Gyarados slumped into the shallows the second he'd dragged his tail free of the portal. To a bystander it might've looked concerning, the big guy just laid out flat like that, but any concerned bystanders could kindly fuck off because after that whole disaster it was a perfectly reasonable response. Blue knew this because he and Charizard were doing exactly the same thing on top of Gyarados's head.
The rainbow halo flickering around everything had faded into a dull gray, the echoing sound replaced only by a faint ringing in his ears. No key stone burning against his chest, no racing heart pounding in his ears, no raging fire warring with icy water, just... nothing. (Well. Nothing except that ache threatening to start throbbing at the back of his head again.) Nothing left to give. At least now, at long last, there was nothing left to give anything for.
The whole thing still seemed ludicrous. All of that...
that, trapped inside one tiny fragile-looking bottle. Blue had to stamp down the small part of him that worried it wouldn't be enough, that it was still possible for the thing to find a way to free itself; it had already proven it could do so once before, after all. Just had to hope that at the very least it would hold long enough for him to be so old and dead that it couldn't possibly be his problem anymore. That might even be almost enough time for the three of them to get some actual rest. Wild, right?
"Hello," it said. "The great Nathaniel Morgan told me to be friends with you. I know who you are." It looked at Blue. "But I do not know you." The child doubted the other human was anyone important, but the great Nathaniel Morgan seemed very interested in her for some reason. "You might be somebody who is not supposed to exist. Who are you?"
He knew as soon as he'd thought it that it wasn't meant to be, of course, because why would Garbage Fire Island be any nicer to him just because the Asshat in Chief was stoppered up again? Why was one of someone else's randos bothering them when what he really needed was to sleep off the fucking post-
double mega-evolution crash? Did they really have to start in on more multiverse blabbering
now, of all the god damn times?
Linden, of course, was still running on root beer fumes, or just her own natural overclocked Electirizer Buneary batteries, or whatever. Could be kind of a silver lining, actually: the rando could talk to her instead of him, and she could talk to the rando instead of him. Might even get, like, three whole minutes of relative quiet before they had to rouse themselves enough to crawl back to the dorms and go to bed.
"I'm Leaf! Blue's friend!" she said, swinging herself down off Tank's shell and reaching for the rando's hand to shake it. "Not sure what you mean by 'not supposed to exist', though, sorry. Then again, can't really say I'm sure about anything right now! I mean, Blue said something about folks coming here from other universes, so is
anybody supposed to exist in this place, really? Uh, wherever this place is?" She gave the beach another quick scan, as if that would somehow tell her anything new, before something occurred to her and she snapped back to the newcomer. "Oh, you must mean you're
from this place, then! I gotta say, you've got a really exciting world-whatsit goin' on here! Are the, uh, giant jewelry monsters a regular thing?"
