AN

No real excuses, to be honest. There was nothing delaying the writing of this chapter but my actually sitting down to write it.
I'll fix that moving forward.

Chapter 3

"Nathan Drake, Nathan Drake, Nathan Drake..." Muttered the lone human in the bowels of the ruins many eons older than him, as he pressed one bloody hand to a dark and dusty wall, leaning on it heavily and smearing his lifeblood across it as he descended down a winding, curving staircase.

There was hardly even five feet between the walls in the stairwell he strode down, and with the dust in the air it only made Aldric feel all the more tense and claustrophobic. His only source of light was the cold, pale white light from his appropriated phone, but it took almost all the effort he had to keep it held aloft and to walk, leading to the light bobbing up and down and doing little to help his mounting headache. With the blood he'd lost, Aldric briefly wondered if he would survive even if everything lined up - even if he found a ballista, could lug it up to the top of the tower, load, aim, and fire it, hit Mothra with it, and kill the damn thing. Even if he could kill Cubone without it killing him. He had lost enough blood that his vision was blurred around the edges and there was a dull ringing in his ears, though that could very well be from the repeated blows to the head these past few days.

Speaking of the head trauma, it reared its ugly head as the sound of his boots thunking against the ancient concrete grated at his ears. It was almost unbearable, and made his head throb with every step. His only solace was in the man whose name he was chanting like a montra - some would argue that modeling himself after a death-defying video game character was illogical at best, and suicidal at worst, but he would ask them to take a step back and look at his life. He had survived a plane crash, gotten mauled multiple times by a demon wolf-bear with an exoskeleton, gotten thrown eighty feet through the air, and then had been attacked by a demon eagle, itself probably as large as a navy ship, also with an exoskeleton. Really, the only thing separating him from Nathan Drake was the treasure hunting through ancient ruins - but wait, what was he doing right now?

Treasure hunting through ancient ruins.

Checkmate.

"Urgh..." He groaned, slowing his pace and trying to grit his teeth through another wave of pain. "Yeah... You know what?" He said to himself, as he saw a door coming up. "IF airlines... I want... Like... Ten million dollars. A year. For the rest of my life. I want a space station. I want one of your jets just so I can blow it up." A pause, "actually, no." He grinned, inching his way down the deep, dark, dusty stairs. "Tell you what, I'll make you a deal: Ten million flat fee, but you stuff Cubone and Mothra's bodies for me. If I kill those goddamn things, I don't ever want to forget." Maybe he'd tear off Cubone's outer skull, or take one of Mothra's feathers.

Wait... Aldric frowned, wasn't mothra a... Well, moth? Shit. He crossed to the other wall with a grunt, and slid down the last few steps before he entered the room. What famous giant birds are there... Are there any? God damn it, you know what? I discovered this thing, I'll name it. If I want to call it Mothra, that's my right. It's in the constitution. He looked up, flashing the light around.

Well, not exactly what he had been expecting.

Flat stone tables laid out in a perfect uniform grid. Glass beakers, microscopes, other equipment, all covered in thick layers of dust. He was in a laboratory. Did Aztecs even have laboratories? Did Romans? Where the fuck was he?

Oh god. He groaned, deciding to slink forward and see if he couldn't find something resembling a map. If I got dropped into the Twilight Zone I'll shoot myself. He thought, idly looking around the lab. He wiped dust off of counter tops, checked under piles of lab equipment, scanned over bookshelves, but couldn't find anything useful.

Wait, wasn't there an SCP like this? He frowned, staring at what looked like a giant picture frame, though it was coated in so much dust that whatever it depicted was hidden entirely. Fuck, which one was it? It was a disc... You picked it up, it glowed a color, you touched it to a mirror and got transported to some Lovecraftian fuck-world. Correction: If he was in the SCP world, he would shoot himself. He honestly didn't know which prospect was more terrifying, as he balled up his sleeve and wiped at the picture frame, praying it was a map. He'd even take a world map, just something to let him know where he was.

No such luck. The more he wiped away, the less likely it was to be a map. It was a simple piece, he quit after he got halfway through, only seeing a large black hilltop, at the bottom of which were four women in long dresses, one green, one orange, one that could either be violet or purple, he wasn't sure, and one such a bright shade of gold he almost confused it for white. Or maybe it was blue. Oh fuck.

If I'm losing the ability to see color, that's not good. Aldric looked down at his chest, sure enough - blood seeping out of his incredible patchwork.

And he wanted to kill kaiju.

Yeah, he was totally ready for this.

He sighed loudly, it bleeding into a curse as he slid backwards and fell onto an ancient footstool.

So... I'm either in a scientific city... Or I just lucked out and this little tower of mine is a science one. Yes, judging the entire tower based off of one room was a bad decision, but he was dying. He didn't have the chance to change the variables and retest like a good little scientist. What do I do? What do I do?

He could either, A, keep heading down to ground level and pray he would find an armory, risking bleeding out or another encounter with Cubone, if it was still alive, or B, climb up, and channel his inner Wander and try to kick the Mothra's ass. There was always option C, run, but then that left him at the mercy of Mothra and Cubone, but without any concrete buildings to protect him. Not that the buildings would help, considering Cubone could jump eighty feet and Mothra was big enough to clip a skyscraper.

He slid around in his seat and leaned against the dusty lab table. He'd been just a second from leaning forward, when he saw, just at the edge of the cone of light cast by his phone, a twinkle. Curious, he reached over and grabbed the beaker. Inside was a strange, sand-like substance that reflected the light from his phone, in a manner almost like gemstones. Even stranger was that it was green. With a light grip at the top edge of the beaker, Aldric idly shook it back and forth as he frowned at it. To his amazement, the motion made the sand inside glow, for just a second, before it dulled down.

Now, geology may not be his expertise, but he was somewhat certain that there wasn't much on earth that could do that. Curious, he leaned forward and sniffed at it. No dice, it just smelled like everything else: Stale, dusty air. Aldric may develop lung problems with all the dust in the air, if he survived his kaiju killing spree.

I wonder if this is some kind of weird magnesium. Aldric thought, peering closely at the sand inside the beaker. Oh, that would make my freakin' day. Just tape some of these to my arrows, and I might be able to stand a chance against Mothra. Considering avian bones were, by necessity, hollow and more brittle than land-dwelling bones, that meant the shockwave from an explosion would much more easily cripple a bird. Of course, considering just how big Mothra was, he could either have paper-thin bones, or its 'thin' would still be as thick and durable as Aldric's femur.

He really hoped the last option wasn't true.

But how would he test this?

Well... He thought, giving the beaker another light shake, and watching the green sand inside build its glow. Seems to be reactive to motion... Maybe I just... Throw it? The glow died down, and Aldric shook again. But where could I -

From their vantage point far separated and above from the battle in the ancient city, the trio recoiled when the sounds of an explosion and, following soon after, a thick column of smoke blasted out of the lower levels of one of the central towers. The two flanking their raven-haired leader exchanged nervous glances, before looking up to the frowning woman.

She simply hummed, "instead of asking me each time something happens, let us instead operate under the assumption that, since I can sense his very life, unless I say he is dead, he is not." She said, cradling her chin in thought.

The gray haired teen, however, gave an incredulous look to the smoke flowing out of the tower. The Nevermore orbited around it, having sensed the energy of the dust that had caused it. "But..." He looked at the ancient bridges and canals, seeing the heavily wounded Beowolf charging towards the tower. "If he doesn't have aura to protect him, that's an explosion, Cinder. How is he going to survive that?"

"If he wins... We can ask him, Mercury." Cinder said, her red eyes watching as the Beowolf ground to a halt, its head snapping back and forth as it watched the smoke flow upwards to the sky. "He's survived worse, thus far."

Oh god, was everything supposed to be upside down? And on fire? Was Cubone back? Did he black out and shoot him with the flare gun? Is it dead?

Aldric groaned, as he was roused back to consciousness. He found himself pressed up against the wall, on his back. He was visibly smoldering, and his ears now rang with a painful intensity, and he felt something leaking out of it. His entire body throbbed in pain, and he coughed out some blood as he laboriously turned over to his chest. Just the act of moving sent lances of pain all up and down his body, he was certain he'd broken his stitches, maybe a rib or two, for good measure.

So... Good news, that shit explodes. He thought, coughing out a dollop of thick, sticky blood. Bad news... Holy fuck, where do I begin? He groaned, hardly finding it within himself to push himself off of the ground, and rest his back to the wall behind him. As a matter of fact, he felt the energy fading from his body.

Oh god... Please tell me this will just be a brief little nap. He thought, as his vision darkened.

It was, but when he awoke, he found himself more exhausted and in more pain than he had been in when he'd fallen asleep. His vision was unfocused and he felt dizzy and weak. Hardly able to string two thoughts together, the only thing he accomplished when he roused to consciousness the first time was lolling his head from one side to the other, before it became too heavy for him and simply fell back to a neutral position, his chin resting against his chest. The next time he woke up, there was little change. He didn't have to wonder if he was dying, he knew he was. No one's shirt got that red if they were healthy. He blacked out a third time.

There was a change when he awoke for the fourth time, but it wasn't for the better. The fourth time he was roused from consciousness, it was to ground shaking beneath his feet. He heard a savage roar that had only grown too familiar to him, but for the life of him he couldn't...

For the life of him, he couldn't...

He couldn't...

Out again.

The next time, he awoke to the smell of burned hair, blood, and bad breath. He cracked his eyes open an inch, and if he'd had any fluids left in his body, they would have filled his pants, when the first thing he was greeted with was cubone looming over him. At some point he'd slid down the wall, now laying on his side. It nudged at him, but he didn't have it in him to resit, and he was pushed back and forth by the animal, as if it were checking if he were alive.

Slowly, his eyes slid away from the massive maw of the demonic bear-wolf creature. He saw, strewn about the grown, other glass beakers, many broken. Through his half-lidded eyes, however, he also saw something perhaps useful. The same sandy substance that had blown him up five blackouts ago was covering the ground. How all of that hadn't detonated too, he didn't even have the brain capacity to question. He did, however, manage to connect the dots enough to know that if he could finger his flare gun and shoot it, yes he may die, but he'd at least take Cubone with him.

It prodded him again, more roughly this time. Fortune seemed to favor him in this, as it made the arm that wasn't pinned to the ground fall over his back, onto his bag, mere inches from his flare gun. He had to build up every ounce of energy within him, focus it all to his arm. He wouldn't really have to aim, either - just fire it in the general direction of forward. Maybe not even, the sparks could ignite it all, if it was so sensitive that shaking it in a beaker set it off.

With a thick swallow through a dry throat, Aldric twitched his fingers. They responded.

Yeah, a big fucking explosion.

What better way to die was there?

With a pained grown, his hand snaked out and grasped the grip of the flare gun. Cubone jumped back with a start, seeing its nemesis suddenly snapping back to consciousness. However, when Aldric swung the gun around drunkenly, it snarled and charged back forward, a second too late. The last thing Aldric saw was the flash of his red flare blasting out of the barrel and over the pile of sand on the ground.

What he wouldn't know was, much like the man whom he modeled his very survival after, fortune, and perhaps something much greater, favored him. The vicious animal's decision to charge him, just as he fired his gun, meant that it was above him when the flare shot, practically smothering him with its weight as it raised its claw. But when the flare ignited the sand covering the ground, the explosion, powerful enough to blast a hole in the building large enough to open it up to the air outside, was mostly absorbed by the monster above him. It took the brunt of the blast with its body and absorbed most of the fire into its fur, leaving Aldric to take little more than burst eardrums, burns to his arm, and multiple broken bones due to the monster's massive weight.

Not unscathed, but only just a bit closer to death than he had been when he'd fired the gun.

The wolf-bear, however, was a different story. Its biology worked in a manner completely alien to the human body. It healed, but far slower, it compensated, but for much less long. Once a threshold was passed, once too much damage had been accrued, this demonic creature simply could not keep itself alive any longer. Since it had taken the brunt of the explosion, many of its hollow organs had been burst completely, and with that damage, it bled out internally in minutes, leaving its corpse to slump onto Aldric's comatose body. Perhaps the most fortunate event of them all, however, came when the bear-wolf's body began to vanish in thick, black plumes of smoke. It filled the laboratory so quickly, and exited so slowly, that most of the flames died down and were snuffed out before oxygen was able to roll back into the room and feed them. By the time everything had settled down, the briefly raging inferno had turned to a few scattered flames, with nothing close enough to provide fuel enough to spread.

He'd nearly died, but Aldric had survived an explosion, that he'd caused, in the ancient ruins he was looking for treasure in.

He really was Nathan Drake.

The next time he awoke, he coughed. He was so dehydrated that his lungs rattled, his lips cracked, and his tongue was dry and thick. On the plus side, he'd slept so long that the pain had dulled down to an uncomfortable ache. On the downside, there were more reasons than he was just healing, that this was happening, and none of them good.

First things first, he tried to slide onto his back, but the mere act of moving his arm sent lances of sharp, peerless pain up and down, and he cried out in a hoarse voice. He'd broken his arm, and while he may be able to improvise stitches, he didn't know how to set, sling, or bandage broken limbs. Oh, and he was alive. He almost didn't realize that, until he blinked to himself and realized that, if he was dead, it followed that he shouldn't be feeling this kind of pain.

Okay... Slowly. He thought, with a croak.

First things first, as he moved so slowly that he may very well have not been moving at all, he needed water. He needed just a little bit, just enough to wet his mouth and moisten his throat. It took him an hour to shift over to his back and use his good arm to pull out one of his water bottles. It took another hour, of small, Spartan sips to down the bottle. If he drank too much, he may vomit it all up, and he'd only be worse off, then.

Once he was done, he felt just a little energy flood back into his body, so he tried to haul himself back up to a sitting position. He noticed now the massive, gaping hole in the building, and the dark night sky outside. As he gingerly leaned up against the scorched black wall behind him, he wondered how many days he had been unconscious.

Next, he fumbled inside his bag for some kind of food. He had to settle for little nibbles, turning a meal that should have taken minutes, into one that took long enough for the sun to rise and begin to brighten the sky outside. Once he finished his paltry meal, his mind, clearing up, bade him look at the injuries on his chest. His shirt and the bandages were all dark, deep red, but they weren't wet, instead they had dried up, just enough such that the blood coagulated and sealed off the wounds. He was still critically low on blood, but he wasn't losing it nearly as fast as he had been.

Small victories, sure, but the sound of wings beating at the air soon drowned out any good feelings he may have allowed himself.

Right.

Mothra.

One foot, and one arm, really, in the grave, burned, beaten, bloodied, and bruised, and he had to kill a kaiju. He couldn't even look to Nathan Drake for help on this, he'd exhausted that arsenal when he'd blown up his ancient ruins and survived.

Would it be... Too much to ask for. He thought, groggily, as he thought hard about how best to get back to his feet. Just... Just a little help? He asked no one in particular.

Silence.

Yeah... Yeah I didn't - He blinked as he realized the beats of the wings were getting fainter.

As a matter of fact, he could now see Mothra, just under the edge of the hole in the building, and it was getting smaller. Best of all, he saw it missing more than a few feathers, though it was arguable if he was hallucinating that bit, or just not seeing it , that didn't change the outcome. He'd won. He'd kicked Cubone's ass and scared the hell out of Mothra.

He chuckled, but when he did, he saw a gob of blood fly out like snot, causing him to slump a bit.

Of course... He thought. Can't win 'em all. He could hardly move his legs, he'd won the battle, but if Mothra came back, he'd lose the war.

As he geared in for another nap, preparing to let tomorrow's him deal with tomorrow's problems, he heard something faint. It sounded like voices. He hardly dared to believe it, until he heard them growing louder. He couldn't make out what they were saying, but when he closed his eyes and tried to block them out, they didn't leave. They were real.

A rescue team.

Maybe they'd helped scared Mothra away?

"He -" He coughed like a chain smoker, slumping over. "Here!" He called out hoarsely. "I'm here..." He said, his voice whistling out of his throat, before he fell forward and lost consciousness again.

"He didn't even kill the damn thing!"

"But it did flee."

"Don't help her!"

"You're just mad because you owe me money."

"That too!"

Aside from the arguing voices, the first thing Aldric realized as he slowly roused to consciousness was that he wasn't in nearly as much pain as he had been in. As a matter of fact, pain seemed to be furthest from his mind. His chest, really his entire body, felt as if it were wrapped tightly by bandages, his broken arm was tightly secured in all manner of splints, and he didn't even feel dehydrated. Still wanted water - a lot of it - but aside from a dry mouth and throat, tricking his body, he didn't feel that urge. There was even what felt like a mattress under his back, and a blanket over his body.

He cracked open his eyes, staring up at a night sky, a vibrant orange glow to his right, where the voices came from.

"Our initial goal for him was met. He killed the beowolf. The nevermore was an afterthought, and the shrapnel from the explosion damaged it enough that it decided to flee. That alone is more than what most huntsman can accomplish with many men, weapons, and aura." Came a low, womanly voice, its calm tone in stark contrast to the raised voices of her two companions.

"But look at him!" Argued a male, "really look at him! Do you think he'll survive the week? Let alone what you want him for?"

"I've got to be with Cinder, here." Said a second woman's voice, it lighter than the first one. "The sheer amount of stuff he's survived so far, and all he's done? Now he's got us with him. Literally all he has to do is lay back and heal, he'll be fine."

Just what the fuck were these people on about?

"I know you two can sense what is there, boiling, stored within him. Even from so far away it was like a bonfire, but now, next to him? His aura is like a firestorm." Said the first woman, Cinder, he assumed her name was. A strange name, but if they were giving him medical treatment, who was he to judge? Especially considering his own damn name.

"Oh come on. Power gets beat by skill any day, you know that." Said the man.

He may have a point, but seriously - what were these people on about?

He forced his eyes to open further, but that did little to help, as it only opened up more of the night sky to his field of view. He got a nice look at the broken moon, but aside from that, nothing. He groaned, in an attempt to get their attention, and it worked, as conversations ceased and he heard the ground crunch underfoot.

A woman with raven hair now came to loom over him. She was dressed strangely, for a rescue woman. Instead of a uniform, he saw a short red dress that ended just over her knees. Her bright red eyes loomed down to Aldric's blue-gray, her face set in a neutral frown as she looked him over. Through the fog of lethargy, Aldric felt as though he'd seen this woman before.

He groaned, "please tell me you're the rescue team." He said, in a volume barely above a whisper.

She gave him a sympathetic smile, "unfortunately not as you may think, Mister Aldric." She said. "We've done the best we can with what we have. For now, just rest, we can speak more when you've healed."

Much as that sounded like a good idea... "Lady... There's a giant Godzilla out there..." He croaked, trying to sit himself up, but barely even able to summon up enough strength to lean on his good arm. "And I pissed it off." He wheezed, "I don't think sleep is the best option, right now." At least, not out in the open air. If they would stuff him in the pilot's cabin, or in the fuselage, or at least prop him up in his magic chair, he'd feel better.

Her sympathy turned to amusement, "don't worry, Mister Aldric. If the Grimm return, we can take care of them."

As he felt himself losing the battle against sleep, he managed to wheeze out a weak, "the fuck are those?", before he was out again.

Anything from hours to days passed again, when he awoke the second time it was still dark. This time, however, he woke up to hushed voices, a far cry to the loud arguments he'd first woken up to. It was hard to make out what was being said, but there was little else he had to do aside from trying as hard as he could to discern what it was being said.

"We're wasting time!" The male voice he'd heard earlier stressed. "Look at him. He's been out three days now and he's hardly improving. You actually think he'll be able to help us? We should just skip this ancient dust nonsense and go get Torchwick. We tried, we got that, we failed. We need to just move on."

"Mercury, for the last time. We're in the home stretch, once he wakes up we'll be ready to wake up his aura, and imagine what he'll be capable of." Said the lighter of the two female voices he'd heard. "With training, he could match Cinder!"

He heard Mercury sigh, "now who's being unreasonable?" He asked, "listen. I'm just trying to point out that he very well may turn out to be a liability to our mission, rather than a resource."

Yeah, the conversation made about as much sense to him, too. On this thought, he tried summoning up what strength he had to push himself up. Remarkably, he found it within him to do so, clenching his chest and sitting up. Granted, when he finally made it up, he found that the effort had sapped him of most of his strength, but he still would call it progress. He looked to his broken arm, seeing it was wrapped up and secured to several cardboard splints. His chest was enveloped in fresh white bandages, and in his good arm he saw a needle, leading up to an IV drip.

Guess that's why I haven't died of dehydration. He thought, turning his eyes over his shoulder. He saw a dark skinned woman with mint green hair, speaking to a tall, pale man with hair grayer than his grandfather's. Both of them were looking at him, the man, whose name he assumed was Mercury, with a reserved expression, and the woman, with a raised eyebrow.

Have I met these two before? He wondered, as a sense of deja-vu assaulted his mind.

The crash survivor cleared his dry throat, "happen to have some water?" He wheezed.

Mercury exchanged a glance with the woman, who rolled her eyes. "Fine." She said, grabbing a small travel bag and pulling out a bottle of water, before she got to her feet and strode over to Aldric. "Here, let me know if you need more."

Nice bedside manner. Thought the crash survivor, as he took the bottle with a nod. "Thank you." He said, opening up the bottle and taking tentative, small sips. "So..." He coughed, "if you guys aren't the rescue team, what are you?" He asked, his voice hoarse. "Tell me you're monster hunters, I need that right now." He added, with a shake of the head, and another small sip from the bottle.

Strangely, he saw a look of horror dawn in Mint's eyes, and a look of glee in Mercury's, as the man said, "oh, oh please tell me you're always that sarcastic."

"I can't believe there's two of you now." Said Mint, looking over her shoulder to Mercury.

The silver haired man simply grinned and clapped his hands. "Oh I think I may grow to like him, now."

"Shut up." Mint turned back to Aldric, "not necessarily." She said.

Aldric bit back a quip about sexual tension between the two, instead asking, "then where am I?" He asked, after a sip from the water. He gestured upwards, to the moon in the sky. "And what in fuck happened?"

Mint looked up, "what, the moon?" She shrugged, "I hardly know, never bothered to learn." She said, leaning back on her haunches and sitting down. "As to where you are... You're in the kingdom of Vale... Specifically in the Beacon Cliffs." She explained, as if it were helpful.

Aldric stared at her from behind his water bottle, an eyebrow raised and a blank expression in his eyes. Sure, considering everything he'd seen, and his SCP and Twilight Zone theories, he should have expected an answer like this, but that didn't change how incredulous he was.

"Uh..." Okay, sure. "And... Where is that? Exactly? South America? Some... Middle of the ocean maybe?" Yes, he knew he was grasping, and he was pretty sure the answers he'd get wouldn't even be remotely close to what he wanted, but that didn't change the strength of denial. Hell, maybe he'd been dropped into the Marvel universe, he'd get to hang out with Spiderman, shoot the shit with Deadpool, or grab ahold of a cosmic cube, turn him into a supersoldier. That'd be fun.

But unfortunately, that wasn't the answer he'd get. The minty-haired woman shook her head, "unfortunately not... I've never heard of those kingdoms." She said, cautiously.

Aldric frowned, wondering if the hesitation in her voice was telling. "Uh-huh." He said, "kingdoms. Sure." He felt confident enough to take a large swig of water, but he ended up coughing up half of it.

"Hey, come on, don't rush yourself." Said Mint, as she pulled out a cloth and gave it to him. "You took some hard hits." He took the cloth and dried his face, "some huntsman won't go after the Grimm you fought, let alone... Well, alone and without any dust weaponry."

Aldric groaned, trying to sop up some of the water soaked into his bandages. "You keep talking like I'll know the things you're saying, lady." He deadpanned, "how about you start from the beginning. Clearly -" He grunted, shifting position and turning to face her, noting that he was half entangled in a sleeping bag.
"I'm not in Kansas anymore. Probably not even on Earth anymore... So where am I?" He asked, "what is Vale, what are Grimm, what is dust... Just where the fuck am I?"

Mint-hair frowned and broke eye contact a moment, "I think it would be better if our leader answered those questions for you." She said. "She should be back soon." She looked back up, "I'm Emerald, by the way. He's Mercury."

Aldric grunted, giving them each a nod. "Well, to finish off the roll call I'm Nebo Aldric. My friends just call me Aldric." He leaned back on his good hand, "you're also very close." He added, indicating the space of less than two feet between him and Emerald.

Emerald retreated a few feet, "so can we ask you a question?"

"Shoot." Said Aldric, as he looked around, wondering where his magic chair was.

"What the hell made you decide to shoot a dust lab, while you were in it?" Mercury said, as he looked at the crash survivor from his position near the fire.

"Forgive my snide, but I'd be able to answer that easier if I knew what dust was." Aldric pointed out, "all I knew was that it was very explosive, and I probably wouldn't be surviving the encounter anyways, so I might as well take out the Cubone with me." He shrugged his stiff shoulders, and tried stretching without stressing the bandaging and stitches that covered his sore, aching body.

"I assume by 'Cubone' you're talking about the Beowolf?" Emerald asked, her head tilted and her bright green eyes locked onto Aldric's gunmetal gray.

Aldric gave her a blank look, wondering if she could understand her mistake without him prompting. After a few seconds, however, it occurred to him that he was being rude for little reason. He'd been dropped into the Twilight Zone, ostensibly into another universe, had nearly died, and here these people were going out of their way to save his ass. A little respect was probably required, he reasoned.

So, Aldric shrugged. "The big skull-bone bear thing." He elaborated. "Yes."

Emerald nodded, not picking up on the implications of his earlier pause, though, if the look on her friend's face was any indication, he certainly did. "We call them Beowolfs." She explained to him.

Aldric grunted, with a nod, and took another sip from the bottle. "Well, to answer your question, I didn't really expect to be surviving anyways."

"You should be lucky they disintegrate when they die, else you may have been burned alive."

Now Aldric gave her an unabashed stare of abject, blank shock. "I have so many questions about that alone." How the hell did something just disintegrate when it died? What, did they rot in seconds? Strangely enough, this was all starting to sound somewhat familiar. It was right there on the tip of his tongue.

"Well..." Came a new voice, causing Emerald's head to snap up, and Aldric to turn stiffly to his side. "I hope I should be able to answer them." And he saw, lazily leaping out of the destroyed fuselage of his airplane, a woman hardly a few years his senior. She wore a long red dress, reaching just to her knees, with her raven hair flowing over her shoulders and out of sight behind her back.

Aldric was again struck by a sense of deja-vu, but his mind, so starved of blood and nutrients due to his injuries, still had trouble connecting all of the dots being given to him. The feeling was akin to staring at a question one knew they had been given the answer to, but simply unable to conjure up from the depths of their memories. He knew what two and two added together to make, he had been taught it before, but the answer was just beyond his reach. But if he'd been dropped into the Twilight Zone, then how the hell would he have ever seen any of these people before?

Actually, he had a question more important than that. "There is no way in hell you heard me say that." He pointed out, raising his hoarse voice so it would carry over the distance between him and the raven-haired woman.

Though if he were to be honest, he didn't quite care for her response, considering he'd met a kaiju-sized raven and a wolf-bear with an exoskeleton that could leap eighty feet through the air. Though not without snide remark, he was willing to accept she'd managed to hear his dull response to Emerald's earlier words.

Instead, he pushed on ahead, "and who are you?" He asked, before double-taking and adding on, "and what were you doing in the Captain's Cabin?" He nodded to the airplane the woman had jumped out of.

As she reached closer, the raven-haired woman nodded once, "I am Cinder." She said, "Cinder Fall." Whoa, he'd gotten some bad deja vu, returning again to the 'two plus two' point he'd made. "I was hoping to find something of use in there. I've never quite seen a machine like it, before."

Aldric stared at her blankly, "you people have..." He looked at the weapons hanging from the small of Emerald's back. "Guns." He turned back to Cinder, "but the concept of flight is beyond you?" Sometimes the sarcasm was unavoidable; Aldric chalked it up to being raised by a bunch of potty-mouthed sailors.

Cinder shook her head, "no, we've airships, but your vessel... If I had to guess, it only moves and cannot hover." She sat down in the grass a few feet from Aldric.

Aldric's head recoiled, "airships? Oh Christ, we used to have those, but the only way we could get them to float was by filling them with hydrogen. One exploded and killed a lot of people. We kind of... Never went back." He nodded to the airplane. "We just fill those things with gasoline and use the thrust to take off and fly. They don't float, but they do land, and when they aren't smashed to shit, they do drive."

Cinder's face grew a curious frown, "hydrogen? Why would you use such a volatile fuel when you could simply use dust?"

Aldric used his good hand to make a brief gesture towards Cinder, pointing at her with his finger before he dropped it back to the ground. "And there's the million dollar term again. What the hell is dust?" He asked, "and while I'm at it, where the hell am I?" He felt a pressure build up in his head, and he paused to press at it, until it went away. "I'm clearly not in Kansas anymore... And your friend, here -" He nodded to Emerald. "She said something about the Vale." He lifted his head to see Cinder regarding him, letting him think aloud. "And if I had to guess, I'm not even on Earth - my planet - anymore either. There is no biological imperative anywhere for evolution to create something like that Beowolf. We've got big animals, yes, but that thing..." He shook his head, "it jumped eighty feet in the air, and has an exoskeleton that seems to serve no purpose. Its size isn't so much what I'm worried about as its strength. That thing was about as big as a bear, but a bear can't jump that high and can't hit as hard as it could. It's too heavy and its muscles, while good, aren't that good. The only animals on Earth even remotely capable of jumping that high are animals that literally evolved to jump, and none of them even come close to the height or length that thing jumped. To do so like that, it'd need muscles denser than gold, and the ability to use one hundred percent of the strength they could unleash at any given time, but the latter is unlikely, because they wouldn't survive long enough to reproduce if it were the case.

"And its big buddy, the bird thing, that one makes even less sense. The largest animal alive on our planet was a blue whale, and that only ever measured about a hundred feet. Dinosaurs were hardly bigger than that at their biggest. The largest bird is..." He ran his hand through his hair, idly noting some bandages tied to his head that he hadn't noticed before. "Shit, I don't know, an ostrich? But those things are hardly bigger than people." He stared off into space, not noticing the glint in Cinder's red eyes, as she regarded him with interest. "And that's all ignoring the fact that something of that size shouldn't be able to fly under its own power. It'd need literal gas pockets, full of helium or something, a lot of 'em, just to get it to float in the air so it could use its wings to fly. If it did, it would have exploded when my fun in that little laboratory had hit it. I saw it as it flew away, it was hurt and burned, but it was still alive and not exploded.

"Even ignoring the amount of leaps of logic one would have to make to make those things comply with the laws of physics... Both of them were clearly territorial. The Beowolf was on me days after I crashed here, and the Kaiju thing was on us minutes after we crashed into its little nest. The Beowolf was clearly a hunter, else it would have just abandoned me after I set it on fire that first time. The Kaiju can't be a scavenger, there isn't enough dead in the world to provide it with the energy it would need to grow to that size and keep living once it did, so it has to be a hunter too. That means there's two entire species of demon wolf bears and enormous birds that outweigh warships and dwarf most skyscrapers. We humans, we're crafty motherfuckers, but regular bows, arrows, those kinds of things? They wouldn't even scratch them. Guns may, but not flintlocks, or anything like that, only heavy artillery, the antimaterial stuff that turns people into paste. But we wouldn't survive nearly long enough to evolve technology far enough along to get those, or the tanks we would really need to fight them.

"So, simply put, with those things walking around the planet... And what I shudder to think else could have evolved in an environment that bred them, there shouldn't be a single way possible that humans are around to populate it. Especially not in such numbers to build a city as big as the one I found just back that way." He nodded his head over his shoulder. "The only way we could is if we had modern technology. Tanks, guns, the things I just listed... But like I said, if we evolved alongside eachother, we damn well should not have survived long enough to invent those things. That means there had to either be... Some kind of..." He shook his head, "I don't know, event?" He looked up, giving everyone a look, and noting how they all were watching him think this out with rapt attention. "Had to have happened, to drop them all here when we had the technology to fight and survive against them... Or we had to have found something that bought us that time..." He shook his head, "but that's going much too deep into assumptions territory. So let's go back."

He turned up to look into Cinder's eyes, "to you. I see guns strapped to her hips..." He nodded to Emerald, "gray hair over there, Mercury? He's wearing what looks like body armor. But you, I see arrows on your back." He nodded to Cinder, pointing out the small bundle of arrows sticking out from the small of her back. "So you have technology... But there's the fact that you don't know what an airplane is... Despite it being a logical, cheaper offshoot of an airship, which apparently you do have, but they don't fly on hydrogen." He looked up to the dark night sky above them. "And to top it all off, I don't know how the fuck that -" He pointed upwards, causing all, including Cinder, to look up to the shattered moon, lazily hovering in the sky, millions of miles above them all. "- happened. Let alone how we survived it.

"So, I think I'm within my rights to assume I'm not on my planet anymore. And considering the vastness of space, while it isn't functionally impossible, it is practically impossible for there to be another planet with a carbon copy of humans, speaking English no less, running around it. So I either found that below one trillionth of a percent, or I'm in another universe entirely." He looked back down to Cinder, "so forgive me, Cinder... I do sound short, I know this, and I apologize..." He rubbed at his aching head, "but for God's sake, where am I?"

There was a stark, dead silence for a few moments, after Aldric finished speaking. After she digested everything he'd said, Cinder simply grinned, arced an eyebrow, and turned her gaze over to Mercury, the silver-haired man instantly leaning away from the orange flow of the fire and waving his hands.

"I know, I know, I know." He said, "maybe he has a chance."

Aldric turned his gaze from Mercury, back to Cinder. Cinder nodded, and leaned forward, interlacing her fingers. "I would say you are correct, Aldric." She began, "in so much that you are not on your Earth... However there is much you are incorrect in thinking, and I will do my best to explain it to you. To begin with, our world is one called Remnant." Another series of alarm bells ringing through Aldric's head. "But I would ask you, before I go into detail... If you are any indication, your world is one that exists squarely within the natural law of things. You value education and the ability to work within the physical limits of your universe, am I correct?"

Well... You're half right. I value those things, but everyone else? Eh, we elected Trump. That says enough. Aldric gave a sidewards nod of the head, "yeah, close enough."

"Then I would ask, what do your people know of magic?"

Aldric frowned, "like, slight of hand, pick a coin out of someone's ear, magic? Or actual, disobey the laws of physics, magic?"

"The latter." Cinder said.

"So far as we know it doesn't exist outside of fiction." Aldric responded, already not liking where this conversation was headed. "Some think its possible, but others... They like to think that magic is just the science of things we don't understand. Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from it."

Emerald grew an impressed expression, "that makes more sense than I think it should."

Aldric ignored her, and leaned forward himself, with a light groan. "Are you trying to tell me that magic exists here? In Remnant?"

To answer him, Cinder extended her hand forward, the palm facing the sky. A moment later, the air began to glow with a red, heat-like light, and out of nowhere a bow swirled into existence and came to rest in Cinder's hand. Aldric found himself staring at it, his blood-starved brain too taxed from his earlier leaps in logic to try and think of any kind of explanation for the can-not-be he'd just seen. Her display, however, wasn't the only one. Cinder lowered her hand and nodded to Emerald, who attracted Aldric's attention and soon had it captured entirely, as he saw her split into two, and the two into four. Then one of the four turned to Cinder, a second into Mercury, and a third, into him, before they all faded away with a ripple of light.

He stared at the area the phantoms had taken up for a few seconds, his brain having ground to a halt, like rusty gears.

Aldric sighed, "okay." He nodded, turning back to Cinder. "Magic." He said, dully.

"Damn it, I wish I'd taken a picture of that!" He heard Mercury laugh.

This prompted Aldric to look at him from over his shoulder, "well now I have to ask what can you do?"

Mercury grinned a toothy grin, and after Cinder gave him a nod, he shrugged, and rolled up his pantleg. He revealed to Aldric a fully cybernetic leg, reminding him of something out of a sci-fi game, and prompting him to wonder if their 'airships' weren't closer to his definition of spaceships, and that, single, simple, seemingly innocuous thought, was when it clicked. All the feelings of deja-vu, the sensation that some of the answers he was looking for were just there, barely out of his reach but close enough to tantalize him, they all fell into place. One puzzle piece suddenly brought the entire picture into frame, and he realized why everything around him was so familiar. For Christ's sake, he'd been watching this universe's sister show on the plane ride in here - the entire damn thing was on the SD card in his tablet.

The Beowolf, the Grimm, these three, their 'magic', that gigantic stone city, the world of Remnant, the Kingdom of the Vale, a shattered moon, the answers had literally staring him in the face. If asked, he would never actually tell someone that it took him looking up a man's pants and then zoning out for a few seconds, for it to click; he would instead say that he figured out when Cinder finally let her name drop. It would save a bit of dignity, but he doubted anyone would ask. What were the odds, after all?

Well... He frowned, turning back to Cinder, and suddenly feeling a lot less safe than he had been moments ago. About as likely as surviving a plane crash... A fight with a skull-wolf-bear... A point blank explosion... And hopping universes into fucking RWBY.