With little effort I quickly discovered that the crystal girl didn’t particularly like me. As we walked down the now sunny promenade it was clear to see that she had only one objective; finish the job. She didn’t want to make friends no matter how much I tried to talk. “S-so…” I said awkwardly after about ten minutes of courage conjuring, “What do you think happened back there?” She didn’t reply and seemed to speed up, widening her strides. For such a small girl she moved very quickly. I understood why the Master had sent both of us, considering we were both as wet nosed as each other, but she could’ve at least sent that Melody girl to lighten the mood a bit. To be honest it would’ve taken a lot more than that to lighten the mood following the blond boy’s exit and the events afterwards. The atmosphere had turned tense and though the Master had tried her best to cheer everyone up even her efforts were in vain. She attempted to move past the event but everything seemed awkward, as if she wasn’t used to being the centre of attention. “So you two want to join us?” She said with false glee, “That’s awesome!” She leapt off her makeshift chair in excitement before quickly readjusting herself, regaining her composure. “Ahem. Well with the power invested in me by… me… I hereby pronounce you…” She lifted her branch over my head. I closed my eyes, bracing for whatever crazy magic she was about to unleash. Donk. The branch had been brought down with a surprising amount of force, causing me to clutch my head in pain. I stared up at the girl who was clearly stifling a laugh. “Trainees.” A smirk emerged onto her face but vanished just as quickly as she realised that she had actually caused some pain. Pulling her pointed black hat over her face, she proceeded to murmur what I guessed were apologies but they were difficult to make out. She spun towards a man stood in the corner of the room, covered head to two in shining silver armour, and began shouting at him aggressively. “AC please help I don’t know what I’m doing I suck at this I don’t know why I took the job from that crazy buffoon!”
"This lady is nuts! Does she ever slow down?" I thought. I turned to Loki, silently pleading for help, but from his reaction I could tell that this was completely normal for their all powerful Master. I turned back to face the girl but was instead met with the head of her staff, the groves in the wood appearing like streets in a mini metropolis. I stepped back in an attempt to avoid another smack but the Master’s face was no longer showing amusement or grief. No, the Master was smiling, her green eyes wide and glistening. “I’m sorry kid, what’s your name?” I heard a loud crash coming from behind me as if someone had just remembered something they should’ve asked immediately and were punishing themselves for forgetting. I didn’t turn to look. Sheepishly, I hung my head low and stared at the ground. “Asura.” I mumbled unsure if anyone had heard me.
“Well Asura,” Slowly I lifted my head to face the woman again, “I’m the master of this order Master Thorne, but you don’t have to be that formal with me.” She wiggled the staff in my face, clearly in a much calmer mood than she was a moment ago. “Grab it.” I reached out for the staff, my fingers only a hair away from its tip, before remembering the advice Loki had given. Quickly, I retracted my hand and grabbed it with my other behind my back and again hung my head. Hopefully I had passed this so called test I had been warned about. “Uh…what are you..” Looking back at their Master revealed all I needed to know. Her face was red with embarrassment and her eyes were moving erratically, unsure where to look. Her mouth hung open in a confused and slightly shocked manor though there were still hints of a smile, now nervous instead of calming. Another sound came from behind me, as if someone was giggling under their breath. Making a mental note to never take anything the damned barman says at face value again I grabbed the end of the staff. Suddenly a white light enveloped the staff and the Master had her eyes shut, her mouth moving as if she was murmuring something to herself. An enchantment of some sort? I wasn’t sure, I had never heard anything like it before. Never except from one time. The white light began to expand making its way up the Master’s arm and eventually covering her entire body. Panicked, I looked around. No one seemed to be reacting strangely to this so I tried my best to do the same. Looking down at my own hand I saw that I too was about to become engulfed. Taking a cue from the woman across from me I shut my eyes. Soon the feeling of the coarse wood vanished and was replaced by a warm sensation, like holding your hands near a fire. We regularly did that back home. Living in a desert meant that though the days were scorching the nights were just as freezing. I cautiously opened my eyes and was taken aback. I was no longer sitting in the quaint little office but was instead back in my home town - well the outskirts anyway - my hand out stretched towards the campfire in front of me. It was dark though I could make out the faint shape of what appeared to be a cave in the cliff beside me. “This place is nice.” I turned around to see Master Thorne sitting across from me, poking the fire with her staff and watching as the cinders danced across it. “Its peaceful. Isolated. I see why your people are so reclusive.”
“What did you do?” I asked her, lowering my hand and resting it on the warm desert sands.
“Oh you don’t know? Figures. I’ve read about the Deadlanders they don’t tend to dabble with magic.” She was still staring at the fire, her head resting on her knees, her other hand acting as a support for the rest of her body pressing hard into the sand. “You much prefer the old ways. If you have to know it was a simple detection spell.”
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“Detection? For what?”
“Your magic power.” She looked up and smiled her original smile, eyes shut and toothless. “Gauging your potential. Don’t worry we won’t be here long.”
I got a strange feeling in my stomach. The Deadlands was a desert so naturally everything looked similar, the same sand and dunes, but this place seemed too similar, as if I’d been to this exact spot before, which was strange. Children were rarely allowed to leave the village. “Where is here exactly?” I asked.
She had stopped poking the fire and had instead begun to draw spirals in the sand. Her pointed black hat mostly obscuring her save from her cropped purple hair. “We’re still at the office. This is just a side effect of the spell, it puts us in an environment familiar to the person it’s being used on.” She lifted her head to give another smile. “Though I can tell that you aren’t all that comfortable. Relax it’ll be over soon.” Suddenly her expression changed. Her brow lowered to create wrinkles in her otherwise flawless face. “This is new.” I turned to face what she was looking at. In the centre of the arch leading to the cave stood a figure, barely taller than a child, waving and walking forward. "It’s… not possible," I thought, "Is it really him?" The landscape around us began to crumble with boulders falling from up above and landing between the figure and I, appearing to crush him. That’s why that place had put me on edge. It was where that cursed event had happened. Master Thorne was clutching her head, writhing on the ground in pain, burying herself in the sand. I tried to run over to her but my legs wouldn’t move, just like they had back then, as if I had none. I was paralysed. She reeled back in pain as the last of the landscape vanished and we were back in the office, the Master lying in a pile of books that had previously been stacked into a tower. Everyone was frantically trying to help Master Thorne. The armour guy, AC, was holding her by her shoulders while Melody sat on her knees and fanned her fainted Master with her hands. Loki was beside them holding the staff, a massive crack having now appeared. The girl beside me seemed just as confused as I did. This clearly wasn’t supposed to happen. Suddenly, Melody shot up and marched towards me. “What the hell did you do?” She barked, reaching for her pink umbrella. I stuttered trying to think of something believable to say. What had I done? I couldn’t answer her question if even I didn’t know. “Leave him Mel.” Master Thorne was now conscious and sitting upright, with help from AC, her face as white as the sheets of paper scattered around her. “He’s clearly just… a lot stronger than I anticipated, yeah…” She said it with little conviction. As if she was trying to convince herself that this was the reason. She tried to stand up but stumbled. Both AC and Loki attempted to catch her but she brushed them off instead gesturing for her staff and using it as a cane. “Do you mind taking Asura and Miss Aurora to the job room please Melody, pick them out something easy, one – two stars maximum.” Reluctantly, Melody ushered us out of the office but not before the three remaining members had started to have a discussion. The door begun to swing shut by itself and all I could here was an unfamiliar voice, assumingly AC, saying “I’ve never seen…”
***
Melody had given us our quest but I may as well not have been there. We had walked around to the outside of the first floor towards a large bulletin board with flyers on it. There was a large hole in the centre of the first floor so you could see down onto the ground floor. Though a neat design choice, it made a awkward trip longer than it had to be as we had to walk around the outside of it, passing what felt like hundreds of identical doors until we reached the board. Melody didn’t say a word to either of us though she did interact with the crystal girl Aurora and even that was brief. She removed a flyer from the board – I saw none of the detail on it except for a large half star on the bottom left of the paper – and handed it to Aurora before heading back across the room and re-entering the office, immediately beginning to shout. Aurora had clearly taken the hint from the other members that I wasn’t exactly in people’s good books at the moment and refused to talk for the whole trip. I didn’t even know where I was going. How could everyone have gotten so mad at me over something I had no control over? More importantly, why was he there? Starting to regret joining this Order I decided I at least needed some answers, anything to clear up even a tiny amount, so I continuously pestered Aurora. “Did that happen to you?” She again didn’t react. Why would she? The answer was obvious, no it didn’t. I stepped closer to her, my strides matching hers, and asked another question. “What did it look like to you guys?” Again nothing. This was getting frustrating. I stepped in front of Aurora, blocking her path, and pleaded that she at least told me something. She looked down at her white shoes and clutched her scarf over her mouth. She struggled to find the words but eventually said; “We are here.” She pointed to an alleyway at the side of the road, placed in-between a tailor’s and a café, and began to walk in its direction. I followed her but stopped when I realised something, an answer to my own question. Something strange had happened back there, an unnatural event even in a world of magic, and it was because I did what Loki jokingly said to avoid. I grabbed the staff. I looked down at my palms. I’d grabbed it with my right hand.