image [https://imgur.com/iCMC25F.jpg]

Our battle against the monsters continued. The longer it went on, the more I got the hang of actually throwing punches.

“Got another one!” I shouted as a Lizzarat scurried toward me.

I gave it a good knock between the eyes, sending it into a tree.

“On it!” Indena jumped in and blasted it with fire.

BOOM!

It was down!

And with that, the nest was cleared! Underneath a pile of twigs and dried up leaves were the fabled eggs we were hunting for. They were surprisingly chicken sized.

“Well, these should work,” Indena nodded, putting a few into a bag.

“Now we need milk.”

That weirdly proved to be a little more of a challenge than the eggs. We had to chase down a goat.

“Baaagh!” The goat uttered as it literally defied physics and scaled a vertical wall of rock.

“What the hey?!” I turned to Indena. “Did you know they could do that?”

“Hah!” she laughed and cheered for the climbing creature. “Little dude’s crazy…”

Needless to say, it was more trouble than it was worth to catch him...or actually, catch her. This was a girl goat.

Since there were two of us, we found a nice spot to corner her and held her down! She was a fighter, but we got that milk and set her free.

Now that we had everything, we started heading back to prepare our breakfast.

Along the return trip, we noticed it got a lot colder.

Indena was suspiciously quiet. Every few moments she'd take a deep breath, tricking me into thinking she was about to say something.

After three times, I decided to speak first.

"Something on your mind?"

Her eyes were glowing a warm orange when they just barely glanced at me. Under her jacket I could see her tattoos also glowing. She was noticeably warmer too.

Along with the wind, she turned her face away.

“Y…you don’t think it’s going to snow, do you?” Indena asked with a stutter in her voice.

With how cold it was getting and the overcast, I’m surprised it wasn’t already snowing. I think I preferred that over the rain anyways. Snow is more fun.

“It might,” I replied. “If it does, you wanna make snow angels?”

Her face cringed, then she turned away to hide her expression.

“W-who’d want to do something s-stupid like that?”

I expected her to say something snippy, but her tone was much less aggressive. She sounded a bit bothered.

“Something wrong?” I asked, hoping to investigate a little further into her weirdness.

“No,” she claimed. “Hey, you’ve got wings, right? Why’d you not use them to catch up to the goat?”

That’s right, she did see my wings when I was intimidating the wolves.

“I can’t fly yet,” I answered. “I’m still learning.”

“What kinda’ angel can’t fly?” she barked. “Ahh…whatever. Guess you are like…what, four years old?”

Did I really look that small to her? Four year old's are like babies. I’m much bigger than a baby!

“I’m seven.”

“Sure you are.”

~☆☆☆~

A cool wind brushed across the trees. The forest fell silent as it passed.

Everything around us felt so still, like all the life we’d heard this morning was gone. No birds, no monsters, nothing.

Indena’s teeth chattered a little. “Damn…how far did we go out?”

I was wondering that too. I know chasing after the goat took some effort, but I was sure we hadn’t moved that far away.

My map was acting a little glitchy, but with some calibration tests, I got it functioning properly. The house was about half a kilometer away.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

By the time we got back home, or what we were calling, ‘Home Base,’ it was already well into the day. Indena was quick to head inside and light the fireplace up, then we both headed into the kitchen to mix all our ingredients together.

Problem was…neither of us knew what we were doing.

What we ended up with was some sort of strange soupy substance with a pretty diverse range of colours. I don’t know how this mixture turned green and purple, but something was very wrong with it.

“Uh…” Indena poked at the batter, causing a bubble to pop out of it. “Christ, I think we’ve made new life…”

My scanners didn’t find anything living in it, but all the bubbles and movements made me think something was swimming in there…

Rather than risk eating this amino acid soup, she poured it down the drain and started over.

“Let me try again here…” she picked up the pan and gathered up the rest of our materials. “Sorry you haven’t eaten anything yet, but go mess around while I get this figured out.”

I don’t know if I trusted her cooking skills…but if she had the same mindset as she did when training, she might come up with something really good.

~☆☆☆~

For the sake of giving her space, I decided to explore the house a little bit. It wasn’t big, but there were plenty of rooms to check out. Only issue was getting the doors unlocked.

I searched around for keys to unlock them. Nothing at first, but I did find two Pier tokens under the couch cushions. Now I have three of them to my name.

Eventually I found an unlocked door that connected with the front room. It led out to a garage with an old car in it. Off to the side were some keys on hooks.

“I wonder if those unlock any doors.”

One of those pairs obviously went to the car, but there were smaller ones that made me curious to test.

I brought them back inside and fiddled around with a few of the locks upstairs. There were about ten keys here, so I had to do a lot of trial and error to see which door they’d open.

CLICK!

At last, one worked. It was a little room with lots of wires coiled up around spools, and some magic crystals were slowly hovering around some sort of machine.

With a scan I discovered this was an old mana generator used to create power.

It was in bad condition, but I think with a little tinkering I could get it to work. Honestly, all it needed was a mana crystal as a catalyst.

Maybe one of the other rooms had a crystal? These things are usually used as batteries.

I went back into the hall to check another room. While I was flipping through the keys to try and pick the right one, I accidently dropped them right into a crack in the floor.

Darn, that crack ran pretty deep in. It was too far down to pinch my fingers in.

One option I had was to magnetize my hand and poke in my finger, but the keys weren’t magnetic, so that didn’t work.

Hmm…this was troubling.

Samael was restless on my head. Then he slithered out of my hair and into the hole, grabbing the keys in his jaw and coming back out.

“Hey, nice!” I cheered, accepting the keys from him. “When we get back home, you’re getting a nice juicy egg for that one.”

“Sssss…”

The room I’d been trying to get in was a bedroom, probably for children. I saw two beds and a night stand with a lamp on it.

The lamp turned on by itself.

“Yeep!” I shrieked, skipping back into the hallway.

The lamp turned off once I was out of the room. It was motion activated. I cautiously tiptoed into the room when I realized.

There was so much dust in here, especially over the beds. It was ash, like after a fire or something. What was up with that?

Come to think of it, this was the same ash we’d seen in that broken down car too. That couldn’t be a coincidence, right?

Besides that, the thing I was really after was the thing powering the lamp.

Lucky me, it was a mana crystal! And it was in good condition too, so this would probably work perfectly in the generator.

I plugged the crystal into the generator. Suddenly lights radiated out of the machine and the crystals hovering around spun faster. The more they spun, the more electricity was generated.

The hallway brightened with light from bulbs placed in the ceiling. Static from a radio startled me as it started on in another room. A warm humming sound filled the walls as the air ducts pumped warm air through the home.

“Shrimp!” Indena shouted from downstairs. “That you?”

“Yeah! I got the power back on!” I shouted back to her.

“How the hell did you do that…?” she said quietly to herself, but I could still hear her. “Good work! Don’t blow up the house. Got me?”

I wouldn’t blow up the house. This generator was old and pretty worn out, but not faulty.

CLICK!

Creee….

A sound in the hallway drew my attention. I ran out to see a door at the very end was unlocked and open.

“I didn’t notice a door there.” There wasn’t even a knob. It was so hidden.

Creeeek… the door went as I peeked inside.

Book shelves lined the walls. Adjacent to the door was a desk filled with papers and writing utensils. Under all that mess of scraps was a book.

I sat down at the desk and started flipping through the pages.

The name written here was Bartholomew Engels Charlton III. Fancy. The date of the book was 396/10/25.

Considering the current year was 516 ED…

“Oh my gosh! This book is over 100 years old!”

A book like this needed very special care or it might fall apart. Luckily my skin didn’t make any oils, so nothing to worry about there.

The book was a hand written almanac. It had details on the seasons and other info for the valley. Unfortunately a lot of the pages had been torn out or scribbled over.

Some of the scribbles almost looked like blobs, or words. I could make out a few repeating patterns…

“Beware…the harbinger sirens…?” my eyes focused as hard as they could. “Beware…the reaper?”

KNOCK KNOCK!

“Gah!” I panicked, quickly shutting the book and nearly falling out of my seat.

“Easy…” Indena walked in. “You’ve been busy up here.”

My heart was pulsing with light so fast. This place really kept me on edge.

“Sorry,” I took a breath. “I just…well…”

I requested she take a look at the book, but she couldn’t make much sense of it either.

“We can talk it over downstairs. Let’s get you some food, alright?” she gestured for me to follow her.

“Yeah…” I grabbed the book and took it downstairs with me.