Book One Chapter Three

# **Chapter III: The Other Side of the Wall**

The first two chapters of this book took place in Reality M, but it's not the only reality. For the next two chapters, the story will take place in the second reality, where things are very different from the reality you're used to. Although some things are the same, in Reality K, IZ144 is much colder. There are also a lot of other differences that exist in this reality, making life and society very, very different from Reality M, being almost the other side of a coin, however things are much more different than that.

In between realities, one may have a reality counterpart, which is someone who is like them but exists in a different reality and is a separate being from them. Another thing that exists between realities are reality clones, where someone is pretty much the same person, but obviously having a different life due to existing in a separate reality. It was thought that when reality clones are created, their original is split into different parts and those parts being put into different realities, however this could never be proven.

...

"I don't know who you are, and I don't really know how you're talking to me, but thank you I guess? It's pretty clear that you know a lot more about me than I do, and I'd like to ask how you know this much about me. I don't know how but I think I know something about you too, but it's weird. If I'm correct, you're in Reality K, but that's all I really know about you from this weird dream I had.

I've dreamt about you a couple times, but you were asleep. I never saw your face, but then I had another dream where there was someone who looked somewhat similar to you, and they were asleep too, but there was something *off* about them, something I couldn't really put my finger on. They looked like you, but I'm sure that it wasn't. If you know, can you let me know what's going on?"

## Downtown Brandon, Stonemill, IZ144/6/76 (K), Sunday October 11, 2058, Oliver Entra -Interconnected-

Class was easy today. Our teacher, Mr. Lurio Rose whatever whatever Kiff didn't assign too much work, and the work he did assign wasn't too hard. The whole class was easy, as long as you paid attention. Today was a really good day for me, because one of the girls in my class thought I was really nice, so she offered me to stay at her mansion with her and her friends.

Being asked to come to someone's house wasn't too uncommon in the upper class haven of Downtown Brandon, made up almost entirely of the upper-middle class as well as many, many very rich people who run the whole city. I've always felt like there was something almost manufactured about it, and I had a friend who really pointed it out to me, but I could never really see it.

Things were pretty normal in today's society, built up over many years and benefiting those who work hard to grow the economy, however things always felt strange, however I could never really put my finger on why. I wasn't really a boy of the party lifestyle, but I decided to try and meet some new people, because I was feeling pretty lonely, being pretty new to the school, having just reached the minimum age to get in of fifteen.

I stopped by my apartment and grabbed a couple of things, then I left to go to her mansion. Her name was Zoey Niravia, and she was pretty nice to me. I decided to help her in class, and because I had helped her so much and that I was a good friend to her, she said that she could offer me a room, living at a mansion that was almost like a hotel. I was pretty excited to be a part of a new living accommodation, so I hurried to get there as fast as I could.

In class earlier, she gave me a piece of paper with directions and her address, so I decided to go on a nice stroll. It was a nice day, not being too cold for October, in fact it was rather warm. I walked towards the outskirts of the city, and finally found the street the building was located on. The house number was 1, so I thought the house would be close to the front of the street, but I soon found out that the road was very, very long.

The road must have been at least four kilometres, and I was exhausted when I got to the end of the road. When I approached the end, I noticed there was a sharp turn to the right, and when I rounded the bend, the giant mansion came into view in front of me. I walked up the rest of the street and towards the gate, there already being a couple of cars parked around a roundabout behind a large open gate, and continued walking to the door.

I knocked on the door, and waited for a couple of seconds. After a short while, the door swung open. I was unfamiliar with the person who opened the door, but apparently they knew me from school. He introduced himself as Kevamar Marinnas, and I realised I recognised that name, but I didn't know from where. He showed me inside, and he introduced me to everyone who was there.

There were a lot of people already there, and he introduced me into everyone. First, there was the main group of people from our school, being Zoey, Jake, Jade, and Ampor Niravia, who were all siblings. Ampor was the eldest, and he was the one who owned the home. They were sitting with a couple of others, named Rico, Zerg, Koniias, Karrina Kattano, Kattano Karrina (yes that was their names,) and Migel.

I knew a couple of them, having passed them in the hallways and seen them in class, even having talked and gotten to know a couple of them. Although there was a lot of people to meet, I was pretty extroverted and connected well with most of the people here, however I felt like Koniias and Zerg were a bit much, and I felt like Rico was really secretive and nervous all the time. Other than that, I liked most of the others even though they were pretty different to me, all being so connected to each other.

I talked with them for a while, and they all seemed pretty friendly. Although I didn't know these people before, it was nice to meet them all. As we talked, Kevamar asked me if I wanted to meet the others, and I agreed. I finished up my conversation with the group, and then I followed Kevamar as he walked through the massive house and into the massive kitchen near the back of the house.

Sitting at one of the tables in the giant dining area was another big group which Kevamar introduced me to as well. There were a lot of them there, and they were mid conversation, but they seemed excited to meet me, and I was pretty excited to meet them as well, being much more interesting than the more average school crew. The group consisted of Sorrin and Uura Tasdurst, Charlie, Nomad, Xander, Tango, and a couple of coronians named Haji, Turrami, and, Zandako.

I was surprised to see uncorrupted coronians, and I was actually pretty excited about it. Every coronian I had ever seen was corrupted, except for one I saw walking around the school once, but I never saw them again. They told me they were looking for some maps, and as they did, I knew what they were talking about. I remember being told about them by a family friend who said he was also looking for them as well, and he got really into his research.

He got a bit too interested some would say, but I've always been just as interested as he was, however I tried my best to hide it. They seemed pretty interested by it, and they asked who told me about them. I told them his name was Aster Arexis, and a couple of them noted that they knew him. I was happy to help, because Aster had instilled an interest for the maps since I first met him.

Even though the whole family thought it was weird and pointless, I still held onto that interest, partially because it really interested me, and partially being an inherent rebellion against my family, with whom my relationship with was never too great, which is why I lived in an apartment building that I paid for myself, being out of the house and away from everyone back at the family home in the suburbs of Downtown Brandon.

We talked and talked about where to look, and I asked where they had already been, trying to find a good spot that was untouched. They looked through the forests of Stonemill for a bit, but they had only just started their search. They didn't really have any leads, and I didn't either, so they were just searching in the forests around Ampor Manor, hoping to find some clues. I decided to bring out a map of the area from my pocket dimension, and I asked them to mark out everywhere they'd been already.

Nomad and Haji were able to easily rule out a few areas, most notably around Old Yina and a couple of the smaller ruins around the forests of upper Stonemill, but they mentioned how they didn't go into Fort Yina. Although it was a stupid question, I asked if there was a reason they didn't go in and check. Besides the obvious reason, they said it would take too long to search. When they brought that up, I forgot how huge the fort was.

There were other areas around the outskirts of Downtown Brandon that they had searched as well, but there were a couple of places they hadn't yet which a few of them thought the others did. It was a good idea to map out all the areas they had and hadn't searched so there weren't any more problems like that. After it was all mapped out, we decided to plan on where to go next, and we started to set our sights on just the Greater Downtown Brandon Area for the time.

There were a couple of random buildings on the outskirts of Downtown Brandon that seemed likely to have at least *something* inside, even if it weren't any clues saying it did. So many abandoned buildings still stand all around the more rural parts of the GDBA that Nomad had always felt were a bit suspicious. I brought up the very real chance that there wouldn't be anything inside, but it wouldn't hurt to check.

We were talking for so long, none of us had realised that dinner was ready. We stopped our conversation for a bit and had dinner. The food was great, being prepared by Zoey, Kevamar, Jude and Jade, who all knew how to cook really well. I suggested that they should start their own restaurant, and they said it could be a good idea. Zoey's family was pretty wealthy, so I suggested that maybe they could use that to start it.

Zoey expressed interest in it, but she mentioned that her parents were the managers of the money, and they were generally pretty stingy with what they used it on, even though they did have a lot. Jude and Jade backed her up, and Ampor stated that even though she was older them, and was adopted by their parents in 1997 after living on her own for most of her life, and she didn't get much of the familial inheritance either.

Charlie asked if they knew why their parents were so stingy with their massive wealth, but none of the Niravias had any answers to her question. Ampor stated that Jack and Jane, their parents were pretty secretive, and she'd seen them do some odd things in the past, but she could never remember what. After she said that, Zoey pressed him on never hearing about it, and Ampor responded saying she thought she already knew, saying they didn't seem to hide it well.

It was clear there was something deeper below the surface, but that could be applied to most things now a days. There's always new statements coming out about how different companies are actually hiding stuff from their consumers, and recently that the police force here in Stonemill was corrupt, but not just corrupt as in generally being corrupt, but also being corrupted too, and yet nobody seems to care, and apparently the people who published that article went missing.

Although the police said that they were still looking into the case, it's obvious they're not. The police obviously denied these claims but I've never really trusted them, and nobody else in the mansion did either, that being the main thing that brought us all together. We were all the others to society, even though some of us were much more popular than others, most of the school crew being pretty popular.

I remember when I was young I would walk through the streets of Stonemill with my family and see the poor people of the town spouting claims of the end times being near, back in the times where they were vocal. In those days, I thought that they were just crazy people or just under the influence, but as time goes by, I start to believe them more and more that the world is ending. I've always kept this to myself, but I was finally able to share this thought with others.

When I brought this thought up in the ongoing conversation, I was surprised to see that they all agreed with me, and they had the same thoughts that nobody else thought was true, and they were just waiting for someone to speak up, waiting for someone else to come and confirm their beliefs and join their minority. Even after dinner was done, we all still stayed at the table and talked about just how shitty our society really is, and a couple of us wondered how much better or worse things were in Reality M.

We talked pretty deep into the night, and after a while, some people started to head to bed. I was still interested in the conversation, but after a while I had to go to sleep so I could get a good enough rest for school. Zoey explained how I could just pick any room that was unoccupied, so I picked a room on the far right side, and set everything up inside. I was really thankful for Zoey giving me a nice place to stay, and she said that it wasn't too much of a big deal.

I got all of the stuff I had in my apartment room and laid it out in the bedroom to make myself feel more at home. I found myself looking out the window of my apartment often before I fell asleep, and I sometimes fell asleep at the window, spending the night staring out at the falling snow and the night sky. This was no different, and I stared far off into the dark night sky and watched as snow slowly fell from the sky.

I was excited to see that I was finally able to connect with people who had the same thoughts as I did, even though some of them I wasn't on the best terms with. Everyone was pretty different, from social butterfly to complete outcast, from rich to poor, from strong to weak. It was admirable to see the camaraderie between everyone and how well this group was able to connect, it was amazing that they even found each other in such a crazy world.

They helped me to see that I wasn't really crazy and that there were really serious problems with society, something I had previously been blind to being born into a upper class family complete with all the privileges it gave and all the comfortable ignorance to the problems that ran rampant caused by the government and the upper-upper class, those above us who lurk in the shadows and control everything, silencing those who stray too far from the status quo.

Having thoughts like this were pretty silly I thought, but I began to convince myself that it was right. I was so conditioned to a certain mindset and ideology that I never really thought about what was really going on. I was thinking so much and so hard that I stayed up pretty late, just being alone with my thoughts and trying to unravel all the lies that have been carefully knit in my mind since I was a child.

When I woke back up in the morning, I had breakfast with the others, and got everything I needed for school ready. I got in one of the cars that were there, and we all drove off to school. It was great that I could get a ride to school, because it would have been a pretty far walk otherwise. When we got there, I realised that after being introduced to everyone, I noticed a lot more people passing in the halls. Not just those that were living at the mansion, but also others.

Before that, I didn't really notice any of the people walking around the schools, not really paying any attention to the people in the school as I had generally kept to myself. Now though, I noticed a lot of people who I'd never seen before in the halls, as well as the others who were staying at Ampor Manor, who I waved to as I passed by. As well as passing friendly people though, I also passed some who didn't seem friendly by their looks, in fact there were a scary number of menacing people in the school.

When I got to class, it was clearly going to be a very normal day. I didn't pay too much mind to the lessons, paying just enough attention to the long lectures so I could do the work, but I could always just read more about whatever we were learning about at the Library if I wanted to know more. Even if there was a subject I would want to learn more about, I probably would have already known about it. I used to spend a lot of time at the library, reading random books that interested me.

All that random knowledge of history and society seemed to pay off well in this class, being based a lot on the history of pandorian society, as well as the main conflicts and events that shaped modern society played out. I already knew about all the main conflicts, having read many books about them during various points in time. When Mr. Kiff started to explain the Sides War, I decided to do something better with my time then listen to stuff I already knew about.

During the lecture, I pulled out the course pack and went over it, making sure I knew everything else that unit. Although I knew everything being taught, I still enjoyed doing the work, because he at least tried to make it interesting. I got bored and started looking around, scanning all the faces in the room. I looked over to the side, and looked at the girl next to me. Her name was Juliette, and although she was a pretty girl, something seemed off about her.

She looked pretty old for her age, so I just assumed that she was starting school later. A lot of people start school a couple of years later, and that's generally for career purposes or other things, for example not having enough money for school, or for whatever other reason and I assumed that. A lot of rich people do that so that they can work for more money during their teenage years, as you get paid more from age 13 to 23.

I didn't know too much about her, but I did know she was related to Callie, who is a pretty notorious gangster-type guy. There are a lot of street gangs around Stonemill, and although a lot of people act like it's cool, but it's nothing compared to the real cool crime people. In Ironhall and Rosedell, there's an organised crime group that are notorious for trying to start an uprising against the powers that be, which started not too long ago.

I've always wanted to join their group, but I've always felt like I wouldn't have enough skill. A lot of Stonemill kids will go to Rosedell or move there, and they get a huge culture shock when they realise that the street gangs and goons they think are the coolest shit are pretty weak and pitiful compared to the proper uprising in Rosedell and Ironhall. Apparently the street gangs in Stonemill are uprising too, but I doubt it seeing as a lot of them are corrupted, while the Ironhall Mafia is completely uncorrupted.

At least they're uncorrupted as far as I know. Although I doubt it, it's possible that the Stonemill gangs are trying to rebel, following in the much larger footsteps of the Rosedell Mafia, however for the Stonemill team, it's a lot harder, due to many factors, especially the increased police presence that prevents most people from flying too close to the sun, because the punishments for uprising here are pretty severe.

As far as I know from this one book in the library, Reality M doesn't have a Mafia like we do, but maybe that's why their reality is apparently better. I've read the book a couple times over, and it's pretty clear that it was created by someone from Reality M and they clearly had a bias, because they didn't list the wrongs in their reality nearly as much as they listed the problems with our reality.

The man who wrote the book is Jean Vert, who is known to be a rather popular author in Reality M, but the book details the fact that he somehow found himself in Reality K, and he decided to publish a book detailing the differences between the two realities. The book was initially quite popular when it was released all the way back in 2028, but since then Mr. Vert hasn't released another book since, and him and the book have since faded into obscurity.

After the lecture was over, it was lunch time. I headed down to the cafeteria and sat with the others. We had a nice conversation during lunch, and when we got back to class, we were assigned group work. When Mr. Kiff mentioned we would be doing group work, the whole class let out a collective sigh. Luckily, the groups were only pairs, and I actually got a good partner, someone who wasn't menacing, and they seemed pretty smart.

His name was Josh Yolipa, and he seemed to know a lot about pandorian and coronian history just like I did. We got along pretty well, and after a while we both noticed that we were probably the only uncorrupted people in the class, aside from Zoey, Jade and Jake. It was so weird that specifically our class got most of the corrupted people, but as long as we didn't say anything to bother them, they kept to themselves mostly and didn't talk to us.

Our group was the first to finish, and we were way ahead of the rest of the class, even being ahead of the three Niravias, for the simple reason we knew what Mr. Kiff was talking about. While he was going around and helping most of the class who didn't pay attention, we just talked about random things. It was admittedly a weird conversation, but it was dumb fun, the best kind of fun. Once the whole class was done, there was only barely enough time for Mr. Lurio to go over all of the answers.

After the school bell rang, Josh asked me to follow him because he wanted to show me something cool he found. At first, I didn't trust him too much as we had just met, but he said he trusted me enough to show me what it was, so I decided to follow him and see what it was. We walked to the suburbs on the north end of town where he lived, and he walked to the front of his house. He stopped for a second, paused and reached into his pocket dimension.

After rummaging around in there for about a minute, he pulled out this really old and broken sword. He said it was really special, and mentioned that it apparently has a really long past, as well as a really long future. I asked him how he knew about it, and he said it was an old legend that his family had passed down for generations. It had become a popular folktale in Stonemill, even I had heard of it but I never really thought much of it.

Now that I was staring right at a legendary blade, I could share in the excitement that Josh had as he talked about it. He mentioned that he found it when he was very young, being buried in the sand at the edge of the beach, the hand guard and part of the blade just barely sticking out of the sand. He let me hold it briefly and when I did, I felt more powerful, almost as if the power of the blade was surging through me.

After swinging it around a couple times, I gave it back to him and told him I was going to walk back home. He suggested I get a bike like he did, and pointed out that there was a bike store a couple blocks down,. I thanked him and headed down the street and over to the store. I bought a nice silver bike, and needless to say it made getting around the place so much easier. I used to ride my old bike all the time, but I outgrew that one around the time I moved into the apartment building last year.

It took me a couple minutes to get the hang of my new bike, but after a while I was having a blast, and I rode all the way back down the long road up to Ampor's Mansion. I parked the bike upfront, and I locked it to a post of the giant iron fence at the front of the building. When I got inside, I mentioned how I got a bike, and a couple of people from the group inside seemed pretty interested in it.

I was surprised to hear that none of them have a bike, and Jude and Kevamar asked if they could try it. I allowed them to, as long as they were careful. While they rode around outside, I went back with the same group from yesterday, the group I labeled as the Map Crew. They were talking about the best places to look, and we started to think of some more ideas. There definitely were multiple map stands located around the island, although some we knew don't contain any maps.

Finding a map stand is really important, because there's a good chance that if a map is somewhere, that it's in a map stand. Even if there isn't a map in the map stand, there's other helpful information that should be in there, as long as nobody got there first. As far as we know, nobody has found any of the map stands, but we can't be sure, because it's likely that if the Red Kingdom got one, they wouldn't tell anyone.

It was really likely that at least one map stand would be located at least somewhere in the northern forests of Stonemill for one good reason, that reason being that the giant mix of multiple different forests, alpine regions, and mountains that exist on the northern end of the island make a perfect cover for anything you would want to hide. The area is so large that almost anything could be hidden deep in the woods, and it's likely nobody would ever know.

That entire northern end just north of Downtown Brandon is entirely uninhabited as far as anyone knows, but it's pretty likely that there's some coronians living in the woods, or maybe some long lost group of pandorians that made a home deep in the woods. I've always wondered what creatures could be hiding out in the woods. Who knows what's out there, just waiting to be discovered.

It's a lot easier to say that you can look for something in the forests of northern Stonemill than actually doing it, because there is a lot of area to cover, and most of the terrain is uneven and covered in snow for most of the year, which only makes it harder to look. I suggested that maybe it could be hidden in the mountains, but Tango said that it might be even harder to look through the mountains, because most of them were uncharted and we would have to climb.

There wasn't really much of an option, and Charlie and I suggested that we should start looking where we knew we would find something, and if we found any clues we could follow those later. We started to plan out where we would start, and we decided to start with the south first and work our way up north. At dinner, we brought this up, and Migel mentioned how he was going to go on a solo hunting trip in the Sarnian woods in a couple of days.

He said he was planning on going during the weekend, so we decided to go to a different but still nearby route, and after a while, we planned the whole thing out. I was really excited to start looking for the maps, and I could tell some of the others were too. We decided that it would probably be best to split off into groups, so we decided to make the teams now. I was with Charlie, and everyone else was in pairs, except for Nomad, Haji and Turrami who were in a group of three, deciding to be the one group of three that would have to be formed for everyone to have a partner.

That night, Charlie gave me a couple of her guns to borrow, just encase we got into trouble. She had a really, really large collection, and gave me a large set to choose from. After I picked out the guns I wanted, we all went to the shooting range that was located on the far end of the second floor of the mansion to test them out. Although it seemed pretty odd for the mansion to have a shooting range, but I ignored it and got to shooting.

I was really happy to have met these people. I've always felt pretty disconnected from society, especially with my family issues, but having met these people made me feel great. It felt good to be able to connect and get along so well with people. I've always thought I was introverted, but it turns out I'm pretty extroverted, but I was just really socially awkward and I never tried to connect with people. It was like every passing day I found out more and more about myself, as well as more and more about the strange world we live in.

## Sarnian Woods, Stonemill, IZ144/6/76 (K), Suladay October 18, 2058, Migel Archimegres -Cabin Fever-

I walked through the forest path of the Sarnian Woods. The snow made a soft squishing sound as my boots stepped onto it. I was on a hunting trip, a hobby of mine and something I've done at least once a month ever since I got my first gun at age 12. There's always been lots of wild animals that live in these woods, too much that it was a problem, but in recent months I feel like there was a really big drop in the amount of wild animals roaming the forests.

I have a lot of rifles that I use, all of them being Earth guns that are pretty common. A lot of people act like you need an expensive and super high end rifle to be able to hunt, but most of the time I find myself using a smaller caliber rifle. I find myself using my battle rifles for hunting, because they have enough firepower to blast away almost anything that would be coming your way.

As I walked through the woods, I held my map with me. I was going off of the charted paths, because you don't find many animals close to the common roads through the forest. I know my way around this forest well enough for it not to be an issue. My boots are made specially to be quieter than normal boots, so I wouldn't be scaring anything away. I was surprised to see that the forest was completely empty; I didn't even see any birds flying overhead.

Deeper and deeper I went into the forest, further and further from the normal route, but still nothing appeared. I was wondering if I was being too loud somehow, but even then I would have seen *something*, even if I was screaming at the top of my lungs the whole way through I would've seen something running off into the bushes. It was weird to see the forest so empty. I decided to go deeper than I've ever gone before, seeing if I could find a map stand before another living creature.

Going yet deeper into the woods, there was still no sign of any animal life. I thought I heard something way off into the distance, but it was probably just the wind blowing through the trees. For the most part, the only sound besides my footsteps was the quiet creak of the trees swaying in the wind. I stopped for a minute to take a small snack break, and I stared off into the sky, looking at the overcast clouds through the canopy.

I was pretty deep into the forest, when I saw something weird in the distance. It didn't seem natural, so I decided to get a closer look. Hidden under the snow was a ramp that led into the ground. I walked into it, and I found a door. The door was huge and made of metal. It wasn't locked, and when I looked inside, the whole building inside was dark, and there were dust particles floating in the air. I turned on my flashlight, and started walking through the complex.

There were clearly lights around the strange underground facility, but they were off. I walked through, and there were many strange rooms throughout the facility, A lot of them I couldn't get inside of. It didn't take too long to find the general power switch, and when I flicked it, the whole place roared to life. Generators kicked in, and the whole place got warmer. The sound of electrical hums filled the air. I put my flashlight away and held my rifle in both hands as I walked through the place.

There was one room that was open, and it appeared to be an office, and there were a lot of random things strewn about inside on the floor and on the desk. One of the things inside was this weird jar looking thing with a floating blue mass inside the jar, emitting a faint hum. I took everything inside the room, including a shredded piece of paper that was scorched on one end and some documents that had a CLASSIFIED stamp printed over the front of their folders in bright red ink.

I walked around the place looking for anything else, but there weren't many other things I could take. There were a couple of other offices that were open for some reason, but there weren't many interesting things inside them. As I walked through, I got to the far corner of the building. As I prepared to turn around and go to the other side of the complex, but I noticed there was something weird with the wall.

At first, I didn't know what was wrong about it at first, but then I noticed that part of the wall was a different colour. I walked up to it and reached out to touch it, but my hand went right through. I walked through the wall and on the other side was a giant metal door with one of those sliding locks on the outside. I unlocked the door and walked in. The inside of the room looked like the inside of a castle, with a fake sky outside the windows. It gave off a weird vibe.

There was a main area, with a kitchen and a couple of rooms branching out from it on the sides. I walked into one of the rooms, and as I did, I heard another door open. I turned around and saw someone walking out of another room. I was surprised to see them, and they were clearly surprised to see me, but their surprise turned to excitement. He was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and he seemed confused to see me wearing full winter gear.

"Why are you in shorts?" I asked.

"Why are you in full winter gear? It's October and it's still full-on Stonemill Summer,"

"It's below freezing outside, what are you talking about?"

"What? Are you sure?"

"Wait, are you from Reality M?"

"Uh yea, am I in Reality K?" I told him he was, and I gave him some extra clothes I had, as well as an extra jacket. I offered him a gun, but he said he knew magic. I was pretty surprised by that, and he said he didn't need ritual circles or anything fancy like that, stating he knew how to do it without them. I had never thought that it was even possible to do magic without a circle, however there are other ways you can produce it without being an elemental.

I didn't know much about magic, and for the longest time I didn't believe in it, just like a lot of people do, however I was proven wrong when I met the others back in September. From what I do know, either a ritual circle, a spell book, or some other object that is infused with magic, most commonly in a weapon of some kind. I definitely would not have known anything about magic if it weren't for Ampor and Zandako who seemed to know a lot magic.

We walked out into the complex, and he was surprised to see it empty. He stated that when he was taken in, the whole place was filled with corrupted coronians, as well as other pandorians who they were doing some kind of experiments on them, but he didn't know what they were doing. I mentioned how the whole place was dark when I came, and that I turned on the generator, and he suggested that we should probably leave as fast as we could, knowing that someone probably knew the place was online now.

We walked outside the facility and into the snow, but when we got outside, I heard the distant roar of motors. We stopped for a second, but then he broke off running through the woods, and called for me to follow him. We ran through the forest as the vehicles got closer, and when I looked behind my shoulder, I could see a convoy of coronians on motorcycles chasing us, spitting up powder and dirt as they drove through the snow.

He clapped his hands together and a circle of light surrounded his feet as he did. He smacked the ground with his palms open, and a row of spikes erupted from the ground towards the motorcycles. It hit a couple of the bikes, cutting clean through them, but the others swerved around them, and more and more came up behind us. I took off running just behind him, and in all the confusion, I realised I didn't even know his name.

I knew it would be pretty hard to communicate without knowing each other's names, so while we began to run, I asked him what his name was. He yelled out the word Willow, and I yelled out my own name to him. He shouted back asking if I had a weapon, and I grabbed my rifle again. I had somehow forgotten to take it back out when we started being chased, and as we ran I tried to put another magazine into the gun, rather ineffectively.

We stopped for a second to catch our breath, but the bikes were pretty hot on our tail, and fast approaching. He smacked the ground again, creating a platform below us that extended up into the air. Smacking his hands together again, he created more platforms below us that went lower and lower to the ground that we jumped across. As we ran down them, it seemed to slow down the bikers a bit more.

Willow and I kept running through the snowy woods, and they were getting pretty far off, so we decided to take a tiny break. While we caught our breath, I turned around and started shooting back at the bikes. I aimed for the gas tanks and the tires, and I managed to take a couple of them out, but then Willow got back up from his knees and we had to run again. We tore off through the snowy forest, but eventually we came to a large drop.

There was an embankment below us and it seemed pretty far down. We both went right up to the edge, and decided what we were going to do. There were clearly more bikes chasing us now, and they had probably called for backup seeing as Willow could use magic. As the roars got closer, I began to realise that there wasn't much of an option left, so we made up our minds.

We jumped down and tried to hide behind the short cliff, but a bunch of cars and motorcycles drove in front of us, pinning us against the rocks. A bunch of the coronians hopped off their bikes and out of their cars and pointed automatic rifles at us. Willow put his hands up in the air, and I put away my rifle and put my hands up as well. A couple of them wearing full black uniforms walked up to us and inspected us.

They were talking to each other, and one said "Yea, that's the one that got away, we're taking him." When they got to me, they appeared surprised. A couple of others walked up to me, all looking pretty surprised. I was a bit nervous and slightly confused too. "Woah this guy's got almost the same energy as him, that's weird," I was pretty confused, and I had no clue what they were talking about.

I didn't know anything about me having a 'high energy level', but it made me think about magic when they compared me to Willow. They put us both in handcuffs and put us in the back of one of the Jeeps, which had four cages connected to the back of the truck. The cages were made of metal and were bolted straight to the floor of the back of the truck. They wrapped a chain around the entrance and locked it with a padlock.

I saw them put the key in the glove box through the back window, and they all started driving away. As the cars started driving along, the beautiful scenery of the Sarnian Woods came into view, lit glumly by overcast skies. After a while, the trucks got into a single line instead of the arrow formation they were in before. I looked to the right and noticed there was a giant ravine just outside the car, and we were driving on a pretty thin stretch of road next to it.

It was a really cool scenery, and I couldn't help but look on in awe. The ravine wasn't too long across, and I had a thought that one of these cars could easily jump the cliff with enough momentum. Although it wasn't too wide, it was very very long from the front to the back, and it followed the road as it went along the ridge. As we went down the ridge and into the horizon, it seemed to get wider and wider, and at the bottom there looked like a forest just sitting there.

I just kept looking on, and started humming to myself. To go along with the beat of the tune I was humming, I started kicking my shoes against the metal. After a while of that, one of the coronians told me to stop kicking the bars. After a short pause, I clapped my hands together instead of kicking. When I started clapping my hands, Willow looked surprised, and he looked as if I had a plan.

For a second, I was confused, but then it clicked. He had that look on his face, almost like he was going to say "I am going to do something absolutely devious, and you better prepare yourself for the incredible amount of chaos that is about to go down". He mouthed words to me asking if he should do it now, but I told him to wait for a good moment. I knew what he was going to do, and I knew roughly when there would be a good opportunity.

I scanned the bottom of the ravine, and I saw a cave on the opposite side of the bottom of the ravine. I pointed it out to him silently, and he nodded. I only had to say one word, and that was "now,". When I did, he clapped his hands together and smacked them both together against the metal bars of the cage, causing a giant part of the ground to extend up and in a swift movement, pushing the car right over the cliff.

As we were falling, two giant chunks of metal came out of the tops of the cages which wrapped around both of us, holding us in place. As the car tumbled down the cliff I thought I was going to die. It smacked the against the cliff a couple of times as it fell to the bottom of the deep ravine. When it finally hit the bottom, it caused a small rock slide that sent a couple of boulders cascading down the cliff, just barely missing the car.

The chunks of metal receded back into the cages, and I crawled through the broken opening of the of the cage. "Haha you screamed the whole way down," He said in a joking tone. I laughed and said "Well I was falling down a cliff and the only thing holding me was a giant metal hand," We laughed with each other and then got out of the car. I looked at the front of the car, and saw that one side was flattened. Both of the coronians that were in the front of the car looked like they didn't make it.

Part of me felt bad, but I remembered that they did try to kill me. We walked through the bottom of the ravine to where the cave was, passing over mossy rocks and trees that blanketed the bottom of the ravine. It was really cool, and I wondered how all of this grew so well down here at the bottom of a ravine. There wasn't even much snow on the ground, and the moss and trees that circled the ponds. As we walked through, I noticed Willow was winded.

I asked him if he wanted to stop and catch his breath because he looked pretty tired, but he said he was fine. He told me how using magic can be pretty physically taxing because it uses your own energy to use, especially when you're using earth magic like he was. I was still pretty surprised that he was able to use his magic that effortlessly. It seemed pretty odd, but I didn't know much about magic so I ignored the feeling.

When we got to the cave, the front was covered in moss and hanging ivy that crawled up the cave wall which died at a certain point from the top. I didn't really notice, but the area at the bottom of the cave was pretty warm, which was probably how this place has such a thriving ecosystem in Stonemill Winter. We passed through the vines that blocked the entrance of the cave, almost as if they were curtains.

As we walked through the cave, I thought I heard the distant sound of rushing water. I knew that there were underground rivers all over the Sarnia region, most of which lead back to civilisation or at least somewhere away from the coronians who were looking for us. I was still a bit worried that they might follow us and attack us. Although it was unlikely they would able to give chase effectively, I still worried about it.

We ran through the cave, until we got to a long underground river. I pulled out an inflatable boat from my pocket dimension and smacked it down onto the water. We both got in and pushed the boat off of the wall. As we went down the river, I noticed it went down, almost like a ramp going down deeper and deeper underground. The river was pretty straight, and it went down and down.

Eventually, I could see something up ahead. It appeared to be a bunch of black mats on a ramp that went upwards, seemingly to slow down oncoming boats. When the boat got to the end, the mats slowed it down rapidly and stopped it at the top of the hill, in front of a short path that led to a giant door at the end of a hallway. I put the boat away after we got out of it, and we walked up towards the giant door.

When we got to the front of the small area, we tried to open the door. It was hard to open at first, but when both of us pulled the handles, the doors swung open, almost slamming us against the wall. We walked inside to a strange room. There were boxes and shelves, as well as other rooms and computers. It appeared to be some sort of base of operations for some group, and I assumed it was a coronian base.

There were many boxes and computers strewn about, but I didn't touch anything. We walked through the complex, passing by multiple doors and little hallways that branched off of the main room. At the very end of the hallway, there was a long staircase. We walked towards it, but right before we got to the top, I thought I heard something behind me. I looked back, but it was only a dog.

The dog was white and very fluffy, and it ran up to both of us, barking playfully as it did. I picked up the dog and I decided to give it a name. I named it James after my older brother and it seemed to take a liking to the name I had given it. We walked up the stairs, with James following behind me. The staircase was made of metal and went all the way to the top of the high ceilings of the facility.

It went all the way to the top and led to a landing, where there was a smaller set of stairs that led to the exit. It was a metal room, almost like a bunker with a small set of metal double doors. We pushed them open, and walked out into a snowy clearing. It was starting to snow outside, and although it was just a light snowfall outside, I knew that it probably would get worse, because it usually does.

We walked through the snow for a couple of hours or so, trying to head north to get to one of the service roads that runs through the woods and back to Downtown Brandon. I held out my map and set our bearings multiple times, assuring we were going northwest, because that was the most likely route to the service station, not knowing exactly where we were. I could see the giant ravine we fell into, so I assumed we were there.

Something I didn't realise though was the ravine was massive, and it was very hard to tell where we landed, and the river took us somewhere farther away from there, as well as going through the underground complex which would change our direction further. I made a guess saying we were a bit east of the ravine, although I was thinking the river ran west. Even if I was wrong, going northwest was still the best option to get to the service station.

The service station is really easy to find on the map, because the main and only paved road in the forest leads right to it, as well as the service station being marked on the map. If we passed the service station and were able to find out where we were, it would be pretty easy to head back to it. I put the map away and kept my compass in one of my jacket pockets for easier access.

As we walked north, the storm started getting worse pretty quick, and after about an hour and a half of walking, it was almost full whiteout conditions. It was starting to get dark, and we were still wondering around the forest at sundown. Luckily, I could make out a building up ahead in the forest, and we both ran to it through the dark forest. We got in and shut the door behind us.

The building appeared to be a small home, although there was nothing inside the main room except for a table with two chairs and a lantern. The windows were intact, and there was a fireplace in the middle of the main room of the house. It had a main room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a couple of bedrooms, although only the kitchen and bathroom had furniture. The two bedrooms were completely empty.

I lit the fireplace, and lit the gas lanterns in the kitchen. We both sat at the kitchen table, with James sitting on my lap. He asked if I had any food, and luckily I kept MRE packages in my pocket dimension. I have a couple of full boxes stored in there, and I pulled out a pot, but then I realised we didn't have water. I remembered I have a special pot that can turn snow into drinkable water. It works by using a filter to separate any rock particles or anything unwanted from the water particles.

I filled up the collection pot with snow produced fresh from outside and started boiling it into water. The process didn't take long, and before long I was able to get a pot full of good water to boil and I got our meals started. We ate dinner, and I was able to give some to James, and then after that we all decided to go to sleep. I had two sleeping bags in my pocket dimension, and I laid them out near the fireplace in the main room.

When I woke up in the morning, the fireplace was still going strong but the other lanterns in the house went out. I looked out the window, but it was still a whiteout. It looked like we were going to be snowed in for a while, or as long as the snow storm would last. I went outside to get more snow so we could eat breakfast, and it was pretty clear that the snow level had clearly risen, and it looked like it was going to be pretty difficult to traverse when we would have to leave.

We didn't do much for the entire day, and from breakfast to lunch, I just read a book and talked with Willow for a while. After lunch, I decided to spread out the map on the table and we tried to find out where we were. We started from the ravine and moved westward on the map, looking for the same clearing we exited the facility in. The map was taken by satelite footage, so it would be much easier to find any buildings.

The map images were taken in the summer when the snow is gone, so it made it pretty easy to find the clearing, even being able to spot the metal roof of the exit to the complex, although it was partially covered by trees. We looked north from there, and were able to see the roof of the house from the map. It was surprisingly far from where we exited, much farther northwest than I expected at first.

It turns out the home is pretty close to the service station, being just south. It appeared to be about a kilometre south from the station, so it would be a pretty easy walk, but we decided not to risk going outside until the storm subsided, because we weren't planning on getting lost in the snow. After that, we didn't do much that day. I played with James in the house as much as I could, but we had to stay inside.

The next morning when I woke up, it was still snowing outside, but the visibility was much higher. I got outside to get the snow to be able to cook breakfast, and the snow was pretty high, being about a fourth of the way up the door. It was a bit worrying, but I did have snowshoe attachments which would make walking out on the snow much easier. After breakfast and a small prep, we decided to go out and get to the service station before it got worse again.

We started walking through the snow, and although it took a while to get used to, I got the hang of it after a while. I don't think I had ever seen this much snow in the forest before, but I have seen many instances of giant blizzards happening in the city. It's not too uncommon for a snowstorm to sweep in and bury a city in a whiteout for a couple days. One time a couple of years ago there was one that lasted a whole five days and dumped almost 60 centimetres of snow over Stonemill.

Walking through the forest was pretty easy, and I thought we had passed the service station, so I checked the map. It turns out it was 10 kilometres instead of one, so we still had a journey ahead of us. After a while the snow started clearing up, which made things a lot easier. Even when there was a small amount of snow falling, it was still pretty hard to travel. After a while of going through the forest, and I tripped on something.

I got up as Willow laughed at me, and I went to see what it was. I assumed it was just a rock, but I was pretty surprised when I pulled a whole map stand from out of the snow. We were both pretty shocked to see it, and although there was no map in it, there were a couple of papers inside which assumed would be pretty useful in finding other ones, and possibly even a map. I decided to put them away immediately so they didn't get damaged.

After the short break, we continued the rest of the way up to the service station, and we got a driver to take us back to Downtown Brandon and close enough to Ampor Manor. We paid him for the ride, and walked up the road to Ampor Manor. I was pretty surprised to see the road was paved, but for some reason it was only paved about three quarters the way up, and the rest of the way just had salt on the road.

When we got back to the house, the others were pretty surprised to see us. They knew about the snowstorm and assumed we found shelter. I told them what happened, and everything about Willow, and after I finished, I pulled out the papers from the map stand. Everyone was pretty excited to see that, and even though there was no map, we had still found something really, really useful. I asked Willow if he wanted to stay at the manor, and he said he didn't have anywhere else. I had forgotten he was from Reality M, and he was pretty happy to take a room at Ampor Manor.

Even though we had to wade through a snowstorm, we'd still found something really cool, so I'd say it was worth it. A couple of hours after we got back to the mansion, the snowstorm got much worse. We were pretty surprised to see that, and we admitted it was a pretty good move to have left when we did, because if we waited for the snowstorm to pass, we would have been caught in the second storm. It felt pretty good to have dodged that bullet and to be in a nice house while it snowed outside.

## Viridan Forest, Stonemill, IZ144/6/76 (K), Selkaday October 20, 2058, Kevamar Marinnas -Deep-snow Love Story-

After the snowstorm that had gripped Stonemill for the past two days subsided, I decided to try and spend the day looking for anything I could find near the mansion. I was walking down the forest path behind the mansion and through the forest, when I came across this weird statue. The inscription was illegible and the statue seemed to be broken and covered in snow, making it impossible to tell what it was trying to depict.

I wasn't too worried about getting lost, because it was better for the anomaly of the group to be the guinea pig and go into the cold forest than someone else who could end up dying. I've always tried to use my ability to help others as best as I could, being able to do anything dangerous without too much risk. Although I feel all the pain, I always tried to help people with it. I've never really had a bad past with it, so I've never seen a reason not to.

I walked on the main path behind Ampor Manor first, and then I went into the nearby forest area afterwards. I wandered into the forest in search of any clues, and I didn't realise how far I was going. The forest floor was covered in snow which made things much harder, but I still tried my best to look for anything that could be of use. I scanned the ground for any strange snow formations that could indicate something.

There were a couple of weird lumps of snow, and when I checked under them it was mostly rocks. One was hiding an entire metal plate which seemed pretty odd. It was pretty clear that where unnatural structures here, and I had a feeling I was starting to get closer. As I went deeper into the forest, I found more and more weird structures strewn about the forest floor, all being hidden underneath oddly-shaped snow piles.

In the distance, I saw a weird shape up ahead, and I heard some voices over the wind. When I got closer, I hid in the brush and pulled out my binoculars to spy on them. The structure was flat and stuck above the ground. There were two coronians talking by the front door, but I was too far for them to be able to notice me, at least I hoped. I decided to try and think of a way to get in while avoiding the guards.

I was able to make a pretty convincing bird call, so I tried that. They looked into the air, trying to find the source of the noise, but they stood in place. It clearly didn't work, and it probably wasn't the best idea because I could have just given away my position. I shuffled and although it made some noise, they didn't hear me because they were too busy talking to each other. I thought I felt the air getting warmer for a second, then I looked behind me.

I turned around and looked up, and there was a massive coronian standing over me. Their eyes gave off a red flash and their hair was long and it covered her face. They were holding a giant axe in their hands, and before I could even react, they brought their axe down on me and cut me in half. When I reappeared in the snow a couple of seconds later, they looked pretty confused and slightly annoyed.

After I reappeared, they ran at me again, but I pulled out my own sword and managed to hold her off. They smiled, and seemed pretty excited to have a challenge. I managed to almost hit them a couple of times, but they cut off my arm, and killed me again. When I reappeared again, they asked if I was ready to come with them, and I said yes. They picked me up over their shoulder and carried me into the facility.

They carried me right into their bosses office, and opened the door. When the boss asked what was going on, they said that they found me waiting outside the complex, and mentioned that I was pretty special. They pressed on how, and without hesitation pulled their axe and slammed it right into my chest. When I reappeared after a couple of seconds later, their bosses expression turned from shock to excitement.

They were pretty excited to have found me, and they told the other coronian to stop killing me, because I was pretty important. They both walked me through the facility, and showed me to this weird area in the far corner of the complex, where there was a transparent wall that we could walk through. It looked like a hologram and it blended in pretty well with the rest of the wall, but it was pretty clearly a different colour.

Behind the wall, there was a whole area behind it that looked like the inside of a castle and was decorated as such. The main area had a table, and on the left side there was a kitchen, on the right side was a bedroom, and on the opposite side from the entrance was a set of four other bedrooms. They left the area, and said that I would have a couple of uncorrupted coronians come to live with me and cook my meals.

After waiting at the table reading a book for a couple of minutes, another coronian came in. He looked like a lizard, something I had never seen before. He was pretty shy, and he cooked lunch for me. As he made the food, I talked to him. I felt kind of bad for him, because he was treated like a punching bag for the other coronians here, and because of such he was pretty socially awkward and nervous all the time.

I suggested that he could make food for himself as well as for me so we could eat together, and he seemed surprised by the suggestion. He went through with it and after it was done, we both sat down at the table and ate our meals together. The food was amazing, and I let him know. He seemed pretty sad about the compliment, and when I asked why he mentioned how he didn't have a great home life.

I could tell that he took my words to heart, and I really felt pretty bad for him. We had a pretty long conversation after lunch, and eventually I got to the topic of why he was even here. He was confused by it too, and he said that he wasn't completely sure either, but he had some kind of idea. He took a moment to get all of his thoughts together, and mentioned to me in a whisper how he needed to try and tell me part of the truth.

I whispered to him why, and he said that they had the place bugged, and they probably wouldn't appreciate him telling me some things. He said that when they took him in, they mentioned something about him having a lot of energy of some kind, and that interested me a lot. I had heard talk about energy to me when I was being taken in as well, and I was pretty confused by it too.

He told me that in coronian culture, energy is a pretty big thing, and he went into detail about how they can sense two energies from a Soul, being the Soul Energy and the Void Energy, which are both produced by any living Soul. Soul Energy is thought to be a dark purple energy which can be sensed by coronians only, and not anything else. Void energy is understood to be a light blue energy, although it can't be felt by anything.

He told that both Soul Energy and Void Energy can differ in any being, and they tend to both have a similar level of radiance, which means that lower energies mean that one's Soul isn't as strong, and it can also be felt a lot less. As well as this, Soul and Void energy can be used to power real machines, although he said it was only thought to be able to. When he said that, he gave me a weird look.

Although he didn't say anything about that, I could tell he knew something about that, and the look he gave me indicated that what he just said wasn't true, and that Soul and Void energy CAN be used in machines. The thought worried me, and the longer I thought about it, the longer I regretted thinking about it. He continued on about Souls and their energies, and it was actually pretty interesting.

He seemed to know a lot about Souls, and I asked how. He mentioned how he comes from a very traditional coronian family, and they teach these values a lot in their family and reinforce it in their kids. He also said that not many other families do this, and that a lot of pandorians don't know how Souls work either, so it was pretty interesting to learn. He mentioned how his family owned some old books too, and he offered to show me sometime.

I was pretty interested in the idea, but he obviously couldn't at the moment because the entire base is covered in pocket dimension jammers, so if he wanted to show me the books, he would have to somehow get outside of the complex and take them out, and then bring them back. Although it was an interesting idea, he whispered to me that he didn't want to show me here, because he had a pretty bad feeling that they would be stolen.

Although he wasn't completely sure, he knew that their boss didn't have much knowledge about Souls, and it's pretty clear that he had a lot more knowledge of how Souls worked then he was letting on, not wanting to feed their boss more free information. He was sure that if he showed the books here, they would be stolen and he would likely never see them again.

After that, we changed the conversation topic, not wanting to go too deep into it with prying eyes about. The conversation got to food, and he mentioned how food was also a pretty big part of his family life growing up, with cooking being taught well to everyone in his family, a lot of whom went on to open their own restaurants, and a couple being pretty common names in the world of food.

Food was pretty important to him, and he always strives to be the best chief in the family. One time his family had a cooking competition, and he got fifth place out of eleven, and even though he did really well, he tried and tried to be number one. He said it was fun to have a sibling rivalry that wasn't too serious, but also was very serious. As he talked about what a good chief he was, I could tell he was pretty happy.

He was clearly excited to talk to me about food, and he went on and on about being a chief and cooking, a lot of things I didn't understand because I am a terrible cook, but I still listened to him and tried my best to keep conversation because it was clearly something he enjoyed. He asked if I've ever cooked before, and I mentioned how I tried one time and I burnt the pot.

He looked sad for a second, but he smiled and said that even terrible cooks like me can become great with enough practice, and he offered to teach me. I accepted his offer because there really wasn't much else to do here, and it was actually really fun. I never knew cooking would be this fun, and I enjoyed being taught by him. I jokingly stated that he should become a cooking instructor, and he said that it was a pretty good idea.

After a while of cooking, someone came through. It was the same coronian that cut me in half in the woods. They told me their name was Cimarie-Izurra, and that they admired that I put up a pretty good fight earlier, being one the best fights she's had in a while, and asked if I wanted to rematch her, just for fun. I accepted the offer, and the lizard coronian came with me as we walked to a training room.

As we walked through the halls, I realised I hadn't gotten his name. He said he hadn't gotten mine, and I told him my name first. His name was Narsie-Sevith, and he said it in a pretty funny way, pretending to present himself like someone from high society. It was a pretty funny joke, and when we got to the training room, I got myself ready. I knew I was probably going to die again, and I had already told Sevith of my status as an anomaly.

Once he pumped me up and readied me for the fight, I stepped out into the ring and grabbed a sword off the rack, being my weapon of choice. There were a couple of others who were training and they all sat on the bench to watch the fight. Izurra even called in someone to announce the fight, and we both got ready. She pulled out her axe from her pocket dimension, which surprised me, but it didn't matter then.

The bell rang, and we began. I just barely dodged an axe swing, and I almost hit her as she pulled her axe out of the ground, but she blocked the hit with her arm. She hit me a couple of times, and I only managed to hit her a couple of other times. I managed to slice a bit of her hair off, and she seemed pretty impressed, but after a while, I got cocky and went for something risky, and I got killed for it.

When I reappeared, I shook hands with her. I looked into the crowd and a lot of the coronians who watched were pretty shocked. It was a pretty good fight, and she told me that I'd earned her respect, and she even offered to train me. I accepted her offer, and she said she'll let me know when she was able. I was pretty surprised to find out that even though the coronians here were corrupted, they actually were pretty pleasant to me.

I assumed it was just because I was an anomaly, but I thought that maybe they were showing their true selves. I knew that there was a pretty good chance that the coronians here were pretty nice people, and would have acted as such if they weren't corrupted. I also had a thought that maybe some of them were just here because it was their job. Izurra mentioned how she worked here when she was taking me in.

It was pretty clear that a lot of the coronians here were just here to do their job, and when I asked about it, Sevith mentioned how they all got paid for working here. Sevith was a chief and he got paid pretty well for it. He mentioned how all of the people he knew here also worked here, although there was a pretty big pay gap in job positions. He mentioned how he didn't know the exact statistics, but he was sure that guards like Izurra got paid the most.

We got back to the housing area and Sevith started making dinner. He made dinner for himself and I, and I helped him as best I could as he did. It was really good, and after a while he left to go to his bedroom in one of the lower levels of the facility. He explained to me that as far as he knew, there were three main levels, us being currently at the top level. The second level was more of the same type of rooms and storage, and the first floor being bedrooms and even more storage.

Sevith also mentioned how there were two basement levels, although he'd never been down there. After he left the room, I went to bed but I couldn't fall asleep. I decided to pass the time by exploring the complex. I had a special pass around my neck so I was able to explore the place at will. I walked around the first floor, and because it was so late, there were almost no coronians about.

I eventually found a giant map by the front door which pointed out all of the rooms on that level and what they were. There were a couple of stairwell rooms, and I decided to go and check those out. I went around and it took a while to find the rooms, and after a while I found one of them. I walked into the room and down the stairs to the second level, just to see what was going on down there.

The layout looked pretty similar to the top floor, and the same was true for the floor below it. The only change was the colour of the walls, being different colours as they go further down into the complex. The main stairwell only went down to the third floor, and I had to look for a map to try and explore the basement levels. After I found the map, it didn't take long to track down the stairwell to the basement.

I walked down into the basement, and the air felt strange. Pipes crawled up and down the walls that coursed throughout the narrow halls. Some of the pipes appeared like they were carrying water, and others looked more like cables that were meant to transmit some kind of energy. I was hoping it was normal energy, but I had a pretty bad feeling at the back of my mind that it could be Soul or Void energy.

There were many strange rooms, and a lot of them looked like storage, but these rooms contained random metal parts and electrical equipment. There were other rooms that didn't have anything, and there was one room that was completely filled with boxes and boxes full of chalk. I walked back through the narrow hallways back to the staircase to head to the next basement, but I decided to wait.

I went back up through the complex and back to the room, and I went to sleep. When I woke up, I read my book before Sevith came in. Shortly after we finished breakfast, we got a call from the boss. They said that there was someone who wanted to see Sevith, particularly one of the guards who was from the same town Sevith grew up in, and apparently they knew each other at a young age.

Sevith asked them to send them in, and shortly afterwards they came in. Sevith was pretty excited to see them, and they clearly had a relationship some time ago. After they hugged each other, Sevith asked what happened to them. They explained how a long time ago they left the city because they wanted to investigate something that was going on in Stonemill, but they got captured by the Red Kingdom.

They whispered to us that they didn't have any other option other than to fight for them, but they explained how they didn't do any harm to anyone who was innocent. After a short conversation, Sevith started making breakfast for them, and he started to talk to me. I asked them what their name was, and they told me it was Doravin-Milo. They mentioned how they had a sister named Mila, although they don't know what happened to them.

Milo felt pretty bad for leaving the city, because ever since they did, the city seemed to have gotten much worse. They wanted to go back for the longest time, but they were afraid of what the people in town would say about them coming back. It was clear that they regretted leaving the town, but they also mentioned how they were able to save others in the time they were on their own.

Apparently Milo and his sister Mila were part of a band that was pretty popular at the time, however Sevith wasn't part of the band because he didn't have much musical experience, nor did he have enough courage to go up on stage. Milo mentioned how he was the sound tech, which Sevith guessed having known Milo to be a very technically knowledgeable person.

I heard stories of their tours and how they mostly got along, but there was always some kind of rivalry going on, and Sevith seemed to be a bit jealous of a couple of the members, most notably one named Tami, who was also generally backstage with Milo, but he was the backup Bass player. Knowing what I knew about Milo and Sevith, I guessed they were in a relationship too.

When Milo left the city, he told me he had no idea if the band was still running, guessing they were but they seemed pretty guilty and regretful for leaving their band mates behind. I wondered what they did for all their lives after they left their hometown, and they were pretty happy to share what they did. They were forced to live off the land and they actually got pretty good at it, just like what I heard from Nomad all the time. He wouldn't shut up about how he was the "King of the wild".

They told me stories about how they would go around the countryside and became somewhat of a cowboy, delivering justice wherever they saw fit. I remember Kari saying that he did the same name, and when I brought up their name to Milo, they seemed to recognise it. Sometimes they'd work together, and they spent a lot of time together, but then Milo admitted he took their relationship a bit too far once and he was too scared to talk to him again.

I mentioned that if it was just once like they said, they'd probably forgiven him by now, but Milo still wasn't sure about it. When Sevith came with Milo's breakfast, they ate it rather slowly and continued the conversation. Sevith was pretty interested in his life, having not seen him in many years. It was pretty clear to me that they had a relationship many years ago, and it was clear Sevith wanted to catch up.

We all talked for quite a while, and after lunch I told them I was going to explore the facility on my own, and they wished me luck, Milo telling me to have fun exploring the base. I walked through the base and although there were more coronians about, I still wanted to explore the place as much as I could. I walked straight down to the first floor, and then I went all the way down to the second basement.

The basement was completely quiet, safe for the quiet hum of a distant generator. The hallways here were much tighter, and the ceiling of the hallways were covered in pipes and wires that transported something somewhere. I tried to follow the source of the wires, but it was pretty difficult. The basement was almost like a maze of thin hallways and random wires and pipes, which only made the source harder to find.

I finally found a room, and in it was a bunch of strange blueprints and papers, all being related to coronian anatomy. The papers featured every type of natural coronian and highlighted the different variations of them, like how some cat-like coronians can have strange tails and how some rabbit-like coronians can feature a segmented ear. It was weird and I had a pretty good guess on what this was.

I theorised it could possibly be blueprints for making coronians, possibly in a similar way to how pandoreals are made, although I don't know much at all about pandoreals or how they're even made. Why would they want to create coronians, aren't there enough? It surely was strange, but I didn't have enough time to look through the papers, because I heard footsteps coming down the hall. I quietly hid under the table until they passed by, and then I slowly got up and followed the source of the sound.

I had a really bad feeling in my gut, but I had to figure out what was going on. I walked down the hall and stayed behind a wall. I peeked over it, and saw a group of coronian researchers standing over a body of a coronian, which laid in the middle of a circle drawn in chalk and interacted with the researchers. There was another one with a dead coronian in it as well, and there were strange symbols drawn on the floor between them.

After a while, one of the researchers stepped up towards the circle and pulled out a book. They read some incantation, but I couldn't hear what they were saying. They finished off the spell by saying "Transfer the being of this Soul into a new body, give him new life!" As the words left his mouth, the researcher clapped his hands together and slammed them towards the ground. As he did, the whole room was filled with a white light, and that's all I could remember.

I ran out of the area which was enveloped in a white light and a loud hum, as well as the screams of the research team. I caught my breath at the end of the hallway and walked out of the basement as fast as I could, the light still filling the entire area as I left. I went up to the first floor, and walked through the halls and saw the white light burst through the vents in the floor. The other coronians around were just as confused as I was.

I went back up to the third floor, and although it was still visible coming through the vents, it was very faint and easy to miss, but I could still make it out well, and other coronians pointed it out. I was really confused as to what the hell was going on, and I decided to back to my living area. I opened the door and called for them, but I didn't see them at first. I walked towards the rooms trying to find them, and after a second Sevith walked out of one of the rooms.

He explained how they were watching TV and he asked what was going on. I explained what I saw, and he looked pretty confused. Hearing us talk about what I had seen, Milo popped their head out of the room and asked what was going on. They looked back and went back into the room, and came out after a second. I told them what happened, but they didn't know what was going on either. It was the strangest thing I'd seen all week, and I needed answers. I had to go back, but was I brave enough?

I had to be brave for everyone's sake, but I was too scared to go back. I kept crying as I tried to explain it because I was so scared. I was so confused. I didn't know what to think, but whatever it was I knew it was bad. I got a weird feeling from it that repelled me. Were they dead? What happened down there? I had to back, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to go alone. I asked Milo and Sevith if they wanted to come with me, and they agreed, but there was a problem.

They weren't sure how the others would react to them walking around the base, especially with them not being on the best of terms with most of the others in the base. Ever since Milo arrived at the base, they were pretty open about their relationship and sexuality, and I fully supported them and Sevith, but a lot of the coronians and pandorians in the base were very conservative and homophobic.

The place was pretty toxic and traditional with things, and it made me feel very uncomfortable most of the time, especially about showing my real self too much. The next day after breakfast, I got the idea to go back. We got ready and I showed Milo and Sevith the way down to the basement area and as I stood in front of the door, I took in a deep breath. We braced ourselves and went inside.

Everything looked the same, but there was a sign on the wall near the room where I saw it all happen. I couldn't read the writing because it was written in a coronian text, but Milo and Sevith were able to translate it for me. It was saying how they were going to do something big in a week, but they wouldn't tell me what it was. It was something horrible and they didn't want me to find out.

But I did. I wanted to find out so desperately that I could barely wait. I really wanted to find out what they were hiding from me, but I didn't want to try and pressure them for it. They had enough shit to deal with as it was, having to take shame from all sides from all of the horrible people here. I just had to wait, and that was all I could really do here. There wasn't too much else to do...

-9 Days Later-

Things were getting much more harsh lately in the complex. I felt like the people got worse and the higher ups got more strict. It was like the cabin fever was getting to everyone. I wasn't forced to stay here for nearly as long as Milo, Sevith and everyone else, but I was starting to feel really trapped too. Although they were allowing me to go to school, they didn't allow me to do much else.

They would pick me up every day from school in an unmarked car, and then they would bring me back to the base, driving through a hidden path that got plowed when it snowed and then back to the complex in the middle of the Viridan Forest. I've always been frustrated with how close it was to Ampor's house. So close, yet so far, but it was just another thing I had to deal with in this place.

Sure I got a good bed, a few good friends and great food every day, but most of the other people here were horrible, and I always felt so trapped here. Milo got into fights pretty regularly, and for that reason Sevith stays in our area for most of the day. We started calling it the outcast room, because it's far away from everyone else, and that's where they send the people they don't want to see, but that didn't make sense for me in particular.

They all seemed to love me, even though they knew I was good friends with Milo and Sevith, who were on the complete opposite of the popularity spectrum as I was. Sometimes it felt like too much, almost as if they were sweet talking me and trying to get me to stay there and be friends with them. A staggering amount of coronians and some of the few pandorians who were there tried to make friends with me, but I never accepted their offers.

Every time they would ask me, it came off as forced and it felt like they were girls trying to be the lucky one who the popular hunk would date. I wasn't interested because they were way too desperate, but also because they were corrupted. I only had a few friends here, and the only one besides Milo and Sevith was surprisingly Izurra. Izurra was corrupted, but she wasn't nearly as awful as the others, and she didn't seem to hate Milo or Sevith.

I was glad that I at least had some people to hang out with here, because I was only able to see my other friends for a couple hours seven days a week. I wanted to tell them about what I had seen a week prior, but I couldn't explain it and I felt awful every time I recalled it. That memory was so strange and harsh and confusing that I couldn't bear to remember it, but when I got back to the complex, i would have to remember.

I was scared as Milo Sevith and I walked back down to the basement. We came down a bit after the time that was listed on the sign so we wouldn't get spotted, because it was pretty likely that they wouldn't want us to be there. Whatever they were doing, it must have been a top secret if they were doing it this deep below ground in an already underground complex hidden in the middle of the forests of Northwest Stonemill.

I walked back through the complex and to the stairwell that I had gone down almost two weeks ago at that point, with Milo ad Sevith following behind me. They looked pretty nervous and on edge, and I didn't blame them. As I reached for the door handle to get into the stairwell my hand started shaking. If I didn't open this door, whatever they were doing was going to keep happening, and nothing was going to change. I had to do something. I couldn't let them get away with another awful deed.

I opened the door and we all walked inside, Milo closing the door behind us. We were all pretty scared and most of us didn't even know what we were getting into. Milo was the only person who could read the sign, and they didn't tell Sevith or I about what it said. I was in the front of the group, and both Milo and Sevith walked close behind me right beside one another holding hands.

We walked all the way down the staircase and all the way to the bottom floor, where the concrete floor was cold and hard. I could feel the warmth draining from my body as my shoes hit the floor. I paused for a moment at the bottom of the stairs and took a deep breath, trying to mentally prepare myself for whatever was out there. Whatever horrible things were separated from us by a mere steel door with a push handle. I composed myself and pushed it forwards, exposing us to the unknown.

The area looked different from what we had seen a week ago. The most notable difference was that the air tasted very different and the floors were stained. Instead of the stone grey of the floor in the stairwell, the floors in the halls now had a brownish hue. The pipes seemed rusty too and there looked to be more stains on the lower portions of the walls and the low pipes. I couldn't really make out exactly what I was seeing though due to the dim light cast by old bulbs.

I slowly led us through the narrow hallways, trying to be as quiet as possible but it didn't seem to matter because after a while, the quiet air was filled with banging and voices from a distant room somewhere in the basement area. The voices sounded calm but I couldn't make out what they were saying. We all paused for a moment to try and hear what they were saying, but after a moment screams began to ring out above the voices. It was someone screaming for help.

We slowly made our way down the narrow hallways to try and track down the source of the noise, eventually passing by the room full of chalk boxes which felt much more empty than when I had been in there initially. I walked back out of the room and we continued down the hallway, eventually coming to a stop close to the source of the banging and screaming. At that point, we could finally make out what the researchers were saying.

They seemed to be doing some sort of experiment with Soul energy, and as we stood behind a wall trying to make sense of what was going to happen, We heard something awful. They were emotionally torturing some pour soul, and from what they were saying, it was to extract more energy out of them. I had no clue what was going on, but I was so terrified yet I was so intrigued. I listened closer and I heard a door in the room ahead of us open and some people walking inside with something.

At first I couldn't tell what it was, but when I adjusted my head to get a good look, I nearly gasped and gave away our position. There were two coronians carrying a body bag. They brought it to the centre and placed it in a chalk circle on the ground. They picked up their unwilling victim and placed him over the other circle, and then they started speaking. I couldn't really hear what they were saying above the shouting, but when I could finally figure out what was going, they stopped making noise.

The man who spoke the spell aloud put his hands together and smacked then down onto the ground. As he did, a flash of white light filled the area, blinding all of us. I could only see white, even though my eyes were closed and I could only hear the screams of pain from the man who gave the spell, and after a very long minute, the light subsided. It seemed that Milo and Fray had left some time ago, but I didn't want to give up.

I poked my head a bit more around the corner and as the dust in the air began to settle, it seemed like the man on the ground had switched places with the corpse, but then I realised that the corpse was alive. The researchers and the man who cast the spell all looked pretty surprised and they seemed pretty excited. They jumped and cheered because their mission was a success.

I didn't know what they were doing, but it was definitely wrong on some level. I wasn't sure how or why I felt like that, but I felt like cheating death wouldn't be a good idea. I wanted to get closer to see what the whole room looked like up close, but there were too many officers and researchers present. Being patient I hid under a couple of boxes that were strewn about the ground, and then I waited.

Hearing every word they said and everything they did, I heard them repeat the process another four times. Four times. I didn't want to have to hear those screams again and when the whole place would turn white, It seeped underneath the wooden boxes and still blinded me, even though I was hiding. It felt like I was being chased by the light every time it happened, almost like I couldn't escape, almost like the light was touching every guilty person in the room, including me.

I couldn't shake the thought that I was as guilty as they were for not doing anything and as they went on and on, the thought rocked my brain. It was true and I knew it was but there wasn't much I could do without risking my own safety, but then I remembered just how valued I was. I had never been so highly regarded in most of my life, most of the time my kindness was repaid with abuse, but I knew I needed to step up again.

After the thought crossed my mind, they all walked out of the room for a lunch break. Nothing like eating a sandwich or whatever in the middle of committing crimes against nature. Wasting no time I sprung up from the box and ran into the room. The floor was dusty and seemed to have what felt like a film over it. In the centre of the square room were two ritual circles, having freshly drawn right before I came in.

From what I could understood, the chalk got spent for every use of the circle, and they would have to draw a new one every time. The two circles were heavily detailed and in between the two were a couple of arrows pointing between the two and a series of symbols and unreadable text. Part of me wanted to get a mental picture of what they looked like, but I didn't want to have to remember them, because I would never need to use them.

There wasn't much else in the room and I was about to leave when I remembered the doors they pulled their victims through. I turned around and looked to the two doorways at the back of the room. The door on the right side was open and I could barely see inside the almost pitch black room that the overhead light couldn't penetrate. As I got closer I could make out an arm sticking out of the darkness and laying on the ground.

I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw it and I didn't want to get closer. I had to compose myself and tell myself that I could to it and after some convincing, I walked closer. I was too late for these unfortunate souls sadly. I couldn't tell how much were in there but I knew it seemed to be around ten. Their bodies were all strewn about the floor and on top of each other and as I stared at this mess, I realised the monumentality of just how horrible these people were; if you could even call them people.

I walked over to the other door which was shut, and I hoped for the best. I paused for a moment and then I turned the handle. I slowly swung the door open but when I did, an axe flew right by my face, proceeded my a faint "sorry about that, I thought you were one of those researchers," I looked inside and saw eleven pandorians, all armed to the teeth and ready to murder anyone who came through the door.

Their expressions of anger and eagerness to fight back turned to slight embarrassment. There was an awkward couple of seconds as I stood in the doorway before anyone asked me what I was doing here. I said that I was exploring the base and I came across what they were doing here and that I decided to step in. I had a question for them though, I wanted to know where they got all their weapons from.

One of them showed me that there was a corner in the room where you could access your pocket dimension, and that they had just found it and were ready to kill those researchers who were killing people for science. I followed her and sure enough, there was. I knew we didn't have much time before they got back from lunch, and I wanted to smuggle them out of here before the researchers came back.

I had to think of a plan on the fly, and I managed to settle on a plan. They all said it was stupid and that it would never worked, but I knew it would. After a bit of persuasion, I managed to get all of them to agree to go in with the plan, because it was their only way out. It was too dumb to suspect and I knew that. These coronians were really smart but I knew they wouldn't expect me to pull something like this.

I got a trolley and a couple of larger boxes, and they all went inside the boxes, somehow managing to fit. I pushed the trolley out of the room and through the narrow hallways and into a service elevator which lead to the loading docks. I knew that there weren't going to be any shipments coming in today, or at least none scheduled so the coast should be relatively clear. I didn't expect this plan to work either, but I managed to get to the loading dock without incident.

Pushing the trolley as I went, I got up to the gate before a coronian walked in and shouted at me what I was doing. When I turned around and he saw who I was, he seemed a bit apologetic. I told him that I got tasked with a couple of errands from one of the higher ups to dump some stinky old food into the river, and they didn't question it. I walked out and the coronian followed me, making sure I didn't run off.

I wanted some way to tell the eleven what happened so they wouldn't worry, so I got out a piece of paper and wrote a note. I slipped it through the wooden planks. I said sorry aloud and pushed the crates out onto the river. They floated on the water and started to head downstream. I gave them a salute and walked back inside. The coronian seemed a bit weirded out, but they didn't get paid enough to question it.

I really wanted to float away down the river with them, but I knew I couldn't. They would never let me get out of this place that easily; I was too important to them. I didn't know exactly what they wanted me for, but I didn't want to find out. I wished them the best of luck as they all went along down the river; that hopefully they end up in a better place away from the impending danger of whatever experiment they were about to do on these poor souls.

As I began to think about that, I remembered that the researchers were probably going back down to the basement, and even though their test subjects were now gone I still wanted to distract them so that the search would be staggered, offering them more time to escape. I walked into the mess hall and spotted the team just about to leave, and I walked up to them and put the second part of my plan into action.

I told them that I lost a necklace that I had and I asked them to help me find it. At first they were a bit hesitant, but eventually they caved and I took them around the first three floors to try and look for a necklace which was always in my pocket dimension. I suggested we go down to the basement and they were hesitant to that as well, but they took me down through the basement and when they couldn't find it, they decided to call off our search.

They assured me that it would turn up eventually, but it didn't really matter at that moment. I was quite surprised when they asked me if I wanted to observe an experiment they were in the middle of conducting before their hour lunch break. I agreed to watch, even though I had been watching in horror about two hours earlier. They walked over and showed me into the main room and brought out a corpse from the dark room, and the another one walked towards the other room.

As they opened up the door, they shouted in horror and anger, saying that their test subjects were all gone. They all went into panic mode and the one who would cast the spell asked me if I had any ideas on where they could be. I pointed out that because this place is locked up pretty tightly (or so they thought), so it's very unlikely they would have escaped. I said that it's likely they were hiding out somewhere in this lowest basement.

A call was made to the boss, and before long they assembled a whole giant search party who flooded the narrow halls of the low basement. The boss dismissed me and I walked back up the stairs and all the way through the complex and back up to our dorm area. I was still a bit ticked off about Milo and Sevith having left me alone down there when shit started to get crazy, but they had enough things to deal with which allowed me to look past that.

When I walked in, they seemed pretty surprised, and they apologised for leaving me behind but I said it was fine. I didn't really mind it and I didn't really blame them either. I would have done the same; I already did the first time I went down there. They asked me if I knew what was going on here, and I said I didn't, but I made them know I was lying. I knew that it was unlikely someone was listening to the wire I knew the room was hooked to, but I didn't want to take any chances.

I knew for a fact they hadn't put up any cameras, so I could still thwart the hidden mic with a simple piece of paper. I wrote down what I had done onto the sheet of paper and they seemed pretty excited about it, and they even hugged me. I guess I hadn't really realised until now that I just saved eleven people from becoming test subjects and likely being killed once the tests were done.

It was a nice moment and I felt pretty good about myself, but I couldn't stop thinking about the ones I saved. I wondered how they were doing floating down the river to wherever they may end up. I assumed they would probably be mad at me for that, but at least they weren't stuck in this place like I was. At least I had company though, they were all on their own wherever they were to end up. . .

## Seamark, Ironhall, IZ144/6/76 (K), Monday October 22, 2058, Lio Shay -Irrational Fear-

I walked through the dirty streets of my hometown of Seamark. The city really isn't what it used to be. A long, long time ago, it used to be a mining town that made a lot of money from natural resources and exporting materials from it's many factories. I'm not sure exactly why, but the city's economy dropped some time in the past twenty years, and that caused the city to become such a dump.

School was easy, but life wasn't too great. Living in a low class family sucks, especially when the government makes life so much harder for you. This whole town is a wreck and I've always wanted to leave, but I feared I never would, or if I did I would never see a stable job. I've never heard of a single successful person from here in Seamark, and I'm sure if there was, then they'd want to hide that about themself.

I was walking home from school to my house on the other side of the town, when I heard something. It sounded like gunshots, something I'd grown accustomed to hearing. I readied my own gun as I walked down the streets, but nothing came of it. As I walked through the city, I heard the same sound again, but louder. At this point I was sure that it wasn't gunshots, but it was something else.

I still didn't know exactly what it was still, but I wanted to investigate. I got closer to the source of the sound, and it was a random alleyway in the city. There wasn't anyone here, and normally there wasn't. The streets are commonly empty, even during the times where people would be going to or from school or work. There tend to be a lot of cars, but not many people walking through the streets.

I walked to the end of the alleyway, right up to the wall at the end of the street. I was pretty confused as to what was going on, but the sound got really loud. The popping became much more rapid and turned into cracks. Before I could realise what was going on and exit the alley, the whole street collapsed and I fell deep into the ground. It was a long way down, and I hit the ground hard.

I looked up to the sky, being surprised I didn't die from the impact when I saw the nearby buildings starting to fall into the hole. I got up and ran through the underground area, trying to get away from the oncoming destruction. It was hard to see in the dark of the cave, but I got to a flat area of ground and watched as the hole in the ceiling began to grow in size as the two nearby buildings began to fall.

They slammed into each other in the air and the pile of rubble fell into the middle of the hole in the ground where I fell into earlier. The cracks in the ceiling began to grow rapidly, and the entire street above me began to fall. Thinking quick, I pulled out my flashlight from my pocket dimension and ran to a safe area, using the flashlight to illuminate the dark cave that I found myself in.

I looked at the giant pile of rubble in the middle of the cave and it slowly sunk in that I wasn't going to get out, and I needed to find another way. Although I could possibly try to find a rope and pull myself up and out, but it was pretty clear there wasn't any rope here, and I didn't trust anyone to come and call the police, because people never do as they don't normally do anything unless it directly effects them.

I looked through the cave with my flashlight out, and it appeared to me much larger than I thought. I kept going in one direction for a while, but I didn't run into a wall. I kept roaming the giant cave for hours and hours, trying to find something, and after about six hours of searching, I found something. There was a hatch in the ground, and when I opened it, I saw that there was a giant ladder under it.

I slowly climbed down the ladder and ended up in another giant cave area, however this area was much, much weirder. There were buildings here, and it appeared to be a copy of the entire city of Seamark. The only light in the area came from street lamps and artificial lights coming out of some of the buildings, however when I went inside the buildings, they were completely empty and the lights inside had no clear source.

I thought I was dreaming at first, but I pinched myself and I was sure this was real. The city was absolutely silent as I walked through, and it gave off a pretty bad vibe. After a while of exploring, I checked my watch and realised it was getting pretty late, so I found a house to sleep in for the night. I walked in and pulled out a sleeping bag from my pocket dimension and laid it out in the middle of the building.

It didn't take too long for me to fall asleep, and when I woke up I thought I was still dreaming, but after a while I realised I wasn't. I didn't have much food or water in my pocket dimension, so I would have to ration it, not being sure how long I'd be stuck in here. I decided to explore the house I was in, but no matter how hard I looked, there wasn't any source of light or even any furniture in the building.

The walls were completely blank, only covered in old wallpaper lit in a golden glow from the nonexistent light. The floors were covered in carpeting, and there were stairs that led to the basement and upper floors of the building. The stairs were old and made of hardwood and looked out of place against the wallpaper of the weird house. I went back to the front of the house, but the exit wasn't where it was before.

Where the front door once stood, the wall just continued on as if it was never there. I looked around the house and I found it on the right side of the wall on the second level of the house. When I stepped outside the building, I came out the front door of the house on the first floor at street level. I walked back inside, and when I turned around the door wasn't there, but in the same place on the second floor as it was before.

I walked through the empty streets aimlessly, just looking for some way to get out. I finally got the foot of the tallest building in town, being the Seamark Grand Hotel, which is a high rise apartment and hotel, with one side of the building being the hotel and the other half being the more permanent apartment. I walked into the main lobby and to the elevator, and took it all the way to the top floor.

When I got to the top, I found a staircase that lead to the observation deck on the roof. I stepped out onto the roof, and from where I was standing, I could reach out and touch the ceiling of the cave. I walked out to the edge and stood here, looking over the city. I felt a slight breeze blow through the secluded and empty streets of this duplicate town. I had a weird feeling that someone would push me off the edge, so I walked back.

As I walked down the staircase and out the door to what I thought would be the top floor, I ended up back at street level. I had no clue exactly what this place was, or how and why it had these strange properties, but above everything I just wanted to be able to find a way out of this place. The town was empty, and after a bit of searching, I managed to find a grocery store which actually had food in it.

I took as much food as I could reasonably carry in my pocket dimension, and I left. As I walked out, I noticed a sign on the door which read "*Take as much as you want*" With a small smiling face drawn beside it on the piece of paper. I walked out the front door and ended up on a different street than before, which made things much more confusing then before. I thought the doors all lead to the same place, but now it was getting more confusing.

. . .

I was wondering around the city for almost a week, completely alone and on my own. I slept in various different houses, sometimes being really hard to exit due to the way the doors worked. The city was really weird to explore because whenever I'd enter a building, there was a chance it would put me somewhere else in the city. Even though it was an exact copy of Seamark, but it was still hard to explore.

It was nice to be in a place that wasn't absolutely dangerous like the city above me, but it definitely felt dangerous. Although the streets were empty and the whole place was quiet, it didn't feel safe. At least in Seamark when you're going to get robbed you can at least see the people coming towards you to take your money. I've been robbed before but I never lost anything really valuable.

As I wondered around the city, having been to both ends of the main road that runs through the town, I couldn't really think of any other way through the city, but I began to really think about it. I thought about ways one would typically leave a city, and I randomly thought of a train station, so I had a thought to find the train station. I didn't want to chance going through doors to take me somewhere else, so I had to walk through the city.

The train station was on the other side of town from where I was, so it would be a long journey. As I walked through the town, I would catch small glimpses of complete shadows, even in the corners of direct light. I knew it wasn't real though, and it was likely hallucinations caused by being completely on my own for six days in a city completely devoid of all life except for my own.

When I finally got to the train station a couple of hours later, I was excited to see that I could actually get out of the city this way. I went down into the subway tunnels, and when I stepped into the train, it started to move down the track and head southbound. I went to the front of the train, and there was no pilot inside the front room of the train. I couldn't go inside, but I looked through the window and it was on a set path.

The map on the computer said it was set to stop somewhere in Rosedell, so I knew I was going to be in for a very, very long ride. I knew there were rumours of there being underground roads that connected both Stonemill and Rosedell to Ironhall, as well as all of the other main islands, but it was never something I believed. The tunnel looked pretty modern, so it was definitely somewhat recent, but I didn't know how recent.

The train ride was nice, because it wasn't complete silence for once. The sound of the subway cart going over the tracks was very loud, but it was also somewhat enchanting to hear when it was the only sound I heard in the past six days. I walked around the train and stuck around at the front end of the train. After a while, I decided to go to the back of the train car, and I looked through the back window of the train car.

Very, very far in the distance, I thought I could make out something in the distance. It looked like it was getting closer, and it seemed to be going pretty fast. At first I couldn't tell what it was, but as it began to get closer, I could make it out to be a small train car that looked similar to a motorcycle, and there appeared to be someone riding it, but I wasn't exactly sure. It was going really fast, and at first I was excited, but then that expression turned into horror.

The whole train car shook, and I fell to the ground. As I laid on the ground a horrible and loud screech of metal being grinded rung out. The entire top half of the train car was cut off by something in a bright flash of light. It smacked into the roof and slammed into the sides of the tunnel, landing on the ground and appearing to travel backwards in the opposite direction because of how fast the train was going.

I looked up, and saw a woman standing on the weird motorcycle like thing they were riding at the train on. They were holding a shining blue blade in their left hand, and when she turned to look at me, her eyes lit up with a fiery red glow, being a very clear indication of corruption. I knew I was fucked because I had absolutely no weapons, so I really needed to improvise with something, and fast.

I grabbed one of the snapped jagged pieces of metal that laid on the ground, and held it like it was a spear. She looked humoured, and jumped from her car to the broken train I was in. I tried to block her blade with the metal pole, but she cut it in half without any problems. The cut was clean, and I tried using the two pieces of broken pole as weapons, but I knew I wouldn't be able to hold her off for too long.

I blocked her swings from the blunt part of her blade so they weren't cut, but she caught on pretty quickly to what was going on. She swung at me hard, and part of her blade cut my chest. I laid there in pain, and she kicked me across the train car. I nearly fell off and onto the tracks, but I held onto part of a chair and pulled myself back onto the train car. She swung her blade towards me, and although it barely missed, it destroyed the chairs next to where I was.

As she pulled her blade off the floor of the train, I smacked her with the pole as hard as I could, but she barely flinched. I went for another shot, but she sliced the piece of metal in two, and sending the two clean-cut pieces of pole tumbling off the train and spilling out onto the track. I knew I was pretty fucked at this point, and in a feat of desperation, I threw the sharp pole and grabbed another.

As it sailed through the air, I ran through the train, trying to keep my distance. It struck her in the chest and she pulled out without a problem. She threw it back at my, and I ducked at just the right time. It sailed through the air like a bullet, chopping off part of my hair. I looked back and it slammed right into her car, getting lodged into the back of the car and sticking out of it like a matchstick in a boulder.

I tried to make myself more focused by making random analogies for things around me, and it helped me to identify what could be useful. She looked pretty mad, and she ran through the train car towards me. I ran through the car, and swept by her, sliding on the ground and ending up behind her. I threw the piece of metal, but she cut it into pieces with her blade as she turned around.

I was running out of pieces of metal to hurl, as well as options to escape, so I tried something that was probably a bad idea. I grabbed more metal to try and stall for time while I thought out my idea. I had done some magic in the past, but I've only been able to do it with a chalk circle. I knew a lot about wormholes, and I knew the incantation to create a wormhole, but I didn't have time to draw a chalk circle.

I managed to dodge her a couple of times, but I kept losing my weapons as I did. I didn't have any option left, and I ran to the end of the train, and said the incantation aloud, keeping in mind the formation I wanted and then I gave a location. She turned around and ran at me, and in that moment time seemed to slow down. Everything seemed to go slower for a moment, and I did what I had to do.

I drew a circle with my hands twice into the air, and as she ran towards me, the wormhole opened up. She ran right through, and then I closed it. I sent her straight to Fort Yina, the first place I could think of that was far enough away from where I was and where I was going. I couldn't believe I had done it. I was amazed. I thought magic without a circle would take ages to master, but I had just done it.

I sat there in silence for most of the trip, slowly wearing off the adrenaline that was coursing through my veins. After I was able to collect myself, I tried doing it with a circle. I drew one with a piece of chalk from my pocket dimension, and tried it again. I set my destination to be wherever the train was set to stop, staring at the map in the train car as I did. I wasn't sure if it would work, but I tried it anyways.

When I stepped through, I ended up at the stop. There was a sign on the platform that read ROSEDELL STOP WEST TWO. There were other branching off paths that stemmed out from the stop, but I walked up the stairs to the upper level. There was a main lobby which had a spiral staircase in the centre of the room. The room felt very strange and it gave off a similar vibe to the copy of Seamark.

I slowly walked up the staircase, as I did every footstep on the hard metal floor echoing in the giant lobby of the train station below. The ceiling was super high and went all the way to the top of the staircase. When I finally got to the top of the super long spiral staircase, there was a landing and a small set of stairs leading to a set of metal double doors that stood in the small room.

I walked up the metal stairs and up to the doors, pushing them open and watching the harsh light of early morning filled the small room. I stepped out as my eyes adjusted to the harsh morning light, I began to see where I was. I didn't know exactly where I was, but I was in the middle of a thick forest. The wood of the trees was almost completely black, and the thick canopy of the woods around the clearing hung low over the forest floor.

I stepped outside the room and walked into the clearing, staring up into the sky. As I stared up, two birds flew over. I finally felt at peace, but then I realised I was completely lost. I didn't know anything about Rosedell, and I certainly didn't have any maps of Rosedell so I had to just try and find my way through the forest and back to civilisation. I knew it would be hard, but I was determined to escape.

I walked through the thick forest, trying to head south to where I knew there was an airport and I could catch a flight back to Hollow Ironhall, and then it's just a cab north to get back to Seamark. There wasn't that much snow on the ground, but where there were gaps in the canopy, there were piles of snow. The canopy must have been so thick that it blocked out a lot of the snow that fell.

The forest was pretty quiet, although I could hear birds singing in the distance and the cold breeze that blew through the trees. The forest seemed to have a mystical quality to it. As I walked through the twisting tree, I felt alone again. The stillness of the forest reminded me of the copy of Seamark and how weird that place was. I couldn't stop thinking about it as I walked south through the snowy forest.

After a while of walking through the woods, I thought I heard singing in the distance. At first, it sounded like one voice but then it grew into a five-part harmony that filled the woods. The sound reverberated through the trees, and it grew as I got closer to the source of the sound. I wandered through the snowy woods trying to find the source of the sound, and as I walked through the trees, I realised I was tearing up.

I didn't recognise the song they were singing, but they sounded great singing it. I stopped for a minute as I went south towards the source of the sound just to listen. It was the only sound this deep in the woods. The sound of the voices was louder than the wind, and it seemed to make everything completely silent. I couldn't even hear my own footsteps over the voices, although the sound wasn't loud enough to completely cover them.

I finally got close to the source of the sound, and I walked through the woods and came upon something really weird. It was a giant area of the forest where there weren't trees, but there was still canopy. The floor was concrete or stone and had a star drawn in the middle. On the five points of the star, there were five pandorians chained down to smaller circles that branched off of the main one.

There wasn't snow on the ground here, and it seemed like a larger circular area around the main circle didn't have snow. The barrier between seemed invisible, and I wasn't even sure if there was an actual barrier, but the snow stopped at the edge of the larger circle, suggesting there was. I stared at them as the sung, but they didn't seem to notice me. One was looking right at me, but they didn't seem to see me.

I didn't know what to do. I just stood there and watched them sing. It was really nice to hear, and it was pretty clear that they had been practising for a while. I wondered what it would be like to be stuck here in the middle of a random forest in Rosedell. I was thinking about how awful it would be to be in solitude like that and my mind kept going back to the Seamark Copy. It was all I could think about.

After they stopped singing, they talked for a bit. I wanted to try and help them, having known what it was like to be stuck in solitude. I walked towards the circle, and when I passed the barrier, they all looked at me, finally being able to see me. When I was inside the area, the rest of the forest was similar, but there wasn't snow. The air was warm, and even being in the area for a couple of seconds I began to feel the heat.

One of them asked what I was doing here, and I said I heard them singing in the middle of the woods and I came to see what was going on. Another one explained how they were here as part of a ritual, although that's really all they knew about why they were there. They asked why I was wearing a jacket and heavy clothes, and I explained how I was in a snowy forest before I walked into the ring.

That sent them into a commotion, two of them telling the others that they knew it. I was confused as to what was going on, and then one of them explained it to me. Apparently this place was strange, and that it was accessible between realities. Even though it's located in Reality M, it can be accessed through other realities. They explained how they didn't know for sure before, but I had gone ahead and proven it.

I took off my jacket and sat down on the warm stone floor as they talked to me. I explained everything that happened to me over the past week, and they seemed pretty interested in it. When I mentioned how I was able to summon wormholes, they suggested that I could try to get them out of here, and I agreed. I drew out the circle and got out the small book of incantations I had, and I started the ritual.

When I was about to summon a wormhole, they all fell silent. I looked into the forest and saw someone approaching. Their eyes burned red and they stared at me as they drew their sword. They sprinted at me, and thinking quick I finished the ritual and created the wormhole in front of me, and I jumped through it and closed it as the man ran at me. I sent myself to Kosoda Rosedell back in Reality K using the wormhole.

I fell right into the middle of a sidewalk, my heart still pounding. When I looked around, the people seemed pretty shocked, so I guess they hadn't seen people fall out of wormholes that often before. I got up and brushed myself on, and walked down to the airport. When I got there, I bought a ticket and waited for a flight that would take me back to Ironhall. As I waited for the flight, I couldn't stop thinking about those five in the forest. I wanted to save them. I felt like it was my duty.

## Kosoda, Rosedell, IZ144/6/76 (K), Kevaday October 29, 2058, Charlie Coreechka -Worms-

After the total bust of a weekend that was the last one, we weren't able to look for any clues for quite a while. Finally, the snow melted enough for travel through the woods to be easy, and Oliver suggested we look for clues in Rosedell. Nobody else was going there, so I decided to go there because we really didn't have anything better to do. We took a cab all the way down to the south port of Stonemill and got a quick boat trip to Rosedell.

I walked through the rural streets of Rosedell, down into the countryside. Oliver and I explored the area around rural Rosedell. We walked through the snowy landscape, and after a while of exploring, we found a path that lead down to an old city. The place was awfully kept, and dead vines and weeds grew over almost every surface that was once covered in stone, not to mention the jungle of short plants that surrounded the old town.

Oliver led the way from the rural streets of Rosedell all the way down to this destroyed city in the middle of nowhere. I asked him how he knew where to look, and he said he didn't know why, but he saw the path in a dream some time ago. He seemed pretty knowledgeable about the area too, being able to point out where we were going relative to other landmarks in the area.

Apparently this town was abandoned a really long time ago, specifically on a random night in late August in the year 1859, and it's been abandoned ever since. He went into a lot of detail of it as we walked through the broken streets. Population records showed that the city began to get smaller over a period of a couple of years, and then the rest vanished in a single week, and none of them were ever seen again.

I didn't know how he had random knowledge of these random things, and when I asked how he mentioned how he would read books about strange history and weird happenings throughout the years in his free time, as well as at school. I didn't know why, but I had a feeling he had gotten his bizarre knowledge from somewhere else, because there's no way one could get knowledge this specific from random books in a library.

We walked deeper, and he mentioned something about people going missing, and I told him that I remembered hearing about that. It was mostly in Rosedell, but there were constant disappearances of people in recent years. Coming from a police family, I would hear firsthand about all of these cases popping up, and I was always pretty concerned with what was going on. I wasn't sure what was happening, but I didn't like where the trends were going.

Deeper and deeper into the city we went, going through every building trying to look for anything that could help with finding the maps. We got to one house, and in a drawer we found one of the papers that was in the map stand. The paper was damaged by water, and we already had a copy that was in good condition, so it was pretty useless. I thought that we should just leave the house, but Oliver thought differently.

Even though we still had that piece, he said it might reveal something else. He suggested we dig deeper, and at first I was a bit confused. We had already gone through everything in the building, but he mentioned how he was talking about the paper. We spread it out on an old table, and held it under light. There were some markings on it, although they were hard to make out.

I pulled out a blacklight, thinking it could be invisible ink, and although I was wrong, it made the letters visible enough to transcribe. Oliver pulled out a piece of paper and I handed him a pen, and he began to write the letters. Although some letters were hard to make out and some of the letters we put down weren't exact, we were able to tell what it was saying, even if it did have a couple of spelling mistakes.

"*The third stand without a map in it, and I'm starting to lose hope. I'm starting to think they took all of them, but what I did find was a fake map, one that led to crystal stands instead of where the crystals are located, or at least I think it's fake. It could very well be a variation of the map that only displayed other map stands and not the crystals, but whatever it is, it's useless. I've hidden it under the floorboards so if they really are coming to use us all in some kind of ritual like all of the people are saying, then they won't find it, and even when I do finally find those maps, I'll take those secrets to the grave. If you're reading this, then I've fled long ago and left this place behind because I can't chance it. I hold secrets beyond the comprehension of someone reading this, and if they find me they're probably going to break my mind in two to force me from leaking their secrets, but they're probably going to keep me alive because I'm too valuable to them. I don't know what I'll do, and if you're reading this, than have fun finding me."*

The note was a lot more straightforward than I thought, and it was pretty useful, containing a lot of valuable information about the maps, and possibly what happened to this town that seemingly nobody knew about, and nobody talked about. We were both pretty excited to hear all this, and we started to look through the house. I was going to start tearing up the floor, but as Oliver ran through the hall, he tripped.

The rotten and old floorboards broke beneath his weight, and although it was hilarious, it was also pretty exciting. He got up, and saw the map laying in the ground below him. He picked it up and laid it out on the table. I couldn't believe it, but we've found a map! Although it was 'fake' according to the note and it didn't display the locations of the crystals themselves, we still had a map to all of the map stands located in Rosedell.

Although it would have been much more useful to have been a map of Stonemill, we still had something, and Rosedell was much bigger anyways. Although we had a lot of map stands listed on the map, at least twenty, the locations weren't exact due to the scale of the map. We took a closer look at the map, and there appeared to be three near the town we were looking in, knowing at least one would be empty.

I was going to call the others about our find, but there wasn't service here. I hadn't realised before just how far we were from civilisation and how alone we were, looking through a city that was miles and miles away from the nearest major city, that being Kosoda which was where Oliver and I started our search earlier in the day, heading up north on the road, past the great Dark Forest and to the north end of Rosedell.

We went through the rest of the strange city, seeing if we could find any other buildings in town that contained more secrets of the maps. Although there wasn't much else in the city, when we got to the very end of the city limits, walking through the very wide street far past where the other buildings ended and only trees stood. The roadway was pretty long past the last buildings, and it led to a giant ravine.

The ravine was almost shaped like a heart, and it was really far across. We stood and looked out to the very end of the valley, but all that stood on the other side were trees. The forest was thick and covered in snow that covered the bottom of the giant ravine. We both stood on the edge of the valley and looked on into the distance. Past the ravine was the north part of the Great Dark Forest.

The Great Dark Forest is a very, very massive forest, which covers a giant area of the north end of Rosedell Island, being between the coast and Kosoda, the capitol city of Rosedell, as well as being the oldest and largest city in Rosedell. It was given its name for its large apartment-like houses which were called Kosodas, named after their designer, Herital J. Kosoda, an architect who designed many other famous buildings, including Jackson Hospital in Downtown Brandon.

Although it was the oldest city on the island, it wasn't always named Kosoda. For some reason, its original name is really hard to find. I asked Oliver about it, and he said he didn't know what it was either. I thought he would know what it was, but in all of his knowledge of random and obscure elements of history, but he didn't know the original name of the capitol or Rosedell, and nobody else I knew did either.

It was a weird piece of history that became lost somehow, similar to many other things. There are many names of great heroes and important places on planets far away whos names were forgotten over the years, even though they had a great impact on society and history. and a lot of these were forgotten only recently, for example a couple of great heroes of the Sides and Pandora Wars, and even some cultural icons such as Kansince are starting to be forgotten.

It's a strange world we live in, and I'm not sure how society is ready to just move on from the greatest things that happened in the past without giving it much thought. That is what I think the reason for Kosoda's old name being forgotten is, that being that society just wants to move on from the old norms of society and bring in a modern society, similar to what is established on Earth, but I don't really see a reason for that.

Sometimes when the world becomes too confusing, you just want to come to a secluded area such as this and just stare into the distance. Oliver and I just stood there and talked to each other about society and how strange it is. It was nice to gaze out into the endless sky and down into the valley. We stared at the clouds out in the air and over the sky that rested guarding the skies above the trees across the ravine.

As we looked out, I heard something behind us. We both turned around, and there was a man standing there. There was a red glow in his eye, and we both knew he was corrupted, probably coming here for the same reason we did. I told Oliver to hide, because I didn't want him to get hurt, thinking I could take him on my own. He wasn't sure, but he decided to run to the trees.

The man laughed at me, but I was determined. His black hair swayed with the cold breeze that ran through the valley. He drew his sword, and he started running at me. Before he could even take a single step, I pulled out an assault rifle and shot at him. Using his corrupt arms, he created a shield that blocked the bullets. I dumped an entire magazine into it, but it managed to block all of them.

I reloaded it and ran around it, trying to catch him off guard, but he spotted me and closed the gap. I shot at him again, but he blocked them again. It was going to be hard to penetrate his shield, but I thought I could try something bigger. I dumped the rest of the magazine, shooting in the same spot, and some of the bullets went through, although they missed him when they did.

I knew I could get through his shield now, but it was clear it wouldn't be easy. I pulled out a battle rifle and it went right through the broken shield, but he put up another layer before the bullets could go all the way through. I dumped two magazines into it, and he laughed while he kept pulling up more barriers. I realised that this wouldn't be a gunfight, so I put away my gun, and reached for something else.

I pulled out a machete, something I've trained with almost as long as I had trained with my guns. "Finally a fair fight," He said. I laughed and ran at him, blocking his swings as he attempted to hit me. Although his sword was bigger than my machete, The machete was thicker and much more broad, so I was able to effectively block with it. He swung pretty fast at me, but not as hard.

I took that into account and used it to my advantage. I started slashing with more momentum behind my swings, it made his lighter blade bounce right off. He managed to counter it and he managed to hit me in the chest, causing me to stumble backwards and think of another strategy. He clearly had a lot of training with his blade and he could easily kill me if he wanted to, but it felt like he was just playing along.

Or maybe he wasn't as well trained as I thought, as I was able to get some pretty easy hits off on him, and I managed to cut him a couple of times, but whenever I did, his corrupt shield covered the wounds in his arms, pulling them together and giving him more defence. It was pretty clear that I should go for smaller cuts rather than larger slashes, as that would give him more armour.

I dived forwards and managed to slash his chest as he did to me, and he fell back pretty far. We both stopped and stared at each other. His shield was repairing every would I inflicted on him which was pretty worrying. I was starting to think this was a fight I couldn't win, but then I had a thought. There had to be some limit to his shield. If I could easily cut through it with two bullets of 7.62x51, then it must have other limitations.

I cut him twice pretty quickly, and turned back, keeping my distance as I caught my breath. His shield took a while to cover his skin, and I noticed he was still bleeding underneath it, seeing blood pooling against the sides of it. I went in, and it was back to what it was like before, both of us locked in stalemate and swinging at each other, trying to get a hit on the opponent.

He hit me again, and that caused me to change my strategy. I had to try and block and hit him at the same time somehow, or just go on the defensive. It was clear that he didn't have much of a strategy, possibly being used to ending fights much earlier than this one had gone on for, while I carefully planned each strike, bouncing his blade off of mine after every hit.

I realised this wouldn't be going anywhere if I didn't end it, and I had a pretty good idea on how. He wasn't thinking when I was close to him and blocking every shot, only hitting me by pure chance with every random swing. I had to look for an opening though, and I needed to catch my breath again. I pulled away and pulled out a water bottle. I chugged half the bottle pretty quickly, and he looked confused.

"Water isn't going to help you win a fight, you know that?"

"That's what you think,"

"Whatever, you don't need to be hydrated,"

When he said that, I knew he didn't have any real fighting experience. Everyone who's been in a long fight like this one knows that you get exhausted pretty quickly, and if you can refresh yourself and cool down, then you can give yourself more space to think, which can net you a pretty big advantage, but the fact that he denied this showed that I was a tough foe for him.

I jumped forwards and close to him, catching him off guard but getting hit in the process. I held off his attacks, and while he was busy slamming his sword against my machete, much harder and more desperately than before, I drew a Desert Eagle, a very powerful pistol from my pocket dimension and held it by my side, keeping it hidden from him. I saw the opportunity, and I lifted my arm and fired off two shots into his chest.

They were hollow point rounds so they stuck inside his chest, preventing his shield from repairing the wounds. He screamed in pain, realising his shield couldn't remove the bullets from his body. He jumped back up off of the ground where he laid, but I shot him again. I pointed the gun at him, and asked him what he wanted and why he attacked us. All he did was laugh and say that he wanted to steal the map from us.

He laughed like a maniac, and he said that he had already done so. I was shocked, and I rooted through my pocket dimension to make sure I still had it on me. As I did, one of his giant arms sprouted from behind him and wrapped around me. It held me tightly in the air, and he walked up to me with his sword drawn. I couldn't move my arms, and as he approached closer, I thought I was going to die.

It was a pretty foolish mistake, and I felt pretty stupid for having fell for his trap. I thought it would be a pretty pitiful way to go, but then I heard a gunshot from the treeline. The bullet pierced his knee, forcing him to kneel on the ground, dropping his sword and causing the hand to let go of me. Another two pierced his chest, and one more hit him in the neck. He looked up, and as another bullet flew through the air, he teleported away.

From the treeline, Oliver came running over. "You're hurt," he said. He bandaged my wounds, and helped me off the ground. I thanked him for saving me, and he said not to mention it. I made sure we had the map for sure this time, and it was still in my pocket dimension where I had put it before. We got up and walked out of the city, and we caught a cab to the nearest hospital in Kosoda.

After they stitched me up, they sent me on my way, and we took a plane back to Downtown Brandon, and before long we were back home. It was almost past sundown as we walked down the main road to Ampor Manor, and as we walked down the road together, snow started to fall from the sky. It was snow at first, but before long it turned into a hailstorm, and we ran up the road to get to the manor.

After we told everyone about our discovery, I got a call from my dad. We were all pretty excited about this discovery, and the call I got was even better. He told me that there was a job position open on the police force, and seeing a good job opportunity as well as an opportunity to seek more answers, I took it without a doubt. I told everyone about the job opportunity, and we were all pretty excited about it. It was a pretty exciting evening, but I still couldn't stop thinking about the man in the town. None of us talked about it, because there wasn't much to say, other than that we were confused.

I didn't really have anything to say on it, because it was out of the blue and it just kinda happened. After dinner we all looked at the map together, and we realised there were much more stands listed than Oliver and I had thought before. Taking a closer look, we counted 44 stands listed on the map, which seemed like a more reasonable number than the twenty we had seen before at a quick glance.

- Two Weeks Later -

I was two weeks into my job at the police force, and it was going pretty well. Because I was attending school, the officers instructed me to look for anything that could be clues to any of the recent disappearances. I knew there was one a week and a half back, but I didn't get the details yet. It was pretty easy to see things that could be suspicious, but when you take a closer look everything changes.

Sometimes people can seem like jerks for no reason, but once you take a closer look at them, you can start to see why they could be acting that way. My higher-ups gave me special passes so I could access different parts of the school, and it aided in an investigation of my own I was doing. I wanted to take a closer look at what was happening at this school, because I had a feeling it ran deeper than what I thought.

I knew there was *something* weird going on, but I could never tell what it was. Since the day I first stepped through the front doors of the building two years ago, I always got a slight strange feeling that I could never place. I knew it was my own intuition, but I never knew what my brain was trying to warn me of, and doing this investigation of my own would be able to solve that and give me some closure for once.

I did my digging during lunch, because I knew I would look pretty suspicious going around the place after hours. I knew that I could be under surveillance, but I always kept in mind where the cameras were, and I tried to seem as normal as possible, although that's quite hard when you're actively digging for secrets. The first places I looked were the random abandoned rooms that the school has so many of.

I don't know why there were so many of these rooms, and I doubted it was because they didn't have enough staff like they always said. I had a suspicion that it was something else, but I didn't have any clue as to what that hidden purpose could possibly be. I looked through the abandoned rooms, and they appeared to be just that; classrooms that had been abandoned for whatever reason. Although I doubted it was a staff problem, I started to think i was wrong.

I had to dig deeper, and indeed I tried. I even took out a black light and shone it over the floors of the various classrooms. When I walked into the hallways, things seemed normal. It was a pretty normal day, people talking about the latest news, that being how Josh went missing a week and a half ago. Oliver had a feeling it had something to do with this school, and so did a lot of other people, but I didn't think so.

I didn't know too much about him because I had barely met him before he vanished into thin air, but he didn't seem like the type of person who the school would be interested in. I kept walking through the empty rooms, and eventually in one of the drawers in an old desk I found a floor plan of the school. Jackpot! The classrooms that were abandoned had Xs drawn on them in red marker, even the one I was in at that moment.

The map was dated 2049, so it was clear that either this was being planned for some time, or these classes have been unused for some time. Whatever it was, I wasn't sure but what I was sure was that the floor plan would be extremely useful for my investigation. Upon closer inspection of the map, there were random rooms that weren't accessible from the hallways, most of which having the red Xs drawn over them.

Said rooms could be accessed through interconnecting doors, although those would probably be locked. I walked down the hall, following the map to another unused classroom, although this one had a direct connection to one of these weird sealed off rooms. There were a lot of sealed off rooms, and some were small while others were pretty big. A couple of them seemed to not have a door, although it's possible the door was hidden in the wall or sealed off, like a couple of the other ones.

I had to do quite a bit of work to move a heap of chairs and desks away from the door, and when I did the door stood in front of me. It was clearly old, and it had a torn poster still hanging by some ancient tape to the front of the stained door. When I tried the door, it was locked. I slammed into it hard enough and it opened slightly, being an old door with rusty components. I slammed into it a couple more time and it opened with a long and loud squeak.

When I looked inside, there were no lights in the room, and the only light was the orange tinted sunlight that poured in from the stained windows, similar to the other abandoned classrooms. There appeared to be strange machinery strewn about the room, as well as a couple of broken desks and other junk. The floor was grimy and the old wooden floor creaked with every step deeper into the strange room.

At the opposite end of the room, there were broken instruments strewn about the floor, being in the same state of neglect as everything else in the room, except for one thing. At the back right corner of the room, the furthest point from the door there was a massive grand piano that sat on a raised part of the floor, seemingly being the only thing in the room that wasn't broken.

Upon closer inspection, the piano was pristine, there not being a single bit of dust or grime on it, almost as if it was cleaned right before I entered the room. The whole room gave off a really weird vibe, so I decided to leave. I closed the door behind me and walked back out into the hallway. As soon as I left the first room and got back to the hallway, the bell rang and I went back to class.

As I did my work, I couldn't stop thinking about that weird room, and without really thinking, I drew it on my paper. I've always found myself drawing whatever was on my mind on random papers whenever I was doing something, and it became a pretty bad habit of mine. This was no different, and I didn't pay much attention to it as I did, because it was a pretty normal occurrence.

After class was over and we were ready to pack up and leave, I stared down at the paper as I was putting all of my stuff into my backpack. It was a pretty good drawing of the room, better than most of my random drawings that I did on autopilot, but this was different. At the very back of the room, where the piano was, there was someone sitting down and playing the piano. It wasn't me sitting there and I had no clue who I had even drawn. I hadn't remember drawing them, but their eyes seemed to stare up at me from their spot on the page.

I thought about it as I walked to the car and drove with a couple of the others back to Ampor Manor. Ampor was driving as she usually did, and I thought about bringing it up, but I felt like it would be too hard to explain. I didn't even fully understand what I had even drawn, or what even happened. I didn't know the purpose of that room, and for the first time in a while, I couldn't wrap my brain around anything.

When I got back to the manor I wanted to bring it up there, but I couldn't. Everyone at the mansion was so stressed because of the disappearance of Josh not too long ago. Everyone was on edge and pointing fingers, desperately searching for an explanation and hoping they weren't next. Almost everyone else who went to school thought it could have been Juliette, and they even managed to convince some of the others.

Most of the map search party was on my side, believing that it wasn't, and I had a feeling I was right. I tried to explain that Juliette wouldn't go after someone like Josh, who generally kept to themselves and didn't have an obvious connection to the maps or anything she'd want to kill or capture him over, but no matter how much I tried to explain this to them, they didn't want to listen.

I was pretty angry to see that his disappearance caused such a split between us, and it certainly didn't help that he went missing just before November, which is when Stonemill Winter really starts to hit, and the weather forecast was already calling for another huge storm to come in tomorrow. The rest of us who thought Juliette didn't have any involvement with the disappearance just left them alone and talked together.

We wanted to try and piece this together, but it was difficult. We didn't have any evidence, and we didn't even know where he was, but then I remembered I had a police report to aid me. I brought this up to the others, but not everyone else. They asked to see it, and I pulled it out. Before, none of us had known where Josh was that day, not even Oliver knew where he was that day, he explained how he just left school and went west.

With the help of a police report, we got some new and valuable information. Josh was last seen at Kat Township Public Library, apparently going back there after being questioned by police for something, although I didn't know what that could be. According to a report from the worker at the desk, he came back in and left after a while, and then he vanished without a trace.

I wanted to look around the city of Kat, but it was looking like it wouldn't be possible due to the giant storm that would be rolling in that night. I felt pretty bad for him, but I knew he wouldn't want us to worry about him. Oliver told us that he had a pretty powerful weapon, so if he was attacked I doubt he would lose a fight, and if he could weild a weapon like that, then it's obvious the red kingdom or whoever was after would want to keep him alive.

We had a running theory that was the only likely connection between all of the evidence we had at the moment. Our theory was that Josh was doing some reading at the library, something happened and he got sent to an interrogation room for some reason that I didn't know, but I would try to figure out when I was back at the station. After he was interrogated, he was sent back to the library, and then he went missing.

It was pretty obvious that something happened afterwards, because he left the library and then wasn't ever seen again. There were no security cameras in the building, but the lady at the desk and a couple of others in the building said they saw him leave after a while. Although we didn't know exactly what happened next, the best we could do was theorise the events that followed.

Knowing that he was the soul wielder of a very powerful weapon, it seems like the Red Kingdom or the coronians would be pretty interested, although we were not sure if the Red Kingdom and the corrupted coronians were working together, but it was rather likely. With that in mind, it seemed pretty likely they took him to one of their hideouts, like the one Kevamar was given residence at.

Although we didn't know for certain if this was what happened; there was a pretty decent chance that we were wrong, but to us it was the most possible sequence of events given what we know about the case, as well as what we know about the Red Kingdom and the corrupted coronians. However, there were other possibilities that we couldn't ignore, even though they weren't as likely to be true.

One thing we couldn't ignore was Juliette and her brother Callie, who were both known to be corrupted. Although we didn't believe that they could be the culprits, and my intuition told me that they weren't involved, but we still had to acknowledge them as suspects for the disappearance. Something that I noticed was that there was a possibility that the two were connected to the Red Kingdom, but it was possible they were completely unaffiliated.

Another possible suspect or group of suspects was the Mafia. Although they were only known to operate in Ironhall and Rosedell, myself and a lot of others on the police force believe that they operate in Stonemill, and interestingly enough there is a possible Mafia affiliated station located in Kat. With that information on hand, I had to consider them as a main suspect, mainly because of how little we know about them.

Although we know for sure they're trying to rise up against the government and the police, we don't know much else about them, and in all of their secrecy there is a good chance they would be interested in Josh and his power, just like the Red Kingdom, However, it's pretty unlikely they would kidnap him, especially with the police having such a giant spotlight on trying to stop them from exposing the truths of the police force.

- 3 days Later -

I was back at the police station, and I was the one who went on the radio and delivered the sombre news to all of Stonemill that after twenty days of searching with no leads, that the higher ups on the police force were officially calling off the investigation, but they were still taking in any tips they could get, however I doubted that we would get any new information, seeing as there were no leads for two weeks.

When I was at the station doing some paperwork, I asked if I could look at the case files. They knew I was friends with him for a brief while, so they let me browse all the files they had relating to the investigation. I went to the evidence room, put on a pair of rubber gloves and started to go through the two folders of information they had relating to the case, being a very small amount of evidence.

One of the files was the report given by the lady at the library which caused Josh to be taken into questioning. The reason was that the librarian feared he was digging too deep into state secrets. I had to take a second look, and it was correct. Apparently he went to look through a couple of files concerning energy consumption records for the city of Downtown Brandon, and the librarian only knew that because he asked where they might be.

They interrogated him for a while, asking him why he was researching stuff like that, but he said that he was only looking into it for a school project, and they only believed him after a long interrogation. After combing through all of the information, I asked some of the other officers what they thought happened. A lot of them thought it could be related to the Mafia, and once they explained their reasoning, I explained why I doubted it.

They seemed pretty shocked to hear this new information, and it was clear they didn't have any clue who could have abducted him. After I started to explain what I thought to be the possible cause for his disappearance, they seemed pretty interested and a couple of them believed me, but a lot of the others were still adamant on their thoughts of thinking the Mafia was involved, just wanting to point fingers at their biggest enemy.

After I was finished explaining my thoughts, one officer there brought up a pretty good point. "How do we know he was abducted?" She said. Although a couple of the officers stated that it was the most likely solution, as it's unlikely he got lost or killed, but I found it pretty odd that we were solely focusing on the narrative that Josh was abducted, and I started to believe her that it may not have been what we thought.

Everyone else started to criticise her viewpoint, but I stopped them and brought up a good point. "He's the explorer kind of type, so it's possible he went into the forest and got lost. According to Oliver he's pretty terrible with directions and he doesn't really think things through and tends to look before leaping." They started to believe me, mostly because I knew him decently well, but also because I brought up a really good point.

I didn't want to think that he died, and on the topic of us thinking of alternatives to him being abducted, two other officers stated that maybe he got into a fight, or possibly got jumped, but Kat is a generally calm city, so that was very unlikely, and I didn't want to think that someone who wielded a powerful weapon was killed, because if he did then that means that someone extremely powerful was roaming around.

We spent a pretty long time trying to wrap our heads around other solutions, and the more we talked, the more we started to doubt the original narrative that Josh was abducted, and a lot of us started to believe the thought that he wandered into the forest and was lost, but we couldn't send a search party due to the terrible weather. The snowstorm was still raging on outside, however it wasn't as bad as it was the past couple of days.

After going through everything, I had a random thought that we had to acknowledge. I brought up the possibility of wormholes, and that immediately got everyone's attention. Due to the fact that were no leads, and the fact that people saw him leave the building, but nobody saw him around the city. The fact that nobody saw him around town poked some holes in the idea that he was exploring or that he got abducted, but it only made the wormhole theory much more likely.

It didn't take much to convince even the most sceptical of the group, and we were all so convinced with this theory, that we decided to update our official report. I got back on the radio and gave the island of Stonemill an update. The search was still off, but I told that we had changed our minds on the abduction narrative, and settled on the absolutely most likely scenario, which was that Josh was sucked into a wormhole, and that he was spat out somewhere unknown.

Although it might have seemed desperate and outlandish to some, it was the most likely conclusion given what we know about the case so far. It just didn't seem likely that he got abducted, and while it is more likely he got lost, it's really likely someone would have seen him exiting town. The library is pretty close to the edge of town and the nearby forest, but there is a public park nearby, and we know for sure there were people there.

One of the first groups of people we questioned were the people who were at said park, which had a view of the library, and only one said they saw him, although they said they saw him walk around the back of the building. They were the only person who said that, and I had a sense of mistrust from them, but I still had to acknowledge it, but if it was true, then what was he doing?

I was starting to fear we'd never piece together this puzzle, and I knew that after a month of him being missing, they would declare him officially dead, being standard procedures in an event like this. Stuff like this happens a lot, where people tend to disappear without a trace with no leads, and sometime they turn back up, but sometimes they're lost forever, and I had a sense of dread that Josh would have the same fate.

## Kat Beach, Stonemill, IZ144/6/76 (K), Tuesday October 33, 2058, Josh Yolipa -Blue and Dark-

After school I didn't really have anything to do, so I decided to go to Kat Beach, the same place I found the Karotta Blade, or what was left of it years earlier. I've always enjoyed coming here, even if most of the time it was just to enjoy the silence and listen to the waves. When I got down to the beach, there was nobody there, just as it is almost every time I go there during Stonemill Winter.

I stood in the beach, but when it started to snow, I decided to head back into town and do something else. I took a cab back to Downtown Brandon, not being too far away from Kat Beach. I debated going back home, but I knew my parents had guests over, and I really didn't want to deal with other people at that moment, so I went to the nearby library, so I could have time to myself, as well as an opportunity to do some research of my own.

The library wasn't too far from Kat Beach, being located in Kat, a small town that's right next to Downtown Brandon, but is on the same power grid somehow. It's a weird process and I've always wondered how it worked, but I never got an explanation. Downtown Brandon is decently far east from Kat, so I assumed they were misinformed, but there is definitely a deep connection between the two cities.

I went in and asked for some books like I normally do. I asked where they kept the books about the history of Downtown Brandon and its surrounding forests, and she gave me the section numbers. I got the books and read through them like I normally do, looking at the pages intently to try and uncover anything these pages could be hiding. Most of the books didn't offer anything interesting to me, except for one.

One of the books was about the city and how it deals with energy. I thought it wouldn't be interesting at first, but something stuck out to me. In the middle of the book, it gave a figure on electricity consumption compared to other cities in Stonemill and similarly sized cities in other countries, and Downtown Brandon seemed to have a really large power consumption figure. Seamark in Ironhall did to and so did Kalami in Rosedell and Markstin in Dinnoma.

It seemed for the seven major countries on the planet, one random city that was middle sized had a disproportionately high energy consumption rate, with Downtown Brandon being the largest. Downtown Brandon wasn't even the largest of the cities given, with Kalami, Seamark, Markstin, and Lenoa in Talloway all being larger cities, but all having lower power consumption than what should be expected of them.

To an average person, this figure likely wouldn't be so strange, but my father and two brothers are electricians and were trying to get me to become one. In an electrician family, it's pretty easy to spot differences in power consumption, with that being such an important thing to worry about as an electrician, and when I saw that Downtown Brandon has a higher power consumption than Mallory, the largest city in Stonemill, it's bound to stick out.

I kept going through the book to see if there was anything else, but nothing else seemed too odd to me. I wondered why some random book revealed something that I had never known about before. I had previously read contradictory information about Downtown Brandon's power consumption in more modern and official books, which provided various figures that seemed more accurate.

All of those books were generally pretty new and had official names on them, but the one I had in front of me that went against this was seemingly unofficial and not as new as some of the others. This older book was from 2030, and it mentioned that the power spike was only recent and was observed by the small publication's tiny team of researchers. I wasn't sure if I could trust it over the more modern and official books, but then again the government likes to hide things.

It didn't make sense that this random book had that information that from what I knew, went against multiple other books. I sat there trying to piece together what could be going on, and the only thing that made sense to me was a cover up. For some reason, the people in charge didn't want this information to be known, or at least didn't want it to be common knowledge, but this random book that was buried behind others on the shelf had seemingly evaded this fate.

I decided to try and ask for more books, so I went back up to the front desk. I asked the attendant if they kept any official or unofficial records about the energy consumption of Downtown Brandon. It was a pretty specific request, and she got a weird look on her face, almost as if she knew I had just found out something I shouldn't have. She gave me a section number where they were and sent me on my way.

At the back of the library, there were official records on stuff like import and export, GDP, trade, economy, travel, and things of the sort. There were a lot of records here, and they were all in random folders that were labelled on the front side, being obscured by the other files in front and behind. They clearly were not sorted and just thrown on the shelf. I took one out, and it said it was an 'official governmental record book'.

With a title like that, it would surely not have the information I needed, but I decided to take it out anyways. I looked through the shelves a bit more, and I noticed there were a few without that seal of approval, however none of those pertained to energy consumption or anything similar to it. I took them with me as well just to see if anything else stood out to me in these less official files.

I walked back to the table I was at before and sat down with a couple of file folders in hand. I sat down and opened one of the folders, being about trade between Stonemill and other countries on the planet. It turns out Stonemill exports a lot of wood, although I had never seen any lumber works anywhere on the island. I was also pretty surprised to see that Seamark exported a lot of fish and seafood, even though it's landlocked.

I kept digging through, but then I looked up. There were two police officers talking with the lady at the front desk, and as I looked, she pointed into my direction. Busted. They walked over and asked me to come with them. When we walked outside into the cold streets, they told me to get into the car. I was confused, but I didn't want to get into any more trouble, so I did what they said.

They drove me to the station and took me inside. I sat down in an interrogation room, and they started asking me why I was looking through records about power consumption in the city, and why I had other folders with me. I told them it was for a school project. Although it was a lie, it was close to the truth and it was pretty believable. They asked why I took the other folders, and I said it was the same thing.

The two officers didn't believe me at first, but after about an hour and a half of trying to convince them I was innocent, they let me go. Although it was a pretty big waste of time, it told me that there definitely was something in those documents. I went back to the library and passed the lady at the desk, who had a look of surprise and anger on her face. She was obviously trying to protect information of some kind, but I had to dig deeper.

I went back to the far corner of the library, and started looking through the very last shelf between the back corner of the building. I had never seen anyone come here and the area felt pretty empty and strange. As I walked to the other side of the shelf and towards the wall at the end, I looked through all of the folders that laid there, holding secrets that waited to me uncovered.

I didn't want to get caught again, so I walked out the front door, past the lady at the desk and waving goodbye on my way out. I was certain she saw me leave, but I wouldn't be gone for long. I knew there was a maintenance door near that corner, and to my surprise it was unlocked. I snuck through, evading detection from the lady at the desk and the security cameras, and made my way back to the corner of the library.

When I walked to the end of the line of shelves, something on the wall looked weird. When I got closer, I noticed that part of the wall was a slightly different colour than the rest, and it was a very, very small difference. Some potted plants covered the discoloured spot on the wall, seemingly trying to block it. I reached out to touch it, and surprisingly, my hand went right through the wall.

It was a hologram, similar to what Oliver told me about what he heard from a couple of his friends, both of which saw something similar in a coronian base, one of which was living inside one of them and was only allowed to leave for school, where they got a ride from another coronian from the base. I slowly and quietly walked right through the hologram, and I got to a small landing in front of a staircase.

The room was pretty dark, and the only light came through the hologram behind me. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but they eventually did. The whole place looked dark and blue as I walked down the staircase. When I got to the bottom, a metal door blocked the way. It opened with a bit of a struggle, and behind it was what appeared to be a records room.

The room was quite small compared to the larger library up ahead, but it had rows and rows of documents that required high levels of clearance to view, most of which being classified documents filled with state secrets and mysteries. I was tempted to go through them, but I didn't. I walked through the room, scanning every row of classified and secret information that was just sitting here.

I couldn't help myself, and I picked up one of the folders that sat on the shelf. When I opened it, I found that all of the pages inside were written in code. I flipped through it, and the whole folder was full of coded papers, all except for the last page in the folder. It only had a small bit of text on the page, and I flipped it over to see if there was anything on the back of it, but the back was entirely empty.

"Please see the Decoding room and use preset three if you want to read this document." It was a strange note, but I assumed there was some kind of decoding room here that I could possibly use to decode the document and find out what its secrets were. I looked around the room, and it appeared to be that there were no doorways, but I thought there could be one behind a hologram in the wall, similar to the other door.

I kept looking and it appeared there was only one entrance to the room. That seemed pretty unlikely for this to be some random crypt of forgotten secrets, so I looked around for a second exit that could lead to a lower level or the decoding room that was mentioned in the file. I paced around for a bit and I couldn't make out anything just by scanning the walls, so I decided to go closer.

I put my body against the walls and held my arms out in front of me, and then I walked along the wall. Eventually, I went through the wall and past the hologram. The area was similar to the one above, with there being a small landing with a giant staircase that went down from it. The staircase seemed longer than the other staircase, and when I finally got to the bottom, the area led right into another room.

The room was a bit bigger than the other room, and the files here seemed older. As I looked around the room, I saw two doors on the left wall and two doors on the right wall. The doors had some weird box in the middle and text above them. The text on the left side read "Decoding Room" and the text on the sign over the right doors read "Discussion Room". Both signs were written in an older menofillian script.

I tried the doors on the left side, but they were locked. I walked over to the right side of the room and tried the doors, but they were locked as well. Upon closer inspection, the box in between the doors seemed to be a key card slot. It looked like I wouldn't be able to decode these documents, or at least not until I found a key card. I looked through all of the folders in the room, but all of the pages were coded, and there wasn't a key card in any of them like I had hoped.

I only had one other option left, and that was to go deeper. It was pretty likely that there would be more below, I just had to keep going. Although I started scanning the walls again for another doorway, I had a feeling I had hit the bottom. After walking against the wall, I found another hologram doorway just beside the front stairs that led into the room. I checked fr any other doors, but it was the only one.

I went through the door, and it was another staircase, this one being much longer than the other two staircases. I walked down and down the endless stairway, the air getting colder as I went deeper and deeper into the ground. When I got to the bottom of the staircase, there was a long hallway that spread out in front of me. There were small doorways that spread out on either side of the hallway, but they all were locked.

All the doors in the long hallway were locked, except for the larger door at the very end of the hallway. When I opened it, I found myself on what appeared to be a subway platform. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the harsh light. There were benches next to the wall, and a doorway on the other side of the platform. I looked across the tracks, and it seemed to have a very similar layout, although it only had one door, being in the same spot as the one in front of me.

The while area felt strange and vaguely familiar, although it was similar to a typical subway station, however I felt like it was a lot deeper than a typical subway station. I walked onto the platform and looked up and down the tracks. The subway tracks went up and down an endless track, going and going until it turned into a blank wall. The whole area looked pretty modern, so it was clearly pretty new.

I had no knowledge of this place, and it looked like there were no trains coming through. Oddly, there weren't any advertisements or even any screens indicating when a train could be coming through. The only things that existed on the walls were torn pieces of paper and fabric, some of which contained broken words and letters that weren't readable. As I stood there, a chilling wind blew throughout the track.

Quietly at first, I heard a whooshing sound that grew louder and louder. I stood on the platform as a subway came through. The train didn't stop, and it cast a strong wind that blew my clothes and hair in the wind. I stared at the train, and saw a couple of coronians and pandorians inside. They sat in chairs and stared blankly out the windows of the train. They watched me, not doing anything or even acknowledging my existence.

When the train passed, I turned and walked towards the door at the other end of the platform. I opened the door, and it was a tiny and unlit room with a ladder in the middle of it. I looked down and all I could see were shadows, but I had to dig deeper. I grasped the chilly metal bars and slowly climbed down the long ladder. As I got deeper, my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I could make up the room below.

In the deep dark blue light, I could make out the room pretty well. The room was rather small, and it had three old metal bed frames on either side of the room, although none of them had beds in them. There were skinny rectangular pillars in between the bed frames, and there was a depression in the middle of the room. The floor was dirty and in the line in the middle of the lower part of the floor, rusted grates failed to keep a small level of dirty water away.

I walked through to the end of the room where there was a door. I opened it, and it led to a short hallway. There was a door at the other end, and nothing in between. I walked to the end, and there was a similar room to the first one, although it was longer, having five empty frames rather than three. I walked through the room and to the other hallway, and it was exactly the same.

As I walked through the repeating rooms, I thought it would go on forever, but after three of the same repeating rooms I got to a different room. There were two doors on either side, one labelled STAFF ONLY. The other door was unmarked, and it was the only of the two that were unlocked. I opened it and walked through the same hallways, but through differing rooms.

There were a lot of rooms that I passed through. I passed through large dining areas, lounge areas, forks in the road, multiple twists and turns, kitchens, and I just kept going, trying to find something. It felt like a dream, or more accurately a nightmare. As I walked slowly through the weird complex, I started to hallucinate. I started seeing completely black figures standing in the deep blue light in the corners of my vision.

When I would turn to look at them, they disappeared. I was starting to lose my mind. I stopped for a second in another dining area, having passed through multiples of random rooms of various purposes and sizes. The floor was dirty and the seat squeaked when I sat down. I put my head in my hands and started to cry. I wasn't going to get out of here, wasn't I? As I was crying, I heard something behind me.

I turned around, and saw another hallucination. It was a completely black shadow, just like all of the others, but this one was different. This one felt much more real. It looked to be a massive robot, appearing to be modeled after a large bear. It stood there in the doorway behind me, and I got up. I kept my eyes on it and it stood completely still. I slowly walked backwards and headed to the exit which was perpendicular to the wall the thing stood in.

As I got to the door and opened it, I saw the things head move. It let out a shrill squeak that pierced the dead silence of the decaying complex. I slammed the door shut and ran through the hall to the next room, and I kept going and going, throwing open and slamming doors as I went through the place. I got pretty far, but I ran out of stamina after a while. I put my hands on my knees and caught my breath and sat down on the scarred floor.

When I looked up, the door opened and the robot burst through the door. I closed my eyes for a second, and when I opened my eyes again, the door was closed. I felt a bead of sweat drip down my arms as I stood there in shock. I rubbed my eyes and looked again, the door still remaining closed. How long had I even been down here? Was this place even real? I slapped myself in the face a couple of times and pinched myself. This was all real.

When it dawned on me that this was all real, I couldn't grasp it, I couldn't even process it. I made my way to the corner and fell back against the wall, taking in the feeling of wind leaving my chest. I slowly fell to the ground, sliding down the wall, my legs spreading out in front of me as I did. I was completely alone, and it was completely silent. The silence was haunting, but it stopped short, being pierced like a knife through a heart.

I heard a distant noise, and in an instant I got up and ran through the halls again. My footsteps echoed through the halls, and when I opened a door into another large meeting room, the lights turned on for a split second, the endless shadows that blanketed the room rearranged and disappeared. The light scorched my eyes, and within a second, the light was gone and darkness fell over the room.

I felt a sinking feeling from it, the random jolt of light that filled the entire complex for a second and then was gone broke my mind even further. I ran to the corner of the room and stopped, staring at the wall for a second. I fell to my knees on the hard floor, scattering the dust around as I did. I collapsed to the ground and started crying again, there was nothing else I could do at that point. I curled up into a ball and cried to myself.

It was the only sound in the air, and the sound of it echoing and reverberating through the empty room. The loneliness only made me cry more. I couldn't take the desolation. I couldn't process how alone I was. After a while, I stopped hearing the sound of my own sobbing. It was there, but I didn't even notice it. I only stared at the marks and dirt on the ground through teary eyes.

After who knows how long, I felt something on my arm. I looked at it, and it looked like a furry arm that was entirely black. I looked up, thinking it was another hallucination, but it wasn't. I stared at two glowing white eyes that shone dimly, emitting a sorrowful expression. The same light also emitted from its mouth, which was slightly open. I felt a jolt of fear at first, but I didn't even react.

In a moment the jolt of fear turned into comfort. I put my arms down and looked at the floor, and then it spoke to me. "Please do not cry," It looked sad, and after a moment it wrapped me in a hug. I wrapped my arms around it, confirming it was real. I felt myself crying, but he comforted me. "It is going to be fine, you are safe with me," After a while, it let go and knelt beside me, keeping a hand on my shoulder.

I stared at it and against the dark blue and dusty walls, I could make its outline. It appeared to be a bear, not to different from the hallucination I saw earlier. It was the same height and although it towered over me, I wasn't afraid of it because of how it comforted me. It seemed to give off a strange aura which felt like sorrow and despair, but it didn't act like that, in fact it was really kind and even slightly upbeat.

"What is this place?" I asked.

"It was an old complex built by the four kingdoms, it was used during the Sides War and War for Pandora, but that is really all I know about this place"

"Well then why are you here?"

"I do not know that either, I woke up here one day and I have been here ever since, wandering through these halls. Why are you here if I may ask?"

"I was in the library above this place, I found some secret entrance to a basement area, and there were two levels of classified documents written in code, and then there was a staircase that led to some subway tunnel, and then a ladder that led down here. I was just trying to dig up some information on the secrets of this city."

"Library? There is a Library above here? Also your mention of a ladder is interesting, because I have never seen a ladder down here. Maybe it's well hidden or this place is much, much larger than I thought"

"I can't even imagine having to be stuck all alone in this place. It must have been awful. How long have you been down here anyways?"

"I do not know. I do not even know what year I woke up down here, but I do know that it must have been just after the place was abandoned. After a couple of years the lights went out and they only come on once every now and then. I have always wanted to escape this place, but I have a feeling that I cannot, or at least the universe does not want me to escape this place,"

"Really, wel I might be able to help you escape if you want,"

"I do not know if that is possible, but I will help you as best as I can. There is nothing else I can do and I want to help you."

All I could say was a thanks, and he led me to another bedroom, this one had mattresses in the bed frames. I sat down on one, and it sat down on the one next to mine. We talked for a while, but I started to get tired. I laid down and said goodnight to it, and I thanked it for helping me. It only responded with a goodnight, and let me sleep. There wasn't a blanket on the bed, but I was so tired that I fell asleep rather quickly.

When I woke up, it was waiting for me to get up. I got out of bed, and it led me a couple of rooms down into a kitchen. It walked to a fridge and opened it, pulling out a fresh meal kit. I was really surprised, and asked if it was good to eat. It said it was and I took their word for it. I opened it up, and all of the food inside was fresh and it was actually quite delicious. I asked it how that was possible, and it explained it to me.

"These use wormhole technology to get fresh meal packs, and it seems these are still fed by electricity, although I do not know from where."

"Well there is a subway tunnel somewhere above here, but that's probably very far away from here"

After I ate my food, I asked it why it didn't eat. It explained how it found out it didn't need to eat, and it thinks it's a ghost of some kind. Although it was a weird explanation, it was the only thing that seemed possible, but I asked it what it thought it was.

"Again, I do not know, but I believe I am some kind of manifestation of all of the forgotten, all of those who died and died alone, all who died forgotten, being erased from history and doomed to obscurity, a fate worse than death, or at least that is what I think. I only think that because I heard a voice telling me that one time years and years ago, and occasionally I hear voices telling me things, but I always assumed it was me going crazy, so I am not even sure."

As the day went on, we talked and talked to each other, eating lunch and dinner passing the time together. After I went to sleep and woke up the next morning, we did the same thing. The hours started to melt into days, and time seemed to go faster, but I enjoyed its presence. It was the only thing keeping me sane. I didn't even know what it was, but I started to develop a pretty deep connection to it.

For the first couple of days, I was happy, but then I started to grow angry from the repetition, of doing the same couple of things every day. After that, I started to get sad, growing hopeless that I was never going to get out, that this was my life now and that I'd live out my years trapped in here with it. Then after that, I became tired. Not tired as in the sense of sleepy, but tired as in emotionless.

We told stories together, but I was tired the whole time. We explored the complex together, but I was tired the whole time. We read books, we played instruments, we drew, we read books, we built things, we broke things, we ate, we slept, we did all that we could together, but I was tired the whole time. The same routine was repeated every day, and after a while it lost its spark.

It was doing the best it could for me, always engaging me and feeding me, It cared for me. It was the only person I'd met who cared for me this much, Oliver and the others coming close, but it was so committed to me, and at one point I asked it why. It said it didn't know why, but it just wanted to help me. It didn't have a reason to help me, but it did, and one night as I laid awake in my bed, I fully realised that.

I started to silently cry to myself. I didn't want it to know I was crying for it, and I didn't know why I tried to hide it. I'm sure it would be over the moon to know that I appreciated every single second I spent with it and everything it did for me. For some reason it made me so sad. There was no way I could repay it, except for finding an exit to this place, but that was nearly impossible.

The place was huge, and even when we travelled in one direction for almost four days straight, we didn't find the exit and only stopped at another bedroom that had matresses in the beds. We set up there as our new base of operations, although we had nothing. I couldn't access my pocket dimension and I wasn't sure if it even had one. There was another kitchen nearby.

Every kitchen pulled from the same group of meal packs, so we wouldn't have to go all the way back to the first kitchen just to get food. That night I realised I had to get us out of here. I told it my plan, and it was excited for me, but it mentioned how it would be very hard, but I didn't care. I had lost track of time at that point, and I didn't even know what a normal day felt like anymore, I had been here for so long.

We walked through endless hallways, twisting and turning, and I began to grow desperate. I ran through the halls as fast as I could, looking back to make sure it was still behind me and following. It kept pace well, and I ran nonstop for as long as I could. I felt like I could run longer than before, but that didn't matter. I kept running and running, and I felt tears stream down from my eyes.

I wanted so badly to escape, but at this point it wasn't for me, it was for it. It had done so much for me, and I just wanted to repay it for everything I had done for it. I stopped for a couple minutes to catch my breath, and it gave me a water bottle from a meal pack. I drank the whole thing and tossed it into a nearby garbage bin, and then I took off again. I kept running and running, and then I found it.

I threw a door open, and it was a ladder. The ladder was very long and was definitely different from the one I came down here so long ago. I began to cry and I hugged it when we saw it. We were so happy, and I pulled away and started climbing up the ladder. I climbed up as fast as I could, but then I got a thought. I wanted to let it go first, and I said that to it from up the ladder.

It said thank you from the doorway at the bottom, and I climbed down the ladder. When I got to the bottom, I went around the ladder and when I looked up towards the doorway, it was gone. I felt a sinking feeling. I ran into the hallway behind it, and called out towards it, but there was no sign of it. I cried to myself, but I pulled myself together. I got up off the ground and climbed the ladder.

As I got higher and higher, I began to cry again, but I had to be strong. I didn't want to cry for it, I wanted to escape, just like it wanted me to. It didn't want me to cry for it to be gone, and I stopped myself. I went all the way up the ladder and I finally got to the top. I put my legs through one of the bars and stood up to push the trapdoor at the top of the room and opened it.

It was heavy, and it took a lot of effort to open. I nearly slipped when I opened it, but I caught myself and pushed it up. The grey light of the overcast skies filled the room as my eyes adjusted to the light. I climbed the rest of the way up. I pulled myself and I walked out into the open air. I looked up to the skies, scanning the clouds and completely ignoring the surrounding area for a moment.

The area around me was a giant open valley, there being a small amount of snow on the ground, which was slightly wet. The wind blew trough the valley, and at first I didn't know where I was, but in the distance I saw the outline of a tall old building, and I immediately knew where I was. I was in the Windswept Valley, which was really far from the library which was near Kat Beach.

The Windswept Valley is on the opposite side of Stonemill as Kat Beach, and it's much more south from Downtown Brandon, being pretty close to the coastline. The mountain range that blocked the eastern coast of the island was visible from where I was, although it was very far in the distance. I couldn't really process it, but I was finally free. The fresh air felt strange compared to the cramped air that I was exposed to for months.

I didn't even know what day it was, but I didn't care at that point. I didn't care about anything. I walked up a smaller elevated area where the grass was dry and laid down. I felt emotionless again as I stared into the sky. I was finally out of the complex, but I had lost a part of my soul. It had become so close to me that I felt like a part of me was missing, like a part of my Soul was missing.

It did everything for me, and I was so sad that they disappeared that I couldn't even cry. I fully realised they were gone. They vanished right in front of me. I didn't know if they were still down there, but I prayed that they weren't. All I wanted to do was see them again, but after watching the clouds for a while longer, that desire left me. I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I didn't know if I even wanted to do anything.

I stared into the sky as the sun began to set over the valley, and when it turned to night I climbed a tree. The tree was tall, but there were a lot of branches which made it easy to climb. I stared off into the distance, to a place where the mountains dipped in the distance, being a pretty big stretch of area that fell into the sea a long time ago. I stared for hours and hours watching the skies, but then I saw something.

Far out in the east, I saw a white pillar of light rise into the sky. It was small, so it must have been really, really far from where I was, and I presumed it was somewhere in Ironhall, possibly being somewhere on the north side, likely being somewhere in the Seamark area. It cast dim light over the night sky, and it persisted for a couple of minutes, but then it vanished.

The way it vanished seemed to hit me in a weird way, instilling a weird feeling deep into my soul, almost as if something tragic was about to happen proceeding it. I climbed down the tree and paid in the shade. I stared up at the stars above, and all I could think about was it. I didn't want to think about it, but I didn't want to forget it. If it was true that they were a manifestation of all things forgotten, then I couldn't forget them.

The sky faded as I fell asleep, and when I woke up, the sky was overcast, and it started to rain. The raindrops felt fresh on my skin, and I didn't do anything to hide from them. I didn't want to hide from them. The rain washed my dirty cloths and shaggy hair that hadn't been kept in months. The rain felt comforting as I laid in it, but then the ground started to get muddy, and I started to get up.

I pulled out an old compass and started to navigate myself to the direction I believed home was. I walked through the massive valley, and as I did, the rain started to subside. I made it to the woods on the other side before it got heavy again, but I had pretty good cover from the trees. The ground was muddy as I walked through the forest, but I wasn't going to let that stop me.

I wasn't sure where I wanted to go, I wasn't even sure if I wanted to go home. My mind was so gone at this point I had forgotten where home was. Was I trapped down there for that long? It didn't matter at that moment though. I just wanted to be somewhere away from the rain. I wandered through the forest looking for something, but it didn't seem like there was much of anything here besides trees, or so I thought.

That's the end of Chapter Three.

Chapter Four is available here.

"I asked around the complex if they knew anything of Josh, but they didn't. I was rather surprised by this information, because the coronians or the Red Kingdom were one of my prime suspects. I even asked the boss if he had anything that could give me closure when I spotted him in the halls, but he responded genuinely stating that he didn't have any information to give me.

Later that day, it was announced that the police had officially changed their story, going from an abduction narrative to a wormhole narrative. Although it seemed like a more likely alternative to the theories of him getting lost or abducted, I still didn't fully believe it. I wasn't sure why, but I kept a small shred of doubt in my mind about the wormhole narrative, although I couldn't place my finger on why.

We all had our own theories in our small group, Sevith thinking he got abducted by the Red Kingdom and not the corrupted coronians, and Milo thought he could have gotten lost in the forest somehow. I pointed it out how it was unlikely for that as in the official report nobody saw him around town, but Milo was pretty firm. They said they had a feeling he got lost or trapped somehow.

It was such a weird experience, and everyone was on edge and freaked out back at Ampor Manor. I'm thankful that I'm staying here instead, because I've been told at school that the environment at the mansion is pretty toxic currently, and I don't blame them for that. The group was formed in August, which is pretty recently, and it's been growing ever since. It was only a matter of time before there would be some discourse."

- Kevamar