From Kre’s perspective, at least, the tour was very odd and unconventional. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was expecting, but part of him thought that his physical body would be wandering blindly through the underground ruins while his mind was being filled with the illusionary visions of what should have been.
Instead, what he got was some sort of fevered dream state where the world around him changed every time he blinked, turned a corner, or looked in a different direction. It was unnerving that he was unable to lock in on anything he was seeing in his peripheral vision. The constant shifting of the world around him was causing him no end of nausea to accompany his migraine.
The priest bandied on about various landmarks as they walked through the blur of colors and imaginary life. He gestured around him magnanimously every few steps and lectured on about some history of the buildings around them. The moment that Kre realized that his guide was only going to talk about who built what when, and how it was architecturally powerful for the time, Kre tuned him out. The history of old buildings, even ones related to the Ancients, just didn’t hold much interest for him.
Another oddity of the tour was that none of the other inhabitants of the city ever acknowledged them. Kre attempted to engage with the first one that they saw, but at the first sight of their strange hazy outlines and unfocused eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to do more than offer a paltry half-wave.
“They’re not real, you know,” the priest admonished him after the unsuccessful contact. “They’re just the images that I populate my mind with to keep myself from losing my sanity.”
“Is that… did that happen to the others?” He worried for a moment that he might be crossing a line, but he didn’t know if he’d ever have another chance to ask.
The priest considered the question for a moment as if it had never crossed his mind before. “Hmm… possibly. It has simply been this… this shadow of what we were for so long now… I don’t think that I’ve ever considered how these millennia has affected us, mentally and psychologically that is.”
Kre nodded as if he understood, and the priest continued with his tour. Even closing his eyes didn’t help protect against the shifting colors and waves of vertigo since all of it was happening in his mind and he could sense the strange shifts and changes in scenery even if he couldn’t see them. In some ways it was actually worse, since he could no longer anticipate the changes.
Thankfully, the tour ended shortly thereafter, back in front of the church where they had started. He had been too preoccupied to notice the building initially, but now he was able to take it all in. If he thought the inside was magical and beautiful from their illusionary experience earlier, it was nothing compared to the outside.