Young Writers Society

His frown deepened.

"I already told you!" he protested. "I was trying to run away. But then I went into one of the labs and grabbed a weird cube and it brought me here. I don't know how to get back, but I don't want to go back there! I'm tired of meetings and Odris always running tests on me. I just want to have fun and play."

Lab? Cube? Meetings? Odris?

Evaline wasn't sure she was understanding, but she wasn't sure she even fully understood Maahes and his shape-shifting ability and tentacle form. She did understand one thing, though: he just wanted to have fun and play.

Her face softened as she slowly lowered her hand when she realized he wasn't aggressive.

"That's why you want to see Elias?" she asked lowly. "Because you want to have fun and play?"

Maahes gave a big nod.

"And because he's my friend," he added. That was even more important than having fun and playing. And Elias knew this world better than he did, but Maahes was also pretty sure he could figure it all out on his own.

He thought for a moment.

"Elias is probably going to be worried, too!" he exclaimed, eyes widening as the realization suddenly dawned on him. "We were together right before I ended up in your room."

Evaline loosely crossed her arms as she looked at Maahes with apprehension. The anxiety wasn't directed towards him, but instead towards herself.

"I'm friends with Elias too," she said softly, deciding to ignore the part that Elias had something to do with Maahes showing up to her room unannounced.

Elias was always making friends... and always getting them in trouble. She was always the one to fix things, but it wasn't all bad. Elias was her best friend, and she didn't mind. But, yet again, here she was -- fixing things for him for another friend.

She sighed, then fixed her eyes back on Maahes, offering a small smile in the midst of the tension.

"Okay," she said. "I guess... if you are looking for Eias, I can help you find him. But he's miles and miles away, and it's not easy to travel between the sectors. Do you need the directions?"

Maahes thought for a moment. He didn't even really know what a sector is, so directions were probably important.

He nodded.

"I need directions," he agreed. He glanced around, almost like he hoped to find them in a very conveniently placed map. When his quick search turned up nothing, he turned back to Evaline. He gave a slight tilt of his head. "Do you know them?"

Evaline nervously pursed her lips as she squinted out towards the horizon.

"I do," she said. "It's, um... through a series of tunnels. I can take you there, but... it's guarded. I don't know if you can just walk through... unless... you maybe transform..."

She didn't really want to say it, but she knew that if he shapeshifted to her mom, Maahes would probably be let through.

Maahes perked up at the chance to change his guise again. He was already starting to feel a little pain right now. He wasn't all that excited to walk through tunnels and be stuck even more underground than he already was, but changing his guise would definitely help!

"I can do that!" he said. "What should my guise look like?"

Evaline let out a nervous chuckle, looking away from Maahes as she continued to squint toward the distance.

"Um," she began, then said the next two words quietly. "My mom."

She then snapped her head back towards his direction, filling in the small silence that followed.

"The woman who kicked you out of the house," she explained. "That's my mom. So, you've seen her. We just have to make sure we don't see her along the way. And... you'll have to act like her too, but I can tell you what to say."

This whole situation was so strange to her, especially since it still blew her mind that shapeshifting was possible. But for his sake and her own, she decided to not dwell on that for now. She wanted to help him find Elias.

Maahes furrowed his brow and crossed his arms.

He hadn't seen Evaline's mom for too long, but he had stared at her for a little bit. And he had been able to make his guise look like Evaline just from a photo.

"I'm ready!" he decided, grinning. "Should I change my guise now?"

"...Sure," Evaline said quietly, already feeling uncertain.

As long as her mom didn't find out, there shouldn't be any problems. They'll be okay.

Maahes screwed his eyes shut.

He didn't technically have to do that, but he wanted this to be perfect. Evaline sounded a little nervous. He had to prove that he could do this right.

After envisioning her mom in his mind, Maahes let his guise change. One moment, he was standing there as an Alteran boy. The next, he was standing there as the perfect copy of Evaline's mom.

He peeked an eye open after a few seconds passed. Why hadn't Evaline said anything yet?

"Did I do a good job-"

He froze. The world around him had changed again, and now he was back in the woods. Evaline wasn't with him. Elias was standing there instead.

And he was there with Odris.

Fifteen Minutes Ago...

Elias was a little upset that Maahes had mysteriously disappeared, and he found himself sighing and sauntering back over to the tree at "the edge of the world" as his friends like to call it. As he walked, and kicked a pebble along the way, he zig-zagged across and found himself straying off the path until he came across the burn marking that Maahes had left on the grass when he was trying to explain who he was to him.

What did he call it again...? Pen... pentagon? Pentagram?

He hummed, kneeling down to poke it.

Odris had that Maahes wasn't supposed to go to the lab at the very top floor of the building, so he should have expected that Maahes would do exactly that the next time he tried running away. But it still didn't make him any less horrified when he realized that Maahes had run off again. He had told him not to go there for a reason. The experiments there weren't always stable. And while they could cause problems for Alterans, no one knew how they could affect someone like Maahes.

He had spent almost half an hour talking to the person that had seen Maahes disappear in a flash of light earlier. He had taken something that they were planning on using in the gates to make them more efficient. It had a tendency to disappear one moment and reappear the next, so they hadn't been implemented just yet.

Thankfully, they had a spare one on hand.

Odris just had to hope that this one brought him to Maahes. He could have tried dismissing him and summoning him again, but he had learned a few years ago that it was difficult doing that when Maahes was far away from him-

The cube in his hand started to hum. There was a sudden bright flash of light. When it finally cleared, Odris found himself standing in a forest he didn't recognize. The humming had stopped now. Tucking the faulty device into his bag, Odris stepped out of the woods and into the nearby clearing.

And then he saw a boy crouching over a pentacle.

Odris came to a stop.

He looked around the age of the guises Maahes adopted whenever he was trying to be subtle, but the way he held himself seemed different. Odris quietly raised his goggles up to check the other planes. His suspicions were right--the boy wasn't Maahes.

...So who was he, and why was he near a pentacle?

"Hi?" Odris awkwardly asked, putting his goggles back down.

Elias looked up as he heard someone greet him, and he stared at the man standing in front of him... maybe for a little too long.

Yeah. He didn't know him. Right? Then again, Elias barely paid attention to the adults. Was he in trouble, or...?

"Uhhhh," he drawled out, unmoving. "Hi?"

Odris thought for a moment.

Someone else could have made that pentacle, but he had used the same kind of device Maahes had used earlier. Add in the pentacle being made with fire instead of chalk, and it seemed like exactly the kind of thing that Maahes would make.

But if Maahes was here, what kind of guise would he have picked? An older guise? A younger one? He was leaning towards a younger one. Maahes had been using those more when sneaking around lately; he didn't seem to realize Odris had caught onto that trick of his.

"My name's Odris," he introduced himself. He glanced around the woods one time to make sure Maahes wasn't hiding in the shadows. He didn't see anyone, so he turned back to the boy. "I'm looking for a friend of mine. Have you met someone named Aen or Maahes? He'd probably be around your age."