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A thought suddenly occurred to Farah, causing her face to light up with potential eagerness. "Aiki… would you mind if I performed a memory scan on you? It's completely harmless, and it might be helpful to retrace your steps so we could potentially find out where we are."
"Huh? I mean, sure… if you want to. What exactly are you hoping to find?" Aiki asked, sounding a bit skeptical. "Do you guys not know where we are either? Are we hopelessly lost in this forest??" He asked nervously. "Ughh… this is not how I wanna die…"
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"We're not hopelessly lost!" Saul burst out. "I'm a Specialist, she's a fairy, and you… I don't know exactly what you are, but you have magic too, from what I've seen, so we're not going to die out here! We'll hunt, and we'll keep walking - there's got to be an end to this [expletive] forest somewhere - but we're going to survive. Got it?"
Farah whipped her head around to look at him. Obviously, his outburst completely shocked her, and it made things even worst since she hadn't told Aiki she was a fairy yet. "Saul?" she whispered.
Aiki turned his ears back at Saul's outburst, cowering a bit. They seemed unfazed at the announcement that Farah was a fairy. It was interesting, sure, but not really groundbreaking to him, especially when he wasn't at full brain capacity. "Alright, alright, sorry…" They mumbled in reply. "I just… don't know how to live out here. I don't have much experience in forests. My dad wasn't exactly the camping or hunting type…"
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Farah raised her eyebrows and shot Saul a confused but menacing look. Then, she turned back to Aiki. "Don't worry. We're going to find out where we are, and we're going to be okay, got it?"
Aiki sighed and nodded, fidgeting as he stared down at the ground. "Alright… if you say so. I just… don't want people to be worried about me being missing, you know? My parents have probably already been told that I'm gone."
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"Is it possible for them to trace you somehow?" Farah considered. It will be a lot easier if they find us before we find them.
"Mm… not that I'm aware of…" Aiki replied sheepishly. "Like I said, the guy who sent me here may not entirely know where he sent me. So he wouldn't be much help to people looking for me…"
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Farah's brow creased with concern. That didn't sound good at all. "Who sent you here?"
"And why?" Saul chimed in, leaning against a nearby tree.
"Just some guy I know who goes to my school… I pissed him off and he's got a teleportation type power." Aiki explained tiredly. "He doesn't have great control over it, at least as far as location goes, so he might have a vague idea of what area I'm in? But as far as specifics, I doubt he knows."
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Farah considered this. She glanced at Saul, who was already looking at her, and then back at Aiki. "As I said earlier, I could still preform a memory scan on you. It's completely harmless."
"I mean, you're welcome to, but I don't really know anything." Aiki shrugged. "He didn't exactly tell me where he was sending me either. Why don't you guys know where we are?" He asked.
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"We're not used to begin in the First World," Farah replied, extending her hand slowly towards Aiki in preparation for the memory scan. "We came here for a mission."
"Don't you know where you were going for the mission, though?" Aiki asked, closing his eyes to prepare for Farah to search his memory for anything helpful.
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Farah and Saul exchanged a look. "No, actually," Farah murmured, trailing off her answer as her eyes turned silvery-blue. Once she was prepared, she closed her eyes as well.
"Weird…" Aiki then fell quiet so Farah could check their memory. She could see Aiki's parents before he had left for school that day, and Eiji, who looked similar to Aiki but with dark hair and different colored eyes. After that, they went through their classes and came up to a red haired boy about his height and started annoying him, which eventually caused him to yell something incoherent and touch Aiki, which sent them to this forest.
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Farah let out a soft gasp as she left Aiki's mind and the memories entangled with hers for a brief moment before they dissipated. Her eyes opened and were their natural brown once more.
"Could you find anything?" Saul's voice asked from behind her.
"No," Farah replied evenly. She was getting increasingly more frustrated with the situation, and Saul could almost sense it.
Aiki shuddered a bit as Farah left his thoughts, shaking his head to clear the peculiar fuzzy feeling. Their ears felt like they were tingling as well. "Mmnh… yeah, I didn't expect you would find anything of significance, but it was worth checking anyway, I guess. And assuming you can see the stuff, you know what my family looks like now, so that's cool?" He shrugged a bit, not sure what to do to lighten the tension.
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"Yes, I… I feel as if I met them," Farah replied slowly. Her mind was racing, trying to figure out a plan.
Saul gently touched Farah's shoulder. "Farah?"
"Hmm."
"Are you okay?"
"Thinking," she responded absently, looking behind Aiki out into the woods.
Aiki nodded a bit and leaned his head back against the tree beside him, looking tired. They honestly didn't really know what they could do to help; their memories turned out to be pretty useless, after all. "Mmmnh… they'll have to figure out some way to track me, I guess? I think there's gotta be someone in the school with the power to track someone off of one of their belongings or something…"
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A serious look came over Saul's features, and he gripped Farah's shoulder suddenly.
Farah looked up at him in surprise. "Saul? What-"
"Rosalind," he interrupted her shortly.
Farah's eyes widened, and she felt a small bolt of panic strike her through the chest before she rose to her feet. "Oh," she whispered.
"She might be able to help," Saul added cautiously. "If she knows why we're late."
Farah tugged on the sleeve of her jacket, pulling it further down her wrist as she contemplated Saul's suggestion.
Aiki looked between the two of them, obviously entirely bewildered. He had no idea what— or who— they were talking about, after all. They hadn't exactly been in this random forest long enough to know a lot of people. "Huh? Who's Rosalind?" He asked after a bit, lifting their head from the side of the tree. "She some kinda witch or something? Uh… the nice kind, not the kind in movies?"
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Farah's head jerked over to look at Aiki, almost as if in her terror, she forgot they were there. "No," she finally answered after taking a short moment to collect herself. "Rosalind is our battalion leader. My mentor," she added the last words under her breath.
"She's the one that sent us here," Saul added, taking the pressure off of Farah. "She used a gateway ring to send us into the First World, which is why we don't know where we are. She's the most powerful fairy in the Otherworld, so she might be able to help you get back to wherever it is you came from."
"Oh… okay." Aiki replied awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. "Um… she just sent you here without really telling you where you were, what you need to do, or where you're expected to stay? She just sent you to some random woods with no instruction at all?" They asked, clearly bewildered. It made sense how he had gotten here without any such instructions, but he couldn't think of a real reason why some fancy fairy battalion leader would do that sort of thing.
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"Well…" Farah replied, briefly exchanging a look with Saul. "There was threat breach, so that's why she sent us here. We were supposed to use the gateway to get back, but we… got lost while tracking the threat."
"Ah… what exactly is the threat?" Aiki asked, leaning back against the adjacent tree. "Maybe I could help with it when I'm feeling a little less awful. And what does the gateway look like? We might be able to find it."
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"A Burned One," Saul answered slowly. "But we already killed it. The problem is, we can't leave it here in the First World, so we need to find the gateway Rosalind made to bring it back to the Otherworld."
"It was a shed or barn somewhere," Farah added. "Rosalind's gateway ring only makes gateways through doors."
Aiki sighed softly, trying to think. "Well, I guess we'll want to try and find a way out of these trees, then. There's not a lot of sheds or barns in the middle of forests. Where's the… the thing's body? Did you leave it somewhere if you need to bring it back?"
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"It is in the middle of the forest," Farah corrected with a sigh. "Rosalind doesn't always put us in the most convenient places so long as it keeps the Otherworld a secret from the First World."
"But the Burned One is back this way," Saul jerked his thumb in the direction from where he'd approached only a few moments ago. "We tracked it down and killed it where it stood so it couldn't evade us again."
"Weird… I guess it's done abandoned barn, then. Maybe there was a farm out here years ago and it got overgrown." Aiki shrugged a bit and yawned, toying with his hair to try and pull out some of the tangles. "You just left the thing's body where it was?" They asked, confused. "Why wouldn't you just like… I dunno… drag it around with you? It's not like there's anyone here to see you doing it anyway."
