"Wait, don't run off!" Jean called out, but Joey and Casey had already disappeared into the woodwork.

"They'll be back, I think." I muttered, trying to determine what exactly the leaves I'd found were based on the rushed lecture about edible plants I'd been given before being sent out into the forest. It's been about a week since I'd met Mumei in the tree.

Jean plucked the plant out of my hand and threw it away. "Leo, that's poison ivy."

"Shit." I wiped my hands off on my jacket the best I could, then went to go pick the mushrooms that were growing in the shadow of a tree's roots.

"Hey, Leo." Jean tapped my shoulder. I turned, and saw one of my plasma gloves in her hand. Wait, that's not one of mine, they're broken and dirty. "I knew yours looked familiar to me, I had one of those. Is there any way you can fix it so it does the blue blades yours do?"

I took it from her. The plasma comes from a little panel that's situated on the back of your hand, and it appears that the one on Jean's glove was completely shattered. "Maybe, but I need new materials. Where did you find it? There might be others there."

"I'll show you later." Jean promised. From deeper within the forest came the sounds of footsteps and arguing. They were back, I assume.

"Why did you use a rock?!" Came Joey's voice.

"Using a bow takes too long!" Casey argued back.

Jean stood up. "Alright, break it up- CASEY!"

Deciding to check out what the heck was happening, I turned around. Joey was standing a full six feet away from Casey, who had a bloody rock in his hand and a rabbit with a bashed in skull in the other.

"Your mother told you to stop using rocks!" Jean scolded.

"It would've gotten away!"

"So what? It's just a rabbit!"

Casey grumbled. He swept his strands of hair out of his face with the hand holding the rock, smearing blood on his face.

"Gross!" Joey complained.

"Hand over the rabbit." Jean sighed. "And go with Joey to the stream near the village to clean up. We're just about done, anyways."

As the two kids ran in the direction of the village, Jean rolled her eyes at me as she cleaned out the rabbit. "Why'd they even assign them with us, anyway? Joey would be remotely useful since she actually knows the plants, but because Casey came along, all they did was bicker the entire time."

"If any predators came by at any point, I guess we could've used them as decoys." I jokingly suggested.

"Casey would probably eat it instead." She deadpanned.

Jean threw away the bones and head of the rabbit into the bushes, then placed the meat into a little bag, then stood up. "Let's go back. It's nearing sundown."

"How the heck do you even tell what time of day it is down here?"

"Internal clock, I guess."

"Makes sense." I got up and stretched, my back aching from a full day of crouching low to the ground and squinting at some obscure herb I've never heard of before today. Picking up my full basket, I followed Jean back to the village.

—<>—

Once we got back to the village, the redhead from the other day returned with her Trike. I'd learned that her name was Emily, and she was in charge of anything related to cooking. We gave her the herbs and stuff, and went our separate ways.

"Wish they let us keep the berries." I muttered. After I met Mumei, I made the mistake of trying the berries and holy shit, they were addicting. How does so much sugar fit into one sphere the size of your fingernail?

"Here." She pulled out a bag from inside her armor.

"Nice." I shook a few into my hand, then returned the bag to her.

"So, uh, how does tomorrow sound for showing you where I got the glove?" Jean asked.

"Mmph-" I swallowed. "I don't have anything going for me tomorrow, so sure."

"Alright." She said as the dinner bell sounded. "Are you gonna come with me into the village for dinner?"

I shook my head. "Nah. Maybe some other day."

She looked strangely disappointed, but turned and headed to the communal eating area. I returned to the Pod.

"Hi." I greeted as I crossed the Pod's threshold. I took a leaf out of Mumei's book bought a pouch to store berries in with the small sheets of metal they used to pay me after every hunt or gathering mission. I reached into my bag and shoved seven into my mouth all at once as I placed an MRE labeled "Lasagna alla Bolognese" into the Pod's microwave.

"You do know that those can easily give you diabetes, right?" The Pod sighed. The screen in front of me opened, displaying a picture of the berries and a bunch of their information, though the only thing I bothered to read was the fact that they were named edelweiss.

"I'll burn all of it out of my system with all the manual labor they make me do, anyway." I shrugged.

The Pod dinged, and the hatch for the microwave opened. I grabbed the tray and unwrapped it, filling the Pod with the smell of tomato sauce and beef.

"You have a visitor." The Pod opened the hatch to let a brown barn owl through.

"Hi, Mumei." I continued eating my lasagna as she turned into a human in a flash of feathers.

"Ooh, berries!" She grabbed my pouch and started stuffing her mouth until her cheeks bulged like a chipmunk would with nuts.

"Hey!" I snatched the bag back from her.

"Hey!" She copied, her voice muffled by the sheer amount of food in her mouth. I watched her chew for about two seconds, then everything went down her hatch.

"Catch." I threw her one more before shaking the seven that were left into my mouth.

She'd been flying to the Pod every so often since we met in the tree to talk, take food, or just watch me do things, sometimes all three at the same time. I appreciated the company, so I didn't mind all that much.

Speak of the devil, she was rummaging through my cabinets as I was speaking. She pulled out a slice of bread.

"Bread." She held it up to me proudly before nibbling on it. For someone who's supposedly thousands of years old, she acted so much like a little kid.

"Yes, bread."

"Ok. Bye!" She morphed into an owl, the bread in her beak. I knocked on the Pod's door, and she flew out into the trees once she was able to fit through.

I waited for the door to shut, then turned over to go to sleep for the night.

—<>—

A loud crash jarred me from sleep. I quickly sat up on my bed, entangled in my sheets and half asleep.

Outside my room, there were grunts and thumps. An ensuing scuffle, probably. A little more alert now, I untangled myself and grabbed the baseball bat I kept under my bed.

The corridor was dark, but I saw that Thomas' door was slightly ajar.

"Thomas?" I called out.

"Someone's trying to steal it!" His voice came from the direction of the living room. I rushed over and saw him tussling with a guy in the dark, the couch overturned and the contents thrown off the shelves into the floor. The block of Element was on the floor.

"What the fuck is happening?"

Thomas raised his hand, and I threw the bat towards him. He caught it and swung it at the guy's face, who was trying to take advantage of his turned back. He crumpled to the ground and Thomas beat his wrist until his hand unclasped around something.

A bloody knife...

I looked at Thomas and saw three slash wounds on his arms.

"Fuck." I ran to the bathroom to grab the First Aid Kit. When I got back, he'd zip tied the guy's hands and feet and was staring at him from the couch. When I got back, he turned to me.

"He tried sneaking in through my window to grab the Element, but I was still awake studying for that math quiz we have on Friday. He saw that I wasn't sleeping and pulled out the knife, swung a few times at me then took the brick and tried to run." He explained as I threw him the gauze and disinfectant.

"Fuck you!" He yelled. I called the dorm security and they arrived a few minutes later to drag the guy away.

"Put it in the safe, maybe?" I suggested. We both had little safes with GPS trackers on them, courtesy of the military.

"Good idea." He muttered. He withdrew into his room and came back out with a little portable safe. He opened it and shook out a few cards and his phone onto the coffee table and placed the Element into it.

"I'm going back to sleep." I announced.

And that I did.

—<>—

I woke up, and found myself facing a light gray ceiling. It took me a few seconds to figure out that I was in the Pod and that was just another dream.

Yawning, I stood up and opened a cabinet. A water bottle was sitting there, right next to the portable safe that Mumei had given me.

WAIT...

I grabbed the safe and turned it around and around in my hands, scanning the surface. Holy shit, there it is. Right there beside my thumb, were letters that were almost indiscernible from the rust. Letters that spelled the name;

Thomas Reynolds.

"What kind of fucking coincidence is this?" I double, triple checked the name to check if I finally went off the deep end and forgot how to read, but nope. It really was his.

"Leo?" Came a voice from outside, followed by a knock on the Pod's hatch. "Who're you talking to?"

Trying (and failing) to flatten my bedhead, I opened the hatch, revealing Jean wearing her armored dress and broken glove, a sword strapped to her waist and a leather bag on her back.

"Uh, no one." I waved around me. "The Pod."

"You talk to your... living space?"

"Yes, he does." The Pod answered.

Jean jumped. "I did not expect that. How does it work?"

"Artificial Intelligence."

"Artificial what now?"

I shrugged. "I don't know how to explain it in a way you'll understand."

She blinked. "That sounds condescending."

"I didn't mean it that way!"

"Just kidding." She smirked. "Now, are we gonna go fix my glove or not?"

"Give me three seconds." I withdrew back into the Pod to get my supplies, which entailed my gloves, one water bottle, two pieces of jerky, and my berry pouch.

"That literally took three seconds." She deadpanned.

I waggled my eyebrows at her. "What can I say? I'm just built different."

"Built different?" She punched my arm. "What the heck does that mean?"

"Oh, right."

How the heck do I keep forgetting that I'm from a different time period?

"Oh, right?" Jean repeated.

"It's nothing. An inside joke between me and the Pod."

She glanced at me in the way that said "I get it, but I don't." before running ahead. I followed behind her. We arrived at the river where I first met Asher, Joey and Casey, and followed it. At one point, we'd gotten so deep into the forest that even the cave roof's bioluminescence was blocked by leaves.

"This place is creepy." I whispered, popping a berry into my mouth.

"Be extra careful, the wilder animals hang around these areas."

Right on cue, what looked like a wolf with rhino horns and hide charged us. Before it could impale me through the stomach, courtesy of my garbage reaction time, one of the giant buzzard eagle things from my first day on the village dove down and snatched it off the ground.

"Holy hell, you were not kidding." I panted.

The bird carried the rhino-wolf hybrid thing into the trees where a nest was sitting on the branches. It flew above it, then dropped it into its offspring. The twigs and leaves rustled as the hybrid screamed guttural screams and the chicks chirped with glee.

The mother stood at the mouth of the nest and turned its head, pointing its gaze straight at us.

"I have a good idea." I muttered to Jean as it swiveled its body around to point at us too. "Why don't we get the fuck out of here, before Tweety Bird over there decides to get dessert?"

She gulped. "That really is an incredibly good idea!"

We turned and ran into the forest. The further we went, the more bioluminescent the plants and even some rocks became. I hoped they only emitted light because of something that came up along their evolution path, because if that wasn't the case, that means so much radiation changed them drastically in the span of a year or two, and only one thing is capable of doing that in this current time period. On the bright side, at least, it'd be easier to see what kind of weird creature would murder us next.

We continued to travel wordlessly. One time, an angry Triceratops tried to run us through with its horns and we'd had to matador style dive out of the way to dodge it, and it got its head and horns stuck into the tree it crashed in. Another time, we passed a pack of sleeping Allosaurs. Another time, and this was the weirdest one, we walked into a pair of Ankylosaurs reproducing. The less said about that encounter, the better.

Finally, Jean motioned for me to stop. She peered down at a cliff that led down to a giant sinkhole. "Alright. We're here."

"You found it at the bottom of a pit?" I laid on my stomach and shimmied up next to her. Whatever quip I was gonna say next died halfway out of my throat, because I saw what she was looking at.

At the bottom of a sinkhole sat a meadow so beautiful that nature would've never have been able to create it by itself. The grass looked too green, the flowers looked like they literally glowed the color their petals were colored. All of it swayed, but there was no wind to push it around. This is definitely the product of radiation.

Right in the middle of the grass however, was the main attraction. It was in several broken pieces and covered in rust and dirt, yes, but still.

Without any doubt, what I was looking at right now, was the ruins of the Catalyst.