Chapter Text
Geralt hated portals. If given a choice, he would much rather travel halfway across the continent than risk being lost somewhere between time and space. Unfortunately, Yennefer found such journeys to be long, boring, and unpleasant, and she refused to wait weeks for him to catch up. And so, Geralt found himself returning from their visit to Ciri in Nilfgaard via portal.
The first sign that something had gone wrong was the fact that there wasn’t any ground where the portal spat him out. Rather, he was several feet above it. Years of training (and injuring himself falling) taught him to tuck into a roll before hitting the earth. The second sign was the cold. It felt like winter when it should have been the height of summer. Cursing and brushing himself off, Geralt stood up and took in his surroundings. He seemed to be in the middle of a forest — a young coniferous one going by the size and shape of the trees. The ground was covered in thick snow which thankfully had cushioned his fall. One thing was certain: this definitely wasn’t Toussaint.
Geralt was pulled from his thoughts by a clicking sound from behind him. He spun around, expecting an arachas or an endrega, and his right hand immediately went to his sword. Instead he found a young girl pointing some kind of hollow metal stick at him. It had a wooden base and some sort of lens on top, but most importantly she was holding it the same way one would hold a crossbow. Instinct took over, and Geralt immediately formed the sign of quen.
It was a good thing, too, because no sooner had he done so than the girl pulled the trigger, her eyes fixed upon the weapon in his hand. Something — Geralt didn’t see what — impacted the glowing shield with enough force to break it, but fortunately it didn’t seem to have gone through. The girl stared at him in shock, and while she was stunned Geralt struck, knocking the weapon from her hand and shoving her into the snow. She quickly pushed herself up, but Geralt leveled his blade at her neck.
“Calm down, I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. The girl was clearly frightened, but she masked it with a look of anger and indignation. It reminded him of a young Ciri.
“That’d be a lot easier to believe if you weren’t pointing a fucking sword at me!” she spat.
“If I lower the sword are you going to attack me?”
“No,” said the girl, after a pause.
“Why’d you wait so long to answer?”
The girl hesitated and then lunged for the stick, but Geralt kicked it away.
“I said I’m not going to hurt you. I just need you to tell me where I am. As you can see, I’m not from around here.”
“Colorado. Now let me go.”
“Hold on a second, I’ve never heard of Colorado.” A thought crossed his mind. “Have you heard of Nilfgaard?”
“What the fuck is Nilfgaard?!?”
Geralt sighed. He really hated portals.