Xaviers!

A infinitesimally small spot of air distorts into a huge bubble for a moment, warping the world around it. It only lasts for a second and when it collapses again Emilie, Victor and Hazard are sitting in a boat in the middle of what appears to be sub-tropical jungle. There are thick trees covered in vines, ferns that reach several feet high and the sound of who knows what kinds of animals. A snake lies coiled up in a nearby tree, tongue lazily flicking at the newcomers and their unusual smell. A palm-sized tarantula wander away from the boat that has so rudely disturbed it's resting place. In the a distance a loud screech cuts through the general noise of the jungle for a moment.

Emilie reaallly wasn't used to traveling in that fashion in particular, So she seemed a bit on edge. After a moment, she realized she was still holding Hazard's hand, and abruptly let it go, making to wipe her hand off on the side of her body starting nearly in her own armpit, and dragging it as slowly and as far as it would go.

She kept a hold of Victor's though.

"Were we... supposed to go to an island?" Victor asked, feigning courage.

Hazard hopped up onto the bow and turned on one foot like a dancer.

"That's noooo smoke monster Mister Smee," he grinned happily, looking back at them.

Emilie had some understanding of crazy speak, and picked up Hazard's meaning well enough.

"This place is dangerous, we need to get on the move." She looked to the jungle ground first, trying to judge the shadows, then to the sky to see if she could see where the sun was, and finally, to the trees to see if she could pinpoint what side the moss was growing on, if there was any.

The sun is kind of tricky to locate, simply due to how much vegetation is in the way, but with some basic survival skills Emilie manages to determine a rough cardinal direction. To figure out much else a climb into the trees would probably be in order.

"We should go south, I think. If this isn't an island, the further south we go the warmer it will get, VS the further north we go, the colder it will get. We can't risk freezing to death dressed like we are for a brisk autumn afternoon, but we can always dress down a bit if it gets too hot.

We'll have to hit a clearing eventually, or if it's an island, a beach. From either point I can get our bearings a bit better.

We should also keep our eye out for not-salt water." Emilie seemed a bit too knowledgeable about all of this. She then looked at Hazard.

"Unless you know where we are?" She asked. If he had some magic internal compass that could point them in a better direction, she'd listen for now. Only because this was becoming way too elabourate a scheme to zap them into a dangerous jungle when he could have just killed them on the spot. She didn't rule out that he still had a far subtler one that he was keeping well under wraps, but addressing that would have to take back burner until they could get to a safer, better known locale.

"Somewhere with plenty of fresh water... and Barneys," Hazard said merrily, before pointing at a mountain, "We go that way. Your friendses will be there sooner or later. Way home."

HOOOOOOONK

Victor had been digging around in the boat, checking under the seat cushions and any little hatch he could find. He poked his head up from behind the hull before lifting up a tiny orange nylon bag.

"I found the safety kit. There's an air horn and some rope."

"Lead the way then." She responded, before the air-horn went off. Is distracted her from puzzling through Hazard's answer.

"Victor!" She chided in a hiss. "Do you wanna alarm the entire animal kingdom to our presence?!"

"It's not the animals you should be worried about," Hazard said cryptically as he started walking in the direction of the Order's mountain facility.

"Well it was an accident." Victor climbed out of the boat and let himself drop to the ground, slinging the bag over his shoulder.

"Besides, the animal part isn't a bad idea. Predators hate loud noises. And if we were trying to keep quiet then maybe crashing a boat into the jungle wasn't the most subtle entrance possible." He tossed the air horn toward Emilie, following the mentally unbalanced blonde.

Whether they were hating it or not, something in the distance responds with a loud roar that doesn't sound like any animal they're familiar with.

Emilie froze for a moment, registering what she just heard. She then put an arm on Victor's back and forced him along with Hazard.

"Go!"

Hazard hummed a particularly disjointed version of the Barney song as he marched onward. Creepy.

As they start running they can hear splintering wood from behind them and a giant T-Rex stomps into the clearing. It turns it's giant head back and forth as it sniffs the air, investigating the place it heard the loud noise at, ultimately stepping on the boat and crushing it like was nothing before it's head swivels towards the small fleeing mammal things and it lets out a loud roar. Footsteps that shake the ground carry the dinosaur forward in pursuit of it's prey.

"Shit shit shit! Aren't we supposed to stand still?!"

Well Vic was still running so perhaps he didn't put much confidence in that.

"VICTOR STOP APPLYING BEAR LOGIC TO DINOSAURS." She screamed over her shoulder, watching intently for cover of some kind they could use.

There's plenty of covers. Trees all around, huge roots, foilage to try and lose the giant lizard chicken-precursor in. But at the same time there's underbrush, uneven terrain, slippery mud branches at face-height slowing down their frantic sprint. Around them they're beginning to notice smaller critters fleeing as well, all kinds of things getting flushed out of the jungle by the hungry T-Rex, occasionally running alongside the three.

Hazard's "ignore me" power had run out and he couldn't cycle quite yet, so...

"I need a minute! Keep Barney busy busy!" he said before promptly tripping over a root. "Oh fiddlefaddle."

"Victor, smol-time!" Emilie replied. One target to focus on might make the lizard easier to wrangle.

Victor concentrated on how he'd been trained. If he could condense Emilie as well as himself, the might confuse the T-rex and maybe even buy their escort a chance to escape. But with so much stress, running, and a task he was only just that year starting to tackle, his attempts were only partially successful. Partial in that his tiny frame hung from Emilie's full-sized fingertips.

Once Victor was smaller, he was promptly shoved down the front of her wide-holed fishnet shirt.

At least he could see?

The T-Rex didn't seem to care about the disappearing prey as much as the one that just tumbled to the ground in front of it. The dinosaur stops and sniffs around to try and find Hazard in the underbrush, his nose uncomfortably close as it brushes aside fauna with it's giant head.

Now that she had Victor under-wraps, Emilie stopped abruptly, still hopping from one foot to another so she could get going again that much faster. She grabbed a piece of errant fruit she hadn't bothered to ID that was light enough to throw and lobbed it at their new 'friend' then honked the air horn in succession, trying to attract the giant predator's attention away from the fallen Hazard. She would continue this pattern until it proved to work or didn't.

The fruit just kind of bounces off the dinosaur's hide, but the airhorn certainly gets it's attention, the head suddenly whipping up from where it had been rifling through the underbrush, tiny eyes focusing on Emilie, it's bulk shifting as it starts moving towards her.

"Come on bird brain! This way! Ignore hog-wild, he's got nothing to do with this! It's me and you big guy! Come get some!"

Emilie continued to honk the air horn to make good and sure she had it's attention while she screamed at the monsterous thing that could probably swallow her whole, before she set off into a dash again.

A buzzing began to fill the jungle as a laughing Hazard picked himself up. A foot long dragonfly flew right past Emilie, headed to dive-bomb the tyrannosaurus. Then came another, and another, and a swarm of horrible wasps, and rat-sized ants. So many ants.

At first the dinosaur doesn't seem to care, picking up speed and stomping after Emilie, but it doesn't get very far before the swarm of insects covers his eyes and anachronistically-sized mandibles and stingers begin finding what few vulnerable spots there are. And without their normal sense of self-preservation the giant insects crawl into nostrils and over giant teeth, clogging up and stinging their way into the dinosaur's head who roars out in pain and begins threshing around blindly, flattening trees as it hits the ground with a thundering crash.

"Serve me! Kill my minions! Kill! Kill!" Hazard chanted madly, greedy for carnage. Smaller insects began to crawl all over their temporary god, a great horned beetle resting on his head like a crown.

Victor had been trying to right himself, but the jumping and arms-waving had made things a little difficult. He managed to reposition himself in time to see the swarm begin to do their work.

"Jesus Christ Em, who the fuck is this guy?"

"A real life Joker, without the Harley to make his screen presence tolerable." She replied, being mindful that Hazard's minions could break free of his control at any time.

"Harley is useless," Hazard retorted. Then he commanded his living decorations to leave him and started walking for the mountain again. "Come along Pond!" he said cheerily.

Emilie followed along mindfully, for the moment. She would keep her arms dangling at her sides in case Victor wanted to climb down.

"Where are we going? " She asked.

"To the mountain where the gate to infinity is being used as a battery," he said with almost religious disgust.

Victor scrambled from his hiding spot, the various studs and bobbles on Emilie's person acting as good hand holds. He dropped from her shoulder, though perhaps that wasn't the proper way to describe it as he didn't really move down so much as expand down to meet the ground, following behind them.

"This is like a bad Conan rip-off from the 80s."

"So what, the Man in Black drug us here as temporary Ka-tet because he's all sad face someone's muscling on his monopoly of todash darkness?" She smirked, dropping some pretty heavy book-nerd talk to Hazard.


"The Savage Land." Emilie replied to Victor's observation. "At least, I think that's where we are, if there's really modern day people here besides us like Hazard says.

It's origin story probably varies from universe to universe, but the Cliff Notes version is 'Ancient as fuck Jurassic Park, 'cept it comes before the times that people cared about safety shit like electric fences and obnoxiously neon Jeeps.

You know, like a biological version of those horridly designed World War I technologies.'But what if we put a flame thrower on the bicycle? How awesome would that be!' "

"Exactly! You really get me kid," Hazard nodded.

"You might want to seek counseling."

"Right, welcome to the land of bad ideas. Got it."

"There's not therapy for our problems, i've checked."