This is a pretty long chapter and there's a few OCs introduced. R & Rs are as always, very appreciated. Enjoy! :)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Koushiro had been walking for hours. The other people with him seemed to know what they were doing, so he pretended to do so as well. In reality, he had no idea where he was, who these people were, or what he was supposed to be doing. He remembered feeling vaguely lost and confused, but the moment he had spoken, everything just went blank.
They were in a forest. Koushiro couldn't recall if he'd ever been in a forest before, or even how he knew this was a forest if he'd never been in one. Or had he been in a forest? The trunks of the trees were as wide as Koushiro was tall, some ascended so high that they pierced the clouds. The ground was damp and the smell of pine and mud mixed together with memories that somehow Koushiro couldn't reach.
"We stop here." An elderly man declared as he rested his hand on a tree, bringing the other hand to the top of his head and smoothing out his thin white hair. "The rest of the team should be here within the hour."
Over the course of the day, Koushiro had noted that this man seemed to be the leader. It was his voice that woke them all up that morning, his footsteps they followed through the terrain, and his orders they took. Koushiro decided it was in his best interest, as he couldn't recall anything before that morning, to stick with this man.
"We're getting closer," The old man told Koushiro as the two sat on a log; it was actually a root from a tree beside them, but almost a metre in diameter, "I can feel it in my bones."
Close to what? Koushiro wondered. And what team am I a part of, exactly?
He looked around at the other people on this "team". There were five of them, including himself and the old man. There was a pair of identical looking middle-aged men who appeared to keep to themselves throughout the day, as well as a bald man, or more appropriately, boy. He looked about Koushiro's own age and as he sat beside Koushiro, the latter realized his hair was very fair and cropped close to his scalp, so he was not in fact bald. All four of the men in his company seemed to have the same accent, their individual speech patterns slightly varying between one another, but definitely related in a manner Koushiro had never heard before.
"I appreciate you taking time out of your research to join us, Frizzy." The old man quipped up, his voice softer than it had been while he had been barking out orders, but tinged with some kind of diluted pain.
"Frizzy?" Koushiro asked, a slight irritation sharpening his speech.
The old man chuckled jovially. "I'm sorry, I'm terrible with names. I've always called you Frizzy, didn't mean offence! It's your hair, and I'm not about to call you carrot-top, as I, myself, sported red hair for the first forty years of my life."
Koushiro nodded and tried to fix his wiry mess of crimson hair, embarrassed for not remembering this man who seemed to be quite fond of him. "Frizzy, it is then." He offered the man a small smile, and got a toothy grin in return.
The log-like root that they were sitting on shifted upwards and Koushiro jumped off it. "Another tremor." One of the twins retaliated as if it had been nothing unusual. "Small one this time."
Koushiro sat in the dirt, his heart pounding as he stared at the log that contorted like a bending arm, then returned to its former place on the ground. An earthquake? No, it felt more fluid… why was he the only one on the ground? The old man, who had stood up as if it was more a nuisance than a shock, kicked the tree and returned to his spot on the root.
"Time and magnitude." The old man directed, and the second twin, without even looking up, pulled a pile of parchment out of his bag and jotted down some notes with a thin stick of dark chalk… charcoal? Who wrote with charcoal? For some reason that didn't seem normal to Koushiro, but nobody else seemed to find it strange. Nobody seemed to think Koushiro was out of place. Except Koushiro.
With a sigh, the red-headed boy stood up and dusted the dirt off his pants. Weird pants that he definitely didn't remember choosing. Whatever. Koushiro sighed before tentatively sitting back on the log.
"Hey, Baldy," The old man turned to face the fifth member of their group, "Motion ratios?"
The fair haired young man, Baldy, squatted on the ground and began sifting through the soil and small weeds that had been freed by the moving log. "Particles, as usual." The way he said it was with some sort of cocky boredom. Koushiro didn't like his tone, but figured that he must be smart, and Koushiro liked that.
Koushiro leaned over Baldy's shoulder to see that, in fact, mixed in with the usual compounds one would expect to find in dirt, was a sprinkling of light shimmery dust. Baldy stood up, rubbed the dirt into his light pastel coloured shirt and walked along the side of the tree root, until he was out of sight behind the tree it belonged to. "The roots are enlarged. There's been tremors here all day." He stretched, looking at leaves as if they were pages of a book attached to the giant tree. He's smart, Koushiro concluded. But weird.
Koushiro, confusion making him lose interest in Baldy's leaf reading, looked around their small crowd. The second twin had taken out his parchment and charcoal again and was recording what the young member of their group was saying. They all seemed to have their roles. But what was Koushiro's? Aside from some research he had been linked to, but had no recollection of committing, he had no role. He had no memory of a role, nothing from before that morning came to mind, and even half of that morning seemed to be a poor quality silent film from the twenties: no colour or speech, blurred and with specks of dust and tricks of light disfiguring what could be somewhat recognizable. He was lost. Lost in a forest. Lost in this group. Lost in his mind.
"Professor Sein!"
The old man looked up and Koushiro finally labelled him with a name. Three cloaked figures trudged towards Koushiro's group, water dripping from the edges of their hoods and the tips of their pale fingers. Koushiro looked down through the trees that they had arrived through, more and more thick greenery shrouded any vision of an exit. How were they wet? Rain? A waterfall? Some other unexplained anomaly like moving trees or sparkly dirt?
"Right on time." Sein approved, giving each figure the once-over, clutching the wrist of the woman who owned the voice.
One of the people, the smallest of the three, removed her hood and a grin grew across Baldy's face. The makeshift rain-jacket released a veil of white-blonde hair, thin and pale, almost translucently so. The girl gave a polite nod to Sein, the twins, Koushiro and finally Baldy.
Her hair and slender body paralleled that of Baldy so Koushiro's assumed he and this addition to their group must be siblings. However, her peculiar beauty wouldn't release Koushiro's gaze, and it appeared the affect was the same on the other four men present. Her snowy complexion and wide-set gray eyes contrasted the tanned and brown-eyed Baldy. The similarities were no longer siblings, but perhaps that of a strangely beautiful race.
"It's been quite some time, Baldwin." She said, her voice like a tiny wind-chime; beautiful but fragile at the same time, the same accent woven through her few words.
Baldy's voice was broken and soft, as if he couldn't figure out what emotion to relay. "Tevy." He managed.
Sein smiled his toothy grin and nudged Koushiro. "They're from the same town, Peri. Tiny town, tiny people, but beautiful. And smart. They're all very into nature, figures as Baldy is the expert on all of Orenda's plant life and no one knows more about animals than Miss Tevy."
The way Sein spoke Tevy's name was with a vague reverence, even though she could be no older than sixteen.
"I thought you would be going to the prince's ball." Baldy said softly, his gaze so intent on the tiny girl that the other people present must not have been anything more than a blur to him.
She shook her head, not returning Baldy, or Baldwin's, intent gaze. "My life is better spent using my knowledge and talents in practical situations. I'd rather spend my days trying to save our world through my knowledge being in a palace holding the prince's royal hand."
This seemed to be profound, as everyone in the group went silent with awe for a minute. Breaking the silence was the second figure, the tallest of the three, but not the voice that announced their presence.
"It's never happened before," a strong feminine voice began. She did not remove her hood, but Koushiro watched the woman, not quite middle-aged, but her eyes saying that she had left girlhood many years ago. Her dark brown, easy-to-mistake-for-black, hair was in a braid hanging out of her cloak. "-Someone denying an invitation to a royal ball. In all my years of studying the history of people in Orenda, as far back as such events are recorded, every invitation sent out has been matched with a girl in attendance. Miss Tevy is quite the phenomenon. Especially in this, the year with the greatest response to the prince's ball."
He hadn't noticed it until she was well into her speech. Koushiro was too focused on putting together all the pieces to the puzzle that he almost didn't notice that this woman didn't have the accent that everyone else spoke with. Even the slight changes between the accent of the two fair-haired Perians compared with the heavy one of the twins, or the elongated version Sein used, they all had it. Holding letters longer than they should, emphasis on strange syllables and the pattern of enunciating and then slurring alternate words, each one of them spoke with it.
Except this woman.
Koushiro leaned forward to get a better look at her face, as her long dark braid and silhouette of worn eyes and a straight nose didn't give much of a full picture.
"I don't believe we've met." She suddenly said and Koushiro jumped, feeling embarrassed that he had been caught examining this woman's face. "I'm Ari."
As she turned and held out her hand, Koushiro felt as if someone had suddenly squeezed his spine. His posture changed and he was momentarily frozen, he knew her from somewhere. Visions poured into his mind: a woman in a suit walking down a crowded hallway, spinning on a chair in a cramped looking room, fixing her prominent square-rimmed glasses.
But who was she?
Sein cleared his throat, "This is Frizzy, he's the best of the best. Certifiable genius, his research on the disasters has been crucial to our project."
"Izzy?" The third woman spoke, her hood still shielding her face, sitting beside Sein. "Haven't heard that one before."
"It's Frizzy," Sein corrected. "Like his hair."
The cloaked girl laughed, and the hair on Koushiro's neck stood up. "I always knew him to be Koushiro, but Izzy does suit him."
Sein opened his mouth to correct her again, but stopped as she removed her hood.
There she was.
As if the sight of her face were the paddles used on a flat-lining patient in a hospital, everything started coming back to Koushiro. He wasn't flat-lining anymore.
The crowded hallway was his high school. The cramped room was the school psychologist's office, and the woman with the square-rimmed glasses was the same woman sitting on a rock in between the twins and Sein, thin wire glasses replacing her designer ones and her always-down hair, plaited.
Dr. Hisami.
Koushiro was throbbing. The blood was rushing to his head too fast and his head felt like the hull of the Titanic must have felt moments before falling beneath the Atlantic's surface. His hands were twitching and there was a definite urge to pass out. Where was he? Where were his parents? How did he get here?
"Izzy?"
Then he remembered her. His hands weren't just shaky now, they were sweaty too.
"A-Amy?"
It was her. The girl Koushiro had begged Yamato to talk to for him, the girl that he stared at for the seventy minutes in each of the two classes that she shared with him; hoping that his History teacher with teeth like they hadn't been brushed since the textbook was written or his overweight Math teacher would, for some ridiculous reason, pair them together. She looked like Snow White, shoulder length ebony hair, cream skin and delicately blushed cheeks. She looked just like she always did, replacing the hair-bands and school uniform with the cloak and some sort of long dress. But it was Amy. No accent, just the same voice he listened to answer all the questions in History class.
And then he felt ridiculously creepy.
"Since when do you call me Amy?" she asked, a teasing smile forming itself on her lips.
Koushiro folded his arms to stop his shaking hands. "Yesterday." He said bluntly, sounding more like a primitive caveman than the certifiable genius Sein claimed him to be.
Her words, still light and playful, questioned him, "Koushiro," she was worried. "We haven't seen each other in four years."
No, he saw her yesterday. She had dropped her pencil and he had dashed halfway across the room to grab it and give it back to her. He'd even managed saying her name to get her attention. She had replied with a simple thank-you, but even that sounded prettier when she said it.
"F-four?"
Amy nodded. "And you always called me Amunet. Never Amy, no matter how much I insisted. No one even calls me Amy anymore. You're not as talkative as I remember. And you never wrote me back."
Sein, seemingly enjoying his Frizzy getting told off by a beautiful girl grinned. "How do you know him, Amunet?"
Amy looked at Koushiro expectantly, as if waiting for him to quip up and tell the story. Somehow Koushiro didn't think his recollection would be the same as hers.
Disappointed, Amy continued, "We were the top in our class. Skipped ahead, two years. But after final year, I wanted to go and study Orendian Mythology so I moved to Eutalia to live with my sister and continue learning, and Izzy was accepted to apprentice with Professor Nettez,-"
"My old friend." Sein interrupted.
"And I haven't heard from him since." Amy finished, staring straight at Koushiro. Through the single year Koushiro had known Amy, the new student at their school, he hadn't seen this emotion. It was a mix of regret and grieving, with a dash of contempt.
As much as he wanted to believe this was Amy, the Amy he sat behind and memorized the way she raised her hand, how she paused before answering questions in class, how she signed her name with a heart for an 'M', this was not her. This was Amunet.
But, God, she was just like Amy.