[color=gray][indent][indent]The ceremony was magical, and that was before any [i]actual[/i] magic had happened. Ambrose followed the crowd like a lost lemming. His eyes fell between being transfixed on Freyja, the music, and his phone. Audrey’s stark [N] and Rowan’s dismissal of him started to hurt. Of course, he knew he should have been a bit more conversational with the former and expected nothing from the latter. Didn’t mean that his pride didn’t sting like alcohol applied directly to a wound. He pocketed his phone about the time the ceremony reached the crescendo.

When the force of the raft pushed ripples out and onto the shore, Ambrose went from highly amused to concerned. For a second he thought maybe New Hope was able to afford both pyrotechnics and hyrdotechnics, but it seemed more like the entire ceremony had gone awry. Logically, Ambrose assumed that maybe something happened with the raft. He inhaled, his chest tightening around the breath. Had he fucked something up? Was Freyja in trouble because of him? Was the entire town in trouble because he fucked up a raft? He glanced around to see everyone standing there, statue-still. It was eerie. He reached out to touch a woman’s shoulder and found that not even the fabric of her clothing moved with the force. 

Music thrummed around him. It reminded him of cranking the bass up enough his chest reverberated with the sound. Yet, this was everywhere. The music flowed into him and through him. A chorus of voices singing something—haunting… macabre. “What is ‘yolk bicker’?” About that time, Brown shot off from his side and ran full force towards the lake. 

Ambrose’s gaze followed the line of panic toward the lake that seemed to be reaching out, wanting to consume the people around it. Freyja was in trouble. His friend ran towards danger. The music pounded in his head. People were frozen around him. Ambrose went to take a step forward and follow in Brown’s footsteps, but his knees felt like gelatin and his heart seized in his chest. His lungs forgot how to function, and he couldn't get it past his tongue when he tried to force a breath down. The static and lights fizzled on the side of his vision. He didn’t want to be here. He wasn’t scared of what was happening around him, but of what was happening within him. This is why he had a hard time sleeping. The medication that he took to ward this feeling away kept him awake. He hated taking it. But he did, anyway. Anything to soothe the panic in his chest. 

He looked up, arms shaking and breathing ragged, to see a tendril of the lake extended towards him. Fine. If this was it. At least it didn’t make any fucking sense. Ambrose shut his eyes tight and refused to open them.
[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/lDWDVhQ.png[/img][/center]
His reality shifted and wobbled, and heat both worrying and comforting engulfed him until the atmosphere broke. It felt less as if he was in some watery purgatory and more on a solid surface. Ambrose lay prone only for a moment before he rocketed up with the speed of a dog hearing its food bowl filled. Air escaped his lungs for a second, he coughed, he wheezed, until he felt his throat open back up and he let in a gulping breath. Slowly, he opened his eyes not sure what he would see. And when he did see it, he was wildly unsure what he was looking at. This all looked… stupid.

“What the fuck?” he asked, still sitting. He then craned his head back to see a creature—a dragon—swiveling in the air. “What the fuck?” He glanced at the amalgamation of weirdos and freaks that surrounded him as he stood. “What the fuck?”

The conversation bubbled around him, and he recognized the voices. They were all people that he was familiar with, some more than others—and then there was Weasel. The fact that the Bilica was a monstrous ape made Ambrose laugh. He brought his hand to his mouth as he did, and an unfamiliar feeling hit him. He pulled his hand back to see that his digits were a blueish-greenish-purple with webbing between them. They were capped off by black, sharp nails. Ambrose yelled and tried to distance himself from his own hand. Upon doing so, he tripped over something else and landed back flat on his back. From underneath his form came a scaled tail with a fan-like fin on the bottom. A quick glance showed that he was mostly still intact. The same height and bulk as before but now the color of a Lisa Frank folder. He was barefooted, but his feet were equally webbed and strange. His ears felt weird against his head and touched them to find that they, too, were webbed. He honestly didn’t know where his ear was. This wasn’t it. Fingers slid down his neck and into a slit where it met his shoulder. It felt like trying to force yourself to vomit by siding your fingers into the back of your throat. He gagged. He didn’t know what those slits were, but his brain was more than confident with one word: gills. He was also greeted by long seafoam hair that curled around his face—and immediately found its way into his mouth. “Pfft…” he let out as he tried to get the strands off his tongue.

“As weird as this sounds, anyone got a scrunchie?”[/indent][/indent][/color]
[right][sub][b]TAG(S):[/b] [@Fading Memory][/sub][/right]