They said their goodbyes and Lara teleported them away from Bled. Parker looked around and saw yet another mountain and a bunch of trees. The mountain towered overhead as they stood at its base.

As Parker looked up, he felt a familiar feeling from within himself. “Is this—?

“Yes, we’re back at the base of Lancastre’s mountain.”

“Why?” Parker couldn’t believe he was asking that question, but he had had a lot of fun on their little teleporting trip.

Lara looked at him for a long minute. “You might be right.”

Parker could tell that was the last thing she ever wanted to say in this moment. “What might I be right about?” he asked with an air of confidence behind his voice that hadn’t been present in a long time.

“Not all of them are awful,” she pouted as she admitted. “I wasn’t convinced at first, but once everyone had gathered around and it didn’t seem like anyone was running off in a fit of panic and fear, I decided that maybe it’s in the way it’s presented.”

“Good!” Parker shouted. It echoed throughout the trees and Parker heard a rumbling coming from his right. He remembered back to the giant rock monster that had attacked them before. “We need to get out of here!”

“Why?” she asked. This time, she felt weird asking. She didn’t want to admit it, but she was starting to actually like Parker instead of wanting to just use him.

After she finished asking her short question, the rock beast, Parker assumed it was the same one, burst through an opening in the trees. He took several steps back and attempted to hide behind Lara without her noticing what he was doing.

“Oh… this is why we should leave?” she asked him.

“Uh-huh…” Parker said in a shaky voice.

“Petra Ingens are nothing to be afraid of. They’re like giant teddy bears if you know what you’re doing. Heck this little guys only about two and a half meters, he’s still a little guy.”

Parker looked at her like she was crazy. “Little guy? He’s over six feet tall!”

“Well, I mean—” she started to explain but a rock the size of Parker’s bed almost smooshed them to the ground. “All right—”

The Petra Ingen froze, mid-throw and Lara walked up to it. She levitated herself up, so she was at eye level and whispered something to it. Parker couldn’t see it give any type of reaction or response, but he couldn’t imagine what she was saying could be anything good.

Lara unfroze time and the monster walked away in the opposite direction without giving them even the slightest of glances. Parker’s jaw dropped open as he watched it lumber off into the trees where it had come from. He closed his mouth when Lara returned to him.

“Teach me that,” he begged. “Teleporting is cool, but I want to just convince monsters to go away with talking. That’s so much easier.”

“Teleporting is what I need you to learn, not convincing baby creatures to leave you alone.” Lara paused for a moment and started talking again. “I will go with your plan— “

Parker jumped with joy. “You will?”

“On one condition,” she began. “You still have to train with me on the off chance that we can’t stop him. I will use my plan as a last-ditch effort to keep him from my daughter.”

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“Thank you,” Parker responded. He couldn’t believe how well the two of them were getting along now. It was definitely something he never expected to happen, not in his lifetime.

“Now go, you have friends you need to explain things to because it will affect them in the end as well.”

Parker started to run up the path to the top of the mountain. He ran off so quickly he didn’t get a chance to see Lara watch him run away with a motherly smile on her face.

——

The look on his friend’s faces when he walked into The Regale was priceless, but he supposed that they had a right to look worried. They had to have assumed that Lara had taken him at that point, right? He can’t teleport on his own yet and they knew that.

Alexis stood up out of her seat as everyone in the dining hall turned their head toward Parker. “Where were you?” She was practically in tears as she ran forward to hug him.

Master Sora approached quickly and asked the two of them to join him in the classroom across the hall. Everyone followed them with piercing gazes. When they walked through the entryway of the dining hall, Caleb yelled from behind them to wait for him. “Lara took me—“Parker began to say.

“We know,” Alexis interrupted.

“You do?” Parker asked in a sheepish, confused voice.

Master Sora stepped between the two of them, facing Parker. “What did she want you for?”

Parker tried to look past the master to see his friends’ reactions. What had happened? “She wanted to train me so that I could help her create her new world.”

“That’s it?” the master asked. “Nothing else? What took so long then?”

“So long? I wasn’t gone even a day,” Parker defended as if going missing from the middle of class for a full day wasn’t a bad thing.

“You’ve been gone since yesterday,” Alexis said, clearly still a little shaken up by his absence.

Parker thought about that for a moment, remembering that in both Lovund and Bled it was daylight, but they had traveled around the world, so it was very possible that it had been longer than what it seemed. They had just been so busy doing everything that Parker hadn’t noticed being tired or anything.

“Well,” the master began in a snide voice. “In the day you’ve been gone, Hailee was kidnapped.”

The room went silent. Parker could hear the heartbeats of everyone in the room, if he wasn’t mistaken, he thought he could hear some from the dining hall as well.

“Wha—”

“Did you agree to let her train you?” Alexis asked.

“Yeah…” Parker answered without thinking about it.

Alexis’s shoulders shot back, and she looked disgusted. “You what?”

“Wait—” Parker tried to defend himself, but Alexis stormed out of the room before he could say anything. He watched Caleb follow her out of the room without uttering a word to him.

Master Sora reached his hand out and grabbed Parker by the shoulder. “They’ll be okay. They don’t fully understand.”

Parker turned and looked at the master confused. “What do you mean?”

“They believe that Lara took her—”

“But she didn’t!” Parker blurted. He couldn’t believe that he was defending Lara now. How could things have changed so much in such a little amount of time?

Master Sora closed his eyes and nodded slowly. “We know that. We saw Warwick take her and disappear through the floor.” Master Sora’s head dropped, and Parker thought he heard him sniffle. “But there was nothing the three of us could have done to stop him. He had us.”

“Do we know where she is?” Parker asked pleadingly, feeling like it was all his fault.

“We were hoping you’d be able to tell us but clearly you two didn’t run into them,” Master Sora explained. “Which in all honesty, is probably a good thing. I don’t imagine that Lara will take too kindly to the fact that Warwick has abducted her.”

Parker put out his hand and caused the air to circulate around his body; one of the few things that still put him at ease. “That’s what I was about to explain when Alexis yelled at me. I convinced Lara not to create her world and just stop Master Terra instead.”

“How did you manage that?” the master asked as he took a seat at a nearby desk.

“I showed her that not all humans were prejudice against Imperials, it was just how you presented it to them.”

Master Sora looked at him quizzically. “Again, how did you manage that?”

Parker explained everything that happened in Lovund when Lara tried to use her Imperial versus when he used his Imperials in Bled. The master listened carefully as Parker walked him through everything that had happened. He nodded his head at all the right times and Parker felt like Master Sora definitely had his back in deciding that he could train with her.

“If she’s not making her new world, why does she need to train you?”

Parker sat down in the desk across from Master Sora. “She said she wanted it just in case that we aren’t able to stop Master Terra. It’s now an emergency back burner plan instead of plan number one.”

Master Sora stood back up and Parker followed suit very quickly. “Thank you,” the master said as he swiftly left the room.”

Parker watched him turn the corner and disappear. Had he done the right thing in saying he’d let Lara train him? What about now that Hailee was taken? Would she still be able to just focus on stopping Master Terra?