Teleportation is rarely an instantaneous event. It doesn't take long, sure, you pop out in an entirely other world than where you began, just moments after you began your travel, stepping out of one world and into a new one in the matter of a heartbeat. And efficient travel method that almost entirely eliminated the travelling perspective of things. And which such a description, then how would someone be able to explain the travel itself, really? It's just stepping into the bus, just top step out on the other side, without the pesky actual being in the bus with all those other people and the smell and noise and the waiting around without being able to do anything. In on one side, out on the other, no sidetracks, no stops in between. Fast, effective. Perfect for the Government and their order and manners and rules and guidelines and boring whites. Because the teleportation by them was pretty much the same. You just waited for the spell, it was usually a spell, though who was he to judge what they did to people they actually liked anyway. He wouldn't be one of them. The spell, the magic would surround you and there would be a moment of whites, sparkling, clean, light filled whites, a sense of movement, though there never really was any, and then you would stand where you were supposed to stand, and not a hair would have moved on your head since your journey began. Everything was as it should be, everything was perfect and nice and boring.
Darkness based teleportation was, to be honest, not much different. Or, shapeshifter based darkness, at least. Then again, shapeshifters were not beings that would bother changing something that works just because it's boring. They would just be and then be somewhere else. Everything was void for a skip of the heart, and then you would be somewhere else and wonder just where you went, when you went away. His own few teleportations back in those days had been messier, heavier, the colour of what you see when you close your eyes, dark but blinking with colours and stuff. Even if the travel took no time, it felt like he had been running with that heavy feeling in his chest, drained and tired and uncomfortable. Like wearing a wet overcoat somehow.
Then there was Cen's. Teleportation. Blinks. They didn't travel for long enough to be more so than that. It felt like that. Blinking and opening your eyes to a new place. But you felt the movement. Not directly, but you knew you had been moved from one spot to another. It was different, probably due to crude magic and lack of understanding, but it was never uncomfortable. It was safe. It hadn't been the first time around, when they hadn't known each other very well, that had been like being ripped away by a current, just without the current. The safety had come with the trust, though, he sometimes guessed Cen was still feeling the rip of the current and not the safety at all. Understandable, somehow.
This, however, was not like any of those.
Kai would have thought most of this, had he had the time, but there was none. Rather it all came in a glimpse of realisation, when the boring whites had changed to swirling, bright colours before the stream between space had spat them both out on something cold, wet and hard and closed with a disturbing lack of sound behind them, the same kind of silence that white noise creates when it stops. It hurt more than the impact with the ground, the asphalt of some foreign city where they were not supposed to be. Then the noise rushed back along with proper vision without dancing dots of neon colour.
