The pilot beamed up to the giant as he accepted the request, although the boy may or may not have flinched slightly as the beast lifted the craft. After a moment, though, he seemed to find the vehicle's stability satisfactory and gave a wave of thanks upwards.

"Much appreciated, sir," stated the pilot. "Perhaps I will return the favor someday soon."

Whatever favor the white mammoth could ever have that would actually be in the reasonable range of the boy's abilities was questionable, but it didn't seem to deter him much, the pilot making it a point to turn around and hurriedly catch up with the others.

The girl gasped a sharp breath, whether it was out of shock or because she was about to say something else was not evident as she stopped, and held the breath. She regarded the witch. Her eyes narrowed.

“Waaaaait a minute,” she said.

“Give me that,” she snatched at the coin.

Rhiannon, looking neither particularly pleased or amused, surrendered the coin graciously, with an obliging incline of her head, tipping her large, floppy hat into an appropriately rakish cant.

The coin itself was utterly mundane. It was bronze, crudely formed at the edges, and covered in writing that meant little to anyone at the moment; even the denomination of it wasn't plain just by looking at it. Its ample surface scratches implied excessive circulation.

"I can also make shoelaces untie themselves," added the witch, as if it were important.

Meanwhile not far outside of the town, another individual had also noticed the flying fortress. Unfortunately for him, though, he had flown too far into it's airspace. A man and his griffon companion lay injured near the road.

Well, mostly the man. The griffon seemed luckily unscathed, just stunned as it started to climb to a standing position. It chirped worriedly down at him as the man tried to sit up. Then nudged him with it's head. He started to sit up, but it was painful. He groaned. He waved at the griffon.

"Go..." He gasped, holding his side, "Find help."

With that, as if understanding, the griffon took off. It flew over the town walls, landing very close to the motley group of memory-wiped wanderers. It's eyes seemed fixated on the potion-seller. It squawked, seemingly at her and no one else. Why it thought she was the one to help over everyone else in town was anyone's guess.

It squawked at her once more for good measure before backing up, glancing back at the town gates. Then it turned around and took off again.

The imp dropped the coin with a stifled yelp as the gryphon landed. Snatching it up again hurriedly, she turned to regard the creature with deep suspicion, as if it had purposefully tried to startle her.

Prior to the gryphon’s arrival she had been engaged in trying to do something to the coin with the sides of her fingers, perhaps trying to roll it across the back of her knuckles. Her fingers, however, were heavily knuckled and chunky—almost mere wedges cut out of the greater shape of her hand—and did not lend themselves well to delicate feats of maneuverability.

She scowled darkly at the coin and then ceased her dedicated fiddling with it for a long enough period of time to look up after the gryphon.

“What’s that thing’s deal?” she asked, scornfully.


Behind her, the white titan quietly hefted the plane. It squeezed its eyes and opened its mouth, and let out a single, scratchy tone.

“Wh...” She looked back at him, momentarily flummoxed.

“What? What’s that going to do for us?"

Winn, who had been silent for awhile, had watched the griffin come and go with interest, but only interjected when the imp girl started questioning her friend.

"I think he's suggesting throwing the plane with us in it so we can follow that thing," he interpreted as best he could.

Pause.

"I don't think we should do that."

The griffin was already getting away, though.

At the approach of the second great winged beast of the day, Rhiannon displayed none of the defensiveness or paranoia her first experience warranted. Rather, as the griffin drew near, she, too, advanced, meeting him with strangely fervent, unpunctuated eye contact. It was hard to tell precisely what was taking place, but even upon the creature's departure, the witch stared at the space where it had been with a bemused lack of focus, a small frown pulled at the corners of her lips, as though trying very hard to remember something. For all the notice she paid to the discussion around her, it may as well have consisted entirely of chirping birds.

"He's getting away," she mumbled inaudibly, taking an impulsive step after the hybrid. With a jarring blink, she became instantaneously more cognizant, and as though only realizing it for the first time, she repeated more urgently, "He's getting away!"

"Come on!"

Breaking into an impromptu sprint, the witch grabbed at Winn's wrist as she passed by. With or without her traveling companion, her heels clacked the crisp, consistent, and rapid tempo of a full on run... until suddenly stopping -- The sound, that is. The witch's legs dashed onward, yet her feet (as well of those of her fabricator friend, provided her grip remained intact) grew increasingly distant from the earth, floating swiftly up into the sky, and after the griffin.

The appearance of the griffin once again brought forth the silent fascination from the pilot, his eyes staring with admiration at the winged beast. A myriad of curiosities arose in his fervent mind, but none were able to bubble out in time. As soon as the creature had arrived, it was promptly leaving, giving the boy yet another thought of vast blue skies twirling in his mind. A shame his own pair of "wings" were currently out of use.

Yet, there went the witch, presenting the greatest amount of urgency the pilot had seen from her in the few minutes he'd actually been in her presence. The puzzled gaze he let follow her appeared to show his surprise.

But why would that be a concern of his now? The chase was on, and he was being left behind in the pursuit!

With a new, exhilarated kick in his step, the boy took off after the sprinting witch... only to be caught off guard by her own sudden liftoff.

"You must show me the workings of that trick, miss!" he called after her, suddenly finding himself with the disadvantage of travel. That surely didn't dampen the smile on his lips, even seeming to give a fond look upon watching the girl's abilities, doing his best to keep pace.

pling

the coin bounced off the ground.

The imp stared after the witch in shock. Her eyes started out of their sockets, looking like shock-struck eightballs.

“Ehe!” She gasped. Then she flew into action, scrambling over herself in an awkward, three-way double-take. Intent gave way to tragic indecision as each thing she attempted to do was over-come by an impulse to do another, possibly more important thing. She dove for the coin on the ground, half-way through she stopped and turned around to speak to the giant—she did not stop when she reached the giant, however, continuing her spin in a full 360 degrees, staring back up at the flying girl. This cycle turned over in increasing chaos as she attempted to do too many things, all of them at once.

“Dzo nyar ha’!” she yelped, finally, making a last dive for the coin, scooping it up and running pell-mell for her friend’s boots. He pulled the rope of flags from around his neck and let them flutter to the ground as he began to lumber after the witch. As the flags fell past her face, she grabbed onto them, and was flung into the air by the growing momentum of the giant. As he began to run faster, she climbed up the rope, still in mid-air. The stationary inertia finally subsided, and she swung back to make contact with the giant’s torso. She scramble-clambered up the rest of the way, finally reaching his tremendous coat collar and hopping into it.

Winn staggered and torqued and hobbled at first with his toes clipping his heels and his boots flapping to the breeze when Rhiannon snagged him on her way past, but he willingly came along, and ran alongside. He ran until he couldn't feel his feet on the ground.

He managed to trip in midair, somehow. Though this seems like a feat in a place where there is literally nothing to trip on (not even the ground itself), it was really the lack of any feedback that made him feel oh-so-certain in the pit of his stomach that he had just sped off a cliff. But no — he was flying.

He frowned — not a frown of displeasure, but a frown of uncertainty, deeply etching into the corners of his mouth and threatening to somehow overtake his jawline as his pupils shot to the bottoms of his eyesockets, and he reluctantly looked down without really looking down, which is to say his head did not tilt, and he only peered so far as to see that the ground was getting farther away, but not so far as to see that his feet were pedaling air.

The boy, with his already-short brown hair blown straight back, locked his attention straight ahead, swallowed his frown away into an expression of utterly contained neutrality, and sufficed to contain the outward expression of his spine-chilling discomfort in his only-slightly-beadier-than-normal blue eyes while he continued to willingly run on nothing.

The injured man groaned, holding his side. Something was clearly broken, as moving sent a searing pain down his body. He powered through it, though, using his feet to push himself back to sit against a nearby rock, taking a deep breath as he watched his griffon disappear.

It was about then that he heard a voice..and what felt like someone poking him where he was hurting. He grimaced and looked down to find a small person with butterfly wings.

"Please stop walking on me..." He winced before moving a hand to attempt to flick her off his body. Of course that resulted in her disappearing and appearing elsewhere. He simply remained silent, glaring at her.

It wasn't long until the griffon landed nearby. Bringing with him, a trail of strangers. One of which, he hoped had some magical brew to make the hurting stop. Or knew how to patch a bad wound. Either would be sufficient at this point.

With all the transitional cues of having walked the whole way there, Rhiannon and her passenger alighted gently upon the cobblestone, a few meters from the winged lion's left flank, strolling straight on towards the incapacitated man.

She paused, level with the griffin's eyes, making a silent, fleeting contact with her own, before brushing past, and dropping to a crouch before the uniformed man.

"Oh," said the witch with a flutter of blinks, much of the gravity draining from her face and tone. "You're not nearly as bad as Alex made you sound."

Despite this, she wasted little time in setting down her bag, and leering unabashedly into Daniel's personal space. There she stared in mysterious silence, occasionally nodding to herself or furrowing her brow in thought as she looked him up and down, while a tepidly committed pointing gesture traversed the space in front of his head and torso over and over.

At last, something must have clicked, for in a sudden motion, she snatched at her satchel, swiftly defeated the clasp, and plunged an arm far farther into its depths than should have been possible. Up to her shoulder she reached, rummaging, rummaging; every now and again, the strange girl would extract a vial or bundle or jar of something or other, look at it, and with a shake of her head, return it to the bag.

"Aha!," she exclaimed triumphantly, finally extracting a small, suede drawstring pouch from within.

She shook loose from it into her palm a generous measure of olive green powder flecked with bits of something vaguely the color of rotten eggs. Taking in a deep breath, she raised the concoction to her lips just in front of the ailing man, and blew it all over him.