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A Mislaid Traveler
It had been at least an hour since the last time you'd seen the path, and the welcoming, warm orange glow of the setting sun had long ago disappeared into dark blue and white, snow-coloured needles, now beginning to be blurred by a creeping, cold mist.
A whisper of panic sneaks into your thoughts. What would you do, overnight in the snowy woods? Where was your campsite, again, and how had you managed to get so horribly lost?
You shake out your map of the island and examine it for at least the dozenth time. If the map - and your sense of direction - was right, you should have reached your camp almost half an hour ago. If it was wrong...
...who knows where you could be?
You hear a rustle in the distance, and you freeze to the spot, heart beating quickly. The noise could be someone able to help - maybe you were near the path again!? - or, you think with a cringe, it could be something much more dangerous...
The sound persists, and you begin walking cautiously toward it. The trees part into a small meadow, and you realize that the ground outside of the trees is draped in a deep, clutching fog that clings to your clothes, sweaty now despite the cold.
The crunches and rustles are uneven - it sounds like someone is smashing limbs and branches as they travel, paying no heed to the sharp needles and cones. You begin to reconsider exposing yourself to whatever would make such a racket, but then - a shape appears at the end of the clearing.
You squint. It is a creature of some sort, winged and with a thick tail and horns. You breathe a sigh of relief as you recognize the familiar form of a draik, but before you can say a word it speaks:
WHO ARE YOU!?
WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?
WHY ARE YOU HERE?!
HOW D-
And - mid word, just as suddenly as he had appeared - the draik collapsed. Bright, rainbow lights pulsed slowly on his horns and tail, but besides that, you could make out no distinguishing features in the thick fog.What had just happened? The draik had sounded so stressed, and so angry at you, but you hadn't even managed to get a word in before he had toppled over.
You take a step towards the prone body, your feet crunching in the deep snow, and then jump back in surprise, A dark, horned head had appeared from underneath the draik's tail.
Hello!, the dark shape says in a calm, feminine voice.
Once again, you're shocked into silence. Really, all you wanted was to get back to your camp-site, but look what was greeting you instead...
Hello? The voice, still calm and mellow, but more assertive, called out once again.
You shakily respond, Hello? I apologize if I shocked you, or-
None of that, please, the voice quietly reprimanded.
The small creature came close enough to make out a small, dark feline body. As she continued speaking, the voice was so controlled compared to the near-ramblings of the collapsed draik that you were somewhat soothed.
I am certain that we frightened you much more than we should have. Please forgive Kant. She gestured at the prone draik. He is having a bit of a rough time right now, and we never expected to meet another at our own campsite.
You look around, surprised. You hadn't even realized the clearing held a camp site, but on second glance you can just barely make out a large tent and ashen, unlit camp fire in the fog. Both were buried several inches in freshly fallen snow.
The feline continued. However - could you help me? I need to move him to the our tent before he gets too cold, and he is quite a load for me.
It was true. She was quite diminutive compared to the draik - perhaps a third of his size - but muscles rippled under her short black coat, and she had stepped close enough for you to notice strange, sharp armor running down her back.
In short, she looked - and sounded - very capable.
Nonetheless, you step closer to the draik's immobile body - and then suppress a gasp as his features sharpen into view...
a very unique individual...
The combination of your surprise and the thick fog had obscured the draik's - Kant, she had said? - deformities from your view before. Now that he was up close, you could see his rudely tattered ear membranes and strange proportions very well.
His front paws were miniscule, and one of his back legs stuck out at a slight angle, the toes looking flattened and fused to one another. His wings, flared and alarming in your shock, were on second glance rather pathetic and much too small to fly with. In general, his form filled you more with a sense of pity than of fear...
Oh, and I am Kijunna. I am Kant's companion, and if you could grab his hind legs, I'll get his front. You had nearly forgotten the small feline, who you now noticed was watching you intently. You followed her request, however, and together you hoisted the draik's limp form into the warm, spacious tent.
Kijunna stared quietly at Kant's still body.
There is no way to tell how long he is going to be out. He has had fits that last barely seconds - he'd catch himself before hitting the ground - and others that have lasted days. She seemed quite eager to talk to you about him, and you wondered how long it had been since she'd had the opportunity to talk to someone else.
But before you can ask the biggest question on your mind - why he collapsed in the first place - she continued with more information about Kant:
True Name: Unrecorded
Common Name: Kant
Age: Mid-twenties
Species: Draik
Size: 4.5ft tall, 8ft long (with tail).
Gender: Male
Colour: Navy blue, with white dorsal speckles.
Wings: Very small, white and black banded.
Eyes: Sea green
Ears: Large, but heavily tattered & torn.
Body: Strongly set, but with an overly large head and small feet.
Family: Unrecorded
As she spoke, Kiju stared thoughtfully at Kant's still form. I'm sure that his crashing through the woods must have alarmed you, but he simply cannot walk very well with his legs and we were rushing to get back to the tent. He's really a nice guy, generally...
...with a unique personality
Kant is pretty quiet, but he's very smart and actually quite opinionated if you go and dig at him enough. If you begin a conversation on a topic he enjoys - or one he is unfamiliar with and becomes interested in - expect to be still talking about it hours later and possibly diving into either the technical or philosophical background (and often both) on the subject.
He loves reading, and has read more books than I can count. A lot of what he reads is non-fiction, so he's a veritable treasure trove of random - and, I'll add, often useless - facts. And of course, he enjoys telling everyone the latest things he has learned, often in the middle of unrelated conversations. He sometimes drives me a bit insane with that hobby, me being a bit more of the practical sort.
He is extremely patient with other individuals, but very quick to become frustrated with inanimate objects or menial tasks.
Despite that, however, he is utterly fascinated by mechanical and electronic items and will spend hours taking them apart and examining how they work. Just don't make him put them back together, or ask him to do a puzzle.
these words - they tell a story
But enough about what Kant acts like; I can tell you're still wondering about his collapse. I'm not at liberty to tell you about his past, but... She trailed off, and you glanced at her questioningly. She was staring very intently at a stack of papers near the corner of the tent. You took this as an invitation to pick them up and begin reading...
The Early Years
Crippled. Nearly deaf. When the child was born, his parents had two choices dictated by the government; either release with painless euthanasia, or to let him enter a government controlled virtual reality where he could 'hear,' walk well, and live out a nourished life in fiction. Either way, they could try once more for their second of two children, and he would become another's problem.
Like most couples, they chose the virtual reality, and bid a shaky, but relieved, farewell to their first son.
And so the child was removed from the family's records, and likewise, his real name and surname were stripped from him. Every year the facility chose a theme for the names of incoming children, and named them alphabetically - his year was the year of philosophers, and he was the eleventh child brought in. He became Kant.
He spent the first years of his life like most young draiks in government care - toddling about, fed regularly and on a set playdate schedule. When he reached his third year, however, the first of many bionic additions were added to his horns and tail.
They began testing his bionic attachments to the digital world innocently, through small games and virtual reality exercises. His playdates no longer involved his friends coming over; instead, they would both plug in to the virtual reality and meet. They were young, and it became almost natural - plus, play time was much more fun when you didn't have to worry about your crippled body parts getting in the way.
By age five, the digital world - the "VG" or virtual grid - was more a home than Kant's real world. Being pulled back to reality for sleep and meals was chafing and frustrating, and he yearned for more time in the VG. There, he was strong. His wings were huge, his legs were long and proportioned, and he could hear sounds crisply and perfectly. Almost everything was possible - in the grid, physics and the typical realities of life were more of a suggestion. He soared higher, ran faster, and was infinitely stronger than he was in the real word.
It was euphoric, and dragging him back to his crippled body was torture.
Thankfully, it was only a few months after his fifth birthday when the caretakers who ran the facility deemed that he had passed the requisite developmental milestones. Kant happily received the last sets of surgeries required to make his connection to the VG permanent, and then plugged in.
A Virtual Life
He found that reaching the outskirts of the grid was interesting; if he was walking in the woods the trees simply tightened together until they were impassible. If he was swimming in the mountain lake, he found himself suddenly unable to swim straight, and looped back into the main part of the grid. And, with the least subtlety, if he was in the plains and traveled hours into the distance, they would simply loop over and over, never ending. But the moment he turned around he would be back at the beginning.
At the beginning of their time in the VG, all 16 children from the year of the philosophers lived together on one floor of an apartment complex. As the years passed and personalities became defined, they slowly moved out, one by one finding friendships or love with others from different years.
Kant, on the other hand, stayed mainly on his own. He spent hours reading in the city's extensive library, even once bothering the outside world to get them to replace the books - he had read them all.
One of Kant's favourite things to do besides reading was to glitch the grid. The virtual reality was near-perfect, but still sometimes would have problems; for example, if he very quickly slammed two items together, occasionally they would meld together instead of properly bouncing off one another. This was usually very short-lived, though, and the items would disappear from existence, reappearing nearby and separated. But it was still very interesting to see obvious rules of the world be bent for a few seconds.
And so Kant lived this quiet life for almost a dozen years. But at the end of those years something strange began happening. The grid began glitching... badly.
The Decay
It would suddenly flicker to nighttime for minutes at high noon. Items would float up instead of fall down when dropped. Holes appeared in homes, and people began slowly disappearing - sometimes temporarily, and sometimes permanently.
Those who disappeared and came back told a story of being in a dark room, tightly held down and illuminated by nothing but dull rainbow lighting. The entire community was worried - they put two and two together, and this sounded like they were being pulled into their real bodies. That was inexcusable for some, especially the more horribly crippled.
Their communications to the outside world became incessant and frantic, but went unanswered. Something had happened outside the VG, and it seemed as though they were left to fend for themselves.
And then, without warning, Kant found himself in the dark room. It was warm and almost somewhat comforting, but Kant was preoccupied by the straps across his legs, chest and neck. He had been planning for this to happen, and he began slipping back and forth in the bindings, testing their tightness.
They weren't that tight. A couple hours of squirming would do it - but then a buzzing, humming noise began to fill the room, and he was light-headed for a second before suddenly reappearing in the VG. He had spent barely minutes in the real world.And that was how it went. Moments in the real world, where he would work rapidly to try and squirm from his bonds - and then back into the VG. It took almost a week of this before his neck was loosened - another week to get his legs. And then he was free.
He wandered the facility, trying to figure out what had happened, but always wary that he could collapse at any second. The building was in ruins, with dust and concrete slabs everywhere - and the entire landscape was like this. Something horrid had happened.
So he began exploring, just like he had in the VG. He first scoured the facility for others who he could free, but many - those who had disappeared permanently - were already dead. Others, he loosened the straps of and hoped that they would wake up before they starved, as the IV food and support systems were no longer running. He then started exploring outside, and learned from old newspapers that there had been a war.
The Meeting
Several months later, Kant gave up hoping that some of the last living subjects would awake. For now, he was unsure of his future plans - to pass time and think, he wandered the nearby vicinity, keeping a cautious ear out for the buzzing, light-hearted feeling that preceded the collapsing fits that pulled him back to the digital world.
He glanced around. The weather was poor - everything grey and drizzly, with the damp earth crumbling under his unsteady paws. It was early morning and a thin mist covered the land, dampening his vision and making him almost feel claustrophobic.
Then - he saw a moving shape! After so many days of nothing but the barren, empty landscapes, he nearly passed it off as a figment of his imagination. But there it was, again. His hopes rose. There had been several empty modules in the facility, so he thought that at least some of the other crippled subjects made it out, like him. But he had found nobody in the area, and no traces of them that he could follow.
Then the shape came closer, and his heart fell.
Although he - she? - had some sort of metallic covering on their back, the shape had none of the telltale electrode beads that every test subject wore. But still, to finally see another (real) person was an amazing treat, and he began walking her way.
She seemed surprised to see him, but pleased. After exchanging names, however, the only thing on her mind was food. He was thoroughly entertained by her bluntness in asking him to supply some, and together they went to the city center where he had kept found stocks of canned food.
Her name was Kijunna. She was strong, graceful, and completely unafraid of the world. While he was even-tempered, she was offended at the drop of a feather. And she was very, very hungry.
She was everything he was not, and within hours he was enamored. They both had no real home, and so after remaining with him for some time, hoping against hope for a sight of other VG subjects, they departed from the ruins together. They had spent nearly a decade together since then, barely spending a day apart from one another.
You finish reading the last words, and not moments later hear a sudden scratching noise as Kant stands up, his dark nails scrambling on the plastic floor of the tent.
His eyes were a sea-green blue and look at you, confused, before finding the shape of Kijunna's small body and visibly relaxing. She bounds over to him as soon as she realizes he has awoken, glancing at you with an almost embarrassed look. Did he see you reading the papers..?
And who are you? Kant asked questioningly, looking between you and Kiju. His voice was surprisingly high in pitch for his age, you notice. He didn't seem to remember your rather abrupt meeting, just minutes earlier. This is guest. You ran into them right before you collapsed, so you probably don't remember. Kijunna answered for you, and then added, You've only been out maybe ten minutes. Not that bad.
And oh goodness, you've woken up just in time. I hear the crowd about to join us - hopefully they've brought some firewood to warm this place up. Kant, you want to say a bit about all of them?
friends, not enemies
Kijunna - "Kiju" - is my constant companion, friend, and sometimes caretaker. We've lived and traveled together for nearly a decade, and could not imagine being apart for any extended period of time.
Despite being such close friends, however, we're very different - while I'm pretty quiet and thoughtful, Kiju is rather impatient, demanding and the word "tact" doesn't brush her vocabulary. I often have to calm her down, and I'm one of the few people who she will always listen to.
Perhaps most strikingly, however, are our physical differences; while I hobble and limp on these bum legs, Kijunna is graceful and strikingly muscled. It is because of this that, despite being much smaller than me, she can help me around when I begin to weaken, and she manhandles me to safety when I have my collapsing fits.
She is not very keen to talk about her past, and I won't betray that, but the ruddy armor fused to her back, roughly cropped ears and scarred body tell their own story, no?
Quan 
is very strange. He's extremely spacey and spends a lot of time staring into the distance, often watching things that he claims to be seeing, but nobody else can.
He weirds me out a little bit, especially when he has several of his little white dragon pets crawling all over him. He loves them, but they always look sick and dirty to me, and I have no idea where he gets them.
I will admit, though, he is quite the artist and does amazing landscapes. They always just look slightly off, though...
Cialse - she goes by "Lia" - is quite the character. She is stubborn and headstrong, but also intensely intelligent and manipulative. I've seen her act as sweet as sugar to get her way, then turn around and drop people the moment their usefulness expires.
Her and Kijunna butt heads constantly and she complains about her all the time... but really, it's because they're very similar on the stubbornness front. Lia is much younger than Kiju and I think she will mellow out eventually, given the chance.
I feel like she's had a rough time so far in life.
Snaiha is honestly just odd. I don't see much of her because she almost never leaves the rainforests (something about drying out!) but when I do stop by, she's quite the enthusiastic one. She said it was rainy enough this week to come camping.
This is one draik whose colours really do show her personality. She's bright, cheerful, and always has a smile on her face. It just takes most people a little while to get used to her stalk eyes, so some find her a little creepy. Once you get past them, she has a great personality and is willing to try anything once.
However, she's also rather... small, so please make sure not to sit on her or something.
Strange Portraiture - Kant
This World is Different |
In the Moonlight |
In a World of Ones and Zeros |
 And the Longing That You Feel |
For Nochi |
 Nochi's Half |
Path Lit |
The Lab's Gone Dark |
Untitled |
 Untitled |
|
Nameless |
Strange Portraiture - Kijunna
Kijunna & Predator |
Moonlight Sonata |
Kijunna |
A Flash of Red |
Kijunna |
Untitled |
a path to return
You turn to find Kant and Kiju standing by quietly. Kijunna was holding a map in her thickset mouth, and as you glance at her, she steps forward and thrusts it in your hand.
I think you must have been at campsite six. She conjectured. It is the only one even remotely nearby, so if not you were really, really lost.
You had been really, really lost, but she was right - you were at site six. It was only a few minutes walk away from where you were now, although who knows how long it would have taken you if you hadn't found her and Kant.
We'll be here for a couple weeks. Kant added nonchalantly. You are welcome to stop by, if you want.
You smile at them both as you watch them leaning slightly against one another in the darkness.
You would definitely be back.
other worlds to explore
Check out some other petpages, perhaps? If you're interested in doing a link trade (with Kant or any of the others!) please neomail Nochi!
