And the walls came tumbling down...

You fly through the air, holding on to Dana for dear life, your roots completely out of the soil for the first time in your long and yet brief existence, and feel yourself slam into the Zone Boundary full ****. Normally Zone Boundaries are 100% impassible to monsters, other than a few 'roving' bands and bosses, which you had hoped to become one of by exceeding the level cap of your zone, but the barrier is there just the same. All this passes through your mind in an instant as you your outermost fronds slam into the barrier, then...

The rest of your body connects a microsecond later, and the barrier: shatters!

All around you is darkness, darkness which swirls with colors that have no names and shines with lights that have no rightful place in the universe as you understand it, and you know instinctively that only the trace of divine essence that Vienna has imbued you with allows you to survive in this ~AEther.~ the thought comes unbidden and from an unknown source.

You and Dana sail on through a chaotic maelstrom of darkness, light, and unnatural color for hours, days, weeks, months, years, you're not really sure. Time doesn't seem to flow the same way here that it did in the realm of your birth, instead of going in a straight line from past through present to future it is three dimensional, and curves or turns corners, sometimes looping back and rejoining itself at a point where you have already been, and may yet be again, or may NOT. You and Dana have sex a few dozen or hundred times just to relieve the monotony, and discuss politics, religion, philosophy, tactics, and mathematics till you both are so intimately familiar with each other's ideas and positions that no further words need to be exchanged. In the process you realize that Dana is deeply in love with you, and a few hours or years after that you realize that you are just as deeply in love with her. The two of you share a primal spiritual connection through the trace of Vienna's essence that permeates you both, and it thrums with a mutual love and respect that will shake the foundations of the world if you ever get out of this place of madness and anarchy.

Dozens of times over your trip you pass close to, even you cannot help but think of them as 'Monsters', which swim through this sea/sky of black colors, moving lazily through times and dimensions that have no bearing on each other or the world as you understand it, save what you and these nonrhythmic titans **** upon it through your intrinsic fields. Their level read outs typically make no sense to you, reading things like Level: ?>#!@$@##$^ but once you brush against one of them and for a moment your fields intersect and you read: LVL: OMFingG-WTF-BBQ-LOL!!!!

There also are lesser monsters in this sea/sky of non-time and non-space, hungry ones, and you and Dana are **** to fight them occasionally. Even as potent as you have become the fights are challenging, though indescribable, your weapons not flailing limbs and spit barbs but intangible things like 'love', 'trust', 'pain', 'hate', and 'reason'. You gain two MORE levels from defeating these abominations, while Dena, less powerful but more skilled at this combat, picks up over a dozen.

New Server Loading!

The words echo out of the colorful darkness like a peal of thunder, the first sound other than one generated by you or Dana's bodies or the * Ding! * of a level up which you have heard in this place, and by some instinct you wrap Dana in a cocoon of vines again, before...

* CRASH! Phish-tinkle-tinkle! *

You slam into another zone boundary, and THIS one HURTS. You take about 90 damage and fly through proper air and time again for the first time in a long time, while your head, instinctively oriented away from the point of impact, sees a hole in the glass-like walls of reality fill in with cascading and crisscrossing ones and zeros, then those crystallize into the same illusory continuation of the sea and sky over/through which you briefly fly.

Until you come crashing down into the glassy still water!

Fortunately for your beloved Dana you can keep your cocoon water tight, at least to the depth you plunge to before, being made of plant fibers, you float back to the surface. Once most of you is above the slowly rippling sea you undo the top of the cocoon and let her out to look around you. It is high noon, and you bask in the sun's rays drinking in the life sustaining mana it provides.

See anything? You ask, knowing Dana's eyesight remains slightly better than your own, being as you are a plant and don't precisely have eyes.

"Nothing, the ocean is still as glass for as far as I can see except right around us." She says with a note of awe.

Now back in stable reality for the foreseeable future you take a minute to examine your level up screens.

/===========================================================================================\
Chlorofiend of Vienna
Level 30 -> Level 32
Melee Attack: 45 -> 49
Ranged Attack: 40 -> 42
Weakness: Fire
Special Abilities:
Plant - heals 6 HP/sec and 5 MP/sec when in direct sunlight or in rain.
Immune to poison
Earth Wade - can wade through the earth like water.
Absorb - can draw mana from target through contact.
Herbal flow - can heal an ally for 8 HP/sec through contact.
Kindred: creatures sharing a type with you receive a significant bonus to HP and melee attack.
Earth Wave: drags roots through the ground, throwing up a wave of earth that has a chance to stun.
Seedlings: fire's a barrage of seeds at high velocity each impacting with half of normal ranged attack strength. Has a chance of sprouting a weed-fiend if seed lands in fertile soil.
\===========================================================================================/

Interesting, you hadn't noticed this before, (None of your screens worked in the AEther except the Status Overlay Filter, which was always set to 'on'.) but apparently your 'plant' HP/MP re-gen ability now did BOTH when you were in direct sun or it was raining. That was useful. You wonder what it would do if both were happening at once? Oh, wait, that's next to impossible. Still, not 100% out of the question, at least for very brief intervals... ~Bah, I'll probably never get to find out, so why give it head-space?~ You think to yourself.

You pull up the next screen which shows your inventory and HP/MP totals and caps, instead of just the green and yellow bars you always see at the edge of your field of vision and are in for a shock...

/===========================================================================================\
Chlorofiend of Vienna
Base Hit Points: 3000 -> 3200
Base Mana Points: 1500 -> 1600

Inventory
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard
Embedded Unidentified Dark Shard

\===========================================================================================/

Oh SHIT! You curse floating in the serine water.

"What?" Dana asks, and you explain, about how a 'Dark Shard' was what got Miera to go toe to toe with an entire forest of spiders, and how killing her singlehandedly leveled you from 13 to 30, though that part doesn't surprise her, and how your inventory now shows you have FIFTEEN of these 'Dark Shard' things embedded in you and unidentified.

"We will have to get them out then." Dana states reluctantly, and you agree.

The surgery takes about an hour, but finally all the shards are extracted, though Dana has to heal herself several times since they are razor sharp and pulling them slashes her hands to ribbons. It turns out they DO glow, assorted colors and tints, and they look like chunks of a broken pane of glass, except coal black save their glow.

They must be be pieces of the World Border... You muse.

After the extractions the two of you drift on the ocean, which grows more and more choppy as time goes on, for five days, sustaining each other with magic from the hit point loss from lack of soil to root in and constant sun exposure, before a storm boils up and you turn your vines and fronds into a makeshift sail, hoping desperately that it is blowing towards land, not away from it. Dana clings to you as you ride through the storm, the rain replenishing your HP rather than her magic, and several times you are **** under by the largest swells but you always manage to hold on to her, and after several hours...