’t dead, as it would seem. And while the pain in her head was great, she was relieved that she was able to feel pain at all. What did alert her though was the silence. Normally she would have heard a fountain of curses, or at least a passive aggressive jab at her expense. But her daemon was completely silent.


She wasn’t hopeful enough to think that she was gone for good, but she’d relish in the seemingly private time she’d have for herself in the meantime. Or so she thought. As her eyes opened she realized that she couldn’t possibly have been alone: after all, there was no way she got herself up into this treehouse on her own. Where was she…?


The smell of salt and ocean was pungent in her nostrils but not nearly as much as earth and vegetation. An island? She could scarcely remember what had happened just before the airship had gone down. That’s what she got for stowing away as cheap passage.
 

She tried to sit up but the stabbing pain in her head kept her down. Instead she moved a hand up, pushing her fingers gently through her long pink hair, searching and feeling out for any cuts or swollen areas. Her healing was fast, but if the damage was bad enough then it could take quite a while. The thirst would come soon no doubt.


Her eyes, barely cracked open to search out the immediate area around her, closed. Since she couldn’t sit up just yet she called out, her voice hoarse and lips dry, "I-Is anyone there…?"

[OOC: The person described here, Jack, is my character's Boreas Dragon. He has been sucked into this storybook world, but been given a human form to keep in line with the narrative's, general premise. Also, MUCH CURSING AHEAD. You have been warned. :P]
 
Stories are inherently the product of sentient creatures. That is a fact, but one that is often qualified by the majority species on a planet. Humans, for example, tend to monopolize stories when they become the dominant species. In this case, as well as others, the majority qualifies itself as being the only possible population from which protagonists can be drawn. As such, other races are often left without a selection of literary heroes to inspire and advise them.
 
Dragon's like Jack, Natsumi's companion, suffered from this fate in Revaliir. Stories of draconic love were non-existent in print and rarely heard of via oral tradition. This race of legendary, winged creatures is, thus, without literary precedent; lost to the whims of human history.
 
However, monopolies in literature do not imply a lack of imagination. Despite their recent illiteracy, Jack's people were still allowed the freedom to dream. He, in particular, dreamed of adventure, of great feasts and giant hordes of treasure. Occasionally, he even found himself in love stories, though those were far and away the rarest and, quite often, his least favorite.
 
Unfortunately for the Boreas Dragon, Rhea's meddling happened during a night that he decided to delve into those rarest of dream sets. His normal expectations of the dream did not come to fruition as a result, and he awoke in his dream realm with nothing short of utter confusion.
 
"What the fuck is this bullshit," Jack had asked while entering a strange jungle in the dead of night? The airship battle overhead lit up the various streams running through the undergrowth, allowing him to witness the humanoid form that this dreamscape had given him. He was a pale human with white hair and azure fins for ears: a true anomaly amongst all creatures. What's worse, his actions were apparently pre-recorded up until a certain point in the dream sequence. Try as he might, he could do nothing but speak(also known as shout) until morning, all while his muscles forced him to rescue and tend to a strange woman from the eventual, airship crash.
 
It was high noon by the time the dragon turned human finally regained control of his scrawny – compared to a dragon, at least – form, and boy did that come as a loud relief to him. His forced guest was just waking up inside the tree house that came into his possession sometime between never and forever at that point, and he could hear her asking if anyone was there just before his bombastic entrance through the rickety door.
 
"Yes, but I don't know why," Jack said with a voice volume not nearly appropriate for someone just waking up. "This is supposed to be my dream, but it looks more like a fucking nightmare!" Pausing, the draconic humanoid plucked his toned triceps like they were bowstrings, "First of all, what's with this flabby crap?! No proper dragon has scaleless skin!" Finally, Jack pointed to his face while focusing on the wounded Hiromi in front of him. "And this face! It's a baby face without even a proper maw! I have fangs, but that's hardly a consolation prize!"

She jolted quickly, eyes opening and flashing to the door when someone stormed through it.  It was a man, a man she didn’t recognize but could tell by his ears and colorings that he couldn’t possibly be human.  Well, at least not full human.  Who was he?  Her eyebrows furrowed and her lips parted, what did he mean when he said it was a dream?  She didn’t feel like she was in someone else’s dream, not that she knew what the sensation would be like.  And the throb in her head reminded her that she certainly wasn’t asleep. 
 
With as much effort as she could muster without going dizzy, she sat up on her elbows, watching him as he went on.  A dragon then?  That would explain his ears at least.  You certainly have a temper on you don’t you…  She kept the thought to herself, pulling her lips in and waiting quietly until he was finished.  It had to have him who brought her here, but he hardly seemed more enthusiastic about it than she was.  Her eyebrows rose, taking his pause as an opportunity to speak, “Are you sure that this is a dream…?”
 
Maybe it was something different, possibly even something more than that.  What if she was still knocked out cold from the crash of the airship and was stuck in some strange ethereal coma that was intertwining with someone else’s near death experience?  That still wouldn’t explain Raïe’s silence though.  Head throbbing, she pushed up until she was sitting up fully, one hand going up to her head and rubbing carefully at a particularly tender area, “I was in an airship, stowing away to get to Canelux.  That’s the last I can remember before the cannon fire started.  Where are we now?”
 
She looked around, taking in as much of the tree house as she could, but recognizing none of the vegetation or smells other than the sea.  Odd.  It’s not a dream, it’s something else.  At least that’s what she was going to keep telling herself until it made sense to her.
 
“In any case, thank you for what you’ve done, even if you’re reluctant it’s much appreciated.”   She wanted to stand, to get on the move and build her strength back up.  She was too weak to go to her next destination by gate travel, and she was regretting not doing that in the first place now.  It would have saved her and her reluctant savior from having to go through this awkward interaction. 
 

Her other hand lifted up and she waved it, but nothing happened.  She tried again, straining harder than she normally had to in order to conjure up a simple sphere of water, but nothing happened.  Not good.

As bombastic as Jack was, he did feel slightly remorseful when seeing how meek and pitiful the woman in front of him was. He could tell she wasn't human from the smell, so he knew not to underestimate her; but, even so, her currently pathetic nature bade him to not shout as much.
 
"It must be," he said in response to her first question while trying to lower his tone. "I mean, I can't shapeshift like Natsumi. I'd love to know if you know how a dragon that didn't know how to shapeshift before lying down for the night can suddenly lose thousands of pounds, wings, talons and be transferred into the body of a puny…squishy…little…sub-human…"
 
Suddenly, the realization of his current predicament sunk in for Jack. The dragon grew closer to the ground with each adjective he used to describe himself, his pride slowly being eviscerated by each syllable. 'I'm a shrimp,' he thought sullenly while cowering on the floor of the storybook tree house. Eventually, he withdrew into the fetal position, and answered all further questions from the floorboards.
 
"I saw that airship," Jack continued with a much milder voice than earlier. "Yet more evidence that this has to be a dream, because you should be dead after a crash like that. It has to be a dream. It has to be a fucking dream." The thanks that followed this line of wishful thinking were not nearly enough to get him to rise to his feet once more, but that would soon change. Once the Boreas dragon gave his explanation for the previous night's activities – saying, "It was that damn Narrator, not me," – the disembodied voice that had come to be his most immediate nemesis reappeared. It was masculine in nature, and already clearing its invisible throat in preparation to speak – to which Jack could only exclaim, "Oh no. He's back."
 
"The strange savage examined the pink haired female," that enigmatic narrator began. "This exotic creature awoke a hunger in him, but not the kind he normally felt when needing to hunt. She was lithe and attractive, looking like his mother but without the blood relation to deter him. He was instantly infatuated by her, especially once the sunlight was pouring through the cracks in the ceiling of his primitive hut. This primal desire compelled him to draw nearer to Hiromi, his hand reaching out to her hair while calling her pretty."
 
Provided she wasn't used to hearing disembodied voices, Hiromi would likely be confused by this strange, invisible interloper - especially when it came to the purpose of the voice. The truth quickly became clear when Jack stood up from his fetal position and cautiously approached the pink haired woman. He drew close to her as if he had no concept of personal boundaries, and then reached out to touch her hair.
 
"Pretty like the cherry blossoms," he said with obvious irritation on his face. It wasn't that Jack wanted to commit such abuses of boundaries. He had no choice. The Narrator, as the young dragon had taken to calling the bodiless voice, was able to manipulate others in the story just by speaking. His words were law and what had compelled Jack to heal Hiromi even though he normally would not be doing anything of the sort outside of a request from Natsumi. The only freedom Jack seemed to maintain during these spells of mind control, thus far, was the ability to think: a liberty he exercised vividly whilst trying to struggle against the inevitable.
 
 'I swear I'm going to kill that son of a bitch Narrator when I find him!'

She watched him as he spoke, lips pulling in as he continued on.  What he said was true: she should be dead, but she wasn’t surprised in the least that she hadn’t perished.  Even without having been sired she knew that it would never be as easy as crashing down from an airship: Raïe would never be finished off as easily as that, which meant neither would she.  But how he was describing himself, his former self at least, sounded magnificent.  How in the world had he ended up so very…different?  That was a nice way to put it at least.  Not that there was anything wrong with him now, but compared to being an enormous dragon?  It was quite a change.  And all he seemed to keep from it was his coloring and his ears.  Strange…selective.

Narrator?  Had he gone mad…?  Her eyebrows furrowed and her eyes lifted up, looking for a person that she knew wasn’t there: she would have smelled them at the very least.  Then again, Raïe was still as silent as when Hiromi had first woken, so maybe her senses were off as well?  “Are you sure-”   But before she could finish her question she heard a strong voice, startling and out of place enough to have her jerk back towards the wall at the expense of her head being hit.  She winced, rubbing it quickly to ease the pain as she listened to him, but tried to speak over him, “Who is that?  Where are they?”
She searched out the room as much as she could from her spot but saw no one, heard no extra pulse, and smelled no one new.  Instead she looked to the man with her as if he would have all of the answers, but the “narrator’s” words distracted her.  “What…is he talking about?”   Her eyes widened as he moved closer to her, matching what the disembodied voice had said and while she had the urge to smack his hand away from her hair, for some reason her hand stayed down.

The irritation on his face was as great as the discomfort on hers as her nose slowly wrinkled and her eyes widened even more, having flashed from green to deep cerulean.  Again she had the urge to try and smack his hand away and again her arm wouldn’t move.  Now the voice continued, addressing her and causing even more unease as she listened to his instruction, “The poor woman, quivering from anxiety and curiosity could only blush and look away as he brought attention to the otherwise unnatural state of her hair.”   Her right eye twitched.  Quivering?!!  Her heart pulsed faster but it had nothing to do with bashfulness as her eyes turned down and her cheeks filled with warmth.

“Only then did she allow herself to see this man as anything other than beast.  Her entire life, always absent of a proper father figure or healthy male companionship had her attention drawn to the creases of his stomach.”   What. “Unable to help but notice the toned and muscular physique that dipped down: staying hidden under teasing cloth.”   All right that’s it!! Her eyes halved in irritation before they closed, but they quickly opened as her arm lifted on its own and despite her tries to pull back or even teleport away, she was unable to do so.

Her eyes flashed up to his face, barely able to shake her head once before her fingers rested on the crease of his elbow to pull him closer.  Her lips pressed into a tight line and the cerulean soon bled into crimson as her fingers gripped his arm.  You’ve been here longer!!  Make it stop!  Of course it couldn’t possibly have been the poor man’s fault, but seeing as the voice was left with no body he was the only person her anger could be directed towards.