The heat of the first battle raced towards an epic climax. Fate had not chosen its winner, and this jeopardized the life of both sides as they neared destruction. A destruction too eagerly anticipated by even the sea as it rocked the boats in the colosseum back and forth.

Archon watched with great dismay as both opponents tried meticulously to break his Rune, his spirit, and his life. The spell he just cast exhausted his reserves for the moment, and a feeling of helplessness washed over him as the struggling woman crawled near his circle and disrupted it with a rift of powerful magic. At the same time, her companion swung a deadly weapon in a decapitating arc.

Just as the magic sparked and prepared to rupture anything in it radius, or possibly merge to create a new spell, Archon felt his body de-stabilize. Just as the blow would have struck his head into a puddle on the ship's ground, it passed through. And just as Archon felt sure that the arena they held their first match in could not change in such drastic measures, it did.

His view changed, or perhaps, and Archon thought this more likely, everything else changed for him. All colors continuously ran to gray, and the monotonous world itself continuously summoned an obscuring fog. Within seconds the perplexing monotony became a limbo of clouds, and the only soul inhabiting the limbo had no idea what to do.

Archon's water weird form remained- the battle had not ended. His slim, attractive female body in the pleasant azure color and seductively long did not fade away with the rest of the world- a stub on his left arm also reminded him that the scars of the previous battle had not gone away, and that danger might take the other one if he did not choose the road of caution. Of course, he still felt strangely helpless in a place not unlike his own void in which he constantly resided.

However, before all thoughts flew away in a neatly organized and reviewed fashion, the scenery changed again. Colors burst from every inconspicuous speck of cloud, and terrain just shot up from below. Archon noticed the black, starry sky first, and then the pale moon which still seemed to suffer from a gaping crater somewhere on its surface.

After the sky came houses; roofs: shingled, wooden, high, low or flat. Especially odd came the realization of being on top of such a roof. This caused feelings of perplexity to once again come into his mind uninvited- but at least they threw out the dangerous emotions of helplessness. He peered around, his watery hair whipping in the wind, occasionally giving a droplet to the air current.

The current roof had a rather flat angle, but an elongated roof. His eyes could not tell him the color of the shingles, but he did see six windows lining them- one trip and a fall was all it took. Light shone from those windows, and a passing shadow warned of the living in this house. Archon moved his tiring eyes on.

In the distance came more houses, more lights. More life, as far as he was concerned, but nothing made sense to him! Where was he? If this was another battle, then victory was almost automatically denied- the question of if pestered Archon the most. If-questions that he had no answer for, and everything here just pointed to a sprawling cityscape with filthy alleys, streets filled with excrements and urine, and people not sane enough to care about it.

“Emilio?” Archon surprisingly called out. An intention to say something in this starry night never occurred to him, but the echo affirmed his action. Might as well, he thought. However, he might as well do it louder despite the fact a shadow from beneath him crept to the window, “Emilio! Are you there?”