Young Writers Society

*I am back and ready to try and make this chapter better than before! I probably failed. This chapter is nothing but exposition, more exposition, and crappy dialogue. Really, I should’ve shoved this exposition into the first chapter >_>

===

“Is it just me, or is this place gaining some color?” Lucius, now sitting down, looked around the area him and Chris were in. When he first entered, it was pure white, but now it seemed to be tinged with spots of green and brown.

“We’re probably being moved somewhere,” Chris replied, shrugging. When met with Lucius’ confused gaze, he rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on. It’s unlikely that whatever that voice promised us is going to happen here, in the middle of nowhere.”

“You trust it? The voice, I mean.” Lucius quirked an eyebrow, having pegged Chris as a narrow-minded person.

“What else am I to do? There isn’t much else to believe in right now, when a door impossibly appears out of nowhere to take you to an unidentified place,” Chris said, his words annoyingly true.

Lucius didn’t reply, instead putting his chin in his palm and observing his increasingly colorful surroundings. A few awkward minutes passed between the two, neither of them willing nor wanting to start a conversation.

Finally, Lucius turned and brought up something that was really nagging him. “Hey, Priss!”

“It’s Chris,” the brown-haired man said, twitching his eye and face arranged in a scowl.

“Close enough,” Lucius shrugged, giving the other person an irritating grin, “but anyways, you had a dream before coming here, right?”

Chris blinked. “Yes.”

“Who’d you think that voice was?” Lucius really didn’t want to call it the ‘omnipresent mysterious voice’ for the rest of his life. That was a mouthful.

“To be honest, I think it’d be more accurate to ask what-“ Chris paused as the environment began to warp, the blurry shapes rippling before solidifying into trees and bushes. The ground below them transformed into a grassy terrain within seconds. A breeze that wasn’t there before swept through the newly formed forest, rustling leafy branches. When the two men looked up, the endless white was replaced by a dark nighttime sky with stars peeping through the heavy clouds.

Most importantly, possibly, was the short, brown-haired girl who now stood before them, her face mirroring theirs of absolute shock.

Chris and Lucius blinked, staring at the girl. She stared back, frozen in the process of taking something out of her long sweater sleeves.

“Oh my gosh please don’t kill me bye I’m going to run now!” The girl unfroze and spun on her heel, her voice and expression that of panic.

Lucius acted quickly even though he didn’t know what was going on, grabbing the girl by the collar before she could properly run off. Once she was temporarily stopped, he took hold of her shoulders and forced her to face him. “Calm down! We won’t hurt you! In fact, we don’t even know where we are.”

“Oh, that explains why you appeared out of nowhere,” the girl said, visibly relieved. Outright horror faded into small traces of wariness. “You’ve just been selected by the door, right?”

“There are more people?” Chris abruptly asked, standing a bit behind Lucius. He was kneeling, feeling the grass as if making sure it was really there. In all fairness, teleportation was a strange thing and could be temporarily mistaken a hallucination, since hallucinations were definitely more likely than teleporting.

“Right, this is going to take a while,” the girl rolled her eyes, putting her hands on Lucius’ arms. “Can you let go of me? Thanks. First things first. My name’s Wila Lowell, and I’m going to be your personal tour guide tonight!” She struck a pose, complete with thumbs up and a smile.

“Right, well, I’m Lucius, this prick is Chris-“

“Hey!”

“-And we will gladly take your offer.” Lucius put on a warm smile, although doing so made Wila flinch. Strange; he thought that such a gesture would be welcoming.

“R-right,” Wila said, fiercely nodding her head. She gestured to the ground, sitting down herself and leaning against a thick tree. “Why don’t you guys sit down? This is going to take a while.”

Lucius went down as well, legs out in front of him. Chris, however, shook his head and stood.

“Your loss.” Wila made herself as comfortable as she could against a tree, putting her hands back in her sleeves before talking. “Alright, this is my first time being the explainer, so listen up! This place we’re in, I have no idea what it’s called. No one ever bothered to give it a name, I guess, so we just call it the arena. By ‘we’, I mean everyone who came here with a weird dream and through the white door, which is, well, everyone here.”

“What are the requirements for being selected by the door?” Chris asked.

“To be honest, I’m not completely sure, but if the info I got from the groups I travelled with is correct, everyone who came here wants something. Fame, revenge, revival, something like that.” Wila shrugged, looking a bit troubled. “Personally, I came here for my mom, but there’s no way I can kill someone for her…” She shivered at the thought.

Lucius’ heart reached out for the young girl. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, and he couldn’t help but think of his sister every time he looked at Wila. However, one part of her words stuck out to him. “For her? There’s a connection between helping your mother and killing someone?”

Wila bit her lip and seemed to develop a great interest in her shoes. “Remember how I said everyone came here for a reason? Well, here’s the catch to this arena: Take something from someone, and you can get that something back yourself.”

Despite Wila’s rather poor explanation, Lucius immediately knew what that could mean and held his breath. “So it’s an exchange system? Kill someone, and you bring another back a life?”

“Yeah.” The girl looked up at Lucius and Chris, tucking her knees to her chest and watching them for any dangerous movements, clearly not trusting them yet despite her friendly demeanor. “Although it seems to be pretty vague, since the definition of what you want varies from person to person. For example, stealing a starving person’s fortune, which could be a loaf of bread for them, allows you to get a fortune of any sorts for someone outside this arena.”

“Isn’t that too easy?” Chris skeptically eyed Wila. “I would imagine the entire world would be already be overrun with riches if that’s how it happened.”

Wila shrugged. “Hey, I’m only relaying what I heard from others. The only other thing I’m sure of, though, is that whatever you do has to be done whole-heartedly. Meaning, if you try to exploit this system by ‘stealing’ worthless things among friends, nothing’s going to happen. Same thing if you take something while planning to give it back. To be honest, this whole thing’s really confusing and I have no idea what magic stuff powers it nor why this even happens. I just know it can happen.”

“Remind me, how do you know such an exchange happens again?” Chris asked, raising an eyebrow. “Since we’re apparently stuck in this arena, how does anyone find out?”

Wila seemed prepared for that question, taking her right hand out of her sleeve and pointing upwards. “First step: Kill someone. Second step: Ask for respective person back. Third step: Dream-omnipresent voice says it’s done through weird telepathic powers,” the girl counted, lifting a finger with each step she mentioned. Then, she stared pointedly at Chris. “If you’ve been through all this already, you might as well trust the being that took you here. Otherwise, there’s no point.”

“Surely most people don’t believe in such unreliable sources.” Even as Lucius said that with an even, doubtful tone, his heart raced as he thought about the possibilities he could do with such a rule. Since he apparently didn’t exist anymore, if he went along with what the voice said, he would have to kill one… no, two or three people to bring back Arianna and her parents.

Wila didn’t answer Lucius’ words, as if she already knew what he was really thinking. She stared at the two of them, contemplating something.

Then, Chris wordlessly turned to leave. He had only taken one step before Lucius noticed and called him out.

“Where are you going?” Lucius glared at the brown-haired man.

“Leaving, of course,” Chris said, twisting his neck to face them. “I have no assurance that you won’t stab me in the back while I sleep, made worse back the fact that you obviously don’t like me.” Then, without allowing Lucius a retort, he walked off, soon disappearing amongst the heavy vegetation and shadows.

Lucius growled at Chris’ easy dismissal of him, even if he agreed with Chris’ reasoning. He got up as well, dipping his head towards Wila. “Thanks. I guess I’ll be going, too.”

“Wait!” Wila got to her feet lightning-fast, latching onto Lucius’ coat sleeve. “Can I… go with you?” She stared at him with those bright, hazel orbs that made it so much harder to refuse.

Lucius was understandably surprised and more than a little distrusting of her sudden behavior. “Why?”

“To be honest, I don’t like travelling alone. Having someone watch my back makes me feel better. I’ve got the same danger risk of travelling with you as anyone else, so why not?” Wila gave him a sympathetic smile. “You have a younger sibling, don’t you?”

Lucius flinched, roughly pulling his arm out of her grip and taking a wary step backwards. “How do you know?”

“It’s kind of obvious. You look at me as if I remind you of someone you are close to, and a family member would be the most common choice.” Wila’s smile turned a little sadder. “I have two little brothers, too, so I’d know.”

There was a brief silence, before Lucius sighed. “Alright,” he muttered, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “We can travel together for now, if only for the reason that you know more about this place and its occupants than me.” He walked right past her, but did a one-shoulder shrug as he passed as a motion for her to follow.

“Yay!” Wila grinned and matched his pace, reaching to grab his arm once again.

“Not yet,” Lucius snapped, dodging out of her hug.

“Oh, alright.” Wila pouted but stayed a couple inches away from him, and the two of them walked through the dark woods, an awkward silence hanging between them. Somewhere in the distance, a bird’s screech –a hawk?- pierced the night.