The Adventures of Rin and Aya

“So why do some of you have different colored wings? Are you guys like birds? Different colored wings for different species?” Rin felt it was silly to ask, but everyone always said that there was no such thing as a stupid question so she asked anyway.

“Yeah, why do you have the cool white wings while this idiot has the ugly brown wings?” asked Aya. Raf literally growled at her and purposely flew close enough to a tree branch that Aya squealed in fright as she pressed her face into his back, hoping that she wouldn’t hit her head. When she recovered curses flew out of her mouth as she pummeled Raf with hate filled words.

Chase shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose it’s something like that. Everyone from Lumineras, like me, has blonde hair and white wings. Nocturia on the other hand has black wings and equally black hair.”

Rin quickly looked down to her left and caught a glance of Sin. She figured he must have been from Nocturia then. Almost as if he had felt her gaze he turned his head to look behind him, and when Rin made eye contact with him she quickly looked away. “The very first inhabitants of The Middle Town some two thousand years ago had brown wings. There are very few left but Raf and Luka managed to inherit that trait. As far as the gray wings go…let’s just say that if someone from Lumineras had a child with someone from Nocturia the child’s wings would a medium gray. Micah for example, since he has darker gray wings, one of his parents probably had the medium gray wings while the other was from Nocturia. Soren is the opposite. His parents were probably a medium gray and someone from Lumineras.”

Flying up along side of Ra’ Shari and Micah, Luka watched the woman as she tried to decipher the map she had been given. Having quiet a bit of flying experience she was able to sit upright, her legs digging into Micah’s sides--he tried to ignore that as best he could--to help keep her balance, and she had spread the map out against his shoulders. “So how many days do we have to keep this up?” the short one asked sounding slightly bored.

“Three at least. Two if you guys are willing to push yourselves. We left at a little after three and it’s now eight, that means you guys can probably last for two more hours. That sound good to everyone?” she called. An assortment of answers like ‘yes,’ ‘sure,’ and ‘of course’ came back to her. “Well alrighty then,” she said as she folded the map back up and continued on with the flight.

---

Around ten they landed in a small clearing and they immediately started setting up camp. Raf, using his new powers, built a large fire and everyone started laying their blankets down around it. “Hey Rin, you wanna give everyone their bags?”

She looked down at all the bags with a curious look, but a large grin soon formed on her face. “Sure! Now I will prove to you, Aya Adams, that I really AM psychic!” Aya rolled her eyes as she sat down on her blanket. All of the bags looked alike so Rin randomly picked two of them up and closed her eyes, looking as if she was trying to get some sort of vibe telling her who’s bag it was. After a few seconds she opened her eyes and she tossed one of the bags to Sin and the other to Luka. This process repeated until everyone had a bag--though it appeared that Aya and herself were sharing a bag, and the same went for Ra’ Shari and Micah--and the blue haired girl waited anxiously to see if she had managed to give everyone the right bag.

Raf and Chase had gotten the right bag…but as far as the others went that wasn’t the case. “Uh, I don’t remember having one of these,” said Luka as he held a pink bra up against his chest.

“Give me that!” Ra’ Shari swiped the bra away from him and threw it back in the bag. “And who packed these anyway?” she asked, clearly indicating the pink bras and underwear that she found in the bag.

Soren held up his hands as if he had been caught by a cop. “Hey, they were in that plastic bag right on the chair and I didn’t want to go through your drawers again…”

“AGAIN?!”

“No no! That’s not what I meant!” He tried to make up some excuse but the continuous glare that Ra’ Shari was giving him broke him down. “Alright fine! I went through your drawers just a few months ago. But I swear I only did it once!”

Ra’ Shari turned and looked at Micah, who was lazily sitting cross legged next to her, and she pointed at Soren. “Shouldn’t you go beat him up or something?”

“Well I don’t really care if he went through the drawers or not,” he said while shrugging. “But I can beat him up anyway.” He stood up and strode around the circle towards Soren, and Soren quickly stood up, screaming like a little girl when Micah lunged for him. When Soren tried to run away Micah just went ahead and chased after him.

Aya moved closer to Ra’ Shari when the blonde pulled the map out again to get a better look at it. “So this is where we are going?” she asked pointing to the small little rectangle and Ra’ Shari nodded. “And we don’t know what it is?”

“Nope.”

“That seems safe. For all we know it could be…some place where they are going to kill us!”

“Tch!” Ra’ Shari waved it off calmly. “Amaranta wouldn’t send us someplace where we might die. Well, she might send Micah someplace where he might die, but everyone else is safe. She can’t afford to lose her best and most skilled fighters because she needs as many of those as she can get for this up coming war thing.”

Rin cocked her head to the side making her look like a confused little dog. “She doesn’t like Micah?”

“Oh dear gods no! She absolutely hates him and the first chance she gets she’s going to try and kill him!”

“Why?!”

Micah had finally managed to tackle Soren and proceeded to smoosh him into the ground. “I might have stolen a few things from a couple of stores here and there. It’s not that big of a deal really except that she wants me dead for it! If anything she should thank me because if it wasn’t for me the old Middle Town leader would still be alive and she wouldn‘t have a job.”

Rin gasped, covering her mouth with her hand, and she looked at him with large, shocked eyes. “You MURDERED the old leader?!”

“ ACCIDENTALLYmurdered the old leader.”

*Flashback*

A seventeen year old Micah stood in the completely dark closet of the Middle Town’s leader’s bedroom, completely encased by scratchy, smelly, tweed suits. He seemed practically unfazed by this however as he grinned almost evilly and rubbed his hands together, going over his ‘plot’ once again.

“Once that old fart walks into the room Micah will jump out of the closet and scare him half to death! Then, using this handy dandy little knife…Micah will persuade the old man to give him all of his money! MWAHAHAHA!!! That will teach him a lesson for putting Micah in jail for two months!”

Clearly the poor boy had gone insane from those two months in jail…

All of a sudden the door opened and Micah quickly shushed himself. An old man walked into the bedroom and dumped his tweed jacket and cane onto his bed before he happily strolled over to the vanity, picked up a comb, and brushed the top of his head even though it was completely bald. He hadn’t come to terms with his hair loss quiet yet. After that he started humming a small tune as he made his way over to the closet.

In a flurry of tweed pant legs Micah pushed the closet door open. “Ah ha!” he yelled as he displayed the deadly weapon in his hands. The old man shrieked in fright but Micah got pulled back into the closet with a gagging noise due to the hanger that had gotten hooked on the back of his shirt.

He quickly turned and using the knife he battled with the coat hanger that was stretching the collar of his shirt out drastically. When he had freed himself he turned with a satisfied grin on his face to look at the old man, thinking that he would see him huddled in a corner and shaking in fear, but that wasn’t quiet the scene before him.

There he was. Sprawled out of the dowdy pea green colored carpet, blue in the face, and his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth. Micah looked at him for a few seconds, then looked up, then looked back at him, then looked up again, then finally kneeled down next to the old man. “Mr. Leader sir?”

No reply.

“Are you okay?”

No reply.

Micah reached out one of his hands and pressed a couple of fingers against the man’s neck. No pulse. “Oh no…what did you do?!” His eyes widened as he looked from his hand to the old man’s neck. “Finger prints! It could be used as evidence against me!” He quickly hauled the man up and pulled him into the bathroom before dumping him in the bathtub which also doubled as a shower. He turned the shower head on and let the water fall onto the fully clothed man. “There, that looks perfectly natural.”

Swiftly exiting the bathroom he made his way to the window and threw it open dramatically before perching himself on the ledge. It was quiet uncomfortable though seeing as how a six foot tall person was scrunched up into a window only three feet tall. “And now I shall disappear without a trace. As silent as the night!” He made to jump out of the window but his foot got caught on the string of what looked like Christmas lights and he crashed down onto the roof of the house.

He somersaulted four times, each time making a loud banging sound whenever he hit the roof, and he quickly tried to grab onto the rain gutter, but it gave way with a horrendously loud, sharp sound and he was sent tumbling the ground. A small groan of pain escaped his mouth as he stood up and hobbled away from the house before someone saw him.

*Flashback End*

Rin and Aya looked at each other with…”shocked” looks on their faces. They just weren’t quiet sure what to make of that whole incident. “That was uh…it was…hm, wow.” Micah narrowed his eyes at the two girls, but Soren quickly drew his attention away when his arm flew up and hit Micah in the side of the face.

“Hey!” Using this opportunity to it’s fullest, Soren pushed Micah off of himself and stood up quickly while moving a few paces away from his attacker.

“Couldn’t….breathe!” Soren said between large gasps of air. He turned his head and spit dirt out of his mouth but his face fell into one of concentration for a few seconds. It quickly passed however and his hair seemed to stand on end as he started jumping up and down, sticking his fingers into his mouth and fishing around for something. He quickly found what he was looking for and he flicked something small, round, and black away from himself. “A beetle!”

Everyone cringed. “Ew.”

“Okay everyone, I hate to be the parent and everything, but we all need to get to bed. We have an early morning tomorrow and a long flight so we all need to be rested,” Chase said as he pulled a blanket over himself. Most of the people in the large circle groaned in protest, but they soon all laid down and drifted off to sleep.

---

Rin’s eyes cracked open. Normally once she fell asleep she didn’t wake until it was morning, so she was surprised to see the sky still as black as it was when she fell asleep. She rolled over on her other side, for the side she had been sleeping on was quite sore, but she froze when she saw that someone was sitting in front of the fire, lazily poking it with a stick.

Sitting up she squinted her eyes. It was Sin. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?” she asked.

“Shouldn’t you?” Touché. Pulling her legs up and hugging them to her chest she watched him curiously. He glanced at her before quickly looking back into the fire, but after a few minutes of her still sitting there staring at him he turned towards her again with narrowed eyes. “What?!”

She just shrugged calmly. “Sin isn’t you’re real name is it? Is it short for something else?”

He sighed heavily, clearly irritated, and they sat there for a few more seconds in dead silence. “Yes.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” he shot back quickly. Sin had never had anyone act so interested in him so he wasn’t even sure how to act at that moment. He almost wished that Rin would go back to sleep and leave him alone, but there was something else nagging at the back of his mind that actually liked the attention he was getting.

Rin continued to sit there, her head tilted to the side again and her eyes narrowed slightly. It wasn’t in a mean, angry way but in a studying, curious way. “Do you not like to talk to other people?”

“Not really,” he said with raised eyebrows. “And I really think you should get back to sleep.”

“What about you?”

Another heavy sigh came out of his mouth. “I’ll go to bed in a few seconds okay?” The blue haired girl nodded with a small smile on her face as she laid back down and closed her eyes.

Sin continued to sit and poke the fire with the stick but after a few minutes he looked back over at Rin. One of her eyes was opened and she was watching him, waiting to make sure that he went to bed too. “Alright alright.” He turned back to his own bed and pulled the blankets completely over his head so he was completely covered. With a final content smile Rin drifted off to sleep soon after.