Eliza In The Flesh!: wonderful world. I

 Elizabeth, prestigious, royal, and 100%, totally consistent on her paperdemon account, fell into a garbage dump, bags of disposal filled with broken scraps, metals, food, and a bunch of other stuff she wasn’t going to name cushioning her fall. The impact caused a stir of sounds, causing her companion to glance over curiously.

 Vector Crawtz blinked wildly at her. “Wha— I thought—” Spitting out whatever was in her mouth, she struggled to get to her feet with the least amount of mess possible. “Hilarious, Crawtz,” she glowered at him as he made a shallow attempt to cover his laughter with a cough. “But for the record, I’m telling Magnus to deliver all your personal belongings and research to the nearest lake.”
 “Who’s Magnus?”

 Eliza froze, slightly embarrassed. “I— HELLO?!” she gestured at the portal surging above her. 
“...wait. Is Magnus the bird—”
 “YES. Keep up, will you, Crawtz? We’ve got bigger problems to deal with.”

 She piled the bags on top of each other to try and reach the rift while Crawtz tried to usher her back down. “I don’t understand,” he muttered. 
“Neither do I. Why didn’t it send me back?”

Eliza stretched an arm out, wiggling around to find dirt. She frowned, looking over her shoulder to see that her arm was not, in fact, reaching out from the other end of the portal she had originally come through. Heaving her body through, she climbed out of the portal to find herself standing on a patch of flora, planted trees stretching up.

“... Your Grace?” Vector called with underlying tones of urgency in his voice. Eliza was frankly too immersed in figuring out where she had ended up. Vector seemed distant now which begged the question: what, exactly, is going on? “Um… Beth?” he tried again.
“What?” she hissed. 

She traversed through the portal, forgetting all about the garbage pile until it was too late. Instead of finding the usual dump, she was met with a wheat field, planted and grown on a stranger’s property.

Eliza blinked, confused. Vector was nowhere in sight. Instead, it was replaced by a neat cottage just in front of the field, the empty street they were using as a testing ground for a “fourth-dimension transversal” or whatever was in view with its patch of greenery with the single tree surrounded by blue flowers —her portal still lingering— the stone path broken up along the way, the single lamp with its flame slowly flickering into existence, and the few abandoned homes littered along the way.

The place was just like Raventown. Same beaten up road, same enigmatic force of —dare she say it— magic.

So it dawned upon her. The portals were not, in fact, working as they should. Looking back at the electric collage of blue spiraling into a singularity, she could see the true nature of its instability. The surge she had noticed earlier pulsed sporadically, sending fragments of latent magic to lash out like a snapping turtle.

With sparks of fire crawling out as unpredictably as their malfunctioning portal system, she took this as a warning to run as far away from the very dry and flammable wheat field.

“Oh. My. Providence,” Eliza gaped. She didn’t even reach Vector before her jaw went slack with shock. Littered across the floor, walls, and randomly floating in the air were several of those surging portals. More just kept tearing through, piercing the air like a spear before the world gave way to another rift.

“It… appears we have an issue,” Vector sheepishly stated upon noticing her arrival. “Yes, yes. What gave it away?” she scoffed, gesturing wildly at the ongoing discord. A potted plant materialized overhead, inches away from crushing their skulls. Tremors began to rattle the ground as fires broke out in random places. Streams of water began to flood the path as troubled winds stoked the flames higher. They blew to rapid speeds, swirling around to make miniature tornadoes, picking up and scattering anything in their paths.

They both backed away suddenly, their circumstances changing to tilt against their favor. The rifts began to widen, swallowing up the road, or houses, or whatever it could touch and placing them out of order. Things began to fall from the sky as the two of them made a run for it. They kept going until they could no longer see the abandoned street in the middle of nowhere. 

***

“It’s so… unpredictable,” Vector commented, peering at the disaster through a spyglass. “The portals— it’s like they… surge. They grow more and more and then just… stop.” 

Eliza had long since found a very comfortable tree stump to lay against, little primroses curiously peering at the pair, gossiping to one another.

She looks like a princess! A particularly young one said, most likely a bud. Look at her crown!
Don't be silly. If she were a princess, she would be wearing a dress! All princesses do! Her companion scolded, shaking its petals side to side. You’ve met other princesses before? The bud squealed with delight.

“BETH!” Vector raised his voice. “Are you listening? It looks like there’s going to be another—” She turned her head to look at him before feeling the ground beneath them tremble and shake. The primroses curled in fear as another surge began.

Like tears in the seams of the sky itself, the world began to fall apart. The rifts surrounded them instead of spreading out in random locations. Like hunters following prey, the greenery flooded before it could burn.

The portals no longer felt like that natural seagreen or ocean blue she had witnessed long ago. Some of them were stormy, gray and full of lightning, angry and restless to snuff out the flames. Some burned, singed, and shrieked with mania, deliriously trying to reach for something to feed itself, something to fuel its fire.

 Just as suddenly, the feeling of the earth splitting apart beneath her feet and waters licking her ankles vanished. Unfortunately, so did the rest of the ground.

She felt herself being dragged down into one of the rifts, hot smoke filling her nostrils as the vision of fire was replaced by clouds and clouds of sky, wind brushing through her hair as she made an attempt for her bronze crown in mid-air.

 

As she continued to descend, uselessly flailing her arms around for something to hold onto and further plummeting to her grave, towers of ivory and gold began to fill her vision. Gone were the grass fields, the empty streets, and Vector Crawtz. Wherever she was, it was built on prosperity. Floating platforms traversed from one place to another, carrying what she assumed to be people. Distantly, communities and markets were clumped together in certain areas, but the busiest parts were the ones with colossal statues with beautifully carved features.

One with a dagger, one with a heart.

 

Eliza closed her eyes and braced for the impact.