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1. Fortune Teller's Den

Author's Note: 'Will be used for character's inner thoughts.' "Normal dialogue tags will be used for speech."

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Strange noises and paths that seemed to double back on themselves...the forest was vast, but he had finally found it.

One year ago, near the colony named Crater, the boy called Pearson hiked through the outer woods alone. The tunnel of trees surrounding him blocked out all the light from above. Even though the sun hadn't fully set that day, it still forced him to use a flashlight to navigate the natural labyrinth of trees, as the lightning bugs in the area did little to illuminate his surroundings. Despite this, the thing that kept him from turning around was the knowledge that the stairs of the den were almost in sight.

Trudging forward, his fingers rubbed against tree bark, feeling for the markings.

After tripping over a particularly large tree root, Pearson's flashlight settled upon the staircase he sought.

"Thank God," he muttered while swatting away a carnivorous nocturnal butterfly the size of his hand.

The animals and insects around Crater seemed to be ‌stranger than what an outsider would typically expect to see in the rural mountains. They were bigger, more aggressive, and some had weird mutations—unexplainable by most scientists. Once, a colonist who left Crater's gates claimed to have seen a deer whose fur was neon green and had the eyes of a frog. The theory was that the leader of Crater had placed‌ them in the area, deterring the unwanted.

Pearson walked up the narrow, windy metal stairs and towards the seer's den. He was quickly lamenting the fact that he had chosen this job. Since he had just earned the triple-star rank earlier that week, new jobs were accessible to him. He chose this as it seemed the most interesting and wasn't a one-time thing but a weekly ordeal. He would archive the seer's fortunes and bring them to the Hounds to be evaluated.

After a tiring climb, Pearson knocked on the wooden door and yelled out, "Hey, Ms. Aca, oracle-lady... uh, my name is Pearson. I'm here to archive your fortune!" He waited but only heard the buzzing of insects and the distant calls of animals from the forest. The forest had made a small clearing around the seer's house. It was round, with a few small circular windows facing Pearson. Heavy curtains had been pulled in front of the windows to block any lines of sight inside. He could see the faint flickering glow of a candle at the edges of the curtains. Moss and vines had crept up the side of the orange stucco walls. They didn't have to reach far to get to the roof, a rickety wooden thing held together by rope. He knocked again, this time louder than before, calling out, "Aca, open the door!" Again, there was no response.

He turned around and looked out over the sea of trees; it was so densely packed that it looked like a bunch of tall men in black tuxedos standing shoulder to shoulder surrounding Pearson. 'Well, this sucks,' he thought. At the edge of the treeline, a loud croaking sound echoed toward him. He watched as a beast, covered with green fur and a mouth large enough to swallow him in one motion, hopped from one side of the clearing to the other.

The colony's seer, Aca, had the ability of clairvoyance. But the limiting factor was that she could only speak the prediction and only say it once. She will feel it inside her and send the Hounds a message for someone to come and archive it. Once she has said the fortune, it will be erased from her memory. At least, that's what the man who briefed him on his job had explained to Pearson. The truth was that very few colonists had ever seen Aca; they considered her more of an urban legend than an actual living person. The Hounds had always claimed that she was real, but it was hard for anybody to believe them because most had never laid eyes upon her.