The small hamlet of Ennuvia was nestled into a long ridge that jutted out of the mostly flat, but well forested surrounding terrain of the planet of Safehouse. Its thousand-something citizens were hard-working pioneers, exploring the surrounding land and assessing any resources that could be reaped from it. Its sudden appearance and growth were spurred by some former Earth refugees who had heard of a new settlement, where the local wildlife was not so overwhelmingly huge or powerful to threaten the lives of their families. Safehouse, for all the sanctity of its name, was still a largely untamed planet; it was home to countless species of aggressive creatures that put the dinosaurs of the old world to shame. Without the advent of the power wielders on Earth, this hidden gem of the galaxy would have been completely inhospitable, and would have remained in the rough forever. Thanks to the ever-growing new generation of demi-humanity, and the many other sentient, extraterrestrial races whose blood have started to blend with theirs, however, this world was an acceptable challenge.<br/><br/>Such brave souls forge the frontier of Safehouse, and humble Ennuvia had its beginnings from the martial warrior known as Sierra Terraloft. Daughter of Cody -- renowned master of spiritual geomancy and the man responsible for personally erecting 60% of all new buildings on the planet in the last 20 years -- and Sumatra -- the ward of the Suzerain himself -- Sierra had little trouble exceeding the shadow that her parents cast. Her ambition and compassion seemed never-ending to those who observed her. She had matured greatly from her rambunctious childhood, forged from a lifetime of endless world-threatening crises. She had learned how to take responsibility for her actions, and how to take charge when it was needed. Sierra learned that she<span style="font-style: italic">liked</span>being in charge. She liked being in a position of respect, but she also loathed the idea of not earning that respect with her every breath. Thus, every day she overpopulated her plate. Clearing the beasts from the area that would eventually be host to Ennuvia, raising several children, responding to distress calls around the planet, and being a strong, opinionated person of influence to many was an extraordinarily draining regimen. Somehow, she managed it all, and then crashed into her bed like a falling log.<br/><br/>Today, the half-demihuman awoke to the embrace of freezing cold arms wrapped around her barren and well-defined midriff. She shuddered quietly and grabbed at the offending body, pulling it away from her and pushing the blankets off of her body. As she began to try to come to terms with this strange predicament, Fei Fong sensed her awakened state and began to produce floating panels of information within her visual field -- the weather outside, the time, news headlines from Sanctuary, messages left, and so on -- and simultaneously began to sit up from the place he'd laid this particular body beside his wife on the night prior. Brushing his smooth, dark hair out of his face, he smiled up at Sierra. "Good morning, dear. You slept well," he greeted, quietly.<br/><br/>The woman, who now stood beside her bed in her underwear, with her hands on her hips, regarded her husband's shell with weary confusion. "Y... Your arms," she managed, on her first attempt. "Freezing. Y-you turned off your stupid body while I was sleeping, didn't you?" It was the only explanation she could think of. She wasn't terribly technologically saavy, which was ironic, considering her choice in spouses. She simply remembered the last time she touched his body when it was turned off; it was as cold as death.<br/><br/>The computer-man smirked, heaved an unnecessary sigh, and started working his way out of the covers to stand, as well. "Well," he began, giving a moment of pause to saturate the moment with his ego, "I wouldn't say it was<span style="font-style: italic">off</span>. Most of its functions were disabled, liiiiiiike ... emotive simulation, circulation, an--"<br/><br/>"Whatever, Fei. You turned off. I thought I woke up next to a corpse or somethin'. Freaked me out. Don't do that anymore, yeah?" she asked, the desire she had for getting into the details of the matter pushing its way out of her groggy mind. She already was dismissing the matter and trying to put her attention on those information panels that somehow were clear and vivid despite her vision in general still not quite being clear. A subconscious thought caused her closet to open, and another panel appeared. This one was the size of her, and appeared in front of her, though it wasn't really there. It acted as a sort of mirror, and interactively helped her choose an outfit for the day. It wasn't terribly hard to choose, for Sierra. One of these outfits was worn yesterday. It'd have to be the other one, then.<span style="font-style: italic">Man</span>, she lamented to herself.<span style="font-style: italic">I really need to bring more clothes from the city.</span><br/><br/>As her selected clothes began to float out of the closet toward her, Fei Fong simply materialized his own set of clothing. "Have you considered that your need to sleep a fourth of the day away is pretty inconvenient for me, too? That's ten hours of time we could be spending together with our children, you know," he admonished, gently. The half-catgirl began to wiggle into a baby tank top, while the single tuft of hair on the end of her tail hooked into its hole in her jeans.<br/><br/>"Yeah, but sleep is awesome, and dreaming is pretty great most of the time. At least leave the heat on, man. That's like half the point of being in bed with me when I sleep, yanno?" Sierra countered, stepping into the pants and securing them in place.<br/><br/>For about a picosecond, Fei Fong considered offering yet another point in his defense, but quickly realized it was useless trying to argue with Sierra. He'd learned in the couple's formative years that trying to win a point with logic just made her angrier with him. Despite how attractive he found her when she was mad, he preferred it when that aggression was focused on the unwitting fauna of their area of residence. "Okay, fine," he simply answered. "I'm sorry. Before you ... freak out again, though, Number Two is in the living room, reading to Josh."<br/><br/>Sierra gave a grunt of understanding as she grabbed a brush and started dragging it through her unruly crimson mane, which had been a genetic gift from her father. She left the bedroom and started down the steps to the first floor of their relatively huge home, where yet another Fei Fong body was sitting on the couch in the living room. Their three-year old adopted son was cradled in his lap, and they were reading a virtual book together. She smiled, and swept the boy out of the shell's arms, holding him up n the air. "Hey, brat! You learnin' any good words over here?" she teased, and the human boy giggled and nodded frantically. "Good." The boy was returned to the lap from whence he came, and with him came a whiskery kiss from the matron to her husband, which was happily accepted.<br/><br/>"Oh, so One gets a lecture, and Two gets a kiss? Man, it's hell being married to you," the AI noted, jokingly, as his first body left the bedroom in slacks and a comfortable button-up shirt, and strided toward the back door. Two bounced little Josh in his lap, as the boy's attention was clearly on mommy and not on reading, for the moment. Sierra leveled a gaze at him of low tolerance. "Shut up, you're stupid. I know you're the same dude. That stuff stopped working on me, like, five years ago."<br/><br/>She cleared her throat, and then turned off toward the kitchen. A pot of coffee was already freshly brewed, and breakfast was cooking itself. She could smell the grakkor sausage and tatchi eggs sizzling before she came in the room. An unspoken thought to her husband caused a new display to appear, showing a digitized radar of the surroundings. She could see for miles with this display, and could pinpoint every lifeform within it, from the smallest bug to the largest carnivore. "Boring," she grumbled, noting a general lack of anything she could identify as threatening. She somatically pushed the panel to one side as she started to pour herself a cup of coffee.<br/><br/>As she was going to ask Fei Fong something else, she found herself preempted, as the entire house and the land underneath it physically shuddered. It was a long, rather violent shake, and it seemed to physically pass through the area, from one side to the other, before fading. The two other orphans she'd adopted were awakened by it. She could hear their worried whimpering already. "...Th' hell was that?" she wondered aloud, shooting a look to Fei Fong Two. As was typical for artificial intelligences, he seemed unphased by the quake, on the surface. Sierra had been married to the digital personage long enough to know, however, that he was scrambling a horde of assets to determine the problem. It was a vacancy in his eyes, a certain dulling of that smart-ass spirit that gave away his preoccupation.<br/><br/>"An earthquake, obviously," he casually responded, as he picked Josh off his lap and set him down on the floor. "Probably nothing to be worried about." He proceeded to simply sit there, staring at the wall across from him, his face lacking any meaningful expression.<span style="font-style: italic">Yep,</span>his wife mused.<span style="font-style: italic">Checked completely out.</span><br/><br/>"I hope you're right," Sierra said, gravely, as she went to go check on the other kids.<br/><br/><div><hr style="height:2px; width:100%; border:0; color: white;background:white;"/></div><br/>A short time later, in an even smaller settlement that had only begun to get its foundations, several men worked with shock-cutters, breaking apart a cluster of crags in an area they wanted to expand into. As there were only a handful of citizens and the area was not yet completely cleared of hostile monsters, there were a pair of novice power wielders doing patrols in the area. The day had mostly been quiet for them; a few groundbats had tried to sneak up on the camp earlier, but they were easily dispatched between the magical mastery of one and the telekinetic command of the other.<br/><br/>Then, it came. That violent shuddering that rippled through the countryside, as though the world had begun to suffer from indigestion. The workers at the dig site paused their equipment, and looked around, ready to drop what they were doing and run, if they needed to. The female feline wizard, who floated above the treetops, exchanged a look with the male human psion, who was stretching out his senses to try and pick up on anything unusual. He didn't seem to sense anything unusual, at first, and he simply dismissed it through a telepathic communique to his comrade, much as Wei Fong had moments prior.<br/><br/>Suddenly, the man's eyes went wide, and he reached a hand out toward the workers. His lips began to form the word "RUN!", but before he could even make the vowel, the rumbling returned, roared to a volume many times louder, and crescendoed with an explosion of rock. A column of monolithic, white, writhing<span style="font-style: italic">something</span>barreled out of a hole of its own making, consuming the entire crag and at least a dozen men. The mage might've been taken too, but she managed to react on a gut instinct, and tumbled away. She righted herself soon after, and as the enormous tendril poured ever higher into the air and curved at the end to point downward, she whipped a powerful defensive spell from out of the ether. Meanwhile, her partner built mental energy upon itself, and then thrust it outward in the form of a translucent spear. The spearhead crashed into the chitinous plating of the ogrish entity, and managed to cause a mild crack, but little else.<br/><br/>Hoping her magic would have a better chance, the arcane warrior summoned a pair of snakes made of crackling green energy. As she prepared to foist them in a death spiral for the head of the centipede-like being, she noted, "We might want to call in some backup on this one, Ethan." ...Those were the last words of Andrea the Spiritspell, before a second terrible insect erupted from another spot on the ground and devoured her whole, without pause. Ethan could barely contain his shock as he felt the life force of the woman he'd been working with for a month now suddenly snuffed out in an instant. He knew he was in way over his head. He was going to die, too, just like Andrea. There was only one thing left to do. He reached out with his mind to the Marshall of their settlement, and as he watched a million man-sized teeth glistening with ichor bearing down on him, he got out one desperate message.<br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #80FFFF">~Get help! Get away! NOW!~</span></span>