Misplaced arrivals.

[Nayt]

this would have to be the second worst.

When the Reapers Circe and Myrria arrived in what Scott Thompson called "the sand pit," they'd feel much quicker than they'd perceive. These feelings were all the same for the both of them, and timed just the same as well. First, there was an intense sickness. Second, there was a rush of force; this one was actually painful and would spark up shivers of ill feelings throughout nearly every nerve. Thirdly, there was a gale of wind the bereaved them from the front. Fourthly, there was a sudden and abrupt stop of their bodies, followed by a sinking, chaffing pain upon their front-sides, and a barely explainable taste of sand within their mouths.

Lastly, they'd feel the heat, Xexoria's most common message to all those arriving upon her land: welcome to the Goddamn desert.

The desert was a cruel mistress. Living off of her was a science that few could ever master, something only tribes could pass down from generation to generation, and even then there was a good bit of "hoping for the best." Hundreds of tribes populated the Xexorian deserts, yet it seemed every day that one died off in the harsh environment, while another organized elsewhere. The girls would find themselves in the midst of this devilish and scorching environment, and only one of them was at all used to it. Myrria could easily be Circe's guide in the Xexorian deserts, as soon as the both of them collected their bearings, that is.

Except when Myrria became fully aware of herself and her surroundings, she would find herself much more . . . naked than before, as well as lacking the depth of many feminine qualities she'd grown into before her death some twenty years ago. She was also lacking her armaments and worst of all, she was much shorter and scrawnier than what she was used to.

Circe's circumstances were just the opposite. Not only was she clothed and much more physically mature than she was before undertaking this mission, but she was physically stronger and seemed to have two blades already strapped to her hips, and while these circumstances were vastly superior to what she was expecting, she'd only need to look for Myrria to understand what just happened . . .

[Paroxysm]

Nausea was the most powerful of sensations for Circe; it was overbearing and the first thing that hit her, everything else was fine, there were several other disturbances about her, of course, but it was the nausea that got her. In fact, it was always the damn nausea!

"Tkk--"

Circe clicked her teeth once and attempted to stand; she attempted once, twice, and three times--each time ended with her falling over quite promptly; and, eventually, the realization that her center of gravity was off and that she couldn’t quite balance right.

No, it was more like she felt completely different than how she normally did ... It was ... She felt ...

Strange?

Circe finally stood up, the action seemed far harder, longer, and more annoying than ever before, but she did it.

On wobbly knees, she braced herself, placing both her hands onto her sides, just at the hips, and in that action, she froze. Sweat beaded against her brow and her face made a slight frown out of confusion.

Her hands slowly squeezed at her sides, moved up in a curve, then back down, and then back up.

No... That isn’t right.

Her hands further moved up and cupped at her chest; she squeezed and bit her lower lip.

“T-t-t-that isn’t right!”

She squeezed again and looked down with a gasp.

First, her breasts were larger. Now, she knew Scott to be a pervert, that was already quite obvious, but she didn’t know him capable to change a person’s body. No, actually, that was impossible, to begin with, and why was her complexion so much darker? That definitely was not right. She wasn’t ghostly pale or anything, but ...

Pushing back down the curves of her considerably more feminine body (in comparison to her previously immature body shape), she rested her fingers around the blades at her sides, which brought her gaze further down, past ’her’ chest, and...

“Ehh!?”

She turned violently around, several times, in fact, and searched wildly for Myrria, the sudden surge of adrenaline and surprise forced her body to completely do away with the teleportation induced nausea--!

To her surprise, she didn’t find Myrria, not in any discernable sense of the word that she knew, at least... No, it wasn’t Myrria that she found, but herself. Her, as she knew herself, that is: fair skinned, small, skinny, but lacking most of the feminine curves she now found herself with.

“My...rria?”

It felt awfully silly asking herself but... She had a hunch.

[Zach Kaiser]

The barrage of sensations, from nausea to pain to what she could only assume was the fall Thompson had hinted at, was not unexpected to Myrria. How badly they affected her, however, was somewhat surprising. Like any of Xexoria's warriors she was a person of hardy constitution, a far cry from some of the frail fighters that seemed to hail from Cizok. But now it was as bad as the first time she'd experienced being transported.

She picked herself up, and wondered why her body seemed so weak. (It was not necessarily weak, she'd realize later, but simply seemed so in comparison.) And why the sensations of the heat and sand--sensations that reminded her of home even after all these years, sensations she was looking forward to--seemed to invade, to grade, to undo, rather than revitalize her.

When she noticed the state of her dress she formulated a guess, one which was confirmed when she heard a distressingly familiar voice call out her name. She nodded. "Y-Ye-" She stopped short, unprepared for the unfamiliar tone of her voice.

For all her time in the Dirige, she'd never experienced anything like this. This was well beyond the mission parameters, and given that as far as she could tell there were no threats in sight she could only reach one conclusion. "Yes," she finished her confirmation, before adding, "It looks like Thompson screwed up."

She remembered the scrolls he gave Circe, which should have still been in the coat that she was now (still?) wearing. She patted around for them, found something that turned out to be a pack of cigarettes (which she promptly discarded), searched a bit more and came up with what she was looking for. She handed one to Circe before opening up--they should let them contact Scott as well as let them hear him.

"Thompson? We have a serious problem." She kept her anger in check for now; how well she continued to do so would depend on whether or not he could fix this.

[Nayt]

The way it worked with the coat was . . . well, it was complicated. As Reapers, Circe and Myrria were the only ones that were going to perceive it at all, as it currently existed only in the Dead Lands, wrapped about Circe's body. Or Myrria's body. Actually, the whole dichotomy was pretty mind numbing. Nonetheless, the girls would perceive the coat well and fine, but unless they had the foresight to drag it in from the Dead Lands, Circe's body was going to look as naked to mortal Xexorians as the day she was born. The was one significant problem with being a Reaper: you couldn't just turn off a look into the Dead Lands. All perception of Dystopia and the Dead Lands were constantly merged. Often times, this was extremely difficult to get used to--and even when accustomed to it, extremely difficult to remember most of the time.

Fortunately for them, Scott answered the summons rather promptly.

"Yo, what's up?" He replied simply.

One of Scott Thompson's merits was absolute grace under pressure. It took a lot to stir him, and it took an impossible amount to make him panic. Nothing shy of a threat from their lost god himself was going to wrack that man's nerves all that much, and he likely doubted that this was the case right here and now.

[Paroxysm]

Fortunately for both Circe and Myrria (the latter of whom was fortunate in a practical sense rather than the former's situation... ) the jacket had appeared shortly after the two Reapers had; in fact, it was only an arm’s length away from Circe’s (Myrria’s current) body and laid sprawled in the desert sand, still buttoned up the chest as though it had never been taken off. Momentarily, Circe’s mind reflected to when she had made a small, unseen gesture onto the sleeve of the coat, and smiled to herself; she hadn’t expected it to work, but piggybacking off of Scott’s ‘spell’ wasn’t a bad idea to try, it turned out.

Shaking herself out of thought, she quickly rushed to the jacket and picked it up, pushing it towards Myrria who would, most likely, quickly put it on, and then make contact with Scott; that was, at least, what Circe figured would happen.

Regardless, by the time Scott spoke, Circe had already unraveled her own scroll, and placed it near her ear, enabling her to hear and speak to the handler.

“Scott!” Circe’s--Myrria’s--voice was shrill and sharp, probably a tone that the woman, herself, had never used before, at least not near the urgency of how Circe spoke, but these were really odd times!

“What the hell did you to do to us,” she demanded in a stern voice that died down as she recoiled from the shock of it; normally, she was relatively clam and centered; sadly, she didn’t know how to handle this situation in such a way. This wasn’t an everyday situation...

“I don’t feel well...” She admitted, drained and defeated for the moment.

[Zach Kaiser]

Myrria would have disagreed with Circe's assessment that she was the fortunate one. Presumably, their Qi abilities didn't also switch, which meant that while she was especially vulnerable with a weaker body and being sub-par at Qi manipulation save for her one skill, Circe (if she was a strong as Thompson suggested) still had powerful Qi abilities, and now a powerful body to boot. Not to mention that she was fully clothed, while Myrria was only wearing a coat.

In truth, she felt rather vulnerable, though she did her best to hide it. "This may be hard to believe, but this is Myrria speaking to you now. Somehow, we switched bodies." The tone of her voice made it clear just how she thought it happened, but to say so frankly might have been considered insubordination.

"We're going to need to undo it," she said flatly. Thompson seemed to think their window for getting the target was narrow, a one of a kind chance--they might not be able to afford to wait, but at the same time could they really defeat something of such power in these circumstances? Myrria didn't doubt her own abilities in her own body, but this was something beyond the scope of what she was used to dealing with.

[Nayt]

There was a long pause on Scott's end, practically a half minute's worth of hesitation. On his end, he cycled through disbelief to belief, and during the latter he checked and double checked the set-up he had on his side of a different world. As far as he knew, everything checked out fine . . .

"Okay, you're either fuckin' with me or somethin' unexplainable just happened to you," Scott began, "'Cause I've got nothin' wrong up here. This set-up's perfect. You and your bodies should've appeared in tandem right above a low spot in the sand. Souls and bodies both should've merged, then you were gonna fall safely into a bed o'sand. Everythin' here is set up for just that. And you were both standin' on the right circles . . ."

On top of that, Scott didn't really know how bodies would be swapped, anyways. He was only dealing with two complex transfer spells--no mergers or the like. Distant transfers and proximity transfers, that was all. Souls just had a habit of merging with their living bodies when touched, provided the soul was outside of the body at the time. He didn't need a spell for that. But souls didn't just inhabit someone else's body when touched. Well, to his knowledge. He hadn't actually tried that before. Addison could do that, but she was a special case . . .

"So hopefully you're just fuckin' with me, 'cause I both don't know how to fix that sort of thing and don't really have the time to learn right now."

[Paroxysm]

"Would we joke about this now?"

Circe would come off annoyed, but she had good reason for it, didn't she? Really, why--how--could this have happened during such a high profile mission? Better yet, why didn’t Scott know what to do? He should at least have a slight idea of what went wrong; he was a handler that was not doing a very good job of handling the situation!

Quieting down, Circe looked about the aptly nicknamed sand pit and sighed. The place already looked unforgiving; did they really need such a large mess up this early in the mission? Once more, what if Scott couldn't reverse it? That was worrying on more fronts than just one.

Biting her lower lip, she muttered something about multi-tasking and maybe even a thing or two about Scott's supposed lineage, but it was kept to an inaudible whisper, for the most part. She released her lip and gritted her teeth, clenching her jaws shut and breathing in, out: "So ... We proceed as planned, you mean? Could we at least bother you for some field supplies, equipment? Something?”

[Zach Kaiser]

"When have you known me to joke?" Myrria asked irritably. Though if he didn't believe them, she honestly didn't know if Circe liked to joke or not, so it may not have been the most effective argument.

She folded her arms uncomfortably. Like Circe, it was difficult for her to imagine what she'd do if Thompson couldn't reverse this. She'd spent so many years honing her body's instincts and abilities...if they couldn't fix it, she'd have to start from scratch. And while there was nothing inherently wrong with Circe's body...it wasn't hers. Her skin wasn't tanned from a life growing up outdoors, nor was it hardened from resisting the scorching desert winds. It wasn't a Xexorian body at all.

The only silver lining she could think of was that at least Circe was the same gender--she didn't even want to imagine how things would have gone if she'd been partnered with a male for this mission.

"I have no problem with dangerous missions, but this is something entirely new. Are you certain we should continue like this...?" While outwardly she kept her cool to someone like Thompson, whom she'd worked with before, the mere fact that she was suggesting retreating would give away just how unnerved she really was. Normally, she'd never hesitate against even the most suicidal odds...

[Nayt]

Truth be told, all of Scott's comments had been purely sardonic. He actually believed them from the start, he just didn't want to deal with the utter truth of the matter right now. He hadn't the slightest clue how to reverse this, and he especially didn't have the time to learn how. It'd simply never happened before, and it wasn't at all expected as any sort of probability, either. It went beyond "this couldn't happen;" things like this simply didn't happen. There was no reasonable or justifiable explanation, and thus no standing fix.

"Complete the mission as outlined," Scott replied.

It was unlikely that Circe and Myrria wanted to hear that, and as much as Scott wanted to care, he couldn't afford that luxury right here and now.

"I'm going to arrange for a backup plan in case things get bad--but right now, you two are the only ones assigned to this," Scott concluded with perhaps the worst news the girls could receive right now.

[Paroxysm]

Circe forced the sinking feeling in her gut down and accepted Scott's order, even if it hadn't been intended as such, determined to get over the event and get on with the mission; there would be time to worry about reversing it later, hopefully, and if they died, then it didn't matter, anyways, right? Well, unless they died because of this, but now wasn’t the time for technicalities.

“Understood,” she muttered just above a whisper while rolling the scroll back up and cutting off the voice communication with Scott, unsure of what to do with the thing, and, eventually, settling for just holding it, at least for now. Looking towards herself--towards Myrria--Circe faked a smile, feeling quite unbalanced in the veteran reaper’s body, but not specifically saying anything; they were both in the same boat, in the end.

“Looks like we’ll just have to deal with it for now, Myrria,” Circe pointed out, obvious as it was; she turned around, surveyed the sand pit again, turned back to Myrria and shrugged, “if you were a soul eating entity rumored to have a disproportionate body, where would you be?”

[Zach Kaiser]

"Understood," Myrria replied, biting back her complaints. Their target was dangerous and needed to be taken down. She'd always seen this as a job that needed to be done regardless of the risks--she'd just have to consider this another risk. It made her feel marginally better.

She spent a few moments thinking about Circe's question; what would their target be doing in Xexoria? They didn't know, but if they worked with a few assumptions she had an idea.

"If he's looking for victims, he's probably staying in the city but preying on people out in the desert--people start disappearing in the city, someone's going to notice, but the desert is dangerous. No one thinks twice if someone dies to the heat, to thirst, to predators, to angering a tribe..." She could go on, but she'd probably made her point.

[Paroxysm]

"Yeah," she remarked, "probably, I guess, but it seems awfully inconvenient to prey on desert folk. I haven’t had too many encounters with Voleur, but I have had a few; the one’s I’ve dealt with liked to assault small settlements, isolated, not quite cities, but large enough to actually be worth somethin’. Then again, this is an ability absorber, too, and his methods might be different. Shouldn‘t count that out, at any rate. Desert settlements--tribes, I think you mentioned--might be targets and worth checking into. Do you know this area,” she asked, finally. “Any towns we might be able to get information out of, maybe?”

Nevertheless, they probably shouldn’t wander through the desert looking for the proverbial needle-in-the-sand-mound; despite the Dirige’s knack for sensing Qi and disturbances, it would be impossible to locate their target without figuring out the pattern to his attacks or, at the very least, stumbling into the most recent contaminated area, the proverbial red-zone, and following him from there. Likewise, neither of the agents (and nor their handler) had distinguishing information on their target to go on; the exception being, of course, that he was apparently deformed/malformed and had a large, unsettling forehead. That helped, some...

“We don’t have much in the way of supplies either,” she thought aloud. “Never been through the desert before, but I’m pretty sure water’s a good thing to have on us.”

For now, at least, Circe pushed their predicament completely out of her mind and focused on the task at hand, the mission and their duty as Dirige agents.

[Zach Kaiser]

Of course, Myrria's suggestion was only valid if the Ame Voleur was trying not to be noticed. If it didn't care, reasoning went out the tent flap.

Myrria shrugged. "The desert is always changing; without some kind of landmark, even I won't know where we are." Water was a good reason why she should have been sent on this mission alone. With her ability she could go far longer without water than most, whereas Circe would be in danger quite soon if they weren't near a settlement or an oasis.

Death in the line of duty was always a possibility, and sometimes sacrifices had to be made for the mission, but Myrria wasn't about to let anything happen to her body without her in it.

"Let's climb to the top of this dune and take a look."

[Nayt]

The sand-dune ahead of them was something like a mountain-- or, rather, it would seem mountainous once the ladies sunk their feet into it. It was almost like it grew. Or maybe it was always that tall. Or maybe it was an illusion, a trick to their eyes from this horrible, horrible environment.

The pain in the girls' heads would be no such trick, though. The closer they were to the top of the sand-dune, the more their heads would ache. It would likely draw them to their knees if they didn't feel strong enough. Closer to the top, it might feel like their ears were going to bleed.

If they managed to crest the mountain of sand, the sincere need to pass out would wash over the both of them . . .

Perhaps roughly the same time as the man in the duster came to view, somewhere down on the opposite side of the sand-dune.