Author's Note: So, I decided that a little world-building was needed for my fanfic. I decided to add a new language that will be explored as we continue the story. It'll all make sense soon, don't worry. Don't be afraid to leave a review! Enjoy! :)

This time, it wasn't the cold that woke her up. It was the annoying beeping sound in her ears. Her head hurt a bit less, but most of the pain was located in her right thigh and her right elbow. She opened her eyes.

She was lying on a hospital bed, still dressed in that strange sundress. An IV was attached to her arm, which explained why her elbow was uncomfortable. A thick white bandage was wrapped around her thigh. The beeping noise was coming from a machine that was monitoring her heart rate next to the bed. The room was mostly empty aside from the bed and the machinery and an end table. The window was covered by blinds, but the light was still too bright for her eyes.

She tried sitting up, but a sharp burst of pain in her leg kept her still. She winced and sat back. She took a deep breath.

What was the last thing she could remember?

Before she woke up in the cave and was chased around by a bunch of lunatics, she was walking home, right? She was wearing jeans and her favorite hoodie, and she definitely remembered that she was wearing shoes at the time. What next?

She closed her eyes and thought hard about it.

She was walking home. It was dark. She had been out with a friend. All of a sudden, a ratty black car slammed its brakes in front of her and a man with- she could swear that he had mismatched colored eyes, one grey, and one brown. She had tried to run and then she was hit by a white light.

Then she woke up in that freezing cold cave.

The door opened, and someone walked inside. She squeezed her eyes shut and pretended to still be asleep. Whoever it was, they seemed to ignore her. They fiddled with the machine and checked the IV drip. She heard a pencil scratching on a piece of paper and then they left. She opened her eyes and sat up.

She needed to get out of there.

She carefully removed the IV needle from her arm, almost throwing up as she did so, and slowly swung her legs off the edge. The bed was almost too high off the ground and she was annoyingly short. She placed weight on her leg and collapsed. She gasped and checked the bandage. It was too thick for blood to seep through, but she didn't care. She used the heart monitor and bed to stand and tore off the rubber nodes attached to the skin under her collarbone. Immediately, the lines on the monitor went flat and an annoying drone came from the machine.

She had watched enough TV to know that when a heart monitor goes flat, nurses and doctors don't waste any time getting to their patient.

Her leg throbbed, but she was able to hobble to the door and swing it open. The hall was empty and colored mint green. She heard someone yelling down the right side and hobbled as fast as she could down the left. She found another door and got to the other side just as someone yelled.

"Hey! Stop!"

She slammed the door behind her and followed the red glowing exit signs as the nurse yelled for help. She heard the door open and the scary looking guy from the cave was there, his gun in his hand and his ratty red cape whipping behind him as he beelined towards her. She screamed and ran as fast as she could down the hall and crashed through the exit door.

An alarm sounded as she opened it, but she was outside. She blinked in the dull sunlight. It was cloudy and she could hear cars and people, though she was sure she had exited through a back door.

The building she had left was surrounded by low, worn-out skyscrapers. She followed the cracked sidewalk around the corner, looking behind her the entire time and screamed as she collided with two other people.

They seemed surprised as she fell back. She quickly scrambled up and started sobbing.

"Please, you got to help me," she said. She was relieved that she wasn't speaking that strange language. The man and woman looked confused.

"What?"

"Someone's after me and I don't know where I am," she explained, wiping her face. She heard running behind her and yelped when the scary man ran around the corner. She scrambled behind the man and woman. "Please!"

He stopped in front of them and she was surprised that no one did anything. Instead, someone laughed.

"It's just Vincent," the blond man said. She froze and looked up. Wait a second.

The man she had run into was the blond man from the cave, only he didn't have his sword with him. His hair was still spikey, and his eyes were blue. He was wearing a black vest and one of his ears were pierced. There was a decoration on his vest that was shaped like a wolf. The woman with him was wearing a black zip-up vest and black shorts with a long duster. Her hair was dark and long and her eyes were red? Brown? She decided on amber.

"What?" She managed to squeak, taking a step back. Her leg was starting to annoy her and it buckled. She almost fell but she stopped herself.

"Hey, be careful," the woman said. "Let's take you back inside."

She froze and tried to back away, but the woman placed her hand on her shoulder. She had no choice but to follow the strangers back inside the building. Someone turned the screaming alarm off as they entered and soon she was led through a maze of metal hallways and was crammed into an elevator with them. She tried to stand as far away from the scary guy with the cape and gun as she could, but the elevator was tiny.

"What's your name, kid?"

She looked away from the number pad. They had pressed the button for the third floor. She blinked at the blond man.

"What? Oh." It was embarrassing, but she had to think to remember her name. Something about a constellation? Stars? The silence was deafening as they stared at her, waiting.

"Um, Lyra, I think."

The elevator dinged, and they led her out to another hallway, this one's floor covered with cheap carpet rather than white tile. On one side of the hall, the walls were painted mint green and metal sliding doors were evenly spaced. For about ten or twenty feet, the other side of the hallway was open, with only a low wall keeping them from the busy first floor at the bottom.

She couldn't focus on where they were going but she was glad that someone was helping her. She was too busy trying to remember if her name was Lyra or not. It felt right, and she could somewhat remember someone teaching her about the constellation. It was a lyre that helped Orpheus enter the Underworld. The more she thought about it, the more she could remember a man, her father? Yes, he had gotten a telescope for her and was teaching her about the stars.

Her name was Lyra. She had a mother. She had a father. She had no idea where she was, but she was sure that the man with mismatched eyes was responsible for her predicament. Out of the company she had found herself with, the least intimidating of the three was the woman.

She jerked herself back to reality as they stopped before one of the metal sliding doors. The open hallway was long behind them and there were few people walking past. The scary man, Vincent, that's what the spikey blond guy called him, passed a security card over a sensor and the doors slid open. Lyra doubted that she would be able to steal the security card from him, but if the other man and woman had one….

"Finally, she's awake!"

Lyra jumped at the sound of the woman's voice. The woman had one blue eye and was wearing oval glasses. Her left eye was closed and her left arm was prosthetic and was hidden behind a clean lab coat. She was wearing a mini skirt and tank top underneath under the coat. She seemed friendly enough and her red hair was frizzy. Her hair reminded Lyra of a friend she was sure that she had. Was this woman a doctor?

The room was huge. It must be a lab of some sort. There were so many machines and a few large tanks of glowing green liquid and cluttered desk upon cluttered desk of computers and stacks of paper. A conference table surrounded by chairs was pushed off to the side.

The doctor woman was quick and suddenly Lyra was sitting on a hard-plastic chair facing away from a computer.

"Need a translator or-" The doctor woman started. The man with spiky hair shook his head.

"No. She can speak Common," he said. The doctor turned on her heels to direct a friendly smile towards Lyra, who squirmed uncomfortably.

"Well then. That certainly makes things easier," she said. She picked a clipboard and a pen from a cluttered table and started asking questions.

"What's your name?"

"Lyra."

"Last name?"

Lyra paused. She almost started to cry when she realized. "No. I can't remember."

The doctor nodded. Lyra glanced at the others. They were staring at her, obviously as interested in her as the doctor was. She squirmed, uncomfortable under their stares.

"How old are you?" The doctor asked. Lyra paused.

"19? I think?"

"You think?"

Lyra nodded. "I can't…. my head hurt when I woke up."

"In the cave?" The doctor looked up from her clipboard. Lyra nodded and she continued to scribble on the paper. "Lyra, do you remember how you got to the cave?"

Lyra almost shook her head, but then the man with the mismatched eyes flashed in her head. Her hands started to sweat and her stomach churned.

"Lyra?"

"There was a guy. His eyes were weird." Lyra said. She was staring at her hands, twisting the skirt of her sundress. She heard someone shuffle their feet, but she didn't look up. "He pulled up in front of me and I tried to run."

Lyra's voice was wobbly and her eyes felt wet.

"Then what happened?" The doctor sounded sympathetic and interested. Lyra wasn't sure what the lady was thinking had happened. She shook her head.

"I tried to run and a white light hit me. I think he smacked my head with something because I can't remember much and my head hurts," she said as her voice broke. "I want to go home! I don't know where I am. Please, let me go home!"

She finally looked up at the doctor lady, who had turned to talk to the others.

"He still in holding?" Her voice sounded blunt all of a sudden. All business.

The scary man nodded. "Cloud and Tifa were coming in to talk to him."

Lyra was almost laughed. The scary man's voice sounded like Batman.

Lyra jumped when the sliding door opened. A girl with short red hair and light and glowing blue eyes entered, her face emotionless. She wore a summery outfit of shorts and a pink T-shirt, but she seemed dead in the eyes. Other than the dead eyes, she looked very similar to the doctor lady.

"I have some bad news," she said in an almost monotone voice. "The man in holding died."

"What? How?" The doctor lady asked. The others looked disappointed. Lyra was just surprised that the kid sounded so formal and dead, like a robot. The kid shook her head in a way that could have been sad if she wasn't so empty of emotion and continued.

"He had a tablet of poison implanted in his teeth. He broke it and chewed it," she said. "He was dead in minutes."

Lyra blinked. "What's going on? He's dead?"

The doctor lady turned back to her. She grabbed a block of tissues from the cluttered desk and held it out to her. Lyra took it and blew her runny nose.

"Guess we aren't going to learn everything today," she said.

"Plan B?" The other woman asked. Lyra frowned as she watched the doctor lady cross the giant lab. She fiddled with a bad and came back with a syringe and a large needle in her hand.

"Yup. Time for Plan B."

Lyra felt dizzy and barely made it to the garbage bin that was shoved underneath the desk across from her. She really hated needles.