Reality Check

The True Danger

Meet Me In The Woods (by Lord Huron)

"I took a little journey to the unknown, and I come back changed. I can feel it in my bones . . ."

___

If there was one thing to learn from this, it was that mummies were evil. Very evil.

Owen wasn't sure how long he'd been trapped in here, calling out his friends names and getting no response. It was completely silent, and that worried him. The last time he had really heard anything was when he'd taken the magical stone and heard a mummy claiming that it was going to hurt his friends. Now, he'd broken out into a cold sweat, and he could only imagine what was happening to his friends right now.

Were they alive? Were they still in the cave? Were they okay at all? There was no telling! Owen had messed up many times in the past, but this time? This time was huge. There was no going back from this. He knew that the Indiana Jones movies were telling the truth! He should've listened and assumed that some kind of curse would always be released if he took anything in front of a creepy mummy.

Owen glanced up again at the caved-in area, which blocked him from getting out of the cavern. When he'd come in here maybe fifteen minutes ago with Charm, she'd had to knock the large rocks down with her super-strong robotic arm. But when Owen had taken the stone, the rocks had fallen back over the area, not letting him escape to save his friends.

Oh yeah, and that was another reason he'd messed up.

He had no way of finding his friends. All he had was the magical stone and his time powers, but he didn't want to use the stone's magic to get out of here. That'd waste their only opportunity of finding Nobody, and Owen didn't want his friends to be even more mad at him than they already would be when they found out what he'd caused to happen. He'd have to find another way out.

And once Owen did that, there was also the whole mummy issue. He wasn't sure what terrified him more: the mummy itself or the thought of his friends getting hurt because of what he'd done. For now, maybe the first option, since he was alone and the mummy might be coming for him next. He had no idea what this mummy could do, or what it was doing right now, specifically.

He'd seen enough movies to know something bad was happening, given how ominous the mummy's message had sounded when it'd last talked to Owen. Or whatever that thing was, if it even was a real mummy. And of course, he was once again on the sidelines while all the important stuff happened! It seemed like that always happened to him.

That had happened to him when he first went to Kiel's world, when the Magister had thrown him into his prison. It'd also happened in Jupiter City when he was stuck in that comic book world (which he now knew was Nobody's prison). And it'd happened to him when he was thrown into Pick The Plot, just so Nobody could get Owen out of the way in order to separate Bethany.

There were probably more times that he was separated from his friends, and this was definitely one of them. Except when he was in Pick The Plot, he'd had Kara. Now he had no one, and he wasn't seeing a way to escape. Saving his friends was the most important thing in the world to him right now, more than anything else. Why did it have to be so complicated?

Bethany had been right about one thing: Owen had to stop chasing after his lifelong dream: to be seen as a brave, strong hero. For his friends to be proud of him. For Owen to not mess up everything for once. For him to do something that no one else could. In this case, that was taking the stone. And he hated to admit that a small part of his motivation to find it was so that his friends would look up to him more.