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Chapter 3: When Darkness Falls

It was 8 a.m. on Besaid Island as a young couple slept in bed, peaceful and happy. This bliss was rudely cut short with the loud wailing of the spherecom. The blonde man groaned softly and rolled over in bed, reaching carefully over his bedmate, trying hard not to wake her. The little screen blipped to an image of a frantic Brother, who was babbling nonsense in a mixture of English and Al Bhed so that no one would really be able to understand. The blonde man sleepily rubbed his brilliant blue eyes as he looked at the image of Brother.

"Calm down, Brother. Now tell me what happened," Tidus yawned.

"IT'S RIKKU! She went to go investigate some sphere waves coming from Bevelle and she hasn't come back!" Brother panicked.

"I'm sure she's fine Brother. You should stop panicking like this when people leave for a little while." Tidus started to lean forward to turn off the device, but then he head Brother yell, "SHE'S BEEN GONE FOR A WEEK!!!"

"What!?" Tidus was pushed backwards as his bedmate, Yuna, pushed his arm away and moved towards the sphere.

"Yuna!" Brother exclaimed. "Please help Rikku! I try talking to her on the walkie-talkie but all I get is fuzz! So I called Gippal, and he says there is nothing wrong with the machine! Rikku is lost!"

Yuna looked over at Tidus. He nodded, and she turned back to the screen.

"How soon can you be here?"

"We'll be there soon," came Gippal's voice as he came into view on the screen from behind Brother. He smiled and turned off the spherecom.

In Wonderland

Rikku ran through the forest as fast as she could, dodging trees left and right. It felt like somebody was chasing her, but she was too scared to look behind her for fear of what she might see. She ran faster and faster, feeling the cold sweat on her face sliding down to her chin and dropping to the ground. She felt branches hitting her on her face, arms, and occasionally her legs, leaving small scrapes.

She took a sudden sharp turn and rested her back against a tree, breathing heavily. She dared to peek around the tree, her chest rising and falling slowly as she tried to slow her breathing back to normal. Her heart started to beat faster with each passing second as she got closer and closer to seeing what she thought was chasing her.

What she saw next horrified her. It had turned out that her instinct was right; she was being chased. She was being chased not by just one creature, but what looked like a pack.

It was a pack of monstrous things that slightly resembled wolves, but also looked sort of like bears. They all had fiendish grins on their faces, their fangs bright against the deep darkness surrounding. The monsters were drooling and disgusting, with powerfully sharp claws and clumps of dirty fur in between grotesque-looking spikes that appeared to be filled with a horrifying sort of liquid. Some of them might have even had tails. Rikku didn't plan on sticking around to see for sure.

Rikku quickly pulled her head back behind the tree and rested her back against it, breathing heavily, her heart pounding much faster then it was before. 'I've never seen a fiend that looked like those things…th-they can't be anything from Spira… th-this can't be happening. This is all just a bad dream.' Rikku thought to herself frantically, wishing it really were just a nightmare.

She dared to look from behind the tree again and saw a few of the terrorizing thing sniffing the ground, searching for her scent. One of them looked up and glared straight at her and let out a low growl as more of the disgusting liquid dripped from its mouth. The young Al Bhed's eyes widened when she realized that she had been discovered.

She wasn't going to wait around and get slashed to bits by those bloodthirsty creatures. Rikku took off running again, dodging huge trees and barely avoiding huge branches to the face. She looked ahead and saw the clearing where she could finally get out of this Yevon-forsaken forest. She looked behind her to see that the creatures were about half a sphere pool away.

She turned and faced in front of her, grinning a little, thinking that she was going to get out of this alive. Right as she was about to make it out of the forest, Rikku's foot got caught on the root of a tree sticking out and she fell to the ground with a loud thud, knocking the wind out of her. She felt her head collide with something very hard on the way down, probably some kind of rock.

For a moment, she thought that it was getting even darker, if that were even possible. Then she realized- 'I'm losing consciousness.' She felt a warm substance starting to spread beneath her head, forming a small pool. She was loosing consciousness and the last thing she saw before she fell into complete darkness were the slobbering, evil faces of the monstrous creatures closing in on her.

Back in Spira

"So she's been missing for a week and you just told us now?" Tidus looked at Brother, slightly annoyed.

"Well uh… I…" Brother looked around at his crew nervously, silently pleading for help from someone, anyone. They all just shook their heads and looked away.

"We've arrived in Bevelle," Buddy turned to the four of them, interrupting their conversation, saving Brother.

"Great," the ex-summoner spoke. Yuna put her guns in her belt as she walked off the airship with Tidus and Gippal. They looked around everywhere outside and found no trace of Rikku. So they did the same thing the sneaky Al Bhed thief did a week ago; they snuck into the big building where Yuna, Rikku, and Paine had killed Vegnagun a while ago.

The trio looked around in the room when something caught Yuna's foot and she started to fall. Instead of hitting the ground, Tidus had grabbed her hand just in time and was holding her up. He had managed to keep her from falling into a hole that had suddenly appeared beneath Yuna. And Yuna was sure to fall if Tidus let her go. Tidus felt himself starting to slip towards the edge, but Gippal grabbed the back of his shirt.

"I gotcha, buddy," Gippal smirked. But, of course as he said this, Tidus' shirt started to slowly rip. "Shit…" The young Al Bhed cursed under his breath as the shirt ripped all the way and Tidus, Yuna, and Gippal went tumbling into the huge hole.

After what seemed like forever they landed in a bright patch of flowers. Of course Yuna recognized this place, but Shuyin and Lenne should have been in their eternal rest.

'The reason for coming to this place,' Yuna thought, 'Is something different.' They all hesitantly walked forward through a clear looking wall and when they came out the other side they were in a completely different world.

"Is this… the Farplane?" Tidus asked in awe as the gang looked around. "Or something else…?"

Back With Rikku

Rikku's eyelids slowly fluttered open, but she immediately regretted it as soon as she felt the excruciating pain shoot through her head. She flinched and closed her eyes tightly, but then gradually opened them again. The young Al Bhed sat up very slowly and looked around, trying not to move her injured head too much.

She sighed, annoyed, and asked in an aggravated voice, "Oh great, where am I now?"

(Well, there's chapter 3! Please review and tell me what you think. )