AN: Sufficient Velocity and Space Battles are super far ahead, and the Pa tre on is on CH 111. You can find the link on my profile if you wanna just get there.
I'ma update this more often than normal for a couple of weeks to catch it up, but you know, go elsewhere if you want the chapters now.
The first thing she smells is salt, there's just so much salt. It's an oddity, but she doesn't question it much. The quest told her to eat something salty to help the transition, so there being salt on the other side isn't that weird.
She is on the other side, right? She opens her eyes and looks around, pushing herself up on her bed - which is still definitely hers - and spotting the surrounding walls. They're made of salt crystals, tall and imposingly jagged looking. She always figured salt was gotten purely from salt water, to see walls of salt, it makes her question. Do they mine salt? Is that a thing? Are there children with pickaxes getting the seasoning for her meal? It has to be children. Adults would use it all, they couldn't be trusted to mine it.
Regardless, much less important than the walls and their sodium content, is a woman sitting at a mahogany desk to the side. It's placed against the wall, strictly adhering to best use of surface area in the small sharp room. The woman's in a chair that's turned away from the desk, looking at her with a smug expression. So maybe saying she's sitting at the desk is the wrong wording, but she's there next to it, and there's papers and bags on top of it so she's been using it.
She's in thick black plate based metal armor, with points on the pauldrons and knees that look like bat wings. It's an ominous look, trimmed with silver that draws her eyes upwards until she's looking at a red eyed monster with long magenta hair and teeth that look like razors. All around, the woman looks very dangerous, and her gear - especially those razer clawed gauntlets - gives her ideas she might pass on to Tenten.
"Okay, I'm actually in another world," Sakura nods to herself, accepting that this could get weirder, "somehow, I wasn't expecting that."
"You're not," The woman's voice is deep and commanding, "that would be very hard to accomplish. You're at a transit point, they're characterized by incredible amounts of salt, as salt has been found to be plentiful in almost every world. It makes the temporary connection easy, which is good, because what you've done is worth rewarding, but it's not worth building an entire portal relay to make an attempt to maybe connect to your world formally."
"... Uh- could you maybe put that in plain language?" Sakura winces, not really sure how they're even speaking the same language, but willing to put that aside in the bin with the many other problems currently going on.
"Aint nobody got time for world travel to give you money." The otherworldly monster lady deadpans at her, and Sakura is happy to note that somehow, she understands the expressions of non-humans better than humans. The way her incredibly sharp teeth hide to accentuate the nothingness of the mocking expression is just, very helpful for her. If she could give everyone long sharp teeth so large the mouth doesn't close unless forced, it'd probably help her social skills quite a bit.
"But they could travel worlds if the motivation was strong enough?" Sakura asks, "that girl, she wanted to go home above all else."
"Sure, it requires a few thousand souls turned into crystals and then used to operate a relay but it's absolutely possible to connect worlds temporarily, though most travel is done completely by accident during grand battles or tragedies," The woman explains with a kind and gentle tone, "you've probably seen the consequences of it a few times. Don't you have any technology in your world that doesn't necessarily make sense how you came up with it? Maybe it doesn't fit your tech progression, or maybe it does fit but the way it fits is weird? That's almost always caused by someone who crosses over, they instinctively try to get back the things they had at home, and end up adding to the culture in odd ways that don't fit. Like a jigsaw but with pieces from another box entirely."
"Uh…" She can't think of anything of that sort, but there probably is some stuff… Maybe she'll look into it, maybe she won't, what's more important right now is that she's been offered a reward and she seems to be interdimensionally confused at the moment. The reality is that if there was something odd and out of place in her world, she probably wouldn't be able to spot it because she grew up in her world so it'd seem normal to her.
"Your reward." The woman picks up a big bag on the desk, and throws it to her. Sakura watches as the bag flies through the air, and seems to hit an invisible wall. It stays there for a moment, and very slowly wriggles through until it lands on her bed with a massive clink.
That implies her bed is still in her world, maybe? Was that the crossover point she just saw, or a magical forcefield intended to protect her sodium levels from the surrounding minerals? She opens the bag quickly, looking into it to find glowing crystals. Hundreds of glowing crystals, all at least the size of her finger, and all shining with a powerful energy that makes her skin crawl just looking at it. "What is this?"
"The reward for taking down Fierro the slaver," the woman says with a pointed glance at the bag, "necromancy's not illegal in my land, I'm a necromancer, some of my best friends are necromancers, but there's ethical standards when you're dealing with the undead. Wraiths, vampires, liches, creatures of intelligence, are all fine. Trapping a sentient soul in a mindless flesh beast like a zombie? That's the kind of fucked up bullshit a selfish human would do. We were very disappointed to find that after we ripped her still beating heart from her chest and ate it to prove a point, her soul managed to latch onto a nearby plane of existence and flee there. She couldn't even die ethically."
"Uh… I see." Sakura finds herself palming a crystal.
"You don't seem to. It's slavery, okay? It's just an attempt to avoid paying workers by making mindless slaves. If you find any other necromancers like that in your world, I'll pay you to kill them too." The woman explains, waving her sharp gauntlets around, they catch Sakura's eye and make her quite interested all over again. Maybe Lee would like those, she doubts her own crafting skills will be capable of creating anything like that anytime soon, but Tenten has to have a basic idea, right? Maybe she could create a group project.
"You want to pay for cruelty done in another world?" Sakura can't help but blink at the woman like she's grown two heads and started talking out her behind.
"Our worlds are a lot closer than you think, with enough firepower you could probably skip the normal process and just tear a hole between them… Don't try that," the woman coughs into her palm, "what I'm saying is that your world's problems aren't that far off from being my world's problems. Hopefully that never becomes relevant, I'd like to never see you again."
"And if we do meet again?" Sakura asks.
"Maybe next time I'll eat you, maybe I'll pay you, it heavily depends on why we're meeting." The woman gives her a toothy grin, one that shimmers in dull glowing salt based light.
"Uh-huh, and um, again, what is this?" She raises a crystal, peering through its mostly see through structure.
"Soul crystals, they're filled with ethically sourced goblin souls. You can use them for spells, freeing the souls when you do, or use them as a catalyst for your own necromantic research without having to kill anyone or disturb intelligent life. Goblins are just smart enough to count, but not smart enough for it to be unethical to mess with them, so consider it a research grant, or maybe a donation to keep you out of the whole mad scientist, evil slaver route. Just don't put them in fucking zombies, and we're gucchi"
"What does that word mean?" Sakura can't help but ask.
"Which one?" The sharp woman tilts her head at her, possibly contemplating how Sakura tastes.
"Nevermind… What if I have zero use for them because I didn't pick up Necromancy?" Sakura asks, "it'd be a worthless reward."
"But you did pick up necromancy," The woman crosses her legs, and gives her a bright, almost hungry stare. "bye-bye, Sakura."
"Wait, what's your name-"
"Byeeee!" The last image Sakura sees before she loses consciousness is a wave from both gauntlet covered hands in front of a smiling, inhuman face.
Sakura finds herself jumping up in her bed, looking around her room in a cold sweat. The only evidence that even happened being the bag of glowing crystals in her lap, and the prompt on the screen.
[Congratulations, you have earned the Trait: Otherworlder]
[Otherworlder: You've officially crossed over from your world, even for just a moment. Your soul is scarred and changed, you can now speak and understand any spoken language. You have gained a basic affinity for space time techniques, and will no longer be affected by anything that stops time.]
[Space/Time Affinity Lv 1]
"Well that's… cool, I guess." Sakura shakes her head, deciding to avoid salt for a while, and hoping to never experience that again. Her brain can't help but try to figure out the puzzle she was given. What kind of technology or ideas and concepts could possibly be from another world? Was any of that even real, or was it just a crazy technical hallucination fueled entirely by her power to justify the gift of the crystals?
Is any of her life real these days?
She shakes her head again, smacks her cheeks, and decides none of that matters. She's not going to figure that out anytime, so why care?
Instead of pondering pointless nonsense, she gets up, does a few stretches, saunters over to her desk, puts on her headphones, and boots into FF14. Nothing clears the mind like morning dailies.
At least, if the woman is to be believed, every zombie she killed was a soul released. That makes her a good person now, rig?ht