Nadi was upset. Why? She had no idea. Instead of dwelling on her emotions, Nadi went to the main meet up location.Thankfully, they had planned out their paths in advance and she knew her group would be heading east from the meeting spot.
Nadi arrived at her destination only to see Alice there, wandering around the area with a strange book in hand. She decided to continue watching Alice. After ten minutes watching Alice stalk the grass and look at her book, Nadi felt strange. The strange feeling was short lived however, and with how brief it was Nadi thought she must have been imagining it, but Alice looked slightly shaken as well. In Nadi’s mind, this was just another reason not to trust Alice.
A few moments later, the book in Alice’s hands vanished, replaced by a clear ball. Alice stared at the clear ball for a few moments before jumping in the air and shouting something in a language Nadi hadn’t heard before. She then headed exactly the way Nadi’s group had travelled.
Alice’s behaviour was clearly suspicious. Nadi was forced to wonder why no one else seemed to see what she did. Alice was entirely untrustworthy! She was about to follow Alice from the shadows to see what she was up to, when she began to doubt herself. She seemed to be the only person who distrusted Alice, which either meant she was the only sane and rational person she knew, which Nadi knew to be outright false. Or, she was simply imagining problems that didn’t exist.
Thinking back on it, Nadi realized she had only started doubting Alice after she found out what she was. Which only happened after she had lost to Alice. Do I really care about losing this much? Nadi ignored the thought that this distrust was caused by jealousy or a wounded pride. The only other option was that that Nadi didn’t like Alice because of what she was. This thought made Nadi sick. After having almost everyone she knew killed just because they were goblins, the thought that she could be the same as those genocidal giants was sickening. Nadi decided she would get back to the cause of her distrust later. For now, she would try to ignore the feelings she had and get to know Alice better. Alice had shown nothing but good will after all.
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Alice was walking along while making sure to keep an eye out for traces of goblin. As Alice made her journey, the forest get denser and cooler, while the light faded until Alice was strugling to see anything over a meter ahead of her. Alice heard a strange rustling in the trees as she felt a chill drip down her spine. Only now did she notice that all the wildlife had vanished. The forest was now eerily silent and a sense of foreboding weighed heavily on her.
Alice feared she may have gotten lost. This was an area she had never been in, and with only a direction to follow she was almost certainly lost. Before she could start panicking though, Alice thought back to her dad’s lessons. Unfortunately, most of his advice was based around how not to get lost in the first place. The advice applicable to the situation was: If you remember the direction you came from, backtrack to a point you remember the way from. If you don’t remember that, stay calm and stay put. Try to find yourself food, water and shelter while making some kind of signal for others to find you with.
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While Alice had forgotten which way the meeting spot was, she knew the village was somewhere to the south-west. She wasn’t too confident she was right though so Alice tried climbing a tree so she could hopefully find her bearings. When Alice got to the top of the tree, she had a couple of scratches and scrapes on her, she also couldn’t find anything that looked like a landmark. There were a few areas that looked like they lacked trees, but Alice wasn’t high enough to see whether they were the village or lake or literally anything else. Alice wasn’t looking forward to it but she would have to stay here until help came.
Alice started by making a signal fire. She started off by looking for dry grass or tinder she could use to start the fire, but everything was green and moist. That would make things simultaneously harder and simpler at the same time. She got the driest kindling she could find, as well as the greenest wood and twigs she could get. This took a bit longer than she thought it would since she had to cut down the trees with a rock she had shaped with her magic. The next step was to start a fire with the kindling she had on hand. Once the kindling had caught, she placed the wet twigs over the fire while placing the logs onto of that. She was very careful to avoid suffocating the fire. Hopefully she had done it right and the green tinder would make a thick black smoke that would be clearly visible in the daylight. The smoke would be thickest at the beginning of the fire’s lifespan so she would have to replace the moist logs often. Alice decided to practice her earth spear to pass the time.
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Alice was already gone when Nadi was done thinking of stalking her. Nadi walked to where her group should have been, hoping to find Alice on the way but even when Nadi eventually got to the instructor and her fellow student she couldn’t find Alice anywhere. Nadi was a bit worried but decided she would start looking for her if she didn’t arrive in an hour.
It had been half an hour and Nadi could smell smoke. Normally, the protocol for a forest fire was to put it out if possible and alert the village if it was too big. Nadi scaled a tree with practiced ease and let out a sigh of relief when she saw how close the fire was, it was also small enough that it could probably be stomped out with some effort. The only issue was that the fire was in an area no one was allowed into, the chief had banned three such areas of forest for an unknown reason and they were not to enter except for the direst of circumstance. Nadi told the other two members of her party what she had seen and they agreed that Nadi would go put out the fire while the other two went to report the circumstances.