AN: I had so much fun writing this one. Set up is important and all, but chapters with actual plot are just so much fun to write. Especially when the plot's been waiting to happen for so long. Enjoy!

"You're sure she's okay?" Gabe asked.

"Yes. Now get back to work." Nadia was getting annoyed. The kids had been in the library for ten minutes, and already had asked about Michaela seventeen times. She had counted.

A minute or two went by in silence. Then Ray said, "But what if—"

Nadia was done. "If you're this worried, go see her yourself, but please stop asking!"

The kids went silent. "Can we?" Allie asked.

"Can you what?"

"Go visit her?"

Nadia sighed. They really should be working, and Michaela really needed rest... but then again, maybe seeing them would lift her spirits. It could be exactly what was needed to raise her out of the gloomy silence she'd been in since the incident with the flute. "She's in the room on the left of the infirmary. Knock before you go in, and if she asks or seems like she wants you to leave, leave."

The kids quickly put away their tablets and ran for the door. "And for goodness sakes, try to cheer her up!" Nadia shouted after them. She really needed her assistant back.

Allie knocked on the door, and Michaela called for them to come in. The room wasn't exactly a hospital room, but it resembled one. A high bed was directly in front of the door, and there were a few machines around, though none of them were on. Michaela was sitting on the bed, on top of the covers, a very worn book in her lap. Ray, Gabe, and Allie pulled chairs up to one side of the bed. Ray was surprised at how many books and personal items there were—it seemed like someone had stayed here for a very long time at one point.

The kids talked for a while, but it wasn't like their usual conversations. Michaela didn't make any bad jokes or sarcastic comments, and the younger kids were all trying too hard not to bother her. Still, Michaela seemed content to hear the others complain about school and siblings and parents, and after a while they fell into a pleasant pattern of talking and laughing and sitting in comfortable silence. Eventually Ray asked about the personal items in the room. It turned out that Michaela had recovered from her weeks in the Nature realm here, and it had become her personal space in the temple.

After almost an hour of just sitting and talking, someone knocked on the door, and Michaela called them in. Gracie, her foster mother, came in carrying a stack of notebooks.

"Gracie…." Michaela groaned.

"This will help."

"It will not."

"If you do it properly, it will."

"I can't do it properly."

"And why not?"

"You know why not."

"I used to, but not since you've remembered."

"That hasn't changed anything."

"Of course it has! Have you seen yourself?" Silence struck the room, making Ray, Allie, and Gabe extremely uncomfortable. "We need to do something. You can't keep going like this." Michaela nodded, but still refused the notebooks.

"Can I have a moment? Or, you know, a few?" she asked. Mumbling of-courses, the kids left. Gracie was the last out.

"Try and get home tonight, okay?"

"Yeah."

Gracie closed the door after herself.

"What's with the notebooks?" Gabe asked her.

She sighed. "It's a technique I use with some of my patients. Writing down something that happened can make it seem more real. I was hoping it might pull Michaela out of her mood."

"Well that didn't work." Allie said.

Gracie smiled. "You kids did, though."

"Us?"

"Michaela's been sitting in that room since Saturday. She's barely spoken, hasn't smiled at all. You kids go in and next thing I know she's being sarcastic again. That's all the proof I need to know she's on the mend." She gave them another smile and left, notebooks in tow.

Chavez was unlike the other Masters. He was very open to new techniques, which had made it easy for the kids to convince him going out to the park instead of training indoors was a good idea.

Ray and Allie were mock-duelling, which basically involved them flailing around and looking ridiculous while Chavez called out what had happened and tried (and failed) not to laugh. Gabe had a stack of tablets to read, though he was more focused on the "duel" than his work.

Michaela had been a bit off for the past few days, but she had dropped her silence and gone back to training, so everyone let the weirdness go unquestioned. But other than what she first told Nadia, she still hadn't said anything about what she had remembered.

After a while, their "training" fell apart a little. Michaela was completely zoned out. Gabe had been staring at the same spot on a tablet for five minutes. Chavez had fallen asleep against a tree, and Allie and Ray were now running aimlessly around the park, pretending to summon increasingly outlandish creatures as they went.

That was, of course, the very moment everything went to hell. A familiar, resounding tearing sound carried through the park, and a veil breach from the nature civilization opened up right in front of Ray and Allie. The sound woke Chavez and tore Gabe away from his tablet, but they were half way across the park by the time Michaela realized what was happening.

The breach had been caused by a Rumbling Terrasour, but they had caught it early enough to keep it from getting out of hand. Or so they thought.

Really, the Terrasour wasn't the problem. The problem was that when Ray summoned a three-eyed dragonfly to help, it wasn't exactly a three-eyed dragonfly. Its third eye was gone, the area where it should have been scarred and red.

"Master Chavez!" Ray yelled as soon as he saw the injured creature.

"In a minute, Ray!" Chavez was busy trying to force the Terrasour through the veil. Gilaflame and Squeaky moved quickly, and by the time Michaela had reached them, they had gotten rid of the creature and the breach had been closed.

Gabe, Allie, Michaela, and Master Chavez ran over to Ray and the dragonfly.

"What happened to it?" Allie asked quietly.

"Whatever it was, it can't be good."

"We need to get back to the temple," Chavez said. "Send the creature back. It will heal in the Kaiju realm."

Ray moved to dismiss the creature, but Michaela stopped him. "We can't just send it back!" she cried.

"Why not?"

"When a creature is banished, it appears exactly where it was when it was summoned. The eye wounds aren't fresh, but some of those other cuts are. Whatever hurt this dragonfly is probably just waiting for it to come back so it can do something worse. And anything that can cut through a three-eyed dragonfly's shell is really powerful. We should try to find out what it is."

Everyone stared at her for a moment. None of them had thought the issue that far through, but what she said made sense. A lot of sense. The kids turned to Chavez.

"Michaela, go back to the temple. Tell them what has happened. We'll need someone waiting here with a creature so we can get back."

"We're going?" Ray asked, excited.

Chavez nodded. "We have to." He added under his breath, "I am going to get in so much trouble for this."

Chavez and Allie banished their creatures, and the Master placed his hand on the dragonfly. Ray grabbed his arm, and Allie his. Just as Gabe was about to grab on, Michaela stopped him. "Call me," she said. "When you get there, call me, tell me where you are. That way we can find you if we need to." Gabe nodded and took Allie's hand, and Ray dismissed the creature, taking them all away in a flash of green.

"Where are we?" Ray asked, but no one had an answer for him.

They had expected the Nature realm, or possibly Fire, but instead they were standing in a cage within an enormous metal-walled room.

Gabe quickly texted Michaela with a description of their location, not wanting to risk being heard talking to her. She replied asking him to send her more info later if he could. Meanwhile, Master Chavez was busy picking the lock on the cage door. He was fast, and within a minute they were all standing out in the hall. They hated to leave the dragonfly behind, but it couldn't fly, so there was no way it could keep it with them.

Moving down the hall, they came across a huge metal door. Allie found a key pad to the side, and Gabe summoned Gargle to hack into it. The door opened to reveal a very short hallway with a smaller door on the other side. Gargle again hacked the key pad and they went through the door.

They found themselves in another large room with metal walls, but this one was different. There was more light, and the roof, while still high, was not as extraordinarily so. A stair case leading down to a raised walkway took up one wall, and there was an odd raised circular platform about a yard across on the far side of the room, but other than that, it was empty.

"Be very quiet," Chavez muttered. While the others explored the room, Gabe took a picture of it on his phone and sent it to Michaela. He didn't recognize anything, but it was possible one of the Masters would.

Suddenly, all four of them heard the distinctive clack of nice shoes on metal. They looked up at the stairs to see someone descending. All of them were too scared to move, though Master Chavez raised his gauntlet.

Finally, after an eternity of waiting, the person coming down the stairs became visible. It was the last person any of them wanted to see.

It was the Choten.

"Ah," he said, leaning against the rail of the walkway. "I see you've managed to snake your way in here. No matter." He tapped a button on his tech gauntlet. "You won't be staying long."

The door behind them burst open, and ten men in Choten uniforms ran in and summoned their creatures. Chavez, Allie, and Ray did the same.

And so the battle began.

The Choten was pleased. He didn't know how the intruders had gotten in, but already he had learned not to underestimate those three children. And now he not only had them and their creatures as hostages, he also had a Master. Sure, he was no Jaha or Brightmore, but he would be a very useful pawn nonetheless. Actually, if he remembered right, this particular Master had had a crush on Nadia when they were acolytes…. That could be used to his advantage.

He had moved to the dais once the battle started; it gave him extra height to see what was happening without making him an easy target. He didn't bother summoning his own creature. His minions might be idiots, but they were well trained, and three acolytes and a Master were no match for ten duellists.

He stood there on his pedestal, watching the conflict with a slight smile. Ah, the sounds of battle! He had missed those sounds, always in a laboratory and never doing the field work anymore. It reminded him of simpler times, before he could see the errors of the Duel Masters….

"August!" The Choten turned just in time to catch a small object flying toward him. It was a leather bracelet with a snap for a clasp, with a name engraved on one side. He looked up to see a tall girl with pretty brown hair he had never expected to see again.

"Michaela," he said. He had glimpsed her in the Water realm, but it had only been a moment, and right after he had knocked his head and blacked out. He had since assumed it to have been a cruel dream.

"How could you do that?" She was screaming at him, but only he could hear her over the sounds of battle. "How could you just… throw me out? I needed you! You were the only person I had, the only person I knew! How could you—"

"Michaela, let me explain—"

"You don't get to explain!" she yelled back. He noticed she was breathing heavy, either from anger or fighting back tears, he wasn't sure. "Not after that. You don't get to explain."

They stood there, not speaking, just staring at each other, and the Choten was reminded vividly of the time he went out to capture a creature without telling her he was leaving. She had looked at him in just the same way, that look that said so completely "this is your fault and you're going to suffer the consequences."

"I didn't order that." He finally said.

"Like hell." Her voice was surprisingly calm.

"I didn't! I didn't even know it had happened until it was too late to save you."

"But it wasn't too late, was it? Here I am, and you never even looked for me!" The calm left her voice as quickly as it had appeared.

"You didn't have a chance! You should have drowned; I didn't find out until half an hour after."

"No. You knew sooner, you knew everything that happened on that ship! And why would they have done that without an order? No one ever did anything without an order!"

"They were scared! They panicked!"

"Scared of what?! A little girl? I didn't have a gauntlet, I didn't even know creatures existed!"

"You had summoned a creature we couldn't control. The crew panicked. They thought that if they got rid of the person who had summoned it, the creature would leave us alone."

"So they threw someone overboard? An eleven year-old?"

"Yes."

"And even when you found out I was alive, you didn't come to get me, did you? You saw me in the Water realm, I know you did!"

"Even if I had believed I actually saw you, how could I have come for you? You didn't recognize me, and if you didn't remember me there was no way you'd trust me." There was a moment of silence between them, though the sounds of the battle continued. Finally, the Choten spoke. "Can you forgive me?"

"No." Michaela said. She didn't even take a moment to think about it.

There was a sudden crash and an accompanying roar from the other side of the room, and Michaela began the kata to summon Athena. But she never finished it. She saw, out of the corner of her eye, the Choten go through a kata. She could tell he had shouted something, but couldn't hear it over the sounds of battle.

Just before she could summon her creature, she felt an immense weight wrap around her arms and legs. She fell to the ground, but the weight kept pulling. It seemed to be trying to pull her through the floor.

Unable to move or even yell, she strained to breathe. Then, for half a moment, she thought she felt the weight give. She yanked in a deep breath, preparing to scream for help, and choked.

The air was not air anymore.

And the sounds of battle were gone.