The first plunder happened when Fang was five years old.
She and her brother Yi were at where they weren't supposed to be. Blame the stream for being so alluring. It wasn't about how it was pristine unlike the murky village beach, or that the sunlight warmed up the water just enough to be cool to dip in. It wasn't even about the birds and the butterflies, injecting life into the area rather than just having a few dead shells sitting in the sand positively looking pathetic.
The stream was out of Oerba; too far to be explored by children, in turn making it too tempting to be left alone. Yi dared her to come along, knowing that she wouldn't have backed down. He had every reason to be smug- he knew he could read her right through.
Bright-bright-bright. The valley's saturation with colours was something Fang could not comprehend. How could every leaf soak up that much green, every flower burst with the intensity that either screamed love or hatred. The saturation was deafening, so much that it didn't occur to the siblings that their world was shaking.
The children didn't know that it was possible for something so grand to have a voice until the entire valley gave into a unified scream, vibrating right into their skulls. The colours, scents and sounds mere seconds ago now over written by the synchronised organic agony, not even the wailing honeybird could pierce through.
Then the dust cloud swallowed them whole. All there was dust and splitting quietness followed by the deafening stretched boom. Oppressing silence. For a moment, all there was in the world was the never ending dust, as if nothing else had ever existed from the conception of time. Just dust, dust, dust.
Nothing could penetrate through the suffocating envelope, and the suffocation would not settle or go away.
When the siblings were found by Uncle Ole later on, he held them for minutes refusing to let go. That too was suffocating, an indication on the scale of the event. It didn't matter than they disobeyed, for that now the only thing mattered was that they were still alive.
Uncle Ole insisted on carrying Fang on his back, she played along as he seemed ready to burst in tears any second; Uncle Ole crying… surreal. They walked home in silence, not once Yi said a single word; Yi being quiet… surreal. Back at the commune, their storage quarter shattered and twisted, chunks of congregated iron in the concrete still stood erect in defiance. So surreal it was borderline comical.
Next to her house where an abandoned shed used to stand was now merely a dirt ditch. It might have been a site that used to be a patch of green, or a small parking yard. Surreal, but then it hit her. Her secret shed was gone, along with the mask she had half-made for Yi, his seventh birthday next week.
Fang was bitterer about that than losing anything else. It was never meant for the thieving Cocoon Fal'cie.
Chances were that the Cocoon Fal'cie hadn't even wanted their house. It probably only robbed Pulse because it needed a new hairdo.