I quickly moved to get back into the fight, knowledge of what I could do with my new body from what I knew about Drakes at the forefront of my mind. Sombra brings his scythe down in a diagonal arc in an attempt to cleave me in twain, I countered with a palm strike to the jaw, throwing him off balance and followed up with a spray of acid from my maw to the blade of his weapon that caused the crystal to weaken and crack.
“Wha,” the voice of Smarties came in a confused tone from where she landed. “How did this get all the way out here?” In her hand was a tiny doll. It had blonde hair which reached just past the shoulders, and large, blue eyes. It also had a large, red ribbon tied into a bow in its hair, and a blue dress. The dress had some white parts on the skirt and shoulders as well as a red bow on the front of the collar. Finally, the doll had black shoes and white socks.
Sombra took advantage of this momentary distraction to retreat back to the wastes of the tundra, leaving us to return to the city.
Once in the city, I asked Smarties if I could take a look at the doll to see if it had any markings to identify the owner. As she handed it over, I heard a female voice speak a message in my mind. “If you are in need of help, don't hesitate to call for me. However, understand that under no circumstances will I ever kill anything. If I can be of assistance, just speak the words 'Daughter of Gensokyo' and I will be there to help in any way I can.”
“What’s a ‘Daughter of Gensokyo’?” was all I said before a hole opened in mid-air nearby. Looking at it, I realized that it was a portal. After a moment, a girl just a little shorter than me stepped through. She had shoulder-length brown hair, and had one red eye and one purple eye. She was wearing a white, shoulder-strap style dress, which had a blue electricity-style lattice pattern on the skirt, and had a ribbon wrapped around the waist, tied into a large bow on her back, the bow being half red, half blue. On her feet, she was wearing strange, sandal-like footwear, which had rectangular pieces of wood as the bottoms, and then each had two blocks of wood on the bottom making them look like small tables almost. One of them had a blue strap, the other had a red strap. She also had a larger version of the doll I was holding on her shoulder. Despite the strange appearance of her outfit, my eyes were drawn to the two small horns on her head, indicating she wasn’t human.
“I’m a little nervous,” she muttered to herself. “This is the first time I’ve been called. I don’t know what to expect.”
“A summon, strange,” I muttered under my breath in intrigue before Smarties, in an amazing feat of suspicion and speed drew one of her daggers and held it to the girl's throat before shouting in her face.
“What are you who are you and how the heck did you do that!?” all came out with no space to even lift a finger between each question.
The girl quickly raised her hands in the air in the ‘calm down, I won’t hurt you’ motion. Her first response, however, was to quickly answer all of Smarties’ questions. “I’m half-human, half-Yokai; my name is Alexandria Kijin; you used that doll there to summon me.” With that last part, she twisted her hand to point at the doll I was holding.
“Yet it has no marks of an enchantment,” I said in haste. “How could it be a focal point to draw you to this plane of existence without the proper magical structure built into the material! An enchantment is a complex thing that took me half my life back home to learn how to properly prepare a receiving object for, the process leaves very specific signatures depending on the material and type of enchantment!”
The girl supposedly named Alex lowered her arms slightly as she answered, an expression of slight exasperation on her face. “Ah? Something tells me you don’t know what Displaced or Tokens are…”
“NO! I was only just revived from 65,000,000 years as a fossil!” I yelled back, agitation clearly slipping into my voice as I felt everything I studied to be able to do for almost a decade, suddenly feel like it had been flipped on its head.
“I… won’t ask…” Alex said under her breath. She then glanced at Smarties before continuing. “But if you could please move your dagger away from my neck, I could explain everything to you.”
“HOW DO WE KNOW YOU DON’T WORK FOR SOMBRA!” she yelled before A.J. placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Calm down now, sugar. Y’all ‘re more worked up than a porcupine in a balloon store.” she said in a calm voice, her voice seemingly stealing all the aggression from Smarties the second she opened her mouth.
“Right,” she said as she backed off. “But I’m still watchin you!” she added with a glare and the ‘I have my eyes on you’ hand gesture.
Alex put her arms down and sighed in relief. “Thank you, my breath was a bit short from the fear.” She then looks at as, genuine confusion on her face and in her voice as she continues. “But, who’s this ‘Sombra’ person?”
“Oh, that’s the big evily mean smoke monster just there!” Pinkie said as she popped out of Alex’s little doll’s hair ribbon.
Alex turned to look and saw the horizon covered in smoke, the smoke cloud having evil-looking, green, glowing eyes within it. “Those eyes…” she said quietly with a small shiver. “Just looking at them fills me with an intense feeling of dread.”
“Try not to let it do that dear,” Rarity spoke up, her fangs retracted and eyes back to normal so as to not scare anyone. “He feeds on such emotions from those around him. Fear, Dread, Anger, Regret, any negative emotion you hold will only serve to make him stronger.”
Alex steeled herself with a deep breath before speaking. “Sorry, I’ll try not to let it get to me.” She then turned to me. “But, I think I should now explain to you what Displaced and Tokens are. It’d be best for you to know.”
“I think we can do that after the others find that Crystal Heart and put Smokie back in his kennel,” I said as I held up my left arm in prep to morph.
“DINO THUNDER, POWER UP!” A flash of light and an explosion behind me later, I strike a pose towards the fastly approaching cloud. "Tyranno Power, Red Ranger!"
Alex turned to face Sombra with a determined expression on her face. “Alright. It’s a deal: I help you to defeat Sombra, then you give me a chance to explain everything to you.” She then turned to look at the doll on her shoulder. “You ready for our first fight in another world, Shanghai?”
“You should know by now that I’m always ready to help you, Alexandria,” the doll Alex referred to as Shanghai responded with an innocent smile.
“How can a doll help?” I asked, firing off shots from my Dino blaster.
“Fairy,” Shanghai corrected me.
“Shanghai is a special type of Fairy,” Alex explained. “She can attack using my own power, which is helpful since I can't dodge and attack at the same time. So, I could focus on dodging while Shanghai attacks, or the both of us can focus on attacking simultaneously for extra firepower.”
“I wonder…” Rarity said as she let loose a volley of telekinetic bullets at the encroaching mass of smoke. “Shanghai darling, do you think it would be possible for you to learn new skills by borrowing power from those other than Miss Kijin?”
As Alex began throwing small shocks of lightning at the smoke cloud, Shanghai stopped to mull over Rarity's question. “I don't know,” she answered. “I haven't really thought to try.”
“Why not see what the power of an Earth Drake can do for you than?” I asked as I holstered my blaster holding out my arm as an offer.
Shanghai looked at Alex. “Go for it,” Alex said. “I find the idea interesting, so I'm curious to see where it leads.”
“Alright,” Shanghai responded with a nod. She then went airborne and flew over to me, grabbing my arm.
Just as Shanghai reached me, I felt the presence of crystals being summoned. Looking up my eyes widened in terror at the sight of THOUSANDS of the cursed scythes filling the sky. “Everyone, LOOK OUT!”