Charm Learning Shard (Worm/Exalted) (COMPLETED)

You bask in the familiar sensation of a power settling in and becoming a part of you. Three days, that's ridiculous. Labyrinth is arguably the strongest cape you've studied so far, yet you figured her out in three days flat. As compared to a solid eight days for the considerably less impressive Faultline, just to give one example among many. You've officially given up on understanding how you're understanding these things, but at least you're saving money right now.

Now for the hard part: Figuring out exactly what power just you got. You never seem to copy things exactly, and the mechanics of exactly how things change are as opaque to you as the apparent variation in complexity. You still don't know how to use the power you got from Lung (another contender for strongest cape studied, whose power took you two days).

You try to activate your new power, and feel a dimensional shift taking hold right away. Thank god, it's one of the cooperative ones. The chess pieces start to crumble, wearing away into fine silvery sand.

"What? What's happening?" Labyrinth asks.

Oh, you probably should have waited until you were alone to try it out. You thought you could just affect some tiny detail that wouldn't be noticed. Instead the chess set has been completely reduced to sand. How do you control this thing? The sand is spreading across the floor. How do you turn it off? You take a spill as the bed you're sitting on turns into sand, and then you're tumbling down a dune. The world is spinning and all you can see is silver sand and black sky. Wait, sky?

You come to a stop lying on your back at the bottom of the dune. Your hair and clothes are full of sand, but your shitty Brute powers saved you from being overly bruised or abraded. You get to your feet with a groan and look around. You spot Labyrinth lying some distance away and hurry over to help her. Oh, ouch. She's not a Brute. It looks nasty, but she's not bleeding too badly.

"Where are we?" she asks as you help her to her feet.

"I don't know. We'll have to climb back up and take a look around."

You have to steady her at first, but she seems to be recovering. By the time you're back at the top of the dune she's walking on her own. The view that greets you isn't encouraging. The sky is pitch black without moon or stars, but the silver sand is glowing faintly, enough that you have no trouble seeing. And what you see is sand. Endless desert, stretching to the horizon in all directions.

"Is this one of your places?" you ask. You noticed that she had several distinct dimensions she was pulling things from, each with its own 'theme'. The desert is new, though.

"No, it's- the worlds, they're gone!"

"What?"

"I, I can't reach any of my worlds." She sounds terrified.

"You can't bring us back?" you ask.

"I don't even know how we got here. My power doesn't work like this."

"And you can't bring anything here? Like, say, food and water?"

Labyrinth shakes her head mutely. Shit. Okay, this is clearly you fault. You owe it to her to get her out of this - not that you were planning on dying in an otherworldly desert regardless. You close your eyes and poke at your new power. It accidentally walked you into hell, now how do you walk back out? Come on, bullshit power intuition.

Aha! Wait, shit! Okay, you can do this. You just have to keep telling yourself you can do this.

"We had better get moving at once," you say. "Come on, it's this way." You start walking.

"How do you know?" she asks.

"Just a feeling," you say, looking back over your shoulder. "Do you have a better idea?"

She shakes her head again and follows you.

---

"You seem different," you remark. "I think you've talked more since you got here than you did over the last three days."

"It's my worlds. They're all gone, so there is more space for... me."

"You know that Faultline hoped that I could figure out some way to help you once I understood your power?"

"Yeah."

"Well, mission accomplished I guess." You scowl. "All I had to do was strand us in an isolated hell dimension."

Labyrinth reaches out and squeezes your shoulder. Huh, initiating physical contact. She really is different.

"It's not so bad," she says, "the Bad World is much worse."

You can hear the capitalization, and decide not to ask for details. Probably the one you called the Asylum. At least you hope so, you'd hate to think she had something worse than that. Instead of dwelling on such things, you hand her your cellphone.

"Here. Record a message saying as much. I'll hold it out in front of me when we get back and maybe I won't get murdered on the spot."

"She's going to be pretty angry, isn't she?" Labyrinth muses. "I wonder how much damage was done to the club this time? I remember her being upset about that before, even though she tried to hide it.

"But can't I just- oh." Yeah. Sounds like she just realized that this is temporary: Once you escape this isolated place her power will come back and everything will be back to normal. It takes her a while to compose herself and record a message that won't do more harm than good after that.

---

Labyrinth lies down and refuses to get up. When you try to coax her, she holds up your phone, showing the time. Oh. You arrived late last evening, and now it's apparently eight in the morning. The sun hasn't come up, though. You don't think this place even has a sun. You decide that calling a halt is reasonable.

"How much longer?" she asks.

You shrug. "Several days at least, I think." You know exactly how long it will take, but you're afraid that if you tell the truth she'll just give up then and there.

She groans and covers her eyes with her arm. You lie down next to her and try to get some sleep.

When you wake up, you start walking again.

---

The night never ends. This probably saves your lives. It remains dark and chilly, and you sweat relatively little as you walk. The makeshift urine-filtering device your Tinker 0 powers rig up probably also saves your lives, but the less said about that the better. It doesn't work all that well, that's more than enough said.

---

The second day wasn't too bad. The third day was awful. Day four Labyrinth became delirious, but she remained cooperative enough that you could lead her by the hand. On day five she wouldn't wake up, but wasn't considerate enough to stop breathing.

So you plod onwards, carrying Labyrinth on your back. She's not all that much smaller than you are, and you aren't all that much stronger that a normal human.

Your resentment involves a certain amount of envy. If not for your shitty Brute powers, you could be comatose right now, too. Instead you're getting to enjoy every nuance of dying of thirst in exquisite slow motion. With a sack of rocks on your back.

Once you're certain she won't wake up, you start cheating by using mind-hands to take up most of her weight. It helps, for a while. But your mind isn't in the best shape either right now, and you're having trouble keeping its hands on task. They have a tendency to drift off and fade away whenever your concentration slips.

Oh, you stopped. Stopping is bad. You had better stop doing that. Heh, stop stopping, stupid. Your feet were hurting before, but now you can't feel them at all. Maybe they've been worn away completely, and you're walking on the stumps? You don't look down to check, just in case. Your vision is too blurry to see much anyway - that's not a symptom of anything, you just had to discard your contact lenses days ago.

You keep expecting to see four-armed Scion, or the sandworm. But it's the wrong desert, this one is real. You think. Real-ish. You keep seeing something in the corner of your eye, but every time it's just Labyrinth's head resting on your shoulder. At least she's too dehydrated to drool on you.

You're pretty sure that you aren't plodding in a straight line any more, but trying to turn around and look at your tracks seems like an excellent way to fall over and never get up again. And that's just too goddamn tempting to consider.

The world is fading in and out, that probably means you're delirious too, now. But your surroundings are subtly different each time, which means that you're still walking. How are you still walking, loaded down as you are? Wait, are you? You feel a spike of panic. You must have dropped Labyrinth! Oh, no, there she is on your back, just where you left her. Yet you're still walking. It's a mystery.

There is sand in your face. Sand in your face means you've fallen down! You flail your limbs about and feel the sand shifting around you. You're lying on on your back, underneath the sand. Not very deep, though. You manage to clear away enough sand that you can breathe, and open your eyes. The sky is dark - but not black, and there are clouds! You made it!

With some struggling you get into a sitting position. You note with relief that Labyrinth is sprawled next to you, not inexplicably buried. You're sitting in a patch of glowing silver sand in the middle of a city. You recognize the buildings - this is exactly what Brockton Bay would look like, if the Palanquin nightclub was a faintly glowing desert.

Speak of the devil, that's Faultline & Co approaching right now. When they recognize you they break into a run. Most of them cluster around Labyrinth with various exclamations of relief and concern, but Faultline herself is focused on you. You prepare an eloquent explanation of your situation, and a stirring defense of your actions.

"Water," you croak, and pass out.

===

Spoiler: Updated status

Charms:
Taylor: All-Encompassing Sorcerer’s Sight, ???
Tattletale: Know the Soul's Price
Bitch: Spirit-Tied Pet
Aegis: Ox-Body Technique
Browbeat: Shaping the Ideal Form
Dragon: Implicit Construction Methodology
Kid Win: Industry and Forge Wisdom
Lung: ???
Vista: Mind-Hand Manipulation
Cricket: Mantis Form
Faultline: Charm of Lesser Unmaking
Labyrinth: Hell-Walker Technique

Spoiler: Mechanics corner

The bad news: You accidentally Cecylene (a primordial god-thing that takes the form of an endless desert) and gave her a foothold in your reality.
The good news: Walking for five days just put you back in the real world, which means you didn't accidentally Malfeas (a primordial god-thing that takes the form of a vast city populated by trillions of demons).

Usually Hell-Walker Technique just brings you into Cecylene, and doesn't leave a permanent foothold behind. However, intersecting Labyrinth's power with other explicitly dimensional effects canonically creates permanent rifts^*. In this case, the DM rules the effect to be as if you'd also used Holy Land Infliction and Dune-Drowned Oasis Ritual, sacrificing yourselves. With you being Essence 3 and her being Essence 2, you just brought 2500 square yards of infinite desert into Earth Bet.

^*Yes, I know, all parahuman powers are implicitly dimensional effects, and this effect makes no sense. That's canon for you.