Pretty woke up after some time.

Everywhere was dark and she could not see anything. She felt confused about where she was.

Then she remembered she fell down in a hole that suddenly caved in below her and then she slammed into something and passed out.

She shook off the stuff that’s covering her and by the smell, she knew it was garbage.

She checked her head and body by patting it and fortunately she could not feel any injury or pain in it. She was also not feeling dizzy.

Instinctively, she activated her ability to summon a flashlight, but then she remembered she couldn't use her ability.

She still tried to summon a flashlight but nothing appeared in her hand.

She sighed and sat there in darkness.

Now, what should she do?

After doing nothing for a minute, she decided to pat around her to look for something. She felt the ground she’s sitting on and it was wet and sticky. All around her she could feel the garbage that fell down with her.

She could not hear any sound except for her own breathing and then she wondered about the person who also fell down with her.

She activated her renisas eyes and there a few meters from her right, was a blob of white renisas resembling a person’s silhouette.

She stood up and stretched her hands above her to feel for the ceiling but there was nothing in there. With the person’s renisas as her guide, she trudged through the darkness, stumbling a few times with random objects in the floor, till she reached the person.

Just as she was about to touch the other person’s body to check on him, the renisas of the person moved and suddenly someone grabbed her hand.

She stumbled back just as the person said something in his deep voice. She could not understand what the other person was saying, but she knew the person was asking her a question.

From his voice she guessed the person might be in his thirties, he had a sound that sounded older, and definitely a male, but she could be wrong. For all she knew he could be a boy all along.

The person spoke again and she could detect the wariness from his voice. She could not understand what he was saying as she had never heard that language before and that was saying something. She was fluent in a few languages and could speak simple conversation in some. She might not be able to speak all the languages, but she could recognize the common ones or ones that she had heard before. It was not hard. Certain languages had markers in them that denoted their culture and origin.

But she could not point out the man’s language or guess what continent it might belong to. There was a chance it could be a local dialect, and god knows there’s millions of them, or it was just a language that she had never interacted with before. Like most countries of Africa, South America, Asia and Europe.

Of course, she was not a polyglot who knew every language in the world, she knew a lot more than most people but it was barely a fraction of the overall number of languages. It just meant that she was probably in a place that she had never been to, a place where she did not know the language. She did not have her phone to use for a translation and even if she had her zipping ability, it would be useless if she did know where she was. Her situation was not looking good every second that went by.

Pretty cleared her throat and replied to the man. “I’m sorry —” she stopped talking midway as she was baffled by the voice that just came out of her mouth.

She cleared her throat again and spoke, “Hello.” But there it was again, a soft and sweet sounding voice unlike her usual baritone and deep voice. Yes, baritone. She had the voice of a man but her voice right now was definitely a female.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Thinking it might be because her throat was just able to speak again, she pushed her voice’s condition in the back of her mind and continued talking.

“I’m sorry, but can you speak English? I could not understand you.” she asked the man, but against her wishes, she could not help not noticing her very different voice.

She could not ignore it. Her voice that people always mistook as a man had now turned into an unmistakable sweet sounding female voice. She did not know she could describe someone’s voice as sweet but her voice did, and it was grating on her nerves a little.

She sounded coquettish or kittenish, like those girls on social media cams asking money from their “Daddy”. That’s how she sounded.

The man did not reply to her, so she repeated her question in other languages. This time she deepened her voice even if it only changed a little.

She tried Mandarin, Nihongo. Hindi, Arabic, German and other languages she knew but she heard no reply of understanding from the man. She was in her last language, Spanish, when the man finally replied to him. To her disappointment, it was still in his language and she could hear confusion from his voice. It was not hard to guess they were not understanding each other.

She continued talking in all the dialects she could speak or the languages where she only knew a few words of, but she never elicited any reply from the man that she could understand. She gave up and thought of other ways to get out of where they were.

Then the man said something to her and in her periphery his renisas moved. She heard footsteps at the same time his renisas moved a few steps away from her and it stopped.

The man said something again. At the same time, some renisas in his right moved back and forth in a waving motion.

“What was this guy saying?” Pretty sighed in frustration.

The man then said something and because she could not understand it, she did not reply. She heard the man sighed then his whole renisas moved farther from her.

After he moved for a few meters, he stopped and shouted something to her, his voice obviously frustrated.

It did not take long for her to understand that the man was beckoning for her, and the moving renisas from his right must be his hand waving at her.

She also realized the man could navigate in the dark.

Pretty followed him without hesitation. But after a few steps, she tripped on something from the floor. She looked at the guy while getting herself upright and saw him zigzagging and jumping as he moved away.

He was walking in the dark like he could see in it. She wondered how he could do that.

The man did not stop this time and continued his way at a fast pace.

She followed quickly, afraid of being left out and losing her only source of direction. But after a few steps she tripped again. It was apparent that it was not enough for her to just follow his renisas in order to navigate the dark

Could he see that she could not see in the dark?

But then again she was not his responsibility so he was not obligated to save her.

But seeing that she stopped walking, the man stopped and shouted something at her. She had a feeling he was ordering her to follow him. He might be too dense to expect someone to easily follow him in the dark but at least he did not leave her.

She took the time he gave and then proceeded to execute the idea she had a while ago.

She let her renisas dispersed from her body and spread them around her. One by one, her renisas broke off into thousands of thousands of dots and she let them spread outward from her.

When she felt something blocking it, she let her red renisas stop on that place. She continually spread her renisas 360 degrees around her and little by little, objects made of red dots from her renisas started to take form around her.

She could now make out the silhouette of red dots that were shaped like rocks and random garbage below her. There were planks, branches, and other lumps and piles of stuff she could not make out in the dark.

After she was done, she could make out of her surroundings and see that she was in some kind of enclosed tunnel.

The ceiling was about three meters in height and there was a hole in her far right where she guessed was the hole they fell. On both of her side there was a wall, five meters apart from each other. She was facing a tunnel while on her back was also a tunnel that she could not see further in. It seemed to go on and she was not sure if it was a dead end or not as her renisas could only spread 5 meters around her.

She elongated her renisas in front of her while collecting those in her back while heading towards the white outline in the distance, following the man. She had no reason to choose the other way, and from how the man was moving, there was a chance he knew the way more than her as he lived in this area.

Every ten meters, she collected her renisas and spread them out in front of her again.

She had thought of this idea a while ago, when she saw the outline of the renisas of the man in the dark. If she could see outlines of renisas in the dark and if she combined it with one of the properties of renisas which were their resistance to outside physical objects, then she could make a makeshift outline of renisas to see the forms of objects around her.

Though she could only see forms and not colors and features of things, it was better than nothing.