Having toweled her long hair as much as she could stand, Morie moved on to the rest of her body. The air in the changing room was heavy from the heat of the showers, all now turned off as many of her teammates were finished changing out of their practice uniforms, shuffling out the door. Morie was always among the last out of the changing room--she had a habit of taking extended showers, on top of always being more than willing to talk to her teammates about the just-finished practice. When it came to volleyball, there was always more for her to say, which tended to be a trait that was appreciated in a competitive environment. Making the decision to get back into the sport by joining her college's team was one she was happy she made.
Chatting away with a few other girls, Morie took out her regular clothing from her gym bag, replacing it with her uniform. She pulled on the white and black, baseball-style long-sleeved tee, then stepped into black athletic shorts. As she sat down to do up her gray sneakers, the conversation she was having began to come to a close, and her friends made their way to the exit. Morie continued to take her time, never in a rush to leave the gym. She threw on her green and white track jacket, not bothering to zip it up. Double checking that she wasn't forgetting anything, the girl finally walked out of the changing rooms, out into the main area of the gym, where the court was.
Morie saw the last of her teammates leaving the building, and made her way to follow, slowing her pace as she noticed a stray volleyball in the corner of the large room. It must have been missed during the cleanup. Taking no time to think about it, she dropped her gym bag by the wall, and made her way over to pick the ball up. She stared at it for a moment as she held it in her hands. There was studying to be done... but she felt like practicing her serve at least one more time today.
The girl smiled to herself, knowing she'd likely be here for another little while. It had happened plenty of times before, and it'd happen again. She walked over to take her position, several feet back from the serving line, bouncing the ball to get an exact feel for it, as she had done thousands of times in her life. Satisfied, she held the ball out in her hand, palm up, and paused for a moment just as she would in a real match. After a slow and deliberate inhale, she dropped her arm slightly and brought it back up, years of muscle memory tossing the ball up and slightly forward in the perfect arc. Before even completing the motion for the toss, her legs were already running her forward, focus locked onto the ball. She timed herself, lowering herself and then jumping up as high as she could manage, the momentum of her run carrying her high and far. Jacket flowing behind her, Morie reared her right arm back in preparation. At the peak of her jump's arc, she launched the arm forward, striking the ball exactly as she had intended to. The ball soared just over the net, its path to touch down just inside the boundaries of the court set.
But something took Morie's attention away from the results of her serve--a distortion of the gym she was in, as though everything was drawing her eyes to the middle of the room. To the middle of the court.
Still in the air, her gaze shifted down to the fast-approaching floor... only it wasn't the floor. She could see grass, trees, sky, a black object. Where that stuff began and the gym ended wasn't clear, but despite how confusing and distorted everything in her vision was, Morie knew she was heading straight for that greenery as she fell.
Instincts kicked in. The girl reached out, knowing the volleyball net should be there. She felt it with her fingers, and grabbed on tight... yet that did nothing to slow her fall, even as she felt herself dragging it down. More and more of the world around her became that forest setting, and a breath later the feeling of the net in her grip had simply disappeared.
Perhaps more concerning than that, though, was the fact that the direction of gravity seemed to have suddenly changed. While she had been falling feet first, now she felt herself moving horizontally through the air, feet first, as though her falling momentum had been carried over.
Down was now the direction her back was facing, and Morie was not in the mood to be winded right now. The girl quickly turned her upper body around, landing and sliding a few feet on her shoulder before immediately bouncing back up and onto her feet in one motion. It was all so swiftly done that her forwards--now backwards--momentum hadn't been completely killed, forcing Morie to talk a few extremely off-balance steps backward in a barely successful attempt to keep herself from falling on her ass.
The girl stood there for a moment, trying to gather herself. What the hell had just happened? Heartrate spiked from the adrenaline, she glanced around quickly, trying to identify immediate danger. Of course, the first thing she noticed were four other people, not one more than ten feet away from her current position.
Incredulous, Morie looked between them for a few moments, then at her surroundings. A forest clearing, with a giant obelisk the highlight of it. There was nothing like that in her home city that she knew of. In fact, there were no forests for miles. The confusion she had been feeling began to settle in as she looked again to the others, noting with only the mildest comfort that many of them seemed plenty confused as well. A woman with impressive red hair, another much shorter girl, an asian boy, and finally a rather plain-looking man. Morie couldn't gather much more than those very surface level details at the moment--her mind was a little bit preoccupied.
"I... was in a school gym a second ago," she managed to say, phrasing it more like a question than a statement.
pkken
Izurich
