It hurt to breathe. Well, it hurt anyway, but breathing didn't feel good. A voice echoed through his mind, begging him to wake up. It sounded familiar- stern but still loving. It called to him again. He recognized it this time; it was his mother's voice.

He didn't want to wake up, though. He never was much of a morning person, and being in pain wasn't helping.

There was a man's voice speaking a different language. It took him a while to identify it as Japanese. That man wasn't going to get far; his parents only spoke Arabic, despite all of their children being quite multilingual. Then he heard one of his sisters translating.

Which one was that? It was either Alexandria or Kanika. Kanika, who fit the stereotypical adoring younger sister mold perfectly, practically worshipped the ground Alexandria walked on and modeled everything off of her older sister, including her speech pattern. It was making it difficult to tell their voices apart. No, she just called Cleopatra short, it was Alex. Kanika didn't do that. She wasn't much taller than Cleo. Where were his other sisters- Kanika and Femi? Where was his father?

Had Nile been awake, he would have known that Femi was fitfully asleep in her father's lap, Cleopatra had her little arms wrapped around his head, Kanika was clinging to Alexandria, his mother was by his side trying not to cry, and that he was half buried in a pile of rubble.

"Don't worry; we'll get him out of there. My assistant's already called for our helicopter and it's on the way. There's medical equipment inside. He'll be all right." Ryo told Alex and watched as she turned and relayed the message in her parents' language. A part of him absently wondered how many languages these children could speak and how they had learned them, but that question would have to wait. Right now he had to focus on getting Nile out of that mess and hope he was stable enough to get to Japan, not only because he knew there was a good hospital in Metal Bey City, but also because if Nile was there Kyoya would undoubtedly go visit him. And if Kyoya saw Nile like this, it would be much less difficult to talk him into helping them take down the Madman's Beys.

.

It had been considerably more difficult to convince Yuki that taking Mark with them was a good idea and, even though he did eventually agree to it, the knowledge that Mark very well could spontaneously decide to drag their plane out of the sky led him to study Mark almost obsessively.

Mark was tall and lean, and he carried himself very loosely. His bey was kept in a carrier which he wore on a brown leather strap around his neck and swayed when he moved, which he did often and slowly. It made him seem rather sluggish, but the man definitely wasn't slow.

Yuki had engaged in conversation with him as an excuse to observe him without seeming suspicious. He had at least a halfway decent grasp of astronomy, since he'd followed an entire conversation with Yuki about planets and constellations, and his Japanese was nearly perfect. Apparently, he also spoke Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and could "curse with the best of 'em" in Italian in addition to his native English. Yuki had expected someone who was supposedly driven mad to be less intelligent.

Gingka had taken the conversation from there and turned it towards beyblade. Specifically, why he'd quit beyblading. Gingka had never been accused of being too subtle.

"Yeah, didn't think I'd miss it as much as I did." Mark said, leaning back in his seat. "I was-"

Mark never got the chance to finish because the very unwelcome sound of crunching metal interrupted them and their plane began to fall.

It was spinning as it plummeted downwards, throwing them around like rocks in a rock tumbler, making it impossible for Yuki to make much sense of anything other than the fact that they were going down, down, down, down.

And then the plane stopped, but somehow he wasn't dead. Yuki opened one eye, then the other. Strange, he didn't actually remember closing them. He must have done it at some point of the fall.
A groan pulled him from his confusion. He turned to find Gingka gingerly picking himself up off the ceiling- no, maybe floor- what's a ceiling called when it's where the floor should be?

"Mr. Gingka, are you all right?" Yuki asked, slowly getting to his feet. All that crashing around in the plane had left him sore, despite all the adrenaline that was flooding his system. He didn't even want to think about how he was going to feel when it wore off.

"Yeah," the redhead groaned, leaning back so he was sitting with his back against a less damaged part of the wall. "I think so, anyways. Something back there hit me pretty hard on the head."

Yuki limped over and sat next to him. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

Gingka looked for longer than he should have needed to. "Three? Maybe four?"

Yuki was no doctor and he certainly didn't know how to properly diagnose a concussion, but he knew he was only holding up two fingers and the fact that Gingka couldn't tell was bad. "Um, not quite."

The only response that Yuki got was "Oh…" Great, what was he supposed to do now? He was alone in the middle of nowhere with a potential lunatic and his backup had a head injury.

Wait a minute, where was Mark?

Yuki's eyes widened in horror as they darted around the plane. He wasn't there. There was, however, a sizeable hole that looked as if something had broken through it from the inside. "Oh, no…"

"What?" Gingka asked.

"W-where did Mr. Mark go?"

Gingka leaned forward, taking in the same things that Yuki had seen. "Aw, man, this isn't good." He said before trying to get up and nearly tipping over.

"Careful!" Yuki exclaimed as he scrambled to his feet to catch the redhead's fall.

"Thanks," Gingka said and leaned onto Yuki for support as they headed out of the wreckage. "So, what do you think we're supposed to do now?"

Yuki was about to tell Gingka that he didn't have the slightest idea when they saw the carnage outside of the plane. Trees were in splintered pieces and the ground was churned up, with mounds piled up in some places and deep grooves dug out in others. The damage was over too wide of an area to have been caused solely by the crash.

"Guys!"

"Ah!" Yuki screamed and whirled around, dropping Gingka in the process.

"Whoa, it's okay. It's just me." Mark called from on top of the plane before jumping off. Gold energy appeared underneath his feet and slowly descended to the ground, his bey spinning next to him. "You guys all right?" He asked, eyes turning towards Gingka.

"Y-yeah, I think so." Yuki stammered, trying to pull his gaze away from the Madman's Bey. "I'm all right. Gingka hit his head pretty hard, but I think he'll be okay."

"I'm fine!" Gingka insisted, attempting to stagger up again. He made it about halfway there before he lost his balance.

"Easy, kid!" Mark called and before Yuki could blink, the golden energy had wrapped itself around Gingka. "You're going to hurt yourself more than you already have at this rate."

Yuki attempted to stifle the impending doom of a panic attack he could feel coming as Mark approached his friend. This was bad- very, very, very bad. That bey needed to stop spinning right now.

"How's the pilot, do you know?" Mark's question jerked Yuki from his frantic thoughts for a moment.

"Um, we haven't seen him, actually." He replied.

Mark nodded once and slowly lowered Gingka back to the ground. "I'll go check on it." He stated and jumped back over the plane, using his bey's energy fields as a springboard.

"Are you okay?" Yuki asked, rushing towards him.

"Yeah," Gingka said, "I'm fine. We've got to get that bey to stop spinning."

"I agree."

"He's not going to be any help." Mark called, circling around the back of the plane. "Cockpit's so crunched up I don't even want to think about what things look like inside there."

Mark's right hand was holding onto his left shoulder, and he was walking slowly. "What did you do?" Yuki asked.

The man tried to shrug, but quickly decided against it with a hiss. "Jarred it up pretty good trying to catch the plane; it's not too happy with me."

"…'Trying to catch the plane'?" Yuki repeated.

"Yeah," Mark nodded. "Sorry about the mess," he said, looking around at the ruins that used to be a forest, "there was a lot of decelerating to do and not very much space to do it. Speaking of which," Mark released his grip on his shoulder to unclip Gingka's launcher from his belt and toss it to Yuki, "I should probably give this back- snagged it on the fall."

Yuki caught it, unsure of what else to do.

"So, how we gonna get to Douala now?" Mark asked.

"I-I don't know." Yuki responded, pulling his phone out of his pocket to see if it was broken or had reception.

"How much distance we got left?"

Miraculously, the phone was neither broken nor lacking signal. "It's not actually that far," he said in reply to Mark's inquiry. "If my phone's location is correct, there should be a road a ways south of us that'll get us there. But I don't know how exactly we'd get to it." He said, glancing at Gingka.

"I can get us there." Mark stated.

Yuki didn't even get halfway through saying he thought that wasn't the best course of action before Mark cut him off. "Don't worry, kid. This ain't my first rodeo."

Neither legendary blader had time to react before his bey's golden energy surrounded them.

.

A/N: I still don't own Beyblade.