• [Jen]

    I am fuming up adrenaline! The breeze trough my hair, the sound of my foot thudding against the ground, the thought of the mob, my parents, and the future that awaits us. I glanced over to everyone, I think they feel the same way I do. I chuckled at Kert, even he has his moments. Trek shouts, moving away from me. The others do the same.
    “What?” I ask them, hardly panting.
    “Oh nothing” Roger replies. “Just avoiding the blades on your arm!”
    I gawk, glance at my blades, and laugh. I forgot I was still holding them! It’s just that they feel so weightless and unnoticeable—well to me, anyway. I shook my head, puffed my cheeks, focused my energy, and ran my fastest. Colors blur past me, so does sound. It was like traveling through time! I can hear faint shouts behind me, but I have no idea what they were saying. It’s not like I had Kerts incredible ‘ears like a fox’. I mean—bam. My time traveling trip ends with a jolt of pain in my right leg. I groan, staring down at it. Great, the beginning of our adventure and I fall in a hole. The guys laughed at me, especially Roger. He was fumbling and clutching his stomach, tiny tears forming in the corner of his eye.
    “It ain’t that funny!” I grumble as Trek helped me up.
    “Well…if you think about it…it is!” Roger pats my head as if I was a puppy. “Poor widdle boy” he laughs again. “this reminds me of the time when me and you went adventuring two years ago and we smelled something funky then you—“ he couldn’t finish the rest.
    “Oh shut up, Roger!” I dust myself off. “At least I didn’t fall so deep that only my head showed”
    He stopped laughing in an instant. “You would’ve too!”
    I glanced over at Trek and Kert, they had no idea what we were talking about since they weren’t there to witness it and me and Roger kept it a secret. “It was your first time going off to steal something in a house…a pillow, right?” I grinned at Rogers reaction. “While I was keeping watch…you fell through the floor and saw somebody’s—“
    “No! Don’t say any more!” Roger pleads.
    “What? Why not?” Kert says. “I want to know, don’t you, Trek?”
    “Yeah!” Trek smiles. “It sounds funny”
    “Okay well—“ I was interrupted again.
    “I’ll make it outside the forest faster than you can!” Roger shouts as he ran off at top speed.
    Oh, this is a challenge. I cracked my knuckles, “Your sword is going to weigh you down!” I shout out to him as I took off.

    I laid on my stomach, on top of a giant rock with a flat surface. We stopped near a stream that flowed along smooth pebbles.
    “I can’t take it anymore…” I mumble. “How huge is this forest, anyway?”
    “I don’t know…” Roger smirks. “But I was still way ahead of you”
    “By a little bit! I hurt my leg, you know”
    “Uh huh”
    “We just need to go further” Kert says in his boring voice. “There’s less trees now, and they’re normal sized, too”
    I looked around. “Yeah…your right! I never noticed it”
    “Lets go now!’ Trek hops for a moment, then walks ahead.
    “Still a child…still a child” I got up, stretched and went towards him. Kert and Roger joined.
    We didn’t say much after that, nothing at all. I stared up at the sky. It was baby blue with smears of foggy white on it. The birds tweeted and tooted—Trek tweeted and tooted. I sighed, He’s so strange. Acting like a nine year old when he’s eighteen! Something dropped on my head, covering my eyes. It felt like clothes. I took it off and looked and it—it was a cloak, light brown. The others had one in their hands, too.
    “Put it on” Kert ordered. “I don’t know what its like out there, but I’m positive they don’t wear armor for their everyday fashion”
    “I’m sure they don’t wear cloaks either” Roger says but still puts it on.
    “I can’t wait to see the world!” I put mine on.
    “We aren’t going site seeing” Kert says.
    “But—“
    “This is serious stuff”
    “I know—“
    “Then act like you do”
    I gape at him, he’s acting like such a…such a—
    “Relax” he grins.
    I sighed with relief, geez, that guy! “Why’d you do that for?”
    “We have to practice lying, don’t we?”
    Ah, I get what he’s saying. We can’t tell them where we’re from, they might think we’re the kids who were responsible for the raid—or maybe they don’t know the village exists? “Can I keep my name?” I ask him. “I don’t want a fake one”
    “We don’t need fake names” he says. “All we need to do is ask some questions, follow instincts, clues, anything that would lead us to her”
    “What if they’re not nice?” Trek suddenly asks. “They could be tricking travelers into doing something horrible. They could be slave holders, arm choppers, brain eaters!”
    “Carnivores?” I chuckled nervously. “No way!”
    “What’s wrong? Afraid of the unknown beings that lay ahead?” Kert softened his voice and narrowed his eyes. “remember that horse four years ago? The blazing eyes, red mane, and blood curdling scream? Yeah, I never saw a horse that could be so dangerous. I wonder what else could be like that…maybe a llama that spits acid or a dog that fetches souls”
    A cold shiver went down my spine as I imagined some other things much worse. Then Roger shouts really loud, scaring me and Trek.
    “Flat plain!” he points, then ran forward.
    I blink, saw what he saw, then followed him. We were out of the forest but we kept on running. The flat grass feels so unreal! The clear blue sky looks wider without tree branches blocking its way. It was like the suns ray broke my shackles and showed me a new world. We stopped on the tallest hill, peering down. The grass was worn down to a dirt road. I didn’t know where it led—of course.
    “It stretches on for miles” I said. “Should we walk on it?”
    “I want to but wouldn’t it look…you know…” Roger gestures to his sword inside the sheath which was strapped onto his back.
    I rub my chin. “Yeah, your sword is humongous…” I glance over at Trek. “But your hammer is a bit more far fetched…we could always trick people into thinking that you use it to hammer thick metal but that wouldn’t explain the spike in the center—oh wait!” I held my arms out in front of me. “What do I do with this?! There is no way I’m walking around looking like an assassin. At least Roger has a sheath!” I turn to Kert, waiting for an answer. He tosses me a black bag, pouch thing. It was hard and didn’t feel at all like leather. I opened the top and looked inside, it was empty. “Why are you giving me this?”
    “You put the blades in there”
    “Oh, right” as I put it away, Kert told me that the straps go around my waist, so that’s where I put it.
    “That doesn’t solve my problem” Trek pouts.
    “Don’t worry, here” he handed him…something. I don’t know how to explain it but it was big, the same size as the hammer.
    “Where’d you get that from?” I asked Kert.
    “I’ve been carrying it with me the whole time” he replied.
    “No way! I never noticed”
    “Of course you didn’t” he sighed then went and helped Trek strap on the ‘something’ on his back and explaining him things I didn’t bother listening to.
    I tugged at Rogers hair. He winced, glaring at me. “What?” he growled.
    “Lets go on ahead” I point at the direction the road led to.
    “Uh…” he stared, uncertain.
    “Come on, it’ll be an adventure. We’ll get some clues at the next village, town, whatever, okay? Don’t you want to see what its like?”
    “Yeah” he grins, sliding down the hill onto the dirt road.
    “Hopefully no carnivores” I say to myself as I follow him.

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