OSA Reimeiki

Rosita stares pensively through the window, rolling her staff from one hand to the other and trying to make sense of the strange vibrations that it had begun emitting. Suddenly, she hurls it aside onto one of the beds lining the dull grey room. There is a flash of purple light, and an irritated mass of yellow feathers topples onto the floor with an unceremonious "thump".

Without turning around, Rosita sighs and addresses the angry quacks coming from her disgruntled companion.

"Sorry Kyna."

"Sorry?! What made you decide you needed to club me and nearly burn me tail feathers off?!"

It would be best, she decides, to tell Kyna what was going on. Even if she can't sense the presence of power just yet, a fellow practitioner of magic  would be the most likely to understand. Nonetheless, Rosita attempts to compose her anxiety before she says anything, trying her best not to sound insane. "...has the air been...telling you anything?"

...Yeah, because that makes her sound perfectly sane.

Kyna simply raises her eyebrow. "Have you been inhaling anything of Anna's lately?"

Tenaciously, Rosita extends her hand towards the crumpled bed in search of her staff, attempting to revert it back into its dormant bracelet form. Instead, the object comes hurtling towards her, striking the bars on the window where her head had been only milliseconds before. Watching as the bars began to dissolve in the trickle of sparks being emitted from the end of her weapon, Rosita crawls across the floor to join Kyna. 

The summoner's beak is slightly ajar, eyes wide, with her one eyebrow still comically raised. "You were saying...?!"

"That wasn't me." Rosita moves gingerly and picks up her wand, which had become slightly reduced in size but was still buzzing with a strange, uncontainable energy.

"There's a force in this land. I haven't been able to identify it, but it's the most tempestuous I've ever felt." Shavings of metal, as fine as dust, begin to settle in a heap on the window frame like the grains draining out of a sand timer. "And the most powerful."

Hearing the clang of something striking a barred window, Rachel pauses in before turning the corner and glances back at her appointed guards in exasperation In response, one of them raps his glistening talons sharply across the door containing the duck-human and the robed, potentially dangerous one. There is a stirring of energy, static-y and restless, that causes her feathers to ruffle and stand apprehensively above her skin - regardlessly she away, resuming her journey to her quarters. Again, she paused when a hysterical snickering - no doubt coming from the one called "Anna" in the first room - wafts boisterously down the hallway. Ensuring that she is alone, Rachel exhales a frustrated but inaudible sigh - not because of the distracting ruckus these humans were causing, but because their very presence seemed to be stirring something - an interest - that her kind abhor. 

Again, she starts down the dimly lit hallway, breathing aloud in irritation, when she notices a foreign smell coming from further down the hallway. Her keen eyes scan the hall with a precision that leaves no crack in the walls unnoticed, focussing quickly upon a thin trail of smoke slowly spiraling towards the ceiling, suspended by...nothing.

Swiftly, Rachel analyzes the situation and bounds forward, prepared to extinguish the source of the smoke...whatever it may be. But what the heck could it be coming fro - ?!

A human hand had materialized, as if from the smoke itself. 

Barely able to contain her surprise, Rachel takes an instantaneous, startled step backwards, all the while being eternally thankful that none of her kind were close enough to witness that...betrayal of weakness. Her apprehension quickly translates into fury, and she creeps as close to the foreign smell as her senses will permit her before spitting belligerently:

"Who are you? Reveal yourself, illusionist, for you are trespassing and are must be punished for it! Is it you, robed one?"

The voice that answers is quiet and raspy, but insultingly familiar.

"My bad." In a fluid motion the wall seems to retract a layer of skin from around the frail form, which is slumped pathetically on the ground but nonetheless bore an utterly amused expression. "Didn't mean to scare you."

Rachel's teeth grind into a vicious snarl at the mention of fear, and she barks through Maria's cacophony of hacking coughs, 

"How DARE you insult me? Why aren't you detained?! How did you make it past the security?"

"They just didn't notice me," Maria wheezes, starring down at the tears in her dark jeans and straightening the collar to her black sweater. By far, in the ragtag group of unruly humans that had arrived on the compound, she looked closest to what one would deem "normal"...perhaps too much so. She notices Rachel starring at her attire and murmurs quizzically, "So noticed too, right? How everyone changes clothes when Anna pushed that button, but they all really work with who that person is? Well, you wouldn't really know, but..." She squints up into the dim light to stare momentarily at Rachel's throat. "You're different from all of them."

Rage, confusion, and interest are suddenly colliding in Rachel's mind in a chaos so engrossing she could hardly maintain her composure. Still, rage wins again.

"What do you mean?!" She growls, her subconsciousness practically screaming at her for even conversing with this scornful little human. Still...

"They're all very..." she snorts, looking disgusted with herself. "Departmental."

"What?!"

"Yeah, YOU never had an english teacher that forced you to analyze poems about ants..." Maria takes pensively drags on her cigarette before muttering, "When we went through to this dimension, they all suddenly had some gold thing around their talons, or their throats. Something with a  symbol thing on it. And you," she stops to cough "don't have one."

Swallowing the sickened that had leapt into her throat, Rachel lunges forward to snatch Maria off the ground by the collar of her sweater. Her panic at the possible truth of these words - although surely hidden behind her contentious expression - ricochets through her chest, impossible to ignore. Was this a glitch in the star's teleportation? ...Or was it an irrefutable display of disloyalty to Lehtrocy, the thing she had worried about for all this time?

With the ill human dangling from her beak like a dead mouse, Rachel bolts back towards the detainment rooms. The other guards step back respectfully as she unlocks the door to the first room and hurls it open. From within, a loud shriek erupts from a red-eyed, cartoon-like figure. Anna, a bedsheet draped around her shoulders like a cape, is somehow dangling from the ceiling. In a corner, the dark haired figure is snoozing peacefully.

"AAAANNNNAAA!" Bellows the anime figure, smoke pouring from her ears as she continues to berate the oblivious creature. 

Rachel heaves Maria onto the floor, where she is promptly squashed by a falling Anna.

"Eee hee hee hee, pancakes!" Anna cackles as she scuttles away from her victim.

Rachel looks upon the scene in cold bemusement, waiting for Maria to peel herself off the ground before slamming and locking the door.

Inside, however, Maria is unfazed. She watches curiously as Anna leaps off the top of a dresser and crashes into the wall in an unsuccessful attempt to get back on top of the lighting fixture. After lying dazed for a few moments, Anna dusts off her black jacket and attempts once more.

Not her straightjacket. Just a jacket.