[h2]The Ex-Old Man[/h2]

Those children... rushing off like that and leaving an old-timer like her alone. Didn't they know that was awfully rude? Not to mention a sure sign of bad luck--the thought was promptly cut off by part of the passageway out collapsing. If she had delayed just a minute more, this would really have been something of a problem. Nearly as much of a problem as the sudden appearance of a forest. 

Hm, from the growth, it wasn't an old primeval forest, it was more similar to the way some woods had grown up during the sage's prior travels. It was all in all... something of a bad sign. Like the bad luck hadn't been put in stasis and things had gone quite wrong, making their rest [i]much[/i] longer. That would explain how her age had changed so drastically in comparison to the relatively short time they had been planning. A few decades, after all, wouldn't have been expected to both reconfigure one's anatomy and remove a normal lifetime's worth of ageing.

The new village at the mountain's base was the only place the others could have gone and Efander made her way down, continuing to work out some of the kinks in her muscles, testing the restrictiveness of her tailoring a bit more. Sure enough, outside the town was a quite noticeably metal figure, presumably left so as to not scare anyone... or maybe they thought that she might get lost on the short trip. As if a great sage could get lost; they would merely take a different path and arrive exactly when they meant to.

"Ho, so you have been left out here to greet me?" the girl asked, moving to more clearly be seen by Aenarius--complete with her change of outfit. Not that this was the ideal target to assess a reaction on.