• tab They’ve been walking for about two hours now. Reyn led them out of the marketing area and into the housing area. He turned a corner and ended up in a dead end.
    tab “Where are you taking me?” Allester asks. Most of the hair dye dried off but his eyes are still shut. “We’re getting nowhere with you leading the way”
    tab “Oh yea? I don’t see you doing anything better!” Reyn turns and tries a different direction. He increased his pace, frustrated that he forgot the way to Trisa’s home.
    tab Walls stood beside the streets and behind the walls were the houses. They were tight together with no more than a foot of space. None of them even has a yard or anything close to a yard. Apartments towered high. This town doesn’t even allow covered wagons because there’s nowhere to park and it would be crowding the street causing long traffic. People who come to town with wagons or a horse gets it taken away into a storage area and horse pin so that the people could enter Mills then come back for their ride and leave.
    tab Allester stops, making Reyn stop too. “Where do you think you’re going?!” Allester says. “Isn’t that one her house?” he points to a small house on the left. The roof was tiled tan and the walls were white. Flowers in pots covered the porch.
    tab Reyn examines it. “Why would you think it’s that one? You don’t even know who Trisa is—”
    tab “Reyn, is that you?” a woman came out of the house holding a spoon. It was Trisa. “Geez, don’t do that! You aren’t suppose to leave without me, you dope” she turns and walks back inside her house.
    tab Reyn sighs and urges Allester to come inside with him. Her house was a real mess. The floor was clean, but the rooms were small. The tables crammed the space even more, holding a million papers. “Neat” Reyn comments.
    tab “Want some ice cream?” Trisa offers without looking at them.
    tab “Uh…how about some real food?” Reyn suggests.
    tab “Well I was waiting for you to bring the breads” now she looks at them. “So where…” she sees Allester. Trisa thought that he was someone passing by her house but he ended up coming inside. “Who are you?”
    tab “Trisa, this is Allester. He ran into some uh…trouble and I was just helping him out. So where’s your bathroom? He needs to wash up”
    tab She nods slowly at the information then points behind her in a hallway, “Last door to the left.” Allester doesn’t make eye contact, he doesn’t even say thank you when he walked past her. When he made it to the bathroom, he shut the door, locked it, and turned on the tub water. “What a weird kid” Trisa says to herself. “He reeks of chemicals”
    tab “That’s because some kids dumped hair dye all over him” Reyn opens a drawer and takes out a spoon.
    tab “How old is he anyway?”
    tab “Don’t know, never asked” he takes some of Trisa’s vanilla ice cream off her bowl and ate it. “I’m guessing about eighteen or nineteen”
    tab “Right…” Trisa snatches her bowl away from Reyn’s reach. “How’d you find my house anyway? You haven’t been here for years so it’s surprising how you found it with your poor sense of direction”
    tab “Well actually I—” he stops, now realizing something. It wasn’t him that found her house, it was Allester. But how? He doesn’t even know who she is, plus his eyes were shut. They always were. Then something Allester said pops into Reyn’s mind. I can still see where I’m going; I’m not like you people.
    tab “Something wrong?” Trisa noticed his strained expression.
    tab “Oh, nothing” he laughs. What was he thinking, anyway? Allester could’ve guessed where the house was, and he probably just said that because he feels higher powered then everyone. What was I thinking? Reyn grabs a chair and sat down. The kid is just cocky.
    tab “Shut up. You don’t know how much I can do to you” Allester says to Reyn. He was out of the bathroom, wearing a towel across his shoulders and another one around his waist, hair wet, naked.
    tab “What are you talking about?” Reyn says in an agitated tone. “Go put on some clothes—now” he looks at his right. “And what’s up with the eye patch? Take that off”
    tab “Nobody orders me around, not unless the—”
    tab Allester was cut off as Trisa grabs his arm and pulls him away into a room. “My younger brother is your height, last time I remembered. Here, go try on his clothes” then she shut the door, leaving Reyn alone.
    tab He was wondering whether Allester was a psychic or just plain weird, but Reyn was certain that he could read his mind. When he said ‘the kid is just cocky’ in his mind, Allester tells him to shut up, saying he doesn’t know anything. As if he read my mind and replied back to me. Also, what did he mean by no one ordering him around? Not unless they…something. Trisa came into the scene and stopped Allester from finishing what he was going to say. Reyn knew she was trying to stop the arguing before it got into a fight, but he wished she didn’t.
    tab “Tada” Trisa says as she opened the door. Allester walked out wearing a green sweater under a dark brown vest. His pants were black.
    tab “What’s with that?” Reyn points at Allester’s waist. He wore a strange gun holster but there was no gun in it. “And I told you to take off that eye patch” he continues to scan him, looking for something out of the ordinary. Allester’s hair looked like a cross of orange and brown, and there was a blond streak on his bangs at the right side. His eye is the lightest color of blue, it seemed so unnatural.
    tab “If you order me around one more time, I’m going to second the thought of telling you about your friend” Allester warns.
    tab “Of who—Trisa?” Reyn laughs. “Go ahead and tell me about her” he laughs again. This kid is such a child.
    tab Allester grips his hands into tight fists. “You think you know it all but you don’t. You call yourself a researcher but you don’t know anything. You haven’t seen anything; all you see is what everyone else already knows. You’re nothing special” he heads for the front door and opens it.
    tab “Hey!” Trisa shouts, she didn’t like anything Allester said just now.
    tab Allester takes a step onto the porch and stops, not turning around. “You’re knight friend almost got killed a few days ago in the dry forest near Trell. If you don’t get there by tomorrow night, she’ll be dead the next time you see her” then he shut the door.
    tab Reyn and Trisa were silent as they absorbed everything Allester said. Reyn was the first to snap out of it. He dive for the door and opened, running out. Trisa came following from behind. They stared ahead, to the left, right, all around, but they didn’t see him.
    Allester was gone.

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