ETTING   OME   O   LFANDRA

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Hespa's Story part 1 - Gold Dust

Somewhere in the vast, uncharted outer-regions of the otherspace she calls thick air, Hespa drifts.  She has been searching for quite some time now, and although she knows some of her friends to be safely home, she herself has failed to find *any* of them without their help.  There are simply too many places to look in this infinity.

**this is ridiculous...**

She knows how hopeless her quest is, but she cannot give up, not while her friends need her.  Sighing mentally, she forces herself to focus, and looks around.  She no longer has any idea where she is - or rather, which part of real space she is aligned with.  While it is not possible for her to get lost in thick air, where space is a very relative concept, it is still strange not knowing what she will find on the other side of any portal she opens now.  She has seen some truly bizarre and unrecogniseable places of late.

Time to move further on and further out.  She concentrates, twists with her hands and her mind.  Not moving through thick air - moving thick air *around* her.  For every point in thick air, there are thousands upon thousands of others with the same distinctive signiature, and Hespa's strange connection with this realm allows her to navigate to any of them without moving.

Thousands upon thousands of points...  There are the familiar ones, the known and visited, the unknown, the strange...  She keeps going, shuffling through them like cards...

Further out...

further out...

further...

further...

further...

STOP!!

There, sitting in her mind like a single speck of gold dust in a mountain of clay...  One point that makes her whole being ring like a bell.

**what the-**

In her astonishment and confusion, she starts to lose focus, to return to herself.  Quickly, she forces herself to focus, reaching out for her destination... and she is there.

She looks about.  Thick air extends uninterrupted in all directions.  Now that she is here, there is nothing unusual to see.  Yet her body is still humming, her mind tingling.  There is something special about this point, something significant to *her*.  And if it cannot be found in thick air... it must be in real space.

Hespa pauses - she needs to calm down and think.  She knows this place is significant to her, but that is all.  Not whether the significance is good or bad.  Out there could be... anything.  Caution is required here.

Slowly, she brings her hands together, trying to keep them steady.  The electric-blue sparks of a perfectly ordinary portal form around her fingers.  She carefully pulls her hands apart, energy flowing between then and expanding out into a perfect circle with her hands on opposite sides of its perimeter.  The portal is a little larger than her head.

She intends to leave it this size while she sees what is on the other side, but after only a slight hesitation it continues growing.  This has never happened before - usually the size of a portal is controlled first by the distance between her hands and then by the amount her mind allows it to grow past that point.  Alarmed, Hespa slams her hands together to destroy the portal, but it no longer seems to be connected to her.

Not to her hands, and not to her mind.

Completely independent of her, the portal now expands rapidly until it is large enough to suck Hespa through - which it promptly does.  She briefly feels a strange compulsion pulling at her, pulling more at her mind than at her body, and then she is tumbling through the portal without a clue as to what she will find on the other side.