The library

Specter Knight pointed out that he had facial hair now. Indeed, when Rex touched his chin he felt a patch of hair. Thankfully, compared to everyone else, his body had barely changed.

"Well, at least I can shave"

Rex tried with all his might to not laugh at how ridiculous everything was because he really needed to get on her good side. Of course, if Tairee paid any attention to him, she would notice that he was snickering.

"So, your boss tried to kill you yesterday. Are you going to help us defeat him or what?"

Miss Tairee looked to Rex with a slight smile as he approached, but after he spoke, she burst out into a fittingly childish giggle. "Tried to kill me? He he, if my boss wanted me dead, he could do it a lot faster and more effectively than a dragon, silly boy" Miss Tairee said to Rex coyly. "I was never in any danger yesterday; that dragon was never going to harm me. Even if I had died I would just come back like all of you" she continued, setting the laptop down on the desk and hopping down to the floor, "still, thanks for killing it. It means a lot to me."

She spun around to twirl her dress and giggled just a bit more before she went on. "Besides, whether I wanted to or not, I couldn't help you defeat him. Now is there anything I can help you with?" Miss Tairee asked, putting her hands behind her back and smiling up at Rex.

edited 15th Feb '16 9:55:47 PM by FirockFinion

Ben trudged past the playing kids sadly. He didn't want them to see him get upset. As he walked, he kept thinking. This was the boss' doing. He called out the boss earlier, so now the boss was trying to make him miserable. As he stopped by one of the doors that led into one of the many hotels, his hands balled into fists and he kicked the brick wall on the side of the door.

Strangely, no pain. It almost felt like the wall was made of styrofoam or something (though with the durability of brick). A punch. Nothing. Two more punches. Completely painless. He wasn't even paying attention to this, however, as Ben soon found himself pounding on the brick wall as hard as he could. "I! Want! To! Go! Home!" he shouted, punching the wall again with each word. "This stupid city, with its stupid changes, and people appearing and disappearing and dying and changing and hurting each other and killing each other!" he ranted to no one in particular.

When he was finally exhausted with treating the wall as a punching bag, he fell down to his knees, breathing heavily. He thought about all the times he had been put in mortal danger in these past few days alone. Normally he reveled in the chance to sort out moments of mortal danger, and he was a thrillseeker, but right now he was overwhelmed. He thought about Brother Marcus. How he had tried to kill Ben twice, and how he had to watch Brother Marcus die twice.

And now the Boss had to mock him on top of that. "You think this is funny?" he yelled up at the sky. "Laugh it up, big guy! You just laugh it up! This making a good story for you? I hope this is worth it. I really do! Last thing I'd want to do is ruin your perfect story, big guy!" With one last kick on the brick-styrofoam wall, he slumped against it and sighed, sitting there silently.

Plague Knight ran through the streets, parks, and playgrounds, occasionally tripping over his own flowing robes in his haste to get to the library, not noticing that he failed to feel any pain from his falls. However, as he gotten close to it, he noticed on a bench on yonder was another little boy wearing cardboard armor painted blue. The Knight looked at the boy for a while, but soon he recognized him.....

"Marcus.......?"

The knight looked around, seeing no one else was approaching the other boy. He walked up to the bench and sat down next to the "armored" boy.

"Hi," Plague Knight greeted.

As Plague Knight got close to Brother Marcus, he'd see that the boy's eyes were closed, and he seemed to be almost... Meditating. He did not respond to the knight, being focused almost entirely on the low mumbling he was doing. It was hard to make out the words, but it seemed to be part prayer, part soothing, and part reciting of mechanical instruction manuals. On the bench next to him was a burning stick of incense in a little bowl.

Though besides just being quiet, the other thing that made his words hard to hear were the other noises coming from the boy. Crossed on his lap just in front of his 'helmet' were his bolt pistol and chainsword. The pistol was a fairly straightforward nerf style pistol, and the sword had the blade made entirely of soft foam while the handle was plastic with a little speaker on it. That speaker would normally be playing imitation chainsaw sounds, but right now was angrily spitting out a quiet cacophony of static that only occasionally sounded like a chainsaw and at other times almost sounded like words. The pistol, which Marcus had taken the magazine out of, was constantly clicking its trigger on its own, over and over. And on the boy's back, the cardboard mockery of his former jump pack had a few superfluous flaps, meant for imitating the exact shape of the jump pack, wildly swinging back and forth.

edited 15th Feb '16 11:19:32 PM by FirockFinion

Lots of new people, and lots of new names to remember and probably forget. A little gashadokuro, Sonic the pointed animal, a few humans, a Rex (not that she recognized him out of the clown getup), a little metal man, "Tiiiiny Rick"...and a very much shorter version of Big Reaper from yesterday. This whole "reverse age" thing that was mentioned didn't seem affect Koishi much, but it certainly did affect him. She tried to spend the trip to the library memorizing all of these people's appearances and blending into the background. It would certainly not hurt, considering how easy it was for her to forget.

The library itself was very spectacular. Loads of books, just about everywhere! Man, if Satori had gotten to this place she'd never leave. She'd be, like, a reverse-hikikomori, someone who never leaves someone else's room. Koishi had a brief giggle at the novel idea.

The woman that worked there looked vaguely like the one who she attempted to rescue yesterday...and she worked for the boss? Koishi wasn't sure about doing anything like trusting her...but no-one else seemed to share her sentiment with how chummy they were, even if they lost years to these time shenanigans. Maybe this was because she was the only line to the one causing all of this? Someone who takes requests, and maybe their only way out at this point.

Koishi forgot the mild tirade about how bad it was to keep people against their will she had planned for the librarian as her mind went on another tangent. How had she been affected by these time-shenanigans? Some people must've been older, sure, but she just felt taller. What if she became younger instead? What if, if she became younger...

Her eyes flashed with sudden inspiration. There was a burning desire that she could fulfill right then and there...but she could wait to ask until everyone else was finished. It would be impolite to make such selfish requests in front of a group of veritable strangers!

She saw the suggestion box, sat at a desk and immediately started writing a note with furious abandon. Shielding it from everyone else's view by folding it many times, she got back up and stared at Little Miss Tairee expectantly like a hungry wolf. A cheerful, and evidently very excited, but still hungry wolf.

"feeling down, buddy?"

Ben would soon find that Sans was standing close by, it almost seemed like he had appeared out of thin air, but in reality he had only quietly followed the boy to the outside, mainly out of curiosity over what exactly he was going to do. The library was a little too crowded for his liking anyway and he could always go back to it if he wanted to.

It seemed that, just like the monsters in the Underground, Ben just wanted to leave his prison and go back to his rightful place, the irony was a little funny but it was there. Sans couldn't help but wish it hadn't been him who fell into the Underground instead of that other kid, but now wasn't the time to dwell on the past like that, the kid-turned-adult looked like they were having a bad time and from what he could see, he didn't really deserve to be going through any of that.

As Ben was finishing his ranting, Sans briefly took his phone out of his pocket and took a little something out of the dimensional box, not that anybody would be able to see what it was, as he soon hid his hands in his pockets again as he drew Ben's attention to himself.

edited 16th Feb '16 1:34:23 AM by FullMoon

Near a playground bustling with activity, Garrett was hiding in the shadow of a tree. It was one of the countless playgrounds in this city, unless it were always the same few playgrounds, for — and this was but one of this place's bizarre quirks — the layout of the place seemed to be constantly shifting... giving Garrett no end of a headache.

This wasn't helping him in any way, especially seeing as he already had plenty of trouble from the strange transformation that came over him. He felt oddly clumsy and awkward, as if he wasn't feeling comfortable with his own body; and indeed, closer examination had left him with the dumbfounding realization that he had apparently reversed in age, back to the days of growth spurts and acne. From the fact that the city was populated mostly by children of all ages (and species!), with but a handful of adults to take care of them, it was easy to assume that this sort of thing probably happened to most of the inhabitants.

And what inhabitants they were. Most were human, but a number of times he had noticed — and carefully avoided — several bizarre creatures that seemed halfway human, but clearly were not. Garrett preferred to keep his distance from these. Experience taught him that if it walks on two legs and isn't human, it's likely not friendly.

"What the devil is this place?", he muttered. This city could easily give the Maw — the chaos dimension, after all! — a run for its money in sheer strangeness.

"Whatever it is, I'm sure as hell not gonna get any answers just standing around. I can't exactly afford to waste time in this... madhouse. I need to find a way out, and fast. I guess I've explored enough... now to interrogate. Let's just quickly check if my gear is all right, in case the locals turn out to be... cranky."

Garrett's confusion quickly turned to anger as he checked his equipment. Was this some sort of a joke? His dagger was blunt and made of some light material, his blackjack barely weighed anything and seemed hollow on the inside, and all his broadhead arrows had harmless sponge tips! "Great. Whoever or whatever runs this place wants it to be one giant friendly playground. Well, this is the one kid who never plays nice."

He came out from the shadows, only to realize that while he was musing behind the tree, his surroundings shifted again. He was now near a building he recognized from seeing at a number of times at a distance. It was the city's sole fixed point: some sort of tower with glass windows.

He took in the group standing in front of the building. There was a guy in an ugly hat; another man, holding the ugliest baby Garrett had ever seen; and— Well, that was alarming. Some sort of a humanlike machine that reminded Garrett of one of the Mechanists' artificial men. Almost like that damn iron baby that once sneaked up on him in the Mechanist tower.

Garrett weighed the idea in his mind for a while, but eventually decided to try and approach the people openly. They didn't seem exactly any more dangerous than he himself did at the moment, the awkward gangly teenager he was.

"Any of you can explain what this place is?"

Only then he noticed Sonic, and stopped in sheer surprise.

"...and what this thing is?"

edited 16th Feb '16 4:31:21 AM by Korodzik

Little City Zone/ Act 2

Sonic was just about to enter the library, when another person showed up. It was a teenager that just called Sonic a thing. Sonic wasn't amused.

"Excuse me, but I'm not a thing. I'm Sonic, the fastest thing alive! As for where we are, well, some guy decided to put you in here with us for inspiration, and now where here in this city that constantly changes. Also you can't die. So, now that that's out of the way, who are you?"

edited 16th Feb '16 5:46:40 AM by DGAMER

The Library

Specter Knight listened to Miss Tairee's response to Rex's question. Well, that certainly confirmed that she probably was as important as she was made out to be. This, plus the fact that there seemed to be no actual weapons, meant that killing her today was completely out of the question. Oh well. At least she was also subject to today's changes. With as much menace as he could muster (which sadly wasn't much), he asked her a question.

"Why have our weapons been replaced with these toys?"

Ben looked up from his brooding silence to see Sans standing beside him. His eyes covered in tears, he wiped them with his forearm before looking Sans in the eye sockets.

"Yeah, I'm feeling down. This place stinks. You don't know what I had to do while I've been here. I watched friends die in front of me. That guy keeping us here keeps trying to get me to kill. See, there was this evil knight who's racist and kills non humans on sight. He tried to kill me cause of my powers. We had to... Take him down. But it didn't work." He winced, rubbing his eyes again.

"A couple days ago, there was this huge snowstorm and people died over and over and went crazy. The guy keeping us here said he'd turn 'em back to normal if we killed this dragon. I yelled at the guy and told him I'd find a way to stop him. And then today he turned me into this, and I can't have fun with the other kids, or even control myself."

He sniffled a bit more, trying to compose himself but failing. "I hate this place. I wanna go home."

edited 16th Feb '16 7:46:16 AM by AllHailThrall

After Twilight's efforts successfully restrained the dragon enough to help the others, she grinned triumphantly before passing out from exhaustion, even before the day shift.

Twilight slept for a good while after the day transition, still reeling from the effort of the previous day. When she finally awoke, she walked around somewhat groggily. She hadn't noticed yet that she had become a little shorter and younger, still a bit older than the Cutie Mark Crusaders, perhaps, but nonetheless young.

She soon ran into an older-looking Ben and a skeleton she had never seen before. Ben was displaying an emotional breakdown due to the stress of being away from home. Twilight walked over and put a comforting hoof on his back. (She was reaching for his shoulder, but her shorter size and Ben's taller size made that fail.)

"You're not the only one here like that. We all miss our homes. We all want to go back. You don't have to deal with this alone."

edited 16th Feb '16 8:26:24 AM by Cybersbe

Cole looked at the...metal thing that seemed to be talking to him, and he only looked even more perturbed at that, stepping back and shaking his head slowly. "Another of you that's so silent, so still inside, how...why...I don't understand! Why can't I hear you?" He grimaced a little, looking at Garrett who had come to them, and his voice seemed to become a near monotone. "Stand not against us, lest you feel the sting of ignorance's barbs." He jerked his head to the side, then just closed his eyes, resting his head against his hand, lowering his head enough so that his face was almost completely hidden under his hat. "Good. Good. I can still hear some of you."

Garrett boggled at the bizarre blue animal. He'd never seen anything like this in his entire life. The entire creature looked bewilderingly wrong; every single part of it seemed too small or too large, too thin or too wide. It was more like a caricature than a proper being. Its color was striking blue of a kind unseen in nature — and, like a weird cherry to top the cake of bizarre, it was wearing the most garish, ridiculous shoes anyone's ever seen.

The creature was evidently intelligent, and yammered at Garrett in response, objecting to being called a "thing" only to immediately declare itself "the fastest thing alive". And then followed an incomprehensible babble of "inspitarion" and how Garrett (?) "can't die".

The thief reflexively responded "Garrett." to the blue thing's final question before turning to the nearby humans. Children could be excused, but what about the adults, can't they see how utterly off-the-wall this creature is? Why are they regarding it with such impassiveness?

"Right. Can anyone translate that for me?" Garrett asked, addressing the humans and the man of iron. "Who runs this place, why am I here, and where's the exit out of this... city?"

Then the hatted man spoke up, but nothing he said made much sense. That phrase he said to Garrett, though... I know I heard this somewhere... That Keeper map! But how... Garrett turned to him, bewildered. "You're a Keeper?"

edited 16th Feb '16 9:27:53 AM by Korodzik

City -> Library

Thankfully, almost everyone who showed up seemed more or less friendly. The key word there was "almost." HK-47 hardly seemed like the most pleasant of individuals. Besides the fact that he seemed to be referring to everyone else as "meatbag," she got the distinct impression that he would have outright killed Ben if he had been able to. She decided to make it a point to stay as far away from the robot as possible.

Potentially murderous robot or not, Zelda didn't get the chance to introduce herself back before the collective decision was made to go to the Library. She had no objections to this plan herself, and since the only other option was to continue wandering aimlessly she opted to follow along.

The interior of the library proved it was just the sort of place she'd been hoping to find upon arrival. Not so much in the "looking for answers" sense, though she hoped it'd help with that to; it was a place she really wanted to look around and find all its secrets. It looked like it had a lot of them.

She'd likely have all day for that, however. First things first was getting answers, and this "Miss Tairee" person Ben mentioned sounded like her best bet. That person looked to be the girl (who, like almost everyone else on this day, probably wasn't supposed to be that age) behind the desk there.

She walked up but didn't say anything immediately. There were already two other people trying to talk to Tairee, and it seemed more polite for her to simply wait for her turn. In the meantime she gave the cloaked kid with the scythe a wide berth; she got the impression that he wasn't the friendliest of people either.

Cole looked a little confused at Garrett's question. "Nnnnno? I am not a mage, or...even Dalish. Your name is Garrett? ...are you the Champion of Kirkwall? You would be a mage in that case, more likely to ever be a Keeper than I."

Ben, startled by Twilight putting her hoof on his back, jumped and instinctively pushed it away with the back of his hand. His left hand. He didn't notice, but once the Omnitrix bumped against Twilight's skin, it beeped and the display turned yellow instead of its normal green.

Ben's head turned towards Twilight. "Whoa... you startled me," he told her. "Sorry bout that," he muttered. "And uh, thanks for the pep talk. I... I needed that," he sighed. He tried to stand up, hoping he would pull himself together.

edited 16th Feb '16 9:44:09 AM by AllHailThrall

All of sudden what seemed to be a purple unicorn came by and gave the depressed Ben a small pep-talk that seemed to help quite a bit. That would be a pretty weird thing to tell someone without any context now that he thought about it. Either way, that sure made things easier.

"i just got here, but going from what you said it looks like some really messed up stuff happened." Sans then shrugged, still keeping his trademark grin in his face "but, y'know, even if this place sucks, you might as well try to make the best out of it, just because you're a grown-up in appearance doesn't mean you can't have some fun."

edited 26th Feb '17 11:40:24 PM by FullMoon

Little City Zone /Act 3

Sonic got a bit annoyed at the fact that Garrertt didn't understand what he said at all, then asked for a translation like if Sonic was a alien. He was no alien.

"Hey, I just told you what has happened. You really are stuck here. There's no need for translation. "

Morty looked around the scene with a mixture of confusion and resignation. To him - a kid that had already sired one half-human son thanks to a series of improbable alien cultural misunderstandings ^note  it was a long story , this entire day was already starting to grate on him. He, Ben, and Rex seemed to be the only ones that hadn't been turned into little kids- Ben had gone off somewhere by himself, leaving him and Rex as some of the only rational adults left. The fact that one of the newcomers was some kind of murderous kill-bot didn't really do anything to assuage Morty's nerves... nor did Miss Tairee's annoyingly laid-back approach to this whole manner.

"I-I, uh, I dunno if this makes up for everything..." he mumbled to himself, looking around at the scenes of kiddy-anarchy and wincing. "Like, uh, y-you can't just kill everybody for fun," he continued, his tone getting a little firmer, "and then, uh, and then... do this to say sorry, I dunno." The teenager looked down at the floor again and tried to shunt his anxious thoughts into a coherent train. "Tw-two wrongs don't make a right... or something. I-i-i-it's not okay." He looked around at the others for some kind of support. There was another pause. Morty was forgetting something... someone... someone very important...

Then it hit him. "Wait!" he said, looking down at where Tiny Rick had been standing just a minute ago. "H-h-have any of you seen Rick?"

There was a crash and the tinkle of broken glass from somewhere outside, as though someone had lobbed a heavy object through a glass window. High-pitched, braying laughter could be heard from somewhere down the street.

"Wooooo! Tiny Riiiiiiick! Wubba-lubba-dub-dub!"

Morty looked down at the floor in secondhand embarrassment. "Aw jeez..."

edited 16th Feb '16 10:27:01 AM by Locoman

Ben smiled and nodded at Sans. "Y'know what? You're right. I should... I should really just try and have fun." At that moment, he heard the sound of breaking glass. His hero instincts went off and his head shot up in the direction of the sound. "What was that?!" Ben asked. "C'mon!" With that, he began to run in the direction of the sound that he heard.

When he reached the source of the sound, his hero bravado crept away as he determined look on his face gave way to complete exasperation. His hand flew up to his face and slid down. "Oh, you've gotta be kidding me," he groaned, sounding irritated. "Rick!" he finally shouted.

edited 16th Feb '16 10:26:55 AM by AllHailThrall

While Ben rushed to the source of the noise, Sans casually walked behind him, it took a little longer for him to get there but it didn't matter anyway. Once he got there, it was pretty easy to guess what had happened there. Ben's reaction to it was fairly amusing if nothing else.

"i'm surprised it took this long for something like that to happen." he commented, he then glanced at Ben again, more specifically his hand that he was using to pound at the wall earlier "by the way, kid, you were punching the wall with a lot of strength earlier, how's your hand doing?" he asked out of curiosity.

edited 16th Feb '16 10:45:25 AM by FullMoon

Ben looked over at Sans when he asked about punching the wall. Ben pulled his arms up to examine his hands more closely.

"That's the weird thing, I punched the walls as hard as I could and it didn't hurt at all. It's like the wall was made out of—" It was now that he finally noticed his Omnitrix was yellow now. "What?! What happened to the watch?! Did I break it?! Oh man, now what am I gonna do?!" He grabbed it and began to fiddle with it, turning the dial. The silhouette appeared on the watch's face and it turned green again.

Except this was a silhouette he didn't recognize. It was quadrupedal, for one; he didn't have any quadrupedal aliens except for maybe Wildmutt. Except this one didn't look like Wildmutt at all, it looked like.... a horse. A unicorn in fact, he could see the horn sticking up from the silhouette's forehead, peeking above the bushy, hair-like mane.

His eyes widened, and he slowly turned to look at Twilight. "....No way.... you've gotta be kidding me. Did I... did I just get a Twilight form?!"

Rick was hunched over, carrying a pile of miscellaneous junk he'd already looted from some toy store or something -there was a little kid's chemistry set, a pile of electronic toys - now already torn apart into a pile of extruded plastic and circuitry... and something that looked alarmingly like a small container of uranium, which he'd used to break open the glass of a candy store. Rick hefted a chocolate par out of the pile and unwrapped it. The scientist turned around and saw Ben and Sans - the former staring at him judgementally.

"Uh... uh-uh-uh... he did it." He pointed at some random kid nearby. It was at about that point that Ben noticed that his Omnitrix had changed, displaying a silhouette of a little horse ^note  he could just barely see it, standing on tiptoe "Huh. So y-you, uh, you got that DNA thingy working again, didja?" There was a pause before Rick dove back into his pile of stolen stuff, producing a screwdriver and a hammer and starting to mash something together. "Aw man, I wanna build one now!"

edited 16th Feb '16 11:01:24 AM by Locoman

"hmmm..."

Sans stopped to think about it for a while, considering all the stuff that Ben told him had happened in the city, everybody becoming kids seemed a little too harmless in comparison, maybe that was the idea? A day where they could relax, being kids and not get hurt? Was worth testing if nothing else.

"what's the deal with the trinket?" he asked Ben as he started walking around a bit, seemingly looking for something

edited 16th Feb '16 11:04:42 AM by FullMoon