The blue haired girl walked out of the cave slowly, breaking small, melting shards of ice under her slippered feet as she went. She blinked her silvery blue eyes several times at the bright sunlight, not having looked at it herself in years. She used her right gloved hand to try to dim some of the bright sunlight as she gazed at her surroundings. She couldn't really remember all that much, her mind felt like it was in a fog.
After her eyes had gotten use to the harsh, glaring light, she reached her hands up and stretched. Every last muscle in her body ached.
'When did I fall asleep?' she wondered quietly to herself as she stretched. She paused, 'Wait…who am I? How did I get here?'
She glanced down at the ice, as if she had just registered the fact that it was there.
"What's going on?" she whispered to herself, feeling confused.
Suddenly, a sharp pain ripped through her mind. She cried out in shock and dropped to her knees, holding her head in agony. She closed her eyes as old memories began to flash behind her eyelids.
She saw her mother calling her and her little five year old sister to dinner. The two of them laughed and raced off to the house. The image quickly faded.
Another image came, this one of herself. She sat out in the woods, drawing a strange circular figure on the ground.
'An alchemic circle, used to perform alchemy,' she thought to herself.
The image faded again. The images came even quicker now through her mind. This time, they were only brief flashes, garbled words and sounds that were incomprehensible, yet, somehow, she understood it all...she remembered…she remembered everything.
When the memories had at last faded, she opened her eyes. She realized that, at some point, she had curled into a ball on the hard, ice strewn ground. Tears ran down her face at what she had just seen.
'Maybe, I could just lie here for a few years. Ha! Yeah right, I'll be lucky if I last a year…I could stay here, wait for death to come. Surely dying can't be nearly as hard as living…right?'
She quickly shook her head, shaking off all of her negative thoughts. She then stood up and looked at her surroundings again.
'How long was I frozen for? It feels longer than six years…Would the village even still be there anymore?'
"Only one way to find out!" she shouted to herself, feeling a bit more optimistic about her present situation. She walked forward and began to carefully plot her course through the woods.
~At the Mansion~
An old woman sat outside, sipping tea. Her head was drawn down as she stared at her tea, apparently lost in thought.
A door opened to the old woman's right. A female in a tight, revealing black dress walked confidently up to her. She had wavy black hair and violet eyes, like all of the homunculi.
The old woman looked up from her tea, "Lust, how was your last scouting?"
Lust shook her head. "Sadly unsuccessful, Master Dante. The alchemist in question was pathetic. He barely lasted five seconds against Gluttony. It was…disappointing…"
Dante shrugged looking back into her tea. "There are others, like the Elric brothers, that are far more interesting than him. Speaking of interesting, earlier today I heard the strangest sound from the forest."
"Oh?" Lust asked, uninterested.
"It reminded me of…never mind." She gave her tea a thoughtful look, as if trying to make up her mind. "Tell Envy to use his 'gift' to look around town. Tell him to look for anyone…suspicious."
Lust shrugged her shoulders, not really caring and started to head back inside to give Envy his new mission.
'But, it's strange,' Lust thought, 'For a second there Dante actually looked...nervous.'
~Near the Edge of the Forest~
'How long have I been walking?' she wondered to herself as she carefully stepped over a rather large tree root. Her legs were tired, but the muscles had loosened up a little. She absentmindedly wondered if she should keep going, after all, it was possible that the village wasn't even there anymore.
'Where'd all these pessimistic thoughts come from?!' she mentally berated herself. She looked ahead and suddenly saw a break in the trees. 'Yes! Almost there!'
She pushed her way out through the last few branches and stared down at the rather large looking town. 'Dublith...I think…Oh, well. It's got to be better than staying in those woods!' She thought, determined to keep up her optimistic viewpoint.
'I wonder where Will is. And why didn't he wake me up?!' She wondered as she made her way into town.
She mentally decided that, when she found Will, she was going to give him a piece of her mind!
-End of Chapter 2-
