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”Only a little longer, Ava.”

Kuja pressed his hand to his dragon’s maw, gently caressing the feathers which spanned the ridges of her cheeks. She was restless. Perhaps it was the climate – far too humid for a creature such as her bred in the timeless fungal forests of Terran soil. Perhaps it was simply the time she had been made to wait as he explored yet another of the Lost City’s crumbling buildings for ancient technology to salvage. Perhaps it was the weight of that technology on her back. She was unused to being used as a pack animal, preferring only to bear his weight, nestled comfortably between her wings. He had no choice, however. His spoils were far too large and numerous for him to carry on his person, and he had not even the most primitive of airships at his disposal. And so he had refitted the saddle bags of an Aljanan kujata for her size and maneuverability and had strapped them in such a way that it would not hinder her wings.

Ava pawed the ground, snorting her displeasure even as her eyes closed at Kuja’s caress. She would bear the weight. For now at least.

With his dragon reassured, Kuja began again at his work. The day had been more productive than most. This time, he’d cut to the root of the half-collapsed ruins he’d been exploring for some time and found the root of its stronghold, a room made of strangely time resistant metals and guarded by its half-sentient mechanical sentries for what must have been millennia. The desiccated bodies in the guarded hallway told him that the room’s guardians had found quite the success over the years, but today they had finally met their end. He’d made short work of them with a few well-placed thundaga spells, and then the bounty of the ruins was finally in his hands.

He’d moved each part of the dismantled machinery one piece at a time. Most were too heavy to lift by hand, and so he had captured each in the sparkling grasp of his telekinesis. He did this, treading the same path again and again until each component formed a pile on the terrace he’d made his landing position, and it was only a matter of placing each carefully within his dragon’s modified saddlebags. He had not expected her resistance to the process, but that had been yet another challenge to seize and then quickly overcome.

By the time that he had finally loaded the last of it, hours had passed since he’d first found that hidden room, and he felt exhausted, both in his magic and in his mind. He was as ready to leave as it seemed Ava was.

And he would have, too. He would have taken his place on her back, sighed, and willed her fly them back to the base they’d made nestled beneath the ruins of the Valley where he’d have spent the night feverishly examining each component, memorizing their functions as his inventor’s mind pieced them back together in schematics and schemes. He would have had a fairly normal time, that was, if he hadn’t sensed a sudden shift in the planet’s core.

Kuja froze, hand still at his dragon’s side as he frowned, trying his best to place that strange feeling that felt more foreign than familiar. He was used to monitoring the Mists of Gaia as the planet slowly died, fed upon and parasitized by a foreign infection deep below the planet’s surface. But this…

Kuja looked to the sky above. Where it had once been a standard sunny, humid day in the Valley, the sky had now darkened most ominously. The clouds (had there been clouds there before?) seemed to flee from some distant force, and as he looked over his shoulder, he thought he saw something. A bright spot in all the darkness due south. Why, that was the direction of the Tower, was it not?

The Tower had always intrigued him, and he needed little provocation to examine its mysteries. Curiosity plucked his soul’s strings like the keys of a harpsichord. His business with the mechanical components was of utmost importance, and yet…

The planet itself was reacting in ways that even he couldn’t identify. How could he possibly resist?

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His silver dragon let out a sharp cry like a bird of prey as they entered the Tower’s sphere. This was not Kuja’s first visit to the World Sight by dragon’s flight. He’d taken to it more than once, circling the Tower and all of its endless floors, searching for some weak point in its defenses that he could enter from above. Alas, the Tower’s construction was immaculate even after all millennia in ruin, and he had yet to find one. This visit, however, was wholly different. This time, he searched not for a shortcut to the Tower’s upper floors, but for the source of the planet’s disturbance. And that was easily found.

Far above him, beyond the Tower’s uppermost reaches and far beyond his dragon’s maximum range, he saw what appeared to be grassy fields spreading out before him, upside down almost from his perspective as though gravity itself had shifted. The edges of the image were blurred into the planet’s sky blue atmosphere. His heart raced at the sight of it. He knew that image or at least the phenomena that it could cause.

”A portal,” he muttered, staring up into that strange, colorful mosaic in the sky. As his dragon circled the Tower, he caught more details – a strange, glittering mountain. The outline of a distant castle. Laughter burst from him in disbelief as he reached out a hand towards the magical tear between worlds, between planets, between infinite realities. ”Now, how did you come to be?”

Its very existence brought everything he thought he knew into question. Were inter-planetary portals the key to it all? Inter-dimensional, perhaps? He had once theorized as such, but without any further evidence…

”Something so familiar and yet only just out of reach…” He knew well that he could not reach the top of the World Sight by his dragon’s wings. It simply reached too far into the atmosphere where the temperature dropped below that of the most vicious mountain winds and oxygen became too sparse to fill a dragon’s lungs. Yet this was a phenomena worth his investigations. If only it were a few kilometers lower in the sky! If only he could reach it, study it, and perhaps…

No. It would not do to slip between worlds. Not when his mortality loomed like an ax blade above his neck. He would have to address one issue at a time, and his life took the utmost priority.

That did not mean that he couldn’t study this strange new piece of data in his ever growing collection, and once he’d sated his curiosity peering into the world above, his gaze dropped to that below. It seemed a fair number of travelers had stalled here to gawk at the portal. Odd. The World Sight rarely entertained so many visitors, but it seemed there was a caravan of them below him, all with their necks craned to gaze upon the unknown. And to gaze, no doubt, upon the threat of his dragon circling above them.

He smirked at the thought of their fear. Doubtlessly, his silver dragon could tear them all limb from limb, and he wouldn’t need to lift so much as a finger. These were no ordinary travelers, however. They were also witnesses. And witnesses, in this case specifically, were more useful living than dead.

Kuja bid his dragon circle ever lower, taking her slow time in descent as he examined the caravan from above. They were nothing interesting. A grizzled type, surely, already pulling their swords and weaponry to face the encroaching threat of his dragon. A moogle was among them. How convenient. If they wished to stay in touch with the postal services, that was.

His dragon landed at his command, and he slipped from her back, landing lightly on his feet like a bird come to roost. He approached them, head held high, thick locks of silver hair rustling in the wind.

”It appears that there are great vistas in the sky. Have you ever seen anything like it?” Kuja had, but it was better to ask or at least act ignorant of his own vast knowledge. He lifted a hand to the portal dramatically. ”Did you happen to notice when it appeared? My own investigations have yielded little.”

Yet. They had yielded little as of yet. Questioning these potential witnesses was but the second step of his studies.

[attr=class,ooc-notes] Sorry for the super long post! Kinda got away from me