"Don't Mysteries of the Boundary of the Real me, old man," Rainbow Neighbour Protean snaps, peering into the Continuum Vortex. While active, it looks less like a badly-kept, kitschy rocks-embedded-in-cement garden pond, and more like a kitschy rocks-embedded-in-cement mystic portal, a glowing crystal kaleidoscope into the Beyond.
"There is much that is unknown," intones the Rainbow Neighbours' mysterious mentor, Arkano, combing fingers through his Gandalf beard like he thinks it makes him look thoughtful. If they haven't all died by Christmas, Polly's going to pointedly give him a gift card to whatever of the hipster mens' barbers in the Bay is currently in the limbo between "not open yet" and "gone broke".
The Vortex isn't supposed to stay open this long, because while the Veil is parted, the demon Sparkless can leap into reality from the Flat Realm, taking the shape of ambient resentments and rampaging as monsters. They're not evil, in the same sense that invasive plants aren't evil. They're just doing what they naturally do.
Much like invasive plants, the answer is nonetheless to kill them.
The Vortex has been jammed open for eighteen hours by some ethereally drifting detritus, and the Rainbow Neighbours are severely running out of steam. Protean is attempting to assist Arkano in clearing it; they've had no luck in trying to push the whatever-it-is out, so Polly has been trying to talk him into hauling it up.
Arkano objects that they don't know what it is. Polly counter-objects that he's a shit arcane mentor, then, and if it's trouble, they'll just do what they do and bop it on the head.
"It's got to go, one way or the other," she points out, and he caves with enormous reluctance, plants his feet and his ornate staff and begins mystically reeling it in.
The incoherent swirl of the Vortex calms around it, transforming the bottomless churn into an endless crystal column of glass-green water. It resolves ever more clearly, the closer it gets.
"Fuck me," Protean mutters, hanging over the lip of the pool.
A battered girlknight, stained glass and clockwork, the stubs of smashed wings jutting from her back, comes slowly into reach. Still. Eyes closed.
"What the fuck," Protean says, as Arkano's occult tether levitates the broken figure all the way out of the Vortex, which destabilises into its usual chaos, flares, and finally closes in a shudder of algae-scummed pondwater. "Who is she?"
"There is much that is unknown," Arkano says, like an asshole who can't ever just say I don't know, like that will diminish him, and levitates the inert knight into a standing position away from the pool.
Protean walks around and around her, staring. At her still and sad and ethereal face, at her body of gears and glass, at her shattered parts. At the socket in her sternum, for some great winding-key.
She almost says we can make a key for that. But Arkano will never do it; will never allow it; will turn it into a team discussion, poison it ahead of time with what-if and caution should be observed. And then Polly will never see those eyes open.
Photos, she thinks. Work from photos, and maybe take some kind of cast. In secret.
She doesn't know yet what she can make a key from; only that she can. She must.
She will.
