The sky here crackled an eerie green, as if a great ferocious energy was trying to punch through the very atmosphere. The thick roiling cloud cover was difficult to sail through, but there had been much worse. He had struggled to get here in an intense storm which had only just cleared off, for one. Captain Tesla had just set his beloved companion, the dragon Gwyntaan, free to hunt. And he was intending to leave before his elegant long time friend would return to the older airship.<br/><br/>Tesla had long understood that he'd worn out his welcome in this Victorian age. He was out of money...and all he had left was a few barrels of fuel and couple of crates of rations. He was flying at high speed, the gears whirring and pumping in the ship, the hiss of steam pouring out of the ship, the steam melding with the thick and eerily green cloud cover all around him. There was something thunderous and yet elegant about the dark ship moving through the sky like a snake, parting the mist quietly.<br/><br/>Tesla was trying to pilot the ship, sitting in the captain's chair as it rotated to let him face any direction he needed, and he shoved the speed of his vessel to Full, knowing that he could need all the the speed and power he could get to make it through the portal. He'd heard that this particular strange doorway to other worlds opened in response to certain codes, and the map he'd had about the portal had a strange set of symbols and icons on it. The gist that he understood was that there would be some way to use these codes in order to pick a specific direction.<br/><br/>Anywhere was better than here, really.<br/><br/>It would be Anywhere, too; Tesla had no idea where he could be sent if he found a way to set in this code. He started the ship into a fast descent, and this was where the storm picked up. It pulled him mostly through the portal, and the ship was being jerked around roughly...until it seemed to hit the eye of the the swirling mass of energy where all was calm and quiet. He could see a bright impossible lime color, and he knew that now was the time for the code...but where to input it?<br/><br/>He was not a foolish man. He was a guilty and ruined one, though. All he could think about was that Gwyntaan would come back from hunting to find the ship gone, and the sadness enveloped him. His dark masked face, masked to hide the scars and the weariness, looked forlorn...even though no expression could be made out. He got up and stepped into the open walkway outside of the ship, looking around. Everything was simply a mass of fluff and rage, and he could hear the gentle booming of thunder around him. But he saw, almost hovering in the air, a small panel full of arcane symbols on it...and when he pulled out his map, the destination symbols he'd read were on his map. He felt a pang of conscience--he wanted to go back for Gwyntaan, but he didn't want to drag his friend along with him when he was likely going to die starving. He couldn't ask that of Gwyntaan. He wouldn't.<br/><br/>It took some maneuvering to reach the mysterious panel, reaching his long dark arm out, his coat flopping in a nearly zero-G environment. Soon he typed in the numbers and was good to go--something in the portal rumbled, and he ran at top speed back to his ship to pilot himself through the opening that was breaking several hundred feet ahead. The whoosh noise nearly deafened him, but he managed to get to his captain's chair and push his old clockwork tub through the barrier.<br/><br/>He entered a new world...and upon looking down at it, he was awed at the devastation of it. It was as if this whole world was a mirror of the Victorian one he'd just left...only everything beneath him looked like bombed out gutters and ruins. Strange beasts with gleaming eyes could be seen far below, looking like ants to Tesla, but he knew they were likely menacing on the ground. What type of place had he gotten to?<br/><br/>What Tesla did not know was that the portal was still open, and his old ship had likely left a smelly trail, even in the heavy weather, and a steam trail, that Gwyntaan would likely have no problem following. The entryway from his own world had the potential to not close--Tesla had been told of the portal and how hard it was to access, and he wasn't even sure how he'd managed to get to the center of the mysterious thing without it banging up his ship....<br/>