A Curious Tag Team

Enelen had been on the island much less than a few weeks. No, he was closer to a few days. They'd been very busy days, where he'd been forced to adapt to the world he'd found himself on. Where he'd been forced to realize that magic was not just uncommon on this world, it was downright rare. He'd gone from average to an oddity, someone who could do things others never could. The very idea of it - the idea that most of the people around him would never be able to practice magic - was mind boggling to him. You might as well have said that the humans around him didn't need to breath.

It was a lot to take in. The school was different. The fact that it wasn't really reasonable to spend his entire life educating himself was different. The lack of magic was really different. And for the first time in his life, he found himself surrounded by people very different from himself. People that could change into things, people that weren't from the earth, people that lived in the deep sea. He'd taken for granted the idea that the people in the world he jumped to would be like him. He'd always seen it as a binary set of options. Either there were people (like him) there, or there would be nothing.

He'd never really considered the middle ground, where there were people who weren't like him.

He'd explored the school, made a place for himself in his apartment, and then fetched a piece of wood that would become a backup staff for him in the event that his current one broke. But he'd barely touched the rest of the island, and it was with more than a bit of hesitation that he forced himself out of the school and down towards the city itself. It wasn't that he wasn't curious (because he absolutely was), but instead that it was so alien he feared being overwhelmed by it.

He'd never really visited cities, even back on his own world. There had never been a need. He'd lived a life apart, nestled away in his school. And there had been nothing like this there. There had been no cars rushing through the city (what a surprise those had been). Everything was different, but the noise of it was the most different of all.

It was a bit too much for him. Down in the city, it was all just very overwhelming, and after less than ten minutes, he'd pulled himself over against the wall of a building, clutching his staff until his fingers were white. His head hung, eyes fixed firmly on the ground.

Even the ground was wrong.

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Tag to @"Reignfinite" - hopefully that works for you, if not let me know.​

Overwhelmed would have been the word Enelen would have chosen to describe his state of mind if someone had asked. Everything was overwhelming. People often got overwhelmed on this world when faced with magic and the supernatural for the first time, but for him it was often the more mundane that did him in. Things people of this world brushed off as entirely normal were alien to him. No one would blink at a calculator, but it seemed so bizarre. The idea of electricity itself was strange. His world had only the most rudimentary of technology, and anything more complex than a windmill was alarming for him.

His eyes rose slowly when someone spoke, unsure of if they were speaking to him, or perhaps speaking to someone else. But no, the man - boy? - was alone, and very clearly facing him. He looked to be about his age, and he looked very... white. Pale skin, pale hair, pale clothes... if not for his eyes Enelen would have had to wonder if he'd been dropped in a vat of white paint.

He seemed to be about Enelen's age, and simply asking out of concern. He hadn't realized he'd been drawing any attention, but then he'd been paying very little attention to his surroundings.

He forced a smile, trying to focus. Focusing on a person - a normal person who could have very well existed in his own world - was a lot easier than trying to think about the environment around him.

"I'm fine. Just a bit... ah, overwhelmed." He'd given up entirely on pretending he was from the island. It had lasted all of thirty minutes after he'd arrived, if that. He simply wasn't very good at that kind of deception.

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Tag to @"Reignfinite" ​

A park? Enelen had no particular attachment to parks (he'd never really gone back at home), but a park would at least have less... stuff. Less cars. Less ads. Less strange things. Trees were trees, and aside from some slight differences, most of the flora and fauna of this world was the same as that of his own. At the very least it would be less different from the city, and there was a small bubble of relief in his emotions at the thought of it.

He wasn't expecting someone to understand - but the man did. His explanation was clear enough (although it had not occurred to Enelen that of all the strange powers and people on the island, some would be true empaths. The very idea of an empath had been pursued once upon a time, before being abandoned. Being able to feel the emotions of those around you was as much a curse as it was a blessing, and it had been too finicky to actually replicate.

"Oh." He said, feeling a whole lot like a balloon whose air had been let out. At that moment, all he really wanted was to be back home - either on his world or at least in his dorm room - but there was a niggling bit of curiosity that was starting to build up.

He tended to be curious about most people he met.

"I imagine that... well, a lot of people get overwhelmed. The island is very strange." He'd come to realize that. Even for people from this specific universe it was weird.

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Tag to @"Reignfinite" ​

He just wanted to be back home. Anywhere that he'd ever considered home. Even the dorm, which was not quite home just yet. Some place quiet and normal, where magic wasn't odd or unusual in any way. At first it had been interesting when people got excited over him having magic, and the it had just become tired. You could only have so many people asking you the same three questions about magic so many times before you were ready to write down a little note card to hand out when asked.

"No. I'm from.." He trailed off for a moment, always struggling to figure out how to describe it. When he said 'another world' people tended to think of a different planet. When he said 'another dimension', people seemed to think he was some kind of fifth dimensional being. "From an alternate universe." He finally settled on. That was probably the clearest way to say it. From an earth that was not this one, in a whole other dimension, parallel to their own. "We didn't really have big cities like this." There had never been so much hustle and bustle, never been so many machines. There was nothing even slightly like cars. Those had been a struggle to get used to.

He had no way of knowing, nor any reason to really expect that the man he was talking to was in the same situation - or at least a similar one. He simply assumed he was a native to the island who had gotten used to people like him. People from other countries, other worlds. People who had never experienced anything like the Manta Carlos Islands (although often it was the weird people that threw people off).

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Tag to @"Reignfinite" ​

Geography was not terribly interesting to Enelen. Really, the world he'd landed on was essentially the same physically as the world he'd come from. There were a few differences (the forests were larger on his home world, and some rivers were in different places), but for the most part it was the same. The mountains were in the same places, and so were the continents and oceans. It was the man made features that were different. The cities were in different places, the divisions of land all wrong. Geography had never been much of an interest to him, and while he had some mild curiosity about the world he'd landed in, for the most part he'd given it little attention.

He was not surprised by the strong reaction to the fact that he was from another reality, although he was surprised it was so positive. Often it was curiosity and little more. No one had a real idea of what his world was like, so it was hard to say how they should react. His world could have been vastly superior to this one, or it could have been much worse. The truth was that it was neither better nor worse, but instead different.

When he heard 'me too', it was his turn to look surprised. He'd never met anyone from another reality - he wasn't sure if they existed. He'd met people from other realms of this reality, but that was not quite the same thing. He wasn't even that bothered by being overwhelmed anymore - no, instead he was now good and curious.

"Really?" Although it wasn't clear if he was reacting to the fact that they were alike, or the place to go. "We can go, and then you can tell me about the world you came from." Not his world - there was no diamond pin to mark him as one.

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Tag to @"Reignfinite" - thread abandoned​