(Hope you don't mind me jumping in. :) I wanted to give Aran a test run, and this looked like a good thread to start in.)

Arancathria swore softly, under her breath. She was beginning to regret buying these portal shards, for they seem to have sent her everywhere but the places she wanted to go. Probably why the trader had sold her a whole sack of them for such a cheap price. She swore that she would find the furry faced miscreant who had sold them to her and make him regret his birth. After she found her way home. Somehow.

The Demon Hunter groaned and shook her leathery, bat-like wings to settle them more comfortably against her back. Transportation via portal shard was always painful and disorientating, and it had taken her half an hour to just shake off the headache- her extremities still tingled with pins and needles. From what her spectral vision was telling her, she was in [i]yet another[/i] forest. This one had a distinctly different aura from the last one she was in, and was distinct yet again from the forests of her long ago birth. These shards were tied to far too many strange forests for her taste. Give her a Legion encampment anytime, she'd be far happier.

At least this time she was in decent health, and properly armed, her new war glaives wrapped in soft leather and hanging from her back. She was thankful for the gracious blacksmith who had crafted them for her, imbuing the layered metal with a quiet magic, which she had then augmented with her own runes and fel energy. She hefted them and her rucksack on her back, and started walking, carefully at first, but then more confidently as she grew accustomed to interpreting this worlds natural magical energies.

After about an hour she became aware of a change in the forest, and could hear snatches of singing that wove its way through the trees. The notes were sad, the song lonely and haunting, but utterly beautiful. It stirred something within her heart, and piqued her curiosity, but she was cautious too. Something singing like that in the night, in the forest, was either confident that it was completely safe, or it was luring the unwary into a trap. She had met sirens and demons and a few other races who lulled others with their songs or beauty.

Freeing her blades to have them at the ready, she pulled the black blindfold over her empty eye sockets to hide their green glow, and securing the pack more firmly to her back should she need to run (she was getting good at that; ever since she encountered the savage beasts of the last world she had learned that fighting wasn't always the best option), she approached the singer's location slowly and silently. She could smell water and damp mossy rocks and wet earth, and within the center of her vision a glowing shape appeared, the red-orange magical aura of something sizeable.

The singing stopped after a while, which made her strangely sad, but in a moment more she peered from around the bole of a tree and witnessed an extraordinary transformation, a kind of fish- or reptile-like being (to judge by the shape of it's aura in her vision) shape shifting into the form of human female. 

She'd seen enough humans to know that they were generally all right folks, but the question here was whether it was a human shifting to look like something else, or something else shifting to look like a human. Continuing to err on the side of caution, she remained hidden and followed the creature, through the trees. She could hear other voices now, some kind of argument or conflict, and having little else to do, she hung about to eavesdrop. Perhaps it would given her a taste of who the denizens of this place were.

It only took a few minutes to figure that it was a gathering of strange individuals who didn't seem to know each other, a hodge podge of unusual creatures including... was that a possum? The creature she had been following bent and patted it's head, so it was definitely a small type of animal.

This was turning out a lot more strangely than she was expecting.