In an instant, they appeared on the other side of the gate. Lisa started to choke and keeled over, though after a moment recovered her faculties and staggered upright. Lepochim also appeared to suffer a bit, though after about 15 seconds was already inspecting the nearby area. Bath, unsurprisingly, was completely fine upon exiting the gate. Bath and Lisa both glanced at Lepochim, increasingly curious as to how he was able to adapt to this world.

Before, Bath had been limited in his perception of the world by using long-range manipulation. After stepping through the gate, he now had a much better understanding of the world. Before, when he'd only sent essence out onto the planet, he hadn't realized the rather strong gravitational field covering the planet's surface. Despite the increased gravity on the planet, Bath felt a bit unstable as he walked, as though the ground were nudging up against him.

This explained the amounts of metal found in the surrounding area's wildlife: organisms on this planet had clearly adapted to a highly magnetic environment. Now that Bath had arrived, he sent his essence reaching out, heedless of his own lurking hunger. As he went, he quickly devoured one specimen from each species he encountered. By the time the region of a few thousand meters was encapsulated by essence from his Center, his hunger had dropped significantly. He began to understand the new species as he absorbed them. It would take him time to understand them all completely, and likely he would need to transform into their forms before he comprehended them fully. The same went for all the creatures he had devoured back at the Ritus mansion.

Even without complete comprehension, Bath now had a general grasp of evolutionary development on the planet. It seemed to revolve around the enormous deposits of magnetic rock, with the very first lifeforms already incorporating metal into their forms to maneuver in the magnetic fields.

The screw dog, for instance, moved rapidly by vacillating its metallic surface to propel itself in a magnetic field. Smaller organisms, or those that were light-weight, tended to rely on their own magnetism to float above the ground and then used fin-like paddles to move themselves around through the air.

Bath hadn't seen any flying organisms, though had already devoured many kinds of long, worm-like beings that existed underground. They also used magnetism to move around by moving magnets within their bodies in a pulsing motion.

Altogether, the species he had seen so far were quite odd, though very interesting. On other worlds, they probably wouldn't be very competitive. On Earth, for instance, he knew that the predatory screw dogs would be slow and cumbersome. All the animals that relied on magnetic levitation for motion would be completely immobile on any other world.

Bath snorted. All of his analysis had taken place under thirty seconds, so Bath didn't miss a beat before leading his travel companions forward.

"This planet's species all rely on the planet's natural magnetism," he explained. "Since we're here to find the gate, and neither of you have any capacity to maneuver quickly under this planet's magnetic field, I'm going to insist that I carry you inside of myself."

Lepochim immediately blanched and grimaced, while Lisa nodded with understanding.

"Okay," she assented. "Like normal?"

"Yes. Lepo, follow Lisa's lead."

Bath quickly changed form from his human appearance to his dragon form with some...local modifications. Bath was eager to try out magnetic gliding.

He opened his chest cavity wide, exposing a hollow interior. Lisa and Lepochim entered.

Bath closed the cavity off, then compressed the inside to form himself around the two passengers.

"Woah, woah, woah," Lepochim cried out in alarm. "This is not acceptable."

Bath snorted. "If I lose our eight-day bet, then you can order me never to do this again. As it stands, you're my servant, even if you're a rather...petulant one." Bath really was getting rather put-out by Lepochim, though needed his experience. If only he could absorb the memories of the creatures he devoured...

"Yes, Bath," Lepochim replied bitterly.

Without any further comment, Bath began to pad across the ground, feeling the natural fluctuations of the magnetic field under his feet. He extended out his now metal-plated wings and swished his massive, tadpole-esque tail. Extremely conscious of his annoyingly-fragile passengers, he accelerated slowly until reaching a velocity of a few hundred miles per hour. Bath knew he needed to go relatively slow over this planet to find the gate.

As he traveled over the world, whenever Bath encountered a new species, he would instantly devour one of its population. He also began to devour members of multiple populations of the same species to gain a better pool of genetic diversity. He didn't find the creatures of this planet particularly useful due to their evolutionary dependence on the planet's magnetism, but as these were the first line of creatures not from Earth that Bath was able to extensively investigate, he was still incredibly curious about their anatomy and evolutionary development.

He realized early on that this planet didn't actually have any species exceeding the intelligence of Earth's avian species. While Bath was fairly surprised that the world didn't have any evidence of trespass--the world did have gates, after all--he figured that the world was a fairly easy place to travel through and that travelers were few and far between. After all, if Earth was considered a backwater, this place was even less significant.

After a few hours of travel, which took Bath around the fairly small planet, Bath finally found the exit gate.

It was situated in a glade very similar to the one around the entrance gate. The planet actually lacked a great deal of genetic diversity due to its small size and relatively constant climate (the planet didn't rotate on a tilted axis). Therefore, when they reached the gate, Bath was quite eager to move on to the next world. He didn't even notify his two passengers that they had reached the end of their first planetary expedition before passing through the gate.

This was the decidedly correct choice considering the welcome Bath received on the gate's other side.

In hindsight, Bath noted that he was rash to simply waltz into the next gate without sending out a bit of essence first to test the waters. He had admittedly let his guard down after the docile Magnet Planet...after all, how dangerous could gate-holding planets be?

As soon as he stepped out of the gate, he was almost instantly assaulted by a barrage of web-like nets. He found himself in a rather large, metal-and-glass-walled chamber surrounded by a group of rather surprised, armored bipedal entities. These surprised, net-gun-toting entities started to scream out in some bizarre, incomprehensible language.

"Well," Bath thought bashfully to himself. "This was clumsy." He had kind of assumed that if someone like Lepo could travel from world to world, then clearly some kind of translation technology had been developed and disseminated throughout the universe.

Maybe this place was just too out-of-the-way to have such technology. Or perhaps they just weren't implementing it, or it was something that Bath himself needed to acquire so that a two-way translation feed could be established.

Either way, Bath found himself surrounded by seemingly hostile forces inside of a heavily-fortified building on a completely foreign world without any way to communicate with said hostiles.

He felt himself feeling an almost completely foreign human emotion...embarrassment.

Bath quickly adapted his form to the smallest size possible that could still hold Lisa and Lepochim. He also changed his form to that of a bipedal humanoid, so he essentially looked like a giant human titan. He held his arms at his side and sat down, hoping that his deference would stop the entities from attacking him. To them, he had to admit that his metallic-dragon form might have been...a tad intimidating. Of course, Bath wasn't actually worried about breaking out of this compound, but he was infinitely more interested in these intelligent bipeds than anything on Magnet Planet. So, he figured working with them, at least initially, would hopefully allow him to gain insights into their group behavior.

As soon as he sat down, the group of armored bipeds seemed even more surprised, if that was possible. Bath couldn't see what they looked like, since they wore opaque suits that completely covered them, but whereas before they seemed surprised but ready for his appearance, now they seemed alarmed and distressed and spoke in nervous chatters to one another.

They did stop spewing their nets, but by this point he was already covered by no less than 15 of them. He raised one giant eyebrow and waited for them to do someone.

From inside of him, Bath heard Lepo scream, "You moron!!! You can't just charge into a gate looking like a giant predatory monster!"

"Oh?" Lisa said in turn, her voice quirking up at the end into what Bath knew translated into a devious smile.

"So, you can understand them," Bath said through a small mouth he placed next to Lepochim's ears. How else would Lepo know what was going on outside, after all? Bath's suspicions about mutual translation technology were suddenly made clear. So, Lepo had a kind of translation technology that both he and Lisa lacked.

Bath resolved to think of a fun punishment for Lepochim in response to this information omission.

"Lepo, how do I obtain this translation technology?"

Lepo didn't reply immediately, so Bath poked him with several sharp, needle-like spikes.

"Ahk!" Lepochim spat in agony. "Was that really necessary?" Bath didn't grace him with a reply. "Fucking damn it!"

"Insolent," Bath stated calmly into Lepochim's ear as he stabbed Lepochim with double the number of needles. Next time he decided to use inflammatory poison.

Bath knew that time was of the essence, since the entities outside were evidently deliberating with their superiors about what to do about his arrival, so he had just about lost all patience for Lepochim's annoying pride.

"Speak now," he murmured into Lepochim's ear while pressing the needles in deeper.

"You'd normally get it from your home world, but Earth's too much of a backwater," Lepo said, clearly stalling. Bath made the needles secrete a capsaicin.

"FUCK!" Lepochim roared, seething. "Just let me talk to them and I'll tell them that you need a translator."

Bath twisted the needles. "How on Earth could I ever trust you?"

Sighing inwardly at his misfortune to be stuck with such a scheming, obnoxious passenger, Bath decided to face the problem outside in his own way.

He pointed at his ears, shook his head, and said in English, "I do not have a translator." He hoped at the very least that their translators would pick up his language, though part of him feared that, being the supposed backwater it was, Earth's languages wouldn't be in the translation database that other planets used.

Then again, Bath knew Lepochim used a translator, and it clearly worked on Earth. Perhaps this incredibly simple plan to ask the entities of this planet for a translator would work after all.

To his amazement, the entities all jumped and paused in surprise. One of them seemed to do something to his helmet, then waited a moment. Finally:

"You're from Earth?" the entity said in flawless English, his voice that of a generic American male, and exactly like Lepochim's.

So, the translators could be used like this as well...no wonder Lepochim's English seemed so good. Bath wondered idly what Lepochim's actual voice sounded like.

"Yes; I would be very appreciative if you could outfit me with a translator."

Laughing came out from the man's helmet, indignant laughter. "Slaves don't need translators."

Hearing that, Bath's titanic form smiled earnestly. He was incredibly eager devour these intelligent lifeforms and discover what they really looked like.

"After I kill 50 of you, I'll give you another chance," Bath said, his voice viciously saccharine. None of the entities present had any time to react before Bath's form increased in size into the form of a vicious wolf-reptile hybrid.

"Hah," Lisa smirked. She didn't exactly know what was going on, but she knew Bath was going to do something badass.

Bath considered asking Lisa whether or not she wanted to see what was going to transpire, and then thought better of the impulse. He had great faith in Lisa's ability to deal with the strange and unpredictable, but he had a feeling that she'd just throw up if she had an open view to everything he had planned.

After all, he considered the next few minutes to be...an experiment in alien anatomy.