No! Niraya shouted back into her own head.
I can't! They'll SEE!
...what good does it do you if you stay hidden, and you and they all die?..
"I'm not a warrior," she whispered aloud, her eyes wide with terror.
I am.
It felt like a bubble rising up her throat from her churning stomach. The kind that would lead to an embarrassing belch. Even as she quailed from it, Niraya knew she'd made her decision already. Life first.
"Therion."
The word cracked like a whip in her mind, and she felt something moving...like tumblers on a lock. Her throat tightened, but she couldn't stop talking now even if her mouth had been sewed shut.
"Therion."
Her heart raced, and even in the arctic chill she felt warm...no, hot. Her skin tingled, and she sensed the air growing heavy around her, with a smell like a spring storm.
She looked at each of the others in the cart with her wide, frightened eyes...but there was something else in them too. A kind of rising exhileration. She wanted this. She feared the consequences, but she wanted it.
"Don't be afraid," she whispered.
"I'm getting help."
Niraya gave her friends a last look, and finished the call.
"...Therion."
Her eyes went white, as clean and smooth as fresh fallen snow. She arched her back and looked sightlessly upward...and a rune of firey orange and yellow appeared on her forehead. Fog condensed out of nowhere and twined and curled around her, embracing her in a thick cocoon of roiling vapor. Despite this, the rune blazed through it clearly.
[sblock=In The Mist]Niraya was standing, not sitting like she'd been a moment ago. All around her were clouds, mostly white but shot through with grey and stormy black here and there. In those darker patches, lightning sometimes stabbed. Her heart was still hammering, but it was all so strange that it was hard to stay scared.
"What's happening?" she asked no one.
"Where is this?"
There was a chuckle; a woman's chuckle. She sounded older than Niraya, and her voice had a funny echoey quality, but it was otherwise ordinary enough.
You don't recognize it?
"Of course not!" Niraya called.
"I've never been here!"
You're here every night. The speaker paused, then admitted,
not for very long at a time, I suppose. This is just the Mist, after all. The place that is not a place.
"The dreams," said Niraya softly. She'd meant it just for herself, but the other woman seemed to hear anyway.
Oh yes. The dreams. Another chuckle.
You know that's not all they are.
Niraya swallowed.
"They're doors," she said.
"My dreams are doors."
No.
Hands grabbed her shoulders from behind.
You are.
The world went white, and when she opened her eyes...everything was different.[/sblock]
[sblock=OOC]The vignette is just how Niraya experiences the 1 minute 'summoning time' while she's cocooned and changing. When she awakens, she's in her Eidolon form...my sense of it is that she's still in control; it's not a different person at that time. I have thoughts on the possible nature of the Therion, and the presence she converses with (if they are not the same), but I also want to give the GM plenty of space to do his own thing with it too.
[/sblock]
